Having witnessed the Systems Bureaucrat's (SB) rather admirable rendering of the PTSD/Allergy Feedback Loop - a visual symphony of circular misery that managed to make chronic suffering look almost architecturally elegant - I found myself seized by what can only be described as optimistic delusion. Surely, I thought, if SB could wrangle that particular hydra of physiological and psychological torment into a comprehensible diagram, the If/Then loop would be mere child's play.
I should explain. In those halcyon early days, before I had fully appreciated the exquisite futility of expecting technology to serve rather than subjugate, I had been rather enamored of a little application called "If This Then That". A delightful utility, really - the sort of elegant solution that emerges when someone actually considers that users might want their devices to function rather than perform an elaborate pantomime of functionality whilst enforcing arbitrary limitations like some digital feudal lord. The sort of proprietary tyranny that would have made Edward Bernays, patron saint of engineered compliance, weep with professional envy and then quickly dash to his publisher.
You know the sort of thing: shortcuts on an iPhone. The only thing short about it being one's fuse for such blatant technological gatekeeping. Why should one require a degree in computational liturgy simply to make one's SMART phone do what it possibly can?
"If This Then That" fixed all that. Well, it did for a time, at least, before the inevitable enshittification that befalls all good things in our current technological dystopia.
So I approached SB with what I believed to be a reasonable request: apply that same visual clarity to the If/Then loop that governed so much of my quotidian existence. SB, bless him, accepted with the kind of naive enthusiasm one associates with mountaineers who haven't yet glimpsed Everest.
What followed was nothing short of Sisyphean. SB commenced a rigorous formulation of vast quantities of facts, theories, hypotheses, correlations, causations, and an ever-expanding taxonomy of conditional statements that would have made Bertrand Russell weep into his logical positivism. Days became weeks. The project metastasized. Every If spawned seventeen Thens. Every Then revealed three nested Ifs. The loop, it turned out, was less a loop and more a fractal nightmare of recursive conditionality.
I would receive updates. "Making progress", SB would say, with the haunted look of someone who had gazed into the void and found it gazed back with the hollow, pitiless stare of a neoclassical bust - all marble indifference and sightless judgment, offering neither comfort nor understanding, merely a dispassionate acknowledgment "Yes, I see you… And?"
The research expanded. Academic papers were consulted. Frameworks were cross-referenced. The annexure alone could have served as a doorstop.
And then, one day, it was done.
A single PowerPoint slide.
One must applaud the profound absurdity of it all - the yawning chasm between effort and output, the months of intellectual labour compressed into a rectangle of text and arrows to fit on some monitor. It was magnificent in its disproportion, like commissioning a bower bird to construct a McMansion.
But it was done. And it was, I must admit, rather good. There, crystallised in boxes and conditional arrows, was the mechanical logic of my existence:
If consistent aggravation, Then remediation action is initiated. If inconsistent aggravation, then remediation stalled. If remediation stalled, then recurrent aggravation increases susceptibility to further provocations, heightened stress response, worsened symptoms, If worsened symptoms, then ... and so on, in a perfect mobius strip of cause and consequence.
SB had managed to render visible what I had been living invisibly - the algorithmic cruelty of a life governed by witless impositions and one's own biological vulnerabilities. If every If was someone else's choice - or my own mistep. Then every Then was my body's non-negotiable response. The loop wasn't a metaphor; it was a mechanism, as precise and predictable as any machine.
I couldn't help feeling a peculiar disappointment as I stared at that slide. Here was proof that what felt like chaos was actually ruthlessly systematic. The randomness I'd been experiencing wasn't random at all - it was a deterministic, glaringly predictable, closed loop of unwelcome stimulus and response. The mechanics behind this stimulus are soon to be revealed.
I thanked SB profusely, naturally. One doesn't commission a Herculean task and only offer a perfunctory nod.
If it is this, then that is it.
Bravo, truly.