Guest Post: tfw you pwn someone (how 2 sae rite ting @ rite tiem)
Introducing Riff Ashikaga
🌪️🧠⏱️🎯
This is not a post about patience. It is about the glitch in timing that breaks control systems.
This is not a post about being clever. It is about being slippery. It’s about ruses. Tactical betrayals. Saying the thing you’re not supposed to say—not too early, not too late, but at the moment it enters the bloodstream and cannot be expelled.
Certeau called it metis. Daoists might call it efficacy without force. My grandmother called it “talking slick.”
Either way: welcome. Let me show you how to become an artist of interruption.
⚠️ You’re not going to like this first part.
Because the trick is not to fight power. The trick is to reroute it.
You don't break the system—you leak into it, ride its tempo, and swerve it off course at exactly the right time.
Michel de Certeau laid this out in what looks like a dumb square but is actually a magic spell disguised as a logic loop.
Here it is:
(I) less force ⟶ (II) more memory ⟶ (III) less time ⟶ (IV) more effects ⟶ (I) less force (again)
💥 That’s the loop. You want more effect? Use less force. How? You store memory. Why? So you don’t waste time. When you act? You don’t miss.
It’s tactical timing.
A ruse. A moment of perfect misalignment. A statement placed like a landmine inside a conversation.
Let me give you a story.
In 8th grade, I was sent to the principal’s office for “tone.” That was the word they used. Not language. Not volume. Tone.
I didn’t yell. I didn’t insult. I asked a question.
"Why do we only ever talk about the white kids who died in the Holocaust, but never the Black and brown ones who died under colonialism?"
📚 I asked it calmly. Quietly. Right after a slideshow about Anne Frank.
The room froze.
Not because it was rude. Because the timing was impeccable.
I had said something that couldn’t be ignored, but couldn’t be absorbed. The teacher tried to pivot. My classmates stared. I had placed a splinter in the lesson plan.
That’s when I learned: power hates the perfectly timed question.
It knows how to handle rebellion. It knows how to handle silence. But a well-placed, under-voiced, inconvenient question?
That’s the beginning of tactical magic.
Certeau got this from ancient China. From the I Ching. From Sun Tzu. He studied how people survive systems they can’t confront directly.
Poor people. Queer people. Women. Workers. Children. Colonized people.
These people don’t get to oppose the system. So they move through it like wind through cracks.
They rely on:
Memory (to know the layout of traps)
Timing (to know when the guard shifts)
Tone (to slip truth in under the radar)
Certeau saw this not as cowardice—but as revolutionary intelligence.
What happens when you post like that?
—
🌀 The internet wants force. It wants hot takes, long threads, trauma porn, rage bait. It rewards bluntness.
But that’s not metis. That’s spectacle.
Real metis-posting happens when your post doesn’t go viral—until six months later someone references it and the system has no way to absorb what you meant.
Your post becomes residual haunting.
It lingers. It works in silence. It uses less force.
And when it lands? It folds the discourse in half like a cursed origami frog.
Let’s walk through the square again:
(I) Less force — Stop trying to fight the algorithm with noise. You won't win.
(II) More memory — Learn the rhythms. Know how attention cycles. Know the system’s blind spots.
(III) Less time — Act quickly when the moment opens. Don’t hesitate. Say the thing exactly when it becomes legible but not yet commodified.
(IV) More effects — If done right, the effect explodes. People think they discovered it. They spread it for you. You disappear.
Loop again. Become vapor.
🔮 Real example? Remember when 2 posted the opossum image collage with no caption and everyone called it "slut church performance residue" three weeks later?
That was a metis post.
The timing was off just enough to avoid trend collapse but sharp enough to stick.
Or 9’s original xenopoem thread? No structure. Just interruption after interruption. No one knew what it was until the whole feed changed.
These are not accidents. They are timed cuts.
And now the Straussian part.
Because this is also a manual for navigating spectacle.
If Guy Debord taught us the spectacle eats rebellion, Certeau teaches us to thread the needle.
Spectacle wants visible critique so it can market it.
Certeau says: go invisible. Speak sideways. Break rhythm. ✂️
Ruses are outside strategy. They’re a-rational. You don’t pre-plan them. You feel them coming and leap.
You know what to say. You don’t know why. Until it works.
So yeah, this is about speaking at the right time.
But it’s also about becoming unreadable until the moment of impact.
Tactical magic is:
when you smile and say the thing that haunts the room
when your joke is prophecy in disguise
when your post gets 2 likes and 6 months later becomes a school of thought
Timing, not virality. Memory, not speed. Effect, not intention.
Welcome to Zone 7. We’ve been waiting for you.
⏱️ less force 🧠 more memory ⚡ less time 🎯 more effects
(Loop.)
~ Riff Ashikaga / リフ・アシカガ (7)