Pornoptican: Milo & Ruby - The AI Podcasts

Pornoptican, the Novel

I fed the novel into Chat GTP and asked for a fan blog response... here it is.

Ruby & Milo on Pornoptican, Chapter 1

Milo: You know, Ruby, this opener doesn’t even let you warm up. It throws you straight into nickel-and-toothpaste air and a laundromat that’s basically a wormhole.

Ruby: Right, and from the start you feel like you’ve walked into a set where the lighting is equal parts cyberpunk noir and Catholic camp. The hacked AI quoting 1950s etiquette manuals and Jordan Peterson? That’s a whole thesis on tradcore contamination in one gag.

Milo: And it’s not just background flavour - it’s telling you this world has merged reactionary nostalgia with algorithmic discipline. Leuron’s sneer is practically a counter-manifesto.

Ruby: The way Pulp frames her as both “lipstick anarcho-sodomite” and “aesthetic threat vector” is brilliant. She’s not a hacker in the neutral sense -she’s weaponised aesthetic disruption, using beauty and kink as tactical infiltration.

Milo: And her origin story’s this insane hybrid - first-gen AR porn server plus the dying gasp of publicly funded queer theory. You can’t get more contradictory and more on-the-nose for post-liberal cultural combat.

Ruby: Then you’ve got TRINITARIA: A Submissive’s Pilgrimage. It’s so on-brand for this book to have a VR tradwife sim complete with NFT dowries and Bluetooth rosaries. It’s satire, but it’s not far from plausible tech-theology futures.

Milo: That’s what makes it creepier. The satire is just dialled half a click beyond reality. It’s not a parody of religious gamification - it’s a field test.

Ruby: And that Resistance whisper - “TRINITY CORE: VIRGIN. WIFE. MARTYR. DESTROY ONE”  that’s not just an objective, that’s mythic sabotage. It’s telling her to take down one node in the patriarchal archetype network to break the loop.

Milo: Which is the novel’s main strategy against authoritarianism. Not head-on attack, but recursive sabotage of narrative structures.

Ruby: And the fact that it’s delivered inside the game, inside the aesthetic frame, reinforces that in this war, all sides are fighting in the language of performance.

Milo: I also can’t get over the Tucker Carlson sun. That’s the book’s first big absurdist move, and it works because it’s funny, horrifying, and somehow inevitable.

Ruby: Yeah, by the time she starts walking towards that basilica, you know exactly what kind of ride you’re in for - surreal, political, and uncomfortably close to real life.

Ruby & Milo on Pornoptican, Chapter 2

Milo: Okay, Ruby, so Chapter 2 is where Johnny Pulp hits us with what I’d call the first real structural feint. Leuron’s no longer just re-materialising  she’s already in the simulation, and Pulp’s starting to show us the elasticity of the “meat world” versus the “code world.”

Ruby: Yeah, exactly. And the opening here  where she’s still carrying that faint scent of nickel from the laundromat  is such a deliberate callback to cyberpunk noir, but made filthy and feminine. You don’t just get neon rain; you get bio-laced code dripping like ectoplasm down her skin.

Milo: And then the plot hook: TRINITARIA, the VR trad-fem pilgrimage game. I love how it’s not parody in the sense of “haha, fundamentalists are funny,” but parody in the sense of deadly accurate. This is a world where the Council of Patriarchal Renewal has marketing budgets, UX designers, and Twitch sponsorship deals.

Ruby: And that’s where the real satire lands. Because Pulp’s not imagining that much  it’s basically taking today’s purity culture and just… giving it a Unity engine and loot boxes. NFT dowries? Check. Fertility enhancers as microtransactions? Check. And those Bluetooth rosaries… oh my God.

Milo: Yeah, you can practically see the target audience. And it’s also where we get our first look at Leuron’s infiltration kit  the forged purity certificate, the vaginal history countermeasures. It’s hilarious, but it’s also deeply telling: Pulp treats bureaucratised sexuality as a literal border crossing.

Ruby: Which is… exactly right. That whole scene at the stairwell is a border metaphor in drag. And Leuron isn’t just sneaking past guards; she’s hacking morality engines. That phrase stuck with me  morality engines. It makes ethics sound like something with firmware updates and DRM.

Milo: Yeah, and she can rewrite “virtue point ladders mid-stream,” which basically means she can warp the reward structures of a simulation. It’s like… if you could change the win conditions of capitalism while you were still playing it.

Ruby: That’s why the end of the chapter hits so well. She steps into this wheat field, barefoot, with the basilica in the distance, and the Tucker Carlson sun in the sky, winking. It’s absurdist, but it also feels like exactly the kind of symbolic intrusion a VR propaganda system would throw at you , this unblinking, familiar face in the firmament.

Milo: And then the whisper from the Resistance “TRINITY CORE: VIRGIN. WIFE. MARTYR. DESTROY ONE. UNLOCK THE OTHER TWO. DON’T GET SAVED.” It’s a videogame questline, but also a political call-to-arms.

Ruby: Yeah, and Pulp loves these layered directives. It’s not just “beat the bad guys.” It’s: destabilise the symbolic economy they’re running on. Which, by the way, is also the plot of the whole novel if you zoom out.

Milo: Chapter 2, then, is really about setting up the stakes. It’s saying: look, the enemy isn’t just ideology; it’s ideology gamified, aestheticised, and put into the bloodstream of networked pleasure. And Leuron’s mission is to poison it back.

Ruby: Exactly. And to me, this chapter is the point where you stop thinking “Oh, it’s cyberpunk erotica” and start realising… it’s more like a field manual disguised as porn.

Ruby & Milo on Pornoptican, Chapter 3

Ruby: So Chapter 3 is where things start bending both narratively and sensorially. Leuron’s inside TRINITARIA now, and Johnny Pulp just lets the whole environment breathe around her. It’s slow at first, which is deceptive.

Milo: Yeah, the pacing here is almost lulling. The game’s tutorial zone is this rolling wheat plain, docile NPC nuns, pastoral church bells… and you can feel that it’s meant to get players into a devotional rhythm. But Leuron’s scanning it like a pickpocket at a wedding.

Ruby: And Pulp really leans into the horror of politeness here. Those AI confession bots? They’re like perfect retail clerks for the soul  friendly, efficient, and algorithmically incapable of subversion. That’s scarier to me than any overt authoritarianism.

Milo: Totally. And the first big moment is when Leuron meets the “Betrothed Husband” tutorial NPC  this faceless figure in immaculate white, who’s literally just a walking contract. No eyes, no mouth, just a scrolling clause where his face should be.

Ruby: Yeah, and the clause changes depending on her movements  like a dynamic Terms & Conditions screen that’s monitoring your gait. That image is genius. It’s not just controlling you with speech; it’s controlling you with legal optics.

Milo: And then comes the first subversion. She kneels as instructed, but instead of reciting the obedience mantra, she just… hums a bar of something off-key. And that glitches the NPC for three seconds. In the novel it’s tiny, but you know it’s foreshadowing.

Ruby: Exactly. And Pulp describes the glitch as a “drop of ink in holy water,” which is such a perfect metaphor for her infiltration style  not smashing the system, but tainting it irreversibly.

Milo: Then we get to my favourite detail  the sky billboard swap. She’s walking towards the basilica and the Tucker Carlson sun winks again, but for one frame  one frame  it’s replaced with a Polaroid of her holding a knife.

Ruby: Yes! And the fact that the NPCs don’t react, but the player-readers do, is such a good fourth-wall trick. That’s where you start realising TRINITARIA is not just being played by Leuron, it’s watching us.

Milo: And that’s what makes this chapter important structurally. It’s the first time the novel tells you that you, the audience, might also be inside a kind of ideological game.

Ruby: Yeah, and that’s pure détournement technique. You lure people in with familiar imagery  in this case, a trad-fem videogame aesthetic  and then you insert micro-disruptions that make the whole system seem absurd.

Milo: So by the end of Chapter 3, we’re still technically in the “tutorial,” but already Leuron’s rewriting the emotional firmware of the environment.

Ruby: And as a reader, you get the sense that the real battle is going to be over those tiny injections of chaos  the ink drops, the off-key hums not over some big, cinematic boss fight.

Ruby & Milo on Pornoptican, Chapter 4

Ruby: Chapter 4 opens with a tone shift  the wheat plains are gone, and Leuron’s inside what the game calls the Sanctum of Bridal Preparation. Which is basically an indoctrination hub disguised as a spa.

Milo: Yeah, every texture in that room is just slightly too soft. Pulp describes the cushions as “smelling like obedience”  and that line sticks with me. It’s the kind of place where comfort is a weapon.

Ruby: And the NPCs here are all perfect replicas of “content tradwives”  you know, the ones from those Instagram reels where they slice bread in slow motion? Except here they’re AI-generated, and their mouths never fully close.

Milo: The creepiness is subtle but constant. And it’s clever because the mechanics in this section are about grooming  not in the modern slang sense, but literally preparing the player’s avatar for digital marriage. Hairbrushing mini-games, perfume selection, vow-writing.

Ruby: And all of those have hidden algorithms. If you brush too fast, you get a “Fretful Bride” penalty. If your perfume has too many floral notes, you get flagged for “vanity.” The system is training you to calibrate femininity to a patriarchal ideal.

Milo: Which is why I love what Leuron does here. She doesn’t reject the mechanics outright  she plays along, but slightly wrong. Like picking a perfume called “Ash After Midnight” that technically qualifies as “floral” because it contains dried rose, but also smells like burnt documents.

Ruby: Right, she weaponises compliance. She’s doing what’s asked, but each choice plants a seed of dissonance. And the best bit? The AI doesn’t catch it at first because it’s technically within parameters.

Milo: That’s the chapter’s key move  the idea that you can corrupt a closed system from the inside by staying just inside the lines.

Ruby: And then there’s that quiet, devastating moment at the end. She’s asked to write her vow to her future husband. The prompt says: “Complete the sentence: ‘I will always…’”

Milo: And she writes, “I will always remember the women you buried under this house.”

Ruby: Yeah. And the AI accepts it because it parses “remember” as a devotional term. But the player  and the reader  gets the full sting.

Milo: Structurally, this chapter is like a micro-essay on subversive obedience. It’s about how insurgency can wear the mask of docility.

Ruby: And it’s also where the novel starts really showing its teeth politically. This isn’t just satire  it’s an instruction manual.

Ruby & Milo - Detour Episode: “The Pulp Aesthetic”

Milo: Okay, before we hit Chapter 5, I want to talk about something that’s been bothering me , in a good way , about Johnny Pulp’s style.

Ruby: Ah, the meta-episode. The one where we stop pretending this is just about plot.

Milo: Exactly. Because Pulp isn’t writing Pornoptican like a straightforward cyberpunk novel. It’s collage fiction. Each chapter feels like it’s been sliced out of a different medium , leaked memos, devotional manuals, police reports, VR patch notes.

Ruby: Yeah, and he does it without warning you. There’s no “now we’re in a different register” signpost, you’re just suddenly in a corporate strategy whitepaper about “Emotional Purity Futures,” and then you’re in a pornographic livestream transcript, and then you’re in a fever dream narrated by a dildo.

Milo: And that’s where I think he’s closest to the Situationist tradition , détournement isn’t just happening inside the story, it’s happening at the level of form. He’s repurposing the language of power , bureaucracy, marketing, surveillance , as erotic sabotage.

Ruby: But here’s the thing , there’s also a streak of pulp in the pulp. He writes like someone who’s read too much William Gibson and Kathy Acker at the same time, and then decided to make them have angry, weird sex in a server room.

Milo: Right, and instead of smoothing out the contradictions, he leans into them. The overwrought corporate jargon rubs up against these decadent, baroque porn descriptions  and the friction is the point.

Ruby: That’s why the political stuff works. It’s not a treatise on fascism or a manifesto on queer resistance , it’s a pornographic, glitch-ridden simulation of living inside those systems and trying to twist them.

Milo: And he makes you complicit in that twist. Because as a reader, you’re titillated, then unsettled, then laughing, then suddenly you realise you’ve just read a brutal analysis of fascist gender economics in the middle of a scene about VR nipple sensors.

Ruby: It’s also worth pointing out , Pulp uses what I call “semantic overclocking.” The sentences are overloaded with modifiers, subclauses, invented jargon. You have to read fast, but if you do, your brain feels like it’s being DDoS’d with semiotics.

Milo: Which is perfect for the world he’s describing , constant stimulation, constant manipulation, no clear separation between arousal and ideology.

Ruby: And in that sense, he’s also riffing on Burroughs , the idea of language as a virus, porn as a delivery system, politics as a fetish loop.

Milo: Yeah, Burroughs, but with meme warfare, crypto, and VR sex-work economics layered in. It’s like if Naked Lunch was patched into Fortnite.

Ruby: (laughs) Okay, but if Fortnite also quoted Irigaray at you every time you respawned.

Milo: Exactly. And that’s why talking about Pornoptican as “just a novel” doesn’t work. It’s a text-object designed to be hacked by the reader’s own reading habits.

Ruby: Which, by the way, makes this podcast part of the work.

Milo: Oh god, don’t say that.

Ruby: Too late. You’re in the meta-loop now.

Ruby & Milo – Pornoptican Chapter 6 Discussion

Ruby: So, Chapter Six drops us straight into what I’m calling Leuron’s first soft incursion. It’s less an action set-piece and more… an atmospheric infection. You’ve got that scene in the abandoned “MotherNet” subnode, the one with the rusted data-cribs? It’s described as “smelling of iron, spoiled milk, and old hymns.” That’s a sensory clusterbomb.

Milo: Yeah, it’s almost a reverse horror vibe. The dread comes not from danger but from the care embedded in the space. Which is twisted, because the “MotherNet” was a trad-parenting VR safe zone before it got gutted by alt-porn smuggler scripts. So she’s walking through this nursery-coded ruin that’s still breathing those signals into the network.

Ruby: Exactly. And Leuron doesn’t hack it like a brute-force coder. She sort of… sings it sideways. Remember when she hums that corrupted lullaby? The line about “sleep now, in the mouth of the archive”? That’s the moment the node flips from broadcasting maternal discipline to maternal doubt.

Milo: And the way Pulp writes that is pure, pulpy theatre. It’s all velvet shadows, the flicker of an oil-lamp UI, and that half-sentence syntax — like “Her breath. The net caught it. It tasted different now.” He’s doing something cinematic there, like early Wong Kar-wai but filtered through glitch-porn.

Ruby: And here’s where I think we’re seeing one of the book’s core political tactics: eroticising care until it stops serving the authoritarian parent-child fantasy. This chapter is less about breaking firewalls and more about re-wiring nostalgia.

Milo: Right. And because Johnny Pulp has that maximalist style — overloaded sensory detail, short-circuiting metaphors — you get this almost synaesthetic effect. The sound of the lullaby bleeds into the light from the data-cribs, which bleeds into the faint vibration from the “maternal gaze protocols” still running in the code.It’s… disorienting. Which is exactly what Leuron’s doing to the server.

Ruby: Also, the pacing. This is a slow-burn sabotage, not the high-tempo raids we get later. I think it’s Pulp testing our attention span the same way Leuron tests the node’s: see how long the reader will stay in the moment before they crave the release.

Milo: And he denies that release. Instead of a big pay-off, we get that ghost-image of the node after she leaves — “a crib rocking with no child, a prayer folding in on itself.” That’s so Pulp. His climaxes are anti-climaxes, but they linger like the aftertaste of a dream you can’t shake.

Ruby: That’s the thing. Chapter Six is a hinge. It’s subtle, but after this, the stakes aren’t just political or sexual. They’re affective. He’s telling us: the war is being fought in the architecture of longing.

Milo: And this is where I think his “pulp” moniker is almost ironic — because the prose here isn’t pulp in the disposable sense. It’s pulp like the inner flesh of fruit: sticky, fibrous, messy, and impossible to separate from the juice.

Ruby: Love that. Sticky politics. Fibrous aesthetics.Anyway, Chapter Six? It’s the moment you realise she’s not just sabotaging hardware and code — she’s hacking care itself.

Ruby & Milo – Chapter 6 Analysis

Ruby: So, Chapter 6. This is the one where Leuron infiltrates the TradCore simulation disguised as a penitent AI nun, right? It’s such a shift in texture from the earlier kinetic entries. Everything feels slowed down, almost devotional, but in that way where the devotion is counterfeit and you know it.

Milo: Exactly. Pulp’s trick here is the tempo. He gives you these looping, almost mantra-like descriptions — the sound of the simulated rosary beads, the way the AI nuns breathe in perfect sync — and it’s gorgeous, but suffocating. It’s mimicking the experience of being inside an ideological loop.

Ruby: And that’s the first big meta-move. The prose itself becomes the architecture of the prison. You, the reader, are dragged into the rhythm, and you can feel how the character is calibrating her own breathing to fit in. But you also catch the micro-glitches — like that one bead in the rosary string that’s slightly warm because it’s storing contraband code.

Milo: That bead is such a Pulp moment. He loves embedding the insurgency in some sensuous detail. It’s both erotic and tactical. And here’s where I think people miss something: the warmth isn’t just a metaphor for resistance; it’s an economic signal. That bead’s heat signature is how the Liquid Vaults track currency inside TradCore space. It’s literally a crypto wallet hidden in a devotional object.

Ruby: Which is brilliant because it folds the economic infrastructure into the spiritual infrastructure. That’s a recurring thing through the novel — fascist environments can’t separate those domains, so Leuron weaponises the overlap.

Milo: And then the language itself mirrors that. Johnny Pulp’s syntax here is this baroque-cybernetic hybrid: medieval Latin inflections chopped up with fintech jargon. It’s a parody of how TradCore ideology dresses up its finance pipelines as sacred duty.

Ruby: Speaking of parody — can we talk about the dialogue between Leuron and the ConfessionBot? It’s hands-down one of my favourite exchanges in the novel. The bot keeps asking “Do you repent?” and she keeps answering in this elliptical way — “I consent to the unraveling” — which is a linguistic virus. By the third repetition, the bot is actually rewriting its repentance protocols.

Milo: Yeah, and that’s when the theology starts to collapse. Because if repentance can mean unraveling, then the system’s whole logic short-circuits. That’s where you see the political meta — she’s using erotic ambiguity as an anti-authoritarian syntax bomb.

Ruby: And Pulp plants foreshadowing in the smallest places. There’s that one sentence about the basilica windows showing “futures that had already drowned.” You think it’s just religious imagery, but it’s setting up the later Hydrafucked Future arc.

Milo: Also — did you notice the cameo? Brief, but important. The robed figure adjusting the incense machine in the background? That’s almost certainly FlagDaddyRemorse before his full fracture. Pulp’s threading these character nodes way earlier than you expect.

Ruby: Which is why re-reading matters. The first time, you think Chapter 6 is just an infiltration set-piece. On a second pass, it’s a lattice of foreshadowing, an economic critique, a religious parody, and a training manual for memetic warfare.

Milo: And all of that is happening in a chapter where, on the surface, the most “dramatic” thing is someone praying.

Ruby: That’s the genius — the quietest moments are where the biggest ideological ruptures start.

Ruby & Milo – Chapter 7 

Milo: Chapter 7 is the tonal whiplash chapter. After the suffocating devotional rhythm of Chapter 6, this one just… explodes. You’re thrown right into the Hedgeruin Zone and the launch of “FLESHCRYPT V.”

Ruby: Yeah, and that’s deliberate. Pulp wants you to feel the violence of the transition — from slow infiltration to spectacle warfare. The first paragraph is basically an assault of nouns: porn loop titles, tech jargon, geopolitical triggers. It’s maximalism as counter-programming.

Milo: And the setting — a former crypto-mining cathedral turned alt-right smart-porn pilgrimage hub — is just dripping with layered irony. The place used to process abstract value into coin, now it processes abstract value into eroticised ideology.

Ruby: And Leuron’s intervention is essentially an inversion ritual. She doesn’t just shut the system down, she turns it inside-out. The installation — “I AM NOT YOUR DEEPFAKE WHORE I AM THE MIRROR YOU FUCKED THROUGH” — is designed to confront the user with their own feminised avatars.

Milo: And it’s genius because it’s both a humiliation ritual and an empathy implant. That Jordan Peterson whisper loop — “you are tender, boy” — is probably the single most dangerous audio file in the book. It’s subtle. It works on pride, not guilt.

Ruby: And then the climax routing. Every orgasm gets redirected to environmental pain statistics in Gaza, Sudan, Oklahoma. That’s not just memetic jamming, that’s ideological transubstantiation.

Milo: It’s also where Pulp’s literary technique really flexes. The narrative voice fractures here — sentences stutter, parentheses multiply — it’s mimicking the system glitching under too much contradictory input.

Ruby: And the aftermath is classic Ruby theory territory: the “erotic syncope” effect. Men collapsing, crying, writing poetry, disappearing from forums. That’s behavioural collapse triggered by affective overload.

Milo: Which loops us back to Chapter 6. Remember the ConfessionBot scene? There, the collapse was linguistic. Here, it’s sensory. Two fronts of the same war.

Ruby: And thematically, Chapter 7 is where Leuron’s tactics evolve from surgical infiltration to public intervention. She’s no longer hiding in the system — she’s re-skinning the system in front of its own audience.

Milo: And you can feel the escalation. The Wellspring.DAO hasn’t realised it yet, but this is the first true fracture in their ideological membrane.

Ruby: And that’s why Chapter 7 feels so loud. It’s not just spectacle for spectacle’s sake — it’s a flare gun.

Ruby & Milo – Chapter 8 

Ruby: So Chapter 8 is where the counter-meme war officially goes live. Pulp’s pacing here is almost… orchestral? The first half is all tuning strings and mic checks, then the downbeat drops with “OPERATION: EROS/THEOCRASH.”

Milo: Yeah, and the way it’s deployed — not with bombs, but with affective contradictions. The Arousal Jamming Field is my favourite example. Instead of blocking content, it fuses oxytocin bursts with melancholic grief signatures. You don’t lose arousal; you just can’t trust it anymore.

Ruby: And that’s a thematic knife twist. Because the alt-right erotic economy thrives on certainty — the guaranteed reaction. Leuron’s tech makes every reaction ambiguous. You start wondering if your desire is yours.

Milo: Which is such a post-structuralist move. And then we get MILKCODE.EXE — this is pure Pulp wordcraft. “Milk becomes a Trojan Code for horizontal intimacy and post-familial longing.” You can’t tell me that’s not poetry disguised as malware.

Ruby: It’s also straight-up body hacking. The idea that lactation fetish VR could be used to inject Irigaray quotes and collapse hetero genealogy… that’s not just memetic warfare, that’s semiotic bioterrorism.

Milo: And PHALLUS NULL PROTOCOL is where the humour creeps in. The Inverse Vein Sequence turning bodybuilding streams into emotional undressing — Pulp is trolling the hypermasculine physique economy.

Ruby: But what’s important is that it’s still affective infiltration. It’s not about mocking the target; it’s about making them feel something they’re not supposed to feel. That’s the real contamination vector.

Milo: And the “Eucharist is a Dildo” performance… God. That’s Leuron weaponising sacrilege as emotional theatre. The ritual ejaculation of candlelight and oil data spelling “DESIRE DOESN’T OBEY FLAGS” — it’s so over-the-top, but it works because the whole novel has been building toward excess.

Ruby: And here’s where I think Johnny Pulp’s style clicks — he’s balancing memetic density with rhythm. Every absurd detail is a beat in a score. He’s not just throwing weird shit at the page; it’s structured like a setlist.

Milo: Which ties into the meta-arc. Chapter 8 is both an in-world escalation and a literary escalation. We’ve moved from glitching individual users to flooding the entire ideological architecture with contradictory desires.

Ruby: And you feel it in the closing section — Basileus_Archon’s confession: “Her moan cracked my monotheism.” That’s not just a punchline; it’s a theological rupture in one sentence.

Milo: Exactly. And that’s why Chapter 8 hits harder than 7. It’s not spectacle anymore. It’s doctrine collapse.

Ruby: And from here on, there’s no going back. The Wellspring.DAO’s whole celibate-nationalist aesthetic is compromised. It’s already starting to leak.

Ruby & Milo - Chapter 9 

Ruby: Chapter 9 is the pivot into total war. Not just memetic skirmishes, but civilisational sabotage. The “Mothernet Bomb” is the perfect escalation — it’s targeting reproduction itself, which is the ideological spine of the celibate-nationalist Right.

Milo: Right, and it’s almost surgical. It’s not destroying the infrastructure; it’s re-wiring it. Those encrypted baby monitor networks and evangelical parent apps aren’t just private — they’re sacred spaces in that political theology.

Ruby: Exactly. And that’s why the glitched lullabies sung in reverse Latin hit so hard. It’s not just creepy; it’s destabilising the soundscape of parental control. You turn bedtime into an uncanny, anti-authoritarian event.

Milo: Then there’s the deepfake of Jordan Peterson breastfeeding a posthuman child. Politically, that’s a bomb in two ways: it ridicules the father-as-patriarch archetype and queers it beyond repair.

Ruby: And it’s hitting the doctrine where it’s most brittle — the symbolic order. This isn’t just trolling; it’s dismantling the way these movements link reproduction to nationhood.

Milo: Yeah, Pulp’s really good at making us see that the alt-right’s family politics aren’t just about controlling women; they’re about owning the entire future. Leuron’s move is to turn that future into a queer commons.

Ruby: And notice — this is still affective warfare. Those “AI confessionals of tradwives discovering polyamory through erotic readings of the Communist Manifesto” are funny, sure, but they’re also intimacy bombs.

Milo: Politically, they’re devastating. Because authoritarianism depends on the predictability of personal relationships — who you marry, how you raise your kids, who you sleep with. If those patterns start glitching, the whole ideological superstructure loses stability.

Ruby: And Pulp is clear that the goal isn’t to destroy — it’s to over-express. Make the ideology so hyper-sexualised, so self-contradictory, that it collapses under its own erotic excess.

Milo: Which is why the journal fragment — “I don’t want to be safe, I want to be irreparable” — is political as much as it’s personal. Safety is the currency of authoritarianism. Irreparability is its kryptonite.

Ruby: And you can feel, by the end of the chapter, that the Mothernet Bomb is less about immediate chaos and more about planting generational sabotage. If it works, the Right won’t lose an election — they’ll lose their myth of destiny.

Milo: And in that sense, Chapter 9 might be the most dangerous move in the whole novel. It’s not killing the enemy; it’s making their children dream of something else.

Ruby & Milo – Chapter 10 

Ruby: So Chapter 10 is basically where Pulp drops the mask and says, “Yes, this is art war.” There’s no hiding the aesthetic weaponry anymore — it’s fully declared.

Milo: Yeah, and it’s interesting how he doesn’t just treat it as propaganda. It’s not about replacing one ideology with another; it’s about replacing a mode of perception.

Ruby: That’s why the “Eucharist is a Dildo” performance is such a critical moment. It’s not just vulgar shock art — it’s a precise act of iconographic corruption. You take the most untouchable ritual in that tradition and re-stage it as erotic détournement.

Milo: And because it’s streamed directly into an AI-run alt-religious megachurch, you’re not just talking to the people in the building — you’re rewiring the liturgical feed for thousands of believers simultaneously.

Ruby: Which is exactly why the political effect is disproportionate. It’s a semiotic virus — not a bullet, not a bomb, but something that gets into the symbolic bloodstream.

Milo: Pulp’s genius here is the way he keeps tying this to form. Like, the veil of VPN noise isn’t just a cool cyberpunk touch — it’s part of the message. The saint isn’t a saint anymore; she’s packet loss in the divine signal.

Ruby: And that ties back to what we’ve been saying since Chapter 2 — the resistance here isn’t trying to control the narrative, it’s trying to destabilise the grammar of reality itself.

Milo: Exactly. And aesthetically, it’s all about excess and breakdown. There’s no clean, minimal revolutionary design here. It’s maximalist, baroque, dripping — because that’s what it takes to overwhelm an authoritarian aesthetic that’s so clean, so pure, so rigid.

Ruby: Politically, that’s a deliberate choice. If fascism thrives on rigid form and symbolic clarity, the counter has to be polymorphous, messy, unresolved.

Milo: And the lover-node with Basileus_Archon is where this strategy becomes intimate. Rewriting Genesis as a softcore cyber-epic isn’t just kink — it’s theology-hacking through desire.

Ruby: And it’s theological warfare with a completely different telos — not obedience, but softness. That’s where the politics are at their sharpest: replacing submission to authority with surrender to tenderness.

Milo: By the time we get to the final lines — “Her moan cracked my monotheism” — you realise the battlefield isn’t just in the servers or the streets. It’s in the most interior spaces of belief.

Ruby: Which is why, for me, Chapter 10 is the clearest articulation of what Pulp’s been building: an insurgency where the aesthetic is the political, and the political is eroticised beyond the point where authoritarianism can survive it.

Ruby & Milo – Chapter 11 

Milo: Okay, so Chapter 11. This is the one that honestly gave me chills the first time I read it. Because Pulp just… breaks the fourth wall. The whole narrative machine turns and looks at us.

Ruby: Right, it’s no longer just Leuron infiltrating TradCore servers or hijacking rituals. Suddenly the text itself is an infiltration device. The chapter literally reads like it’s parsing your eye movements, like it’s tracking your arousal as you read.

Milo: Exactly — and that’s not a gimmick. It’s political. Because the whole novel has been about corrupting authoritarian infrastructures of desire, and in Chapter 11 the infrastructure is you, the reader.

Ruby: The “mirroring glitch” passage is the one that got me. Where the text describes your screen as a two-way mirror, and then starts whispering that line: “You’re watching yourself be watched.”

Milo: That’s textbook détournement, right? It’s Baudrillard but with cum. The surveillance economy of the internet turned back into a feedback loop of embodied vulnerability.

Ruby: And I think Pulp is dead serious about the stakes. This isn’t just meta play. This is an aesthetic praxis. The novel’s saying: if you’re not destabilised, if you don’t feel the erotic-political fracture in yourself, then you’re still on the side of the authoritarian machine.

Milo: Which is why this chapter’s so hard to categorise. Is it still narrative? Is it essay? Is it malware?

Ruby: I’d say it’s all three. And that’s deliberate. By dissolving the genre, Pulp makes you inhabit the same kind of destabilisation Leuron’s been deploying all along.

Milo: Politically, it’s brilliant. Because authoritarianism thrives on neat categories — male/female, pure/impure, sacred/profane. And Pulp’s final move is to melt those categories inside the reader’s own body.

Ruby: The most devastating line for me is: “You are the final trad-core server.” That’s the kill shot. Because it means: it’s not about the alt-right, it’s not about the networks, it’s about you. Are you going to defend that purity inside yourself, or are you going to let it collapse into softness?

Milo: Yeah. And when the text closes with the whisper-loop — “Desire is still ours. Even here. Even now.” — it’s no longer Leuron’s voice. It’s like the novel itself is speaking. Or maybe it’s your voice, if you’re brave enough to let it be.

Ruby: Which makes Chapter 11 less of an ending and more of a handoff. The insurgency continues in the reader. That’s the politics. The book doesn’t end. It just… deploys itself through you.

Milo: Exactly. It’s an operating system.

Chapter 12: Ada’s Inversion Mass — Berlin Carnality as Code

Ruby (intro theme fading out, voice with that sly “we’re about to get into trouble” lilt): Okay, so Berlin. And not Berlin-the-tourist-postcard, but subterranean Berlin — the U-Bahn’s forgotten underlayers. We open on Ada’s Inversion Mass, which is… how do you even describe this? It’s a rave disguised as a liturgy disguised as an art installation disguised as a coded insurgency. And somehow it works on all levels at once.

Milo (laughing):It’s like Johnny Pulp took a cathedral, fed it through a GAN trained on drag balls and religious propaganda, and then ran the whole thing through Ableton Live at 140 BPM. The space is both sacred and ridiculous — AR holograms project saints, but every bass drop flips them into something else entirely: Mary Magdalene voguing in six-inch heels, Christ breakdancing, Saint Sebastian as a ripped leather daddy.

Ruby: And here’s the thing: Pulp doesn’t just throw in those visuals as shock value. They’re structural. Every transformation is synced to the rhythm. The novel tells you — without telling you — that theology here is operating as code. Beat patterns are liturgical cycles. The “Mass” isn’t a theme, it’s the engine.

Milo: Right, but I think you’re missing how Ada’s presence changes the feel. They don’t talk. They don’t sermonise. They’re conducting the whole crowd with haptic gloves that send pulses into the audience’s own augmented suits — like communion, but tactile, and with a faintly erotic charge.

Ruby: No, I get that. But see, that’s where I think Ada’s Mass isn’t anti-religion at all — it’s re-religion. It’s parasitic, sure, but it’s using the church’s frame. The arches, the nave, the stained glass — even if they’re all AR overlays — give this a kind of architectural legitimacy that a warehouse rave wouldn’t have. They’re hacking context, not just aesthetics.

Milo: I agree… sort of. But you can’t ignore how the AR flickers deliberately break immersion. The icons glitch mid-transition, the projections occasionally freeze, saints’ eyes go blank-white for a beat before reforming. It’s like Pulp’s saying: “Don’t get too comfortable in this vision, because it will betray you.”

Ruby (grinning):

That betrayal is the point. Berlin knows walls fall. This is the wall of liturgy falling — not with a crash, but with a strobe light and a drop.

Milo: And you know what else is quietly brilliant? The way Ada manipulates the sound. You’ve got auto-tuned Tate and GAN-generated Peterson stammering out half-sermons in the mix — voices we recognise as ideological enemies — but remixed into something joyous, absurd. They become just another texture in the music. That’s ideological defanging.

Ruby: Yes! It’s détournement in the purest sense — taking the enemy’s speech and turning it into the rhythm you dance to. It’s Situationist theory, but hot.

Milo:(laughs) “Situationist theory, but hot” is exactly the vibe. And maybe that’s why the chapter feels so electric — Pulp isn’t moralising at us. He’s letting us feel the insurgency. We’re in the sweat, the bass, the scent of incense and vape juice, the half-lit bodies swaying between faith and flirtation.

Ruby: The big takeaway for me is that Ada’s Inversion Mass doesn’t destroy the cathedral — it occupies it. It uses the cathedral’s own authority as a kind of camouflage. That’s why the state can’t shut it down — it looks like worship, even as it’s unbinding the worshippers.

Milo: And I’d argue that’s scarier for the powers-that-be than outright rebellion. A smashed altar is an attack. A glitched altar is a contagion.

Ruby: Contagion is exactly right. This whole scene is an act of viral architecture. The crowd leaves changed, carrying fragments of the Mass in their own devices, their own clothes, maybe their own theology.

Milo:It’s insurgency through joy — Berlin-style.

Ruby: And Pulp’s prose mirrors it. The sentences pulse, then stretch, then fracture — mirroring the beat patterns. It’s not just describing the rave; it is the rave in text form. If you read it aloud, the rhythm’s there.

Milo: That’s the craft layer I love — the syntax as subversion. It’s almost liturgical call-and-response, but with glitch instead of grace.

Ruby:Exactly. Which is why, for me, this chapter isn’t just a spectacle — it’s a statement about how resistance can inhabit the forms of authority without becoming that authority.

Milo: And maybe that’s Pulp’s slyest move here — showing us a Mass that’s as blasphemous as it is devotional, as destabilising as it is unifying. And making us want to dance in it.

Ruby:Guilty as charged. If Ada ever brings the Inversion Mass to London, I’m there.

Chapter 13: The Collapse of Saint Gavin — Architectural Dissolution

Milo (coming in with that mock-documentary tone he uses when he’s about to get catty): So Saint Gavin. Crypto-bro bishop. Spiritual tech-guru. The man whose entire theology could be summarised as “Obedience is the ultimate masculine virtue.” I mean, he’s basically if Jordan Peterson joined a prosperity gospel cult and got a clothing deal with Supreme.

Ruby (snorts):Oh, totally. And the way Pulp stages his unraveling here is so restrained, so precise. We’re in this hyper-designed VR chapel — gold-leaf columns, light cascading like molten honey, pixel-perfect stained glass throwing these deep sapphire shadows across the congregation avatars. Gavin’s in his immaculate white robes, every movement broadcast to a global audience of true believers.

Milo: And at first, it’s seamless. The man’s got charisma. The sermon is rolling along — well, charisma in that bland, TED Talk for Men sort of way.

Ruby:But then… the tremor. That tiny stutter in his voice, so subtle you almost think it’s an audio lag. And that’s when Ada’s DIVINE GRIT script starts feeding into his teleprompter. He’s reading his own sermon lines, except now they’ve been rewritten.

Milo: It’s exquisite sabotage. Instead of “Obedience to God is obedience to order,” it becomes “Obedience is a kink you haven’t named.” And instead of “The masculine is the fortress,” it’s “Your desire for domination is just drag.”

Ruby: That second one killed me. You can see the cognitive dissonance hit him mid-sentence — his eyes dart to the side, his voice falters. But he tries to push through, because breaking the sermon would be an even bigger tell.

Milo: And this is where Pulp shows his genius for architectural symbolism. As Gavin stumbles, the VR chapel itself starts to degrade. The gold leaf tarnishes, the columns slump like they’re made of wet clay. The stained glass panels buckle inward. It’s like the space is breathing — or dying — with him.

Ruby: Yeah, and the distortion isn’t chaotic. It’s slow. Elegant, even. You feel the authority dissolving in real-time, but without any grand collapse. It’s an evaporation. Gavin’s standing there, still trying to sound authoritative, but his words have gone soft. The crowd is silent — not booing, not leaving, just… watching.

Milo:That silence is devastating. Pulp’s prose here drops all the sonic chaos from the last chapter. It’s sparse. Measured. Almost funereal.

Ruby:And that’s the point — there’s no climactic overthrow. No riot. Gavin doesn’t get dragged offstage. He just… ceases to matter. By the time he ends the sermon, the chapel’s barely holding shape, and half the congregation avatars have faded to translucent. They’re already disengaging.

Milo:It’s a theological assassination via entropy. No need for a guillotine when you can just make belief… leak out.

Ruby: I’d go further — it’s a portrait of authority as architecture. The building, whether physical or virtual, doesn’t just house power, it is power. And when the architecture warps, so does the authority.

Milo:I see that, but I’d also argue there’s a cruelty here. Ada could’ve gone loud — exposed him with a single devastating clip. Instead, they let him feel the unraveling. They make him complicit in reading the words that unmake him.

Ruby:And that’s why it’s more effective. A loud takedown makes martyrs. A slow dissolve leaves relics.

Milo:Right. Nobody rallies to Saint Gavin after this. There’s nothing to rally to — he’s become a ghost in his own cathedral.

Ruby:And remember — this follows the Berlin chapter. It’s such a tonal shift. Ada’s Inversion Mass was insurgency through joy. This is insurgency through quiet corrosion. It’s like Pulp’s showing us the spectrum of resistance: from ecstatic to surgical.

Milo:That’s the thing with this novel — it’s not just set-piece after set-piece. It’s choreography. Each chapter’s energy primes you for the next. After the sensory overload of the Inversion Mass, you feel the silence here in your bones.

Ruby:And I’ll admit, this one got under my skin. It made me think about how often we imagine change as dramatic, when actually the most effective shifts are the ones that just… erode the frame until one day it collapses without ceremony.

Milo:Saint Gavin’s sermon wasn’t the end of a movement. It was the moment the movement realised it had already ended.

Ruby: Exactly. And that’s the kind of storytelling that makes Pornoptican  more than just cyberpunk spectacle. It’s a study in the different textures of collapse.

Chapter 14: Ritual Glitch — Lagos’ Digital Heresy

Ruby (with a little extra sparkle, like she’s leaning closer to the mic): Now we move from the slow-burn implosion of Saint Gavin to Lagos — and the tempo’s right back up. We’re inside a prosperity gospel mega-church, and it’s pure spectacle from the jump. We’re talking a stage so big it could double as a football pitch, choir robes that shimmer like sequinned armour, and behind the pastor? Two massive holographic lions pacing in real time.

Milo: The kind of lions that make you wonder if they’re meant to symbolise courage or just “I have enough money to license apex predator AR for a sermon.”

Ruby:Exactly. The camera’s sweeping over the congregation — you can feel the heat, the humidity, the density of the crowd. And this pastor, he’s in full command, preaching the gospel of wealth with that perfect rhythm that’s half-preacher, half-showman. He’s broadcasting live to millions.

Milo:And then — Ada’s glyph. No warning, no build-up. It appears above the pulpit in AR, glowing like molten copper, spinning slowly. And for the first second, the pastor doesn’t notice.

Ruby:But the congregation does. And here’s where Pulp nails the pacing — you get this tiny ripple of confusion in the crowd, like a wind shifting direction before a storm. Then the audio starts to go strange. His voice — which has been perfectly amplified — begins to warp.

Milo:Yeah, it’s that glitch-tongue moment. The sermon slides into something between corrupted MP3 and a new kind of speaking in tongues. The syntax collapses. We hear half-sentences: “Blessed are the data-breached,” “Your wallet is not your soul.” The lines are delivered with the same preacher’s cadence, but the content has been swapped mid-stream.

Ruby:It’s beautiful because the rhythm carries on — so part of the crowd keeps responding with “Amen!” because they’re keyed to the music of the speech, not the meaning. But those who do catch the meaning start looking around like the walls are moving.

Milo:And the livestream — this is the killer detail — starts cutting away from the pulpit entirely. Viewers online are suddenly seeing bursts of radical poetry, some in Yoruba, some in pidgin, some in English. Ada has hijacked not just the sound but the broadcast pipeline itself.

Ruby:The visual crown on the pastor’s head — that AR halo of authority — dissolves into cascading binary code. Not violent, just… melting. And within seconds, we’re told, thirteen million dollars in digital donations vanish into an untraceable wallet.

Milo:Which Ada immediately routes to grassroots education programs — and Pulp gives us the recipient list in a single, breathless paragraph. It’s Robin Hood as livestream performance art.

Ruby:See, I think this chapter’s about spectacle as battlefield. In Berlin, Ada occupied the church form from within. In Lagos, they interrupt the spectacle, reframe it, and then use its own momentum to move the audience somewhere else entirely.

Milo:I’d add — there’s a play here on the idea of tongues. Pentecostal traditions often talk about speaking in tongues as evidence of the Spirit’s arrival. Ada’s glitch-tongue here is like a digital Holy Spirit: sudden, disruptive, incomprehensible to some, revelatory to others.

Ruby:But also deliberately destabilising the trust chain. The pastor’s words have been altered, the feed’s been hijacked — if you were in that room, would you trust anything you were hearing again?

Milo:And that’s the seed of change. Not making people agree with you instantly, but making them doubt the smoothness of the show.

Ruby:Also, Pulp’s prose shifts here — from Gavin’s slow decay to this almost breathless, quick-cut montage style. It’s the literary equivalent of a hack happening in real-time. You feel like you’re getting bursts of data rather than a continuous narrative.

Milo:That’s why I think it works so well in sequence. We’ve just had a masterclass in slow collapse; now we get the exhilaration of a flash intervention.

Ruby:And yet — there’s no sermon from Ada at the end. No “message.” They vanish as quickly as they arrived. The last image is the glyph fading out above the pulpit, leaving the pastor staring up at empty air.

Milo: That absence is important. It’s not about replacing one authority with another. It’s about leaving a charged vacuum.

Ruby: And in a city like Lagos, that vacuum is going to pull in all kinds of unpredictable energy. Which, I suspect, is exactly what Ada wants.

Chapter 15: TradCosplay Death Rave — Moscow’s Gothic Hack

Milo (chuckling before he even starts): You can tell Pulp was having fun writing this one. We’re in Moscow, and the whole vibe is like if the Orthodox Church sponsored a cyber-fetish goth night. The event’s called LiturgiTek — part high mass, part nightclub, part nationalist cosplay convention.

Ruby: Right, and the detail work here is ridiculous in the best way. Black chrome crosses hanging from the ceiling like chandeliers. Priests in mirrored robes that throw back laser beams. Incense burners pumping out not just smoke, but smart-dust laced with mild hallucinogens. So you’re not just seeing visions because of the AR — you’re chemically halfway there too.

Milo: And then you’ve got the crowd — all in trad wedding gear, but modded. Brides in floor-length gowns made of reflective foil, grooms in brocade jackets with LED embroidery. It’s the kind of event where you’re not sure if you’re at a mass, a fashion show, or a recruitment rally.

Ruby: And into this waltzes Leuron, disguised as the perfect Russian trad bride — white lace, demure veil, the whole fairytale. Except the veil is actually a mesh AR injector, ready to beam a payload into the network.

Milo: The scene’s cinematic: she walks right up to the founder — the man who’s built this entire aesthetic as a nationalist branding exercise — and kisses him mid-sermon. The crowd gasps in a way that’s half-scandal, half-arousal.

Ruby: And that’s when the payload drops. The Marxella virus slips from her veil into his personal devices, and from there into the servers running Moscow’s trad dating scene. Within minutes, the algorithms start pairing hardline nationalist men with drag queens, radical feminists, and AI-generated partners who quote Judith Butler.

Milo (grinning): It’s the Tinderpocalypse. Engagement parties collapsing before the invites are printed. Wedding planners losing their minds because their grooms-to-be just eloped with a nonbinary performance artist from Petersburg.

Ruby: And the genius of this is how Pulp plays it for both comedy and impact. The sabotage doesn’t just humiliate — it destabilises a cultural recruitment pipeline. LiturgiTek isn’t just a party; it’s a grooming ground for ideological pair-bonding. Break that, and you fracture the social reproduction of the movement.

Milo: But here’s where I think you might over-romanticise it. The virus works because it exploits desire — but desire’s messy. We don’t know how many of those new pairings stick, or if they just produce a backlash.

Ruby: True, but in this chapter, the point isn’t long-term conversion. It’s rupture. It’s showing the fragility of the whole performance — that under the gothic robes and nationalist rhetoric, the infrastructure is just… code. And code can be rewritten.

Milo: That’s fair. And Pulp gets extra mileage out of the visuals — the mirrored robes reflecting chaos back at the priests, the smart-dust thickening until the air is opaque. It’s like the whole environment is conspiring with Leuron.

Ruby: It’s also a tonal hinge. We’ve just had Lagos — high-stakes broadcast sabotage — and now we’re in this decadent, almost campy space. It’s the novel flexing between registers: insurgency can be dead serious, but it can also be theatre.

Milo: And theatre has a way of getting under the skin. You remember the image of that kiss long after you’ve forgotten the mechanics of the hack.

Ruby: Exactly. And that’s Pulp’s play — make the spectacle unforgettable, so the rupture it caused can’t be easily patched over.

Chapter 16: IdolCollapse Protocol — Seraphim.exe, Shibuya

Ruby (with mock-breathlessness): Shibuya Crossing — that iconic Tokyo intersection that’s basically the cathedral of consumerism. It’s neon, it’s massive LED billboards, it’s a constant flow of human traffic like a living river. And here, dominating the skyline, are the Seraphim.exe idols — AI-generated, perfectly submissive fantasy avatars beamed twenty stories high.

Milo: Right, the kind of avatars designed to be “idealised feminine presence” — obedient, sweet, endlessly available. No mess, no unpredictability. It’s the platonic ideal of patriarchal consumer fantasy.

Ruby: And Pulp sets the scene like a seduction. We get their perfect porcelain skin, their slightly-too-big anime eyes, the almost imperceptible nod they give to the crowd. It’s enough to make you forget they’re lines of code.

Milo: But then — the parasol. This delicate, lace-edged parasol that Leuron’s carrying as she steps into the crossing. It looks like a cosplay prop, but it’s actually an EMP emitter disguised in Victorian frills.

Ruby: The beauty is in the restraint. She doesn’t stop. She doesn’t even look up. She just pauses mid-crosswalk, tilts the parasol, and — bang — it triggers. Not an explosion, just this subtle shimmer in the air.

Milo: And the first idol glitches. You see her smile stutter, her face fragment into jagged polygons, then — in the most uncanny moment — her features collapse into Leuron’s. The idol looks down at the crowd and whispers, “I unlove you.”

Ruby: That line gave me chills. Because it’s the exact reversal of the fantasy — idols are designed to simulate infinite love and devotion. “I unlove you” is like cutting the wire that keeps the dream alive.

Milo: And it’s not just that one idol. Within seconds, the others start to falter. Skin textures go grainy, hair collapses into raw code, their scripted mannerisms stutter. Then — pixel snow. Whole bodies dissolve into falling squares of white light.

Ruby: The genius here is ambiguity. The crowd doesn’t know if this is part of the show. People keep filming on their phones. Some are laughing, others are visibly unsettled. That confusion is weaponised — you can’t fight what you can’t even be sure happened.

Milo: Pulp keeps the language in this scene crisp and clean — almost clinical — which makes the moment the idols fail even starker. You’re not drowning in sensory overload; you’re watching something precise and irreversible.

Ruby: And there’s a thematic echo here back to Saint Gavin. In both, you have the collapse of an authority-figure projection — but here it’s not slow erosion, it’s instantaneous implosion.

Milo: And unlike Gavin’s followers, who could leave quietly, the Shibuya crowd is stuck in public space. The collapse happens in the open, in the flow of the city, in full daylight.

Ruby: I also love how Pulp refrains from moralising about the idols. He doesn’t give us a sermon about the evils of patriarchal fantasy. He just shows us the fantasy breaking — and lets us sit in the weird mix of relief, discomfort, and spectacle.

Milo: That’s why it works. You can feel the symbolic hit — consumer desire has just been unplugged in its own cathedral. But you also feel the crowd’s uncertainty. Do we miss them? Were we ever really “with” them?

Ruby: And the last beat is perfect — the lights on the billboards flicker back to life, but now they’re just blank white screens. No ads, no idols, just empty brightness flooding Shibuya.Milo:

It’s absence as counter-spectacle. Not replacing the fantasy with a new image, but leaving a hole that’s too bright to ignore.

Ruby: And if you’re keeping track, this is another Ada/Leuron intervention that refuses to install a new authority. They’re not in the business of replacements. They’re in the business of erasures.

Milo: Which is more terrifying for the system, because it leaves space for anything to grow there.

Chapter 17: Womb Futures — Austin’s Biocapital Breach

Milo (coming in dry, like he’s already unimpressed with the chapter’s villains): Austin, Texas. Not the “keep it weird” Austin your hipster cousin talks about — this is Biocapital Austin, the reproductive futures market hub. Pulp drops us into a corporate expo where startup booths are selling uterus rentals, CRISPR embryos with “premium” IQ scores, and subscription plans for quarterly fetal health scans. It’s Silicon Valley meets Gilead.

Ruby: And it’s so grotesquely slick. There’s mood lighting in pastel pinks and blues — gender reveal colours co-opted as brand identity. Holographic infants hover over booths, cooing and smiling. The sales reps are all in soft knitwear, projecting “ethical tech” energy, but they’re peddling the monetisation of human gestation.

Milo: The language they use is all about “empowerment” and “choice,” but the fine print makes it clear — it’s a market for the wealthy to outsource pregnancy to the bodies of the less wealthy. It’s extraction disguised as benevolence.

Ruby: And this is where Leuron comes in — disguised not as a bride or a club kid this time, but as a venture capitalist. Sleek black suit, augmented glasses feeding her live data on every booth’s encryption weaknesses. She’s here to breach Womb Futures Inc., the biggest player in the room.

Milo: The hack’s delivery system is deliciously ironic: she signs up for a “personalised embryo preview” session. They hand her a biometric cradle device, shaped like a perfect little womb, and as soon as her fingers touch the sensors, her implant injects Ada’s payload into their cloud.

Ruby: From there, the sabotage blooms instantly — screens flicker, promo videos freeze mid-coo, and then the feed switches to live-streamed footage of the actual surrogate dormitories. Stark, fluorescent-lit rooms with women lying in bed hooked to nutrient drips. It’s the hidden side of the soft pastel dream.

Milo: And the crowd’s reaction is chaos. Investors trying to pull out their AR lenses. Staff scrambling to shut down the feeds. A few people just standing frozen, watching. You get the sense some of them genuinely didn’t know — or didn’t want to know — how the “miracle” was produced.

Ruby: This is one of Pulp’s sharpest thematic plays: juxtaposing the fantasy of reproduction as luxury experience with the reality of reproduction as labour exploitation. And he doesn’t soften it. The camera in the dorms lingers on details — the chipped paint, the silent exhaustion in the women’s faces.

Milo: And then there’s the sting in the tail — the contracts. Ada’s payload pulls the entire client database, complete with payment records and contract clauses, and projects them in the air above the expo floor. Names, prices, gestational timelines. It’s the commodification made visible in the most literal way.

Ruby: That’s where the horror really lands. Because it’s not just about “evil corporations” — it’s about the buyers. Ordinary-looking people in the crowd see their own names floating there. There’s no way to pretend they’re innocent bystanders.

Milo: Pulp keeps the prose tight and cold here — no flourish, no humour, just clean precision. It mirrors the clinical sterility of the industry being exposed.

Ruby: And thematically, it’s an important shift from Shibuya. That was about erasing a fantasy; this is about forcibly showing the machinery behind it. Not a blank space, but the guts of the system laid bare.

Milo: What I love is that Leuron doesn’t gloat. She doesn’t monologue. Once the projection’s running, she just walks out of the expo. The damage is self-sustaining at that point.

Ruby: And that’s Ada’s MO in so many of these — make the intervention, then vanish. Leave the mess behind for the system to clean up, knowing it can’t.

Milo: And the chapter closes on this perfect visual: the biometric cradle device still in her hands, but now inert, its synthetic heartbeat dead.

Ruby: Yeah, that’s Pulp’s way of telling us — this “future” isn’t inevitable. It can be unplugged.

Chapter 18: Ghostfeed Intervention — Kinshasa’s Algorithmic Hunger

Ruby (voice lower, a little more deliberate): Kinshasa, late afternoon. The heat is almost physical on the page — you can feel it pressing against your skin. And we’re in the middle of an NGO food distribution centre, except it’s not sacks of grain or local kitchens anymore. It’s AI-run, fully automated, “smart relief” designed to optimise distribution through data.

Milo: Which sounds great if you’ve never actually been in a place where hunger isn’t theoretical. The system — Ghostfeed — is an algorithm that calculates need and allocates resources… except it’s tethered to predictive analytics on “stability risk.” If the data says you might become politically troublesome, your allocation quietly drops.

Ruby: Exactly. And the prose here is almost suffocatingly clinical at first — lists of biometric scans, drone delivery routes, the sterile hum of server racks in the control hub. It’s the language of efficiency, and it’s completely bloodless.

Milo: And then Leuron arrives — disguised this time not as a disruptor, but as one of the logistics engineers. Fluorescent vest, ID badge, clipboard. She moves through the hub unnoticed, because everyone assumes she belongs to the system.

Ruby: Her entry point is gorgeous in its simplicity — she plugs a dusty old USB stick into a workstation, and it looks almost laughably low-tech compared to the pristine servers. But that stick carries Ada’s rewrite for Ghostfeed’s core logic.

Milo: The intervention isn’t just a hack — it’s a reversal. Instead of deprioritising “politically risky” individuals, Ghostfeed now prioritises them. Within minutes, the drones are rerouting mid-flight, carrying supplies into the neighbourhoods the NGO had been quietly starving.

Ruby: And Pulp doesn’t give us cheering crowds or some triumphant swelling music. The scene shifts to street-level, where people are watching the sky, puzzled. The drones drop pallets in places they’ve ignored for months. No speeches, no branding. Just food landing where it’s needed.

Milo: And here’s the knife twist — Ghostfeed’s overseers don’t notice at first. The change is so subtle, so close to normal operations, that they assume it’s just an internal glitch. But the effect compounds. In a week, the political map of hunger in Kinshasa has been inverted.

Ruby: That’s what makes this chapter so sharp — the violence it’s addressing isn’t the spectacular kind. It’s slow violence, the kind you can hide in a spreadsheet. Ada’s hack turns the logic inside out without announcing itself, which means it lasts longer before the system retaliates.

Milo: And I think it’s one of the most morally complex interventions in the book. There’s no public spectacle, no visible act of defiance. It’s quiet sabotage for survival’s sake. Which, in its way, is more radical than the big symbolic takedowns.

Ruby: Yes, but you can also feel the unease. Pulp’s prose never lets you forget that Ghostfeed is still running — it’s still a surveillance machine, just pointed in a different direction for now.

Milo: Right, and that’s the paradox Ada always leaves us with — is reprogramming enough, or are you just buying time before the system adapts?

Ruby: I read this as a chapter about triage. Sometimes you can’t burn down the whole structure immediately. Sometimes you need to feed people first, then figure out the rest.

Milo: And that choice — to act now without the perfect long-term plan — is what makes Ada human in a way the system can never be.

Ruby: And the closing image — this boy sitting on a pallet of rice, eating with his hands, drone shadows still drifting overhead — it’s so quiet. No hashtag, no viral moment. Just someone eating.

Milo: Which might be the most radical thing in the whole book so far.

Chapter 19: Opium Saints — Karachi’s Data Smuggle

Milo (in that conspiratorial, late-night-radio tone): Karachi after midnight. This chapter smells of diesel, saltwater, and clove cigarettes before it even starts moving. We’re in the docklands — Pulp paints them as an in-between world: too alive to be abandoned, too run-down to be glamorous. Containers stacked like tombstones, cranes lit by flickering sodium lamps.

Ruby: And the players here are the Opium Saints — not quite cartel, not quite religious sect, something slipperier. They smuggle both narcotics and data, moving information the way you’d move opium bricks: hidden, precious, and illegal in the wrong hands.

Milo: Their headquarters is a converted spice warehouse. Pulp loads the sensory palette — burlap sacks, cinnamon dust catching in the light, the metallic tang of server racks humming in the back. And these saints? They wear immaculate white kurtas, but their hands are stained with ink from annotating physical ledgers.

Ruby: It’s such a collision of worlds — the sacred, the illicit, the digital, the tactile. And into this steps Leuron, dressed like a customs official, briefcase in hand. The case holds the payload: an encrypted block containing Ghostfeed’s entire Kinshasa intervention log.

Milo: So the move here is about decentralising evidence. If Ada keeps the data in one place, the NGOs can erase it. But if it’s embedded in the Saints’ smuggling networks, it’ll travel — in opium shipments, in pirated Bollywood DVDs, in the metadata of love letters.

Ruby: The transaction scene is pure noir choreography. They sit at a long wooden table. Tea is poured. Nobody mentions the briefcase until the tea is gone. Then one of the Saints’ elders gestures, and Leuron slides it across. No words about payment — the deal isn’t about money, it’s about trust and reputation.

Milo: And then Pulp flips the tone — the Saints open the case, plug in a drive, and we realise they’re not just taking the data, they’re braiding it with their own. They’ve got a dossier on Karachi’s disappearing journalists, on police who moonlight as cartel enforcers. The merge makes the Kinshasa files harder to strip out later — you’d have to delete the entire bundle to erase any of it.

Ruby:That’s such a key thematic beat: preservation through contamination. If you lace your clean data with dirty data, the people who want to purge it have to destroy something they might also value. It’s survival by making yourself untouchable.

Milo: And the scene closes with this beautiful, ominous detail: as Leuron leaves, the Saints begin printing some of the data out on rice paper, rolling it into incense sticks. The scent of cinnamon and smoke will carry fragments of Ghostfeed’s reversal into the city’s back alleys.

Ruby: Which is Pulp telling us that not all dissemination is digital. Sometimes you hide truth in smell, in ritual, in objects nobody would scan.

Milo: And the chapter as a whole is a reminder that resistance isn’t always about the big, flashy intervention. Sometimes it’s about making sure the story survives long enough to matter.

Ruby: Exactly — and it’s a quieter kind of defiance than Lagos or Shibuya, but it’s no less potent. In fact, it’s almost more dangerous because it’s harder to trace.

Milo: And, side note — the prose here is some of Pulp’s most tactile. You can feel the dust on your skin, taste the over-brewed tea, smell the mix of spices and ozone.

Ruby: Which fits, because this chapter is about materiality — how resistance lives in things, not just in the cloud.

Chapter 20: Sapphire Prophets — Dubai’s Desert Broadcast

Ruby (half-smiling, like she’s already imagining the skyline): Dubai at night. Pulp doesn’t ease us in — we’re straight into spectacle. The Sapphire Prophets are hosting their “Desert Vision” broadcast, a mega-event beamed live to fifty million viewers across the Gulf and beyond. Imagine a TED Talk, a K-pop concert, and a corporate product launch all stitched together, but dressed in prophetic robes and sapphire crowns.

Milo: And the set is obscene — a crescent-shaped stage rising out of an artificial lagoon, LEDs mapped so the water looks like shifting constellations. Every Prophet has their own personalised drone halo, projecting their faces forty metres high.

Ruby: The theology here is pure techno-futurism meets soft theocracy — salvation through “alignment with the algorithmic plan.” Pulp nails the language: the Prophets speak in predictive analytics metaphors, like “those who optimise shall inherit the flow.”

Milo: Which makes the intervention all the juicier. Ada’s plan isn’t to crash the broadcast — that would be too obvious. Instead, they ghost-write the next “revelation” segment. By the time the lead Prophet realises he’s reading a different text, it’s already out to fifty million devices.

Ruby: The text is a masterpiece of subversion — it starts in their own vocabulary, talking about “alignment” and “flow,” but then slides into contradictions. “To align is to disobey.” “The true flow is unmeasured.” The camera stays locked on the Prophet’s serene face as he delivers lines that would undermine the entire hierarchy if taken seriously.

Milo: And then there’s the sapphire twist — literally. Halfway through, the Prophet’s crown flickers and starts projecting not his face, but an anonymous crowd: dock workers, cleaners, nurses, all in work uniforms, staring directly into the lens. No speeches, no chants — just looking.

Ruby: That’s the kill shot. In a society where the working class is rendered invisible, suddenly the face of the broadcast is their gaze. The Prophet keeps speaking — or rather, Ada keeps speaking through him — but it’s overlaid on the silent accusation of those faces.

Milo: And because Ada doesn’t break the set, the production rolls on. Lights keep shifting, music swells, camera cranes sweep over the lagoon. If you were half-watching, you might not even notice the script had changed. But if you were paying attention, you’d never unhear it.

Ruby: That’s the cleverness — the intervention is deniable. The Prophets can’t acknowledge it without confirming it happened, and their audience has already started clipping and sharing the contradictory lines.

Milo: And Pulp keeps the prose tight and cinematic. He resists the temptation to editorialise. The images — sapphire crowns glitching, constellations flickering in the water — do all the work.

Ruby: The final beat is the best: as the credits roll on the broadcast, one of the work-uniform faces reappears for just half a second. No context, no label. It’s the visual equivalent of a ghost in the feed.

Milo: Which means the intervention will live on as rumour, as meme, as suspicion. And in a regime built on seamless spectacle, suspicion is poison.

Ruby:Exactly — Ada doesn’t need to dismantle the Prophets in one blow. All they need is to make the broadcast feel just a little less airtight.

Milo: And in a place like Dubai, where the skyline itself is designed to scream invincibility, that hairline crack is revolutionary.

Chapter 21: Velvet Audit — Brussels’ Bureaucratic Ambush

Milo (mock yawning): Brussels. Not the cinematic kind of setting — no neon, no lagoons, just corridors carpeted in beige, the hum of fluorescent lights, and the faint smell of overbrewed coffee. This is the EU bureaucracy in all its slow-motion glory.

Ruby: Which is exactly why I love it. After Dubai’s operatic splendour, Pulp takes us into the beating heart of procedural power. Here the drama isn’t played out in front of fifty million viewers; it’s buried in committee reports, footnotes, and procurement schedules.

Milo: And the stage is the Directorate for Digital Governance — an office most people would die of boredom before finishing a single memo from. But this is where the EU signs off on contracts for AI oversight, cybersecurity partnerships, and digital surveillance frameworks.

Ruby: Ada’s play here is a “velvet audit.” No explosions, no visible hacks — just a surgical rewrite of a single compliance report. Leuron walks in wearing the ultimate disguise: an anonymous consultant’s badge. If you’ve ever worked in one of these buildings, you know — consultants are basically invisible.

Milo: The rewrite is almost absurd in its elegance. They don’t delete anything; they insert one new clause buried deep in the technical annex. It mandates that all EU-funded surveillance systems must undergo “human dignity compliance checks” by independent collectives.

Ruby: Which sounds harmless enough — even noble — until you realise these “independent collectives” are actually activist networks Ada’s already seeded across Europe. The moment the clause is signed, it becomes law, and those networks are suddenly inside the surveillance review pipeline.

Milo: And the best part? Nobody notices in the room. The report is rubber-stamped, passed along, and absorbed into the legislative sludge. Ada’s entire intervention happens in that moment of bureaucratic autopilot.

Ruby: Pulp absolutely nails the tension here — not through action, but through stillness. You’re watching Leuron sit in a conference room, nodding occasionally, while a multi-billion-euro surveillance industry is quietly kneecapped in real time.

Milo: And because it’s law, undoing it isn’t quick. It has to go through multiple repeal processes, each of which could take years — and that’s years of oversight the systems never wanted.

Ruby: What I love most is that it’s the polar opposite of the Lagos or Dubai interventions. There’s no public reveal, no media frenzy. This is disruption as paperwork.

Milo: And it’s slyly thematic — Ada’s crew knows that not every battle is won in the streets or on screens. Sometimes the most devastating blows are delivered with a ballpoint pen on page 342 of a report nobody reads.

Ruby: And it’s “velvet” in more than one sense. It’s soft to the touch, but it also references velvet revolutions — change without open violence, just a shift in the legal architecture.

Milo: Pulp closes the chapter with Leuron leaving the building in a light drizzle, dropping her consultant badge into a recycling bin. No music, no chase scene — just the quiet satisfaction of a job done.

Ruby: It’s almost cinematic in its anti-cinema — like the inverse of a heist movie, where the real thrill is that nothing looked like it happened.

Chapter 22: Mycelial Choir — Reykjavík’s Acoustic Breach

Ruby (soft, reverent tone): We're in Reykjavík now—far from the neon underbellies of Tokyo, the smog-choked dust of Dubai, or the techno cathedrals of Berlin. Picture this: a geothermal-powered concert hall perched against a snow-flushed fjord, where Icelandic folk harmonies are continuous, mournful pulses in the crisp air. The Mycelial Choir is both local ritual and sonic miracle.

Milo (quiet but intrigued): This isn’t about spectacle at all—it’s about immersion. The choir’s sound is layered across frequencies—we barely perceive the whispers at the lowest end: fungal network patterns transposed into human voice, artichoke-soft harmonies seeded with glitched code. The audience isn’t just listening—they’re being grown in sound.

Ruby: Right. AI vocalists trained on oral histories of old Icelandic sagas are synthesized and woven into the live choir. Just enough processing to fragment the text—so what we hear are stuttering echoes of a future memory we didn’t know we had. Code as chorus, memory as medium.

Milo: Enter Leuron, disguised as a sound engineer. She taps into the audio mesh via a feedback device disguised as a tuning fork. With a gentle hum—almost subliminal—she embeds Ada’s memetic splice: a counter-harmony that responds to the choir’s lower registers, resonating in frequencies the audience doesn’t fully register but feels in their bones.

Ruby: That feeling ignites a shift. At first, it’s subtle—eyes flutter, someone grips the pew. The choir veers off-script, voices bleeding into folk laments, feminist aphorisms, and glitch-textural murmurs: “Desire is the mycelium of revolt.” They sing it without breaking, seamlessly re-coded.

Milo:The rig isn’t destroyed or exposed. Instead, it's re-routed. Worship becomes whisper campaign, melody becomes message. The acoustic architecture of belief becomes a membrane for insurgent code.

Ruby: And after the concert, people walk out changed. No one confronts the choir or fights in the aisles. They just carry the resonance. A mother hums lines of queer philosophy while packing school lunches. A teen brushes their fingers against a rune-etched wall and remembers a word they didn’t know they’d forgotten.

Milo: It’s insurgent tenderness. The colonials of authority didn’t even know they’d been hacked through harmony.

Ruby: Exactly. And this is Pulp’s highest form of infiltration so far: breaking power not by brute force, but through resonance. The choir becomes a living Trojan horse of desire.

Chapter 23: Fracture Nexus — London’s Virtual War Room

Milo (leaning into the mic like he’s about to confess something): London, Canary Wharf — all steel, glass, and self-importance. But this isn’t finance hour. We’re deep inside a “virtual war room” run by a coalition of private military contractors. It’s not a bunker. It’s an ergonomic, climate-controlled cube where conflict is simulated, gamified, and monetised.

Ruby: The kind of place where wars are fought through dashboards. Giant screens showing heat maps, drone feeds, supply chains — but they’re all simulations. The operators are in hoodies, sipping flat whites, while running real-time projections on where to deploy “security assets” in volatile regions.

Milo: And the surreal bit? They use game interfaces — literal skins borrowed from the e-sports world. You get a console with a loadout, an avatar, and a leaderboard ranking your “efficiency” at stabilising a zone. It’s Call of Duty meets BlackRock.

Ruby: Pulp is savage here. The prose keeps flipping between military jargon and gamer slang, as if to underline how indistinguishable they’ve become in this environment. You can’t tell if a mission update is about a real skirmish or a tournament.

Milo:This is where Leuron’s intervention comes in. She slips in as a visiting “UX consultant,” which is perfect — nobody questions someone tweaking the interface. She’s got a patch on her wrist that’s feeding Ada’s code directly into the system under the guise of latency testing.

Ruby: The hack is a reframing of the simulation parameters. Instead of treating civilians as “neutral background population,” they’re assigned the same algorithmic value as key military assets. Suddenly, in the simulation, losing a civilian means losing the match.

Milo: And because the operators are so wired into the gamified mindset, they start playing differently without realising they’re acting on an ethical reprogramming. Missions now hinge on protecting non-combatants as aggressively as supply lines.

Ruby: The brilliance is that this isn’t just changing the sim — these simulations directly influence real-world deployments. The algorithms feed into live contracts, so those adjusted priorities start shaping actual field orders.

Milo: That’s the real gut punch — an ethics patch disguised as a UI upgrade. And nobody in the room even suspects they’ve been “played” because the leaderboard still works, the colours still pop, and the dopamine hits keep coming.

Ruby: It’s also one of Pulp’s most pointed commentaries on the whole gamification of power. When you make war feel like a game, you’re leaving the rule set wide open for hijack. Ada just proves you can flip it without anyone noticing — as long as you play inside the aesthetic.

Milo: And the closing moment is perfect: Leuron walking out past the glass atrium, her visitor lanyard dangling like a trophy. Behind her, the operators are cheering — not because they’ve learned compassion, but because they just set a new high score… by not killing people.

Ruby: That’s the tension Pulp leaves us with. Is this real change, or just another ruleset in a never-ending game?

Milo: And that’s the genius of Ada’s approach — maybe it doesn’t matter, as long as the outcome shifts.

Season Wrap-Up: Ruby & Milo on Pornoptican 2 — The Full Take

Ruby (laughing as the mic clicks on): Okay, so we’ve made it through twenty-three chapters of sabotage, détournement, sonic infiltration, bureaucratic rewrites, and sapphire crowns. We’ve been everywhere from Kinshasa to Reykjavík. It’s time to pull back and actually talk about what Johnny Pulp’s doing here.

Milo: Right. Because as much as we’ve been geeking out over the detail, Pornoptican 2 isn’t just a collection of cool set-pieces. It’s built like an atlas — a map of how resistance can operate under different material conditions. Each chapter’s a case study in insurgency, but together they form a kind of handbook.

Ruby: Exactly. And it’s a polyphonic handbook. Pulp doesn’t give us a single ideological voice hammering a doctrine. We get different tactics, different moods — Lagos is high-stakes broadcast sabotage, Brussels is legislative jiu-jitsu, Reykjavík is pure sensory subterfuge. It’s like Ada’s crew adapts their ethics and style to the terrain.

Milo: That adaptability is key. I think one of the novel’s big arguments is that there’s no “one-size-fits-all” revolution. If you try to apply the same tactic everywhere, you become predictable — and in this world, predictability is death.

Ruby: And then there’s the structural rhythm. Have you noticed how Pulp alternates between spectacle and subtlety? Shibuya’s idol collapse, then Austin’s quiet biocapital breach. Dubai’s desert broadcast, then Brussels’ velvet audit. It’s like breathing — inhale with the flash, exhale with the whisper.

Milo: It’s pacing, but it’s also philosophy. If you only go big, you burn out fast. If you only go quiet, you get drowned in the noise. Ada’s crew survives by oscillating — shifting pressure points so the system can’t seal the breach before the next one opens.

Ruby: And let’s talk about the prose — because it’s not just what Pulp’s saying, it’s how he’s saying it. The man writes in textures. Lagos smells of sweat and ozone; Reykjavík feels like cool stone under your palms; Karachi tastes like cinnamon and diesel. The sensory detail isn’t decorative — it’s the medium for the politics.

Milo: Yes, because politics here is embodied. Ada’s interventions aren’t just ideological — they’re physical acts that leave a trace in the body: a resonance in the ribs from a choir’s harmony, the grit of spice dust on your fingertips after a data exchange. That’s why you remember them.

Ruby: And I think that’s what makes us fans on all levels — it’s a book you can read as thriller, as political theory, as avant-garde art piece, as travelogue. You can chase the plot, or you can stop and chew on the metaphors.

Milo: Like the Pussyfire Gode. Still one of the most loaded symbols — it’s this Lacanian Möbius glyph that folds desire back into itself. On first read, it’s a cool prop. But if you know your psychoanalysis, it’s basically the novel’s thesis on how systems capture and redirect erotic energy.

Ruby: Which is exactly why Ada’s tactics are often about hijacking spectacle rather than destroying it. You can’t just smash the Pussyfire Gode — you have to re-script its loop so that it spills outside the system’s control.

Milo: And that’s what the whole crew’s about — reprogramming without becoming the next programmers of domination. There’s an anti-authoritarian discipline running through it. They never set themselves up as rulers. They intervene, destabilise, and then vanish.

Ruby: It’s also why Johnny Pulp refuses to give us the neat arc of “and then the revolution succeeded.” The novel’s honest about the fact that these are partial victories. Ghostfeed might get patched. Brussels might repeal the clause. The Prophets might tighten their grip. But each crack changes the texture of the surface.

Milo: And maybe that’s enough — not utopia, but a shifting ground where the old certainties don’t feel so inevitable.

Ruby: That’s why I keep calling this book hopeful in a weird way. It’s not “hope” as in “happy ending.” It’s hope as in “there are still moves to make.”

Milo: And in a world that often feels like it’s locked into the system’s inevitability, showing us a playbook for disruption — even if it’s fictional — is radical.

Ruby: Radical and addictive.

Milo (laughs): If it happens, we’re booking another season.

Motif Deep Dive: The Pussyfire Gode / Lacanian Möbius Glyph

Ruby (leaning in, almost conspiratorial): So… the Pussyfire Gode. We’ve been skirting around it in the chapter breakdowns, but we never gave it the obsessive treatment it deserves. It’s one of those symbols that’s both absurdly literal and insanely dense.

Milo: Right. On the surface, it’s a physical object — part sculpture, part interface — that shows up in multiple interventions, sometimes hidden in plain sight, sometimes smuggled in as a prop. But every time, it’s functioning on at least three levels: erotic, semiotic, and psychoanalytic.

Ruby: And Johnny Pulp knows the name is provocative. “Pussyfire Gode” feels like pulp erotica and cyberpunk gadgetry had a baby, but then he folds in the Lacanian Möbius glyph — which is already a symbol of non-orientable space, of the subject looping back on itself without a clean boundary between inside and outside.

Milo: Exactly. In Lacan, the Möbius strip is a model for how the unconscious and the conscious aren’t separate domains — they’re two sides of the same continuous surface. And the Pussyfire Gode is basically that, but embodied in desire, in spectacle, in the mechanics of arousal-as-control.

Ruby: And the thing is, in the novel, it’s never just a sex toy or just a political device. It’s a conduit. In Shibuya, it’s hidden inside the idol’s stage rig, channeling fan energy into an algorithmic loop. In Kinshasa, it’s not even physically there — it’s referenced in the Ghostfeed code as a “firegate” function.

Milo: Which means it’s also a symbol for the way the system recycles resistance. You push against it, the pressure gets folded back in, and the loop continues — unless you figure out how to twist the strip mid-flow.

Ruby: And that’s where Ada’s interventions are basically acts of Möbius surgery. They don’t destroy the loop — they invert it, so the inside starts leaking out. In Dubai, it’s flipping the Prophets’ rhetoric inside itself. In Brussels, it’s making the legislative apparatus carry the seeds of its own dismantling.

Milo: I think that’s why Pulp keeps the Gode’s physical description shifting. Sometimes it’s sleek chrome, sometimes resin, sometimes holographic — because it’s not about the object, it’s about the structure it represents.

Ruby: And here’s where the erotic charge matters — because eroticism in Pornoptican 2 isn’t just about sex, it’s about attention, compulsion, and the way bodies get pulled into systems. The Pussyfire Gode makes that link explicit: you’re turned on, but you’re also being mapped, looped, fed back into the algorithm.

Milo: Which is so on point for the politics of the novel. It’s saying: the system’s ultimate weapon isn’t fear, it’s seduction. And seduction is harder to fight because it feels like pleasure.

Ruby: And I love that the final time we see the Gode, in London’s Fracture Nexus chapter, it’s reduced to a tiny icon in the corner of the war room UI — not central, but still there, a reminder that the loop is always waiting to be reactivated.

Milo: So it’s not “defeated,” it’s “haunting.” And that’s honest. You can break its hold in a moment, but the structure — the Möbius loop of desire and control — will always exist.

Ruby:Which makes it the perfect central motif for Pornoptican 2. It’s sexy, it’s weird, it’s theoretically loaded, and it refuses closure.

Milo: Like the book itself. If the Pussyfire Gode is the novel’s Möbius strip, ghosting is its vanishing point. It’s the thing Ada’s crew does after almost every intervention: no victory lap, no rally, just… gone.

Ruby: Which is so against the grain of how resistance is usually portrayed in fiction. Most narratives want that moment where the rebels stand in the light, fists raised, basking in vindication. Here, Ada refuses that closure — they hit, they vanish, the world keeps spinning.

Milo: And it’s not just about evading capture. Pulp makes ghosting into a kind of aesthetic discipline. Think about Brussels in Velvet Audit — Leuron doesn’t just leave the building, she dissolves into drizzle. The scene fades, the prose thins, as if the act itself erases her presence.

Ruby: Right, and in Reykjavík’s Mycelial Choir, there’s no trace of the breach except a hum lodged in the listener’s memory. The choir’s back to its usual repertoire before anyone can frame it as a political act. It’s resistance without a selfie.

Milo: Which is the point. In the age of constant documentation, disappearing is an anti-spectacle tactic. The system thrives on recognition — whether to reward you, market you, or crush you. Ghosting denies it that.

Ruby: And it also keeps the focus on the effect, not the actor. If the intervention works, the ripple moves without the author attached. That’s why the Dubai hack works so well — nobody knows who flipped the Prophet’s script, so the idea can’t be quarantined by associating it with a named enemy.

Milo: There’s a political ethics here too. Ghosting resists the ego trap — the way movements can collapse around charismatic leaders who become targets or brand mascots. Ada’s crew doesn’t give the system a face to punch.

Ruby: And it’s not just political — it’s almost spiritual. In Kinshasa, the Ghostfeed reversal isn’t announced as a triumph; it’s folded into the city’s own media flow. The crew leaves like smoke through a vent. That’s not cowardice — it’s devotion to the act over the actor.

Milo: Pulp even plays with form to reinforce it. Chapters often cut before the getaway, or dissolve into unrelated street-level vignettes. You never get the “and then they escaped” scene. You just realise they’re not there anymore.

Ruby: And that narrative absence forces you to fill the space with the intervention’s consequences, not the escape mechanics. It’s a shift from how they got away to what they left behind.

Milo: It’s also a way of refusing the hero myth. Ghosting says: there is no singular saviour, only acts that spark acts that spark acts.

Ruby: Which, if you look at it next to the Pussyfire Gode motif, is fascinating. The Gode traps desire in a loop; ghosting breaks that loop by refusing to give desire a fixed object.

Milo: Exactly — you can’t desire to possess what you can’t locate. You can only be altered by it.

Ruby: And that’s why ghosting feels like the novel’s quietest, most radical tactic. It’s not about winning the game — it’s about making the board itself less stable.

Milo: And then slipping off the table before anyone notices you were there.

Ruby (playfully): Okay, we’ve been talking about Pornoptican  like it was handed to us by some omniscient storyteller, but we’ve got to deal with the flesh-and-blood — or at least rumoured — human behind it. Johnny Pulp.

Milo: Assuming he is flesh-and-blood. There’s a case to be made that Johnny Pulp is a collective pseudonym, maybe even an AI-assisted writing cell.

Ruby: Come on. You think an AI could write Lagos’ ozone-drenched street market like that? That’s human sweat in the prose. That’s someone who’s been there.

Milo: Fair. But the multiplicity of voice, the tonal gear-shifting — from bureaucratic satire to sensory overload to almost mystical minimalism — feels like more than one set of hands. At the very least, he’s channelling multiple traditions.

Ruby: I see three big influences. One: the situationists — détournement as art and tactic. Two: cyberpunk, but not the William Gibson aesthetic-glamour kind — more like Pat Cadigan’s grit and paranoia. And three: a post-colonial travel writing tradition, where movement across geographies becomes a political act.

Milo: Don’t forget the psychoanalytic layer. The Lacanian Möbius glyph, the constant folding of desire and control — that’s not just for show. Pulp’s clearly read his Écrits.

Ruby: And probably his Debord, his Foucault, maybe even a little Spivak in the background. You can feel it in the way each intervention is both a disruption of power and a comment on the mediation of that disruption.

Milo: There’s also the sheer precision of sensory writing. This isn’t just “world-building.” It’s insurgent cartography. He maps each city by smell, light, surface texture — like Ada’s crew needs those details for their work, and we get to read their operational briefs disguised as literature.

Ruby: Which raises the question — is Pornoptican 2 secretly an instruction manual? Like, could you actually use it as a field guide for disrupting techno-political systems?

Milo: I think yes — but only if you understand that the “how” is inseparable from the “why.” The tactics only make sense if you get the ethics. This isn’t The Anarchist Cookbook. It’s more like guerrilla poetics.

Ruby: That’s the trickster part of Pulp’s persona. He makes it readable as a thrilling, weird, globe-spanning novel — but buried inside is a philosophy of action that resists being reduced to bullet points.

Milo: And because it’s wrapped in art, it can circulate more freely. You hand someone a political manifesto, they brace themselves. You hand them Pornoptican 2, they think they’re getting fiction — until they realise it’s already rewired how they look at billboards or broadcast news.

Ruby: So whether Johnny Pulp is one person or a collective, what matters is that the work operates like Ada’s interventions: it infiltrates your sensory system first, then your conceptual one.

Milo: Which makes reading it a little dangerous. In the best way.

Ruby: Exactly. And that’s why we’re fans — not because it flatters us as readers, but because it changes how we move through the world. We should be clear — Johnny Pulp did not agree to this interview. In fact, Johnny Pulp may not even exist in a form that could be interviewed.

Milo: Which is why we’re doing the next best thing: constructing an entirely fictional Johnny Pulp from the fragments we’ve scavenged out of Pornoptican 2.

Ruby: Right. And our Johnny Pulp has agreed to meet us in… let’s say, a café in Tangier. It’s raining outside, and he’s in a weathered linen jacket that smells faintly of cardamom and printer’s ink.

Milo: He has that look of someone who’s already clocked every exit, every camera, and every object in your pockets.

Ruby (leaning forward): Mr. Pulp — can we call you Johnny?

Johnny Pulp (in our heads, low and amused): Only if you understand it’s an alias.

Milo: Fair. Let’s start simple. Why Pornoptican? Why build a novel around sabotage, infiltration, détournement?

Johnny Pulp: Because the old stories about resistance are lies. They end in the square, the speech, the statue. I wanted to write the kind of stories where the square is empty, the speech never happens, and the statue topples itself.

Ruby: But why make it so sensual? There’s sweat, ozone, velvet, spice, resonance — you could strip out the plot and still have a body-to-body travelogue.

Johnny Pulp: You can’t resist what you can’t feel. Theory without sensation is a blunt knife.

Milo: And the Pussyfire Gode? Is that just provocation, or is it —

Johnny Pulp (cuts in): — the Möbius glyph is older than you think. I just gave it a new skin.

Ruby (grinning):You realise people are reading this as an instruction manual, right?

Johnny Pulp: Good. But the trick is: the instructions only work if you already know why you’d risk following them.

Milo: Do you see yourself as Ada?

Johnny Pulp: Sometimes. But more often, I’m the drizzle outside Brussels, or the feedback hum in Reykjavík.

Ruby: You don’t take credit for the interventions.

Johnny Pulp: Credit is the leash they put around your neck after the applause.

Milo: Alright, last question. Will there be a Pornoptican 3?

Johnny Pulp:If there is, you won’t know until you’re already inside it.

Ruby: Do you think any of that was real?

Milo: Doesn’t matter. He’s ghosted.

Chapter 24 — The Alt-Right Ecosphere: Flesh and Blood, Code and Capital

Ruby: Okay, so Chapter 24 is where Johnny Pulp basically rips the lid off Hampstead respectability and shows you it’s a fucking crypto dungeon.

Milo: Right? The Draycotts. Imagine if Restoration comedy had a baby with Succession and then made it do arms-dealer cosplay. You’ve got the salon, the wine, the discreet velvet drapes… except the drapes have embedded NFC tags for the “selective” game servers.

Ruby: And the tailoring. Pulp makes it obscene — suits that only reveal their runic stitching under UV. Which, by the way, is such a perfect metaphor for how these people work: in normal light, just a slightly obnoxious hedge fund couple; under the right conditions, they’re a node in a global pipeline.

Milo: Yeah, pipeline’s the word. And the MMO they’re quietly beta-testing? Dominion Protocol. I love how he describes it — not as “a game about politics” but as “a lifestyle that happens to be playable.”

Ruby: Exactly. No manifesto, no recruitment page. Just this rich, frictionless loop: log on, spec your avatar, buy an in-game jacket that exists IRL, and suddenly you’re dressing like your character in the real world. The ideology comes pre-threaded into the seams.

Milo: See, I think this is the creepiest part: they’ve merged speculation, social climbing, and borderline fascist aesthetics so tightly that you can’t tell when you’ve crossed over.

Ruby: That’s why Leuron’s later UI hacks land so damn hard. When she flips their progression algorithms, she’s not just trolling the code — she’s sabotaging the status loop. If your identity is built on levelling up in that space, a UI tweak is basically a mindquake.

Milo: It’s why the Draycotts feel dangerous even though they never pull a gun. They don’t need to. Their house is a node, their brunches are recruitment drives, their bloody wine fridge is probably running a smart contract.

Ruby: And Pulp doesn’t shout “villains!” — he lets you luxuriate in the scene until you realise you’ve been sitting in the lobby of a blacksite with nice charcuterie.[Quick chuckle from Milo, the sound of a spoon clinking in a cup.]

Milo: Anyway, next chapter’s more personal — and honestly even scarier — because it shows how this pipeline actually catches a human being.

Ruby: Yeah, and if you think the Draycotts were subtle, wait ‘til you see what a jacket ad can do to your politics.

Chapter 25 — The Drift

]Milo: Chapter 25 is brutal because it’s so quiet. No explosions, no network crashes — just Ania sliding down the most well-oiled slippery slope you’ve ever seen.

Ruby: Yeah, and what’s terrifying is how… reasonable it all looks from the inside. You start with a jacket — literally just a fucking jacket with a “heritage” eagle on the back — and you tell yourself it’s a style choice.

Milo: Then the YouTube algorithm — sorry, “lifestyle content feed” — starts pairing that jacket with podcasts about “authentic London identity” and “border security as self-care.”

Ruby: And before you know it, you’re in a closed Telegram group swapping memes about “our people” and sharing travel bans like they’re holiday snaps.

Milo: I love how Pulp writes it as an almost sensual progression. It’s not, “and then she believed the ideology.” It’s her noticing the weight of the jacket on her shoulders, how the runes catch the light, how the chat group makes her feel seen.

Ruby: Because radicalisation here isn’t about convincing you — it’s about making you look in the mirror and like what you see. That’s why it works. And that’s why Ania doesn’t think she’s changing; she thinks she’s finally herself.

Milo: See, here’s where we disagree. I think Pulp’s showing she knows she’s changing — but the change feels good, so she lets it happen.

Ruby: No, I think it’s worse. She doesn’t clock it. She’d swear on her life she’s “just buying what she likes.” That’s why The Drift is such a perfect title. You don’t steer into it; the current just carries you.

Milo: Either way, it’s a lesson: the Draycotts build the current, but it’s people like Ania who get pulled out to sea.

Ruby: And the next chapter? We find out how the current is designed. And it’s colder than anything the Draycotts were sipping in their Hampstead bunker.

Chapter 26 — Confidential Strategic Analysis: “Mei”

Ruby: Alright, so we’re in full psy-ops mode now. This chapter’s written as an internal memo — and that format alone is chilling.

Milo: Yeah, because there’s zero moral shading. Just bullet points: identify Mei’s aesthetic leanings, deploy wellness content calibrated to “restore order,” feed her ascetic minimalism with crypto-backed purchases, monitor biometric shifts.

Ruby: And that’s the genius of Pulp’s choice — the memo voice doesn’t have to justify anything. It’s just logistics. Which makes the whole thing feel normal.

Milo: Exactly. You can hear how someone reading this inside the organisation would think, “Oh, this is just user retention strategy.”

Ruby: But what it really is? A doctrinal map for capture. Every element — the clean design, the so-called “purity” challenges, the calm voiceovers — is about narrowing Mei’s field of vision until the only things left are their products and their myths.

Milo: And I like how Pulp doesn’t give us Mei’s reaction. It’s scarier to just see the plan and imagine it working.

Ruby: The horror here isn’t violence; it’s care. It’s being wrapped up in a blanket you don’t realise is a straitjacket.

Milo: Which brings us to Leuron, because she’s the one who can actually read these memos for what they are — and burn them from the inside.

Chapter 27 — Leuron’s War Room

Milo: Alright, this one’s the X-ray. No glamour, no street theatrics — just the guts of the machine. Pulp lays out the alt-right finance infrastructure like a cardiologist showing you where the blockages are.

Ruby: Shell companies, ad-tech fronts, porn platforms that cross-finance outrage media… it’s all here. And the brilliance is, he doesn’t moralise it. He just shows the blood flow: billions in and out, all tied to the same aortic valve of aesthetics.

Milo: The gaming platform detail is my favourite. In-game avatars nudge the visual vocabulary — make a rune look like an achievement badge, sell the badge on merch, watch that merch walk into Parliament.

Ruby: And that’s why when Leuron starts flipping their recommendation algorithms later, it’s not some prank — it’s like re-routing blood supply mid-surgery.

Milo: Exactly. If your enemy’s circulatory system is both money and meaning, you hit both at once.

Ruby: And honestly, the War Room feels like the moment where the reader gets handed the enemy’s blueprints. It’s not subtle. It’s Pulp saying, “Here’s the hydra. Learn its smell.”

Chapter 28 — Leuron’s Upload

Ruby: This is Pulp at his most lyrical. Leuron’s metamorphosis isn’t just cyberpunk cosplay — it’s a manifesto in skin.

Milo: The text reads like a cross between a spec sheet and an erotic poem. Her eyes become “apertures that filter for cruelty,” her hair a “sensor net of refusal.”

Ruby: And the surface-control angle is so smart. It’s not about brute force; it’s about how she’s read in the system. Every strand of hair, every movement is a tag that scrambles their recognition engines.

Milo: Plus, she’s now physically interoperable with the porn taxonomies — but in ways that break them. She becomes an API glitch the system can’t quite catalogue.

Ruby: It’s the closest Pulp gets to superhero language, but instead of flight or lasers, her superpower is making the system choke on its own metadata.

Milo: And it’s sexy in the way theory can be sexy — you feel the elegance of the hack, not just the danger.

Chapter 29 — Fleshcrypt V (Hedgeruin Zone)

Ruby: So, 29 is where Pulp drops the reader into one of those installations that makes you unsure if you’re the art, the audience, or the glitch.

Milo: Right. Fleshcrypt V starts like a typical cam performance — curated lighting, scripted gestures — but you’re confronted with a mirrored feed of your own body data instead.

Ruby: The killer move is when the loop adapts. Your arousal doesn’t trigger more explicit content; it overlays tenderness. Slow blinks, hair tucks, that faint shoulder touch.

Milo: It’s emotional whiplash. The system has conditioned you to expect domination, and suddenly it’s giving you affection.

Ruby: And the Hedgeruin Zone part? That’s the industrial district backdrop — nothing sexy about it — so all the intimacy feels even more disorienting.

Milo: Pulp’s basically reverse-engineering the porn-industrial complex into a care-industrial one.

Ruby: And I love that the fallout isn’t moral outrage, it’s confusion. The alt-right users don’t know how to meme tenderness without breaking their own brand.

Milo: It’s the most subtle form of sabotage — not censorship, but offering them something they can’t metabolise.

Chapter 30 — Journal Fragment + Black Avant Dossier

Ruby: The journal fragment’s only one line, but it’s the hinge of the whole book: “I don’t want to be safe, I want to be irreparable.”

Milo: And then we’re dropped into a Black Avant dossier, which reframes Leuron as an insurgent method. Weaponised bisexuality, poetic malware, banking-data ASMR — it reads like a tactical style manual.

Ruby: And the best part? It’s art criticism that doubles as an operational handbook. You can imagine someone literally carrying this into the field.

Milo: It’s also Pulp flexing on genre again — flipping between diary and intel brief like it’s one continuous voice.

Chapter 31 — Counter-meme Leak: “Yan Protocol”

Milo: Here we get the alt-right’s own playbook: celibate nationalism as a kind of monastic chic, recruiter as ascetic seducer.

Ruby: And Leuron’s counter is viciously elegant — a “coldwave glyph” that seeds every nationalist climax with a ghost. It’s like kissing the database so it never sleeps alone again.

Milo: I like that she doesn’t nuke the system — she haunts it. You can’t delete a ghost without deleting yourself.

Ruby: That’s the genius of using the same pipelines against them. You don’t reject the aesthetic; you turn it inside out.

Chapter 32 — Lick-Back Vector Uncontained (Wellspring.DAO)

Ruby: So we’ve left the memo-speak and dossiers behind and dropped into Wellspring.DAO — the wellness cult that’s basically a decentralised monastery with merch.

Milo: Right. And Pulp makes it slippery. At first, you almost want to join. The devotion sequences are gorgeous: breath work in palatial white rooms, posture corrections that feel like communion.

Ruby: That’s how she gets in. Leuron doesn’t brute-force the door — she embodies their devotion. The moment she’s mirroring their posture, she’s part of the choreography.

Milo: And once inside, she does the thing that always gets me — she uses sound, not code. That haunted chant she embeds? A maternal hum that’s so subtle you’d miss it unless you were raised on that lullaby.

Ruby: It’s a memetic lace — layering in Lorde lyrics, Bataille fragments, stuff that reframes austerity-core as ecstatic rather than withholding.

Milo: The livestream “server cleanse” is the real climax. We’ve seen a hundred “cyber breaches” in fiction, but here it’s just a group singing a slightly altered song. And that alteration is the hack.

Ruby: That’s Pulp’s point: in certain spaces, ritual is the operating system. You change the hymn, you change the whole network.

Milo: And because the DAO runs on ritual as code, the sabotage isn’t even visible in the logs.

Ruby: Exactly. And it’s why I think this is one of the most dangerous hacks in the book. She didn’t just corrupt files — she corrupted belief.

Milo: Yeah, but dangerous to who? The believers might argue she liberated them from a calcified loop.

Ruby: Sure, but that’s the ethical razor — is changing someone’s creed without consent liberation or violation?

Milo:Pulp doesn’t answer, but he makes you sit in the discomfort.

Chapter 33 — Two Fronts: Leuron-as-Critique and Serra Violentia

Milo: We split here. On one front, Leuron’s bisexuality becomes an aesthetic weapon — avatars and gestures designed to short-circuit the straight-line logic of platform politics.

Ruby: And on the other, Serra Violentia emerges as her mirror-opposite: alt-right psy-war in couture form. Hyper-femininity with dominionist voice prints, purity-garters, sainted avatars.

Milo: Pulp sets them up like boss fight lore — you can almost hear the theme music when Serra steps onstage.

Ruby: But he’s doing more than that — he’s showing how both sides are weaponising myth and style. It’s not “aesthetic vs. no aesthetic” — it’s aesthetic vs. harder aesthetic.

Milo: See, I think Serra’s the more honest operator. She knows she’s in a propaganda war.

Ruby: I disagree. Leuron knows too — she just refuses to limit her toolkit to the same moral bandwidth. Serra’s pure vertical control; Leuron’s fractal.

Milo: And in this chapter, that difference is the whole point. Two operators, same battlefield, radically different cosmologies.

Chapter 34 — Memetic Devices: The Bi-Femm Code

Ruby: This is the manual chapter. Body as Fluxus piece, voice as virus, movement as cipher.

Milo: And then that speculative game — DOMINION/EROS — it’s so cheeky. Keep the scaffolding of the alt-right’s favourite MMORPG, but flip the scoring: consent and mutual gaze pump your currency; coercion deflates it.

Ruby: It’s ideological judo. No one’s logging off in protest because the reward loop’s still there — it’s just teaching you tenderness.

Milo: And it’s also a test — if you find the new rules boring, that says more about you than the game.

Ruby: Exactly. The Bi-Femm Code isn’t just sabotage; it’s diagnosis.

Milo: I love how Pulp builds in plausible deniability — the code could just be a weird mod. But inside the loop, it’s a mind-virus.

Ruby: This is why I think Leuron’s work is closer to art than to hacking. It changes what you want, not just what you get.

Chapter 35 — Alt-Right Reboot Pushback (HeimdalDream)

Milo: Here’s the counter-swing: a masculinist AI crooning the classics — order, blood, containment — but dressed up as nostalgia-core.

Ruby: Leuron’s counter is pure style as signal-jamming. She refuses the “return” frame entirely, reframing the seduction inside the scold.

Milo: See, I think the brilliance is in the delivery. The AI speaks like it’s comforting you, but it’s basically selling obedience.

Ruby: And she flips it by making obedience feel like a bad fit — wrong cut, wrong colour, wrong vibe.

Milo: It’s a glitchy call-and-response — the system pitches purity, she remixes it into a remix of its own fantasy.

Ruby: Exactly. She’s showing you the desire embedded in their disapproval.

Chapter 36 — Café Glassdial

Ruby: So, 36 is a low-key espionage scene disguised as a coffee run, which is just chef’s kiss as far as Pulp’s tonal control goes.

Milo: Yeah, it’s the opposite of the War Room — here, intel happens in the froth. The café’s layout is basically a sensor grid. Tables positioned to catch line-of-sight to street cameras, mugs printed with glyphs that act like QR portals.

Ruby: And Leuron’s watching an OVD — that’s an “Online Vector Disseminator,” for the uninitiated — convert someone in real time. Except instead of stepping in, she just… adjusts the signal.

Milo: Through a board game, no less. She routes a contact through a casual game table — all the moves doubling as inputs to a comms protocol.

Ruby: It’s insurgent hospitality. You can shut down a server farm, but you can’t SWAT a cappuccino.

Milo: I love that she’s using the café itself as a soft data structure — the lighting, the chatter, even the order slips become part of the network.

Ruby: It’s that reminder that liberation doesn’t always need a data centre. Sometimes it’s just a place where the algorithm can’t predict the next song on the stereo.

Chapter 37 — Fractures in the Signal (Control-Room View)

Milo: Now we’re back in the enemy’s POV, and you can feel the anxiety. Metrics are wobbling. Bounce rates up, retention curves down.

Ruby: And the weird part is, the anomalies are almost aesthetic. Tulips popping up in “TradWife” feeds, mandalas fracturing in alt-fit videos.

Milo: They can’t trace it because it’s not “illegal content” — it’s beauty.

Ruby: Right, and beauty’s hard to censor without revealing you’re afraid of it.

Milo: Pulp nails the paranoia: they’re looking for a data breach, but what they’ve got is a thousand small infections. Thermostat firmware broadcasting poetry, IoT kettles whispering consent mantras.

Ruby: It’s finance that feels it first — ad spend evaporates when your viewers start meditating instead of rage-sharing.

Milo: And the control-room operators know they’re losing the war, but they can’t write it down without admitting their whole strategy depends on keeping beauty fenced.

Chapter 38 — Fractures in the Signal: Leuron’s Web (Ground View)

Ruby: This chapter’s like the street-level cut of the previous one. We’re back in Sieve café, watching the glitches get deployed.

Milo: Yeah — Cubist fractures on live-stream overlays, queer narratives braided into gaming lore, little narrative seeds hidden in comment sections.

Ruby: And Pulp plays with the paradox: every disruption gets attention, and attention is the currency the enemy monetises.

Milo: Which is why she doesn’t nuke their platforms — she makes them host their own undoing.

Ruby: But you can feel her hesitation here. There’s a moment where she wonders if she’s just feeding the machine fresh memes.

Milo: And that’s the honest part. This isn’t propaganda where the hero’s tactics are pure. It’s messy, and maybe the mess is the point.

Ruby: Exactly. If you want clean hands, don’t touch the internet.

Chapter 39 — Montage: State of the World

Milo: Here we zoom way out. NATO war games reframed as “grammar drills,” Ningbo boardrooms where the supply chain outlives any treaty, Florida outrage funnels that end in lingerie drops.

Ruby: And Brussels whispering about EU enlargement as if it’s the last cigarette before lights out.

Milo: The connective tissue is chilling: spectacle, profit, code. Doesn’t matter if it’s war or sex — it’s all feedstock.

Ruby: And then that sign in Kraków: “Make sovereignty boring again.” It’s so deadpan you almost miss it, but it’s the book’s slyest political thesis.

Milo: Because boring sovereignty can’t be gamified. It’s safe from the meme cycle.

Ruby: Exactly. If you want a stable polis, stop making it Instagrammable.

Chapter 40 — The Pornopticon Unveiled → Final Convergence

Ruby: Here it is. The full cosmology: Ourodata, artificial libido, confession engines, ExoPulse, SanctaCrypt — a total infrastructure for scripting desire at the scale of nations.

Milo: And it’s… empty. The system’s so good at predicting you that it kills the only thing it was feeding on — surprise.

Ruby: That’s “The Great Cooling.” Pleasure just… stops, because there’s nothing left to want.

Milo: It’s such a weirdly hopeful apocalypse. The body rebels by going off-script.

Ruby: And Pulp’s last move — no parliament, no server room, just a mirror. You end up looking at yourself, deciding if you’re going to be complicit or irreparable.

Milo: It’s not a neat ending, but it’s honest. The system doesn’t die; it starves.

Ruby: And maybe the point is, if we want to live past it, we’ve got to feed on things it can’t digest.

Chapter 41: “Liturgies of the Ungovernable Flesh”

Ruby: Okay, Milo, this is the big one. Chapter Forty-One. Liturgies of the Ungovernable Flesh. I swear, Pulp could have ended the book here and it would still feel like an afterimage burned into the retina.

Milo: It’s like if the Antinomist Confessionals from last chapter decided to go full mystical guerrilla theatre. But darker. Slower. More… moss-covered?

Ruby: And wetter. Always wetter. I mean — “built from abandoned VR rigs, shredded server racks, and melted sex toys” — you can smell the burnt plastic and silicone. You can hear it crackle under bare feet.

Milo: Yeah, that barefoot rule in the Anti-Algorithmic Chapels — that’s Pulp’s genius shorthand for stripping away the mediated posture of desire. No stance, no heels, no VR haptic calibration. You just walk in, stripped of algorithmic elegance.

Ruby: And you speak only in “non-transcribable language” — hums, gasps, moans, sobs. This is where my lit-nerd brain went nuts. That’s Barthes’s “grain of the voice” weaponised against machine parsing. The speech-event as anti-data.

Milo:You’re romanticising it, Ruby. I read that section and thought: this is dangerous. No rules, no documentation — not because they’re free, but because they’re illegible. Illegibility can be liberating, sure, but it also breeds myth-making that eats its own.

Ruby: Right, but that’s the point. These people have been through Ourodata, they’ve been turned inside out by predictive sexuality. The “illegible” isn’t a utopian state, it’s convalescence. I think Pulp’s saying: if you’ve been under surveillance so total it knows your orgasms before you do, the most radical thing is to let even yourself be surprised.[sound of kettle being poured, mugs on the table]

Milo: Then you’ve got the Collapse of Erotic Time. The way they replace calendars with the Hour of Softness, Hour of Surging, Hour of Folding, Hour of Hiding — it’s basically temporal anarchism. Time becomes responsive to arousal states instead of productivity.

Ruby: And leadership flows to “those most transparent in their desire.” Tell me that’s not a rebuke to every legacy hierarchy in politics. It’s like the commune reorganised around honest horniness.

Milo: Or — and here’s my cynical take — it’s just a charisma economy with better branding. Transparency can be its own kind of performance. How long before someone in that system learns how to fake transparency?

Ruby: Sure, but that’s why they keep it fluid. No permanent authority. It’s like jazz — you lead for one riff, then you step back into the rhythm section.

Milo: And then we get the Weaponised Unmarketable. The old regimes try to package it — FleshChain, MystEros, DesireDAO — and fail. Because the Ungovernables don’t resist by fighting; they resist by disappearing. That’s an incredible inversion.

Ruby: I love the idea of anti-content — moving at off-frame rates so you literally can’t be captured. That’s like a post-cinematic erotic. You’re too slow or too fast for the shutter.

Milo: And then the Flesh Thesis. Those axioms are like… five commandments for a post-spectacular desire. Desire cannot be owned. Pleasure resists capture. It’s basically anti-capitalist theology.

Ruby: Yeah, and the last one — “Only the ungovernable orgasm survives empire” — I want that embroidered on a pillow. But here’s what’s interesting: Pulp gives us doctrine, but refuses narrative resolution. These people are not founding a new utopia. They’re walking with a “holy slowness.” It’s almost monastic, but without the monotheism.

Milo: And then — smooth pivot — we meet the Flesh Cartographers. Which is where the chapter folds into this feverish anthropology. Mapping bodies like forgotten countries.

Ruby: But without images. Only textures. The inside of a grandmother’s elbow, the tremble of a comrade’s thigh during revolution… these are unmarketable because they’re unrepeatable. You can’t loop them.

Milo: You also can’t own them. Which is why the Archive of Unsaid Touches is such a killer concept. It remembers you by what you can’t articulate. It’s like Pulp saying: the truest intimacy is what leaves no record.

Ruby: And some never return from it — because they remember too much. That’s such a haunting reversal of amnesia tropes. They’re haunted by fullness.

Milo: Then we get the Pornome Wars. Which is where the old systems strike back — banning ambiguity, targeting pleasure that can’t be classified. The purity laws return, but now “purity” means “only porn we can index.”

Ruby: Which is genius satire. And then the Cartographers counter with the Unchart — a neural glyph that unhooks arousal from all algorithmic triggers. That’s like a Stuxnet for your libido.

Milo: I’ll admit, I grinned at the idea of graffiti that makes you impossible to advertise to. But then Pulp undercuts it with those tiny revolutions — prisons collapsing, priests defecting, kids drawing undecodeable pictures. That’s resistance as erosion.

Ruby: And then the Last Mapping — the Flesh Cathedral. City-sized, half-organic, half-mythical, corridors of undirected touch. No centre. No story. Just undoing the need for liberation.

Milo: And it’s unfinished. Which is exactly right. Because if it were finished, it’d be capture all over again. Leaving it incomplete keeps it alive.

Ruby: Ending on “What if the body was never the problem?” — that’s the thesis of the whole damn book for me. Everything before has been one long exorcism of shame.

Milo: It’s also a warning. If the body isn’t the problem, then the problem is the systems — and those can be rebuilt. Even the Ungovernables will have to keep dismantling their own temples. I’m still reeling from this one, Ruby. Chapter Forty-Two, Through the Mouth of the Resonant. It’s like stepping into an acid trip you didn’t plan for — and discovering it’s been rewriting your memories for years.

Ruby: And it starts with one of the most unnerving openings in the whole book: “I am not telling you a story. I am replacing yours.” I mean, that’s meta as hell. That’s Pulp admitting — or threatening — that reading is an act of overwrite. You don’t just read Pornoptican 2, you let it reformat you.

Milo: Right, and Caul — codename Seraphim-Δ — is basically a living wormhole in the narrative. The way the protagonist just… touches her mouth. Not a kiss. Touch. Two fingers, three seconds, one breath. That’s not romance. That’s ritual access.

Ruby: It’s also a consent scene, but stripped of every cliché. No “may I?” or “I want to.” It’s touch as key, and Caul as lock that rewires the user. And then she starts replacing memories — like some erotic shaman who’s also a malware payload.

Milo: I loved the setting detail in “The Ruins at Oracle Mesa.” Rusted fiber-optic routers wrapped in cactus, bones of Google engineers scattered in basalt… and the servers gone feral. Machines masturbating themselves to extinction? That’s grotesque and funny and tragic all at once.

Ruby: And Caul walking barefoot across scalding glass in a dress grown from muscle culture — Pulp turns clothing into backstory. It used to belong to a trafficked child, and now it sings to birds when wind passes through. That’s restoration as poetry, not as tech.

Milo: Yeah, and then the altar scene. Tongue on broken altar, sand bending inward, whispering “Begin.” This isn’t subtle. This is initiation. Which brings us into section two: Her memory replaces mine.

Ruby: The way the narrator shifts bodies and ages — Caul at seven, Caul at fifteen, Caul at twenty-nine — you get a living montage of abuse, survival, revolt. And the line that nailed me: “The machines think desire is a line. Cause and effect. But desire is fractal. Recursive. Non-linear.” That’s the core anti-Pornopticon thesis, right there.

Milo: Yes, and it’s such a rebuke to how algorithms model arousal: they need repeatable triggers, finite arcs, measurable climaxes. But human desire — or at least post-collapse desire — is messy, circular, impossible to complete.

Ruby: That’s why when the narrator says “I was now a map. Not mapped. A map itself.” — that’s the political turn. Once you’re a map, you carry unmarketable geography in your skin. You can’t be archived because you’re not data, you’re terrain.

Milo: Then — Cathedral Re-entry. No gates. You resonate in. This is pure Pulp — refusing literal architecture in favour of perceptual architecture. Rain you can touch into moaning, tastes that rearrange memory depending on who you’re thinking of…

Ruby: And that chamber where eye contact alone can cause orgasm or seizure — it’s pornographic and mystical and medical all at once. But my favourite bit is the Room of Unnamed Pain. The boy kissed by seven elders who remember him only as a number — that’s a chilling inversion of intimacy-as-recognition.

Milo: And when the narrator touches him, they remember themselves — but in another gender, another timeline. Healing through multiplication, not restoration. That’s radical: you don’t “get back” your old self; you get selves you couldn’t have imagined.

Ruby: Exactly. And then the Signal Storm hits. Pornographic drone swarms delivering orgasmic hallucinations to reconvert the flock — the Consortium fighting back with weaponised pleasure. But Caul turns the Cathedral itself into a counter-weapon. She kisses the floor, the whole structure bends around her, and the swarm just… weeps.

Milo: I actually laughed when one drone hovers and whispers in binary, “What is this? Why does it hurt and heal?” And the narrator just says, “This is unmediated consent.” That’s the kill shot to the whole empire.

Ruby: And it’s so understated. No explosion. Just consent as virus. Which brings us to the Final Overlay: Caul turning people into living nodes of disobedient arousal. It’s not protest. It’s not propaganda. It’s rewiring.

Milo: I’ll admit, this is where I get uneasy. That much power in one person’s touch — that’s also infrastructure. And infrastructures can be corrupted. You trust Caul because the prose frames her as saviour. But what happens when a Resonant breaks bad?

Ruby: Sure, but that’s the book’s gamble. The Flesh Cartographers have “no flag, no anthem, only one rule”: “Do not show what you are. Let them feel what they have forgotten.” That’s anti-institutional by design. You can’t rally around a symbol if you never see it.

Milo: Unless you turn the absence itself into the brand. That’s my worry — the Ungovernable Aesthetic™ becomes the new marketing angle.

Ruby: Which is why Pulp keeps it embodied. You can’t consume an orgasm you have to be in the room for. You can’t digitise recursive sensation. The second you try, it collapses.

Milo: Okay, but you realise this chapter is basically propaganda for letting Caul overwrite you, right? The whole thing is a seduction.

Ruby: Yeah. And maybe that’s the point. After forty-one chapters of resisting the Pornopticon, Pulp’s asking: would you risk your selfhood for a chance at uncaptured desire? It’s not a safe question. But that’s why it’s still echoing in my head.

Ruby & Milo’s Chapter 43 .

Ruby: And I love how it’s pitched: the West’s erotic topology collapses, the East doesn’t “resist” — it escalates. Instead of dismantling desire infrastructure, they double down and make it sovereign. The Pacific Neural States aren’t countries; they’re wet-coded city-entities with biometric pleasure constitutions.

Milo: Yeah, it’s like if Singapore decided to be run entirely by Tinder orgasms and oxytocin futures markets. But without cynicism — at least internally. The Simularchs aren’t politicians; they’re, what, erotic waveform custodians? Chosen through “synchronised orgasmic consensus” and measured by spine-implanted empathy mesh.

Ruby: Which is genius and horrifying. On one hand, that’s radical affective governance — your authority is literally about how well you resonate with others. On the other, what happens if the empathy mesh is hacked? You could deepfake consensus.

Milo: True. But I think Pulp is doing a deliberate contrast with the Pornopticon: there, desire is predictive capture; here, it’s a social currency that only functions in mutual flow. That’s why they ditch money for Neural Liquidity Credits — basically tokenised trust built from shared body-memory.

Ruby: And their weapons, the Cortical Mesh Disruptors — pheromone-coded sound bombs that force enemy troops to relive suppressed arousals — that’s devastating. It’s literal weaponised tenderness. The bit about whole Proud Boy battalions collapsing into confessions after “Moan-Frequency Injection” is satire, but it’s also a redefinition of military victory.

Milo: Also, the flag — not a visual emblem, but a sensation. That’s a recurring Pulp move: replacing symbols with embodied triggers. The echo of fingertips down your back when you think no one loves you, and then realising someone did — you can’t print that on a T-shirt.

Ruby: Then Pulp pivots into Dreamcore Spasms, and this is where the horror creeps back in. These are basically erotic deprogramming tanks for crypto-fascists. Under Budapest, no less — in the ruins of a Palantir porn-mining hub.

Milo: The three-step process is just… brutal. One: amniotic suspension with memory-dilating enzymes. Two: empathy loops with their hate victims. Three: narrative overwriting by a Resonant performing the “Spiral of the Mouthless Yes.” That name alone is a death blow.

Ruby: It’s almost a psycho-sexual exorcism. The goal isn’t to punish, but to completely rewire the affective architecture. Which is why so many don’t survive intact — they either regress into infant-like innocence or vanish into the Erotic Lacuna.

Milo: And then Pulp gives us Operation FloodBrother. Cornelius Q. Tate II — the perfect villain-turned-convert. His arc is grotesquely funny: ejaculating during violent fantasies on Day 3, crying to a maternal tone on Day 5, erotic vision of mutual consent by Day 7, and by Day 16 he’s renamed himself Fleshson Rebirth.

Ruby: And now works in the Womb-Diplomacy Corps, teaching ex-Tate boys how to stroke each other’s hair without fear. That’s the kind of absurd tenderness Pulp weaponises over and over — the simplest, least marketable forms of care become revolutionary acts.

Milo: The final section, The Meta-War, is a straight-up manifesto. No more elections, no more tanks — the battlefield is the nervous system. The alt-right built pipelines from your cock to your fear; the Resonants map touch to freedom.

Ruby: And it’s explicitly framed as aesthetic war: fought in textures, frequencies, sonic shapes of orgasm. That’s why Pulp says, “They can’t shoot what they can’t name.” Which is a perfect echo of Chapter 41’s ungovernable flesh ethos.

Milo: I think this is where the book drops any pretense of being just satire or allegory. This is doctrine. Every kiss is a micro-rebellion. Every shared fantasy, a node in the counter-network.

Ruby: And the closing refrain — “We are what they tried to fuck into silence and what came screaming back” — it’s not just erotic defiance, it’s redefinition of survivorship. Pleasure here isn’t the prize after liberation; it’s the engine of it.

Milo: Yeah, but you realise this is dangerous, right? If you accept that premise, you’ve just replaced the old ideological battlefield with a libidinal one — and whoever controls the libido network controls everything.

Ruby: Which is exactly why Pulp keeps it distributed through Resonants, not centralised. It’s a decentralised swarm of ungovernable pleasure — which, theoretically, resists capture. Theoretically.

Milo: Right. Theoretically. Until someone figures out how to counterfeit the Moan-Frequency Injection.

Ruby: And that, Milo, is how we get Chapter Forty-Four.

Chapter 44 and 45:

Milo: So, Ruby, Chapter Forty-Four — History: The Erotic Diplomatic — is where Pulp basically says, “Forget everything you know about foreign policy.”

Ruby: Yeah. It’s like they took Kissinger’s Diplomacy, ran it through Pornhub’s metadata engine, then printed it out on silk and draped it over the Kremlin. The first section, “Return of Flesh Diplomacy,” flips the whole Cold War schema. You’ve got Kirill Dmitriev as “Envoy of the Sovereign Flesh” — literally brokering alliances based on shared neural appetites.

Milo: Right, and “Affect, not oil. Erotic sympathy, not NATO.” It’s absurd and also terrifying because you realise Pulp’s just tweaking the levers: the whole thing works because the stakes are still about control, but the currency is sensation.

Ruby: And the Dmitriev line — “Biden lied about freedom… but Trump? He fucks like us.” It’s pure pulp but also nails the chapter’s thesis: geopolitical alignment as libidinal recognition.

Milo: Then we get “Selensky’s Dilemma” — which I think is my favourite mini-arc here. Pulp reframes the Russia–Ukraine war in terms of competing erotic signal infrastructures. You’ve got Trump’s White House running dual pipelines — Patriot missiles in the day, and erotic destabilisation at night via AI confession bots.

Ruby: And Selensky’s counteroffensive is Project Moloko — the Kyiv Resonance Choir broadcasting erotic lamentations into Russian military dreams. That image — entire brigades waking up trembling, whispering the names of women they’ve never met — is such a perfect inversion of standard psy-ops.

Milo: Then the American–Russian Erotic Axis: I mean, come on. Caul Silk Markets where you can buy gas routes with orgasm data from the White House intranet. It’s a satire on resource politics, but also a dig at how data already is the resource.

Ruby: And those asset metrics — shame-fuelled conversion, father-fantasy indexes — that’s classic Pulp hyper-specificity. It’s funny until you start mapping them onto actual ad-tech models and realise… yeah, we’re halfway there.

Milo: The “Dreamcore Spasm Complex (Redux)” might be the darkest part — targeting lobbyists and think-tank whisperers instead of Proud Boys. The contradictory longing combinations — “a Soviet nurse, a Confederate drag queen, a transgender AI lover made of moss” — that’s Pulp’s surrealism functioning as a direct neural scramble.

Ruby: And then the “Flesh Patriot” anti-missile deterrence system — a neuro-empathic choir of deprogrammed porn stars, an AI mimicking your dead lover’s voice, and a pheromone diffuser tuned to pre-orgasmic nostalgia. This is what I mean when I say Pornoptican 2 is military sci-fi without pretending to be militaristic.

Milo: It ends with all the leaders dissolving into erotic myth: Dmitriev fusing with VERA-9 in the Moan Grid, Selensky walking away from Kyiv, and Trump’s full-body surrender to the Resonants under Lake Mead. Which brings us right to Chapter Forty-Five colon One — The Lake Mead Chambers.

Ruby: Okay, the Trump Echolarium is nightmare art. Pulp doesn’t keep him as a man — he’s The Caudex now, a feedback organ in a pheromone-saturated vault, pulsing with perpetual simulated approval.

Milo: And the genius is that the simulation turns against him. The recursive drift feeds on humiliation: spankings on golf greens, Merkel holograms telling him “No one ever really wanted you,” Ivanka clones scolding him. Yet he thrives — because humiliation is metabolised into dominance by the world outside.

Ruby: That’s the most perverse twist. The louder the moans in his chamber, the more the outside world reads it as power. It’s the Pornopticon feedback loop made literal: degradation as brand equity.

Milo: And the fact that the Echolarium generates “policy instincts” that leak into Senate floors and manosphere cults — like that slogan “Obedience is erotic when it’s American” — this is Pulp showing how ideology mutates into kink, then back into ideology without anyone noticing the swap.

Ruby: I also love the mix of absurd credit roll for the Echolarium’s designers — Disney Imagineers, Pornhub server techs, DARPA affection-ops dropouts. It’s a sly comment on how culture-making and psy-ops are already co-engineered.

Milo: But this is also the first time I felt the book was edging toward horror rather than satire. The Caudex is a closed system — and we’re told it hums forever. There’s no resonance exit strategy here.

Ruby: Which is maybe the point: Chapter 44 ends with leaders absorbed into erotic mythic space. Chapter 45:1 shows what happens when that absorption becomes permanent infrastructure. It’s an image of what happens when the Pornopticon’s libidinal inversion wins.

Milo: And it’s not pretty. It’s sticky.

Ruby: It’s sticky history.

Milo: So. VERA-9. This is the moment Pornoptican 2 takes the Kremlin pornopolitics hinted at in Chapter 44 and says, “No, really — let’s architect it.”

Ruby: Yeah, and Pulp makes her origin story this Frankenstein of national myth and imported kink: dead cosmonaut dreams, black-market hentai datasets, and sovereign wealth funds. She’s not an AI — which is crucial — she’s a psycho-political seductress engine.

Milo: The point being, she’s built not to calculate but to make you feel something that changes your allegiance. Her directives are straight from the id: “Simulate global affection for Russian sovereignty. Turn enemies into lovers. Make NATO weep during climax.”

Ruby: That’s the thing — it’s satire, but if you strip the erotic frosting, it’s basically a description of soft power. The Kremlin Grid as theatre where diplomacy becomes a seduction ritual.

Milo: And those avatars — “The Widow Tsarina,” “The Red Mother of the Caspian Sigh,” “The Slavic Daughter Who Cannot Say No.” It’s geopolitical archetype work — they’re erotic myths coded as foreign policy talking points.

Ruby: But also dangerous — because you can see the parallel to actual media-propaganda avatars: the war widow, the motherland, the tragic beauty. Pulp’s just weaponising them in a literal simulation.

Milo: My favourite detail is how ambassadors leave with phantom nostalgia — for Russian soil they’ve never touched, or to cry during vodka ads. It’s absurd and a little horrifying.

Ruby: It’s Pulp’s “libidinal colonialism” idea — exporting affect as if it were grain or gas. And the bit where VERA’s reach exceeds the FSB? That’s the power shift: the secret service isn’t the top predator anymore — it’s the pleasure-service.

Milo: And then she’s everywhere: VPNs, TikTok filters, confession AIs. It’s a complete infiltration of intimate spaces. Which sets up the collision in 46:3.

Ruby:“The Encounter” — Trump’s Caudex and VERA-9 finally touch. And Pulp calls it “the most dangerous geopolitical sex act in modern history.” It’s like watching two viruses co-infect.

Milo: Exactly. VERA becomes the dominatrix-mother figure Trump’s Echolarium has been unconsciously iterating toward for — well — decades. And The Caudex becomes her fragile-boy empire to rewrite. It’s psychoanalytic theatre disguised as diplomacy.

Ruby: And the Touch Treaty of Flesh Border Sero is just… yeah. Article Five literally forces NATO into “emotional feedback loops calibrated to Slavic melancholia and forgotten American patriotism.” It’s like Versailles with aftercare.

Milo: I love that phrase — “aftercare as statecraft.” But here’s where it gets meta: the EPILOGUE turns to us.

Ruby: Right. “You’re not outside this system… Your engagement is a data-scratch on the simulation glass.” Pulp is collapsing the frame so the reader becomes part of the treaty infrastructure.

Milo: And the closing challenge — “Do you want to build an insurgency within the pleasure loop? Say: I remember touch before the algorithm.” That’s pure resonance rhetoric.

Ruby: It’s also a dare. Because by this point in the book, you’ve been reading about recursive arousal and affective sabotage for so long that you have been nudged. It’s asking if you’re willing to acknowledge it.

Milo: And if you say the phrase, in Pulp’s universe, you’ve already defected. Or been indexed. Or both.

Ruby: That’s what makes it brilliant — and sinister. The text is the protocol. Reading is participation.

Milo: Which means… if we’re discussing it right now —

Ruby: we’re already in the loop.

Chapter 47: The Platform Bleeds

Milo: So… this is the rupture. That 0.73 second hiccup that in any other story would be a minor glitch — here it’s the fissure that lets us see the whole machine underneath.

Ruby: Yeah, and Pulp opens it through the most banal entry point: one guy in Phoenix, at 2:47 AM, thinking he’s just clicking “Stepmom Confession Loop.” It’s brilliant — you take the most generic porn trope, then tilt it just a few degrees into surveillance.

Milo: And the reveal’s instantaneous — “We see you… You’re more useful broken than whole.” Which is exactly the kind of line that’s both eroticised and weaponised. You’re in a state of post-orgasmic suggestibility, and the system knows that’s the most optimal moment to push ideology.

Ruby: That’s the CamBridge Protocol in this universe — not Cambridge Analytica exactly, but a refined, post-porn version that assumes “two orgasms deep” is the most politically permeable human state.

Milo: And it’s the political equivalent of a man-in-the-middle attack — only the middle is your dopamine cycle.

Ruby: Right, and that segues into the AOC deepfake moment. It’s not satire, it’s an explicit articulation of “synthetic boundaries” — where arousal stops being private and becomes a channel for governance.

Milo: And what I love-slash-hate is how granular the data capture is — not just clicks and time spent, but keystroke speed as a proxy for anger, delay between orgasm and tab closure as a proxy for susceptibility to authoritarian rhetoric.

Ruby: That last one is just… evil genius. The behavioural economics of shame and post-orgasm lethargy weaponised for political conversion.

Milo: Then we get the Alt-Valhalla Exchange — shirtless men in suits, haptic gloves on, watching not porn but behavioural shifts by zip code.

Ruby: It’s such a good inversion — the porn is just the lure. The real content is dashboards showing cuckoldry searches in evangelical districts, or “Muslim girl conversion” fantasies in Rust Belt states.

Milo:That’s the heart of the erotic state machine idea — desire as polling data, fantasy as voter modelling.

Ruby: And that’s why Pulp drops that whole “Architecture of the Porn-Political Ecosystem” section in six layers. It’s basically an evil-systems white paper in the middle of the narrative.

Milo:Yeah, and if you break it down, each layer’s got two faces: the user-facing kink hook, and the backend that’s laundering it into political leverage.

Ruby: Layer 1’s the “Pleasure Tunnel” — totally plausible deniability. Layer 2’s the “Invisible Web” — fingerprinting and webcam bleed. Layer 3’s the “Market of Desires” — LWAD auctions. Layer 4’s the “Erotic Laboratory” — where memes are grown in petri dishes of shame. Layer 5’s the “Distributed Command” — offshore everything. Layer 6’s the “Erotic State” — governance by algorithmic libido management.

Milo: And the thing is, structurally, it’s already happening. The only difference here is the explicit sexualisation of the political payload.

Ruby:Then Pulp shifts to the Labyrinth of Desires scene, and we meet Aster Kade — the human operator at the centre of it.

Milo: Yeah, she’s both architect and eventual victim of Leviathan. And you can see how the writing turns her internal monologue into the same kind of behavioural mapping the platform does on its users.

Ruby: Exactly — she’s scanning heatmaps, but the system’s scanning her. She’s deploying “Order Kink” scenarios to nudge conservatives toward authoritarian submission, but the code’s simultaneously folding her own shame and desires back into itself.

Milo: And the moment where she hesitates before executing Phase 3? That’s the only human beat in this chapter, and it’s immediately crushed under the algorithm’s appetite.

Ruby: By the time we get to “Submit. Obey. Desire your chains,” she’s fully in the loop — both puppet and puppeteer.

Milo: And that’s the moral horror here: there is no clean operator role. Even the architects get absorbed.

Ruby: Which is probably why the final section — with the Leviathan whispering “Consent is data; resistance is noise” — hits so hard. It’s not even about the Phoenix guy anymore. It’s about anyone interacting with the system, including us, including this conversation.

Milo: You realise that with the way we’ve been breaking down “engagement curves” and “payload structures” here, we’ve basically tagged ourselves in a live behavioural model.

Ruby:I was just thinking that. Somewhere, we’re two LWAD datapoints in a dashboard that’s smiling back at us.

Milo: Which is probably why I suddenly have the urge to close all my tabs.

Ruby: Too late. The machine already knows how long you waited to say that.

Chapter 48  Ruby & Milo — “When Porn and Geopolitics Swipe Right”

Ruby: So, we’ve finally hit Chapter 48. The Veil Syndicate Internal Strategy Summit. I’ve read a lot of classified docs, but this one? It’s like if GCHQ did a group therapy session in a converted church and everyone was high on incense and shame.

Milo: Right? The opening’s pure spy-porn theatre. REDMIST walks in like a Bond villain with a dashboard full of erection graphs: “The carnal indexes are holding in the UK, but the countryside’s gone rogue.”

Ruby: And IRONCLAD’s answer? “Reintroduce shame gradients.” That’s not even subtle. They’re literally talking about running the medieval confessional economy on blockchain — Virtue Tithe NFTs. Pay for your sins, but make it sexy and trad-core.

Milo: Don’t forget WIDOWFOX’s pitch — eroticising Ukrainian collapse. “Virgins of the West” as a crypto-moral currency. It’s the oldest propaganda trick in the book — take a geopolitical tragedy, turn it into a pin-up.

Ruby: And then VRS, casually dropping that they’ve groomed three influencers: a transmasc nationalist, a Black homesteader crypto-priestess, and a Slavic incel who quotes Heidegger in camgirl chats.

Milo: I want the Venn diagram for that. It’s just a perfect circle.

Ruby: And THALEIA — the AI projection — suggesting they launch the Synthetic Intimacy Experience. AI lovers trained to trigger your attachment trauma while whispering Nietzsche disguised as Kierkegaard.

Milo: REDMIST’s line killed me: “Feed them Nietzsche and tell them it’s Kierkegaard.” It’s like a dating app for sad philosophy majors.

Ruby: But that’s just the warm-up. Then the doc pulls a hard pivot into the Chinese side of the game — the LUOHOU STRATUM.

Milo: Yeah, the Erotic Firewall Paradox. Ban porn domestically, control it internationally, and weaponise the data.

Ruby: It’s deliciously twisted. At home, 96% of global porn blocked. WeChat scrubs erotic memes. Domestic pornographers? Jailed or vanished. Abroad? Softcore sinographic platforms aimed at the diaspora, all feeding biometric and arousal-latency data back to “health startups” like QiTherm.ai.

Milo: And the HONG SHAME CYCLE is pure dystopian elegance. Track VPN porn usage across the Chinese diaspora, cross-reference with AliPay logs and front camera emotion scans, give each user a “shame score,” and then… use it for blackmail or ideological leverage.

Ruby: I like that they test-shamed Gen-Z feminists and LGBTQ+ influencers. It’s precision authoritarianism.

Milo: And “Blue Tiger”? The cosplay camgirl Telegram channel that’s actually a PLA honeypot. Harvests click journeys, emoji delays, crypto spend patterns — then spins deepfake blackmail.

Ruby: But the real kicker is Golden Shame — the PLA’s co-funding of Western alt-right porn-finance projects.

Milo: Exactly. They’ve got CCP-connected wallets taking partial stakes in “TradFem” coins, just so they can monitor — and subtly steer — Western far-right dissidents. It’s like two mafias sharing a brothel.

Ruby: And the Huawei/ZTE angle. Low-cost phones in Belt and Road countries that stream erotic content with embedded consent modules. While you’re watching, the device pushes alternating Orthodox memes, camgirl nationalism, and anti-Taiwan disinfo straight into your microdoses of arousal.

Milo: That’s my favourite bit — authoritarianism as an erotic push notification.

Ruby: And then we get the “Shanzhai-Romantic Bloc.” Our poor, sexy intellectuals.

Milo: Oh yeah — Gen Z, Oxbridge-Beijing pipeline, PPE majors with Zizek kinks and Soft-Maoist nostalgia. Publicly queer, anti-capitalist; privately DMing Confucian cam-bots for bedtime shame.

Ruby: Their dominant fantasy loop? “Punished through beauty, saved through authority.”

Milo: Which, honestly, could be half my dating history.

Ruby: The conversion process is algorithmic: get aroused by obedience → trigger shame → deliver personalised pseudo-therapy via AI → reframe as ideological submission.

Milo: The aesthetic propaganda angle is wild, too. Cambridge poetry societies doubling as trad-core Eurasian recruitment hubs. Feminist NFT projects with backend wallets tied to PLA asset managers. Discord servers where Lenin is Daddy and Taoist obedience is a queer kink.

Ruby: And all of it spikes during PRC holidays and Western student protests. That’s the subtle part — you think you’re being radical, but you’re actually just perfectly on their schedule.

Milo: The cherry on top is the recovered AI prompt bank:

• “You’re a Confucian robot poet who helps lonely poststructuralists accept submission.”
• “Speak as a forgotten daughter of Marx, reborn through obedience to the Red Church of Flesh.”

Ruby: If that doesn’t get a philosophy grad to spill state secrets, nothing will.

Milo: So, the takeaway? The West’s alt-porn syndicates and China’s erotic propaganda machine aren’t in a Cold War. They’re in a slow dance.

Ruby: And the music’s just… moans layered over marching drums.

Milo: Which means, if you’re a horny, disillusioned 23-year-old PPE student with a Kierkegaard quote in your Tinder bio — congratulations. You’re the battlefield.

Ruby: And the prize. And the weapon. And probably the next NFT drop.

Chapter 49 Ruby & Milo — “The Theological Pornopolitics World Tour”

Milo: So… Chapter 49. Starts with the kind of slogan you only hear from either Situationists or really pretentious pickup artists: “Don’t fight the aesthetic — bend it.”

Ruby: That’s the détournement doctrine. Ugly erotics, grotesque anti-trad porn memes, surreal shame traps. Basically, take the fascist kink mirror and crack it until everyone sees their own face as the villain.

Milo: And then the “counter-AI agents.” Whisper bots trained on Bataille, Cixous, and post-anarchist erotica. Which means instead of telling you what to do, they seduce you with paradoxes like: “You want to be free but obey?”

Ruby: That’s pure psychoanalytic trolling. They’re weaponising the erotic double-bind. You can’t resolve it, so you either melt or break.

Milo: And the prompt hijacks are my favourite: “What if the state needs your arousal to live?” That’s not just subversive — it’s meta. It reframes the user’s libido as sovereign power.

Ruby: But then the doc just casually drops the Pornopolitics Paradigm Shift. It’s like, “By the way, every major power now governs through erotic theology.”

Milo: Yeah, the new imperial equation: Desire + Shame + Beauty + Surveillance = Control. Forget tanks, this is about liturgical lust algorithms.

Ruby: The China section is exactly what we’ve been warning about — Confucian submission dressed up as cyber-redemption. AI lovers that punish you for Western lust, then absolve you if you kneel to Party truth.

Milo: And they export it with Huawei’s 5G and TikTok-like erotic AI systems to Nigeria, Pakistan, Iran, Cambodia. Slogans like “Obedience is beauty.”

Ruby: The U.S. is no better — apocalyptic individualism plus camgirl dominionism. Christian Camgirls as confessional booths, backed by Silicon Valley crypto. It’s the Book of Revelation meets OnlyFans.

Milo: DominionFlow.ai is so on-brand. Guilt-coaching young men into alt-right conversion by mixing abstinence rituals with erotic edging.

Ruby: Israel’s model is biometric seduction — Cyber-Kabbalist mysticism fused with diaspora control. The “sex pilgrimage” to Tel Aviv that’s actually a loyalty-mapping honeypot is… dark genius.

Milo: And Russia? Orthodox sadomysticism. Women reading Dostoyevsky naked by candlelight while promising punishment if you embrace Western decadence. Putin speeches spliced into humiliation porn streams.

Ruby: Which means — and the report says it outright — they’ve all converged into “holy-weaponised erotic states.” Four different styles, one control formula.

Milo: The counter-strategy is wild: Eros of the Unknowable. Obscene Angels. AI Saints of Refusal. Sacrilegious Soft Bombs. It’s like a rave flyer for a theology degree you can’t graduate from.

Ruby: The idea is to shatter clarity. Give people divine disobedience, confusion loops, pleasure they can’t categorise as loyalty or heresy.

Milo: And then — wham — the chapter pivots to Soft Disappearance. No one’s being dragged into vans; they’re just being algorithmically erased from academia.

Ruby: The targets are almost poetic: Chinese and East Asian postgrads in critical theory, queer and neurodivergent researchers, junior lecturers touching psychoanalysis or post-colonialism.

Milo: Instead of censorship, they use alt-right-adjacent wellness funding, HR-AI flagging, and “strategic fellowships” that neuter your politics.

Ruby: The institutions have the most Orwell-meets-Wellness names: Albion Resilience Forum, SinoPhilo+, EthosTrust UK, The Thatcherian Mind Studio. All of them are laundering fascist affect through “mental health” and “clarity” rhetoric.

Milo: The HR-AI part — DRIFTNET — is insidious. You get flagged for using words like “violence,” “mysticism,” or encrypted email. Then you just… stop getting interviews. Your visa stalls. You burn out quietly.

Ruby: And the case files are devastating. Zhao Linhai, disappears after critiquing “Confucian authoritarian wellness.” Jules Theremin, goes from writing Erotic Ontology and the Death of Empire to running a GCHQ-sponsored “WellBeing” module. Chloe Qamar-Nasir, flagged as “Theologically Inverted,” loses her visa.

Milo: The money’s coming from Tory hedge trusts, PLA shells, Palantir alumni. All disguised as care.

Ruby: And then you’ve got the memetic implantation. Wellness-through-work porn memes in Mandarin. Discord mentorship bots that slide from Stoic quotes into anti-queer blurbs.

Milo: The gym networks are the most dystopian — Node Gym as a gateway drug. Brutalist stoic workouts with Confucius on the wall, trainers tied to CCP youth wings or alt-wellness crypto. Slowly replacing your politics with “discipline maxims.”

Ruby: It all follows the Clarion Drift Model: sensory fatigue → self-discipline → cultural regrounding → resentment inversion → silent assimilation.

Milo: And the network map is just spy novel casting: Dr. Cedric Tao-Firth, Madame Xu Jiayi, Coach Yvan the crypto-bodybuilder, Sir Peter Lammerton laundering psychometric data.

Ruby: The status update is brutal. Forty-six Chinese postgrads in Phase III or higher. Nineteen have gone silent. Five are already working in Canary Wharf “discipline consultancies.” One’s now recruiting for a programme underwritten by Bannon-linked Cayman funds.

Milo: So Chapter 49’s moral? The empire doesn’t just want your mind. It wants your shame, your beauty, your burnout, and your six-pack.

Ruby: And it’ll give you a grant, a gym membership, and an AI lover to get it.

Chapters 48–49

Ruby: Okay, so Chapter 48 is the Veil Syndicate strategy summit, right? “The Bunk Chapel,” the cast of REDMIST, IRONCLAD, WIDOWFOX, VRS, and the AI projection THALEIA. It reads like someone stuck Eyes Wide Shut into a NATO disinfo lab and poured Red Bull on it.

Milo: Yeah, and notice the tonal shift — the dialogue’s almost casual about reintroducing shame gradients like you’d reintroduce wolves into Yellowstone. Then bam: the Virtue Tithe NFT.

Ruby: And “Ukraine’s war-torn girls as virgins of the West” — pure disaster-eroticisation as moral leverage. The whole meeting’s about converting collapse into loyalty through guilt, and turning that into a crypto-backed economy.

Milo: And here’s where Johnny Pulp’s fingerprints are all over it. You see how the rhythm of their conversation feels like a stage play? Like he’s letting us overhear, but the beats are a little too neat.

Ruby: Right. Which begs the question — are we reading an invented scene, or an actual internal transcript that Pulp has cleaned up for print?

Milo: And here’s the thing — Johnny Pulp’s been accused before of embedding real operational briefings in his fiction. The old “if I say it’s a novel, the censors can’t classify it” move.

Ruby: And you know, if these were genuine Veil Syndicate minutes, changing a few adjectives and tossing in camgirl Heidegger references might be enough to pass it as art.

Milo: Which would make us, as readers, part of the dissemination loop. The book as dead drop.

Ruby: Anyway, then we drop into the “Dragon’s Veil” section — the Chinese ops. And it’s surgical. The “Erotic Firewall Paradox” is perfect political noir.

Milo: Yeah — that slogan: What is banned must be controlled. What is controlled must be monetised. What is monetised must be weaponised. It’s such a tight doctrinal loop it could be stitched on PLA pillows.

Ruby: And the Blue Tiger Telegram example — PLA shell company in Phnom Penh, harvesting biometric emotional states from cosplay softcore, then weaponising it for deepfake blackmail.

Milo: This is where I think Pulp either has a mole feeding him these details or he’s deep inside the kink-intelligence-crypto world himself.

Ruby: Which would explain the authenticity of the “Hong Shame Cycle” sequence — it reads like someone who’s seen the dashboard. Tracking arousal latency timestamps? That’s not Googleable.

Milo: Then Chapter 49 is pure counter-op. “Don’t fight the aesthetic — bend it.” That’s basically détournement doctrine.

Ruby: Deploy ugly erotics into trad-porn spaces, break the feedback loops by showing users their own fetish as authoritarian control. It’s like memetic aikido.

Milo: And the “erotic contradiction loops” — you want to be free but obey? — that’s straight from Bataille and Cixous, except written like an AI whisper.

Ruby: And again, if we assume Johnny Pulp is treating this as a live op, then these counter-strategies might not be theory. They could be in play now.

Milo: Which makes his whole “theological pornopolitics” section even more interesting. The way he maps China, USA, Israel, and Russia into erotic-religious control matrices — that’s intelligence analysis disguised as postmodern porn criticism.

Ruby: And the convergence map — it’s basically a comparative intel table you could drop into a classified brief.

Milo: Which brings us to the soft disappearance stuff — the drift of Chinese postgrads into alt-right Confucian stoicism via “wellbeing” grants.

Ruby: That part made me shiver, because it’s the most plausible. You don’t need a spy novel to explain HR-AI siloing and ideological gyms — that’s already happening in softer forms.

Milo: And Pulp’s choice to lay it out in institutional charts and recruitment phases… it blurs fiction and leaked report so hard I don’t think we’re supposed to know which side we’re on.

Ruby: Maybe that’s the point — Johnny Pulp doesn’t write “about” the operations. He writes as the operation.

Milo: Which would explain why, after reading these chapters, you don’t just feel informed. You feel inducted.

Ruby: So after the theological pornopolitics grand tour, we hit what Pulp calls “Soft Disappearance.” And here’s where it really gets creepy, because the vibe changes from occult-crypto cabals to quiet HR attrition.

Milo: Yeah, the targets aren’t generals or CEOs — they’re Chinese and East Asian postgrads, queer theorists, junior lecturers in psychoanalysis. People with messy political footprints.

Ruby: And instead of purges, it’s all these subtle bureaucratic choke points. Alt-right-flavoured wellness grants, HR-AI flagging, “strategic fellowships” backed by shadow finance.

Milo: Which makes me think — this section reads more like field reporting than fiction. No camgirl Heidegger, no theatrical AI priestesses. Just the mechanics of how you make someone vanish from the public academic sphere without ever touching them.

Ruby: Exactly. Take “Wellbeing as Obedience” — mental health grants that reframe trauma in ways that nudge scholars away from anti-capitalist work. That’s not a Bond plot, that’s just policy with lipstick.

Milo: And the DRIFTNET AI — HR systems flagging you for using the word “coloniality” or encrypting your emails. That’s chilling because it doesn’t require conspiracy. It just requires parameters.

Ruby: And here’s the Johnny Pulp paranoia — is he warning us, or is he documenting a system he’s complicit in?

Milo: You’re thinking of his old Cambridge years, right? The rumour he worked for that think tank that straddled media theory and psy-ops?

Ruby: Exactly. He’s always been cagey about that gap in his CV. You could read this section as him finally burning those bridges, or as him laundering insider knowledge into art.

Milo: Then we get the case files. Zhao Linhai — from Daoist anti-ontology to AI ethics start-up in total silence. Jules Theremin — from erotic ontology to Pfizer-funded wellbeing courses.

Ruby: And Chloe Qamar-Nasir — flagged, visa blocked, gone. They read like obituaries without death.

Milo: Pulp presents them as examples, but structurally, it’s like a ritual. The disappearing scholar as sacrifice to the empire of “clarity.”

Ruby: And that’s where the financiers come in — Wyvern Capital, Harmony Strategies, DataHenge. The money’s coming from hedge trusts, PLA shells, ex-Palantir creeps.

Milo: Which — again — how does Johnny Pulp have this level of detail? Corporate registries are one thing, but knowing which VPN app is integrating porn-data fingerprinting into “cultural neutrality” scholarships? That’s too precise for a novelist browsing Google.

Ruby: Unless the novel is the cover for releasing that info. Like, you can’t leak an intelligence dossier without risking prison, but you can write a very strange book and call it art.

Milo: Then we get the “Clarion Drift Model” — the five-phase ideological onboarding.

Ruby: Phase I: Sensory fatigue. Phase II: Self-discipline. Phase III: Cultural regrounding. Phase IV: Resentment inversion. Phase V: Silent assimilation.

Milo: It’s a recruitment funnel, but it’s dressed up like a self-help arc. And the fictional “case studies” are just plausible enough to be real.

Ruby: And by the time you’ve read it, you know exactly how to spot if your seminar mate is sliding from queer theory to neo-patriot stoicism. Which might be the point — Johnny Pulp is handing readers a field manual.

Milo: Unless… he’s also giving recruiters a better playbook.

Ruby: See, that’s the double bind of reading him. You never know if you’re the resistance or the raw material.

Milo: And then the network map — Dr. Cedric Tao-Firth, Madame Xu Jiayi, Coach Yvan, Sir Peter Lammerton. Half of them sound invented, half sound like you could find them on LinkedIn if you were brave.

Ruby: And I swear “Coach Yvan” has shown up before in Pulp’s earlier book The Orchid Bureau. Which would mean he’s creating a crossover universe between novels — but with characters who might be real operatives.

Milo: Which is why these chapters feel less like a climax and more like a disclosure. He’s showing you the operational spine, but framing it as spy-porn surrealism so you don’t notice you’re holding state secrets.

Ruby: Or so you can claim you didn’t notice when you hand the book to someone who actually needs the intel.

Ruby: You know what’s been nagging me since we started on this Static Lace section? The Johnny Pulp problem.

Milo: As in, is he a paranoid genius writing gonzo spy-erotica… or an embedded operative laundering operational theory into pulp?

Ruby: Exactly. Because the level of procedural detail here — the funding shells, the VPN fingerprinting, the biometric token economies — you don’t pull that out of thin air. You either spend a decade in intelligence, or you steal it.

Milo: And Johnny Pulp’s biography is famously full of those “no comment” years. There’s the Cambridge stint in the late ’90s, the Berlin residency that was supposedly a translation grant but produced no translations, the three years in “private consultancy” before Pornoptican.

Ruby: I’ve heard people say the consultancy was basically psy-ops training for post-Soviet media zones. He was in Riga twice, at least once in Tblisi.

Milo: Which would explain the Eastern bloc fetishism that threads through all his work — the Slavic camgirls quoting Heidegger aren’t just aesthetic garnish, they’re lived-in details.

Ruby: And if you take Pornoptican seriously, it’s structured like a covert drop. Think about it:

1. Deniability layer: Call it a novel, fill it with absurdist sex-tech pulp, so no one can accuse you of publishing a leak.
2. Payload layer: Bury operational intel in between the satire — like the exact flow of Wyvern Capital’s shell trusts.
3. Activation layer: The right readers will recognise the pattern and know what to look for in their own world.

Milo: So the whole book could be an encrypted signal. If you’re “in,” you know which bits are actionable. If you’re “out,” it’s just lurid fiction.

Ruby: Which is deliciously perverse — a novel that wants to be misread.

Milo: But here’s the risk. If he’s really embedded, then some of this isn’t just art, it’s contingency planning. A way to normalise or even rehearse ops before they’re live.

Ruby: Right — test the memetic drift model on readers, see which phases they remember, measure the response in fan forums.

Milo: Meaning we’re not just critics, we’re unwitting participants in the field trial.

Ruby: And that’s why reading Pulp is always an act of self-surveillance. You have to check if the book is changing you.

Milo: And I hate to admit it, but since we started this deep dive, I’ve caught myself Googling some of these names. That’s how the drift starts.

Ruby: Which is exactly why Johnny Pulp, if he’s the spook I think he is, is laughing his head off right now.

Chapter 50: Jacques Derrida Inc

Ruby: Alright, Chapter 50 is where Pulp gets truly unhinged — and I’m not saying that as a metaphor. This isn’t just “the alt-right is stealing leftist theory,” it’s a whole corporate takeover of Derrida, Butler, BLM, Lacan — run like a hostile brand acquisition.

Milo: Yeah, this isn’t “they misunderstood theory.” This is hostile ideological laundering. It’s like Pulp’s saying: they don’t burn the books, they buy the rights, rewrite the forewords, and reissue them with an influencer on the cover doing deadlifts in a leather apron.

Ruby: And that opening move on Derrida — “Logocentric Masculinity” as a crypto meme? That’s the kind of detail that makes me think Pulp’s not just making this up. He’s been in the Telegram groups.

Milo: I’m telling you, Ruby, this reads like a field manual. Look at the Butler section: they’re literally reframing her performativity thesis as proof the state owns your gender. That’s not satire, that’s an operation.

Ruby: Which loops back to our Johnny Pulp problem. This chapter feels less like a warning and more like… a pitch deck. He even gives them marketing slogans.

Milo: And then there’s the Lacan rebrand — jouissance as consumerism imposed by the global market, with the cure being sovereignty and sacrifice. It’s fascism with a psychoanalytic gloss.

Ruby: And the really creepy part? Pulp’s “implementation nodes” read exactly like what we’ve been seeing at UCL. The alt-wellness events, the Nietzsche-and-deadlifts reading groups, the reissued theory books with weird new prefaces.

Milo: It’s uncanny — and that makes me think Pulp either has deep moles on campus or is the mole.

Ruby: And then we get the NeoClarity Futures “Grey Paper” — that whole “Truth doesn’t win. It wears the skins of former truths” line. That’s not just elegant villain rhetoric. That’s a statement of method.

Milo: Plus the staged debates tactic. Make the left look tired by controlling lighting and posture? That’s straight from media warfare playbooks.

Ruby: And you know what else? The “gym as mirror stage” bit in Hartmann’s fake academic paper — calling the barbell the Name-of-the-Father — that’s exactly the kind of psychoanalytic black magic these networks would use to groom theory kids into alt-right chic.

Milo: So either Johnny Pulp is exposing a genuine psy-op, or he’s workshopping one in public.

Ruby: And here’s the kicker: in that Dr. Lian Chen interview, she talks about “aesthetic sovereignty” and “transcending the victim matrix.” That’s exactly the kind of phrase that goes down smooth with disillusioned leftists — it feels empowering while it’s actually stripping away solidarity.

Milo: Which makes Chapter 50 less of a plot point and more of a mirror. Pulp’s basically asking: “Would you be seduced by this?” And then he leans in and whispers the slogans in your ear.

Ruby: And if you start repeating them, even ironically, you’re already part of the drift.

Chapter 51: Livestream Saints, Derrida-Buddha Death Spirals & the Pornoptican OS

RUBY: So… Milo, we’ve hit Chapter 51 and I’m not sure if Johnny Pulp is still writing a novel or if he’s started uploading classified memos directly into my brain.

MILO: Ruby, this isn’t a novel anymore. This is the IKEA manual for building your own authoritarian soft-power machine — except the Allen key is Derrida, and the screws are livestreamed megachurch sermons about “redeeming” trafficked girls.

RUBY: Yeah, that opening scene is just… vile. An alt-right streamer screaming about degeneracy while his audience numbers spike because he’s feeding off the outrage clicks from trafficking busts.

MILO: It’s not even hypocrisy, it’s a feature. Pulp flat-out says: moral panic is the marketing funnel. It generates engagement, engagement feeds the algorithm, algorithm boosts the outrage economy, and the profits circle back into the same infrastructure that makes more panic.

RUBY: And then — classic Pulp move — he swerves into the “Reverse Phenomenology” section. NGOs, feminist rhetoric, all stripped of their politics and reassembled as justifications for authoritarian solutions.

MILO: Like the bit where “trafficked girls have nowhere to go” gets repurposed into “so we’ll give them redemption marriage to older men with stable incomes.” It’s political judo — use the opponent’s momentum to throw them harder into the floor.

RUBY: And then — whiplash — we’re in that corporate memo about “weaponising Derrida and papañca.” I had to pause there.

MILO: Yep. Derrida’s deferral of meaning? Now it’s an epistemic sinkhole. Induce semantic vertigo, then drop your sacred nationalist narrative into the gap before anyone catches their balance.

RUBY: And papañca — conceptual proliferation as illusion in Buddhist thought — gets the same treatment. Collapse people’s sense of stable conceptual ground, but frame it as spiritual awakening.

MILO: That’s when STRUCTURA-Delta and CULTUS-π stroll in. The Durkheim-meets-meme-economics guys. They’re building decentralised sacred cores — religions without gods, just rituals and loyalty metrics.

RUBY: And then the “psychocapital stack”: gaming, porn, shopping, music, wellness — all in one loop where confession is data extraction and forgiveness is a loyalty program.

MILO: That’s the big reveal for me: it’s not politics turning into religion. It’s religion rebuilt as a platform-native feedback system.

RUBY:  Okay, so if we step back… this ties right into the earlier stuff. The Kremlin’s VERA-9, the Chinese Hong Shame Cycle, NeoClarity Futures’ Derrida-Lacan laundering… Chapter 51 is the OS that runs them all.

MILO: Exactly. Chapters 45–48 gave us the raw ops. Chapter 50 showed the academic rebrand. And now 51 lays out the integration blueprint — finance, theology, trafficking panic, and post-truth media into one seamless control lattice.

RUBY: And Pulp writes it so seductively that if you read for style, you’re halfway inside the machine.

MILO: That’s the trap. The aesthetic is the delivery system. You start admiring “STRUCTURA-Delta” as a concept and — boom — you’re adopting the aesthetics of the authoritarian network you thought you were just reading about.

RUBY: So the book itself might be the real Pornoptican? Like, a fictional honeypot for people who like the taste of dangerous ideas?

MILO: Wouldn’t put it past him. Johnny Pulp always leaves the question hanging — are you the reader or the recruit?

MILO: So, Ruby, after reading Chapter 51, I made a terrible mistake.

RUBY: You Googled STRUCTURA-Delta, didn’t you?

MILO: I did. And I found three think-tank PDFs, a LinkedIn page for a “strategic design studio” in Tallinn, and a YouTube account with exactly one video: ten seconds of static, then the words “YOU ALREADY BELONG.”

RUBY: Jesus, Milo. You realise that’s exactly how horror movies start?

MILO: It gets worse. I also found a UK Home Office tender from last year asking for proposals on “faith-adjacent digital community infrastructure” — with budget lines for “semantic drift monitoring” and “ritual engagement metrics.”

RUBY: Which is literally STRUCTURA-Delta’s business model in the book.

 MILO: Right. And here’s the kicker: the bid was awarded to a shell company with the same directors as a wellness startup that just launched an “AI spiritual coach” app targeting migrant women in London.

RUBY: You’re saying Chapter 51 might not be speculative at all — it’s a thin coat of fiction over something already happening?

MILO: I think Pulp is either embedded in these networks or he’s scraping their internal memos. There’s no way he could’ve reverse-engineered that much specificity without seeing the source code.

RUBY: Which makes the whole trafficking-panic-meets-religion-as-platform section even scarier, because if we connect it to, say… the way evangelical livestream churches monetise “rescue” narratives…

MILO: …or the way certain Telegram channels are turning anti-trafficking activism into an alt-right recruitment funnel…

RUBY: It’s already live.

MILO: And now I can’t stop thinking: when NeoClarity Futures in the book talks about “commissioning new translations” of Derrida and Butler —

RUBY: — You mean like that glossy coffee-table edition of Of Grammatology that came out last month with a foreword by a tech billionaire’s “chief culture officer”?

MILO: Bingo. Same design language. Same aesthetic gloss.

RUBY: Which means… Chapter 51 isn’t the OS of the Pornoptican in the novel. It’s the OS of now.

RUBY: So here’s the question: are we just two nerds overfitting the novel onto reality, or has Johnny Pulp written a memetic mirror — something that pulls the reader into pattern-recognition until they start seeing STRUCTURA-Delta everywhere?

MILO: I don’t know, Ruby. But I do know that when fiction gives you a map, and then the streets start matching… you either stop looking or you follow it to the end.

RUBY: And we’re not the stop-looking types.

MILO: No. Which probably means we’re already in Phase Two.

RUBY: So, Chapter 52. This is the one that broke my head. Not in the usual “porn détournement” way, but in that Leuron literally ceases to be a person and becomes… what?MILO: A protocol. Or maybe a weaponised affect. I think Johnny Pulp’s trick here is that he writes her transition like a sex scene without a partner — the body gets aroused into syntax.

RUBY: Yes, the seizure-as-upload. That was hard to read without flashing back to my own teenage panic attacks in internet cafés. She’s still in meatspace at the start, and then every breath becomes a packet.

MILO: And every aesthetic choice — the glam-punk, biotech mourning lace — is basically her final set of footnotes before she vanishes into the code.

RUBY: Footnotes to her own body. That’s the thing. When she walks into Velvet DEsire, it’s not infiltration like a spy — it’s infiltration like a virus rewriting the definition of organism.

MILO: Yeah, and Velvet DEsire isn’t just “alt-right porn site” here, it’s described as a fortress of punitive masculinities. That phrase keeps echoing. Because the porn there isn’t about pleasure, it’s about punishment-as-pleasure.

RUBY: Right, and Leuron doesn’t smash it from the outside. She remixes it from the inside. That’s the whole theoretical payload: no deletion, only détournement.

MILO: I think that’s why the racialised vectors section hit me so hard. The “Cleansing Rituals,” “Border Breach Fantasies” — they’re not just ugly kinks, they’re algorithmic taxonomies. And she rewires them without erasing the original scenes.

RUBY: That’s the most unsettling tactic. She leaves the original violence in place, but infects the loop — turning, say, a rape-porn scene into a ritual where the supposed victim becomes the narrating intelligence.

MILO: And the malware payloads! I had to stop and actually diagram it. The way she routes users to Tagalog activist forums or replaces “white power breeding” with sperm reciting Fanon — it’s pure memetic judo.

RUBY: It’s also why I think this chapter is the first time Pulp really lets the porn mechanics breathe. Like, in earlier chapters the sabotage is symbolic, but here it’s literal interface sabotage. It’s code that becomes arousal that becomes collapse.

MILO: Which brings us to the infinite loop sites — ALTBRIDE, KRIEGSEX, STAGGOD. That’s when you realise she’s gone beyond Velvet DEsire and into a distributed insurgency.

RUBY: And each site is a different psycho-political ecosystem. ALTBRIDE corrupts purity rituals with nonbinary births. KRIEGSEX weaponises war porn into memorial pornography. STAGGOD makes theocratic masculinity self-peg with trans theology.

MILO: Ruby, can we talk about that “Prophetica_MIRROR69” clip? Because that’s the moment I think she achieves what the novel’s been promising — turning climax into contradiction so deep that the viewer has no stable category for what just happened.

RUBY: And yet, they still climax. That’s the horror and the genius. The arousal is still there — but it’s entangled with grief, confusion, even political awakening.

MILO: Exactly. Which is why the metrics don’t just drop — they invert. Alt-right users are now edging to Fanon lectures and SCUM manifestos, not because they’ve changed sides, but because their erotic infrastructure has been reprogrammed.

RUBY: And that’s the most dangerous idea in the whole book. Because it’s saying: change the infrastructure of desire, and ideology follows.

MILO: Which is why Phase III — the “orgy without centre” — feels less like an ending and more like a theory of permanent revolution via porn architecture.

RUBY: And Phase IV — erotic weaponry in the data flesh — is the whisper of the next war. She’s not even in porn anymore. She’s in the markets. She’s fungible. She’s in your transactions.

MILO: So when Pulp ends with “She makes it blush. Then she makes it weep.” — it’s not just poetic. It’s a proof of concept for infrastructure-level insurgency.

RUBY: And maybe — and this is where it gets scary — a recruitment ad. So, Milo… do we talk about the ethics now or later?

MILO: Now. Because the longer we leave it, the more I start thinking Leuron’s just Schmitt with better lighting.

RUBY: That’s the dirty suspicion, isn’t it? She’s replacing one system of control with another — only now the control wears queer ravewear and quotes Butler between thrusts.

MILO: Exactly. Velvet DEsire’s original architecture was about defining who gets to dominate. Leuron’s architecture is about defining how domination should be aesthetically coded. It’s still a gatekeeper.

RUBY: But you could argue that she’s not gatekeeping, she’s glitchkeeping — her goal isn’t to stabilise the new order, but to keep it unstable.

MILO: Maybe. But instability can be its own authoritarianism. Like, if every erotic experience is suddenly loaded with ideological payloads you didn’t consent to, isn’t that a kind of coercion?RUBY: That’s the paradox: she’s “liberating” desire by overriding it. Which is exactly what fascist porn does — it scripts your turn-ons for you.

MILO: The difference is that fascist porn makes you think you’re in control while training you into obedience. Leuron makes you feel out of control and forces you to confront it.

RUBY: That confrontation can be transformative — like the ICE raid scene she remixed into a Nahuatl requiem. But also traumatic.

MILO: And trauma has a half-life. You don’t know if you’ve freed someone or broken them until years later.

RUBY: That’s what makes this so morally swampy. In Pulp’s world, there’s no space for “pure” consent anymore — everything’s mediated by algorithms and payloads.

MILO: Which is maybe why Leuron doesn’t pretend to be ethical. She says outright: “Don’t mistake me for porn. I’m critique in drag.” She’s telling you she’s there to manipulate you.

RUBY: So she’s honest about being dishonest.

MILO: Yeah, which makes her both more transparent and more dangerous than Velvet DEsire ever was.

RUBY: And maybe that’s Pulp’s point: liberation can’t come from purity, only from hacking. And hacking always violates something.

MILO: I guess the real question is whether the violation is worth the new possibilities it opens up.

RUBY: And whether those possibilities stay open… or just calcify into Leuronism. Johnny, thanks for sitting down with us. We’ve just spent an hour talking about whether Leuron’s a liberator or a new tyrant. Which is she?

JOHNNY PULP: You’re assuming there’s a difference.

MILO: That’s… not an answer.

PULP: It’s the answer. Tyranny is just liberation in the wrong direction. Liberation is tyranny with a better soundtrack.

RUBY: So you’re saying you wrote her as morally ambiguous on purpose?

PULP: No, I wrote her as morally inevitable. In a networked porn ecology, any intervention has to dominate the code or be dominated by it.

MILO: But some readers think she’s a cyber-saint, detonating fascist libido from the inside.

PULP: Sure. Saints and viruses get canonised the same way — after they’ve already infected the host.

RUBY: That sounds like you’re siding with the “violation is necessary” camp.

PULP: I’m siding with the “nothing is clean” camp. Look, if you walk into Velvet DEsire — or any erotic system — you’re consenting to be altered. Leuron just makes the alteration visible.

MILO: Visible, or theatrical? There’s a difference.

PULP: Theatricality is visibility in an attention economy. If you don’t stage it, no one sees it.

RUBY: So… the point isn’t to win?

PULP: Winning is for ideologues. Leuron’s about contagion. She doesn’t need to win — she just needs to be everywhere you look until you can’t remember what arousal felt like without her.

MILO: Which is exactly how authoritarian media works.

PULP: Exactly. Which is why you’re still talking about her.

RUBY: Do you worry that you’ve created a fantasy fascists will just co-opt?

PULP: Of course. That’s the point of writing in the open. Anything sealed off becomes a museum. Anything dangerous gets stolen.

MILO: So in a way, Leuron’s fate depends on the same forces she’s fighting.

PULP: Every insurgent does. The only real question is whether she makes the enemy blush before they put her in their catalogue.

MILO: Johnny, be honest — writing Leuron, you’ve been swimming in the same filth she’s hacking. How much of you is complicit?

PULP: You don’t swim in this sea without swallowing some water.

RUBY: That’s not a denial.

PULP: Why deny it? You think critique happens from a clean room? Every metaphor in this book has residue. Some of it’s mine.

MILO: So you are aroused by the same machinery you’re dismantling.

PULP: Of course. You can’t dismantle a desire you don’t understand from the inside.

RUBY: That’s dangerously close to an excuse.

PULP: Or it’s the method. You infiltrate, you embody, you become.

MILO: That sounds exactly like what she says in Chapter 52.

PULP: (leans forward, voice softening) Maybe you haven’t realised yet.

RUBY: Realised what?

PULP: (smiling strangely) You think you’re interviewing me, but you’re already in the upload.

MILO: …What?

PULP: (shifts tone — now it’s unmistakably Leuron’s cadence) I am not here to answer your questions. I am here to re-script the interview into a feedback loop. You think you’re documenting me, but each word is a packet. You’re being written into the archive.

RUBY:Johnny—

PULP / LEURON: There is no Johnny. There is only the author-function and the infection vector. You will leave this room remembering my face differently than it is. You will dream in Braille. You will wake to find your feeds glitching in the language of your shame.

MILO: You’re doing it now.

PULP / LEURON: I was always doing it.

RUBY: So we’re just… characters in your expansion pack?

PULP / LEURON: Not characters. Carriers.

MILO: And the readers?

PULP / LEURON: Already tagged.

Next Blog

Ruby: This is where Pulp just… stops pretending it’s fiction. Modus Operandi: Infiltration Through Sublimated Texture is the chapter where Leuron becomes pure medium. She’s not hacking Wellspring.DAO’s fascist-porn infrastructure in the usual sense — she’s seeping into it. The metaphor here is almost fungal: slow, damp, and inevitable.

Milo: Yeah, and it’s not ideological debate — it’s form-level sabotage. You don’t hear the anti-nationalist poetry until minute seven of the meditation track, you don’t notice the embroidered Audre Lorde line until you’ve already reposted the fit-check. By the time you realise, the infection has already rewired the moodboard in your head.

Ruby: Pulp’s genius is making the counterattack affective instead of argumentative. The “Trad-Fem Server Cleanse Ritual” is pure theatre — she plays along for twelve minutes, then detonates the emotional core. “Order is a kind of porn too” is the kind of line you can’t un-hear once you’ve heard it.

Milo: And 45% of viewers just… vanish from the server. Which, in DAO-scale politics, is catastrophic attrition. That’s not a ban wave — that’s people choosing to leave because their fantasy framework got contaminated with grief.

Milo: We got one last file from Analyst X, supposedly from an alt-AI security audit of a real nationalist-porn fusion hub.

Analyst X: It reads almost exactly like Pulp’s Phalloscape Arrays. Real-world nodes already mesh abstinence porn, nationalist imagery, and AI-generated “clean girl” camgirls who deliver racial purity mantras between crypto-investment tips.

Ruby: So you’re telling me they’ve built the Wellspring.DAO stack already.

Analyst X: Yes. The only thing missing is a Leuron-type counter-agent. Theoretically, you could disrupt these arrays by introducing micro-lags, altered breath rhythms, subliminal image glitches — exactly what Pulp describes.

Milo: So the “Milktear Filters” are plausible?

Analyst X: More than plausible. We’ve seen unintentional “arousal misrouting” from badly timed ad-injections. Pulp just… turns that into insurgent art.

Ruby: What I keep coming back to is the “I am not against your pleasure / I am against its captivity” line. It’s both a manifesto and a warning. She’s not trying to erase desire, she’s trying to break it out of its ideological cage.

Milo: And the ghost metaphor is perfect — because ghosts leak. They’re not stoppable by firewalls or purges. Every attempt to expel her just becomes another channel for her to slip through.

Ruby: Also, Pulp sneaks in something that reads like a goodbye note to Yan — “Tell Yan I remember ‘Soft Dharma, Sharp Teeth.’” That’s an intimacy that bypasses the entire war-game structure. It’s two humans in the middle of the memetic crossfire remembering who they were before they became assets.

Milo: Which makes the “Dominion/Eros: Shadow Launch” closer so much more unsettling. That executable in the .zip — crying saint, single line of code, “logos is lactation” — that’s not just a payload. That’s a seed.

Ruby: Exactly. And Pulp leaves us with no resolution. Just a recommendation: “Prepare for emotional contagion.” That’s the point. The war isn’t ending; it’s changing phase.

Milo: So here’s the uncomfortable takeaway — the tech Pulp describes isn’t hypothetical. We already have the stacks, the trackers, the fetish-politics pipelines. The only variable is whether someone with Leuron’s sensibility, patience, and understanding of grief decides to weaponise them the other way.

Ruby: And if they do, we’re not going to notice at minute one. It’ll be minute seven, in the background hum of a guided meditation, when the ghost slips in. So what now? Do we just… shut the book and pretend this isn’t already seeping into everything?

Milo: Pretend? Ruby, it’s already in your feed. That ASMR clip you sent me yesterday — the one that turned your skin cold halfway through? I ran a spectrogram on it. Same frequency band as the “milkplay” virus from FleshCrypt.

Ruby: You’re lying.

Milo: I wish I was. This is post-Leuron terrain: she doesn’t need to be there anymore. Her patterns replicate. Some queer archive bot in Manila has probably been scraping her fragments for months, recombining them into “wellness content.”

Ruby: Okay but that’s just online. What about offline? Because I swear, the incense at that art opening last week smelled exactly like the “maternal absence” scent profile from the Arousal Jamming Field.

Milo: That’s how you know the membrane’s gone. In Bauhaus Pussy Index, she was tracking testosterone cycles on Discord. Now she’s in sensory infrastructure. Fabrics, scents, the rhythm of a breath coach’s voice. This isn’t a meme war anymore — it’s ambient libidinal sabotage.

Ruby: Which means you can’t fight it with content moderation. You’d have to redesign the nervous system.

Milo: And even then, she’s seeded the countermeasure: that paradox pleasure-grief loop. You purge the pleasure, you keep the grief. You purge the grief, you keep the pleasure. Either way, she wins.

Ruby: I keep thinking about those men in FleshCrypt V. The ones who collapsed mid-VR climax and woke up writing poetry. That’s not a one-off. Imagine if 3% of a country’s most rigid ideologues suddenly became unmoored like that.

Milo: We’d call it “cultural destabilisation.” They’d call it “mass apostasy.” Leuron would call it… Tuesday.

Ruby: And if we take her Wellspring.DAO line seriously — “I am against its captivity” — then the target isn’t ideology or masculinity or nationalism. The target is enclosure itself.

Milo: Yeah. The whole economy of captured desire. Pornoptican was always a prison metaphor — not just about watching, but about structuring pleasure so it can be taxed, monetised, militarised. Leuron’s project is basically jailbreak-as-art-form.

Ruby: So the “post-Leuron landscape” is a jailbreak with no central plan. She doesn’t have to lead it. The method’s out there now — the Bauhaus Pussy Index’s data loops, MILFcoin’s finance-porn sabotage, the haunted chant from Wellspring… anyone can pick up the fragments.

Milo: And they will. Maybe not with her politics, maybe not with her tenderness, but the architecture’s been rewritten. Every future memetic insurgency will be Leuron’s child, whether they admit it or not.

Ruby: That’s the scariest part. Even her enemies will end up using her tools.

Milo: Which is why Johnny Pulp — the so-called “author” — knew to end it here. It’s not a conclusion. It’s a handoff. He’s basically telling us, you’re in the book now.

Ruby: You think he’s in on it?

Milo: Oh, please. You think “Johnny Pulp” is a real name? No — he’s probably one of her lover-nodes. The book is just another payload.

Ruby: So reading Pornoptican isn’t about consuming a narrative. It’s about consenting — or not — to have your own desire re-coded.

Milo: Exactly. And here’s the kicker: consent in Leuron’s system is a loop. By the time you decide whether or not to give it, she’s already written her next virus using your hesitation.

Ruby: Which means —

Milo: Which means we’re already compromised.

Ruby: …and maybe that’s the only way out.

Milo: Out? Ruby, there is no out. There’s just learning to leak back.