an exploration in the fourth order
The rite has three parts. We completed one.
We live in the margin. It has furniture in it now.
The sound is made rather than played, and no browser will start it unasked.
There is no index and no order. Filaments are labelled with a fragment of what they lead to, never its title. Some leaves argue, some tell a story, some are running a computation you can watch — they are marked plate, folio, figure and prior, and none of them is more important than the others.
The lattice also listens while you read. What you type is compared against one word, in your browser, and is never stored and never sent — not to the measurement described under Memory, and not anywhere else.
Held in this browser: which leaves you have opened, how long you stayed on each, whether that region has opened. It is read by the lattice itself and can be erased below.
Measured, on machines this work controls: how it is read, and what breaks. Every leaf here has its own address, so that is a record of reading rather than of traffic, and calling it page views would be misleading.
Nothing here is sold. Nothing here is shared or given away, and no service is paid for with what a reader leaves behind — which is why it runs on machines this work controls rather than somebody else’s. Nothing follows you off this site. Nothing is taken that you did not give. Nothing you give is used for anything except making and running this work.
This browser is recognised as one that has been here before, because parts of the work depend on it: a region that stays open once it has been found, a plate that is not the same on a second reading, a walk that can be read back to you. Recognising a browser is not knowing a person, and that difference is the whole of it.
A browser asking not to be tracked, by Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, is not measured at all. Erasing below clears what this browser holds; what was already counted was never attached to you and cannot be taken back out of the total.
Where a leaf rests on a real object, place or event, it is recorded here, so that the argument can be checked and the inventions can be told from the record. This holds only the leaves you have walked, in the order you walked them. The complete ledger is at the foot of the flat reading.