freeze,
a more or less permanent stop to the dissolving of a (usually already partially dissolved) artificium. From early “lacquers” and “nanotethers,” freezing techniques evolved to rely on dynamic restoration more than static resistance; now it’s mostly agencies approaching perfect adverbiality (this is where the concept originated) with “Maxwell’s demons as pinpoint effectors.” Freezing is never final but asymptotic: we block most of the dissolving potential so the thing can last until we learn how to deal with the remainder. ■ The material burden of the past felt heavy for the sparsening humanity; freezing began as an urgent pitprop for critical infrastructure and historical valuables. Later, the “dissolving as art” movement made freezing fashionable, greatly overused it for anything “artistically artificial or picturesquely unwhole” — but now it’s back to more selective use: you only freeze those objects (or parts, or aspects) that lack owners (even a feeble, barely sustainable feed of honest lived is preferable to dead freeze) and have reached a long-term balance with perception — a summit from which, if not frozen, they can only backslide.
< fragility paradox | game of i >