This is sort of an early draft, but how often do you get to tie together conspiracy thinking, occultism, hyperreality, weaponizing parastructuralism and (a personal favorite, longtime readers will recall) Halo: ODST? Not every dang day, imma tell you what.
Which is weird, because they’re all kind of the the same shape.
“One day, you stumble across something — a long video, an article, a conversation (How rare those are! You must make more time for them…) with a learned friend. The same self-righteousness of authority crosses his face, the tinniness of certainty issued from his mouth too, but this time what he says sticks. It seems to explain the wrongness. Or not even explain it, really—just make it stand still. It was this thing that was wrong. The monster disclosed himself. He was something small and definable—a vaccine, a chemical – that spreads until it can’t be isolated, or he was something large and indefinable – “wokeness,” “CRT” – that terminates in many small, sharp wrongnesses. Or maybe it was the second sort of thing, but epitomized in a single image, so that it sounds like the first: The Cathedral. The cabal. But for a second, you could see the wrongness. How clarifying, simply to see it. You felt something like desire.”
Just recently I came across an amazing presentation that Brian Moriarty made at the 1999 Game Developer’s Conference about the Paul Is Dead rumour. In it, he introduced a phenomenon he called “constellation”, as in a verb “to constellate”: the human drive many of us seem to share to imbue form and meaning into chaos.
In a sense, his presentation is both a rediscovery of older ideas (Beaudrillard, C.S. Lewis) and an incredibly prescient and astoundingly dangerous new approach, a brand new tool being sharpened to a razor’s edge at a time when game design and the larger concept of gamification were still nearly children’s toys. If you look at this with the right eyes, you can see the seed crystals not just of ARGs and ODST, but Gamergate, antivax propaganda and QAnon.
In barely an hour Moriarty, somehow perfectly if inadvertently named for the job, is introducing the world to the gamified, self-assembling virality that would become the flagship propaganda tool of the internet age.
“Paul is dead”, said Moriarty, “is one of the best games I have ever played. This ridiculous rumour sucked my entire generation into a massively multiplayer game, a morbid treasure hunt in which the accomplices were connected by word of mouth, college newspapers, the alternative press and underground radio. We can only wonder what would happen if something like this were to happen today in the age of the World Wide Web. Imagine how something like this could get started by accident.
Imagine something like this could be fashioned on purpose.
He’s describing the dark mirror image of engineer’s disease: not a worldview where perfection would be possible if it weren’t for all the people, but one where there must be a reason behind all of it, a real and perfect underlying structure. One we could scry through chaos, that would make sense if we could just see the connections of the world, interpret all the signs.
I wrote a few years ago that there are striking parallels between the practice of seeing a chaotic, half-engineered world through this lens of mandated rationalism, and C.S. Lewis’ view of “the occult temptation“.
After dabbling with it for much of his youth, Lewis ultimately came to see occultism as a sort of psychological snare, a rat’s nest of endlessly self-referential symbols of symbols of symbols with no ultimate referent. A bottomless semiotic rathole for the overcurious inquirer, designed to perpetually confuse and distract the mind. Beaudrillard, incidentally – creator of the term “hyperreal” – saw modern finance, and particularly advertising, in the same light – a set of self-referential symbols ultimately disconnected from reality, meaningful only in their own context and self-sustaining only to people trapped in that carefully interlocking mesh. None of us are immune to propaganda, of course, but when you hear somebody talk about “brand engagement“, these are the brainworms that are making their mouths undulate like that.
[…] “Constellation” is usually used as a noun referring to pictures in the sky formed by stars but I use it as a verb to describe one of the basic functions of human intelligence. Constellation is pattern recognition. “To constellate” is to apply order to chaos.
When faced with any kind of new experience, be it images or sounds or even just a strange idea, we marshal our personal knowledge and experience and project it into the novelty to imbue it with meaning and significance. And what kinds of meaning and significance are we most likely to project?
The meanings we expect to see. Constellation is in fact a form of self-recognition.”
A perfect ideological snare, in other words, for people who are smart enough to see the patterns but can’t see the metagame, a carefully constructed heat sink for harmlessly radiating away second-order cognition.
This came to a head recently over in the ODST fandom, where after years of strange “clues” and oblique hints about the true meaning of the glyphs that pervade a game inspired by The Hollow Men of T.S. Eliot and Dante’s Divine Comedy, a connection was finally drawn back to the 1999 Paul Is Dead speech that inspired the developers and the collective realization that … there’s nothing there.
An rat’s nest of symbols, tucked away in a game world that was itself built of and on a host of other symbolic structures. Virtual hyperreality, in a sense. Considering the game is about a young recruit lost in the twisting passages of darkened city at night, being led around the city by a guiding “superintendent” you (cruelly, fittingly, ultimately) never meet? It seems possible.
ODST came out in 2009.
There is no hidden meaning, no ultimate referent. There never was. In the place it should have, could have, we all wished it would have been, there was simply carefully, deliberately parastructured bait. The seed crystals of a hint of a pattern, a vaguely intersecting antipattern hinting that meaning must, somehow, be there, if we only look deep enough. Symbols of symbols of symbols with no ultimate referent, a complicated scaffolding assembled by enthusiastic participants, hinting at the shape of a building that could never exist.
You’ve heard this story before, I bet, in some other conversation about vaccine denial, flat earthers, the QAnon dorks, any of the various fashy fandoms that seem to be all over the place these days. People can spend years of their lives trying to open – or maybe escape from – a box they’ve helped built for themselves. One with nothing in it but the raw materials you need to build more elaborate locks, so people do. After all this time we’ve spent, the effort, the investigation, the connections … it has to mean something, doesn’t it?
We have very few defences against the idea that the world should, fundamentally, in some way, from some perspective, make sense. Even fewer, I think, when we’re nervous, angry, frightened and tired and there are whole industries out there now, billion-dollar companies, whose real job is making sure people stay just nervous, angry, frightened and tired enough to keep clicking the things that make people nervous, angry, frightened and tired, of engineering moral vulnerability in people getting their first free hit of a scholar’s joy from the worst people in the world.
He (it is so often he) thinks himself free from the formal, recognized strictures of School, and he is. Unfortunately, this does not mean that he is free in general—rather, without extraordinary luck and discernment, he is completely at the mercy of whichever informants an unregulated marketplace has put in his path.
I don’t want to say that this is all being done deliberately, of course. That’d be pretty crazy, like saying that there are people out there right now, conspiring to … make sure we’re all primed to believe in conspiracies.
That would be a silly thing to believe, wouldn’t it.
But those tools are on the table now, they have been for twenty years. They’re well understood, they’re testable, they can be sharpened to a razor’s edge, polished until you can see yourself, so clearly, in the reflection. So if you think somebody might be out there using them, that would make a certain amount of sense, wouldn’t it?
You know, if you looked at it the right way.