Teeming Links – August 23, 2013

Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Today’s invocation comes from author and cultural historian Mike Jay, author of last year’s The Influencing Machine, slated for U.S. publication in January 2014 as A Visionary Madness. The article’s tagline states the basic thesis, which articulates an uncanny experience, sensation, and intuition that we’ve all had with ever-increasing frequency and intensity in recent years: “Schizophrenics used to see demons and spirits. Now they talk about actors and hidden cameras — and make a lot of sense.”

Popular culture hums with stories about technology that secretly observes and controls our thoughts, or in which reality is simulated with virtual constructs or implanted memories, and where the truth can be glimpsed only in distorted dream sequences or chance moments when the mask slips. A couple of decades ago, such beliefs would mark out fictional characters as crazy, more often than not homicidal maniacs. Today, they are more likely to identify a protagonist who, like Jim Carrey’s Truman Burbank, genuinely has stumbled onto a carefully orchestrated secret of which those around him are blandly unaware. These stories obviously resonate with our technology-saturated modernity. What’s less clear is why they so readily adopt a perspective that was, until recently, a hallmark of radical estrangement from reality. Does this suggest that media technologies are making us all paranoid? Or that paranoid delusions suddenly make more sense than they used to?

. . . As the American screenwriter William Goldman observed in his memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983), in the movie business, nobody knows anything. It might be that a similarly bold metafiction could have been successful years earlier, but it feels more likely that the cultural impact of The Matrix reflected the ubiquity that interactive and digital media had achieved by the end of the 20th century. This was the moment at which the networked society reached critical mass: the futuristic ideas that, a decade before, were the preserve of a vanguard who read William Gibson’s cyberspace novels or followed the bleeding-edge speculations of the cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000 now became part of the texture of daily life for a global and digital generation. The headspinning pretzel logic that had confined Philip K Dick’s appeal to the cult fringes a generation earlier was now accessible to a mass audience. Suddenly, there was a public appetite for convoluted allegories that dissolved the boundaries between the virtual and the real.

. . . In the 21st century, the influencing machine has escaped from the shuttered wards of the mental hospital to become a distinctive myth for our times. It is compelling not because we all have schizophrenia, but because reality has become a grey scale between the external world and our imaginations. The world is now mediated in part by technologies that fabricate it and partly by our own minds, whose pattern-recognition routines work ceaselessly to stitch digital illusions into the private cinema of our consciousness. The classical myths of metamorphosis explored the boundaries between humanity and nature and our relationship to the animals and the gods. Likewise, the fantastical technologies that were once the hallmarks of insanity enable us to articulate the possibilities, threats and limits of the tools that are extending our minds into unfamiliar dimensions, both seductive and terrifying.

— Mike Jay, “The Reality Show,” Aeon, August 23, 2013

If you find such ruminations interesting and evocative, note well that the entire final chapter of Victoria Nelson’s The Secret Life of Puppets (2003) offers a lucid and fascinating discussion of the very same phenomenon, with references to the very same texts and authors. And it serves as the culmination of a book discussing the entire thing within the wider context of the Platonic mystical-esoteric philosophical and spiritual impulse that has been squeezing in through the back door of horror, science fiction, and fantasy entertainment during this ongoing age of Aristotelian scientific rationalism.

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Hacker Exposes Big Facebook Security Flaw — By Posting On Mark Zuckerberg’s Private Wall (The Huffington Post)
“Khalil Shreateh, a computer programmer in the West Bank, discovered a flaw that allowed him to post on anyone’s wall on the site, even if that user had strict privacy settings. Shreateh initially submitted his find to Facebook’s ‘white-hat’ program, a system that lets benevolent computer hackers tell Facebook about security flaws. . . . But when the engineering team didn’t seem to think the problem was real, Shreateh decided to prove that the bug he found did indeed exist.”

Fukushima nuclear plant facing new disaster (CBC)
“Tokyo Electric Power Company workers have detected high levels of radiation in a ditch that flows into the ocean from a leaking tank at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Japan’s nuclear watchdog said Thursday the leak could be the beginning of a new disaster — a series of leaks of contaminated water from hundreds of steel tanks holdng massive amounts of radioactive water coming from three melted reactors, as well as underground water running into reactor and turbine basements.”

Ex-pope Benedict says God told him to resign during ‘mystical experience’ (The Guardian)
Pope Francis’s predecessor breaks silence to contradict explanation he gave to cardinals when he stepped down. “Benedict denied he had been visited by an apparition or had heard God’s voice, but said he had undergone a ‘mystical experience’ during which God had inspired in him an ‘absolute desire’ to dedicate his life to prayer rather than push on as pope.”

Dr. John Mack Talks about Transcending the Dualistic Mind (Hidden Experience)
“Harvard professor Dr. John Mack gave a two-hour long presentation at the International UFO Congress in 2003. The title of his talk was ‘Transcending the Dualistic Mind.’ This is the audio lifted from a 12-part YouTube video of this presentation.”

Self-Fashioning in Society and Solitude (Harvard Magazine)
On crafting a liberal-arts education. “This is the image I want to leave you with: developing the ability to maintain ‘with perfect sweetness’ the independence of solitude — the integrity and wholeness of the self — in the midst of the crowd. Your education should give you the capacity to shape and sustain your selfhood.”

A Wilderness of Thought: Childhood and the Poetic Imagination (Orion Magazine)
“So much of this childhood ease with both the visible and invisible, what we know and don’t know — the pure sense of expectation and delight in the mystery of what is happening and about to happen — is not only a function of our mind’s ability to balance opposites through the equipoise that is our imagination, but also a way of experiencing the world poetically.”

The Writer as Reader: Melville and his Marginalia (Los Angeles Review of Books)
“Melville remains one of the best American examples of how every important writer is foremost an indefatigable reader of golden books, someone who kneels at the altar of literature not only for wisdom, sustenance, and emotional enlargement, but with the crucial intent of filching fire from the gods.”

Why I love . . . Night of the Demon (BFI)
“Paving for the way for later occult classics like Rosemary’s Baby and The Wicker Man, Night of the Demon is a spooky tale of witchcraft in modern Britain. With Jacques Tourneur’s film opening the BFI’s Monster Weekend, curator Vic Pratt explains why it’s a masterpiece of fright.”

Fans to celebrate horror writer H.P. Lovecraft with NecronomiCon gathering (The Washington Post)
Article inspired by this weekend’s convention in Providence. Many of my good friends in the Lovecraft world are there. Alas for those of us who can’t attend! “The mythos that Lovecraft created in stories such as ‘The Call of Cthulhu,’ ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’ and ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ has reached its tentacles deep into popular culture — so much that his creations and the works they influenced might be better known than the writer himself.”

Why Rod Serling Still Matters (Mitch Horowitz for The Huffington Post)
“The visuals of The Twilight Zone form a kind of collective generational nightmare. The remarkable thing about the man who created many of these episodes from 1959 to 1964, Rod Serling, is that the writer-presenter learned his craft not in the visual era but in the age of radio drama.”

Everything I Know About America I Learned from Stephen King (The Millions)
Written by an only child who grew up in an American Foreign Service family. “I [am] struck by how much of my conception of America comes from those thick books — what they said to me during that quasi-rootless time, and what they say to me now that both the vague internationalism and the natural solipsism of my childhood have mostly dissipated. For better or worse, I cut my patriotic teeth on the oeuvre of Stephen King.”

Eleanor Longden: The voices in my head (TED)
“To all appearances, Eleanor Longden was just like every other student, heading to college full of promise and without a care in the world. That was until the voices in her head started talking. Initially innocuous, these internal narrators became increasingly antagonistic and dictatorial, turning her life into a living nightmare. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, hospitalized, drugged, Longden was discarded by a system that didn’t know how to help her. Longden tells the moving tale of her years-long journey back to mental health, and makes the case that it was through learning to listen to her voices that she was able to survive.”