Billy Connolly tells the story of ordering Mexican food and realising it’s all the same thing, just folded differently. He asked for something new, but it wasn’t what he expected. The waiter brought the chef, who unfolded the meal, refolded it another way, and handed it back—“There you go.”
I was a postgraduate student in a place that was supposed to be about innovation, about novelty, but it was exactly the same. Life’s other complexities and stochastic circumstances aside, what I found was just the institution presenting itself again and again, folded slightly differently, and calling it new. It wasn’t innovation—it was repackaging.
It’s the rules of geometry and folding that apply, establishing a canonical sense of what it is to be a person in this system, how one should act, how one should belong. It is presented as natural, inevitable, as though it had always been that way, when in truth it is largely arbitrary, only partially emergent. This canonisation of behaviour and identity is sustained through endless repetition, and its supposed inevitability is the mask that hides its fragility.
The result is layers of bullshit. People in positions of control and power who often have no idea what they’re talking about, but who once brushed against something clever enough to lend them borrowed gravitas. That faint association becomes their authority. And yet, beneath it all, the system is just folding itself again and again, dressing up emptiness as inevitability, and calling it leadership.
Daedelus Kite 