Romania, a case study
45°12′N 29°30′E / 45.200°N 29.500°E. Romania, Tulcea County
"…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it"
On Exactitude in Science, Jorge Luis Borges
44° 40' 16" N / 22° 31' 45" E, Romania, Mehedinti County
Romania had been under a communist dictatorship under 42 years. There are endless sad stories about life at general and the social contract during this time, which was designed to work on a precarious sense of trust. The general climate was of censorship, oppression, covered acts of aggression and crime if you would think against the system. If your smile wasn't convincing enough that you silently comply you would find yourself haunted. All roads had to lead to the supreme leader and, for that to happen, emerged a hybrid hierarchy of secret services (Securitate, by name), dissolved and disguised in the civil society. It could be a father, a brother, some cousin, even your best friend; it would happen that you share a wonderful vacation together, baptise your child or even promise each other a happily ever after. One could not know who in his/her front is part of Securitate, so the general sense of trust felt distant and alien.
This hit hardest at the moment of revolution in december '89, when a certain part of Securitate was trained and mobilised to lure the army, spread rumours of infiltrated terrorists and shoot in the protesting population. The purpose was to hinder any initiative and restore peace on the streets, so that the supreme leader would return breathless and save the day. This plan was laid out in detail, but the population did not back as expected - they went out on the streets and many of them preferred to die in dignity and hope for freedom. Romanian democracy was born in blood and betrayal. Many years after, in a fragile and confused atmosphere, there was a ferocious quest to grab power and countless efforts to erase proofs of who killed who.
And then, there was silence.
It followed after all this a melange of confusion, precarity, mistrust, fear and a rush to cover the simmering frustration and steep trauma with an as-long-as-it-takes breathhold.
The reason of bringing back The Universal Shop today - in the context of the long awaited rise of artificial intelligence, algorithmic governance, distributed cognition, quantum computing, crypto-economy, climate change fever, hopes of alignment - is to stress the necessity to consider also the negative stacks that would be viscerally inhabiting the language of a new geo-political landscape and further cosmo-geographies.
By negative stacks I refer to the bodies of memory (cultural geographies) that have not been recorded by the current large language models (LLM), but they act, just as any body of memory, out of deep time.