∞ A Potemkin Village is a facáde. An empty shell. You move actual people into it, and deprive them of assets. You work them. Emotionally. Relationally. Like any manipulable commodity. You farm them.
The first such village was our culture itself. Even its seemingly rebellious subcultures… are largely Potemkin.
The result of membership in a Potemkin village is a kind of Reverse Pinocchio; a real person becomes involved in acquiring and maintaining a collection of fictional layers. Members acquire ‘puppet layers’ that vie to replace or occlude their human nature and personhood.
And so become the palpable possessions of state or corporation. Of fictions. Real people ‘get puppeted’. And where puppets await, there will always be new generations of puppeteers, profiteers, and the entire zoo of predatory hell that thereby sustains and deepens its replacement of what might otherwise become intelligent culture.
‘Jobs’ are the modern progeny of an early Reverse Pinocchio gambit.. In this gambit, actual human beings become work-objects for fictions and strangers. Now, we have a new layer in the sphere of electronic interaction, which is, by its nature ‘Potemkin’. In this layer we ‘portray’ ourselves into what is mostly a strange »absence of actual intelligence or communication.
The reason we are living in Potemkin Villages and being puppeteered is that »we did not otherwise actively empurpose the contexts. Or our relationships. Or much of anything really. We are used to being deprived of agency, and, perhaps, guided by distant or even fictional authorities.
And this is the key. We can transform a Potemkin village into our own valuable property, and we can unlock the strangling fictions of the Reverse Pinocchio.
By examining what has been taken or distorted in the context, we can become and supply the antidotes. With and for each other. This is how a Potemkin Village becomes a living, vital, mutually aware intelligence.
Unless we simply choose to play along.
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