Why I'm Getting Weird
Tilt your head to the side like a dog and consider the impossible
People have been asking why I’m engaging with so many “weird” topics lately. Technically I’m a media theorist and technology philosopher, yet I’ve been writing about plant medicines, indigenous wisdom, and a whole array of occult, countercultural, spiritual crafts and practices. I’ve been no more likely to publish a piece about media technology or bioregionalism here than one on retro-causality, simulation theory, or sex magick.
And I’ve seen a few comments here or on my YouTubes asking why I’m so into this esoteric stuff right now—particularly when the world is facing so many real, on-the-ground, actual challenges. Genuine violence, starvation, suffering, slavery, abuse in the moment. Loss of cultures, languages, species, habitats. Colonialism—not just as some abstract concept—but an ongoing exploitation, taking ever-new forms, disguising itself as populism while it breaks what’s left of civics, a social safety net, or international cooperation.
And even though there are occasional setbacks to the twin monsters of authoritarianism and Neo-liberalism, the war between the two only distracts us from the rapidly accelerating crises threatening us all.
Things seem hopeless, I get that. And some of the most informed environmentalists I know say we’re past the point of no return; my political science colleagues argue the world has tipped toward at least a half-century of globally dominant dictatorships; my fellow media and technology theorists think AI is going to destroy human cognition and psychological coherence whether or not Artificial General Intelligence is ever achieved. The collapse of civilization as we know it seems not only inevitable, but like it may have already happened. It feels like we’re already over the edge of the cliff, noticing the wind rushing by around us as we descend, and maybe just mustering the courage to look down.
So how, facing this urgent, inevitable certainty of—at best—crisis but, more likely, doom… how am I here offering such a diet of “weird” along with substance? Isn’t this more a moment for me to step up in my persona of Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics instead of the psychonautically informed hope fiend?
But it precisely the urgency and inevitability of our situation that calls for us to shake something loose. To see things…differently. Call to the outliers. If all of our most logical faculties, or our standard tools for evaluating our situation point to bad outcomes, then maybe we need to employ some non-standard tools. And that’s even more than I’m asking for here; it’s above and beyond the mere “supposing” I’m trying to initiate. I’m not asking we get all the way figuring out our best new strategies right here and right now. I’m just asking us to achieve the preconditions. Let’s even just get to a place of psycho-social readiness.
That’s not so easy to do when it feels like we’re staring through the windshield of a car accelerating toward a concrete wall. The closer we get, the more the wall fills our field of vision until that’s all there is. That’s the feeling right now, between domestic troop deployments calculated to provoke fear or anger, economic policies structured to force farmers into foreclosure while transferring another few trillion dollars of collective wealth to the top .1%, or America’s withdrawal from any form of global collaboration over energy, health, or pollution.
The resulting state of fear and paralysis is an intentional byproduct. Something like “shock and awe,” but really just traditional ‘psyops’: the“psychological operations” that one country would carry out on the population of its adversary in a war to soften their resolve or distract them from good warring. Keep the people in a state of panic until they go numb, or—better—begin to direct the fear and anger against others. Just help them find someone else to hurt more than they do, or to blame for the imminent collision. Convince them that there is no future, only a past when things were better, and to which we can somehow return.
When people are in a state of trauma, or bad PTSD, their eyes lock in. That’s what EMDR therapy is all about, where they have the patient follow LEDs with their eyes left and right, while thinking about the traumatic event. It loosens up their eyes and, correspondingly, loosens up their brain to look at the story in other ways. To change their relationship to what happened. Put some play in the wheel. Leave things up for re-interpretation. Unlock the trauma so it can metabolized and transformed from a psychic scar of trapped energy into new possibilities and potentials.
That’s the same thing that these magical moments, inklings of awe, reconnections to each other, or the divine, or “the everything” do. They’re like the deja vu that helps Neo recognize a glitch in the matrix, or when Katniss shoots an arrow at sky in Hunger Games to reveal it’s just a dome. Despite all evidence to the contrary, there is a way out or—better—through. All you have to do is tilt the picture a new way, so you can distinguish between the actual limits and those that have been imposed by people and institutions who don’t want us to even try (either because they think it’s not possible, or because it will undermine their own efforts to exploit widespread doom for their own self-interest). So they use media, religion, economics, and even hard evidence to lock down the inevitability of doomsday—all the while building spaceships, underground shelters, and arks of the covenant (I kid you not) for their own escape.
Whether we are mentally trapped in a simulation or simply stalled by a propagandistically curated wall of facts, we need to be able to consider alternatives. To unlock our gaze, and free up our minds. And these strange but increasingly common and provable phenomena—from autistic kids demonstrating ESP on the Telepathy Tapes to the Practical Magic of Mitch Horowitz, to the demonstrated retro-causality theories of Rod Sutherland, or Julian Barbour showing how half of time since the big bang is going backwards, they crack open the mind for a moment of possibility. They make us go, huh? If a hundred people take a test, and then fifty of them are told to study for the test after it’s over, those people will end up having done better on the test. Huh? The studying somehow trickles backwards through time?
I know, half of you already don’t believe me. Even that’s fine. Don’t bother Googling. Just wrapping our heads around this Mobius strip of possibility flips a switch. It’s like when you show a dog something it doesn’t understand, and it tilts its head to the side, as if it will understand things better looking from a different angle? That’s the state we want to go for. That place of confusion. Of living in-between the inevitabilities. Suddenly uncommitted to a reality tunnel and willing to choose or even create a new one. It’s not fantasy, but rather, “is there a better way of framing what I am experiencing now?” Reframed, like at the end of a movie where they flash back through all the moments that you now understand differently.
Or even before that part when you have a new frame. The space of possibility. Of being able to suppose…anything. Just suppose. Just open your mind. Open your skull. How long can you hold that? Without succumbing to terror? Hold onto the truth that no one knows what the fuck is going on here? What made us, what are we here for, why is there so much pain and suffering, what if….?
What if…?
It’s hard to hold onto that. Usually, when people get zapped into this place, when the surface illusion of one of the prevailing systems of thought is pierced, we rush to create some new “sense” and flip into hardened religion or conspiracy theory. That’s when I found Jesus! That’s when I knew they were out to get us!
That’s just as debilitating as being trapped in the original hopeless conundrum. You have the moment of opportunity, but then surrender it to the first fantasy or nightmare that comes along. Like a person succumbing to a bad trip or one of those first seductive or scary Bardos along the way to the white light. That’s MAGA world, poor things, with 5G towers and nano vaccines controlling behavior, Jewish space lasers, HAARP weather station-induced earthquakes, or Venezuelan remote election hacking. And that stuff isn’t even as weird as actual remote viewing, dark matter, inter-dimensional travelers, or shooting a fly out of the air with my fingers.
That state of openness is hard to maintain. There are many casualties of learning to see or un-see this way. Fallen fellow travelers, from Russell Brand and Naomi Wolf to Alex Jones. They went too quickly from huh? to aha! Pointing the finger at their new villains. Too secure they know what’s going on, they replace wonder with worship of one kind or another.
The current neo-fascist, technofeudalist, billionaire oligarchic simulation has no tolerance for the weird or wonderful. The premise of their escape plans, for their sealed off eco-villages and Mars colonies and eugenic civilizations, is that they can account for everything: the ventilation, the soil matrix, the social codes, the diet, the water treatment. Environmental disaster is the excuse, but the aspirations is the same: America 2.0, hatched ex nihilo, as if from nothing, and—more important—accounting for everything. No surprises. No wiggle room. No magic. No women, for that matter. Just robots and little girls.
There’s no magic to it. Everything has to be figured out, from vertical farming to regenerative systems. As if the complexity of life can be recreated from a sterile starting place more easily than tweaked back into balance right here in the real world. Pave over the living planet and live above it, as if a moss could grow on a plastic-sheathed tree trunk, or a gut biome can thrive on packaged protein powders. And it never works. No matter how well they lay down their foundation, there’s always cracks in the pavement. And something sprouts through it. Unaccounted for. Differently alive, in spite of everything.
Reality is weirder than these simulations. Weirder and better and more powerful and sustainable and regenerative and sexy and fun. Yeah, fucking is even more fun than blowing up a Venezuelan fishing boat. I promise you it is. I’ve never blown up a Venezuelan fishing boat, but I know in my bones it’s not as much fun as good sex, or singing in the shower, or rolling in the grass, or seeing the stars. I feel certainty about that.
But that’s besides the point. All I’m trying to get across here is that when things seem impossibly bad or inevitable, we have the option of considering the impossible. So challenge the evidence. Find the cracks in the pavement. Tilt your head to the side like a dog, and welcome the state of confusion.
Embrace the absurdity, and stop making sense for long enough to actually sense what’s happening here.
I’m glad you’re expanding your explorations to the “margins” as @Martin Shaw says in an interview from 2017:
“Stories with weight to them have what C.G. Jung terms ‘the lament of the dead’, which in our frenetic culture we can no longer have time to hear. Most indigenous cultures will tell you that this world belongs to the dead, that’s where we’re headed. So mythology for me involves a conversation with the dead, with what you might call ancestors.
Whatever we are facing now we need to have a root system embedded in weather patterns, the presences of animals, our dreams, and the ones who came before us. Myth is insistent that when there is a crisis, genius lives on the margins not the centre. If we are constantly using the language of politics to combat the language of politics at some point the soul grows weary and turns its head away because we are not allowing it into the conversation, and by denying soul we are ignoring what the Mexicans call the river beneath the river. We’re not listening to the thoughts of the world. We’re only listening to our own neurosis and our own anxiety.”
Fantastic essay, Douglas. So chock full of ‘cracks in everything’ it’d make Leonard Cohen proud.