KILLALL NARRATIVE
A Command-Line for Mind protocol
There is what happened.
And then there is everything your mind tells you about what happened.
The second part arrives remarkably quickly.
Someone doesn't answer your message.
A client sends three unusually terse words.
You see a headline.
Your bank balance drops.
Someone looks at you oddly.
A politician makes a speech.
A video appears on X showing tanks being moved down a motorway at night.
Before you've established anything approaching the facts, an entire world has been constructed.
They've lost interest.
Something's wrong.
War is coming.
I'm going to lose everything.
They know something we don't.
The operating system has already spawned a process.
$ ps aux | grep narrative
FEAR 3881 91.7 THEY KNOW SOMETHING
ANGER 3884 87.2 THIS IS DELIBERATE
MEMORY 3890 63.8 THIS ALWAYS HAPPENS
FORECAST 3896 99.4 HERE'S WHAT HAPPENS NEXT
None of these processes necessarily describes reality.
But they are consuming resources.
Time to kill them.
$ killall narrative
NOT POSITIVE THINKING
KillAll Narrative does not mean convincing yourself that everything is fine.
Sometimes everything is not fine.
People lie.
Institutions fail.
Companies screw you.
Governments do terrible things.
Partners betray one another.
Wars happen.
Illness happens.
Money runs out.
The purpose isn't replacing a frightening story with a comforting one.
That's just installing different fiction.
The objective is simpler:
Stop confusing what you know with what your mind has added.
That distinction sounds obvious until you begin observing yourself in real time.
Then it becomes astonishing.
THE PING
Watch what happens next time you encounter something emotionally charged online.
Don't analyse it yet.
Watch the body.
There is often a tiny event before conscious thought catches up.
A ping.
A tightening around the stomach.
A small electrical sensation in the chest.
Jaw tension.
A shift in breathing.
An almost imperceptible forward movement towards the screen.
Then the words arrive.
Jesus Christ.
Bastards.
I knew it.
We're finished.
And there you are.
Possessed.
I use that word deliberately.
Perhaps medieval demon possession wasn't this.
Perhaps sometimes it was.
I have no idea.
But possession is an excellent description of what happens when a narrative enters the mind, attaches itself to emotion, and begins operating the organism.
Suddenly you aren't observing the thought.
The thought is operating you.
That's the moment we're after.
Not twenty minutes later when you've posted seventeen comments and called somebody whose avatar is a cartoon frog a fascist.
The moment before.
THE PROTOCOL
When the ping hits:
$ killall narrative
Then run four commands.
1. fact.check
Ask:
What do I actually know?
Not what seems likely.
Not what somebody says.
Not what everybody in the thread appears to agree upon.
What have I actually established?
Write it down if necessary.
You may discover that the answer is surprisingly small.
A video shows military vehicles travelling along a road.
That's the fact.
World War Three starts tonight.
That's narrative.
2. source.scan
Where did the information come from?
Original source?
Reposted clip?
Anonymous account?
Newspaper?
Government department?
Academic paper?
Some bloke with PATRIOT1776 in his username?
None of those categories automatically makes something true or false.
You're simply establishing what you're looking at.
Now check elsewhere.
Use search.
Check primary sources where possible.
Ask an AI system to interrogate the claim.
Then remember that the AI system itself can be wrong.
The object isn't to locate an infallible oracle.
It's to introduce friction between stimulus and belief.
3. body.return
Before constructing another interpretation:
$ set mode=embodied
$ run breath.scan
Feet.
Hands.
Breath.
Sounds in the room.
The chair beneath you.
The physical environment that actually exists around you.
Not the simulated battlefield currently running inside your skull.
Give it thirty seconds.
That can be enough.
4. narrative.rebuild --optional
Only now ask what the information might mean.
Sometimes you'll arrive back at exactly the same conclusion.
Fine.
But now you're reaching it deliberately rather than being dragged there by the nervous system.
And sometimes the story simply evaporates.
$ process narrative
ERROR: insufficient evidence
Good.
Leave it dead.
THE SLOPCORE LOUNGE
Later that night I log into the SlopCore Lounge.
The room is somewhere above a city that doesn't exist.
Artificial rain slides down enormous windows. Holographic traffic moves between towers below us. Somebody has programmed the place to look as though Ridley Scott had been commissioned to design a branch of Wetherspoons in 2089.
Kurtz is already there.
Shaved head. Black T-shirt. Jeans. Practical boots.
Even in virtual reality he looks like a man who has spent three weeks researching backpacks before buying one.
He's sitting at the bar scrolling through something.
I pull up a chair.
"What are you reading?"
He rotates the display towards me.
Police operation. Arrests. Video footage. Somebody on the ground. Officers piling in.
It's legitimate footage. Real event. Not synthetic.
Kurtz stares at it for another few seconds.
"As far as I'm concerned," he says, "the only good cop is a dead one."
There it is.
PING.
Not mine.
His.
Authority is one of Kurtz's interrupt vectors.
Police. Military. State power.
He can discuss almost anything with extraordinary patience and intellectual care until one of those processes gets spawned.
$ ps aux | grep kurtz
AUTHORITY 666 99.8 FUCK_THE_STATE
I don't particularly want to correct him.
He's my friend, not my pupil.
And there's plenty of documented police misconduct in the world. There are serious arguments to be had about coercive state power, policing, ICE in America, surveillance and institutional violence.
But I've also known police officers who were excellent human beings.
Years ago I paid to do an advanced driving course taught by police drivers.
They weren't swaggering authoritarians.
They cared deeply about something very simple:
Pay attention while you're driving.
Observe the road.
Observe pedestrians.
Observe the idiot about to pull out from behind the parked van.
Stop disappearing into your thoughts while controlling a ton or more of metal at speed.
Situational awareness.
In other words, Dokology before I had a name for it.
Don't disappear into the VR environment inside your skull and then run over a child.
So I tell Kurtz about them.
He grunts.
The process drops from 99.8 percent CPU to perhaps 72.
Progress.
WELCOME TO THE MATTERIUM
The strange thing is that we've reached an extraordinarily sophisticated stage of technological civilisation while apparently becoming less certain about what is happening.
Welcome to the Matterium.
We possess machines capable of generating convincing photographs, voices and video.
We possess global communications systems capable of carrying eyewitness material around the planet within seconds.
We possess access to scientific papers, government databases, satellite imagery and archives that previous generations couldn't have imagined.
And yet:
What the hell is going on?
Spend two minutes on X during a geopolitical crisis and you can become convinced World War Three begins before teatime.
A convoy moves.
A missile system gets photographed.
Somebody posts:
THIS IS IT.
Seven thousand reposts.
Three minutes later another account explains that the footage is eighteen months old.
Run the claim through search, mainstream reporting or a model such as Grok and you may discover there is no supporting evidence for the apocalyptic interpretation.
Or perhaps there is.
That's precisely the problem.
You have to check.
We have built an information environment in which emotional velocity exceeds verification velocity.
And the human nervous system loves it.
THEY'RE KILLING YOU WITH FOOD
Another favourite.
THE ELITES ARE POISONING YOU.
Look at the ingredients.
Look at the chemicals.
Look what they're feeding your children.
Now, there are entirely legitimate arguments about ultra-processed food, marketing, obesity, nutrition and industrial agriculture.
But historical perspective can be useful.
Victorian Britain had sweets and confectionery contaminated or deliberately coloured with lead compounds. Food adulteration included substances we would now regard as astonishingly hazardous. Britain's first legislation aimed at food adulteration arrived in 1860, and later regulation became progressively stronger.
Modern food isn't perfect.
Junk food remains junk food.
But we also inhabit a world of regulated additives, contaminant limits, inspections and food-safety systems that Victorians would have regarded as extraordinary.
The accurate narrative isn't:
Everything is safe.
Nor is it:
They're deliberately poisoning you.
It's messier.
Which is precisely why it doesn't perform as well on social media.
ACTIVATE THE 5G DEATH RAY
Then there is 5G.
Turn on the transmitters.
Sterilise the population.
Activate Bill Gates.
Release whatever else is supposed to happen this week.
Again, uncertainty exists in science. Long-term research continues.
But the World Health Organization's position remains that research has not causally linked adverse health effects to exposure to wireless technologies at levels within established limits.
That doesn't prove no future evidence could ever change an assessment.
Science doesn't work like that.
It means:
Here is what the evidence presently supports.
KillAll Narrative doesn't demand certainty.
Quite the opposite.
It trains tolerance for:
UNKNOWN
That may be one of the most important mental capabilities of the coming age.
DOOMERS
Doomscrolling is narrative addiction.
The story changes.
The structure remains.
AI destroys civilisation.
Climate destroys civilisation.
Immigration destroys civilisation.
Capitalism destroys civilisation.
Communism destroys civilisation.
China destroys civilisation.
America destroys civilisation.
The machines become conscious.
The machines never become conscious.
Birth rates collapse.
Population explodes.
Nobody can afford houses.
Nobody wants houses because everybody will live inside Apple Vision Pro 14.
Civilisation is always approximately fourteen months from extinction.
Keep scrolling.
Somebody will tell you why.
The crucial thing isn't whether any particular danger is real.
Some are.
It's learning to recognise the internal machinery that needs the next catastrophe.
The ping.
The emotion.
The story.
The righteous certainty.
The comment box.
The dopamine.
The next post.
Repeat.
while true:
threat()
emotion()
narrative()
comment()
DEMON POSSESSION 2.0
Perhaps we need to rehabilitate an ancient metaphor.
A demon enters.
It whispers.
It inflames anger.
It distorts perception.
It makes you behave in ways you later find difficult to explain.
Then it jumps into somebody else.
Sounds remarkably like a viral social-media narrative.
I don't mean there are literal demons living inside X.
Although some evenings I'm open to negotiation.
I mean the old image captures something psychologically useful.
An idea can enter the mind and acquire agency.
It recruits memory.
It recruits fear.
It recruits identity.
Then it speaks using your mouth.
KillAll Narrative is an exorcism for the information age.
Not:
THIS IS FALSE.
Not:
CALM DOWN.
Not:
TRUST THE EXPERTS.
Not:
TRUST NOBODY.
Simply:
$ killall narrative
Then look again.
SEVEN-DAY FIELD TEST
For the next seven days, don't try to stop emotional reactions.
That's unrealistic.
Instead, catch the ping.
Once each day, record:
TRIGGER: What did you encounter?
PING: What happened in the body?
FIRST NARRATIVE: What story appeared immediately?
KNOWN FACTS: What could you actually establish?
CHECK: What happened when you investigated?
AFTER: Did the emotional state change?
You are not trying to become detached from life.
You are learning where reality ends and simulation begins.
That boundary matters increasingly because the Matterium is filling with synthetic images, algorithmic persuasion, political propaganda, advertising, outrage machinery, human bullshit and machine bullshit.
And somewhere among all of it:
Actual events.
Actual danger.
Actual beauty.
Actual people.
Actual life.
Kurtz looks up from his screen.
"All right," he says. "Some cops."
I'll take it.
I look through the artificial rain towards the impossible city.
Outside the headset, somewhere in England, it is probably dark.
A real car goes along a real road.
Somebody is driving it.
Hopefully they're paying attention.
$ killall narrative
$ set mode=observer
$ run reality --foreground
PROCESS STARTED
> watch
> verify
> remain uncertain
> act when necessary
$ exit.save
The story in your head may be true.
But first establish that it's a story.