I remember purchasing in 1990 the Reverend Ivan Stang’s High Weirdness by Mail, a précis of all the American fringe groups, UFO nuts, renegade ontologists, racists, conspiracy fanatics, and outlaws he could muster between two covers. It was a comforting and funny encyclopedia—to know that someone out there was, in fact, thinking differently, no matter how misguided.
Then came the public’s adoption of the Internet. It made the world of Stang’s book look like Roberts Rules of Order. The internet has made clear that vast numbers of citizens don’t buy the gilded bullshit our mass-media society offers; it continues to break down the defenses of the matured epistemology of techno-fascism. It is actively affecting the production of knowledge, and our ontology. Witness the 2012 hysteria, chemtrails conspiracy, crop circle hermeneutics, UFO cults, analyses of “Satanic symbolism” in mass media, fan fiction and obsessive celebrity websites, etc.
It is nutland.
Is this old news?
Varieties of mythology and counter-narratives have sprung up surrounding the 9-11 attacks, the 2008 economic crash and any number of contemporary events and trends...For instance, it took years for clear counter-narratives for the Kennedy assassination to emerge in popular consciousness; on September 11, 2001 they were being disseminated before the toxic dust had settled on Lower Manhattan. I remember a bogus Nostradamus quatrain supposedly predicting the event being read solemnly on-air by Pierre Thomas of ABC News within 48 hours of the attacks—but it was just a fake,written by some nut-job and gone viral with incredible speed. Conspiracists began parsing every mass-murder story within minutes and posting their counter-narratives within hours. The alternative histories mutate in their outlandishness.
The number of those who have opted out of believing any “Official Story” has increased with astonishing speed—a direct result of the Internet. But this will to disbelieve the Official Story as propaganda and advance an alternative was already present in the culture, awaiting a means of expression.
We have found that means.
To become informed under the old epistemology, you would consult a book written by a person who had studied allthe other books on a given subject. Each of those books had, in turn, been composed by scholars who’d poured over the yet older works—an ancestral network of knowledge that extended backwards in time. To compile an encyclopedia required an enormous battery of experts working a tremendous amount of hours. The information within them had to be as correct as humanly possible and great care was invested in making it so, because the books were expensive to produce.
But they would endure in a foreseeable future. A literate citizen living between the 16th and 20th centuries knew intimately the maxims of great writers—if you were lucky. You heard anecdotes of these mysterious, distant authors’ lives and actions—and that was about the extent of it. That writer lived on in your memory and your Imagination. You held an inner picture of them; you exercised your Imagination in forming a picture of them, and you invested in it an emotional aura.
It isn’t news that the Internet’s irrational, non-linear epistemologies are carrying over into the world the greatest consciousness shift since Gutenberg, but just contrast the authority of a bibliography (to say nothing of an encyclopedia) with the Internet: What was once only a few end-pages listing sources in a book is now a network accumulating changes in real-time, creating a stored knowledge ‘anarchive’ that is deleting and adding to itself countless novelties. By definition, such a thing can never reach an ‘end-state’ like that of the printed bibliography, nor can a virtuous consensus ever evolve it into the comforting stability of those pages. The changes are occurring too fast. For scientist and non-scientist alike, knowledge now has the nature of a time-saving palimpsest.
The Net has accelerated the exchange of knowledge and “democratized” it. Enough knowledge is now stored digitally that one could conceivably become an expert on one’s own in any discipline imaginable, if willing to give the time and eye-strain, intellectually and theoretically, and exclude the practice of a real-world apprenticeship.
It’s too early to tell but I’d wager our still-nascent optimism about the internet will go the way of television’s in its early years as an “educational tool.” It has surely spawned thousands of academic careers investigating its knowledge-mutating effects on our culture, its rogue philosophies and freak shows, the hermeneutics of memes and vector dynamics of virality.
Yet no-one’s willing to be the zookeeper for its ecological mutations. Google orders information by relevance, but who’s gonna put in a word for that which you can stumble across?
A world alongside ours filled with unverifiable facts and contextless torrents of information. The economic costs of deleting and/or sharing information have both been reduced to zero. We need not delete anything and we can share everything. We accumulate info that signify our least interests,despite the fact that we might never get around to reading it, causing a sense of anxiety over “non-closure” and open-endedness, a series of increasing loose ends we can never deal with.
It is also a plagiarism machine. The same bits of information pastiched into a thousand blogs, spun (or not spun) in differing ways. No attribution to the primary source necessary.
In its method of presentation, filled with blinking advertisements and links that lead only to more links, the web has introduced a type of complexity we are as-yet cognitively ill-adapted for.
And just at this time of political “falling apart” the internet has come along to accelerate everything to the nth degree and collapse space-time between us—while further separating our “mental spaces.” I fear that the disorientation this new world to which we are still acclimatizing ourselves is not some mere effect of information glut and linkamania and glowing rectangle fatigue—this vertigo is itself the new medium (or message it delivers) and in which knowledge will percolate unsettled. This psychosis of depersonalization is how knowledge will appear to us as a permanent feature of our ontological landscape. It is re-mapping our cognition.
Can it be that with our rapt hypnosis towards the screen and our digital selves that we are in the slow process of losing contact with what the physical means? People used to get out in the streets by the tens of thousands and mix it up with the riot police. They still do—in other countries. Their hands were forced and there came a time when they had to take it to the street. This has happened recently, sporadically, here in the US, but nothing like that of other countries.
We seem more content to take it to the information superhighway and stick a thumb out, hoping some van full of trailblazers will pick us up and spark the old spirit in our hearts to abandon that sitting posture and get out there.
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If there is one thing of which you can be certain when you post a creative work or your opinion of something there will be an equal and opposite reaction to it. There will be a self-appointed or credentialed expert there to debunk or deride it. For whatever motive, someone will want to quash your expression as misguided.
Expertise is still the defining concept of the credentialed specialist or universal professor, but thanks to the interconnectivity of the Internet mob the purchase this “epistemological snob’s” knowledge holds for them diminishes by the day. Just as the knowledge of the Latin-speaking priest of the Middle Ages was eroded by the secular managers and curators of all knowledge (the encyclopedists and philosophes of the 18th century), now the credentialed specialists’ authority has been dampened by that of the “network” and “mob” alike. The formal setting of the university has already been outmoded. The linear blackboard-and-discussion pace of the classroom is seriously handicapped alongside society’s computerized lightning pace, and the knowledge gained in a five-year PhD will be challenged and refuted by a thousand co-professional and faceless idiots alike. Of this one can be assured.
As more and more individuals have made their opinions known to us through the mirror of the Internet over the past twenty-five years, it has become quite clear that there is not a uniformity of belief and faith in the Enlightenment’s legacy.
The Net is also the place where we’re working out our neuroses. It is performing the role of the trickster upon our society.
And some people do not like the real-world effects it is having.
The webpage, single and finite in location, mirrors the atomism of the individual’s under democracy, and amplifies through repetition and copies the chaos of the world. The Internet represents and reproduces well the real-time interactions between individuals but we only can process them in a sequential fashion as we see one comment after another, answer critics ad nauseam. It creates, multiplies and reinforces our subjective differences.
We share a hunch of ours, an intuition, a vision, with others on the Net—but the peer-review process is a bitch. There are the trolls and autarchic skeptics and cowardly anonymous sadistic critics—but we, more importantly, also find those who agree and see what we see too, people we don’t even know who share our vision, in principle if not in the specifics. Moreover, we are compelled by the lure of instantaneous access to facts, anecdotes, and glosses that confirm any dim hunch or any stray desire for a particular (possibly imaginary) state of affairs to be real.
The Internet is not merely a network—it is a dream machine. We find what we desire, and others find it alongside us, and we create a hermeneutic of validation between most of us.
The spurious and fantastic finally has found a way back into knowledge. Do we need weird cults like we’ve never needed them before? Eccentrics in black cloaks leading people to their doom? Do we need more fire and brimstone visions of what has slowly being visited upon the planet? Raving preachers willing to get off the keyboard and back on the street corner soapbox?
We need to multiply our difference.
Maybe the Heaven’s Gate adherents’ souls did gather at that spaceship in the tail of comet Hale-Bopp. Maybe we need a shrine to them.