Synalosis
Synalosis names a single geometric operation that runs through the natural and human worlds: the contraction of the set of futures still open to a target toward a single point as many agents converge at once.
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About This Book
A pack of wolves closing on a moose, a Roman army walling a city, a surveillance system mapping a single life, and a detective closing on the truth of a crime are doing one thing in four different materials. Each takes a target that still holds many possible futures and strips them away, one after another, until a single future is left, and that future is its capture. The thing being destroyed already has a name the engineers who build guided weapons use, the reachable set, the collection of every place a target can still go. Synalosis gives a name to the operation that closes it, and once you hold the name you begin to see the ring everywhere.
David Boles builds the word from Greek, from halosis, the fall of a besieged city, joined to syn, the many who close as one, and he follows the single shape from Caesar's double wall at Alesia to the wolf packs of the Atlantic, from the run on a bank to the spread of a plague, from the cornered market to the feed on the phone in your hand. The claim reaches past resemblance, which is cheap, to a single measurable quantity that contracts the same way in a salt marsh and a police database. The book maps the four faces the operation wears, the hunt that closes forward, the defense that closes back, the watch that holds still, and the case that closes inward on one truth, and it names the second wall that almost every closing hides, the one that faces away from the target and seals off rescue.
Boles refuses the two easy endings, the one that frightens you with the ring and the one that admires it, and offers a third. A target that can name the geometry closing on it can sometimes break it, by one of three cuts and no fourth: blind the sensor the closer steers by, outrun it by keeping your futures too widely spread to shut at once, or poison the gradient so the trap shuts with its whole force onto empty ground. The same shape that drew a ring around smallpox and lifted it off the earth can draw a ring around a citizen and wall a republic, so the geometry takes no side, and the only guard against it is to see it while there is still room to move. Synalosis hands the reader that sight, and the seeing is the first cut.
The Wall at Alesia
The clearest picture of the operation is also one of the oldest. In the year 52 before the common era, Julius Caesar ran down a Gallic army under Vercingetorix and trapped it on a hill called Alesia, where he built two walls. The inner wall faced the trapped army and held it in place. The outer wall faced open Gaul, because a quarter of a million Gauls were marching to break the ring from behind, and Caesar meant to hold them off while the army inside starved. Two walls, back to back, one to keep the target from breaking out and one to keep its rescue from breaking in. The object of all that timber and ditch was a number rather than a place, the count of escapes still open to the men inside, which the digging drove down to one. That second wall, the one that seals off rescue, turns up almost everywhere the operation appears, and it is the part a target most often forgets to look for.
One Quantity, Measured Everywhere
A book that claims the wolf, the wall, and the license-plate camera are one thing has to answer an obvious objection, that things can look alike without being alike. The answer is the reachable set, a single quantity the engineers who design guided weapons and self-driving cars had to define and measure, because you cannot build a machine to catch a moving thing, or to flee one, without it. Draw the reachable set of a moose on open grass and it is a wide fan opening in all directions. Set one wolf on the only causeway across the marsh and a whole arc of that fan goes dark, though nothing has touched the animal, because a path with a wolf on it has stopped being a future the moose can reach. A closing is the contraction of that set toward a single point, and because the set can be measured, the claim can be tested, in a marsh or a database, and made to give up a number.
The Three Cuts
The book is hard about what cannot be escaped and generous about what can. A target that can name the geometry closing on it holds three cuts, and no fourth lies within its own power. One cut blinds the sensor, denying the closer the signal it is steered by, the way a fugitive who goes dark starves the manhunt and a citizen who encrypts starves the broker. Another outruns the closer, keeping a target's futures spread so wide that no arrangement of agents can shut them all at once. A third poisons the gradient, feeding the ring a false reading so the trap tightens with its whole force onto empty ground. Every escape in the book is one of those three, and the first move in all of them is to see the ring at all, because a closing you cannot see has already taken half your futures before you think to defend the rest.
Table of Contents
Front Matter: Copyright · Dedication · Epigraphs · Contents
Part I. The Geometry · Before the Wall · The Double Ring · The Shape
Part II. The Four Faces · The Forward Ring · The Reverse Ring · The Standing Ring · The Inward Ring
Part III. Rings Without a Mind · The Accidental Ring · The Fire · The Living Ring · The Last Ring
Part IV. Rings Inside Human Systems · The Self-Siege · The Cornered Market · The Feed · The Game
Part V. Breaking and Judging · The Three Cuts · The Closing State · The Right to Close
End Matter: Acknowledgments · Glossary · Appendix: The Single Shape, Side by Side · A Note on Sources · Sources by Chapter · Questions for Discussion · About the Author · Also by David Boles
The Epigraphs
“When you surround an army, leave an outlet free.”
Sun Tzu, The Art of War (trans. Lionel Giles, 1910).
“The form of an object is a diagram of forces, in this sense at least, that from it we can deduce the forces that are acting or have acted upon it.”
D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form (1917).
“The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (trans. Richard Crawley, 1874).
A Note on the Free PDF
A book about how the watched lose track of the ring around them should let anyone read it and check the argument, so the full text is free. The reading edition is a formatted PDF with embedded fonts and a clickable, page-numbered table of contents, one hundred fifty-nine pages of US Letter, set for screen reading, home printing, or the archive. The complete book is here, copyright page through the sources. Download it, read it, and weigh the claim against the cases it names.
Dedication
For Janna,
and for everyone counted down to a single square,
who chose what to do in the one that was left.
Author Interview
Further Reading
On Synalosis and the Closing Ring (Prairie Voice) · On Synalosis and the Second Wall (Boles Blogs) · Carceral Nation: Twenty Years from Blog Post to Book (Boles Blogs) · The Venus Effect and the Artifice of Assumption (Boles Blogs) · The Claimed Body · Carceral Nation · About David Boles