The Dividual Strikes Back

why nothing and everything is your faultQuick note: If you’d prefer to listen to this, I read it aloud here. In Vincenzo Natali’s 1997 cult indie classic film “Cube” a group of disconnected individuals awake alone in a labyrinth of identical interlocking rooms. Throughout the film they must find each other and work together to survive a ghastly array of fatal traps and puzzle their way out. Each character seems to have a purpose; a doctor, a police officer, an escape artist, a maths wiz and we see them coordinate their unique skills to outwit the sadistic mastermind behind… … The CubeIt’s a film about our human capacity for cooperation, the benefits and the difficulties, but the genius of the film—the evil genius—spoiler alert: is that the villain is also human cooperation. We find out that Worth; a character whose worth to the group appears to be to make unhelpful jaded jibes at every turn, turns out to be an engineer responsible for designing a component of the Cube, with no idea what the whole was. I never even left my office, I talked on the phone to some people, specialists, other guys like me, working on small details, no one knew what it was… The Cube turns out to be an invention of no one in particular, but rather the product of the siloed alignment between specialists just following orders. The project gets completed because that’s what projects must do, the product gets used because that’s what products must do. This may be hard for you to understand, but there’s no conspiracy, nobody is in charge. It’s a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan. The DividualIn a previous post, The Era of the Dividual, I used this archaic term to refer to entities that can be seen to function in the world through individuals, but independently of them. The first is Milton’s conception of proscribed religion, where a religious person must adhere to dogma imposed from the outside, rather than from an internal sense of what is true. Another example was s