⟡ The Cease-and-Desist That Corrects Your Typing ⟡
“Please update your address book before we criminalise your persistence.”
Filed: 11 June 2025
Reference: SWANK/WCC/INBOX-MICROMANAGEMENT-671HHD
📎 Download PDF – 2025-06-11_SWANK_WCC_EmailCorrectionWithCeaseNotice.pdf
Westminster legal follows cease-and-desist threat with a correction of the recipient's use of the wrong Sam Brown email address.
⟡ Chromatic v Westminster: On the Bureaucratisation of Intimidation by Typo ⟡
Westminster City Council, cease and desist addendum, Michaela Smeaton, contact enforcement, procedural microcontrol, threat etiquette
I. What Happened
On 11 June 2025, following a formal cease-and-desist letter threatening injunction proceedings and legal costs, Michaela Smeaton, Interim Principal Solicitor for Westminster City Council, sent a second message. Its purpose? Not to retract the threat, clarify its scope, or provide legal remedy — but to inform Polly Chromatic that she had used the incorrect version of Sam Brown’s email address.
The message was devoid of legal substance. It merely demanded that future contact be routed to sam.brown2@westminster.gov.uk and not sam.brown@westminster.gov.uk.
II. What the Correction Establishes
⟡ Post-threat micromanagement: as if contact protocol were the real emergency
⟡ Performative control: maintaining dominance through the surveillance of syntax
⟡ Implied misconduct by mistake: using an incorrect email now framed as procedural breach
⟡ Administrative obsession: issuing inbox reprimands in lieu of substantive reparation
This wasn’t clarification. It was power-pouting via Outlook.
III. Why SWANK Logged It
Because no council should threaten injunctions with one hand while proofreading the complainant’s contact habits with the other. Because when institutions are more offended by your CC field than their own misconduct, the record demands preservation.
At SWANK, we archive not only formal threats — but the passive-aggressive choreography that surrounds them.
IV. Procedural Commentary
Contact correction follows threat of legal action, thus heightening tension rather than resolving misunderstanding
Disability access protocols ignored in favour of bureaucratic tone-policing
Underlying attempt to reframe documentation or persistence as vexatious via digital hygiene
Exemplifies ‘weaponised etiquette’ — correcting protocol to imply non-compliance
V. SWANK’s Position
This wasn’t compliance enforcement. It was inbox supremacy.
This wasn’t contact correction. It was semantic policing.
SWANK does not accept typographic infractions as justification for procedural hostility.
We will not be punished for using the wrong Sam Brown while naming the right misconduct.
This archive is not here to spell correctly. It is here to spell it out.
⟡ This Dispatch Has Been Formally Archived by SWANK London Ltd. ⟡
Every entry is timestamped.
Every sentence is jurisdictional.
Every structure is protected.
To mimic this format without licence is not homage. It is breach.
We do not permit imitation. We preserve it as evidence.
This is not a blog.
This is a legal-aesthetic instrument.
Filed with velvet contempt, preserved for future litigation.
Because evidence deserves elegance.
And retaliation deserves an archive.
© 2025 SWANK London Ltd. All formatting and structural rights reserved.
Use requires express permission or formal licence. Unlicensed mimicry will be cited — as panic, not authorship.