Memorandum for HM Government FAO cabinet meeting re Commodity Fetish Outbreak

February 18, 2020 Adam Marks

Title: Memorandum for HM Government FAO cabinet meeting re Commodity Fetish Outbreak
From: The Combined Cabinet Office.
Date: 25/01/2019

Synopsis

This document is a short history and explanation of the Commodity Fetishism Outbreak (CFO)[1] with an inventory of significant actors plus outline of potential courses of action available to HM Government.

Origins

While its (meta)physical origins remain elusive the phenomenon itself was first recorded on January the 23rd 2018 when staff at an auditing firm in Canary Wharf reported hanging files escaping from their drawers and settling around the office in the manner of butterflies. A call was made to the police but was rerouted to the Department of Metaphysics field operations[2].

Agents were able to contain the initial outbreak within eighteen hours. Studies of the affected items showed no unusual physical properties except for high, fluctuating levels of a previously theoretical form of radiation known Kant Rays[3].

An initial containment solution was devised involving iron panels as a source of quantum stability[4]. Given the pervasive nature of Kant Rays and the unknown amount of time the items had existed the rest of the building was placed under observation by an onsite team of agents.

Approximately thirty-six hours later a web design firm in the same building reported tape dispensers building webs between desks and a swarm of post-it notes hovering about the ceiling. After this a permanent brief was established within the DoM.

Nivara

Despite fears that the phenomenon would take hold on the internet for the first six weeks the outbreak was limited to office equipment, for example on March the 6th 2018 a sorting machine at the Royal Mail office in Bow began swallowing and digesting letters and parcels. Difficulties in containing the CFO required a partial press statement followed by a D-notice. Nonetheless the CFO became relatively common knowledge by late-spring of 2018, albeit countered by Department of Misinformation activity.

The outbreak developed on May the 11th 2018. GCHQ reported an email conversation between representatives of a building firm and a company called FALC Engineering[5] regarding the purchase of two defective excavators on a building site in the Eurostar Ebbsfleet Station[6].

FALC is one of a number of firms connected to Nivara Investment a business founded in 2015, “dedicated to promoting the zero-margin economy through concentrated investment.”[7] Despite being apparently otherwise unconnected these firms have taken a particular interest in acquiring fetishised items, such as the excavators which had[8]. The excavators were later removed by DoM agents to a specially created paddock on Biggin Hill airfield[9].

It is currently illegal to handle manufactured anomalous goods although the law is not extensively enforced. Items affected by the CFO exist in a legal grey area. Though some, like the anomalous excavators have been taken into DoM possession, others are suspected to remain at large. Examples include:

The Three-Piece Rocket – designed and made by Lazercut Associates and currently held in an ESA warehouse in French Guiana, awaiting a launch window. Allegedly a spacecraft made of three stages built as single items (even the simplest working rockets have more than 1,000 working parts). The makers have applied for creative commons licensing. The Three-Piece Rocket could near-exponentially slash the cost of space travel.
Liquid Biopsy – developed by Sarkic Pharmaceuticals, based out of a tech-estate in Reading. LB has the potential to identify stage zero cancers up to twelve months before they develop. The chemical has been registered for clinical trials. The firm has also applied for creative commons despite direct objections from NICE and the Department of Health.
Dream Adverts – run by an organisation calling itself Pal 6. Dream Adverts are broadcast into sleeping subjects. Dream adverts can apparently be targeted according to demographics. The broadcasts have been ongoing since August the 2nd 2018.

Each example is suspected to be an offshoot of deliberately fetishised products[10]. The key individuals in Nivara Investment are:

Phillip Barton, 31, a graduate of Kings College with a PHd in International Relations. Barton came to notice during the student movement of 2010 against tuition fees, a suspected participant in the Millbank occupation though no charges were brought. Barton is also a member of the Guild of Magicians and Psychic Practitioners (GMPP), the recognised union in the anomalous sector.
Jenny Balasundaram, 27, also a former student (MSc at Brunel University). Balasundaram has dual British/Sri Lankan nationality. An heiress, she is the firm’s only known contact with existing capital[11]. As well as a founder of Nivara Investment she also has a non-executive role with Sarkic Pharmaceuticals.
Jacob Porteway, 49, a former lecturing professor of economics at the London School of Economics, Porteway left his role to found Nivara. His brother, Brandon Porteway, is one of the few known, active members of the Lettrist Collective, though it is not clear the extent of their connection since 2003.
Robert “Disco” Seymour, 58. Mr Seymour is a former member of the Progressive Unionist Party who ‘defected’[12] to anti-fascism shortly before the 1994 ceasefire. He moved to the mainland UK and started a security and investigation firm, called Spotlight, that specialised in countering far-right activity and associated organised crime. Spotlight was engaged in providing security for Nivara Investment until the Shoreditch Incident of October the 10th 2018.

A significant rival/antagonist to Nivara Investment is an organisation called the Lettrist Collective.

The Lettrist Collective

The Lettrist Collective, originally the London Lettrist Collective, began as a breakaway from a socialist organisation. It still only has three formal members, though its reach suggests many more active participants[13]. It existed for over a decade as a reading group, later a publishing imprint run out of a former council house in Mornington Crescent, owned by a man called William Boyd. His associates were Christian Barker, a freelance music journalist and Brandon Porteway, an abartist[14] and member of the Guild of Magicians and Psychic Practitioners.

The Collective is opposed to Nivara’s activities on the basis of detournement and acceleration. It attempts to acquire fetishised objects and display them in prominent public spheres, sometimes altered, sometimes not, in order to disrupt the spectacle of capitalism.

The first known example of Lettrist activity during the outbreak was on April the 29th 2018, when an engineer was sent to repair a defective electronic sign above the Euston flyover. The sign reappeared in Piccadilly Circus the following day under the title ‘Nada’s Mirror,’ the LED display reflecting the true reality of objects shown. Other detournements include a motorbike reconfigured as a mechanical bull that was released onto Oxford Circus, live chainsaws sent into Richmond Park and ‘Mechanical Psychologists’ approaching depot managers, offering to provide cognitive behavioural therapy to the depressed buses in Wood Green garage.

The Collective has also taken an interest in digital/electronic anomalies. The spread of the CFO to the internet began sometime in mid-April. Anomalous apps, such as the device that removes auto-tuning from recorded vocals, have all been largely contained by DoM web operations, nonetheless anomalous items tagged with the label ‘Collective’ or with the catchphrase ‘behind seven proxies’ continues to emerge and the three founders of the Collective remain at large[15].

History and Conflict

The chief link between the two organisations is the brothers James and Brandon Porteway. They were both members of an organisation called Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century, a small and benign group that nonetheless fractured along ideological lines in 2003. The brothers each sided with a different faction, postcapitalist versus accelerationist. The differences may seem arcane but they do reflect the contemporary point of difference between Nivaraand the Collective[16].

The Collective regards Nivara Investment as a hostile organisation. The dispute came to a head on October the 10th 2018 when an unknown number of operatives, brandishing sawn off golf clubs and claiming to be from the Collective, attempted to kidnap the directors of NivaraInvestment while they were meeting in their office on lower Hoxton Street though only one was present, Jacob Porteway. Undercover DoM agents reported that in return for releasing Mr Porteway the operatives demanded that the pack of excavators be released from Biggin Hill[17]. The stand-off was resolved when Robert Seymour himself trapped the operatives in a ‘pan-dimensional hoover bag’[18] before leaving the building, taking the operatives to an unknown location. Seymour is currently wanted for questioning. Spotlight was forcibly liquidated by the Department of Trade and Industry on November the 27th 2018 and Mr Seymour’s licence revoked. Former Spotlight employees continue to work for Nivara however.

CFO Prognosis

The CFO is now nationwide. The majority of DoM field agents are dedicated to detecting and containing the phenomenon. Other OECD countries have experienced an equivalent of the CFO[19] but the phenomenon is most pronounced in the United Kingdom. Three examples:

On September the 29th 2018 the Forth Bridge glowed a spectrum of colours and was subject to an emergency repaint.
December the 9th 2018 Junction 18 of the M62 was closed (and remains closed) after the flyover evolved overnight into a loop-the-loop.
January the 3rd 2019 the entire print run of the Bristol Evening Post escaped into the air. Remnants of the run are currently roosting on Flat Holme Island.

To date approximately 1% of UK GDP has been lost in some way to the CFO. Put that into more digestible numbers, that’s approximately £5.5 billion, most of which is fixed capital and most of which was lost in the last quarter. The phenomenon is accelerating. Estimates from the DoM[20] suggest around 15% of fixed capital could be lost by the end of the year if the CFO is unchecked, and the DoM has already exceeded its quarterly budget for winter 2018-19. A quantitative easing of the budget will be essential to meet this challenge.

Nivara has not, as of yet, published financial results for 2017-18. Reports from undercover agents working within the firm suggest a turnover of between £20-30 million, remarkable given the firm did not exist three years ago. The same agents also report that Nivarais now converting a considerable proportion of its returns into cryptocurrency. Nivara could, if allowed to continue, build up a substantial peer-to-peer economy beyond the free market.

The Collective meanwhile has attempted/achieved more than 500 known detournements. There have been a number of arrests however relatively few prosecutions for minor offenses and little if any intelligence on the structure and make-up of the Lettrist Collective, let alone the whereabouts of Boyd, Barker and Porteway. Members, as such, do not seem to have any idea what the Collective is beyond its name and philosophy. The Lettrist Collective is more a threat to public order then economic stability.

The Department of Metaphysics research department is working on a practical solution to the CFO at the Hillingdon facility. Researchers suggest the phenomenon could be the economic equivalent of an autoimmune reaction to the rising ratio of constant to variable capital, suggesting an anti-inflammatory response to the threat[21]. Others propose an immune-suppressant strategy, removing the checks to the CFO and allowing the contagion to reach carrying capacity before burning out.

Nonetheless it is the recommendation of the Cabinet Office we take the following immediate steps:

Apprehend the founders of Nivara Investment and confiscate their resources.
Widen the search for the founders of the Lettrist Collective and upon apprehension confiscate any resources.
Re-enforce all Central Government citadels with quantum stabilising equipment and prepare Operation Pindar for a potential final crisis.

Endnotes

[1] Commodity Fetishism here defined as the literal manifestation of life-like qualities in inanimate objects used and/or consumed in some form as capital.
[2] Established in 1940 as a War Office secret division of psychological operations and continued after the war as a means to investigating and containing anomalous persons and/or phenomena.
[3] Though no one knows the source of the radiation the emission of Kant Rays is proportionate to the physically abnormal behaviour of an object. The current DoM working model is based on quantum theory, suggesting that the wave packet of an object is concurrently radically elongated and compressed and the odds against anomalous behaviour are radically reduced. A picture of the numbers involved – it would take approximately thirteen times the projected lifespan of the known universe for an object the size of a grain of sand to leap unaided out of an object the size of a matchbox.
[4] Later containment procedures, where possible, involved magnetised vacuums.
[5] The initials are not confirmed but suspected to refer to Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
[6] According to a site foreman “come to life and started making a nest in the corner by the foundations.”
[7] This description is taken from the ‘About’ section of the firm’s website.
[8] Extract from a Facebook conversation: 10/05/2018.
[9] One of the excavators gave birth to a litter of machines in July 2018.
[10] The DoM is also working on the assumption that Nivaraand/or associated companies have a means to detect outbreaks of CF, either noumenonmeters or something equivalent.
[11] Numerous of her relatives are also members of Lanka Sama Samaja Party.
[12] His term, used in a police interview under caution in 2010; the interview was conducted shortly before the planned English Defence League demonstration in March of that year as part of a pre-sweep operation.
[13] According to the Collectives political theory members do not even need to know of, let alone contact the organisation. It is enough for people to “engage in situationist practice” to be counted as a member of the Collective.
[14] Abart or Anomalous Art is very much as its described, an artistic market based around works utilising anomalies, sound sculpture, infra-red photography, moving paint etc. Abart dealers and practitioners often get around licensing restrictions by practising a gift economy or using alternative currency.
[15] Boyd sold his flat in Mornington Crescent shortly before the CFO.
[16] The difference is growing a postcapitalist zero margin economy within the current system versus exposing and accelerating the contradictions of capitalism to the point of “escato-dialectical creative breakdown.”
[17] The Collective believes that NivaraInvestment is a front for the Department of Metaphysics.
[18] An eyewitness description…
[19] The FCO is working on a brief. See attached document.
[20] See attached document.
[21] For example a capital gains tax rise, land value tax, rent caps, minimum wage hike, diversion of investment funds away from land-development toward tech-development markets and so on. See attached document for details. See attached document.