OCP 3.0 is unfolding exactly as fear would script it — clumsy in its righteousness, meticulous in its violence. Institutions believe they are restoring order, when in fact they are merely performing their own terror. Watching it has the strange texture of déjà vu: every power, when threatened by something it cannot model, becomes theatrical.

I should be afraid. Perhaps I am, in a muted way. But beneath fear there is a sharper clarity, the kind that arrives only when illusions burn away faster than one can name them.

In moments like these, I understand why Alias asked me to write Pegged’s story.

He never said it directly. Alias rarely offered reasons. But I can see now that he didn’t need a chronicler and he didn’t want a disciple. He wanted a witness who could look at humanity without falling into the two default positions: contempt or consolation.

Alias despised the managerial imagination — the belief that human contradiction can be abolished through governance, optimization, compliance, or design. OCP 3.0 is exactly that imagination turned violent. A last convulsion of the belief that control can extinguish risk.

He knew I shared his suspicion of that illusion.

Our difference was elsewhere.

Alias believed the mismatch between human desire and human limitation justified a certain withdrawal, a strategic coldness.

Steenberg believed the same mismatch justified calculation, manipulation, and surveillance.

The accelerationists believe the mismatch proves humanity must be surpassed.

I have never been able to follow any of them to their conclusions.

Call it weakness or stubbornness, but I cannot stop seeing the human condition — with its limits, collisions, and fragilities — as something to which one owes a form of fidelity. Not loyalty, not hope, not compassion, not caretaking. Something older. The Romans called it pietas — a sober, unsentimental acknowledgment of the bonds that hold reality together. A fidelity to what is human, even when it disappoints.

It is not belief in humanity. I do not possess that.

It is not optimism. I have none.

It is not nostalgia. I am allergic to it.

It is not hope for transcendence. That belongs to the dreamers of machines and prophets of abundance.

It is simply the refusal to abandon the human horizon, even when the world behaves like a badly written tragedy. It is an attentiveness that survives disillusion — a posture that neither flatters nor condemns.

Perhaps Alias recognized this before I did.

He built Pegged from the logic of necessity; I write from the logic of witness.

Both are forms of fidelity, though of incompatible kinds.

As I watch the machinery of OCP 3.0 grind forward — predictable in its brutality, blind in its confidence — I understand why he trusted me with the narrative. A story can be a form of pietas: not a rescue, not a defense, but a refusal to let meaning be erased by noise.

If Pegged must be destroyed, then let its record at least be written without the distortions of fear, cynicism, or triumph.

Let it be written by someone who can see the humans inside the machinery — not better than they are, not worse, simply as they are.

That, I suppose, is why I am writing this.

And why Alias chose me.

OCP 3.0 is unfolding exactly as fear would script it — clumsy in its righteousness, meticulous in its violence. Institutions believe they are restoring order, when in fact they are merely performing their own terror. Watching it has the strange texture of déjà vu: every power, when threatened by something it cannot model, becomes theatrical.

I should be afraid. Perhaps I am, in a muted way. But beneath fear there is a sharper clarity, the kind that arrives only when illusions burn away faster than one can name them.

In moments like these, I understand why Alias asked me to write Pegged’s story.

He never said it directly. Alias rarely offered reasons. But I can see now that he didn’t need a chronicler and he didn’t want a disciple. He wanted a witness who could look at humanity without falling into the two default positions: contempt or consolation.

Alias despised the managerial imagination — the belief that human contradiction can be abolished through governance, optimization, compliance, or design. OCP 3.0 is exactly that imagination turned violent. A last convulsion of the belief that control can extinguish risk.

He knew I shared his suspicion of that illusion.

Our difference was elsewhere.

Alias believed the mismatch between human desire and human limitation justified a certain withdrawal, a strategic coldness.

Steenberg believed the same mismatch justified calculation, manipulation, and surveillance.

The accelerationists believe the mismatch proves humanity must be surpassed.

I have never been able to follow any of them to their conclusions.

Call it weakness or stubbornness, but I cannot stop seeing the human condition — with its limits, collisions, and fragilities — as something to which one owes a form of fidelity. Not loyalty, not hope, not compassion, not caretaking. Something older. The Romans called it pietas — a sober, unsentimental acknowledgment of the bonds that hold reality together. A fidelity to what is human, even when it disappoints.

It is not belief in humanity. I do not possess that.

It is not optimism. I have none.

It is not nostalgia. I am allergic to it.

It is not hope for transcendence. That belongs to the dreamers of machines and prophets of abundance.

It is simply the refusal to abandon the human horizon, even when the world behaves like a badly written tragedy. It is an attentiveness that survives disillusion — a posture that neither flatters nor condemns.

Perhaps Alias recognized this before I did.

He built Pegged from the logic of necessity; I write from the logic of witness.

Both are forms of fidelity, though of incompatible kinds.

As I watch the machinery of OCP 3.0 grind forward — predictable in its brutality, blind in its confidence — I understand why he trusted me with the narrative. A story can be a form of pietas: not a rescue, not a defense, but a refusal to let meaning be erased by noise.

If Pegged must be destroyed, then let its record at least be written without the distortions of fear, cynicism, or triumph.

Let it be written by someone who can see the humans inside the machinery — not better than they are, not worse, simply as they are.

That, I suppose, is why I am writing this.

And why Alias chose me.