Category: Other Page 93 of 177

Is Twitter full of evil spirits?

On 15 July 2021

I had a dream a couple years back after getting pretty deep into some Twitter stuff, that the platform was inhabited by evil spirits. I turned the dream into a short story, here. The short story in its written form doesn’t mention that somehow these cruel, violent entities were part of the dark forces which haunt that platform.

While we could take it as metaphorically true, a symbol sprung up from the subconscious to explain the nature of some of the darker experiences one might have on the platform. But I’ve just as often wondered whether it might also literally be true… If insubstantial evil spirits that feed on human cruelty and suffering live anywhere, Twitter might be a compelling host environment for them. I’m not really an expert on evil spirits or anything. It’s just something that’s stuck with me as an image ever since having that dream.

I’ve tried recently to wipe my Twitter history. It never works fully, even with multiple deletion services. The profile breaks, and somehow pieces from the past drudge back up, and pollute the purity of the present moment again. Forcing you to relive past moments of anger, foolishness, or needless victimization. I’m as guilty of anyone of saying dumb things on social media over the last 20 years. I’ve tried to at least clean up after myself, and am relentless at this point about deleting old, unused accounts. Sever ties with the things that don’t serve you anymore, and all that. I’ve never read or watched Marie Kondo, but I think her stuff is about that.

Blogging, anyway, feels to me still after all this time, like one of the purest forms of internet communication. If the evil spirits of Twitter are nothing more than our own tangled, undeletables, then blogging still feels to me different. Somehow better. This is my platform. You can read it if you want. If you don’t, I don’t care. I’m still gonna write it. I’m not gonna chase followers, or follow traffic. Evil spirits can leave their baggage at the door. I’m home here.

What is the Hypogeum?

By Tim B.

On 15 July 2021

In Other

Many people on Reddit have been curious about especially why do I cross-post from other subs interesting videos of magical and pre-historic nature stuff. Even though I wrote this helpful explainer about things, people still want to know more. So here is a bit more on magic and the Hypogeum.

The term hypogeum, generically speaking comes from Greek, and means below (hypo, like hypothermia) earth (geum, like geo-caching). Subterranean or underground. Such natural, man-made, or augmented below-ground structures have persisted throughout human history since pre-historic times. There is one especially well known hypogeum, the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum in Malta. (The history & pre-history of Malta, and other Mediterranean islands are especially fascinating on their own.)

While those historic hypogea have much in common with these types of physical structures, the classical Quatrian conception of the Hypogeum encompasses what in other cultures have been called the Underworld or the Otherworld.

As Wikipedia explains about this global mythological phenomenon:

Comparable religious, mythological or metaphysical concepts, such as a realm of supernatural beings and a realm of the dead, are found in cultures throughout the world.^[1] Spirits are thought to travel between worlds, or layers of existence in such traditions, usually along an axis such as a giant tree, a tent pole, a river, a rope or mountains.

Thus, in what is known to us about Quatrian myth, the Otherworld that is the Hypogeum may be accessed via a physical hypogeic structure such as a basement, a catacomb, a burial mound, a cave, or even a closet. The Hypogeum is neither good, nor evil, but encompasses both; all Powers are present in the vastness of the Hypogeum.

The nature of the Hypogeum in Quatrian myth, however, is not as a Land of the Dead, as modern audiences might think of such a thing today. It was instead a place of vibrancy, regeneration, and magic. Something perhaps akin to the magical cauldron of Celtic lore.

The Hypogeum in Quatrian lore is populated by all manner of magical beings, who have truck with our world, and have throughout all of time. Hypogeans have visited Earth endlessly, traversing easily the worlds while the passageways between them have remained open.

The Hypogeum is thus home to an endless array of Monsters & Magicians, including theriomorphic and therianthropic varieties of each. The struggle between these two sometimes collaborating and sometimes opposing forces is represented meta-symbolically in the Quatrian Winter Solstice Festival of the Hypogeum. (archived)

Thus, when I post things on Reddit which have weird or unusual animals in them, it is in recognition of Quatrian myth which says that magicians and monsters can take many forms when they cross over from the Hypogeum into our world. To be on the lookout for them. And that they often choose animal biomorphs, either because it suits their essential magical nature, or because they see the human form as too corrupt to want to take on. (Though some still choose to, for a variety of reasons.)

Conspiracy & Enchantment (Doctorow)

By Tim B.

On 8 July 2021

In Other

Was excited last night to find Cory Doctorow’s blog entitled Pluralistic. And even moreso this article with some intelligent points about conspiracy theory culture. I find it fairly rare to see anybody saying anything terribly new or worthwhile on these topics, so here are some good bits:

“I was taken by Ming 1’s discussion of the role that “enchantment” plays in conspiratorialism – the feeling of being in a magical and wondrous (if also anxious and terrible) place. He says this is why “debunkers” fail – they’re like people who spoil a magic trick.
Ming 1 and the hosts talk about replacing the enchantment of conspiratorialism with a counter-enchantment, grounded not in the conspiratorialist’s oversimplification and essentialism, but in the wonder of reality.
Ming 1 analogizes his “counter-enchantment” to the “double-wow” method of Penn and Teller: first they blow you away with a trick, and then they blow you away with the cleverness by which it was accomplished.”

I’m not so sure that once people go down the rabbit hole of conspiracy that they necessarily will be “wowed” by the “wonder of reality,” but I do tend to agree with this idea of counter-enchantment. And that debunking fails in large part because it doesn’t speak the underlying mythological language which draws people into conspiracy thinking in the first place. There are real needs – and as he says, material conditions – which drive people into conspiracy stuff in the first place. And recognizing that the “magic” in all of it is part of the draw is an important first step in unraveling the whole ball of yarn in the first place.

You probably won’t like my book

By Tim B.

On 7 July 2021

In Other

Being a writer means having to be honest with yourself about certain things at certain points. At least enough to get them down on paper during the act of writing. Those certain things and points may vary from writer to writer, of course. But there is always that root connection to some kind of ground truth, or honesty… or at least openness to realization (however temporary) that fuels the whole enterprise of being a writer.

One of those ground truths I’ve managed to ascertain in my time at the grindstone of two-bit writerdom is that not everybody likes my stuff. Shocker, I know.

I would go so far as to say most people won’t, for example, like my book, if they ever manage to somehow even see it in the first place. It is weird and obtuse and niche and very much an experiment and a personal project. Plus it’s written in a weird style about mythological things and other bullshit that only a few small group of weirdos seem to care about. It means a lot to me, personally, but other peoples’ mileage may vary. A lot.

Just as there are many different paths to Quatria, there are vastly more paths leading away from it. Which is just as well, probably. For the Lost Books of Quatria that can be written are not the true Lost Books of Quatria. Those are lost forever.

That all said (whatever that is), I tend to believe that creators who tap into the deeply personal, if they stick with it long enough and sincerely enough, they will break through to the universal. I’m in a bad position to objectively judge whether I’ve accomplished such a feat as that in the eyes of others. That’s up to them. I’ve done it for myself though, and maybe a handful of others (if I’m lucky, and they weren’t just being nice). The book for me has opened up a new way of being in this world AND in the otherworld at the same time. It’s transformed my definition of reality, and transcended my own experiences. I can’t tell in a way what it is or even what the overall shape is or will be or should be. I can only follow the way, and document my own passage to get back to that place, that lost land of legend. Quatria.

New Age Is Definitely Postmodern

By Tim B.

On 6 July 2021

In Other

If conspiracy theory can accurately be called postmodern, and I’m pretty sure it can, then New Age can most definitely bear that label as well.

Rather than try to do the analysis myself, here is an excerpt from a more elaborate blog post on the subject from 2018: (go read the whole thing)

“The New Age Movement also rejects the authority of the established church, with its belief that spirituality is within, and that it is up to each individual to find their own path to inner truth.
The New Age Movement accepts relativism – there are diverse paths to spiritual fulfillment, and no one authority has a monopoly on truth, which fits in with postmodernism’s rejection of metanarratives.
The spiritual shopping approach of the New Age seems to correspond with the centrality of consumer culture to postmodern societies.”

Makes sense if you think about it!

Conspiracy Theory Is Actually Just Postmodernism In Disguise

By Tim B.

On 4 July 2021

In Assessment, Explanation, Feeling, Idea, Information, Item, Memorandum, Message, Other, Pattern, Problem, Reference, Research, Review, Theory

I should preface this by saying I don’t know anything “officially” about postmodernism outside of what I read on Wikipedia and Googling around (and a really stupid Jordan Peterson article I won’t link to). And the fun part is, that’s kind of postmodern itself. You can become an expert in five minutes. And then of course being an expert then makes you automatically untrusthworthy as a source. It’s ninja turtles all the way down, I tells ya…

Anyway, I gathered some of what I found already here, so I won’t rehash that all at length, but wanted to pull on a couple strands I didn’t cover there.

Namely, that Lyotard himself defined the postmodern as, “incredulity toward metanarratives.”

Anyone who has looked at conspiracy theory stuff online will know that people are always saying in a tongue and cheek way: “Don’t question the narrative.” That is, they feel oppressed by or don’t agree with whatever they perceive to be the “official” metanarrative.

What’s a metanarrative in the context of postmodernism? Also from Wikipedia: “a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience.”

So when they jokingly say, don’t question the metanarrative, they are literally demonstrating Lyotard’s own definition of the postmodern. They are incredulous of the metanarrative. They want to question it, to challenge it, to tear it down and replace it with their own version of the truth. Their own metanarrative.

This is a decent WaPo article by Aaron Hanlon from August 2018 about Postmodernism. I’ll pull out a few choice quotes. Regarding his book, The Postmodern Condition, it:

“…described the state of our era by building out Lyotard’s observations that society was becoming a “consumer society,” a “media society” and a “postindustrial society…”

Hanlon continues:

“This was a diagnosis, not a political outcome that he and other postmodernist theorists agitated to bring about.”
“[…] Right-leaning critics in the decades since Bloom have crassly contorted this argument into a charge that postmodernism was made not by consumerism and other large-scale social and technological developments, but by dangerous lefty academics, or what Kimball called “Tenured Radicals,” in his 1990 polemic against the academic left. At the heart of this accusation is the tendency to treat postmodernism as a form of left-wing politics — with its own set of tenets — rather than as a broader cultural moment that left-wing academics diagnosed.
“[…] This “gospel” characterization is misleading in two ways. First, it treats Lyotard and his fellows as proponents of a world where objective truth loses all value, rather than analysts who wanted to explain why this had already happened.”

So if we accept Lyotard’s original assertion, that postmodernism is characterized by mistrust of “grand narratives,” it unequivocally has that in common with garden variety conspiracy theory. But not only that, right-leaning conspiracy theory has reconstructed its own grand narrative where Postmodernism is the grand narrative which it mistrusts… Which is entirely postmodern in itself if you think about it. A subset of postmodernism attacking its own superstructure…

It would be funny if it weren’t so foolish and tragic. Because this kind of blatant self-denial creates a somewhat predictable (and boring) loop. Conspiracy theory denies it has anything in common with Postmodernism. It then projects its shadow contents onto the “other” & villifies the perceived differences. When, in actuality, they’re rooted in the exact same thing. The same social-cultural phenomenon that’s been happening for decades now, generations. Brought on by consumerism, industrialization, media-saturated soeiety, etc. Which is what the original theorists were observing happening all along, and which is still happening today. Nay, which is in utter free fall today. Hyperreality is on over-drive, and virtual & augmented reality haven’t even yet kicked in. HFS. Are w ever in for it!

I mean, no wonder people are clinging to any & every life raft they can find. I don’t blame them. I do blame the short-sightedness of getting bogged down in dumb political-territorial games & losing track of the larger phenomena at play though. When instead, we could be working on finding a way through it all. There is so much greater possible insight we could have into our shared condition than just fighting or getting sucked down into the quagmire of loser scripts that constitutes conspiracy theory outright.

The world is literally never going to learn, though. I’m old enough to accept that now. At least I got to write a nifty blog post about it.

Conspiracy Theory as Post-Modernism

By Tim B.

On 3 July 2021

In Other

Happened across this compelling quote on the Wikipedia metanarrative page:

Although first used earlier in the 20th century, the term was brought into prominence by Jean-François Lyotard in 1979, with his claim that the postmodern was characterised precisely by a mistrust of the “grand narratives” (Progress, Enlightenment, Emancipation, Marxism) that had formed an essential part of modernity.^[5]

It’s compelling to me because it neatly characterizes conspiracy theory, in terms of its “mistrust of the grand narratives” as a central defining characteristic.

Its interesting to me especially because there’s an undercurrent of contemporary conspiracy theory which claims to attack post-modernism itself as one of the “grand narratives.” But upon reading the above, it set things back into perspective for me. Namely, that conspiracy theory, where it does purport to attack post-modernism, does so by completely embracing its tools and methods.

Modern Dilemma of Communication

By Tim B.

On 1 July 2021

In Other

How do you communicate, write, or make art publicly, when everything you do or say can and will be turned against you one day? Justice in the court of public opinion may be swift and brutal. Not only that but everyone is just so inundated and saturated with endless communications and creations. All vying for their time and eyes and attention, and belief or behavior modulation. We have to tune it out just to survive, let alone hear the “still small voice” that drives the creative spirit in the first place.

Interestingly, never knew the origin of the “still small voice,” though had some vague idea it was religious (though that’s not quite the way I’m using it above). Not sure I’ve ever read that book of the Bible (Kings, evidently), but I have to admit this original excerpt is kind of cool just purely as epic poetry:

“…a great and strong wind tore into the mountains and broke the rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; ¹²and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice.”

The rest looks sorta violent, so I’ll leave that off, cause this was already a tangent to begin with. Or was it??

We see them as we are

By Tim B.

On 30 June 2021

In Other

I’ve never actually read any Nin (though I listened to some NIN in high-school), but this quote popped out at me once again for the hundredth time, as being entirely related to the hyperreal [found this time via]:

We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.
– Anaïs Nin

I’ve been watching & interacting with the phenomenon of conspiracy videos lately (some example selections here). This is kind of a hyperreal stew when you get right down to it. Or maybe like the offal from a slaughterhouse might be more accurate. It’s messy. It’s chaotic. There are bits and bobs of disembodied parts of stories floating around in it. Many of them putrid or toxic…

Conspiracy as an online subculture is of course remarkable, despite & because of all that. So much is wrapped up in it. A lot of really dark & bad, to be sure, but the kernel of something if not always good in its outcomes, then at least true as a human need is in it somewhere too. The desire to seek and ask questions, and seriously look for real answers. That’s actually noble at its core, and can be harnessed in more or less productive and impactful directions as a human or groups of humans. However, in actual practice, the art of online conspiracy artifacts is usually just this sort of weird & sometimes dumb thing of unqualified assertions and free association that people get into.

Which, don’t get me wrong is sometimes fun. I’m a writer & an artist. I love to free associate and see where things take me. To go along for the ride, as a maybe what if type thing.

How much of ourselves we put into it, I guess is the thing. How does belief even work? When we talk about projection, what is it we’re projecting? Conspiracy theories and fantasy are cut from the same cloth. Conspiracy is just like a very stilted and predictable subgenre of fantasy whose narrative mutates really rapidly as it gets networked.

It’s shitty, but it’s our modern folklore, to some extent. To ignore it or dismiss it out of hand, without gaining a real understanding of the dynamics or the needs that drive it would be a mistake for me as a writer operating already on the fringes of reality. I make my own projections into all of this. Have my own reactions and reads, my own deep dark weird needs and dreams that drive it all. I don’t know what to say about it all, and it really doesn’t matter. Because no one will read this far who isn’t carrying with them already their own assumptions, assertions, and associations about all of this. And most likely they made up their mind already.

One thing I’ve noticed at the platform level is viewer comments on YouTube within the same conspiracy subculture, and on TikTok are extremely different. YT commenters seem far more often out for blood. Hyper-critical and weirdly demanding at times, and eager to see through the veil as presented to them. Or so they seem to see it. TT commenters seem more like they want to see the veil. They are more along for the participation mystique aspect of things as presented, perhaps partly due to the rapid fire pace of browsing very short videos. At the same time, I feel less frequently that YT commenters are “playing along” in a sort of suspension of disbelief (rather than active belief) relative to TT viewers who very much do seem to be playing along. Probably due both to content & format differences, along with user base and other factors. Who knows.

Anyway, my emotional reaction, my gut feeling, after having seen a lot of activity on both platforms is that people online like & need to criticize each other. I am no different, I’m sure. One tried & true way to get engagement in a hyperreality campaign is to take the road of triggering the critics. Getting people to speak up, to correct. Directed provocation is as old as the hills. Counter-engagement is still engagement. Traffic is traffic.

To sum it all up, I guess I would say that the art of crafting a hyperreal conspiracy is, you want to leave plenty of room for the audience to speculate, to criticize, to question, to believe, to feel wonder, etc. To leave room for the broadband spectrum of human experience that makes up this hyperwebbed interworld we all live in now. And the algorithms will bring it to the people. And the people will basically do the rest. They will project any and everything into it, any which way they can. They will free associate, make assumptions, and state unqualified assertions as facts. Rinse repeat as a fractal. This is simply how online communication functions. You read something. You “like” it, you share it, you pose with it for status, etc. People reinforce each others likes. And that starts to count for more than anything. As it should be. As it shouldn’t be. And everything in between. In the future there are few answers, and also immeasurably more. We just have to ask the right questions, and undertake the right quality of investigations. Bring of ourselves everything we can, bring it to light, and examine that too. The conspiracy isn’t just outside. It is within. The hyperreal continuum.

Grotto-Heavens (Taoist mythology)

By Tim B.

On 27 June 2021

In Other

Source

The Grotto-Heavens and the Blissful Lands are worlds believed to exist hidden within famous mountains and beautiful places. They are earthly paradises that do not suffer from floods, wars, epidemics, illnesses, old age or death. Such imaginary places are usually known by the single compound, dongtian fudi. However, the two words originally referred to different things, fudi broadly meaning “paradise” and dongtian denoting an underground utopia.
One of the earliest descriptions of the Blissful Lands is found in the Baopu zi. The major mountains, says Ge Hong, “have gods of their own, and sometimes earthly transcendents (dixian) are to be found there too. Numinous mushrooms (zhi) and grasses grow there. There you can not only compound the medicines, but also escape war and catastrophe” (see Ware 1966, 94).

And, very interesting vis-a-vis Quatrian mythology:

Another feature of the grottoes is that, although each one is independent of the others, they are all linked in a network by underground passages called dimai (“earth channels”).