My post-punk media-theory book, The Medium Picture, is now available for preorder from all of your favorite places: UGA Press, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, and even Amazon! Preorders mean more than you think. They’re very important for the life and success of the book. If you know you’re going to buy it, please consider snagging a copy early.
Preorders serve as an early indicator of a book’s potential success. They signal to publishers and retailers that there is interest in the book, which can lead to increased marketing efforts and larger print runs. For authors, preorders can be crucial in boosting their book’s visibility on platforms like Amazon. This can improve their sales rankings and increase exposure. On Amazon, preorders can affect the sales ranking before release, which might influence the platform’s promotional efforts. If you’re not sure, read on! Thank you!
Of all of my books, this is the one I’ve worked on longest and hardest. It’s the closest to my heart.
Here’s what other people are saying about it:
“Exactly the sort of contemporary cultural analysis to yield unnerving flashes of the future.” — William Gibson
“Like a skateboarder repurposing the utilitarian textures of the urban terrain for sport, Roy Christopher reclaims the content and technologies of the media environment as a landscape to be navigated and explored. The Medium Picture is both a highly personal yet revelatory chronicle of a decades-long encounter with mediated popular culture.” — Douglas Rushkoff
“A synthesis of theory and thesis, research and personal recollection, The Medium Picture is a work of rangy intelligence and wandering curiosity. Thought-provoking and a pleasure to read.” — Charles Yu
If you’re so inclined, you can post one these on the social medium of your liking. Link ‘em to your favorite online book outlet or just to http://www.themediumpicture.com
Aidan Fridman and the Filmmaking Club at the University of North Florida sat me down for an interview about writing and teaching and put together this little video. Check it out!
I first experienced Eli Pariser’s fabled filter bubble twenty years ago, before scrolling the fevered feeds of social media had such a hold on us. I didn’t have a television, but my ex-girlfriend had one stored in our garage. I pulled it out specifically to watch the 2004 election coverage on the news. George W. Bush was up for reelection against challenger John Kerry. For the two years leading up to this election, I had been in graduate school in San Diego. So, no, I didn’t know anyone who liked Bush, no one who didn’t make fun of him, not a single person who had nice things to say. To be fair, I didn’t really know anyone who liked Kerry either, but…
I sat there, by myself, in front of that small cathode-ray television tube, wondering what the hell I was seeing. How could this many people be voting for the guy I was sure didn’t have a single fan on the continent?
That’s what it looks like when your bubble bursts, and you’re exposed to the cold light of consensus reality. That’s when you realize you were duped, but by whom?
One of the first non-children books I read was a biography of P. T. Barnum. My middle-school mind was fascinated by his brash persona and his blatant sloganeering. “There’s a sucker born every minute,” he supposedly once said as he curated freak shows and curiosities and co-created the Barnum and Bailey Circus, “The Greatest Show on Earth.” Thankfully as a young impressionable mind, I didn’t internalize his con-man values. Maybe if I had, I wouldn’t need side jobs.
But the silver lining isn’t cynicism, nor are koans like that lost on the tricksters and trolls gatekeeping the path. Everybody knows everything yet fails to notice how far they have left to go and how little air they have left to breathe. That’s one of the defining features of a bubble: It’s sealed. Airtight.
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.” ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World
But we don’t need the internet to be blind to the blight around us, stuck not seeing the things about the world we find too disturbing to know, too annoying to think about, or just plain too inconvenient to consider. We do a lot of it on our own. We all wander through the world with blurry lenses, what the literary theorist Kenneth Burke called “terministic screens.” Have you ever learned a new word and then started seeing it everywhere? Burke would say that it was always there, but you were filtering it out, obscuring it with ignorance. Once it became a part of your terministic screen, then you started seeing it.
Outside the circus, Barnum’s resonant ideas rang much louder than simply hawking curiosities for cash. He served two terms as a Republican in the Connecticut legislature, as well as serving as mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Arguing for the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, the abolitionist Barnum said, “A human soul, ‘that God has created and Christ died for,’ is not to be trifled with. It may tenant the body of a Chinaman, a Turk, an Arab, or a Hottentot—it is still an immortal spirit.” In spite of his outdated nomenclature, the man most known as a 19th-century huckster had more progressive ideas than many of the current lot.
Now the terministic screens are actual screens, shiny rectangles, radiant with outrage. Now the most lucrative approach to news is anything that foments fear, anger, and resentment: any reaction is great, but rage is preferred and more profitable. Now the bubbles are smaller, stronger, and finding one’s way out is a lot more difficult. Any semblance of distortion your reality may have been teasing you with, easing your mind with a blur on the lens, a national election will quickly clear up for you. Your brain left broken, your shelter shattered.
I’ve been thinking about allusion, quotation, and sampling in the broadest possible terms. It’s led me both deep into the self and what makes up consciousness and way, way outward into what constitutes reality. Some of the concerns are epistemological. That is, how we know what we know. And some are ontological. That is, how we be who we be. I’m zooming in and zooming out to find the limits of the concepts of reference and recycling.
Before we get to Kathy Acker’s writing practices, let’s start with brief survey of other perspectives:
In his book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (Tarcher, 2006), Daniel Pinchbeck extends Heisenberg’s idea that observation influences the observed into a Hegelian word-view that consciousness constitutes the core of reality, as if the physical world and our perception of it are merely two sides of the same phenomenon. Taken wholesale, it’s not quite solipsism, but it’s close. The act of writing blurs the lines even further.
In his introduction to Cicero’s On the Good Life, Michael Grant writes,
Cicero strongly believed that the universe is governed by a divine plan… When he looked round him at the marvels of the cosmos he could only conclude, adopting the “argument from design,” that they must be of divine origin. He was happy to adopt this form of religion, purified and illuminated by the knowledge of nature, because it justified his confidence in human beings, which was based, as has been seen, on the conviction that the mind or soul of each individual person is a reflection, indeed a part, of the divine mind.
Cicero held a distributed view of religion, each of us representing one aspect of the divine. Evoking both Immanual Kant and Jakob Johann von Uexküll in her book Ecstatic Worlds (MIT Press, 2017), Janine Marchessault writes,
Building upon Kant’s philosophy, Uexküll maintained that the world of every living organism on the earth is different from that of every other organism because of the uniqueness of its sensory organs and its environment; each creature inhabits a unique environment that is uniquely experienced. The world is thus made up of multiple, overlapping environments.
So, on one side, we’re each the eyes of the divine, but if each of us sees ourselves as the center of our own universe, then we all live in universes made up of our own observations and experiences. It’s its own many-worlds theory, even if just by a slight shift in point of view. For the sake of the discussion at hand, let’s adopt the theory—even if only by analogy. When we write, we take on a point of view, make observations, and relay experiences. Now, what if we step outside of ourselves and borrow points of view, observations, and experiences from others?
“I’m not an enclosed or self-sufficient being.” — Colette Peignot, channeled by Kathy Acker in My Mother: Demonology
Kathy Acker in London in the late 1980s. [photo by Mark Baker]
Experimental writer and all around badass Kathy Acker would do just that. Her writing practice included variations on William Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s cut-up method, parody, pastiche, postmodernism, and forms that flirted with plagiarism. During a visit to RE/Search headquarters in 2012, her friend and ex-lover McKenzie Wark told V. Vale, “She would just read a book and re-write it. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she would just read Treasure Island and re-write it. You don’t wait for inspiration, you just get going” (italics in original). Wark met Acker in July of 1995 when she was visiting Sydney, Australia. The next year, Wark visited her in San Francisco. Their brief relationship, which largely existed between those two meetings, is chronicled via their collected emails in I’m Very Into You: Correspondence 1995–1996 (Semiotext(e), 2015).
Like everyone who came in contact with her, Wark was irrevocably inspired. Acker left no stone unthrown, no line uncrossed. Wark continues, “When I met her, she had three books… And she was writing Pussy, King of the Pirates (Grove Press, 1996). It’s one-third Treasure Island and two-thirds something else, and she would just read these three books and, almost at random, re-write them.” Acker explained her methods in a1990 interview with Sylvére Lotringer:
I placed very direct autobiographical, just diary material, right next to fake diary material. I tried to figure out who I wasn’t and I went to texts of murderesses. I just changed them into the first person, really not caring if the writing was good or bad, and put the fake first person text next to the true first person. And then continue to see what would happen. I used pre-Freudian texts because I didn’t want to deal with Freudian jargon. It was a very naive experiment at first. I was experimenting about identity in terms of language.
Like a mash-up artist or hip-hop producer, Acker would sample other texts, recontextualizing them among her own. It wasn’t a shortcut, it was an experiment, an exploration outside herself. Marchessault adds, “The environment described by Uexküll is defined by a multiplicity of overlapping subjective experiences of time.” Acker continues,
What a writer does, in 19th century terms, is that he takes a certain amount of experience and he “represents” that material. What I’m doing is simply taking text to be the same as the world, to be equal to non-text, in fact to be more real than non-text, and start representing text.
Acker was not plagiarizing or imitating but representing another’s text. It’s not mimésis or mimicry in the Aristotelian sense. A symbol on a map represents a particular building or destination, but it isn’t imitating that building or destination. As Acker added, “I didn’t copy it. I didn’t say it was mine.” She was smuggling in other points of view, other observations, other experiences, others. Hers was a proto-punk act of creative destruction.
In her Acker biography, After Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus writes, “But then again, didn’t she do what all writers must do? Create a position from which to write?” Architect of a different vector of bomb, one designed to level the pedestals of the literary canon, Acker could have proclaimed, “Now I am become life, creator of worlds.”
Bibliography:
Kathy Acker, Hannibal Lecter, My Father, New York: Semiotext(e), 1991. Kathy Acker & McKenzie Wark, I’m Very Into You: Correspondence 1995–1996, New York: Semiotext(e), 2015. Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology, New York: Grove Press, 1994. Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates, New York: Grove Press, 1996. Aristotle, Poetics, New York: Penguin Classics, 1996. Michael Grant, Introduction, in Cicero, On the Good Life, New York: Penguin Books, 1971, 8. Chris Kraus, After Kathy Acker: A Biography, New York: Semiotext(e), 2017. Janine Marchessault, Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopias, Ecologies, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017. Steven Shaviro, Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction About Postmodernism, San Francisco, CA: Serpent’s Tail, 1996. V. Vale, A Visit from McKenzie Wark, San Francisco, CA: RE/Search Publications, 2014, 21. McKenzie Wark, Philosophy for Spiders: On the Low Theory of Kathy Acker, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021.
The time-travel trope never seems to wear thin. Even a bad time-travel story has its moments. Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1962) was the first full-length novel I ever read, and something about it latched onto my sixth-grade imagination and hasn’t let go. Several of my favorite all-time stories involve time travel to some extent.
“Part of the fascination of time travel concerns the stark paradoxes that threaten as soon as travel into the past is considered,” writes the theoretical physicist Paul Davies in his 2001 book How to Build a Time Machine. “Perhaps causal loops can be made self-consistent. Perhaps reality consists of multiple universes.” These thought experiments are rife with unanswered and unanswerable questions, which are the very stuff of great stories.
Though the concept started in religion, it was popularized by H.G. Wells’ 1895 novella, The Time Machine. Mechanical time travel has remained a standard in science fiction ever since. According to James Gleick’s Time Travel: A History (Pantheon, 2016), H.G. Wells wasn’t trying to explain anything. He was just trying to come up with a “plausible-sounding plot device” for a story.
There are the plausible-sounding back-in-time explorations like the Back to the Future franchise (1985-1990), and the time-loop lunacy of Groundhog Day (1993), as well as the outright hysterics of Hot Tub Time Machine (2010) and Hot Tub Time Machine 2 (2015), but they’re not all winners. Project Almanac (2015) illustrates the inherent paradoxes of temporal travel and their intrigue while still being only an okay movie, but it falters in spite of the time travel rather than because of it. 2009’s Triangle also loops time into a muddy and often confusing story. Time travel can be such a cumbersome cognitive load that it’s difficult to get right in a story with much else going on and even harder to make feel real. And then of course there’s Justin Smith Ruiu’s ChronoSwoop app.
With that said, here are twenty-three of my favorite stories that feature time travel in one form or another.
“Time is a game played beautifully by children.” — Heraclitus, Fragment 79
Time Bandits
Jack Purvis, Malcolm Dixon, Tiny Ross, David Rappaport, and Craig Warnock in Time Bandits (1981).
The story that best captures my childhood fascination with adventure—and directly follows the feeling I got from A Wrinkle in Time—is Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1981). Reluctant to go to bed, a young boy (Kevin) is soon whisked away by a band of tiny time-traveling thieves who’ve stolen a map of the universe from the Supreme Being. Through portals marked on the map, they bounce through time, stealing whatever they can along the way. Though young Kevin has been longing for adventure, soon all he wants is to get back home.
Primer
David Sullivan and Shane Carruth in Primer (2004).
Written, directed, produced, edited, and scored by Shane Carruth, who also costars, Primer (2004) is a D.I.Y. garage sci-fi thriller. It got a lot of attention upon its release in 2004 for its bargain budget, but it’s an achievement at any price. Friends and engineering colleagues Aaron (Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan) build a box that turns out to enable them to travel back in time. The fact that they stumble upon this ability and then use it for fairly frivolous means (stock trades) doesn’t dull the chronologically jumbled plot or the inevitable unraveling of their relationship.
Palm Springs
Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg in Palm Springs (2020).
Right when you thought the time-loop concept was past tense, it comes back around again, just as renewed and refreshed as it is recurring. A destination wedding is the setting for the temporal hijinks in Max Barbakow’s Palm Springs (2020). Like the Harlequin in Harlan Ellison’s “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman,” who deliberately knocks a clockwork world out of its scheduled whack, Nyles (Andy Samberg) breaks everyone out of their routines and shows them a different way through the wedding day, over and over again, until Roy (J.K. Simmons) and Sarah (Cristin Milioti), er, shake things up for him.
Timecrimes
Karra Elejalde and Bárbara Goenaga in Timecrimes (2007).
Timecrimes (Los Cronocrímenes; 2007) capitalizes on its causal loops and suspenseful twists rather than wasting them. The film contains exactly four actors, and its action takes place over the course of about an hour and a half. In its handling of causality, Timecrimes is somewhere between Primer and the popular Back to the Future franchise of the 1980s, both of which feature extensive backwards time travel. Like Primer, which uses time travel as the pretext for the study of larger issues, Timecrimes evokes themes of voyeurism and ethics in addition to its time-looping structure and the subsequent questions of causality. [See my full write-up in the Econo Clash Review.]
Safety Not Guaranteed
Inspired by a classified ad that ran in Backwoods Home Magazine in 1997, Safety Not Guaranteed (2012) shows how the possibilities of time travel test our loyalties. All of the film’s characters are faced with decision points that didn’t exist before but that point back to issues they should’ve already processed: one applying for medical school, one tracking down his high-school flame, one seemingly above everything anyway. It’s a surprisingly poignant and effective movie.
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
The narrator in Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Vintage, 2010) is a time-machine mechanic. Charles (the narrator has the same name as the author) travels around in his TM-31 Recreational Time Travel Device, alone save his AI supervisor Phil, his onboard computer TAMMY, and his imaginary dog Ed. His mom is stuck in a time-loop, and his dad—inventor of the TM-31—is missing. That premise and those few details unfold into some interesting possibilities and wild predicaments.
Tenet
Robert Pattinson and John David Washington in Tenet (2020).
Before Tenet (2021), the writer and director Christopher Nolan was often criticized for being all head and no heart, but when he ventures too far into love (e.g., Inception and Interstellar), he falters. With Tenet, Nolan seems to stay with his strengths, one of those being the technical intricacies of time travel. Here it’s not so much time travel as we think of it but reversed entropy. So, within this ontology, if one wants to go back in time, one must travel through that piece of time backwards (i.e., you can’t blink back to last Tuesday; you have to go backwards through all the days since then to get there). This yields unique results and finds Nolan at the peak of his powers. Though someone described Tenet as “a puzzle box with nothing inside,” I say it’s well worth the puzzlin’.
The Shining Girls
The tangled timelines of Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls (2013).
“The problem with snapshots,” Kirby Mazrachi thinks, “is that they replace actual memories. You lock down the moment and it becomes all there is of it.” Kirby is one of the girls in The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes (Mulholland Books, 2013), a disturbingly beguiling novel that is now an Apple TV series in which Elisabeth Moss plays Kirby. Beukes’ easily digestible prose and gleefully nagging narrative betray a convoluted timeline and staggering depth of research. Drifter Harper Curtis (played in the show by Jamie Bell) quantum leaps from time to time gutting the girls as he goes. The House he squats in his helper, enabling the temporal jaunts. He’s like an inverted Patrick Bateman: no money, all motive. Where Bateman’s stories are told from his point of view in the tones of torture-porn, Harper’s kills are described from the abject horror of the victims. And the victims, who are all strong-willed women with drive and purpose, are only victims at his hand. Otherwise they shine with potential and promise. [Read my full review.]
Happy Death Day and Happy Death Day 2U
The babyfaced killer and Jessica Rothe in Happy Death Day 2U (2019).
Time-loops don’t get any loopier than this. One of the genius turns in the script for Groundhog Day, written by Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis, was their use of the Kübler-Ross model of the five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—as an outline for the loops. Christopher Landon’s Happy Death Day (2017) follows Tree (Jessica Rothe) stumbling through a similar cycle. In its sequel, Happy Death Day 2U (2019), a different person is stuck in the next day, and given her repeated previous experience, Tree steps in to help. And a third HappyDeath Day is on the way!
12 Monkeys
Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt in Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (1995).
A core thread of 12 Monkeys is Gaston Bachelard’s Cassandra Complex, in which one is given knowledge of the future, but is unable to convince anyone that the knowledge is true. Inspired by a 1964 French short called La Jetée written and directed by Chris Marker, Terry Gilliam expanded it in 1995 into a feature film starring Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt, Madeline Stowe, and David Morse. James Cole (Willis) is a prisoner in a decimated 2035, having been ravaged by a virus released in 1996. Cole is sent back to 1995 to try and find the source and stop it, but no one believes his claims of imminent doom.
The Peripheral
Chloë Grace-Moretz as Flynne Fisher in Scott B. Smith’s adaptation of William Gibson’s The Peripheral (2022).
After three novels set in the present, The Peripheral (Putnam, 2014) marked William Gibson’s return to the future. The story projects all of the hallmarks of cyberpunk both into the near future and much further afield. In the far future, what passes for a government has figured out how to open new timelines in the past (a.k.a. “stubs”) just prior to an apocalyptic event. As in 12 Monkeys, they’re trying to figure out what happened and somehow benefit from it, exploiting the past for gain in their present. The television adaptation predictably deviates from the novel, but is also pretty great.
The Story of Your Life
Logograms from Denis Villenueve’s Arrival (2016).
Leveraging a very strict interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (i.e., that the language you speak creates and shapes the reality you live in), the lead scientist in Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life,” Dr. Louise Banks (played by Amy Adams in Denis Villenueve’s 2016 adaptation, Arrival), starts to see the world through the language of the alien visitors, the heptapods. Their language, like their perception of time, is nonlinear, so Banks begins to experience her story, and that of her daughter’s short life, according to the alien linguistic sequence.
Source Code
Jake Gyllenhaal, director Duncan Jones, and Michelle Monaghan on the set of Source Code (2011).
What happens to one reality when we change another quantum reality’s outcome? Source Code, the system for which the movie is named, uses the last eight minutes of brain activity we all experience upon death to allow a person to experience a different timeline in another, compatible person (via quantum entanglement and “parabolic calculus”; As William Gibson put it, “The people who complain about Source Code not getting quantum whatsit right probably thought Moon was about cloning.”). The idea of the system is to be able to find out what happened just before a catastrophic event (in this case a train bombing), in order to prevent further events from happening (e.g., a massive dirty bomb set for downtown Chicago). Somewhere between brain stimulation and computer simulation, Source Code does its work. But Captain Coulter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) goes in for one last shot at getting everything just right (like Aaron’s repeated runs in Primer) and manages to manipulate more than the system is supposed to allow.
Kindred
Octavia Butler’s Kindred (Doubleday, 1979) keeps landing her self-styled protagonist (Dana) in the slavery-era of the American South. Though she meets some of her ancestors, her jaunts are unplanned and unpredictable, making this a harrowing read at best. Among many other things, Butler is one of the few authors to address the physical dangers of time travel, as Dana loses an arm during her first temporal trip.
The Hazards of Time Travel
Can you be nostalgic for the future? In Joyce Carol Oates’ The Hazards of Time Travel (Ecco Press, 2018), the 17-year-old Adriane Strohl is exiled 80 years in her past (1959), finds another expatriate from their present (2039) and thus begins a time-fraught, dystopian love story.
The Time Traveler’s Wife
Audrey Neffenegger’s debut novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife (MacAdam/Cage, 2003), has already been generative enough to yield a movie and a TV series. In another interesting take on temporal logistics, the time-traveler himself, Henry, makes his unexpected jumps due to a genetic disorder.
Donnie Darko
I’ve already written quite a bit about Richard Kelly’s 2001 Halloween myth, Donnie Darko, but it deserves mention for Kelly’s attempt at constructing a comic-book logic of time travel. As somnambulistic as it is, from the very beginning of the movie, something is off, and the traveler is drawn to fix it. He leverages help from unwitting friends, family, and authority figures to correct the anomoly. [Read my full write-up.]
This is How You Lose the Time War
Cowritten by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This is How You Lose the Time War (Saga Press, 2020) chronicles the correspondence between two lovers/enemies in a war over the fate of the universe. This epistolary novel is written from the highest vantage point on time and space I’ve ever seen. Its time travel is only due to its scale. It’s difficult to even describe the scope of it, but thankfully the drama between them is relatable to all.
Before I Fall
Lauren Oliver’s Before I Fall (HarperCollins, 2010) puts a YA twist on yet another time-loop story that flows through different stages of purpose and grief. Seventeen-year-old Sam Kingston keeps having to redo February 12, “Cupid’s Day,” and has to keep doing it until she gets it right. Sam approaches the repeated day in ways she wouldn’t normally, surprising her friends and family. Like the novel, the movie—starring Zoey Deutch as Sam—is somehow both dark and uplifting.
Recursion
Blake Crouch has written several compelling stories: Dark Matter (Ballantine, 2017), the Wayward Pines trilogy (the basis for the TV show of the same name), and Upgrade (Ballantine, 2023), among others, but none ignited my mind quite like Recursion (Ballantine, 2020). A billionaire-funded neuroscientist doing memory research on one side, and a detective investigating False Memory Syndrome on the other. When they meet in the middle, well… Things get crazy.
Paper Girls
Brian K. Vaughn and Cliff Chiang’s Paper Girls (Image Comics, 2015-2019) tells the story of four girls on their paper route one morning in the 1980s, who suddenly find themselves in the middle of an intergalactic war being fought across time. There’s an Amazon TV show of this one, too. It’s like Stranger Things but better in every way.
Detention
Joseph Kahn’s 2011 genre-melting thriller Detention is a wild, wild ride. It’s like The Breakfast Club meets The Faculty meets Back to the Future. Through their school mascot, a giant grizzly bear (the time “machine”), secrets about these misfits in detention, the principle who put them there, and their collective past are revealed. Oh, also one of them is a serial killer.
The Future of Another Timeline
Once it’s possible to repair the past, which revision remains? Bouncing between 2022 and 1992, The Future of Another Timeline (Tor, 2020) by Annalee Newitz explores the very notion of what time and history actually mean when you can travel through one to change the other, yet also how everything is connected to everything else.
“Just as the river where I step is not the same, and is, so am I as I am not.” — Heraclitus, Fragment 81
In November 1993, a few months after I first moved to Seattle, I went to see Washington, DC’s Tsunami at the late, legendary RKCNDY. It was a magical time in a magical place, and I was marveling as the names on record sleeves and magazine pages emerged in the flesh. At the merch table, I met Fontaine Toupes of Versus (who signed my Versus 7” “Seattle ain’t shit!”), my friend and collaborator to this day Tae Won Yu, as well as Kristen Thompson and Jenny Toomey of Tsunami and Simple Machine Records.
Toomey is a towering figure in 1990s punk rock, playing in bands, running a record label, and so much more. She and Kristen Thompson, put out The Introductory Mechanic’s Guide to Putting Out Records, Cassettes, and CDs [.pdf link], which was repeatedly updated with new and better resources over four editions throughout the 1990s. After releasing nearly 80 records, Simple Machines ceased operations in 1998.In the meantime, Toomey has continued quietly trying to figure out how technology can serve music and musicians. She was the founding executive director of the Future of Music Coalition, and she worked in various roles at the Ford Foundation. She’s also working on a book about all of this stuff. In her recent op-ed piece for Fast Company, she recognizes a pattern repeating. Likening generative AI to the file-sharing wave of the early 2000s, she writes,
The potential bait and switch of the tech world today is worryingly reminiscent of the early 2000s. While new technology always promises a flashy quantum leap into utopia, it instead regularly delivers opaque systems that streamline mistakes from the past. Throughout 2023’s frenzied AI debates, my feelings of déjà vu have become undeniable.
After years working behind the scenes, Jenny Toomey is thankfully emerging again.
Roy Christopher:When the impact of the internet started to dismantle the music industry as we knew it, many touted it as a new DIY revolution, returning the means of production to the people. What did you see?
Jenny Toomey: I didn’t see it flatly that way. In the same way that I didn’t feel like punk rock solved the problem of consolidated corporate media. I mean, if you look back at the hippie movements, you can criticize some of the hippies as being sort of just hedonist utopic people in denial about the systems in the world and just rejecting them (drop out), and then you can think of other ones as pragmatic utopian people who say that if we’re going to live a different way, we have to model how to live that different way which is more “drop in” or Whole Earth Catalog or Our Bodies Ourselves or eventually DIY punk.
That’s the element of counter culture and punk that I really liked. Not the flashy nihilism of tearing the old down, but rather the joyful enthusiasm of building the new. Asking that increasingly unasked question, “Why are we consenting to so many things we don’t agree with? And what would it look like if we tried to build different systems to give us more and better choices?” So, putting out your own records is a piece of it. A nice piece… nothing wrong at all with putting out your own records, but it’s not going to solve the problem of highly concentrated corporate media systems in late-stage capitalism. It does offer you a way to not completely condone what you abhor. Simple Machines was very much about that… grasping at, or rebuilding a small patch of agency.
With Future of Music, it was a little bit more trying to bridge those two things, saying we’re actually at an inflection moment where the systems are going to change, and if we could model more open systems, more transparent systems, systems that artists had more say in the design of and more benefit from, then we might get both things. We might get to avoid the systems we hate while actually contributing to building new systems that we could love.
And for me, there was an idealism to it that came out of coming from DC and a kind of can-do quality, that kids that were my age that grew up in DC felt empowered—to DIY, to make your own thing. But we were also practical and pragmatic, because we’d done some of this before. When we put out The Guide to Putting Out Records, and we saw that it took on both of those problems at the same time. First, the guide let novices get on third base and be in charge of their own punk-rock destiny and put out their own records because we spelled out the recipe. But the advice and guidance in the guide wasn’t neutral, it embodied certain values. It looked across the scene and modeled better behavior and therefore it influenced how the scenes functioned. So, if a pressing plant was using bad vinyl, we wouldn’t recommend them, and if a distributor wasn’t paying independent labels, we would take them out of our recommended list of distributors, and if somebody like Barefoot Press was doing great work, we would enthusiastically promote them. It was a way of putting our thumb on the scale to amplify the kinds of behaviors and values and relationships and systems we wanted built.
RC:That was just the beginning though, right?
JT: Yeah, that’s what we were trying to do initially, before we started the Future of Music Coalition. We were just trying to figure out the best path forward for our own catalog. Kristin Thomson from SMR and Tsunami and I started the work as a project we called “The Machine,” which was basically a blog on Insound’s website that allowed us to share whatever we were learning about the music/tech space in real time. We would just sort of reflect on all of the different music distribution systems that were reaching out to Simple Machines as potential partners because there were like dozens of different companies that were all starting up. They all had different business models. Some would buy your copyright outright, and some would license it, and some would encrypt your music, some would stream, some would download. We had no clear idea which of these options were better or worse. So, a lot of what we were doing was trying to understand the trade-offs and make our best recommendations based on guidance from different experts that we ran into in our travels. Very often, once we’d published something, other experts would come forward and disagree with some aspects of what we’d written and that back-and-forth would allow us to refine our recommendations and make the information even better.
We thought, let’s just do this until we can figure out what we want to do with our own catalog. Because we had like 80 releases and we had no idea what to do with them. Ultimately the music tech bubble began to burst, companies began merging and going out of business and getting sued by the major labels and we realized that that the emerging system wasn’t solid enough for us to recommend any of these companies. That’s when we knew we needed to set up an advocacy group. We couldn’t just recommend a good and trustworthy company, because that company would be out of business in a few months. Everything was in flux. Instead we realized we needed to advocate for a set of systems.
RC:That systems mindset is so important, zooming out enough to see the context of the changes you can and can’t influence.
JT: We believed that instead of just waiting around until everything was set in stone according to the desires of the most powerful companies, we could identify more artist-friendly systems we wanted to advocate for. That’s what it was about. And FMC served quite a useful purpose for a number of years, but then the bubble burst and the collapse of the marketplace put a lot of the idealists on their back foot and the concentration of control began to reestablish itself until it turned into the system we live with now.
It’s hard to remember the level of constant polarized propaganda that we live within now was once uncommon. Today controversial issues are sorted into a quick binary, and everybody finds themselves on one team or another in relation to most things. But that didn’t really exist back then. The internet started as a way to let a billion flowers bloom but ultimately played a starring role in fomenting that polarization. Just around the time that I left Future of Music. It felt like the copyright issues had become a total religious war. There was no discussion about the merits of the different opinions, and you were either on the team that were Luddites or you were artist-hating thieves. It was all caricatures, and in many cases the only ones who benefited from the public battles were the companies.
One of the main reasons I went to the Ford Foundation was to work on these questions at a systems level… I felt like we were not going to be able to build better systems if we were just focused on music. Music was the canary… It was the first industry where we could see the tech and society clashes, the trade-offs, the stakes. The systems that we were developing out of the music battles were on a path to impact all the other systems of journalism and publishing and film and democracy and everything else… as we’ve seen.
The systems that we were developing out of the music battles were on a path to impact all the other systems of journalism and publishing and film and democracy and everything else.
We forget that in the time before the internet there were public interest battles that led to rules that regulate newspapers, radio stations, TV…constraining the behavior of those who control the information pipelines. People fought to establish community-input requirements, ownership limits, and regulations to balance thought, constrain bias and propaganda. All sorts of rules and regulations existed for traditional media. But very few of those protections were extended clearly into the internet environment. Or if the rules did theoretically extend into this internet environment, it wasn’t clear how they would be enforced and by whom. So both the legacy media and the emerging tech companies went on the offensive and were able to use this moment of public disagreement and confusion as a fig leaf or fog behind which they successfully advocated for reduced regulation altogether. And that’s the world we’ve been growing accustomed to over the past 20 years. But it didn’t have to be this way.
Actually, the reason I started writing about music recently is because I feel like that same land-grab is happening all over again in the AI space. The optimism that I felt in the 90’s about the potential for the internet to transform society into a better place has disappeared and been subsumed into a kind of overwhelming powerlessness and pragmatic nihilism. An acceptance of how little protection we can expect from these surveillance and consumption systems that have basically threaded themselves through all of society. So, the piece I wrote for Fast Company was just trying to remind people of a time back when it was a smaller set of problems, focused on music. In retrospect it’s clear to me that we didn’t have to make the choices we made, and we shouldn’t have trusted the companies on either side to protect us because it’s now absolutely clear that they exploited us. And maybe we can learn something from that.
RC:Here’s hoping!
JT: I think part of this problem is now everybody is so dependent on the tech systems that validate them with likes and attention we’ve all come to think of ourselves as a brand, and everything’s intermediated in that way. There is so much time spent on navigation and optimization… that somehow if we do everything right, two-factor authentication and just the right amount of self-promotion and other bootstrappy bullshit, we can win the rigged casino game. It’s very strange to me, but we also just assume these bad systems are the best we can possibly have and that they are permanent. They don’t have to be, but we’ve lost the outrage and the imagination that we’d need to remake them.
RC:That’s one of the things you’ve been able to see very clearly, is that none of this is permanent. It’s going to change again.
JT: Right, right.
RC:There seems to be something fundamental about abandoning analog practices for their digital equivalents—or simulations thereof—that puts human authenticity in peril. Do you think that there’s a distinction there that’s meaningful?
JT: Yeah. The vertical integration of everything and the co-mingling and codependence of information, creativity, community, labor and the systems of delivery, commerce and connection all through a self-dealing commercial gateway mostly designed by technologists who never took a humanities class… It’s disgusting and it’s obviously tremendously dangerous.
You and I are a bit older and technology was perceived in a completely different way when we were growing up. So, to give you a personal example, I very, very reluctantly took a typewriting class in junior high because I believed I was going to be a powerful woman who was never going to work as somebody else’s secretary. The association to typing back then was clerical. There was a status association to whether you did the “thinking work” or whether you did “technical work” supporting the thinkers. And in the 80’s women were still very often seen as the supporters and not the thinkers. So, as a feminist, I felt reluctant to even learn typing because typing was associated with a service role I didn’t see for myself.
When the internet came, that shifted dramatically. If you couldn’t type or understand the value of typing as the gateway into the internet you were gonna seem outdated and square. I remember my mother left a pretty powerful job running a large non-profit. When she was trying to get her next job she had grown fond of saying, “I don’t even know how to type.” It was a badge of honor… a marker of her status as the type of woman who isn’t a secretary but who has a secretary. And I remember saying to her, “If you want to get your next job please don’t ever say that out loud again.” In the space of maybe five years “up” became “down”… and that’s just one example of how dramatic the shift was and how opaque and slow the cultural catch-up was for so many people, particularly my generation and those who were older.
RC:There are all of these invisible boundaries we find each other behind.
JT: When I went to Ford initially, that “othering” of tech was commonplace. Almost every single person who was recruited to run programs came from the academy, organizing, legal advocacy, policy advocacy—respected careers on the humanities side. Many of them carried with them bias-against, or incredulity or aversion-toward, tech as compared to the disciplines they studied and revered. This meant that they were incurious and had a gap in understanding just how thoroughly tech was transforming the landscape where they did their work. So, the smartest people, the ones with the power to stop it, sat back without contesting much of what the tech companies were doing till it was too late.
And it wasn’t until much, much later when I had a different role at Ford that we did research that allowed us to see that even the universities who were best prepared to graduate hybrid tech-experts, were actively siloing the tech away from the humanities. And we can all see how that turned out. So many of the clunky technical systems we are forced to use everyday (and live within) were designed by guys who were solving a technical problem on a deadline in a humanities-less void.
So, I think my major point is this one: We didn’t have to go into an environment where the internet was completely unregulated, because when you scratch the surface of the historic media rules—the rules that we have for telephones and the rules that we have for privacy and the rules that we have for equal opportunity and thousands of others—all of these rules should be enforced within the internet environment. But the advocates and the leaders who ran the nonprofits or the regulatory agencies that advocated for establishing and enforcing those historic rules were scared of tech, or functionally blind to tech. This meant that they functionally ceding enforcement. They back-burnered governance for long enough to normalize a digital world that lacks public protection. And while that was happening the tech companies became more powerful than the robber barons, and we all became complicit and dependent upon the systems they control.
RC:Is there a way out of that?
JT: There have been some moments of protest over the past 20 years, where artists have tried to demonstrate the value of their labor and their agency by saying, “I’m not going to be in your Spotify, or I’m going to build my own internet player that’s going to be artist controlled” or whatever. But in the meantime as the market becomes more streamlined and consolidated the stakes have become existential. The centralization of recommendation through the music players actually determines who can be seen as a legitimate artist and who is invisible. What’s worse, as the markets become integrated, how you are seen or “not seen” in those environments determines other things… whether you get enough attention to be paid any royalties whatsoever from Spotify… whether a venue will book your band without a certain number of likes or followers etc. We couldn’t even get a professional Spotify account for Tsunami if we didn’t have a Tsunami Instagram page to link it to. It’s way worse than I expected where all but the most powerful artists are forced to shop at the company store just to be in the game. And each post those artists reluctantly put out there to try to develop an audience is just more labor and content extracted to sell ads and train large language models, generating profits they will never share. So you go to Bandcamp to keep it real in the indie-sphere and that platform is actually owned by a Video game company and then they sell it… and you have to wait for the other shoe to drop… So, that just another reason to work with the largest companies that might not go away. Yuck.
I also wonder if that desire to be outsider and not self-promoting and secret is going to reestablish itself as a value in the same way that punk rockers said, I’m not going to look normal. I’m not going to sing pretty.
Tsunami: Jenny Toomey, John Pamer, Kristen Thompson, and Andrew Webster.
Kristen Thompson, who ran Simple Machines with me, shared an album where all the song titles were in Morse code, which of course makes it impossible for any of the algorithms to recommend their songs. There’s no way that this was an accidental choice, and that kind of decision does seem a little bit like an art project or as like a way of getting a different kind of attention because it’s so different from a word where constant self-promotion is just a precondition of being a creator or getting a next job or whatever we have at this moment.
So, I really don’t know how we disentangle those things. Maybe you don’t want to be on LinkedIn, but where do you get your next job? That’s where everyone’s looking. Maybe you don’t want to self-promote on social media, but if you’re going to try to do a tour, more and more often the clubs determine who they book based on numbers of followers.
RC:You’re speaking my language now. These are all problems I’ve been having.
JT: It’s that centralization of attention. I don’t think it has to be that way. We could have chosen a different way or built different kinds of technologies that would’ve allowed us to maintain agency, privacy and diversity… lots of smaller pockets of success coexisting… and we would’ve had more competition in those environments, and we would’ve had accountability because they’d be fighting for your business. It sucks that for the last 20 years, the people who were in charge ignored technology, and then—in my book I talk about it like the stages of grief. There was a very long period of denial and then, you know, bargaining and rage and negotiating, but so many of them still haven’t gotten to the place of acceptance. And when you’re in acceptance, you’re like, “Okay, the world we were in before, it’s over. My partner is dead now. I can’t have another vacation with them. It’s over,” you know? And now I’ve accepted this, and I am in my next life and it’s sad… but acceptance means I can begin to build a real life because anyone that pretends we’re living in the previous world is in denial.
I don’t know if that makes sense, but that’s certainly how I see it.
RC:Oh, it does…When I talked to Ian MacKaye, he mentioned the fact that punk was the last youth movement that used paper, which just struck me as such a brilliant insight that I’d never really thought about. He’s talking about zines and flyers and stuff. What do you think about that idea of paper being punk?
JT: I think paper contains the human gesture in a way that many forms of digital creativity does not. It almost always involves a greater level of scarcity. You could have the gesture of a human image or a human choice in someone who makes digital art, but it’s immediately replicable, you know? So, there’s not that scarcity in the same way—like people trying to create the artificial scarcity through the Bitcoin type stuff and those whatever they were called that everyone was talking about—
RC:NFTs?
JT: Yeah, but there’s something else about the pace of paper. It’s slower. Tsunami’s putting out a box set and Simple Machines putting out a box set with Numero, so I was forced to look at my archives. I have like 50 journals, and I had something like 17 suitcases packed with ephemera and letters—even before punk rock: I have a whole suitcase of all of my junior high school and high school correspondence, and it’s absolutely transformational.
RC:Absolutely.
JT: In almost all of the letters that I received in junior high school and high school people used fake silly names. They drew art on every envelope. They created collages. They were poets. There’s poems in there. There’s pictures in there. We were using every bit of our creativity to communicate with each other. And soooooo much time. These letters took hours. I can barely be bothered to write a full email these days or to listen to a voice message. Our level of attention is so fragile. It’s just destroyed. I had such deep attention, but everything is constantly distracting and pleasing us with little dopamine hits. We’re always jonesing now.
I also think that there was more of a barrier in some ways, too. There’s a privilege barrier. You had to have enough time to write all those letters, or the ability to cobble together a group house and enough part-time jobs that you had enough resources to be able to go on tour. So, when I think of how inexpensive it was to live when I was younger and how expensive it is now, it’s really shocking to me, but aside from that there was also a physical and time barrier to getting things out in the world. There were a lot of great bands that just didn’t have the work ethic to put the 30 to 50 postcards together to send them out to the clubs to try to get shows, because that’s how we got our shows. You wouldn’t waste money on a phone call. You sent a postcard to a club suggesting they might want to book your band without any ability to hear you at all.
RC:This is a whole other world.
JT: Part of what I really liked about working at Ford was we’re funding these brilliant visionaries who are getting the grants. They are the people who do the work, and they should have the platform and the attention to use their brilliant voices and it’s been a privilege to amplify those voices. But it also does mean that except in a few very specific forums, I’ve put my voice away for 16 years, and a part of that op-ed was also about beginning to think about, Well, what does Jenny’s voice sound like,16 years later?
RC:Exactly.
JT: That’s why I’m trying to write a book as well, but it’s really hard to write a book. I don’t know how you wrote nine books.
RC:Well, I’m glad to help in any way that I can.
JT: I mean, what I should be doing is not an interview with you but writing. I’m supposed to be writing every day, and I get to do it a couple days a week.
Constraints—self-imposed or otherwise—can be a powerful tool. I have argued in the past the merits of pulling back, but John Oakes’ new book, The Fast: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Promise of Doing Without (Avid Reader Press, 2024), digs deeper into the history of abstinence of all kinds than I’ve ever dared. It’s erudite and well researched yet highly readable, historical and thorough without being unnecessarily verbose, and instructional and inspiring without the inherent condescension of a self-help manual.
John has been a friend and a supporter of my work for years now, so it’s an honor to turn it around and talk about his here.
John Oakes reading from The Fast. [photo by Gordon A. Gilbert Jr.]
Roy Christopher:You found an angle that cuts across so many other concerns. How did you arrive at fasting as the topic for this book?
John Oakes: It was something I fell into. Post-Trump—or what I thought was post-Trump—I decided to do an intense fast as a curative. A long shower wasn’t enough, celebrating wasn’t enough, meditation didn’t work… I needed to purge myself. A long fast seemed just the ticket, and it more or less was. And during a long fast (this was a week) you find you have a lot of free time, not buying/not preparing/not cooking food. I became curious about what was happening to my body—around Day Three or so you begin to feel a bit stoned, because of the various chemicals coursing through your body—and I searched for details. And then I started thinking about the role of fasting in religions, philosophy, and politics. The entire concept of pulling back appeals to me—and there wasn’t a book out there that combines these concepts. There are precisely a zillion how-to books on fasting that tell you it will cure everything from depression to old age, and a handful of academic books that look at aspects of the practice, but nothing that brought it all together. Plus, I like the idea of bringing a political perspective (the hunger strike and boycotts) to the discussion. Fasting has been integral to various political movements, from Russian civil rights activists in the 19th century, to suffragists and suffragettes, Irish and Indian patriots in the 20th century, to eco-activists in the 21st. Africans in the Middle Passage went on hunger strikes on such a regular basis that an instrument known as the speculum oris came into use by slavers to ensure force-feeding.
RC:Is there an underlying statement or message in The Fast that fasting is the path to?
JO: I would prefer to think I am simply reporting on the phenomenon and its spinoffs. BUT if pressed, I would say that fasting has so many applications beyond the religious or body-centric themes with which we are familiar. Judicious fasting can empower even those of us who are areligious and not body-obsessed. And it has been around a long, long time. It is for me a path to self-acceptance, to better understanding my place in the world, and it is a path that never ends. It is an important practice and it seems to me an effective one from a political standpoint. Even if hunger strikers don’t win their cause, they almost invariably force a dialogue—authorities may brutalize hunger strikers (thereby revealing their corruption), media may report on the situation, bringing outside attention to bear.
RC:I’ve found a lot of personal growth in going without things. I haven’t eaten meat since 1994, haven’t owned a car since 1998, haven’t had any alcohol since 2017, never owned a television… What is it about going without that is so powerful yet untapped by so many people?
JO: Good for you, Roy! That succession of “going withouts” is going against the grain for sure, and I find that admirable. I think we give ourselves a sub-conscious pat on the back when we refrain from doing certain somethings that we know we could do, that we know we have the right to do. (Of course, that doesn’t apply to all obligations; if, for example, we are supposed to pick up a child from school and decide not to do that, we are going to feel guilty.) Going without (to a limited degree) gives us strength because we suddenly realize we are stronger than we realize–whether it’s something as profound as resisting making a cutting remark or as trivial as eating an extra slice of pizza that we don’t really need. And yes, the nature of social media, with its lightning-quick responses, is anti-fasting. On social media, we’re swept along by our reactions (even if we don’t post) or our desire for reactions, and (with the help of corporations) we deceive ourselves into thinking we’re expressing individuality.
RC:Fasting in particular and doing without in general are not always seen as rebellious or revolutionary, yet they are the simplest means of undermining oppressors, manipulators, and the system at large.
JO: To me, abstention can indeed be revolutionary, but I am not sure how simple that act is. The act of withdrawal threatens the system—any system—which depends on participation. If, for example, you are a prisoner, you are expected to play the role of a prisoner; a businessperson or consumer, the role of a businessperson or consumer, etc. If you undertake a hunger strike (in the case of a prisoner) or a boycott (in the case of a businessperson or consumer) the act of withdrawal—fasting from food in one case and fasting from contact in another—becomes a powerful tool, even a weapon. The ancient Irish weren’t wrong to respect the power of fasting—“illegal fasting” even merited a fine in pre-Christian Ireland. Nothing terrifies Israel as much as BDS. But it is very hard to force people not to fast, or to boycott.
RC:You fasted yourself while writing this book. Have you done any form of fasting since finishing it?
JO: Indeed I have—in fact, at this moment I am on Day Five of a weeklong liquid-only fast. I fast for at least a week, twice a year, once in spring and once in the fall. It is my own personal ritual to assure the change of seasons!
During the last episode of season four of True Detective, some cheered and others groaned when Raymond Clark said “time is a flat circle,” repeating Reggie Ledoux and Rustin Cohle’s line from season one. OG creator and showrunner Nic Pizzolato himself did not appreciate the homage to the original. Allusions as such can go either way.
At their best, allusions add layers of meaning to our stories, connecting them to the larger context of a series, genre, or literature at large. At worst, they’re lazy storytelling or fumbling fan service. It feels good to recognize an obscure allusion and feel like a participant in the story. It feels cheap to recognize one and feel manipulated by the writer. They are contrivances after all: legacy characters, echoed dialog, recurring locations or props—all of these can work either way, to cohere or alienate, to enrich the meaning or pull you right out of the story.
[WARNING: Spoilers abound below for all seasons of HBO’s True Detective.]
The spiral as seen in season four of True Detective: a motif smuggled out of the mythology of season one.
Our experience with a story is always informed by our past experience—lived or mediated—but when that experience is directly referenced with an allusion, we feel closer to the story. Allusions are where we share notes with other fans, and they form associative paths, connecting them to other artifacts. So, if you recognized Ledoux or Cohle’s words coming out of Clark’s mouth, or if you recognized all of them as Friedrich Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, you probably felt a closer tie to the story. As he wrote in The Gay Science (1882), “Do you want this again and innumerable times again?” For Nietzsche, this is all there was, and to embrace this recurrence was to embrace human life just as it is: the same thing over and over.
Rust Cohle and Marty Hart in season three.
Moreover, in season four we got the ghost of Rust Cohle’s father, Travis Cohle, a connection to the vast empire of the Tuttle family, and the goofy gag of recurring spirals. Season three had its passing connections to season one as well, as seen in the newspaper article in the image above. Given the pervasive references to it, season one may have been the show’s peak, but my favorite is still the beleaguered second season, the only one so far that stands free of allusions to the other seasons of the anthology. Perhaps it is the most hated season of the series because of its refusal to connect to and coexist with the others, yet—riding the word-of-mouth wave from season one—it’s also the most watched.
It should be noted that in addition to its lack of allusions to season one and any semblance of interiority, season two also lacks any sense of the spiritual. There is only the world you see and feel in front of you, no inner world, no adjacent beyond, no Carcosa. As Raymond Velcoro says grimly, “My strong suspicion is we get the world we deserve.”
Bezzerides and Velcoro share a moment of quiet contemplation.
Season two continues the gloom of the first season, moving it from the swamps of Louisiana to the sprawl of Los Angeles. Like its suburban setting, season two stretches out in good and bad ways, leaving us by turns enlightened and lost. Though, as Ian Bogost points out, where Cohle got lost in his own head, the characters in season two—Ani Bezzerides, Paul Woodrugh, Frank Semyon, and Velcoro—get lost in their world. The physician and psychoanalyst Dr. John C. Lilly distinguished between what he called insanity and outsanity. Insanity is “your life inside yourself”; outsanity is the chaos of the world, the cruelty of other people. Sometimes we get lost in our heads. Sometimes we get lost in the world.
Rust Cohle in his storage shed in season one.
To be fair, season one isn’t without its references to existing texts. Much of the material in Cohle’s monologues is straight out of Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (Hippocampus Press, 2010), where he quotes the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe (even using the word “thresher” to describe the pain of human existence), and the dark-hearted philosophy of Nietzsche, of course. The writings of Ambrose Bierce (“An Inhabitant of Carcosa”), H.P. Lovecraft (Cthulhu Mythos), and Robert W. Chambers (“The Yellow King”) also make appearances. Daniel Fitzpatrick writes in his essay in the book True Detection (Schism, 2014), “Through these references, engaged viewers are offered a means to unlock the show’s secrets, granting a more active involvement, and while these references are often essential and enrich our experience of the show, in its weaker moments they can make it seem like a grab-bag of half thought-through allusions.”
“One of the things that I loved most about that first season of True Detective was the cosmic horror angle of it,” says season four writer, director, and showrunner Issa López. “It had a Carcosa, and it had a Yellow King, which are references to the Cthulhu Mythos with Lovecraft and the idea of ancient gods that live beyond human perception.” The hints of something beyond this world, “the war going on behind things,” as Reverend Billy Lee Tuttle put it, pulled us all in. “That sense of something sinister playing behind the scenes, and watching from the shadows,” she continues, “is something that I very much loved.”
In his book on suicide, The Savage God (1970), Al Álvarez writes, “For the great rationalists, a sense of absurdity—the absurdity of superstition, self-importance, and unreason—was as natural and illuminating as sunlight.” By the end of season one, Rustin Cohle seems to embrace the eternal recurrence of his life, the spiral of light and the dark—including his own daughter’s death. At the end of Night Country, Evangeline Navarro seems to do the same, walking blindly into extinction, one last midnight, a lone sister, fragile and numinous, opting out of a raw deal, lost both in her head and in the world.
Growing up watching cartoons and slapstick comedies made it seem like rare one-off events like getting stuck in quicksand, slipping on banana peels, and anvils falling from the sky were persistent problems in the world. Not only that, but primetime dramas made it seem like adults could get arrested for anything, and they might never even know the reason! The world seemed dangerous in ways that it really wasn’t.
Posited by George Gerbner in the early 1970s, cultivation theory states that among heavy television viewers, there is a tendency to view the world outside as similar to the world the way the television depicts it. That is, heavy media consumption tends to skew the general views of the media consumer.
Around the turn of the millennium there was a major push in certain underground circles to subvert consensus reality. The internet had connected people according to their esoteric interests (“find the others” as one popular site put it at the time), and it had evolved to a place where they could launch campaigns against the larger culture. Rabble-rousers came together in temporary autonomous zones to jam culture and pull pranks on the squares.
Josh Keyes, “Drift” (2020).
A lot has changed since those heady days of us vs them. The squares are all online now, and the mainstream has split into a million tributaries. Online our media diets are now directed by search results that base what we see on what we’ve seen before and what’s popular among others like us. In other words, the algorithm-driven internet is a similarity engine, producing a shameless sameness around our interests and beliefs, cocooning each of us in an impervious reflective armor. This can create what Eli Parser calls a filter bubble, an echo chamber of news, information, and entertainment that distorts our view of the real world. As Parser told Lynn Parramore at The Atlantic,
Since December 4, 2009, Google has been personalized for everyone. So when I had two friends this spring Google “BP,” one of them got a set of links that was about investment opportunities in BP. The other one got information about the oil spill. Presumably that was based on the kinds of searches that they had done in the past.
Combine Gerbner’s cultivation theory and Parser’s filter bubble, and you’ve got a simple recipe for media-enabled solipsism. “Participatory fiction. Choose your own adventure,” the conspiracy theory chronicler Robert Guffey writes. “Virtual reality, but with no goggles necessary.” False microrealities like the Deep State, PizzaGate, and QAnon come alive in this environment. A limited ecosystem produces limited results.
It’s not farming and it’s not agriculture, it’s gardening: each of us hoeing a row, working a plot to grow only the food we want, regardless of what everyone else is eating.
This fragmentation in the United States has never been more evident than during the last few presidential elections. Above is the electoral map from the last one. As the nightly network news spread out into 24-hour cable coverage, so did its audience and its intentions. In his book, After the Mass-Age, Chris Riley writes that instead of trying to get the majority to watch, each network preferred a dedicated minority: “Now you didn’t win the ratings war by being objective; you won by being subjective, by segmenting the audience, not uniting them.” And we met them in the middle, seeking out the news that presented the world more the way we wanted to see it than the way it really was. With the further splintering of social media, we choose the news that fits us best. If we’re all watching broadcast network news, we’re all seeing the same story. If we’re all on the same social network, no two of us are seeing the same thing.
Rewind: Above is the electoral map from the 1984 US presidential election. Republican incumbent Ronald Reagan carried 49 of the 50 states, while Walter Mondale pulled only his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia. The year 1984 stands as the most united these states have ever been behind a president.
This map is the product of broadcast and print media: one-to-many, mass media like television, radio, newspapers, and magazines. Over the past 40 years those platforms have divided and splintered further and further into unique, individual experiences. The 2020 map above is a product of the internet and social media: many-to-many, multiple sources and viewpoints, and fewer shared mediated experiences.
The medium is only the message at a certain scale, and that scale is diminished.
Reality doesn’t scale in the way that our media depicts it. Nietzsche once called any truth a “useful fiction.” Now that’s all we have, but a lot of them aren’t useful, and none of them are sustainable. A temporary autonomous zone is just that — temporary. There is no longer a consensus to subvert, but we need to know what everyone else is eating if we’re ever going to eat together again.
This is only one of the results of our media gardening. If we share fewer and fewer mediated experiences, some of those disconnections are going to have consequences. Tucked away in the alleys and valleys of our own interests, we stay entrenched in our own tribes, utterly outraged at any other tribe’s dis, disdain, or destruction of one of our own’s preciously held beliefs. The internet has exacerbated these conditions. Instead of more connection, there is a sense of more dis-connection. Where we are promised diversity, we get division. We burrow so deep in our own dirt that we can’t see the world as it really is: a spinning blue ball covered with tiny cells, passive plants, and dumb meat, each just trying to make its own way. Starting from such focus, we can find ourselves in a place. We can belong at a certain level. It just feels like now we never seem to zoom out far enough to see the whole. Instead of giving us the tools to see the bigger picture, the algorithmic biases of our media feed our own individual biases.
Retreat is not the answer, retreat is the problem. We need more connection, not less — real connection. We need to eat at the same table once in a while. We need to engage more with those who aren’t like us. Lift the little ones, help the ones who need it, and learn as much about each other as we can.
A new year typically brings renewal and hope. I will admit to struggling to find it in these first couple of weeks of 2024. There are too many things we need to get out from under first. Satisficing, the resigning oneself to the first workable option as sufficient (the word itself a workable but unwieldy portmanteau of “satisfy” and “suffice”), is often considered a good thing, saving one from the needless pursuit of an elusive better or optimal solution. Too much of this good thing leads to the same old thing.
After writing about unintended outcomes and technology not solving problems a few weeks ago, I seem to have closed something else off. Now those unintended outcomes are all I see. Greatness is never achieved through satisficing. The road to mediocrity is paved with just good enough. Now more than ever, we need more than that.
There’s a story under there somewhere, I think.
When you watch a video clip on YouTube, it is typically preceded (and often interrupted) by some sort of advertising. They give you a countdown clock to when the ad is over or to when you can click “skip” and get on with your initial purpose. The very existence of this click-clock indicates that the people at YouTube know that you don’t want to see the ad(s) on their site! They’ve been cracking down on plug-ins to block such ads, and they along with other such “services” offer premium packages where you can eschew all ads for an additional monthly fee (Gee, thanks!).
I mentioned direct mail in the preamble to my previous list, writing that a successful direct-mail advertising campaign has a response rate of 2% and what a waste that is for all involved (98%!). How much mail do you recycle compared to actual mail and written correspondence? Mail seems like an antiquated example, until you go online.
It’s global, yet it’s local. It’s the next thing in Social. Hip-hop, rockin’, or microbloggin’ — You get updates every time you log in. So, come on in, we’re open, And we’re hopin’ to rope in All your Facebook friends and Twitter memories. There’s a brand-new place for all of your frenemies. You don’t really care about piracy or privacy. You just want music and friends as far as the eye can see. So, sign up, sign in, put in your information. It’s the new online destination for a bored, boring nation. Tell your friends, your sister, and your mom. It’s time for justgoodenough.com
When you log into Instagram and check your notifications (or your other accounts or even your email), how many of them are from people you follow and how many are from spam accounts? Mine are fairly even. That is, I spend as much time on these platforms deleting junk as I do “interacting” with friends and colleagues. I’m sure you have similar experiences.
Where is the break boundary? Where is the point when enough of us have had enough to actually ditch these platforms? I abandon my accounts every other month. None of them are essential after all. YouTube and Instagram are toys at best, amusements for brains trained to seek such tiny nuggets of validation and entertainment, but these same inconvenient priorities spill over into things that do matter. All noise and very little signal. All soggy vegetables and very little pudding.
We’re starving, but… Everything is okay.
Everything is just okay. And it won’t get better until we all demand something else. It won’t get better until we stop satisficing and give each other more of what we want and less of what they want us to have.
