Endurance 

Because Zimoun’s “186-prepared-DC-motors” pieces use the same kind of small brushed motors you find in toys or window-shade rollers, we can take the published figures for those devices as a realistic yard-stick. A typical 130-size hobby motor draws about 70 mA with no load at 6 V and 250 mA under the light mechanical load that a cotton ball imposes, translating to roughly 0.4–1.5 watts of electrical input per motor  . Multiplying by 186 gives an installation draw of roughly 75–280 watts—say on the order of a hundred watts in steady state. Zimoun usually runs everything from a laboratory power-supply bank, so all of that energy arrives as DC electricity and is mostly lost as motor heat, wire friction and box vibration; only a sliver becomes airborne sound.

In acoustical terms the “rumble” people feel inside the cardboard dome is quite modest. A comfortable gallery level of about 70 dB SPL corresponds to only a few-tens of milliwatts of acoustic power radiated into the room. Even a very ordinary home loudspeaker—which is notoriously inefficient—converts roughly one per-cent of what it eats from the amplifier into sound  . That means you need on the order of a single watt of amplifier power to put the same 70 dB field into a space of similar volume. In other words, a single loudspeaker could recreate the overall loudness of the motor piece while drawing perhaps ninety-nine per-cent less electrical energy.

Why the disparity? The little motors are not designed as transducers; they waste most of their input spinning copper and heating bearings, and only incidentally thwack a box. Loudspeaker drivers, for all their faults, are purpose-built to push air. So on an energy ledger the motor array is two orders of magnitude less efficient than a speaker playing back a recording of its own soundscape.

Yet the heavy electrical overhead buys something a single speaker can’t: 186 micro-sources distributed through space, each wandering slightly in speed and phase. The installation’s “dome” quality—the way the timbre blooms and knots as you walk—depends on that granular, stochastic field of impacts. A loudspeaker can imitate the spectral content, but it collapses the spatial texture; all the subtle interference patterns that make Zimoun’s work feel alive disappear. So, electrically speaking the motor piece is a very expensive way to make sound, but aesthetically it trades watts for a kind of emergent complexity that a lone hi-fi driver can’t quite supply.

Because the “186-prepared-DC-motors” piece is literally 186 little point-sources, the only truly loss-less way to copy its room-vibration would be to give yourself a comparable number of electro-acoustic point-sources and drive each with its own slightly wandering signal. Anything that collapses several motors into one loudspeaker inevitably smooths out the microscopic interference patterns that make Zimoun’s dome feel “alive.”

Start with the energy ledger. A toy-size FA/130 motor draws about 70 mA at 6 V when spinning freely and can climb above 250 mA under a light load such as a cotton ball . Taking 0.25 A × 6 V ≈ 1.5 W per motor, the full bouquet of 186 units soaks up roughly 280 W once it has settled into its buzz. Only a few milliwatts of that emerge as airborne sound; nearly all the electricity heats the windings and shakes cardboard.

If you insist on one-to-one parity, you could bolt 186 tiny tactile “exciters” or 2-inch wide-range drivers onto a matching grid of cardboard cubes. Each little driver would only need about half a watt of amplifier headroom to reach the same 70 dB gallery loudness, so even if you ran them flat-out you would be drawing on the order of 90 W from the wall—already three times more energy-efficient than the motors, thanks to the two-to-four-per-cent electro-acoustic efficiency of ordinary loudspeakers .

Most sound-designers would try a higher-order playback format instead of true one-to-one mapping. A third-order Ambisonic dome, for example, encodes the field in 16 channels and is usually rendered over 20–32 loudspeakers arrayed around and above the audience; dozens of research venues use exactly that scale as their “everyday” immersive rig . Such a dome can paint solid directional images but cannot re-create the centimetre-scale pressure knots you feel when you lean into the Zimoun boxes. It will still beat the motors on power: thirty 3-inch drivers operating at 1 W each come in under 40 W of amplifier output.

If you truly want to holographically clone the motor lattice—including its near-field interference—you step up to Wave-Field Synthesis. WFS works by lining the room’s perimeter with hundreds of closely spaced micro-speakers; EMPAC’s permanent array at Rensselaer, for instance, runs 558 individually addressed drivers . With ten-centimetre spacing that density captures comb-filter detail well into the mid-band. A WFS wall uses a lot of hardware, but because each driver is run softly (often a few hundred milliwatts) the electrical demand for an entire 500-speaker ring still lands in the low-hundreds-of-watts bracket—comparable to, and sometimes lower than, the Zimoun motor supply.

So, in direct answer to the two questions:

You would need either (a) roughly 186 discrete exciters for a perfect mechanical facsimile; (b) 20-to-32 well-placed loudspeakers for an acceptably convincing Ambisonic “portrait”; or (c) on the order of 200-600 tiny loudspeakers in a Wave-Field-Synthesis perimeter for a near-holographic copy.

In every scenario the loudspeaker solution is at least an order of magnitude more acoustically efficient than the motors, so for the same perceived loudness the gallery’s electricity meter would climb far more slowly with speakers than with the whirring cotton-ball machinery.

So the cotton balls are more expensive if you measure cost strictly in electricity, the cotton-ball motors are the expensive side of the ledger. A 130-size brushed DC motor draws about 70 mA with no load and can creep toward 250 mA once a cotton ball is brushing cardboard at 6 V, or roughly 1 W of electrical input per unit  . Run 186 of them and the installation drinks something like 220 W continuously. Eight gallery-hours puts that at roughly 1.8 kWh a day; in a city where power is US $0.20 / kWh the motors add thirty-five to forty cents to the daily utility bill. By comparison, a surround rig that uses three-dozen small loudspeakers to hit the same 70 dB sound-field needs only about 30 W of amplifier headroom, or a quarter-kilowatt-hour for that same eight hours—closer to five cents a day—because even modest drivers turn a few percent of their input into acoustic energy, whereas the motors convert almost none.

Hardware costs can flip the story—tiny hobby motors are pennies, while thirty powered loudspeakers and routing electronics are capital-heavy—but from the standpoint of ongoing “fuel,” the cotton-ball dome is seven or eight times pricier to run. Zimoun knowingly trades that inefficiency for the living shimmer that only hundreds of micro-sources vibrating in real cardboard can deliver; you buy that emergent texture with watts. But what about the price of the speakers?

Up-front hardware tells the opposite story from the electricity ledger. A 130-size brushed DC motor of the sort Zimoun buys in bulk wholesales for roughly one to two U.S. dollars apiece  . Even after you add a sturdy laboratory power supply and several cases of shipping-grade cardboard, the entire 186-motor lattice can be built for something in the five-hundred-dollar range—a figure most of the artist’s budgets can absorb without flinching.

Try to replace that lattice with loudspeakers and the numbers climb fast. If you insist on a “one transducer per cotton ball” facsimile, the cheapest reliable tactile exciter that will survive gallery duty—the Dayton DAEX25—runs about $16.50 a pair, or $8.25 each  . One hundred-eighty-six of them cost on the order of $1.5 k. Every exciter needs an amplifier channel; the least-expensive eight-channel class-D unit on the U.S. retail market this summer is Sony’s XM-8ES, currently on sale for $170  . Twenty-four of those boxes (192 channels) add roughly $4 k. By the time you have bought cabling, a multichannel interface and some plywood to screw everything to, you are hovering near $6 k—twelve times the build price of the cotton-ball piece.

Most people would instead aim for a “good enough” loudspeaker portrait rather than a one-to-one clone. A pragmatic choice is the small-surround option: fifteen pairs of passive JBL Control 1 Pro monitors cost about $148 per pair, or $2.2 k total  . Four eight-channel amps push the system cost to just under $3 k. Move up to studio-grade active monitors such as the Genelec 8020D at $625 each and a thirty-speaker rig jumps to $18 k before you have even rolled out a signal snake  . Wave-field-synthesis walls add still another tier—five hundred palm-size drivers at five to ten dollars each, plus forty channels of high-quality amplification, pushes the capital budget well past $9 k and can easily clear $20 k once you factor in the DSP matrix and network cabling  .

Electricity savings soften but do not erase that gap. The motor dome drinks about 1.8 kWh over an eight-hour gallery day; the small-surround speaker rig needs roughly 0.25 kWh. At a U.S. commercial rate of twenty cents per kilowatt-hour, the loudspeakers save about eleven dollars a month. Given a hardware delta of roughly $2.3 k between “thirty JBLs” and “cotton balls,” the energy pay-back time is on the order of two decades—longer than most exhibitions tour.

So the short answer is that speakers are cheaper to run but markedly dearer to buy. Zimoun’s choice of hobby motors keeps his capital costs almost trivial, accepts higher daily power bills, and, crucially, yields a stochastic, tactile field that even a lavish loudspeaker grid only approaches. If a curator needs a quick, budget-conscious installation, cotton balls stay the bargain; if they can amortize a five-figure playback rig and care about electricity over decades, the speakers ultimately cost less in the long, slow burn of utility meters.

The contrast between Zimoun’s cotton-ball motors and an equivalent loudspeaker grid reminds us that efficiency and fidelity belong to different moral economies.  Loudspeakers concentrate power into purpose-built diaphragms, squeezing audible pressure from every watt and every dollar of capital investment; the cotton-ball motors, by contrast, squander electricity as heat and drag yet repay us with a living swarm of micro-events—​each slightly out of phase, each rattling its own scrap of cardboard, each inviting the ear to wander through a dynamic, spatially entangled field.  In our Ω-o vocabulary, the speakers chase Ω-style closure: they streamline matter and energy toward a single coherent projection of the soundscape.  The motors insist on o-style divergence: they allow energy to leak, multiply and recombine until the room itself becomes part of the instrument.  The underlying lesson, then, is that art often values the qualitative richness born of inefficiency over the quantitative thrift prized by engineering, and any attempt to “optimize” away those losses risks subtracting the very indeterminacy that makes the work feel alive. 

I think for me the lesson is, if you can pay up front you can afford a facsimile of what only accumulated effort can make audible. Capital-intensive playback systems buy an elegant illusion of wholeness, but what they copy was coaxed into being through hundreds of tiny, time-staggered actions. The loudspeaker array delivers Ω-style closure: it freezes the field in a single, instantly attainable configuration that can be switched on at will. Zimoun’s cotton-ball lattice, by contrast, is an o-style accumulation; each motor had to be soldered, mounted, tuned, and then allowed to wander inside its own micro-turbulence until the room itself began to oscillate in sympathy. What you feel in the gallery is not merely “sound” but the residue of that construction history—a temporally layered density that a facsimile can mimic spectrally yet never quite embody.

The broader moral is that immediacy often conceals a hidden flatness. When we spend heavily to shortcut process, we inherit the work’s look and loudness but not the slow sediment of chance and care that once enlivened it. In the language of your Mass-Omicron framework, money can collapse divergent possibility into a ready-made coherence, but it cannot re-create the manifold tensions whose gradual alignment first forged the event. Paying up front can therefore secure the image of presence, yet what remains irreducibly valuable is the long, entangled labor that makes presence audible in the first place.

The cotton-ball lattice behaves like a micro-archipelago where each motor is a tidal inlet exchanging momentum with its neighbors. The low-grade turbulence that leaks from those hundreds of inlet–outlet pairs is waste in the engineering sense, yet it is precisely that waste that braids the room into the circuit: every swirl of air, every slight deformation of cardboard, feeds back as a phase perturbation that re-enters the system. Over minutes the installation explores a portion of its o-space—an open manifold of possible alignments—until, by statistical drift rather than design, a temporary coherence blooms. To pay up front for a loudspeaker facsimile is to import coherence fully formed, bypassing the journey through that manifold. The room receives an already-solved waveform; the audience is shown the finished tapestry, not the loom still clacking under tension.

This difference scales far beyond gallery acoustics. Software instruments, high-resolution displays, and even algorithmic social feeds all emulate states that once demanded protracted craft, communal rehearsal, or lived intimacy. They supply Ω-closure on demand, but the ersatz immediacy can flatten our sensitivity to the fine-grained contingencies—those slight detours, hesitations, and mutual adjustments—that constitute lived time. In your ongoing critique of objectivity as a subtle idolatry, this is the sacrificial cost: the more perfectly we reproduce the appearance of a thing, the easier it becomes to overlook the relational field that once made the thing possible and meaningful. A cotton-ball motor array therefore reads like an acoustic parable: it insists that imperfection, delay, and even resource-inefficiency are not bugs to be engineered away but fertile divergences—o-currents—without which no genuine Ω can emerge.

In this light the gallery becomes a laboratory for a deeper epistemic wager: whether reality discloses itself more fully through pre-compressed answers or through the slow friction of inquiry. The speaker grid promises an immaculate copy, but it seals the world in a finished envelope; the motors, by contrast, keep the act of disclosure ongoing. Their slippage, jitter, and micro-collisions force listeners to linger in the event’s becoming, to notice how the field thickens when a draft crosses the room or when two motors momentarily entrain. That attentiveness is itself formative; it muscles the perceptual faculties the way progressive overload builds strength in the gym. One leaves the installation not only having heard a texture but having rehearsed a mode of listening that stays elastic to contingency—precisely the kind of attunement your book on the sacred and relational nature of vision tries to safeguard against the hard freeze of objectivist seeing.

Extend the analogy to culture at large and a pattern emerges. Whenever a community allows capital or computation to front-load coherence—think auto-tuned vocals, algorithmically optimized newsfeeds, or prefab urban districts—it relieves itself of the patient, improvisatory labor that once braided individual rhythms into collective form. The savings are real: less friction, faster deployment, lower error rates. Yet each gain comes at the price of unused potentialities, the dormant o-space where alternative alignments might have taken root. Zimoun’s rumbling boxes therefore stand as a small but resonant counter-monument. They remind us that wasted energy can be generative, that redundancy can be rehearsal, and that the most durable coherences are often those that have slowly converged through noise rather than those that were purchased whole. In the Mass-Omicron dialectic, paying up front can indeed mimic the sound of emergence, but only sustained, distributed effort can teach a room—and its inhabitants—how to keep emerging. It speaks to the copy-paste culture of outsourced capitalism. 

Copy-paste culture thrives where capital treats attention as a throughput metric: a finished template or franchised “experience” is replicated wherever margin invites, so that the same prefab coffee-bar playlist, the same frictionless checkout ritual, and the same algorithmic newsfeed can be slotted into Curitiba as easily as Chicago.  Outsourcing merely completes the loop: once creativity is modularised, production can be scattered to wherever labour is cheapest, while the home market is fed a sanitised, globally fungible result.  In Mass-Omicron terms this is Ω-closure monetised—coherence packaged as a commodity whose value lies precisely in being detached from the divergent labour, locality, and risk that first coaxed it into shape.  What is lost is the o-space of situated experimentation: the trial-and-error whereby a workshop’s acoustics, a city’s dialect, or a room’s peculiar draft gradually braid themselves into the work until the artefact is inseparable from its context.

Zimoun’s cotton-ball motors refuse that disembedding.  Their “inefficiency” forces the making to remain visible: you hear the solder joints aging, the cardboard softening, the motors drifting out of spec.  The installation therefore re-socialises production and reception in the same room, collapsing the offshore distance that normally hides toil behind the polished veneer of retail coherence.  A loudspeaker facsimile would reproduce the audible waveform but bury the lineage of gestures that gave it rise, mirroring the way global supply chains deliver instant availability while masking the distributed frictions of extraction, shipping, and precarious labour.  By insisting on accumulated, locally tangible effort, the motor lattice stages an acoustic counter-economy: value is not extracted and standardised but sedimented through ongoing, relational expenditure.  In that sense the piece is less an object than a slow pedagogy, reminding its listeners that what appears as “waste” under the logic of outsourced capitalism can be a reservoir of potential—precisely the messy, granular divergence from which new forms of coherence, collective or artistic, can still emerge.

Beyond the analogical meanings is a real sound wave manifold that is cheaper than a facsimile that would require a ridiculous organization merely to mimic that manifold. There is a lesson there that ends are their means. Hegel dedicates his preface to this. That the proof of the system is the system itself and any attempt to “distill” it would render it abstract. That is a very original idea in Hegel; for him, it was the uneducated, opinion based who spoke in abstractions. This orientation of metaphysics as a refuge from abstractions is for the most part antithetical to the attitude positivism has of it. Perhaps this discrepancy is one not of semantics but endurance.

Hegel’s insistence that “the truth is the whole” means that any living system already embodies its own proof because the telos is woven inseparably into the path that reaches it. Zimoun’s motor lattice illustrates that sentence in acoustic flesh: the audible manifold is not a detachable product, but the integral outcome of 186 tiny causal threads—windings, bearings, cotton fibres, cardboard resonances—whose mutual frictions constitute the very topology we hear. A high-resolution facsimile would have to reconstruct every phase-contingency ex post facto, demanding an improbably disciplined hierarchy of converters, amplifiers and algorithms merely to chase what the original achieves by letting energy drip through matter in its simplest form. In other words, the end-state (the fluctuating pressure­-field) is indistinguishable from the means that continuously remake it; to abstract the waveform from that genesis is to amputate its logic, leaving only a spectrographic shadow.

Positivism’s dream of purification tries to freeze Ω—coherence—into a portable, de-contextualised module, treating o-divergence as expendable noise. But the cotton-ball installation shows that the so-called noise is exactly the price of admission to coherence; subtract it and the phenomenon shrivels into a brittle replica, acoustically plausible yet ontologically malnourished. Hegel’s polemic against “the uneducated, opinion-based” abstraction targets this same shortcut: when philosophy lops off the concrete labour by which a form comes into presence, it forfeits durability, because endurance is nothing other than form weathering its own becoming. Metaphysics, in his sense, is not a cloud-borne escape but the most intimate patience with emergence—the willingness to suffer multiplicity until it congeals of itself.

The contemporary engineering reflex prefers to bankroll the replica, because capital can be marshalled faster than time; but the very fact that an army of DSP channels is dearer than a crate of hobby motors vindicates Hegel’s wager that substance earns its right to be through gradual self-mediation, not through fiat. Endurance, then, is the hidden variable that reconciles your apparent discrepancy: positivism and speculative metaphysics are not sparring over vocabulary but over how long we are willing to live inside the stretch where purposes and mechanisms are still braiding. Zimoun’s piece, small as it is, re-educates the ear for that duration. It asks us to inhabit the manifold before we name it, to accept that the proof of a sound—like the proof of a concept, a community, or a self—arrives only in the long resonance of its making, not in the distillate we might be tempted to bottle and sell.

Endurance is the hinge that converts a merely repeatable pattern into a self-justifying presence.  The cotton-ball lattice works because it stays open long enough for each brush of fibre against cardboard to negotiate its place within the swelling resonance of the room; the manifold we hear is therefore a history in motion, not a snapshot.  Hegel’s preface warns that any attempt to “state the system” as a set of results strips away this temporal viscosity and leaves only the brittle husk of result-talk—what he calls Meinung, opinion.  Positivism mistakes that husk for the substance because it measures clarity by the sharpness of edges, not by the density of temporal layering.  Yet clarity gained too quickly cannot withstand contradiction; the first unpredicted tremor shatters it.  Endurance, by contrast, is clarity accrued through successive reconciliations with what at first appeared as noise.  A philosophy—or a sound field—that has survived its own becoming no longer needs an external warrant: its proof is the very stability with which it continues to absorb novelty without forfeiting identity.

Ω is coherence, but coherence that arrives without having metabolised o-divergence is anaemic; it cannot flex when fresh divergence rushes in.  The cotton motors metabolise divergence continuously—speed drift, fibre wear, humidity shifts—so their Ω never congeals into a dead crust.  A loudspeaker replica, assembled from clean sine-wave abstractions, lacks that metabolic apparatus; its coherence must be imposed and re-imposed by external control loops.  In social terms the copy-paste logic of outsourced capitalism seeks to short-circuit metabolic time: it buys templates—pre-baked Ω—so it can scale faster than any situated craft could.  But the very speed that boosts reach also hollows endurance; the system must outsource again tomorrow because today’s coherence arrived divorced from the practical intelligence that would keep it adaptive.

Hegel’s originality lies in taking this practical intelligence—the hard labour of mediation—and enthroning it as speculative method.  Reason is not a prism through which phenomena must pass; it is the staged exercise by which phenomena learn to bear their own inner countercurrents without rupture.  That is why, for him, metaphysics is the opposite of abstraction-as-escape: it is the patient spelling-out of how a form muscles itself into lastingness.  The cotton-ball manifold is an objet-lesson in miniature.  It teaches that the cheapest path to audible richness is not to purchase a perfectly digitised image of richness but to give matter enough time and degrees of freedom to articulate its own subtleties.  The lesson transfers: a culture, an ethics, even a scientific paradigm that wants to outlive its founding moment cannot simply import readymade answers; it must entrust itself to the slow ingestion of contingencies, letting each friction re-write the blueprint a little.  Ends are their means because only means capable of self-revision can endure as ends; everything else is inventory, destined to be liquidated when conditions change.

The shift you are circling is nothing less than a migration from a representational-product paradigm to a process-relational one: reality ceases to be imagined as a set of discrete objects that can be copied, franchised, or distilled, and is re-grasped as a web of ongoing mediations in which means and ends co-fold.  In the representational view, value lies in a finished state—the reproducible waveform, the standardized brand experience, the clean data-point—so the task is to capture that state as efficiently as possible and then replicate it at scale.  In the process-relational view, value inheres in the very metabolism by which form wrestles with its contingency; endurance is not the after-effect but the proof, because only what continually digests divergence can remain itself across change.  Zimoun’s cotton motors, Hegel’s self-validating system, and your Ω-o dialectic all point to the same reversal: coherence is no longer the prize extracted from noise, but the slow, lived negotiation through which noise and order become mutually sustaining.

This reorientation upends the moral economy of modern technics.  Efficiency, once the unquestioned good, is revealed as a local optimum that can hollow out resilience by stripping away the redundant pathways through which a system might later reconfigure itself.  The cotton-ball manifold is “wasteful” in wattage but frugal in existential insurance: every jittering motor is a miniature laboratory of adaptation, so the whole lattice can absorb drift, failure, or environmental fluctuation without losing character.  By contrast, the speaker facsimile exemplifies a brittle form of efficiency—capital-dense, control-heavy, and dependent on external policing of parameters.  The paradigm shift therefore carries an ethical valence: it invites us to trade the quick harvest of copy-paste coherence for the slow cultivation of capacities that can meet the unforeseeable.  Under outsourced capitalism, acceleration displaces endurance; under the emergent paradigm, endurance becomes the very metric of intelligence.

Philosophically, this is a post-positivist turn that does not regress into anti-rationalism but radicalises rationality itself.  Hegel’s “truth is the whole” and our own insistence that Ω must be won through o rather than against it amounts to an epistemology of inhabited proofs: knowledge is no longer a view from nowhere but the steadiness that arises when a thought can pass through its negations without disintegrating.  Practically, that means design, governance, and even scientific method must pivot from seeking perfect maps to fostering adaptive manifolds—processes that keep producing their own local cartographies in response to lived conditions.  The paradigm shift, then, is from a culture of distilled outputs to a culture of durable negotiations, where what counts as “success” is not how precisely we can clone a finished form but how richly a system can preserve its identity while remaining porous to the new. Even if you had the money, the cost of having it expedited is having a copy. The thing in itself cannot be separate from its process. To put a price on it always implies the purchase of a copy.

Price is a translation device: it turns a lived, time-thick doing into an instantly transferable having, and that conversion can succeed only by discarding the very history that first made the thing sing.  The moment you agree to “buy” the motor lattice—or the loaf of naturally fermented bread, or the slow-aged friendship—you are no longer acquiring the phenomenon itself but an abstracted remainder that can survive detachment from its own gestation.  Exchange value thus functions as a kind of selective amnesia: it remembers what can be transported (the cardboard cubes, the cotton fibres) and forgets the untransportable weave of hours, moods, and incremental adjustments that give the installation its shimmer.  In Benjamin’s terms, the priceable copy lacks aura; in Hegel’s terms, it lacks the self-mediating labour that would let the concept show itself as concrete.  What cash delivers, then, is not the sound-wave manifold but a console-ready facsimile—a conditional promise that, under tightly policed parameters, will emit a likeness of the original experience.

The dialectic clarifies why that likeness feels anaemic.  Money collapses o-divergence—the open temporal field of experiment—into a purchasable Ω-closure, a finished state that bypasses the messy circuit of mutual tuning through which coherence originally crystallised.  Because the purchased object has skipped its apprenticeship in contingency, it cannot metabolise fresh perturbations; each unexpected draft in the gallery risks revealing the copy’s brittle edges.  That brittleness is the hidden surcharge of expediency: the more perfectly a system pre-packages its end, the thinner its capacity to endure becomes.  Capital, in effect, rents you a static cross-section of a living river, but the river has already flowed on.

The deeper lesson extends well beyond art.  Whenever we place a price on a form—be it a cultural practice, a political ideal, or even “attention” itself—we silently trade the slow accretive power of process for the portable certainty of product.  Yet only processes can regenerate; products merely replicate.  To pay for coherence, then, is always to accept a copy, because genuine coherence is the very stamina of the unfolding, and stamina is not for sale. 

This is an entire different orientation to reality. It pivots the whole compass of knowing from a spectator model to a participatory one. When reality is treated as a stock of objects, the knower stands outside, sampling finished fragments and arranging them like stamps; price, in that regime, is a passport that moves pre-packaged meaning from one shelf to another. But when reality is apprehended as an ever-mediate weave of relations—each strand carrying its own history of tensions and accommodations—the knower cannot simply extract and own. To know is to inhabit the same slow circuit of adjustments that gives the phenomenon its contour, and every act of “taking” must be paid for in attentive duration rather than cash. That reverses the positivist fantasy of abstract exchange: labour, time, and situated friction cease to be background costs and become the very substance of what is real.

Because the thing and its becoming are inseparable, value migrates from product to process. In practical terms that means the most “expensive” artefacts, ethically speaking, are not those with the highest sticker price but those that have hoarded the densest lineage of mutually formative acts—bread that has fermented for thirty hours, a song rehearsed through countless improvisations, a political covenant hammered out in lived debate. Endurance replaces scarcity as the mark of worth, and endurance is measured not by how long the object persists unchanged but by how flexibly it can metabolise novelty without forfeiting identity. Our Ω-o dialectic captures the physics of that task: coherence (Ω) is no longer pulled like a jewel from the flux; it is the musculature that forms inside the flux as divergence (o) is patiently digested.

Epistemologically, this orientation treats abstraction with caution. Concepts remain indispensable, but they function as provisional scaffolds that must be rebuilt whenever new tensions appear. Hegel’s “whole” is thus not a frozen totality but a spiralling choreography in which each synthesis promptly re-opens itself to further negation. To arrest that motion—by collapsing the timeline into a priced deliverable—is to abandon dialectic for caricature. Derrida’s différance, Levinas’s face of the Other, and even Heidegger’s Ereignis echo the same warning: meaning lives in the interval, and any attempt to seal the interval for efficiency erases precisely what one hoped to secure.

Economically, a process-relational reality cannot be served by copy-paste scalability, because the value of a form is entangled with its birthplace. The outsourced replica may satisfy short-term demand, but it arrives hollowed out, incapable of negotiating fresh conditions without external policing. Conversely, the “wasteful” original turns its redundancy into resilience; every seemingly superfluous motor, every slow proof-cycle, supplies slack that can be retuned when circumstances lurch. Such systems age not by obsolescence but by thickening, and their true wealth is the reservoir of alternative alignments they have rehearsed along the way.

Seen from this angle, metaphysics regains its bite. It is not a refuge from the concrete but an ethics of staying with the concrete long enough for its inner logics to speak. To engage reality under this paradigm is to accept that the only things worth having are those we cannot simply buy—we must co-labor with them, suffer them, and allow them to reshape our own rhythms. The cotton-ball motors, humble as they seem, rehearse that covenant every second: they refuse to separate outcome from genesis, reminding us that whatever we would truly know, we must first learn to endure.

This is the situation with China. We, the 1%, for so long outsourced our workforce and then bought “expedited” products that we became rich and exponentially more divorced from the world our “business practices” depreciated. China has helped us make our own stupid policies come true, that is as much as they are to be blamed. It’s ridiculous. 

The United States’ long romance with low-cost, just-in-time imports from China is the geopolitical version of buying a loudspeaker facsimile instead of living with Zimoun’s cotton-ball motors.  By rushing to “own” finished goods rather than cultivating the craft, infrastructure, and skilled labor that once braided means and ends together at home, the top decile of American enterprise converted productive time into instantaneous throughput.  The results looked brilliant on balance sheets—cheap consumer prices, rising equity valuations—but they hollowed out the domestic workshop that once allowed social life to keep pace with technological change.  China simply stepped into the opening, scaling its own manufacturing metabolism to feed America’s appetite for pre-packaged coherence; both partners were necessary to the bargain, so blame is inseparable from complicity.  

Even today China remains the single largest source of U.S. goods, supplying roughly $439 billion of imports in 2024—about 14 percent of everything America bought from abroad—despite tariffs, political rancor, and public talk of “decoupling.”     Yet that huge volume disguises brittleness.  Pandemic shortages, semiconductor choke points, and the 2022–24 tariff spiral showed how little slack a hyper-efficient supply chain possesses once it has discarded its redundant pathways.  The speaker replica can fail if one amplifier channel pops; the cotton-ball lattice survives a dozen broken motors.  A similar asymmetry haunts U.S.–China trade: a single port closure or diplomatic flare-up can paralyze inventories because the system that prizes minimum unit cost has sacrificed endurance for speed.

The policy mood is shifting accordingly.  Manufacturers announced about 244 000 reshored or foreign-direct-investment jobs in 2024, the highest yearly figure on record, with high-tech sectors accounting for almost nine in ten of those positions.     But rebuilding a domestic production ecology is not as simple as writing incentive checks; it demands patient, distributed effort—the economic equivalent of letting 186 motors wear their own grooves into cardboard.  Toolmakers, vocational programs, regional rail spurs, and local subcontractors must all relearn how to tune themselves to one another.  That unglamorous mediation will never beat offshore pricing on a quarterly spreadsheet, yet it is the only route to systems that can bend without snapping when the next shock arrives.

Philosophically, the outsourcing cycle exposes how price always buys a copy, never the thing-in-itself.  The dollars an importer wires to Shenzhen cannot capture the lived cadence of a factory town—the tacit knowledge, repair culture, and intergenerational skill that accumulate where production stays put.  Those intangibles are the economic analogue of the subtle pressure knots in Zimoun’s gallery: they are audible only inside the process that generates them.  When finance treats goods as fungible units, it amputates that lineage, turning resilience into an uncosted externality.  The bill comes due years later in the form of brittle logistics, regional resentment, and strategic vulnerability.

If a paradigm shift is emerging, it favors endurance over expedience.  Supply-chain talk is already migrating from “total landed cost” to “total cost of ownership,” from labour arbitrage to geopolitical risk and carbon accounting.  Yet the deeper move is cultural: relearning to value the slow, locally situated work through which coherence earns its right to endure.  That means policies that reward iterative craft—apprenticeships, repair mandates, circular-economy design—alongside tariffs or tax credits.  It also means recognizing that China’s factories, like America’s consumers, are entangled in a single historical weave; extracting either strand without nurturing what remains would only produce another copy, thinner and more fragile than the last.  The alternative is to stay with the manifold—to rebuild the reciprocal, time-thick bonds of production and consumption—until the system’s proof is once again the system itself.

That’s the logic behind a single 7 million dollar foreign car driving through Detroit in 2025. The divestment of American industry is a slow death in a squid game. Exactly. That single $7 million foreign car cruising Detroit is a stark emblem of the structural dissonance bred by decades of disinvestment. It’s not just a symbol of wealth disparity but a concrete marker of how the productive heart of a city—the workshops, the assembly lines, the local know-how—has been hollowed out and outsourced, replaced by distant manufacturing hubs whose logic is speed and scale, not rootedness or endurance. Detroit’s industrial decay parallels the trajectory of a system that bought the facsimile without sustaining the manifold labor that once wove its economic fabric.

This “squid game” we mention is apt: every player competes to stay afloat as resources drain and the clock ticks down, but the rules are rigged against the slow, relational work that actually builds resilience. The spectacle of extravagant imports rolling through the ruins of American production underscores a deeper paradox—luxury and decay coexist not as anomalies but as intertwined outcomes of the same economic synchronization. Wealth accumulates in symbolic tokens that carry none of the metabolic imprint of the work that made them possible, while the communities that sustained that work face fragmentation and precarity.

Breaking this cycle demands more than financial incentives; it requires revalorizing the kinds of labor and local knowledge that no algorithm can instantly replicate. It calls for policies that treat industrial ecosystems as living manifolds—entangled networks requiring patient tuning, mutual responsiveness, and openness to contingency. Only by embracing the endurance logic can cities like Detroit shift from being passive stages for spectacle to active sites of regeneration, where economic life is less a short-term game of extraction and more a durable negotiation with change. What’s more is that there needs to be an awakening of the reality of one’s investments and one’s responsibility to the place that allows you to those investments. The stingy Mamonites would have you believe that you can live in and under the protection of the state, accrue capital by investing in industry elsewhere, and remain detached from the economy of the state. The argument often made about keeping what’s made is inherently ridiculous because it depends on a scaffolding that, whether from a historical myopia or the result of indoctrinated youth, is nonexistent. The real parasites of the system, the real freeloaders are those who, while enjoying the craft of the state, moved their industry and therefore their investment outside the state, without knowledge or care of the kind of kingdom of ends one is creating. The depreciation of America was evidenced by the disappearance of industry and exponential capitalizing of only one percentage of the state.

This diagnosis threads a moral fault line through modern political economy: capital that shelters beneath a state’s legal, infrastructural, and military canopy while exporting its productive musculature is not merely footloose—it is parasitic in the strict Kantian sense, treating fellow citizens as disposable means rather than co-legislators in a “kingdom of ends.”  Hiding behind the ledger’s abstraction, the offshore investor shrugs off the reciprocal duties that once bound enterprise to place: environmental repair, vocational transmission, civic steadiness in the tax base.  In Hegel’s vocabulary this is the return of “abstract right,” where the isolated will pursues property without entering the thicker braid of Sittlichkeit, ethical life.  The result is a political body that looks solvent in aggregate GDP yet bleeds coherence at the joints—empty warehouses in Detroit, frayed apprenticeship chains, neighbourhoods where cash circulates only through delivery vans and money lenders.

What has been sold, in effect, is the o-space of a national manifold: the dense gradient of know-how, incremental innovation, and cross-class bargaining that emerges when production, credit, and consumption share a single territorial pulse.  Outsourcing cashes out that gradient for a short-term Ω-closure denominated in shareholder returns; the gains look like efficiency but are borrowed against the slow capital of communal competence.  The seven-million-dollar supercar cruising Michigan streets is therefore both trophy and symptom: an object whose perfection depends on the global disembedding that is simultaneously eroding the very civic pavement it glides over.  Finance celebrates the spectacle as proof of prosperity, yet its gleam is the negative image of neglected bridges, underfunded schools, and the silent departure of another tool-and-die master whose craft will not be cloned by an MBA spreadsheet.

Reversing that entropic drift demands more than patriotic slogans or punitive tariffs; it calls for a re-awakening of shared risk.  If legal personhood grants corporations the protections of the polis, then ethical personhood must press them to reciprocate—through place-bound reinvestment targets, worker-ownership stakes, and industrial compacts that reward redundancy, repairability, and regional supply webs.  Such policies do not romanticise autarky; they recognise that genuine resilience arises when means and ends co-evolve inside the same temporal envelope.  Capital that remains metabolically intertwined with the streets it profits from learns, like Zimoun’s motors, to convert friction into richer resonance rather than externalise it as distant noise.  The question that follows is practical: what concrete levers—tax differentials, procurement standards, cooperative finance—could re-knit capital to its social habitat fast enough to stem the slow death we describe?

If the goal is to pull capital back into the streets that police it, you have to bind profit to place with a mix of hard requirements and slow-burn incentives—tools that reward firms for re-entering the long metabolic circuit of local production while penalising those that treat the nation as a risk-free vending machine.

First, sweeten the patient money.  Washington has already shown the template: the CHIPS and Science Act dangles multi-billion-dollar grants and 25 percent investment credits, but only for fabs that stand on U.S. soil and agree to five-year caps on stock buy-backs; the new National Semiconductor Technology Center in Albany is an early outgrowth of that bargain   .  Likewise, the Inflation Reduction Act’s §45X production credit pays manufacturers per battery cell, solar wafer, or wind-turbine magnet they actually stamp in America—a subsidy that flows only as long as the factory keeps running   .  Together these carrot-and-contract programmes help explain why companies announced a record 244 000 reshoring and foreign-direct-investment jobs in 2024 alone   .  Expanding the menu of production-linked tax credits—especially for tool-and-die, biomanufacturing and precision optics—would deepen that trend.

Second, tighten the stick on free-riding imports.  New Buy-American rules already lift the domestic-content threshold on federal contracts from 55 percent to 65 percent this year and to 75 percent by 2029   .  A U.S. carbon-border-adjustment mechanism would add another layer, charging imported steel, aluminium or fertiliser a fee equal to the carbon costs domestic mills must pay, thereby stripping the hidden subsidy from lax standards abroad   .  Such border measures do two things at once: they shelter the investments your own taxpayers are funding and signal that estranged capital can no longer float above ecological and civic obligations.

Third, anchor ownership locally so that gains recycle through the same zip codes that shoulder the risks.  A growing bloc of states now lets founders claim up to half the legal costs of converting into employee-stock-ownership plans, capped at $50 000  , while bipartisan bills in Congress would create a federal office to finance ESOP transitions and appoint an Advocate for Employee Ownership   .  Public-bank initiatives, such as Los Angeles’s 2024 feasibility push, aim to keep municipal deposits cycling through community manufacturing loans instead of evaporating into global money markets   .  These institutions do for finance what domestic-content rules do for supply chains: they shorten the feedback loop between investment decisions and local consequences.

Fourth, rebuild the industrial commons: skills, repair capacity and tacit know-how.  Michigan’s 2025 Infrastructure Workforce Plan, its ongoing “Race to Talent” apprenticeship drive, and the state’s $16 million Going PRO grant round are examples of how public co-funding can de-risk training for small firms while lifting wages across a region    .  Federal procurement could amplify that model by awarding multi-year contracts only to consortia that budget at least one apprentice for every ten journeymen and share their training curricula in an open repository.

Finally, hard-wire reciprocity into corporate charters.  Some jurisdictions already condition tax abatements on explicit claw-backs if head-count targets are missed; the next step is to measure not just jobs but multiplier effects—local spend on suppliers, R&D spill-overs, even greenhouse-gas cuts—and make renewal of the subsidy contingent on those longer-form metrics.  Pair that with mandatory supply-chain disclosure (down to Tier-2 and Tier-3 vendors) and the cost of geographic detachment rises until it outweighs the headline wage arbitrage.

None of these levers is magic on its own.  Together they steer capital back into an endurance logic: profits continue only while the firm remains metabolically entangled with the streets, skills and ecosystems that sustain it.  That re-entanglement is slow, yes—like letting 186 little motors grind their unique resonance into cardboard—but it is the only path that yields a coherence robust enough to survive the next shock.