You're listening to the third and final part of Unexplained, Season six, episode twenty eight, The noo Sphere. Many will no doubt be horrified at the thought of accelerationism, the idea that if we are, indeed, as a species caught up in an inescapable capitalistic vortex of diminishing cultural returns, rather than trying to resist it, we should instead be
speeding it up. Why not, as the accelerationist might argue, increase the rate of capitalist growth and technological development to destroy everything of the old world in the hope that
something better will come out of it. But even now we may feel that changes are happening too quickly, as it is when everything from the traditional role of the media to the application of law and order, the traditional purposes of politics and politicians, and even the ways in which we receive and prioritize information seems to be up
for grabs these days. Although it's important to remember that none of these so called traditions are old in the grand scheme of things, and they've always been up for grabs. Their destabilization from what we've been used to to something a little more uncertain is for some of us. Nonetheless, deeply unsettling. It may then be even more alarming to discover that the language of the Internet itself might be the very thing that is preventing us from imagining a
way out of our current predicaments. In his twenty fifteen book You Are Not a Gadget, theorist and tech pioneer Giron Lanier details the paradox of Web two point zero platforms, those such as TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook, which facilitate user
generated content. On the one hand, these various apps do make it easier to share our expressions and ideas, but on the other, through their readily assembled and easy to navigate interfaces, it could be said they actually limit us by removing the possibility for altering and playing with the
medium of expression itself. As Marshal mccluan famously stated, the medium is the message, by which he meant that it isn't only the content of an idea that influences us, but also the mechanism with which that content is delivered. In this sense, if you imagine and the tools that we use to communicate with online as a language in themselves influencing the way we think and formulate ideas, if that language is restricted, so too will it restrict our creativity.
An obvious example of this would be twitters one hundred and forty character format, since doubled to two hundred and eighty in twenty seventeen. Enforcing tweets to be brief can have positive consequences. For example, it might encourage us to think more carefully about precisely what it is we're trying
to say. On the other hand, it can lead to the propensity of sharing only small snippets of information, in which the true scope and depth of an idea can be lost and reduced to at best a superficial rendering and at worst, a complete misappropriation. To engage with others
on Twitter means having to communicate within these parameters. There are, of course, many other online tools with which to share information, and who's to say that communicating and only two hundred and eighty characters might not in fact invigorate our creative potential or lead to more and better ways to be creative. Either way, if Twitter is where the conversation is taking place, if you want to get involved, you can only do
so on the company's terms. Giron Lanier also highlights the emergence of the advertising business model as one of only a handful of viable ways to make money from creative industries that are increasingly dependent on the digital sphere, which could very possibly be all of them one day. This, he believes, is yet another way in which our imaginations
are being shackled. The impact is twofold. If receiving money from advertising is the only way to make significant earnings for the things we create, as Lanier argues, we are
forced into only creating in ways that satisfy that model. Musicians, for example, will increasingly make music in ways that are designed to be more effective on streaming services, while journalism becomes an industry more focused on click bait headlines and articles that grab the audience's attention to bring eyeballs to their sponsors adverts, rather than one that delivers us something useful.
If algorithms decide which content deserves to be more visible than others, it stands to reason that people will also create content that serves the algorithm, rather than look to create something genuinely innovative. This, in fact, is something that
many companies now devise entire business models around. This model also leads to an explosion of advertising in our personal space, as anyone who's ever tried to read an article online while having to contend with a tropical sunset emerging out of the third paragraph, or the sudden appearance of the latest scoder speeding across the top of the page will attest.
As we become enveloped by advertising, even our freedom to choose the things we want to buy becomes restricted thanks to the clever use of algorithms to decide what you need based solely on your previous search history or something you might have liked on a friend's Facebook page. There are few things that unsettle me more than one terrifying
scene in Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Minority Report. It's the moment the central character, John Anderson, is bombarded by targeted adverts popping up on every adjacent surface as he strides through a building on his way to work. What unsettles is how preposterous that seemed in two thousand and two
and how commonplace it feels today. Perhaps it could be argued that as long as this model dominates, we might still find innovative ways to do things within it, but we will always in some way be constrained by it. In a sense, it would be as if we'd become
trapped inside a Zeno's paradox of false progress. Where once the Internet appeared to offer us an infinite potential of creative possibilities, we discover it isn't the infinity of an ascending whole number scale moving vertically from one to two to three ad infinitum, but instead merely one that moves laterally from naught to naught point one to naught point one two, and so on, appearing to increase, but fated
never to get higher than one. The late Mark Fisher, cultural theorist and early member of the Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit, as mentioned in last week's episode, tragically committed suicide in twenty seventeen. Towards the end of his life, he grew increasingly concerned though we might never escape the trap of what he termed capitalist realism, and that, especially since its hijacking of the digital sphere, we are becoming increasingly entombed
by it. Fisher examined this through the concept of horntology. The term a portmanteau of haunting and ontology, the philosophical study of the nature of being, was coined by French philosopher Shaq Derrida in his nineteen ninety three book Specters of Mars. The term is a play on the temporality of ideas, or, more precisely, the impossibility of eradicating knowledge or ideas. Once they've been conceived. From the moment they exist, they remain forever a part of our collective knowledge, haunting
our perception of both the past and the future. Like in the way that something new is discovered learning the Earth revolves around the sun, for example, it is no longer possible to conceive of a time when this idea was not understood. The implication is that only by returning to a time before the idea was conceived could we
hope to imagine an alternate future unshaped by it. It is through concepts such as hauntology that we might better understand, if not support, the despotic fixation for burning books, or when rebellious forces advocate for the destruction of ancient cultural artifacts. Such practices form the practical reality of attempts to expunge the past in the hope of creating a different future.
Back in the naughties, Mark Fisher and a number of other cultural theorists found evidence that in socio cultural terms, at least we were approaching an evolutionary could sac by applying the idea to emergent trends in art and pop culture, in particular with regards to the growing sense that westernized music, especially electronic music, had already reached this creative dead end. If electronic music, he thought, was supposed to evince a sense of the future, it seems only now to evince
a sense of nostalgia. As he put it in a twenty twelve essay titled what is Horntology, there was simply no leading edge of innovation anymore. In the accelerationist interpretation, the Internet can be viewed as a mechanism in service to our restrictive social and economic models that is hastening our arrival to the end of this colder sac. For example, consider the way in which the TV drama Stranger Things
has been universally acclaimed. As much a fan of the series as I am, it's hard not to see it as symptomatic of a cultural dead end, a sort of televisual backway of almost every trope and idea from the genre of horror and science fiction, imaginable reassuring in its nostalgia,
but ultimately trapped by the limits of its language. If we choose to see slender Man as the Internet's own monster, something that embodies all that is to be feared about where the Internet and digital technology is taking us as a species, it's not surprising that he's associated with the idea of luring us, and particularly children, to their doom. It's the perfect metaphor for a damned future as we become ever more tightly wound up in a feedback loop
of diminishing imagination. The slender Man, that creature that at first seems so strange and new, only to then, like a long forgotten old one, be steadily revealed to have been with us all along, stands silently in the shadows, waiting to smother us with his tentacle embrace. Slender Man's association with children has often seen him compared to the
Pied Piper of Hamelin. In the German folk tale thought to date back to the thirteen hundreds, the people from the town of Hamelin are struggling to rid themselves of a troublesome rat infestation when a mysterious stranger arrives, promising to take care of it in return for a modest fee. The townspeople accept his help, and the following day, the stranger, using his skills as a pipe player, leads the rats away. However, when he returns for his fee, the citizens refuse to
pay him. In retaliation, the Pied Piper lures or the children from the village to a mountain from which they will never return. It is easy to see the comparison with the slender Man, since both characters are considered monstrous, unknown others who are said to commit the most heinous crime imaginable, stealing our children away. If slender Man is to be compared to the Pied Piper, we might as well read this as reflective of our wider concerns about
the Internet. Where once we saw it as a magic technology that we hoped would improve our lives, like the piper with this mysterious pipe. Now suddenly it had turned on us, corrupting our children and robbing us of all hope for our future. Not an unfair analogy if indeed slender Man embodies the worst of the Internet. But is
there another way to look at it? Something frequently overlooked in slender Man's parison to the Pied Piper is that it isn't the Piper who is the villain, but the townspeople. Not only do they double cross him and refuse to pay for his services, we could say that in the Piper's final act, he isn't stealing the children away, but merely protecting them from the rat infested world that their forbears had created. In other words, the problem is not
the Internet. The problem is us. If I may be allowed to add my own creepy pass to entry to the myth of slender Man, it would be to betray him, not as an emblem of the terror of the unknown that lurks on the horizon of an uncertain digital future, but rather as a messenger from that future sent back to guide us. How fitting that it would be the younger generation, the children who are most aware of the
slender Man. Not only are they the ones who will be most harmed by a failure to correct a doomed future, but it will be them who will save us from it. That being said, for all the fear of how the Internet might be damaging us, we've barely got the Internet out of the box, let alone plugged it in. Should
we not expect a few teething issues? The simple fact may be that as a species, we just haven't figured out how best to work it yet to our advantage, although of course best to our advantage as a wholly subjective phrase in any case, In this sense, we shouldn't always fear online behavior that we don't understand or feel threatened by, but instead try to see it as merely the growing pains of an entire species learning how to
use a new tool. Humanity has always fought with itself in the offline world, establishing laws and rules to create societies. Why should we expect it to be any different in the online world. As these online battles play out over how we might best use our latest tool, it is worth examining what it is exactly that scares us about it.
Where once the internet was thought to offer something akin to a beneficial newsphere, something in which we could all pool our best ideas, many have instead been left fearing it has merely opened a door to chaos, disrupting established orders and threatening all the so called progress that such
order has contributed to. Is this sphere warranted or is it simply born from the inconvenience of hearing other voices and perspectives that aren't like ours, voices that have been made louder and given more potency thanks to the Internet. For all the uncertainty of a post truth, more fluid world, could something like the Me Too or Black Lives Matter
movements have been successful in a pre Internet age. For all, those who talk about a return to a more stable, simpler time, do they really mean a time where they don't have to be confronted by ideas such as white privilege? For example? That sense of fear and uncertainty could simply be the feeling of being inside the paradigm shift of a changing world. Indeed, for many, in spite of the disruptiveness, the immediate consequences of a digitally accelerated cult remain profoundly appealing.
The feminist philosopher Donna Harroway was an early accelerationist before the term had been adopted. Her nineteen eighty four seminal essay The Cyborg Manifesto, provides an idea of what a post accelerated world in which our bodies and minds become more and more entwined with the digital sphere might look like. Harroway's essay invites us to imagine the human evolving into cyborg, a hybrid of machine and organism, as she describes it,
that might usher in a post gender world. Since the cyborg is not human in the traditional sense, it is transcendent of restrictive social conventions to do with perceptions of gender, a transcendence which by extension, could be applied to all restrictive perceptions such as race, disability, and sexuality, among others. What cyber utopians had hoped was that the Internet and the virtual space would help us escape the worst aspects of ourselves. Yet this virtual space is nothing, if not
just an extension of ourselves. It was always going to be subject to the same stresses and to complications we experience in real world societies, and like those real world societies, it will always be evolving through the ongoing processes of different ideas and perspectives rubbing up against each other. As unsettling as it may be, there are positive reasons to challenge seemingly stable established orders. Take one fairly recent example.
In nineteen ninety one, as Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich gave an to view to influential broadcasting and a cable magazine telling advertisers not to sponsor radio stations that played what he described as rap music. Gingrich's stance was one adopted by many US government officials that sought to demonize a growing trend that they didn't understand.
Concerned that hip hop was a threat to the country's moral values, instead of seeking to understand it, they tried to destroy it. In twenty seventeen, R and B and hip hop surpassed rock music to become the biggest selling musical genre in the United States and one of its leading cultural exports, although as a genre it was already well on its way there before the Internet really took off its dominance. Those much to the free spirited sharing
and streaming culture of the Internet. Interestingly, as Thomas Pettit acknowledges in his Guttenberg parenthesis theory, hip hop, much like the oral nature of pre printing press culture, is a medium that thrives on the mutability of ideas and the fluidity of sampling. Once dismissed and maligned as an inferior art form, hip hop and its myriad offshoots are now widely regarded as superior modes of innovative and creative expression.
Many continue to voice their concerns over web two point zero platforms and the cult of the noble amateur which it engenders, as well as the drift toward a way of thinking which seems to be prioritizing the wisdom of the crowd over the authority of individual experts. However, it seems often the primary concern is not the diminishing quality of creative content, but more to do with the fear that people won't be individually rewarded and recognized for their
creative ideas. Yet, in the grand scheme of things, what does it matter who it is that first has an idea? Exactly? Is it not more important that the idea exists in the first place, that it is used well and propagated widely, so that it can be better understood and improved upon.
As for questioning the quality of work that might emerge from a culture no longer chained to the obsession of authorship and ownership, we might consider the work of one of literature's greatest pilferers, William Shakespeare, routinely regarded as the finest writer of all time within the English speaking world.
Unlikely ever to be surpassed, Shakespeare is a pure product of the pre printing press age, having apparently lifted liberally from texts written by Greek philosopher Plutarch, English chronicler Raphael Hollinshead, and French Renaissance philosopher Michel du Montanes, among potentially many others. In twenty eighteen, a book written by a self taught Shakespeare's scholar Dennis McCarthy and professor of English June Schleiter revealed that one manuscript in particular had proved a source
of inspiration for up to eleven of Shakespeare's plays. The pair made the discovery after applying the plagiarism software w copy fined to a late sixteenth century text aptly titled A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels. The unpublished manuscript, written by a mine, a courtier of Queen Elizabeth the First called George North, was found to include source material for plays including King Lear, Macbeth and Henry the Fifth.
Not only did Shakespeare use quote the same words as North, but often used them in scenes about similar themes and even the same historical character. There's no reason to assume our digital fate is sealed, that we are a species
hurtling towards the destruction of our own making. Locked in by the tools we've made, it is far more likely that in a thousand years time will be discussing the problems of a new technology that'll make the Internet look like two cups joined together by a piece of string.
Whether by considered choice, survival, instinct, or pre determined genetic compulsion, we are a species of explorers, primed always to be looking for new ways and new ideas, never more productive than when confronted with the problem that threatens our existence. But if ever we should fear that we might be losing our way, perhaps it might be useful to bear in mind the words of historian Aaron Sachs, as featured
in Rebecca Solnits, A Field Guide to Getting Lost. In responding to a query of Solnits on the subject of exploration, Sachs replied, explorers were always lost because they'd never been to these places before. They never expected to know exactly where they were. In my opinion, their most important skill was simply a sense of optimism about surviving and finding their way unexplained. The book and audiobook, featuring stories that have never before been featured on the show, is now
available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes, and Noble Waterstones, among other bookstores. All elements have Unexplained, including the show's music, are produced by me Richard McClain smith. Please subscribe and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like
to share. You can reach us online at Unexplained podcast dot com, or Twitter at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at Facebook dot com. Forward Slash Unexplained Podcast