phoebus glykon & luís gonçalves, metalogos — ideas
a bunch of british people obsessed with mysticism happened to all have collective interests that accidentally ended them up in a flat where a british mystic who happens to have had collective interests in his own practice was staying, and a bunch of randomly arranged complexities produce a bunch of randomly arranged patterns over time as interacting with this complexity ends up producing words that match with numbers and locations that match with narratives
think about it this way, coincidences and alignments produce a set of experiences that can activate behavior. however, if you think about what behavior is or can be hard enough, its the ultimate coincidence or hyperstition engine. nothing is more coincidental than doing something no one expects, and everyone does this all the time without attaching any salience to it. the only way out of the loop is to understand that signification and significance are actually the same thing on a physical level
this is my theory of what a hidden message is, maybe it doesnt align with what AQ is or does (youd have to let me know there and re-read the text to confirm) but this is my theory, at its most complex (not usually or ever what happens) it goes like this: 1) actions in space are loaded with a higher density narrative 2) letters meant to communicate future interpretations of present are hidden behind numbers 3) numbers are scrambled or put into graphs that vaguely hide them on immediate exposure 4) a small world of signification is built around previous 1)'s 5) actions in space are then overdetermined on purpose (loaded with more complexity or randomness than necessary) 6) unintentional 1)'s start popping up 7) the agents behind 6 build 2+3 8) 2+3 communicates with past 2+3 9) a small meta-world of signification is built around 4's 10) a second 5 is built on top of a 9, which causes salience to rise and the field of signification to narrow 11) actions in space are re-encoded with a higher density narrative, and sometimes attempt to produce a new 1)