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Önce ve Sonra / The Spinning Robot: It’s Alive! It’s Alive! 🦋🤖 / Hinges Between Waves: how Haymarket, May ’68, 9⁄11, and 7 October re-tuned the operating system of power

Across a century and a half, four shocks—Haymarket, 1968, Sep11, and Oct7—forced institutions to swap the delicate links by which they once governed for sturdier links that could be executed at speed. If you’re coming to this fresh, think of each hinge as a paradigmatic intimidation that sets off thousands of small decisions: after Haymarket, custom yields to factory code and the punch clock; after 1968, clerical procedure yields to broadcast persuasion and the media buy; after Sep11, television’s impressions yield to explicit coding—checklists, watchlists, procurement; after Oct7, even those explicit codes yield to implicit, model-level rules that decide what moves before anyone reads the words. The first article introduces Žižek’s reading of Sep11 and Oct7 to explain why images began writing the rules and why, later, rules began hiding inside models; the second folds Haymarket and 1968 back into the same story so you can see how custom became code and code became image long before dashboards and classifiers took over. Read together, they map one operating-system upgrade of modern life: from acquaintance to accounting to audience to algorithm, with consent and testimony protected as the human knots that must never be automated away.

1) Images That Write The Rules — Žižek On Sep11 And Oct7, From Explicit Coding Over Impressions To Implicit Coding Over Rules

If you’re new to this terrain, start with one image from Slavoj Žižek and one operating rule from media history. Žižek’s provocation about September 11 is that it wasn’t ‘reality entering our images’; it was the image that smashed into and reorganized reality itself, rupturing the symbolic coordinates that told us what counted as real in the first place. Media history’s rule, in turn, is that regimes of communication crest, turn absurd at their limits, and then get subordinated to a successor logic. The interface where meaning hardens into rules—courtroom↔codebase, policy↔targeting protocol—decides what comes next. Read together, you can see how two violent shocks—Sep11 and Oct7—did not merely make headlines; they intimidated institutions into replacing delicate links with sturdier ones, first by turning impressions into explicit codes after Sep11, and then by letting implicit, model-driven codes cancel even the explicit codes after Oct7. In the language of a four-wave map, Sep11 finalizes television’s reign and ushers power into datafied security; Oct7 finalizes social media’s reign and shifts power into provenance, AI-assisted sense-making, and network geopolitics.

How Sep11 broke television by replacing impressions with explicit codes

Žižek insists that the live, looping television of September 11 produced an ‘effect of the Real’ that we could endure only by already having fictionalized it: the spectacle was an image that delivered ‘the thing itself,’ a nightmare that forced institutions to change their rules so they could metabolize what they were seeing. He adds a key about censorship and codes: in situations where you ‘lack red ink,’ you can still tell the truth by writing the missing code into the message; the very reference to what cannot be said forces a new reading grid to appear. That’s exactly what happened to the television regime. Before Sep11, broadcast power leaned on delicate links: cultivated impressions, brand aura, ratings-friendly rituals, and producerly instincts about what a ‘serious’ segment looked and felt like. After Sep11, a thousand small, sturdy links replaced them. Rolling chyrons, threat levels, compliance checklists, embed protocols, off-the-shelf crisis formats, and legalized procurement scripts took priority over on-air charisma and impressions. You could see it in postponed movie openings and sanitized montages—a collective repression of the films that resembled the towers’ collapse, a tell that the fantasmatic background of TV had been exposed and then curtained off by policy.

This is what ‘paradigmatic intimidation’ looks like up close. A violent eruption frightens executives, editors, advertisers, and regulators into micro-corrections that seem technical—new standards for ‘appropriate’ imagery, fresh legal boilerplate for ‘crisis,’ newsroom rules for live footage, visible security theater at airports, color-coded alerts, and template language for anchors. None of these acts alone ‘ends television.’ Together they cancel the legitimacy of impressionistic judgment as the governing link. The prestige slides from aura to apparatus. Žižek’s point about the image shattering reality explains why the old soft power—in TV terms, the practiced skill of managing impressions—suddenly read as insufficient to the stakes at hand. The wave model names the sequel: after 9⁄11, authority relocates into data-driven security and platforms—the surveillance dashboards, watchlists, and sorting systems that make rules executable at speed.

Two further moves from the four-wave schema clarify the change. First, a mature medium tends to push its reigning code to reductio ad absurdum; the very brilliance of broadcast impression-management revealed systemic limits once crisis became continuous programming. Second, the successor wave captures surplus-value procedurally. Influence becomes inference; charisma becomes configuration; leverage concentrates with the owners of datasets, guardrails, and deployment knobs. The upshot is as political as it is technical: impressions no longer decide; explicit codes do.

How Oct7 broke social media by letting implicit codes cancel explicit ones

Žižek’s Oct7 essay, titled with the line ‘Truth has the structure of fiction,’ stages an imagined phone call between Hamas and Israeli hardliners to show the obscene ‘middle term’ that links two visible extremes. The point isn’t conspiracy; it’s to reveal an objective logic of mutual provocation that polite discourse disavows. This is the same Lacanian maneuver he uses in the book: we ‘traverse the fantasy’ not by exiting fictions for the real, but by identifying the kernel of the Real that we can only bear by fictionalizing it. The method matters because it maps directly to the hinge your wave model tracks. Social media had already reached saturation. Moderation policies, fact-check labels, trending pages, and ‘explicit’ community standards formed a paper shield over feeds that were actually governed by engagement heuristics and opaque ranking. Oct7 then supplied the paradigmatic intimidation that compelled platforms, states, and audiences to operationalize what had previously been disavowed: the implicit codes—hash-matching, classifier thresholds, risk scores, trust vectors, provenance marks, and ‘de-amplification’—now overruled the explicit codes bannered in the policy pages.

You could see it in the avalanche of micro-moves: high-velocity takedowns before human review could complete, temporary exceptions for graphic evidence that later hardened into new machine rules, emergency rules of origin that privileged posts with sensor-grade metadata, and re-prioritization of ‘context’ from a label to a distribution decision. On the ground, even the military’s ‘humanitarian’ instructionality turned into machine-readable grids—numbered blocks and scannable maps that reorganized life into zones, prompts, and coordinates—converting moral claims into operational links. The public learned, often brutally, that what circulated or stalled online was no longer governed by the explicit text of standards alone. The implicit code—the model and its knobs—had eaten the standards.

This is why Oct7 doesn’t just change narratives; it completes social media’s regime and moves the center of gravity into the policy-stack era. The four-wave file says it outright: after 7 October, power migrates into provenance, AI-assisted sense-making, and the geopolitics of networks. That migration is the cancellation the prompt asks us to name. If Sep11 replaced impressionistic links with explicit codes, then Oct7 replaces explicit codes with implicit ones: the tacit inferences of models and scoring systems that decide what moves and what stalls before any human reads the words. The ‘truth has the structure of fiction’ device illuminates how this could happen—by making visible the obscene glue of the system, the story that institutions won’t say out loud, and then watching as the unspoken story becomes the very spec the machine starts to run.

Why these shocks rewrite the operating system, and what must remain human

Across the four hinges, the choreography repeats: the old order strains, an event scrambles its script, and the counter-move restores surface control while seeding a successor logic that shifts where consent is gathered, narratives are made, and rules are enforced. Sep11 was the exemplary intimidation that retired television’s delicate rule—impressions—by hardening television’s moods into checklists, classifications, and procurement. Oct7 is the exemplary intimidation that retires social media’s delicate rule—explicit policy text—by installing the supremacy of implicit, model-level decision-making. In both cases, thousands of small acts—stylebook edits, risk-scoring defaults, dashboard toggles, emergency exceptions that become permanent—do the real constitutional work. That’s how a medium dies: not with a proclamation, but with a million sturdy links that quietly cancel the old ones.

If the pattern sounds chilling, the four-wave model also names what must not be surrendered as we cross the seam from speech to code. The remainder that machines cannot close is the origin of authority itself: the human ‘yes’ and the human ‘this happened,’ formalized as verifiable consent at the first mile and durable testimony at the point of contest. In earlier waves, the safeguard was the eight-hour statute and the right to speak and exit; in this one, it must be consent you can grant and revoke, and testimonial channels that can stand against manufactured noise, with provenance and auditability as first-class constraints. That is not machine worship; it is the minimum for keeping high-speed systems livable.

A last pass through Žižek’s lens

What makes Žižek useful here is not a taste for provocation but a discipline for reading seams. His famous joke about ‘red ink’ under censorship shows how coding works even when the code is missing: the reference to an absent sign tells you how to read the whole message. Television after Sep11 is that joke at scale: the missing innocence of the image is replaced by procedures that tell you how to read every image; explicit coding cancels impressions. His Oct7 fiction repeats the method in a different key: by making the obscene middle term speak, he shows how the unspoken rules already govern the field; implicit coding cancels explicit coding. The wave account brings the institutional mechanics that his psychoanalytic register leaves offstage: who owns the datasets and guardrails, where provenance and audit are enforced, and which appeal paths keep people inside the loop when models err. If we protect those last human knots, the next quilting point can be rewoven without tearing the fabric—and surplus-information can still be converted into just value instead of predatory extraction.

2) Before The Screens — Haymarket And 1968 As The First Two Hinges From Custom To Code And From Code To Broadcast

The easiest way to see how Haymarket, ’68, Sep11, and Oct7 belong to one story is to track what breaks each time and what gets installed in its place. In each episode a violent shock functions as paradigmatic intimidation. It forces a thousand small, local decisions that quietly cancel the old, delicate links by which a system held together and replaces them with new, sturdy links that can be executed at speed. There is a rhythm to these replacements. First, custom gives way to code. Then code gives way to image management. Then images give way to instrumented rules. Finally, even the visible rules give way to implicit, model-level inferences. Žižek helps name the pressure that drives each turn. He keeps insisting that the Real intrudes in a way we can only metabolize by reorganizing our symbolic order, and he dramatizes that reorganization with fictions that expose the obscene, unspoken middle term—what institutions do but dare not say. If you keep that lens and follow four hinges—Haymarket in 1886, the uprisings of 1968, September 11, and October 7—you can watch the operating system of modern life refit itself layer by layer.

Begin with Haymarket. Before that bomb and the hail of police bullets, industrializing cities were already pulling production out of households into factories, but the social order still leaned on delicate links—shop-floor custom, foreman favor, kin networks, mutual aid, and the rhythms of sun and season. The Haymarket affair terrified owners, politicians, and newspapers. In the months and years after, no single statute explained what changed, but an accretion of small moves did. Punch-clock discipline and standardized shift lengths replaced gentleman’s agreements about “a fair day’s work.” Factory rulebooks and posted prohibitions displaced the tacit understandings of craft. Safety drills, foreman checklists, and insurance underwriting requirements hardened into compliance regimes. Pinkerton dossiers, police “rogues’ galleries,” and centralized ledgers of strikebreakers made labor relations legible to management in a new way. Railroads synchronized schedules by standard time; workshops synchronized bodies by the whistle. None of this was created by the blast alone, but the blast licensed a turn: household tact became tolerances and shifts; impressionistic authority on the floor gave way to explicit coding of time, motion, attendance, and wage. The myth of the autonomous craftsman could no longer govern; the eight-hour demand became a line in contracts and statutes; the factory clock was not a metaphor but the new sovereign. A delicate link—trust me, I’ll do the job—was canceled by sturdy links—time cards, posted rates, enumerated infractions, standardized parts. The terror didn’t just suppress radicalism; it also compelled elites to choose an order they could defend in court and on paper, and it forced labor to fight in the same register. Custom was no longer enough. Coding took its place.

Jump forward to ’68 and the crest of the mid-century tabulator state. Between Haymarket and the Sixties, the second wave perfected procedural bureaucracy. Files, forms, punch cards, and actuarial tables organized roads, schools, pensions, and war. By 1968, that machinery had become self-parody for a generation asked to fill out forms while watching Vietnam burn on television. The uprisings—from Paris to Prague to Mexico City to Chicago—were not just interruptions; they were intimidations that told institutions their sober paperwork had lost legitimacy. What followed, again, was not a single decree but an avalanche of adjustments. Police acquired standardized riot gear, training modules, and use-of-force matrices; universities rewrote codes of conduct; governments professionalized press offices and crisis rooms; campaigns moved from precinct captains and patronage lists to focus groups, pollsters, and the calculus of media buys. The think-tank era grew alongside the public-relations industry, converting the moral temperature of a crowd into the purchase of a thirty-second spot and a talking-points memo. The delicate links of clerical discretion—“we’ll see what the file says”—no longer felt like governance. They were canceled by broadcast-PR links: ratings, Q-scores, target demos, the choreography of the press conference, the engineered spectacle of the convention. Bureaucratic procedure did not vanish, but prestige migrated to those who could script and stage a nation’s attention. If the first hinge had replaced custom with code, the second replaced code with image and procurement—whoever could buy, schedule, and smooth what the camera saw now set the terms.

Žižek’s reading of Sep11 shows what happens when the broadcast-PR regime meets its reductio. In his formulation, it was not “reality entering the image” but the image smashing into reality and reorganizing our coordinates. The loops made us stare at something we could only endure by fictionalizing, and elites quickly built an apparatus that could metabolize the shock. The micro-moves came fast and felt merely technical: color-coded threat levels and signage at airports; standardized pat-downs and shoe checks; the embedding of journalists; new checklists for studios about what to air and when to cut away; “appropriate” imagery guidelines; crisis playbooks; procurement rules for surveillance gear; risk scores and watchlists; interagency memoranda and data-sharing protocols; compliance training and background checks for new categories of worker. None of these choices was a constitutional convention. Together they formalized the fact that impressions—anchorman gravitas, a public’s gut sense of normalcy—no longer decided. Explicit coding canceled impressions. What mattered, decisively, was what was on the list, in the database, behind the green or orange square. Television remained, but the aura of the live shot ceded authority to dashboards, audits, and procedural legality. The center of gravity slid from publicity to instrumentation.

Žižek’s Oct7 text performs the next turn in miniature. He imagines a phone call between Hamas and Israeli hardliners—not to declare a literal conspiracy, but to dramatize the obscene middle term that polite discourse excludes. It is a fiction that reveals the Real by naming the reciprocal provocation each side needs to justify escalation. That gesture matters because it marks the seam where the social-media order breaks. Social platforms had grown a thicket of explicit policies over content and behavior, but in practice the feeds were governed by engagement heuristics and ranking. October 7 delivered the paradigmatic intimidation that exposed the gap. In the fog and fury, what moved or stalled online was decided first by implicit code: classifier thresholds for graphic violence, hash-matching for known atrocities, trust signals tied to provenance, emergency down-ranking of unverified virality, rapid exceptions for evidence that morphed into new defaults. On the ground, a parallel transformation proceeded through numbered blocks, QR-coded evacuation maps, and machine-readable zones that converted moral claims into coordinates. As with each previous hinge, no single reform announced the new order, yet a thousand toggles did. The visible rulebook didn’t vanish, but the real decisions now happened one layer down, in models and scores. Implicit coding canceled explicit coding. Social media remained, but authority migrated to those who own datasets, guardrails, and deployment knobs, and to those who can prove where a piece of media came from and why a model treated it as it did.

Seen in one sweep, Haymarket closes the household-craft regime and installs factory code; ’68 closes the tabulator-bureaucracy regime and installs broadcast persuasion; Sep11 closes the broadcast persuasion regime and installs instrumented procedure; Oct7 closes the policy-on-paper regime of platforms and installs the supremacy of implicit, model-level governance. In each passage the violent event is the intimidation that teaches institutions their reigning delicacy can’t bear the load. After Haymarket, your promise to work hard is nothing next to the punch clock and the posted shift; after ’68, your immaculate files are nothing next to the camera and the buy; after Sep11, your poised anchor and tasteful montage are nothing next to the checklist and the watchlist; after Oct7, your explicit standards are nothing next to the classifier and the provenance ledger. What counts as “governable” moves from acquaintance to accounting to audience to algorithm.

Žižek’s contribution is not that he loves catastrophe, but that he reads the seams where these replacements happen. When he says the Real erupts, he does not mean we awaken from illusion into purity. He means we rush to rebuild an order we can stand to live inside, and we do it by changing the links that bind speech to action. His imagined phone call is not a flirtation with conspiracism; it is a diagram of how institutions quietly need what they loudly denounce, a reminder that the tacit logics doing the real work must eventually be named and, better, designed. That lesson is priceless at the present hinge. If model-level links are now deciding who sees what, then public legitimacy depends on provenance you can verify, consent you can grant and revoke, and testimonial channels that can challenge a machine’s judgment with human evidence. The first wave’s answer was the shift and the statute; the second wave’s was the press conference and the media buy; the third wave’s was the dashboard and the audit trail. In the fourth, the answer must include licenses at the point of data ingress, watermarking and chain-of-custody for media, interpretable thresholds for emergency interventions, and appeal paths that keep a human veto near automated acts. Otherwise the obscene middle term Žižek exposes stays outside the law, doing its work without responsibility.

If you started this story knowing little about Haymarket or ’68, it’s enough to remember what changed in people’s bodies and days. After 1886, workers woke to whistles, not to the sun, and managers read ledgers, not faces. After 1968, politicians learned to hire pollsters and image doctors, not just precinct captains, and police chiefs learned to brief on camera as much as to file reports. After 2001, travelers learned a color before they learned a gate, and producers learned to consult a checklist before they trusted their instincts. After 2023, posters and viewers learned that a hidden score could erase or amplify them before anyone read their words, and moderators learned that their written standards would be outpaced by the settings of a model. The hinges are not just dates on a timeline; they are the moments when delicate links snap and sturdier links are installed. If we accept that pattern, we can still decide what those sturdy links should protect. The only non-negotiable is that the human yes and the human this happened remain legible to the systems we are building, because without first-mile consent and durable testimony, the next refit will be faster and stronger, but it won’t be ours.

3) Echoes Across Two Centuries: How Sep11 Replays Haymarket, And How Oct7 Replays 1968

History doesn’t just move forward; it learns by rhyming. The shock of Chicago’s Haymarket tragedy in 1886 and the shock of September 11, 2001 belong to the same stanza: both convert soft judgment into hard procedure, replacing what people used to sense with what systems must enforce. Likewise, the upheavals of 1968 and the calamities of October 7, 2023 return as a later rhyme: both moments reveal that the visible rulebook no longer governs; something tacit does the actual deciding. Put bluntly so a newcomer can follow the thread: Sep11 repeats Haymarket because impressions are pushed off the stage by explicit code; Oct7 repeats 1968 because explicit code is then upstaged by implicit code.

Begin with the nineteenth-century city. Before the bomb at Haymarket Square—its maker never definitively identified—industrial life still leaned on personal standing, a foreman’s feel for a worker’s reliability, and workshop customs that varied block by block. The blast and the bloodshed didn’t invent factories or managers, but they froze a narrative: “gut feeling” could no longer carry the burden of public order. What followed were not grand speeches but small, relentless conversions. Time and effort migrated from trust to trace. Timekeeping instruments, numbered badges, gate checks, standardized shift rosters, disciplinary write-ups, and new contract language translated workshop moods into records. City authorities matched the transformation with criminal statutes, licensing regimes, and centralized files aimed at turning a volatile labor market into something legible to courts and police. The message embedded in all this paperwork was simple: if you want authority, you must put it in writing. A world that had run on reputations learned to run on forms.

Now jump to New York, Washington, and the studios of the early twenty-first century. For decades television had banked on poise, tone, and the cultivated hunches of producers—impressions that told millions how to feel about the week. Live images of the towers collapsing made that craft feel indecently thin. Once again the corrections arrived as practical minutiae that changed the center of gravity. Transportation and border agencies hardened “common sense” into procedures that could be audited. Airlines and governments built name-matching and no-board lists; immigration shifted toward biometrics and machine-readable documents; interagency “fusion centers” sprouted; incident-command templates told responders who salutes whom before the first press statement was drafted. Even inside newsrooms the grammar shifted: escalation paths, risk desks, and pre-cleared playbooks took precedence over an anchor’s gravitas. In both eras the same kind of replacement occurs. First you have impressions—“I know this man, I trust that footage”—and then you decide impressions no longer count. Authority moves from the handshake to the stamp. Haymarket supplied the pretext for the factory to write its authority into ledgers; Sep11 supplied the pretext for the national-security and media complex to write its authority into interoperable rules. When people say “impressions were canceled by explicit code,” this is what they mean: the felt sense of what’s appropriate lost, and the written procedure won.

The second rhyme pair takes a different path to the same insight: what you can see on the surface is no longer where decisions are made. In 1968, a generation discovered that the sober files and forms of the mid-century bureaucracy were powerless against the stagecraft of a passing camera. Governments still had clerks and case files, but the political game moved to televised events and the industries that fed them. Candidates began testing phrases in focus groups, spinning after debates in “war rooms,” and answering to overnight audience curves. Police doctrine shifted to a new repertoire for crowds, with pre-planned formations, designated protest zones, and media corridors designed as much for optics as for safety. The paperwork stayed; the camera decided. A city hall could produce an immaculate stack of memos; a single image could undo the lot. That’s what it means to say explicit code—what is written—lost its primacy to an implicit force—what the screen makes decisive without ever stating it.

Now consider Oct7 and the weeks that followed. Platforms had long posted elaborate community standards, and states had passed laws about speech, extremism, and reporting. Yet the life or death of a post, a clip, or a livestream hinged on processes that were invisible to ordinary users. What carried through one hour and vanished the next wasn’t usually the direct result of a paragraph in a policy; it was the outcome of quiet thresholds in detection systems, pattern-matching against perceptual fingerprints, source credibility scores, and real-time checks on provenance that throttled or accelerated distribution before a human team could weigh in. Safety teams did publish updates, but the actual referee lived a layer down, where models infer intent and classify content. On the ground, even emergency messaging reflected the same shift toward tacit instructionality: large areas were subdivided into grid squares navigable via links to mapping dashboards, and movement was guided by coordinates rather than narrative. The rulebook stayed; the hidden criteria ruled. That is why it’s fair to say Oct7 repeats 1968. In both moments the written or formal text keeps up appearances, while a different logic—first the logic of the lens, later the logic of the model—quietly takes command.

For readers who did not live through any of this, it helps to picture everyday life rather than institutions. In the late 1800s a young worker’s day had once been paced by relationships—kin, crew, a head craftsman—until the city demanded clocks, tickets, and rules. After 2001 a traveler’s progress through an airport became a sequence of gates defined by databases and scanners, not by a gate agent’s judgment. In 1968 a mayor could recite statutes and ordinances, but the public decided on the basis of what they saw in a few minutes of nightly footage. After October 7 a person trying to publish raw evidence online discovered that the fate of that evidence was determined by a web of unseen settings—confidence scores, similarity searches, heuristics about timing and origin—that no comment policy could fully explain. In each case an interruption forces a migration of authority: first from felt judgment to written procedure, later from written procedure to an unspoken mechanism.

At this point a skeptic might ask whether we’re simply swapping one kind of opacity for another. Weren’t foremen unfair, weren’t TV producers biased, aren’t algorithms inscrutable? The answer is that each transformation solves a real problem and then creates new ones. Writing rules down makes power appealable and portable; it can also create rigidities and blind spots. Letting pictures set the agenda responded to bureaucratic indifference; it also favored drama over substance. Letting models police floods of speech addresses scale that people cannot handle; it also buries decisions inside code most citizens can’t read. The point of tracing the rhymes is not to celebrate any hinge, but to diagnose what has been displaced. After Haymarket and Sep11 we know why institutions reach for checklists and standard operating procedures: they promise consistent action, and in emergencies consistency saves lives. After 1968 and Oct7 we know why the visible text becomes a fig leaf: pace is too fast, volume is too high, and so the actual referee must be something that acts in real time—a camera’s appetite back then, an inference engine now.

If you are trying to keep your bearings inside the current refit, the lesson of the two pairs is practical. Whenever you hear someone say “we go by feel,” expect a crisis to end that phase with forms, signatures, and interoperable rules. Whenever you hear someone point to a policy page as if it were a steering wheel, expect the real steering to be happening under the hood, without anyone saying so. Sep11 replays Haymarket by insisting that felt authority step aside for explicit code; Oct7 replays 1968 by revealing that explicit code itself has become a costume, with implicit code doing the work. The rhyme is not accidental. It’s how large systems learn to move faster than fear. The work ahead is to make that speed compatible with fairness, which means dragging the tacit logic into daylight where it can be argued with—so that, this time, the new rivets holding the world together can be inspected, not simply endured.