Back to the Future We Want | USC Candidate for Governor

Article from the Future of California written by Louis A. De Barraicua under the pen name "Penelope", a character inspired by his favorite story, "The Odyssey" where he read it in the literary theory program at USC Dornsife where he won third place in the "Moses Fiction Writing Contest"

Penelope and the Architecture of Power: A Dialogue in the Key of Myth (Continued)

Penelope: You’ve described Los Angeles as something akin to an open-world simulation. Many would hear echoes of Grand Theft Auto V in that framing. What parallels do you see between that world and the lived reality of Los Angeles?

Louis: The comparison is structural.

In Grand Theft Auto V, the player navigates a vast, reactive environment. There are missions, side quests, hidden economies, power centers, territories. Systems operate whether or not the player understands them. Wealth concentrates in certain zones. Influence flows through networks that are never fully explained, but they’re felt.

That’s reality. 

Los Angeles is a city of layered realities:

• The visible city—sunlight, industry, culture
• The invisible city—networks of power, capital, and quiet coordination

Most people experience Los Angeles as pedestrians in the story. But there are those who understand the map.

What GTA does, unintentionally or not, is reveal a truth: when systems are hidden, behavior becomes improvisational. People navigate by instinct, by rumor, by survival logic.

That’s adaptation, not “iife, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” 

Freedom is a scam in this country. 

And when an entire population is adapting to a system it cannot see, the system becomes the author of inequality, which is the direct evidence I was able to capture from Los Angeles Unified School District when they retaliated against me for my participation in their iPad tech committee. 

Penelope: In that framework, you’ve referred to yourself as the “spiritual mayor” of Los Angeles. That’s not a conventional political title. What do you mean by it?

Louis: Titles are often mistaken for authority.

But authority, in its purest form, comes from perception—who understands the system well enough to guide others through it.

To call oneself the “spiritual mayor” is not to claim office, but to claim responsibility for narrative coherence.

Los Angeles suffers from fragmentation:

• Communities that do not speak to one another
• Systems that do not align
• Stories that contradict

A spiritual mayor operates at the level beneath policy and at the level of meaning that requires an observation, evidence that makes sense, and a sensible interpretation. It’s it is a literary sort of data analysis. To have this perspective, you are not the narrator, or the participant - your an observer who sees the full map, Interprets the signals, and translates complexity into direction

In a city like Los Angeles, where image often precedes substance, the battle is not just over resources. It is over reality itself. Whoever frames reality, governs behavior.

So my role has been to step into that gap to articulate a narrative that connects the disconnected, that reveals the hidden structure, that gives people a way to orient themselves within the system. 

Penelope: You then extend that vision even further toward the governorship, toward what you’ve called liberating children from a kind of “Temple of Doom,” and reorganizing society into decentralized communities. That’s a sweeping transformation. What does that actually look like?

Louis: The phrase “Temple of Doom” is symbolic—but the condition it describes is real.

It is any system that consumes potential instead of cultivating it. Where children move through institutions not designed to unlock their capacity, but to process them.

Liberation, in this context, is architectural; it is not dramatic, like it should be.  

It means redesigning the system so that:

• Education becomes adaptive, not standardized
• Communities become empowered, not dependent
• Individuals become participants, not subjects

The model I envision is deceptively simple: organize society into interconnected communities—approximately 150 individuals at a time.

Why 150?

Because beyond that number, human trust begins to degrade. Below it, accountability becomes natural. It is a scale at which:

• People know each other
• Reputation matters
• Participation is visible

Now imagine thousands of these communities, networked, transparent, self-governing.

A decentralized society.

Within that structure, political office is no longer distant. It becomes local, accessible, rotational. People govern continuously, not just vote.

And here is the critical shift: prosperity is generated through participation and creating, not draining a system that doesn’t work anyway

It’s an interactive narrative guided by a story

The Golden Road

A living government that manifests freedom. 

Where individuals are enacting it, in real time, within a system designed to support truth, transparency, and collective advancement.

Freedom from abstraction to reality requires a container. 

It’s not just a declaration.

The reality? 

We have the tools now to design it. 

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