OBJECT OF POWER

Assignment: Make a list of 20 objects of power in society, a list of 20 personal objects of power, and a list of 10 objects of power relative to particular cultures. Make an object of power.

OBJECTS OF POWER IN SOCIETY:

Triangles, magnets and crystals; memory; reputation; claws; feminine wiles; beauty; mortality; society's superficiality; dragonballs; people; black ties; crowns and thrones; umbrellas; planes, trains and automobiles (and boats); mathematical factorization; educational degrees; national flags; taxes; photons and other subatomic particles.

PERSONAL OBJECTS OF POWER:

A tongue capable of deceit; Superman symbol dad painted for me; my insightful wit and modesty (and sarcasm); a soda cap entitling me to a free 20 ounce Coca-Cola product; crappy video camera I had as a child (by way of formulating my current ambitions); Atari system that grandma gave us for Christmas which got us more "friends"; Proverbs 3:6; "Yo Jason, couldn't do it."; Batman buttons; dad's alarm clock; my computer; my specific family and friends; Blockbuster Video membership card; Cherokee nation membership card; chapstick; skates; orange construction cone taken from a Houston skate park, eyeglasses/contact lenses, stujkx@mail.utexas.edu

CULTURAL OBJECTS OF POWER:

The Holy Bible (Christians); sacrificial blood (many ancient cultures, namely Aztecs); Ankh (Egyptians); the Sun (ancient cultures in fertile crescent, Babylonians); rain sticks/wands (some Native American societies), masks (many cultures, almost every culture); swastika (nazi Germany); Shroud of Turin (some Christians, located in France); Lenin's corpse (Russians); city of Hong Kong (between Britain and China)

The object of power that I made was a text of confessions and truths and lies about myself. I don't really think that there are any objects of true power other than God and information. People can be very powerful, but they are also very unreliable. No matter how sure a friend someone is, they are leading their own life, and aren't fully at your disposal. Planes and trains break down, and educational degrees vary is prestige and are are so widely distributed, that their full power is reduced simply by their abundance. And so, I am left with only God and information, and since one cannot create the Creator, I had to build the object around information. Information if power because knowledge something changes its relationship to you. Simply knowing someone's name is power, because it makes you equal to them in the respect that you both know who they are. If you don't know their name, you don't have as much power as you would if you did know, and if you don't know their name, but they know yours, that is really a power imbalance. The text I wrote was then encrypted, because that is our being able to exercise another, less reliable power, over the power of information. By encrypting it, I denied it's revelation (at least until quantum computers or comparable computational devices are constructed).