Weft · Strategy Tapestry · a grouped relation-matrix, woven
Weft
The Loom Reads Back
Belief systems hang together the way cloth does. A creed recapitulates an eschatology two thousand years old; a 1951 novel prefigures a movement, and a film warns against another decades before it exists. Here is one such weave, the Silicon Valley Quasi-Religions corpus, laid on a loom: six tech movements (EA, longtermism, singularitarianism, transhumanism, e/acc and rationalism) set against the ten world end-time frameworks they echo and the two centuries of prophetic fiction, from Frankenstein in 1818 through cyberpunk to Black Mirror, that foresaw them. 44 typed nodes and 145 weighted, rationale-carrying relations, rendered as a piece of cloth rather than a hairball of floating nodes. Rows are warp threads and columns are weft; where two groups cross, one recapitulates, prefigures, warns against or parallels the other. Touch a crossing and the machine reads it back to you as a sentence.
- Nodes
- 44
- Relations
- 145
- Groups
- 11
- Bands
- 4
- Node types
- 6
- Relation types
- 7
i The notation
Each row and each column is a thematic group, a bundle of movements, critiques, eschatologies or works gathered under one heading. Coloured bands sort those eleven groups into the four bands of the corpus: the movements, the critique and lens that expose them, the world eschatologies they recapitulate and the prophetic fiction that foresaw them. Where a row meets a column the row group is the source and the column group is the target. Each mark standing there carries one or more typed weighted claims, every claim with its own rationale.
Six kinds of thing
Every node is one of six types: movement, work, eschatology, critique, risk or lens. In the cloth they are the raw fibre.
- MVSV movement
- WKProphetic fiction
- EVEschatology / evidence
- OBCritique
- RKGovernance risk
- PVMethod / lens
Seven ways to relate
Every relation is typed and directional, so you can read any cell in the active voice:
- prefigures“prefigures”
- warns_against“warns against”
- recapitulates“recapitulates”
- parallels“parallels”
- influences“influences”
- extends“extends”
- opposes“opposes”
How to read a cell
- Size of the mark = how many threads run between those two groups.
- Colour = the dominant relation type in the cell.
- Dashed ring = the cell holds a mix of relation types.
- Warp & weft cross over and under at every knot, as real cloth does.
- The diagonal is the selvage, a group folded back on itself, drawn as a woven lozenge.
- Margin bars: the right edge shows how much each row sends; the foot how much each column receives.
ii The loom reads back
Hover a knot and its two threads light the whole way to their names while the machine composes the cell as a sentence below. Click to unweave it: the knot fans out into the individual claims it stands for, each with its weight and its cited rationale. Thin the cloth with the relation toggles and the weight slider to leave only the strongest, most-cited threads.
Threading the loom…
iii The threads that carry
Thin the whole weave to its heaviest fibre (the relations weighted 5, the most-cited and least deniable claims in the corpus) and a smaller sharper cloth appears: the threads that carry the story. The singularity recapitulating the Christian Parousia, transhumanism the Gnostic escape from matter; Foundation prefiguring longtermism decades early; Frankenstein and The Terminator warning against it; Christian and Islamic end-times paralleling one another across the Abrahamic family. Here they are as their own sub-weave, then quoted verbatim with the provenance each thread earned its weight from.
The threads that carry the most
Unfurl every weight-5 thread
iv The instrument
Weft · Strategy Tapestry. An interactive grouped-matrix engine for mapping relationships between different kinds of thing: movements, works, eschatologies, critiques, risks and methods. I built it with Next.js 16, React 19, D3 (scales only), React Three Fiber, AG Grid and XY Flow; the dataset woven here is the Silicon Valley Quasi-Religions corpus, a comparative theological reading of EA, longtermism, singularitarianism, transhumanism, e/acc and rationalism as quasi-religions, set against the ten world eschatologies they recapitulate and the two centuries of prophetic fiction that foresaw them.
The engine doesn't care about theology. The same matrix holds strategy corpora and a language-machine corpus too; swap the dataset and it weaves whatever you give it. What carries across is the structure. Any field where ideas stand in typed, weighted relations can be laid out as warp and weft, then read back one crossing at a time.
Data verbatim from data/projects/sv-theology/. Weight rationales cite the corpus's own comparative-theology knowledge base: the documented parallels scholars have drawn between the movements and the world's eschatologies, the fiction's place in the canon and its influence on the movements' founders, plus the critiques that read them all together. Nothing here is invented.