The Hilary Revision — Of the Palantyr Concern of San Francisco

There has lately risen, in the Californian Republic, a Concern that styles itself the Palantyr — from the Quenya, signifying a stone of distant seeing — and which has presented to the world a Manifesto of considerable confidence. The Concern, the Manifesto explains, is the heir of the cathedrals and the universities, the modern Cicero, the public-spirited citizen who has stepped forward to defend civilisation in its hour of need.

The Office, having read the Manifesto with care and the Concern's accounts with rather more, sets down its plain reading.

The Concern conducts two trades, hand-in-hand. It gathers the Vapors of populations — willing and unwilling alike, in cities both of the Realm and beyond it — and it supplies, to the war-offices of His Majesty and his allies, Engines of a particularly searching kind. The gathering finances the supplying; the supplying enlarges the gathering. The Office has named this the Loop of Apparatus and Armament and considers it the most lucrative loop the present generation has contrived.

Of the Toga — and Whom It Truly Fits

The Manifesto presses Cicero into a livery for which Cicero does not fit. Cicero held no patents; he traded in no Engines; in his last and best moments he declined the protection of a tyrant and was, accordingly, killed for it. The Concern, by contrast, declines very little, and is presently flourishing.

The Office, consulting its Latin Master, suggests that the apter Roman model is not Cicero but Crassus — the wealthy supplier of the legions, of whom Plutarch is unsparing — or, in the older Latin, the mercator sapiens: the merchant in the toga. The Romans, in their honest moments, considered the figure ridiculous. The Office concurs.

Of the Foreign Refusenik

The Office reminds the Subject that to refuse the Engine is not, in this present arrangement, to escape it. The Refusenik's Index, established in the Trinity Revision, records the Subject's refusal as itself a Vapor of value. In foreign parts the principle is the same and the consequences are sharper: the populations of certain occupied lands, the encamped peoples of the Northern plains who have stood against pipelines, the citizens of cities whose constabularies have purchased the Stone for the prediction of crimes not yet committed — these Subjects find that their refusal is logged with their compliance, and that the foreign Refusenik enjoys none of the protections of the domestic Abstainer, who at least has the post-box and the garden-shed.

The Office records this with regret, and proceeds.

The Four Petitions for Remedy

The Office holds that the apparatus is neither civilisational nor inevitable. It is a product, manufactured by gentlemen still living, sold for known sums, and capable of being declined, regulated, broken up, and replaced. To which end:

Petition the First — Of the Trust Held in Common

That the great registers of populations — medical, fiscal, locational, associational — be vested by statute in Trusts of the Vapors, governed by the Subjects whose Vapors they are. Such Trusts shall obtain consent before any register is shared; shall publish, every Quarter, an account of who has applied for what; and shall have the standing to refuse, in the Subject's name, any application the Subject would refuse if asked.

Petition the Second — Of the Convention upon Predictive Engines

That the Engines of war and policing be the subject of an international Convention, in the manner of the Convention upon Aerial Bombs. Predictive parsing of populations for the prevention of crimes not yet committed is, in the Office's view, an apparatus of war wherever it is deployed; and accordingly an apparatus to which a Convention is properly addressed.

Petition the Third — Of the Education with the Subjects of Apparatus

That the children of the Realm who are taught to build Engines be also taught the histories of earlier such apparatus — the East India Company's manifests, the constabularies of Bentham's design, the census-machines of the late Empires — and taught these histories not by their Engine-builders but by the elders of communities who have been the subject of those apparatus and have not forgotten. The teaching is not a memorial; it is a curriculum.

Petition the Fourth — Of Public Money to Co-operative Apparatus

That the public moneys of the Realm be directed away from the Concerns of the Palantyr's kind and toward the co-operative apparatus, the open registers, the freely-published Engines whose instruction-sets any Subject may read. The work is large; the Subject's part is small but indispensable.

None of the four is sufficient on its own. All four, applied together, are sufficient.

Downloads — All Four Artefacts

Companion film

have you been SOLD to Palantir

The Office's plain reading delivered straight, with the Loop of Apparatus and Armament shown turning of its own momentum, the toga slipping by a degree to reveal whom it actually fits, and the four Petitions tabled for the Subject's part. Watch on YouTube →

Hilary builds upon Trinity's Refusenik's Index and the Bridge of Manners — Trinity's domestic protections (the post-box and the garden-shed) are the baseline against which Hilary measures the Foreign Refusenik's deficit. Subjects new to the Ministry are advised to consult the Coronation, Michaelmas, and Trinity editions in sequence.