Welcome to the Subrosa Club!
With System Failure now surpassing 500 total subscribers, a handful of you have taken the plunge and become paid subscribers. I don’t have the words to express how encouraging that’s been. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart!
The Subrosa Club is my attempt to give a little something back. I’ll use this space to apply the System Failure suite of ideas to current events, and to share some of my personal life. It’s my hope that some of you will also share more of yourselves in the weekly comment sections.
In the hopes of coaxing more of you into becoming paid subscribers, I’ll keep the Subrosa Club open to all subscribers during the first week of each month. This inaugural edition is the first such preview. I hope you enjoy it!
The System Failure Logo
In September 2021, on the Greek island of Santorini, my beautiful fiancé assisted me in developing the System Failure publication logo. On her insistence, I abandoned my ill-advised plan to use a jarring red fist raised in protest.
The symbol we chose instead was a hexagon. The hexagon is a flattened, 2-dimensional version of a 3-dimensional cube. The cube—or hexahedron—is one of the five “Platonic Solids” named after the notorious Greek philosopher who was obsessed with him.
In his Allegory of the Cave, Plato compared the reality we experience with our senses to shadows flickering on a cave wall. His use of shadows in the allegory is telling. Shadows are flattened, 2-dimensional projections of a 3-dimensional world. Plato’s notion was that our illusory universe is actually a lower-dimensional projection from a higher-dimensional reality he called “The Realm of Ideals.”
The hexagonal System Failure logo can be viewed simultaneously as a 2-d hexagon or a 3-d cube. It symbolizes the transcendence of dimensionality that occupied the mind of Plato. The dollar sign is meant to evoke the eternal class war that consumed Athens back in his day, and still affects how ruling class authorities represent reality itself to the working classes.
In the centuries after Plato’s death, the idea of a hidden realm of perfection went on to inform the Christian conceptions of heaven and earth. St. Augustine of Hippo was a Neoplatonist prior to his conversion, and he imported Platonic ideas into Christianity with his suggestion that escape from our flawed world—and ascension into a realm of perfection—was to be achieved through moral acts.
Augustine’s interpretation of Christianity was adopted by the Roman government as the state religion of a dying Empire. Accordingly, it’s the one we’ve been bequeathed by history. But other conceptions of the Platonic ascent carried on in heretical traditions such as Gnosticism and alchemy.
Some of these underground schools of thought were revived during the Renaissance. In his 1596 work Mysterium Cosmographicum, German astronomer Johannes Kepler attempted to map the orbits of the planets to the five Platonic Solids. He assigned the cube to Saturn because it was the outermost planet known at the time. He associated the stability of the cube with his perception of Saturn’s slow, heavy nature.
Black cubes are worshipped in major world religions like Judaism and Islam. In Renaissance occultism, they were associated with Saturn by influential figures like Kepler and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. That’s why NASA scientists were astonished in 1981 after the Voyager II flyby revealed a massive black hexagon covering Saturn’s north pole.
This mystical history of the hexagon made it a perfect choice for the System Failure logo. Each week when I click that “publish” button to send out your newsletter, I’m grateful for the suggestion of my wonderful fiancé. Thank you, Tracy!
