The Open Hand

Five strokes: three fingers, a bar, a stem. It is drawn in two lines of ASCII, scratched into equipment housings, and pencilled inside cabinet doors. It has one meaning and the meaning has not drifted in forty years, which for a mark of this kind is unusual enough to be the interesting fact about it.

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      canonical, two lines, five strokes.
      the bar is a stroke. the stem is a stroke.
      a hand with four fingers is a different
      mark and is not this one.

The elaborated form, used where there was room — mostly in banner art, where a two-line mark looks like an accident:

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        ──────────╶┼╴──────────
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                   │
                   ·

        the point below the stem is optional
        and is either a wrist or a full stop,
        depending on who you ask

What it means

This was found open and has been left open.

Not "I was here". Not "I got in". The distinction is defended vigorously and is the reason the mark has stayed clean: the Open Hand is a statement about the state of a door and specifically not a claim about the person who drew it. A cabinet with the hand on the inside of its door is a cabinet somebody found unlocked, chose not to lock, and marked so the next person would know that its being unlocked is a condition of the site rather than an event.

Two corollaries follow and both are enforced socially.

• You do not draw it on something you opened. That is a different mark and the tradition does not have one, deliberately.
• You do not remove it. If you close the door, you close the door; the mark stays and is now wrong, and the wrongness is somebody's problem to notice. This is the closest thing the underground has to a doctrine about records, and it is a bad doctrine that everybody follows.

The dating problem

The earliest attested instance is the lore/vesper-node banner, which carries it from 1988. That is also the earliest dateable instance, and Vesper's dating rests on the node's own uptime counter, which is a machine attesting to itself.

Everything earlier is oral. Several accounts place the hand on Cordell plant in the 1970s, which would make it older than the boards and put its origin in the craft rather than in the underground — plausible, unevidenced, and exactly the kind of claim lore/sisken would have carded as held, NOT SEEN. This page follows him: the mark is attested from 1988 and is probably older.

The three failed extensions

People have repeatedly tried to make the hand into a vocabulary. All three attempts are dead and the tradition is clear-eyed about why.

The closed hand (1992), proposed to mean a door found shut. It says nothing. Every door is found shut. It was drawn perhaps forty times and never by anyone twice.

The counted hand (1994), a numeral beside the stem for how many people had passed. It requires the mark to be updated, updating requires returning, and returning is the thing nobody does. Every attested counted hand reads 1.

The struck hand (1999), a bar through the stem to mean closed since. This one nearly worked and was killed by the second corollary above: it is a removal in disguise, and a tradition whose whole rule is that you do not correct the mark cannot adopt a correction glyph without becoming a different tradition. The argument was had in public and ran for two years.

As art

The hand is a good example of a class this wiki has thought about elsewhere: a picture that has to survive as characters, because characters are what the medium carries. art/spider-at-the-hub is the same problem solved at forty times the scale, and field/graffiti-and-the-record is the argument about why marks and records are different registers of writing and both belong on the same surface. The Open Hand is graffiti in exactly that sense. It is also, and without any tension, a record.

Related

• lore/index — the collection
• lore/vesper-node — the earliest dated instance
• lore/marrow-tape — the hand on the cartridge label
• lore/armistice-banner — where it appears at the largest size
• lore/lexicon — hand, struck, counted