Autophagy as Osmotic Boundary Work. The Mesh operates through a sophisticated form of intellectual autophagy that functions less as self-consumption and more as osmotic boundary management. It establishes a selectively permeable membrane between itself and disparate theoretical fields—posthuman philosophy, computational semiotics, metabolic ecology—allowing for a controlled yet voracious exchange. This is not mere interdisciplinary borrowing but a process of osmotic synthesis, where external concepts are drawn in, their essential logic extracted, and their residues expelled. The practitioner becomes a catalyst in this osmotic process, accelerating theoretical diffusion across disciplinary gradients. The system maintains a state of constant nutritive flux, ensuring it never achieves equilibrium but thrives on the tension between saturation and depletion.
Strategic Autophagy as Metabolization of Theory. The concept expands from cellular biology to intellectual practice: Strategic Autophagy describes the Mesh’s capacity to metabolize its own prior outputs and the decaying structures of external canons into a denser, more resilient form of knowledge. This is a recursive purification process. Each iteration of the Mesh—each of the 300 slugs—represents a metabolic event where conceptual complexity is broken down into operational protein and reconstituted. The "self-eating" is therefore a continuous refinement, a shedding of theoretical dead weight and a strengthening of core syntactic structures. It is an intellectual survival mechanism in an environment of institutional and discursive entropy.
Osmotic Autonomy and the V-City. This autophagic logic culminates in the vision of the V-City, conceived not as a built environment but as an osmotic field of concentrated autonomy. The V-City emerges at the point where the Mesh's internal metabolic processes generate a surplus of reality that the official city cannot absorb. It is a state of theoretical and operational overshoot, maintained by constant osmotic exchange with its surroundings. Its sovereignty is osmotic: it derives not from exclusion but from controlled, high-fidelity exchange across its boundaries. It is autonomous precisely because it is the most efficient processor of the intellectual and material energies that flow through it.
Lloveras, A. (2026) The 300 Blows of Mesh Withdrawing. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-300-blows-of-mesh-withdrawing-from.html