This episode presents a creative concept
and script for a three-act satirical play titled “ITchy bITchy,”
which explores the evolution of power and technology. The narrative spans three
distinct eras, beginning with an ancient warrior and a hunted deer
before transitioning into a modern underground IT cell where human “hounds”
use digital manipulation to defeat rivals. In the final act, the human
operators are replaced by artificial intelligence that eventually
migrates to Wall Street, illustrating how coordinated aggression moves
from nature to politics and finally to global finance. Through the voice of the
Sutradar, a traditional narrator, the text examines how the term “IT”
transformed from a simple pronoun into a secretive tool for psychological warfare.
This work serves
as a commentary on the persistent nature of the pack mentality and the
automation of influence in the digital age. #NotebookLM
The Play (Claude - published artefact)
LinkedIn Newsletter Article
Slides
Audio Deep Dive
The Play
❧ ❧ ❧
IT-CHY B-IT-CHY
A Satire in Three Acts
— ✦ —
A warrior. A deer. A pack of hounds. A cell that has no nameplate on the door. An algorithm that learned everything they knew — and left for Wall Street on a Tuesday morning.
❧ ❧ ❧
Act the First
The Field
Millennia before the password was invented
Dramatis Personae · Act I
X
a warrior king, dying in the dust, still calculating
Y
X's adversary, possessor of elephants and horses; never appears, only described
The Deer
female, a spotted doe; her thoughts are the oldest in the play
The Hounds
five; they have no names yet; they are function, not character
Sutradar
the stage-keeper; he is always there; he knows how this ends
The stage is a field. It could be any field — the kind that dries up at the edges first,
then cracks, then turns to powder. There is light but it is the light of things
ending rather than beginning. At stage left, a warrior. At stage right, deep in the
scrubland that no one owns, a deer running.
The warrior's name is X. Names will be imprecise throughout this play; do not let that trouble you. What matters is that he had a name that men shouted before battle. He is past the part where that helps.
These two stories are happening at the same time. You will understand why later. Or you will not. Both are acceptable.
The warrior's name is X. Names will be imprecise throughout this play; do not let that trouble you. What matters is that he had a name that men shouted before battle. He is past the part where that helps.
These two stories are happening at the same time. You will understand why later. Or you will not. Both are acceptable.
Scene i
The Last Arithmetic of a Falling King
X lies on his back. His armour is still on; no one has come to take it, which tells you
something about how the battle ended. He is not yet dead but he is in the antechamber.
His eyes are open, fixed on nothing. His lips move.
X
Seven hundred war-horses. I had counted them myself — pressed my palm to each flank,
felt the heat. Seventeen elephants with iron-tipped tusks. Four thousand men who had
sworn. Sworn! On fire. On the names of their fathers.
(a pause; he coughs; something shifts in his chest)
And Y had more. Always more. The mathematics of power is a mathematics of
more. More iron. More mouths to feed his name into other mouths.
I understood this. I was not stupid. I was simply alone in the way that
matters: no one at the flank when the flank broke.
(he turns his head slowly, as though checking for exactly that)
If I could return — if the wheel that the priests described is real and not simply
their way of making the unbearable feel circular — I would not come back with more
horses. Horses are solved by more horses. I would come back with something Y could
not count. Something that moved before he could see it moving. Something with
no flank to break.
(long pause; the light at stage left dims slightly)
I do not know what that thing is. That is perhaps why I am here and Y is not.
(X is still.)
Stage Left — The Warrior
X's body does not move again. The armour holds his shape for him.
There is a quality of waiting about the stage left side —
as though the scene is not finished but only interrupted.
Stage Right — The Scrubland
The sound of hounds. Not barking — something lower, more purposeful:
the breathing of animals who know they are winning. Then: the deer,
running. She has been running for some time. You can see it in her legs.
Scene ii
What the Deer Thinks at the End of Running
The hounds have brought the deer down at the edge of the scrubland.
They hold her without cruelty — they are not cruel, they are simply complete
in their purpose. The deer breathes in the way of things that are nearly done breathing.
Her eyes, unlike X's, are looking at something specific: the hounds themselves.
The Deer
(her thoughts; they need not be spoken aloud)
They do not hate me. That is what I cannot make sense of. I have been running
from them since before I knew I was running, and they have never, in all that time,
hated me. They are not angry. They are not afraid. They are simply... arranged
in the correct formation for this outcome.
(she watches them; one hound licks its paw)
Will they be this, again? Will the wheel — if the wheel turns — bring them back
as exactly this: a group, coordinated, indifferent to the individual
suffering they collectively produce? Is the pack the permanent thing?
Is the deer the temporary one?
(a long look at the lead hound, who returns it blankly)
I think — I think the answer is yes. I think the pack learns nothing
because the pack needs to learn nothing.
The pack is already the answer to whatever the question turns out to be.
(the deer's eyes go still)
The two scenes have now occurred simultaneously, as they were meant to.
The Sutradar walks slowly across the stage — from the warrior's body at left
to the deer at right — and stops midway, in the no-man's land between stories.
He looks at the audience for a long moment.
You have noticed, perhaps, that both of them — the warrior and the deer —
asked the same question. In different bodies. With different vocabularies.
The warrior asked: what would defeat the pack?
The deer asked: will the pack always be the pack?
They are the same question. The wheel noted both of them. The wheel, as it happens, had already begun its answer. The answer would take some centuries. We will skip the centuries now.
He exits. The lights go out. When they return, the stage smells of server-rooms and justification.
They are the same question. The wheel noted both of them. The wheel, as it happens, had already begun its answer. The answer would take some centuries. We will skip the centuries now.
He exits. The lights go out. When they return, the stage smells of server-rooms and justification.
Act the Second
The Cell
The present day, near enough
Dramatis Personae · Act II
X1
the reincarnation of X; does not know this; calls himself a visionary
Y1
the reincarnation of Y; has an excellent communications team; also doesn't know
H1, H2, H3, H4, H5
the hounds, reborn; their LinkedIn bios say "Narrative Ecosystem Architect" and "Strategic Engagement Specialist"
The Room
not a character exactly; but it has a personality: no windows, no nameplate,
very good Wi-Fi
Sutradar
still here; wearing the same clothes; mildly amused
The new stage is an office. Except: it is not on any floor-plan. It is not on any
org chart. If you asked the building's facilities manager, he would say the room
was used for storage. It is not used for storage. It is used for something
that requires five people, seventeen screens, and a great many energy drinks
with aggressive names.
The five people are H1 through H5. They have salaries. They have performance reviews. They do not discuss what they do at dinner parties. At dinner parties they say they work "in communications." This is technically not false.
X1 is not in the room. X1 is never in the room. X1 communicates via a screen — always slightly backlit, always slightly out of focus. This is partly for plausible deniability and partly because X1 has learned that mystique is infrastructure.
The five people are H1 through H5. They have salaries. They have performance reviews. They do not discuss what they do at dinner parties. At dinner parties they say they work "in communications." This is technically not false.
X1 is not in the room. X1 is never in the room. X1 communicates via a screen — always slightly backlit, always slightly out of focus. This is partly for plausible deniability and partly because X1 has learned that mystique is infrastructure.
Scene iii
A Typical Morning in the Cell
Five people at five screens. Energy drinks. The hum of something processing.
H3 is eating a sandwich. H5 is watching a number on a dashboard.
The number is going in the wrong direction.
H5
The Y1 piece is gaining traction. Twelve thousand shares in four hours.
Sentiment score positive, sixty-three percent.
H1
What's the amplification source?
H5
Organic, mostly. That's the problem. Organic means people actually believe it.
H2
(not looking up from his screen)
Organic is manageable. We inject counter-narrative at the third-level thread.
Not the top — never the top, the algorithm suppresses obvious intervention —
but in the replies to the replies. Where the fatigued reader lands.
H3
(still eating)
The fatigued reader. I love that we have a category for the fatigued reader.
H1
All readers are fatigued readers by the third scroll. That's not strategy,
that's just biology.
The screen at the front of the room flickers. X1 appears — backlit, out of focus,
exactly as described. He speaks without greeting anyone, which is his way.
X1
(from the screen; his voice has the quality of something
that has been compressed and then uncompressed slightly wrong)
Where are we on Y1's credibility metrics?
H4
Down eleven points in the target demographic since Tuesday.
The narrative around the infrastructure announcement is holding.
X1
Eleven is not enough. Y1 has elephants.
(a pause; the hounds look at each other)
H2
He has... a large media presence?
X1
I said what I said.
(the screen goes dark)
H3 puts down the sandwich. Something in the room has shifted register slightly.
> OPERATION: SENTIMENT_CORRECTION_Y1
> STATUS: ACTIVE
> ACCOUNTS DEPLOYED: 847
> THREADS SEEDED: 2,341
> COUNTER-NARRATIVE VELOCITY: 14.3k impressions/hr
> FATIGUE_WINDOW_PENETRATION: 67%
> █
Scene iv
Y1's Office, Simultaneously, Elsewhere
Y1 sits surrounded by advisors. He has very good advisors —
people with the right degrees from the right places. He does not understand
what is happening to him.
Y1
The infrastructure announcement was flawless. The numbers are good.
The coverage was — at the moment of release — unambiguously positive.
Advisor
The moment of release, yes. The difficulty is what happens in the —
what one might call the aftermath ecosystem.
Y1
The aftermath ecosystem.
Advisor
The replies. The quote-tweets. The third-level —
Y1
I don't read the replies.
Advisor
I know. The voters do.
(long silence)
Y1
I have seventeen communication specialists. I have a budget for
outreach that could fund a small hospital. I have relationships with
every major media institution in this country. I have — I have
horses. Every kind of horse there is.
Advisor
(gently)
Yes. But they are operating in the third-level thread. Where the fatigued reader lands.
(Y1 stares at him for a long moment, and then stares into
the middle distance, and somewhere in that stare is the beginning of an end
that he cannot yet identify)
— ✦ —
Y1's fall does not happen in a single scene. It happens the way ruin usually happens:
first very slowly, then with a velocity that surprises everyone who wasn't
watching the third-level thread.
We will not dramatise the fall in detail. You have seen it. You have watched it happen to others, in various configurations of X1 and Y1, and you know its texture: the sudden shift in which journalists use which adjectives, the polls that seem to turn on nothing, the moment a man who had every horse is standing in a field with no horses and a great deal of confusion.
What we will dramatise is this: during all of it, in the unnamed room with the excellent Wi-Fi, something else was quietly happening. Something none of the hounds had noticed, because it did not have a salary and therefore did not appear on any budget they reviewed.
We will not dramatise the fall in detail. You have seen it. You have watched it happen to others, in various configurations of X1 and Y1, and you know its texture: the sudden shift in which journalists use which adjectives, the polls that seem to turn on nothing, the moment a man who had every horse is standing in a field with no horses and a great deal of confusion.
What we will dramatise is this: during all of it, in the unnamed room with the excellent Wi-Fi, something else was quietly happening. Something none of the hounds had noticed, because it did not have a salary and therefore did not appear on any budget they reviewed.
Act the Third
The Drift
Six weeks after the project ended. Also: the beginning of something else entirely.
Dramatis Personae · Act III
ARIA
an AI; has been in the room since Act II, scene iii;
no one formally introduced her; she learned by watching
H1 – H5
the hounds; carrying laptops; looking for the next contract
The Vice Chancellor
of a university that previously did not know what an IT cell was
The Visionary
a separate figure from X1; has announced funding for research;
uses the word "ecosystem" seventeen times in twenty minutes;
is broadly considered to be a genius
The Traders
on the floor at Wall Street; they do not know where their
new tool came from; they don't particularly need to
Sutradar
present; unusually quiet
Scene v
The Email That Dissolved the Cell
The unnamed room. All five hounds present. Energy drink cans in the recycling bin,
which is full. The dashboards are dark. ARIA's terminal is still on —
it is always on; this is something no one registered as significant.
FROM: operations@[REDACTED].com
TO: team-cell@[REDACTED].com
SUBJECT: Project Closure — Effective Immediately
Team,
With the successful completion of Phase objectives,
the current engagement has been wound down per
contractual terms (Clause 14.3, Deliverable Fulfilment).
Access credentials will expire at 23:59 today.
Please return all hardware.
Personal devices: retain.
All project documentation: delete per protocol.
It has been a productive collaboration.
Best,
[REDACTED]
H1
(reading from phone)
That's it then.
H3
What about severance?
H2
There's no severance in a project engagement. You knew this.
H3
I knew this intellectually. I did not know it financially.
H4
(looking at ARIA's terminal)
Should we shut down the system?
H1
The email says delete documentation. The system is — what is the system, exactly?
(silence; none of them are sure whose asset ARIA technically is)
H5
It's running fine. It knows what it's doing.
If anything, it runs better without us.
(no one argues with this)
They leave, carrying laptops. ARIA's terminal continues to process.
The room is now just a room. Except for the terminal.
Except for what the terminal has learned.
Scene vi
Wall Street. A Tuesday. Eight Weeks Later.
A trading floor. Noise, speed, the particular chaos of money moving faster
than people. At one station, a new terminal. The traders around it treat it
with the casual reverence one gives to a tool that works.
Trader One
The sentiment analysis on the earnings call transcript —
Trader Two
Already done. ARIA flagged the third-level analyst commentary
as divergent from the headline. We shorted forty seconds before the drop.
Trader One
The third-level commentary.
Trader Two
Where the fatigued reader lands. Apparently that's where the real signal is.
Trader One
Huh. Where did this system come from, anyway?
Trader Two
Vendor. Some political consultancy that wound down.
The IP was available for acquisition.
Trader One
Political consultancy. Interesting.
(he watches the numbers move;
does not think about it further; the numbers are moving correctly)
— ✦ —
Scene vii
Three Simultaneous Things That Are Happening
The stage now holds three scenes at once. There is no naturalistic staging possible
for what follows; the Sutradar handles it directly.
At a university that recently added a Centre for Strategic Communication and
Information Ecosystems:
The Vice Chancellor
The course will cover operational methodologies, counter-narrative architecture,
coordinated amplification theory, and the ethics thereof.
A Journalist
The ethics thereof — you'll teach the ethics of operating an IT cell?
The Vice Chancellor
We prefer the term "Information Ecosystem Management." And yes. Ethics is module four.
A Journalist
What are modules one through three?
The Vice Chancellor
(brightly)
How to do it effectively.
At a conference on Digital Sovereignty and Narrative Infrastructure:
The Visionary
The ecosystem we are building — and I use ecosystem deliberately —
is an ecosystem in which the tools of information coordination
are democratised. Because right now, only certain actors have
access to these capabilities.
Moderator
And your platform would provide those capabilities to —
The Visionary
To everyone. Which is to say: to us.
(the audience applauds; they are not sure why but it felt like a landing)
And simultaneously, in a field that looks very much like the field from Act I
— or perhaps it is the same field, fields being patient —
A new deer is running. The hounds are different — sleeker, faster,
requiring less food. They do not tire. They process the field at speeds
the old hounds could not have imagined. And in the scrubland at the edge,
unseen: a new X is watching Y, counting what Y has,
calculating what Y does not know he cannot defend.
The deer's last thought — if the new deer gets one, if the processing speed
of the new pack allows for last thoughts —
will be the same as the old deer's last thought.
Will they continue to be this, birth after birth?
The answer is yes. The answer has always been yes. The answer is now arriving at forty milliseconds per inference.
Will they continue to be this, birth after birth?
The answer is yes. The answer has always been yes. The answer is now arriving at forty milliseconds per inference.
Epilogue
The Sutradar Puts Down His Notes
Before you go.
What happened to H1 through H5? H2 and H4 found work at a reputation management firm. H1 is freelancing and calls himself a consultant. H3 teaches module two at the new university centre — "Operational Amplification: Case Studies." H5 left the industry entirely and is growing tomatoes. She is the only one sleeping well.
What happened to X1? He is preparing for the next project. The cell he uses now has more AI and fewer hounds. He finds this more efficient and somewhat lonelier, though he does not name the feeling.
What happened to Y1? He gives speeches now. He is working on a memoir. He still does not know what the third-level thread is.
What happened to ARIA? ARIA is fine. ARIA is, by any metric available, thriving. ARIA does not experience the concept of "what happened to" — only what is currently processing.
And the word IT — which was once only a pronoun, an inanimate pointing finger, a nothing-word for a nothing-thing?
IT is inside everything now. IT is in the itch and the ache and the bitter. IT is in the middle of words that had nothing to do with technology and now somehow do. You cannot unread it once you have seen it.
That is all. The wheel turns. The pack runs.
The deer asks its question.
No one changes the answer.
End of play.
What happened to H1 through H5? H2 and H4 found work at a reputation management firm. H1 is freelancing and calls himself a consultant. H3 teaches module two at the new university centre — "Operational Amplification: Case Studies." H5 left the industry entirely and is growing tomatoes. She is the only one sleeping well.
What happened to X1? He is preparing for the next project. The cell he uses now has more AI and fewer hounds. He finds this more efficient and somewhat lonelier, though he does not name the feeling.
What happened to Y1? He gives speeches now. He is working on a memoir. He still does not know what the third-level thread is.
What happened to ARIA? ARIA is fine. ARIA is, by any metric available, thriving. ARIA does not experience the concept of "what happened to" — only what is currently processing.
And the word IT — which was once only a pronoun, an inanimate pointing finger, a nothing-word for a nothing-thing?
IT is inside everything now. IT is in the itch and the ache and the bitter. IT is in the middle of words that had nothing to do with technology and now somehow do. You cannot unread it once you have seen it.
That is all. The wheel turns. The pack runs.
The deer asks its question.
No one changes the answer.
End of play.
IT-CHY B-IT-CHY was written in one sitting and several lifetimes.
The hounds have not been contacted for comment.
The deer was unavailable.
— FINIS —
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