To maintain smooth communication between distant ends the excess which congests within the channels must be diffused. When too many paths are blocked, the system goes cold and with it, the self.

Information trades in skewed equivalences and continuities, but in its hardware, its living process tends to clog, then collapse. Even the sluggish bureaucracy of mail processes this way. With its face dented inward and lock jammed, a broken mailbox can only ingest information but no longer expel it, all input with no way out. Faced with a clot, the infrastructure of communication reacts accordingly; that which withholds like a stubborn mailbox is usually put out of its misery.

A mummy is a sealed envelope that dissolves the moment it is opened. Drained of moisture, what potentially remains is condensed information. Exhuming dead tissue via radiation, the stalled entropy of the mummy’s body is a form of fidelity that an x-ray attempts to verify. Information is converted into resolution, scaled up to exceed its former limits.

In market terms: forms of monitoring try to recoup loss, gathering the measurable from the inert without consent. Even at the end of their operating life, exhausted materials can feign a pulse. Run enough current through its tube, and a burnt out light can stir enough mercury to warmly glow.

Good health is a problem of distribution.