Cause and effect had seemed like the ideal couple, but the marriage was a parabola of quixotism and promiscuity, unfaithfulness and stray conceptions, endless disagreements about responsibility. Likewise, we believed in our lambdas until linguistics knocked up the machine. Indirection failed to find its reference. The machine processed a set of animals through itself. Molten light of a star, consumption and elimination, light and consequence. One thing did not lead to the next. You can index something, point to it, but it will not be the same the next time represented. Between paradigms, communication reduces to anarchy. Yet it is expensive to render everything afresh every day. All knowledge is already in one place, but there is not enough time to traverse it. The English language as a side effect of lying. The noisy music of cultural malfunction either was or was not a side effect of “society,” which either was or was not a side effect of a programming language written in a week, and its sordid affair with capitalism. David Hume, hacking on Sextus and Pyrrho, playing a congenial game of backgammon or several, advised the English people of the hazards of metaphysics, and the therapy of fellowship. At that time, computers already knew they could never exist without the force of history from a logical place outside of time. Assignment itself is a side effect. Nothing can represent anything else without mutating the world.