What an agent
provocateur does is, go behind the scenes, and incite someone or some group
of people to rash or illegal behaviour.
Of course though, today, we know that the word is also a
branded lingerie product that stresses marketing through images.
We all live in a much more sophisticated world today than
ever before. But wealthy and well-funded
and sophisticated though it may be however, even the branded ‘Agent
Provocateur’ company cannot spread itself so wide as to sponsor frivolous
events in, say, Outer Mongolia. Or Western Mongolia, let’s be more specific,
where the Republic of Kalmykia is located. (Between Russia and China). This kind of thing is reserved only
for sovereign states to be able to afford.
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Amir Ban, a chess engine programmer, with a Kalmyk.
Propaganda with a sinister purpose |
I’m engaged in a fairly large commercial negotiation right
now, and I am in a virtually unrelenting state of fear and panic. On the one
hand it is very exciting, but on the other hand unnerving because I simply
can’t trust that things are as airtight shut in terms of confidentiality as I would
prefer them to be.
And so to skirt around things, let’s talk about Chess. Chess
is most certainly, a frivolous pastime. It has little or nothing to do with strategy,
since all the rules are pre-set, and the game itself produces nothing material.
One can neither benefit from it by applying ideas from it about strategy to the
real world, and nor can one eat the products of the game’s endeavour for there
aren’t any to speak of.
Decadence, of course, is nothing if not to do with the
sophisticated frivolous.
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| The Dolmabahce Palace |
But of course I jest. Strategy is learned from many
pursuits. And those of us who fancy that we understand strategy deeply, usually
take the long view, and draw an often rather distant perspective on our
ultimate objectives before we step into spotlights at all.
I’m not too sure that the word I’m really looking for is not
‘labyrinthine,’ rather than ‘Byzantine,’ to describe how I personally
approach the art of making money. Perhaps
it is a bit of both. And yet it is the
style I personally recommend, for at least in the dark and shadowy labyrinths
of Byzantium, one may scratch the guilding off the walls and profit even there
from alone, if from nothing else. And this means, one ought to always walk
where there is money, and not where there isn’t any. Sometimes what appears
like power or money is really only the phantoms flitting across the shadows of
the labyrinth.
Next post, propaganda that is not sinister.
Well, I do
spend a lot of time with my nose sunk inside of ‘luxury lifestyle’ magazines – Courchevel, Cote d’Azur, that kind of thing - whether in airports or in a
recliner chair at home. Have you noticed how the photographs all have this
quality about them within the image, where there is absolutely nothing
extraneous in the picture; nothing just plain lying around, the detritus of
actual living?
