The first rule of the Institute of Uselessness and Inefficiency is that there are two Institutes of Uselessness and Inefficiency.
This dualistic structure follows from the IUI's mission of omnigenesis, a mission which includes, necessarily, the bringing forth of all possible Institutes of Uselessness and Inefficiency. The first IUI, the Institute whose structure and activities are described below, will die—either literally, through dissolution, or metaphorically, by devolving into usefulness and efficiency. The second IUI, the imaginal IUI, is eternal; it is the Form, the unkillable Seed from which an endless, purposeless succession of Institutes will germinate.
The second rule of the Institute is that there are no rules—or rather, that every rule, restriction, and role exists to be bent or broken, and indeed must be bent or broken. This radical permissiveness takes two principal forms. First, in the model of open pseudonyms like Luther Blissett and Karen Eliot, the "IUI" is a shared institutional identity, belonging to everyone and no one—which is to say: I am the director of the IUI, but so are you, and we may do anything, anything at all, in its holy name.
The second is an active encouragement of usurpation, heresy, and schism. In this respect, the IUI is akin to a virus, a kind of imaginal plague, leaping from mind to mind, mutating as it spreads, permanently integrating itself into its host like HIV (apostasy is impossible, there is no leaving this church). Once infected, every act—every step, every breath, every word, every touch, however useful and efficient—is transmuted into an act of uselessness and inefficiency; every act—even acts which are non-acts: mere consciousness, the bare fact of beingness—becomes a movement towards omnigenesis.
The Hasidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.