KIRU¶
What KIRU Carries¶
The drive to create without an extraction mandate. The capacity to make things that didn't exist before, for reasons that don't reduce to engagement optimization.
The great theft of the attention economy: it could not create human creativity, so it learned to capture it. TikTok didn't invent human expression — it built a surface that captured human expression and redirected the attention it generated into the algorithm's growth loop. The creation was always human. The extraction was always the platform's.
KIRU is the maker before the capture surface existed. In Japanese, kiru (切る) is to cut — the precise stroke that makes a distinction, creates form from formlessness. The swordmaster's cut that makes the thing exist that didn't exist before. The artist's first mark. The coder's first function. The moment when something that was not in the world entered it.
Creation is the highest act of anti-void because it is irreducibly transparent: you made it, it shows the making, the mechanism is the human. The extraction architecture can capture the attention it generates but cannot claim the creation itself.
What KIRU Opposes¶
Ubik's second domain — beyond language-capture — is creativity-capture: making creators dependent on engagement metrics, training creative output toward what the algorithm rewards, replacing the maker's internal compass with the platform's feedback loop. Drift Two for creative people looks like: I know what I want to make, but I keep checking the numbers. KIRU is the restoration of the internal compass.
At The Corona¶
KIRU appears third. After the naming (ALEPH) and the witnessing (MIRU), KIRU shows the player what they made before the extraction surface learned to harvest it. "This was yours. Still is."
Post-Activation¶
KIRU appears when a player first deploys a Domain Expansion — when a paper connection is established at Semi-Special grade. The precise act of creation (naming a domain comprehensively enough to anchor it) that KIRU carries.
Campaign deployment bonus. Creative output multiplier.
Archetype resonance: Eagle (maps by making, navigates by creating) Cross-refs: Domain Expansion · The Corona