in Writing
Where Gravity Doesn't Vote begins
A book about how shared realities collapse opens on a balcony in Bucharest, four minutes before the crowd stops behaving.
Gravity Doesn't Vote opens on 21 December 1989, on the balcony of the Central Committee building in Bucharest. A hundred thousand people have been assembled below, the way furniture is assembled: workers ordered out of factories, delivered by bus, handed placards, told where to stand and when to cheer. The man about to speak has ruled Romania for twenty-four years and has four days left to live.
Why start there
Because the footage exists, and because it shows the exact moment a reality stops working. A few minutes into the speech a chant reaches the balcony from the back of the square, and the most feared man in the country stops mid-sentence, taps the microphone and says hello, hello, as though the problem were electrical. Within his reality it is the only available explanation: equipment fails, people do not.
What the book is arguing
That the question is not why people believe untrue things. It is why some facts survive disbelief for decades and others are dead by morning. The interesting variable is rarely the evidence. It is what a fact costs the people around you to hold, and what it would cost them to drop it.
Where it is
In preparation. It is being written now, and it will be announced here and to the mailing list when it has a publication date.