The Fractal of Consent

  Blender Dumbass
December 09, 2025

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https://blenderdumbass.org/articles/the_fractal_of_consent : 👁 1
https://blenderdumbass.org/ : 👁 1

#fractal #consent #politics #philosophy #freedom

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"Consent" is a word thrown around willy-nilly these days. And yet it feels like people don't really understand it. Some assume one thing while there is a different thing. Some assume another thing, while there is the one thing. And so on and so forth. Consent forms on websites and inside of apps. Sexual Consent. What the fuck is consent? Is it even real?

Here is an example: Some far right individuals ( a lot of whom are religious ) have a strange misunderstanding of the word. They accuse victims of rape of being "too desirable", by flipping everything on it's head. You could have come across a statement or two of some guy saying something along the lines of "it's acceptable to sexually harass a person, if the person expresses something that could be read as desire for sex".

Let me explain. I don't remember where and when, but you perhaps can search for it and comment me a link to it below, but I remember Jordan Peterson commenting on the #MeToo movement a while back with an interesting proposition ( interesting, because it is fallacious ): He said that you can view makeup ( lipstick and stuff ) on women's faces as an indicator that they are trying to attract a mate. And therefor you could read this as, at the very least, a sort of "consent" to being flirted with.

The proposition alone that makeup equals to "trying to attract a mate" is itself fallacious. There is more than one reason to do any one thing. And sometimes makeup could be used to mask an imperfection of some kind ( to avoid shame ), or just to fit in. To feel "normal". And there seems to be a higher probability of those reasons to be the reasons to apply makeup. But what is interesting to me, is the second fallacy. The "consent fallacy".

Say there is a woman who applies her makeup to attract a mate. There is nothing wrong with that. Why would you think she is trying to attract you specifically?

It is conceptually analogous to a privacy advocate appearing in front of a lot of people on a highly publicized event. Say a talk at a conference, where cameras record everything. And where everything will be published freely online. Or even worse, where the whole thing is live-streamed.

Again, I cannot quite remember where and when I saw it, but my memory suggests that I remember a situation with Richard Stallman ( who is very much into privacy ) being asked: why he is using his real name and stuff at a conference, the location of which will be published. It would constitute a sort of record of Stallman. There would be a way to know that Stallman visited this specific place on this specific date and did this specific talk on this specific time. What kind of privacy is this?

Both examples are examples of the same fallacy ( at least conceptually ) because both are failing to address the fractal nature of freedom. Or in other words the fractal nature of the world in general.

Fractals are interesting little things. In geometry a fractal is a finite shape with infinite detail. Think of a tree. It's one object, right? Well it has a trunks, from which grow branches. And from those branches grow smaller branches. And so on and so forth, until on the tiniest of branches, you have leaves. And those leaves are little fractals themselves. The more you zoom in, the more you see detail. There never seems to be absence of details. You zoom very far in and you see the tree's molecular structure and then atomic structure and then sub-atomic, quantum and so on and so forth. It is a finite shape with infinite detail.

The same is true for the world and for the people in the world. Some people fail to see the fractality of the world. They treat everything as solid, or black and white, good and bad, or whatever. They tend to simplify things.

If you remove the fractality from the question of privacy, the fact that Richard Stallman revealed his location on such and such a date is a proof of some sort of hypocrisy. But there is no hypocrisy. He simply didn't mind revealing his location in this specific situation. In a way he consented to it.

And when it comes to consent, a lot of people tend to think of sexual consent as black and white. As willing or unwilling. If she is willing, she is willing everything and with everyone. Because if not, why is she not showing that she is not willing?

But if you take a step forward and see the fractal in the picture you could see a tree instead of a simple shape. Suddenly she is willing, with that one guy. Or those types of people. But not those other people. And not this other guy. And even that only in those types of circumstance. And then maybe if she finds out this or that she may change her mind. And so on and so forth. You know what I mean. The detail is infinite.

When you press the "agree" button in a consent form for an app, do you actually consent? Have you read the damn document? And if you did, can you even comprehend the fractality of it? The words might say one thing but mean something else in certain situations. With that judge it will be this way and with that other one it will that way. This lawyer will look at it in one way and this other lawyer will look at it the other way. Everything is a fractal.

The law is therefor also fallacious. It is trying to rigidify a fractal system. And it does it with a fractal language. At the very least if you wrote it in a programming language, the same text would mean the same thing every time, right? RIGHT? ... Well if you compile it with a specific version of a specific compliter on a specific operating system... version... ah... then maybe... I don't know. I mean there are significant changes in syntax alone between python2 and python3. Code written for python2 will fail to run if you try to execute it in python3 and vise versa. Everything is a fractal.

The law attempts to address the fractality. It attempts to make sense of it all. For example in a lot of countries there are laws specifically outlying what certain people can and cannot consent to. So even if it is written into the agreement, it will not hold value. Can you consent to your death? Especially if you didn't understand you consented to it? Well, no. But then there are situations where people do seemingly consent to death. People hooked to life-support may choose to die. Depressed people sometimes choose ( consent ) to end it all. There are even cases where people consented to being murdered. And the law is not fractal enough to address all those edge cases.

People who view law as reflective of reality, fail to comprehend the fractality of said reality. And therefor fail to comprehend the inherent limitation of the law to properly represent it. The same is true of ethics or any other political value. The same true of any attempt to quantify reality, to categorize it.

Racism, sexism, transphobia, ageism, what have you... are all failures to see the fractality of the world. A "minority" is just the less visible part of the shape. The part that is lost in the detail. And then there is the minority of the minority. And so on and so forth.

Don't become a bitch. Don't become a fractal-blind. Become a fractal-hacker instead.

Happy Hacking!!!



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  Troler c:0



https://yewtu.be/watch?v=gyQFm8NoOLE

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  Troler c:1



It is far easier to address the public face to face, to instill trust. "Here I am, I came to you, as you can hear and see me. Now, I ask for you to pay attention to what I have to say."

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