Funhouse Mirrors [Trenchant Edges]

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes, 48 seconds. Contains 1560 words

Welcome back to the Trenchant Edges, a Blog about fringe culture and how it’s conditioned.

I’m your host Stephen.

Let me tell you a story.

Technology warps perception

Once upon a time a person picked up a stick for the first time. Our distant ancestor discovered that the stick was an extension of their arm and an extension of their mind.

It changed everything.

Stick+Ape can do things Ape and Stick could not do by themselves.

Doubtful it was the first tool, but it was the first time one of us picked up a tool.

Over time the cybernetic system between primate and stuff laying around started to speed up. That hybridization between us and the things we build began to gain momentum. Every new insight could be expanded into newer insights.

Sooner or later we ran into culture and art and language and so on all the way through agricultural and industrial revolutions until the moment I’m typing this and the silent pause for you to read this.

For me it’s 5:18pm on Saturday the 17th of August. You could read this tonight or a billion years from now.

If it survives that long it will probably be identical to when I wrote it.

You’re welcome for the typos and strange constructions.

This is us. This is our story. A hyperobject relay race of billions of people over millions of years.

I’ve spent a lot of my time trying to understand the way that technology redefines how we see the world. It’s too complicated a subject for one person. It can be explored from a thousand angles.

It’s 5:22pm and I’m in the Eastern Time Zone and I’m in a bit of a weird mood.

McLuhan was only partially right:

All media work us over completely. They are so persuasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage.

It’s 5:26 and I hit replay on the song I’m listening to:

A one hit wonder I’ve loved since I first heard it from a band that’s about as hardcore as bands come whom I mostly don’t enjoy.

It sums up my mood.

The lyric:

Some will die in hot pursuit in fiery auto crashes
Some will die in hot pursuit while sifting through my ashes
Some will fall in love with life and drink it from a fountain
That is pouring like an avalanche comin' down the mountain

Even as I write this my mind reaches out to external objects, quotes, music, to make it easier for you to see where my head’s at.

I’m putting up flares.

They’re for me too. I’m going to publish this without editing it. In the future, like you, I will read it without the benefit of actually feeling what I feel. My memory can be hazy on good days.

Is it getting the mood across?

Probably not.

But I think it sets up what I want to talk about.

The hero of our story is change itself.

And we can see our hero most clearly in the distortions it leaves behind.

I write this, it’s 5:31pm, I wonder if trying to collapse the illusion that the writer is a coherent whole will get this across, and I write. I write to find out what I know and how much of what I know I can believe.

If change is the hero, does that make sameness the villain?

No.

There is no villain like that.

The hero generates its own problems and changes even more.

But we follow the traces anyway, in hopes of seeing omens to tell us if we should expect weal or woe.

I’d say “The End” but we both know that’s always a lie.

Where Am I Going With This?

This isn’t a newsletter about the newsletter. I’m trying to be done with those.

We will come back to Epstein and his evil bullshit by “popular” demand.

But today isn’t about him either.

It’s about you and me, dear reader.

Like the stick and ape we form a cybernetic system and are capable of more together than apart. You construct the meaning of these words as much as I do.

If we’re both doing our jobs there’s something a bit like telepathy that happens. It’s glorious.

For the moment you’re reading this, where or when ever you are, this is living culture again. Larger than the sum of its parts.

Neat.

Have you been well? I hope so.

I have not. I’m more seriously bedridden than usual and will be for the near future. That sucks but it’s not what this is about.

I’m trying to tell you about how the rate of change increases the distortion and we’re all trapped in in the spinning wheel and there’s no way to slow it down until there’s some major state change and I have no idea what to do about that.

The brain circulates electricity multiple times a second depending on how active it is. From about .5 hertz (1 event or cycle per second) to 100 hertz.

It’s hard to say how that translates into perception but it’s clear from neuroscience that the brain does a ton of preprocessing out senses to create a living sensorium, while patching over the holes and doing a lot of guessing where there’s doubt.

There are blank spots and limits to experience and the whole thing is kind of a hallucination. It’s just the best fit to current circumstances the brain can do.

I once read that when you pick up a stick, the brain doesn’t have a category for “Youplusstick” it simply lengthens your arm into the shape of the stick.

That fits every experience with a tool I’ve ever had. It takes a bit of work to get the senses right.

What I’m saying here is that every technology works similarly. Our sense of self shifts to one that can better accommodate the work.

I feel it now with the keyboard I’m using. It feels as much a part of me as my hands are. When I think about writing with a pencil there’s so much more friction, so much more uncertainty. I’m typing quite fast and without much error. I cannot see the keyboard.

Because, you see, I’m laying down and my laptop is on my chest. The keyboard is on my belly. And for regular typing I can do pretty well.

It’s a matter of groove.

I once tried to explain it this way: Coral are to reefs as humans are to technology. We build them and then they build us. It’s a two way feedback loop.

The feel of the keys is a part of me right now.

When I’m a reader like you they won’t be.

Self shifts with circumstances.

Old ideas of selfhood may not be able to keep up with a world that’s less information superhighway and more information big goddamn solar flare.

Solar flares are huge ejections of energy from stars into space. This is one of the biggest ever recorded by NASA. They can be massive and are enormously complex events.

How does one cope?

Break information down into simpler forms. Ignore as much as you can. Overestimate your confidence in your own knowledge. Treat anyone trying to shake you from these paths as an attacker.

Because that’s the only way to stay coherent at this scale.

There’s a lovely old saying: The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.

We’re at the combination dying old world and new world struggling to be born.

But, I wonder, isn’t that our natural state?

It’s real, real weird being the universe observing itself.

What I’ve been trying to do with this project since I started it about Terence McKenna is illuminate the present by pulling out influential bits of the past.

It’s a tricky thing: To write in public and be heard you almost always have to write with more confidence than you feel. To make bolder stances than you can perhaps truly claim.

That paradox has lead many “influencers” down silly and self destructive paths.

We’re trying to do something else here.

To see how our vision is distorted a little clearer.

You can never fully correct it, but you can accept it and be transparent about the distortion.

Through A Glass Darkly is a photograph by Gerry Kanonik

And here is the great truth: There are in fact people standing in the spots we can’t really see and using our limits to manipulate us.

And we can’t really orient ourselves against the world until we see that more than we do now.

We can’t stop to catch our bearings, we must adapt to changing.

Closing up

Alright.

It’s 6:20pm.

I haven’t eaten much solid food in a couple days (Makes things easier in the bathroom, tmi I know)

But we’ve got ourselves a conversation here and I don’t plan on shutting up. This janky mosaic I’ve written may be rubbish or a gem but it’s at least authentically what I could write in this moment.

The funhouse mirror only gets worse when you add in the intentional deception of advertising and intelligence work into it. But that’s the world we must face.

Be seeing y’all soon.

-S