Governments no longer suspend laws. They perform procedural legitimacy.

COVID made it visible. The algorithmic state made it permanent. We are governed not through emergency, but simulation. Checklists. Dashboards. Risk assessments. Everything is coded in a language of order. Everything suggests control. And yet none of it works the way it’s supposed to.

What used to be an extraordinary event now becomes a spreadsheet. Exceptions have been normalized through process. The ritual of governance becomes the performance. Press conferences and memos replace leadership. API calls replace accountability.

This isn’t Agamben’s State of Exception. The law isn’t suspended. It’s aestheticized. Something happens, or might happen, or could happen, and so the rules adjust around the vibe. There’s a form for that. There’s a portal for that. If there’s no button, then maybe it’s not real.

In Agamben’s formulation, “the state of exception is not a dictatorship but a space devoid of law.” But what we’re experiencing now is even more insidious. It’s a space overflowing with procedural law, where substantive protections are buried under layers of administrative aesthetics. The law remains technically intact but functionally unreachable.

Agamben warned that “the voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states.” Yet today’s administrative state doesn’t need to declare emergencies at all. The emergency is always implicit, always encoded in the risk scores, the compliance metrics, the workflow queues.

Simulation governance means we don’t make decisions. We perform the steps that look like decision-making. We enact workflows. We manage risks that have already passed us by. We update protocols as if updating the document updates the world.

The normative aspect of law can be obliterated and contradicted with impunity by governmental systems that—while maintaining the veneer of process externally and producing a permanent state of low-grade compliance internally—nevertheless still claim to be applying the law.

This is governance as middleware. Not as force, but as form.

The scariest part is how normal this all feels. You don’t notice simulation governance if you’ve grown up inside it. You just learn to keep refreshing. You learn which screens to click through. You learn what the right keywords are to get the system to behave.

Eventually you stop asking whether anything works. You start asking if it can be made legible. That’s the victory. Not solving it. Logging it.

We deserve to call this something. So let’s start here.

Drafted while listening to Stars of the Lid — Requiem for Dying Mothers