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Speaker 1: You're listening to the third and final part of Unexplained,

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Speaker 1: Season six, episode twenty eight, The noo Sphere. Many will

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Speaker 1: no doubt be horrified at the thought of accelerationism, the

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Speaker 1: idea that if we are, indeed, as a species caught

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Speaker 1: up in an inescapable capitalistic vortex of diminishing cultural returns,

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Speaker 1: rather than trying to resist it, we should instead be

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Speaker 1: speeding it up. Why not, as the accelerationist might argue,

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Speaker 1: increase the rate of capitalist growth and technological development to

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Speaker 1: destroy everything of the old world in the hope that

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Speaker 1: something better will come out of it. But even now

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Speaker 1: we may feel that changes are happening too quickly, as

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Speaker 1: it is when everything from the traditional role of the

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Speaker 1: media to the application of law and order, the traditional

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Speaker 1: purposes of politics and politicians, and even the ways in

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Speaker 1: which we receive and prioritize information seems to be up

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Speaker 1: for grabs these days. Although it's important to remember that

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Speaker 1: none of these so called traditions are old in the

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Speaker 1: grand scheme of things, and they've always been up for grabs.

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Speaker 1: Their destabilization from what we've been used to to something

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Speaker 1: a little more uncertain is for some of us. Nonetheless,

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Speaker 1: deeply unsettling. It may then be even more alarming to

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Speaker 1: discover that the language of the Internet itself might be

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Speaker 1: the very thing that is preventing us from imagining a

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Speaker 1: way out of our current predicaments. In his twenty fifteen

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Speaker 1: book You Are Not a Gadget, theorist and tech pioneer

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Speaker 1: Giron Lanier details the paradox of Web two point zero platforms,

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Speaker 1: those such as TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook, which facilitate user

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Speaker 1: generated content. On the one hand, these various apps do

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Speaker 1: make it easier to share our expressions and ideas, but

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Speaker 1: on the other, through their readily assembled and easy to

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Speaker 1: navigate interfaces, it could be said they actually limit us

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Speaker 1: by removing the possibility for altering and playing with the

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Speaker 1: medium of expression itself. As Marshal mccluan famously stated, the

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Speaker 1: medium is the message, by which he meant that it

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Speaker 1: isn't only the content of an idea that influences us,

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Speaker 1: but also the mechanism with which that content is delivered.

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Speaker 1: In this sense, if you imagine and the tools that

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Speaker 1: we use to communicate with online as a language in

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Speaker 1: themselves influencing the way we think and formulate ideas, if

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Speaker 1: that language is restricted, so too will it restrict our creativity.

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Speaker 1: An obvious example of this would be twitters one hundred

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Speaker 1: and forty character format, since doubled to two hundred and

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Speaker 1: eighty in twenty seventeen. Enforcing tweets to be brief can

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Speaker 1: have positive consequences. For example, it might encourage us to

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Speaker 1: think more carefully about precisely what it is we're trying

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Speaker 1: to say. On the other hand, it can lead to

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Speaker 1: the propensity of sharing only small snippets of information, in

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Speaker 1: which the true scope and depth of an idea can

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Speaker 1: be lost and reduced to at best a superficial rendering

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Speaker 1: and at worst, a complete misappropriation. To engage with others

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Speaker 1: on Twitter means having to communicate within these parameters. There are,

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Speaker 1: of course, many other online tools with which to share information,

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Speaker 1: and who's to say that communicating and only two hundred

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Speaker 1: and eighty characters might not in fact invigorate our creative

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Speaker 1: potential or lead to more and better ways to be creative.

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Speaker 1: Either way, if Twitter is where the conversation is taking place,

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Speaker 1: if you want to get involved, you can only do

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Speaker 1: so on the company's terms. Giron Lanier also highlights the

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Speaker 1: emergence of the advertising business model as one of only

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Speaker 1: a handful of viable ways to make money from creative

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Speaker 1: industries that are increasingly dependent on the digital sphere, which

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Speaker 1: could very possibly be all of them one day. This,

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Speaker 1: he believes, is yet another way in which our imaginations

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Speaker 1: are being shackled. The impact is twofold. If receiving money

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Speaker 1: from advertising is the only way to make significant earnings

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Speaker 1: for the things we create, as Lanier argues, we are

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Speaker 1: forced into only creating in ways that satisfy that model. Musicians,

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Speaker 1: for example, will increasingly make music in ways that are

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Speaker 1: designed to be more effective on streaming services, while journalism

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Speaker 1: becomes an industry more focused on click bait headlines and

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Speaker 1: articles that grab the audience's attention to bring eyeballs to

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Speaker 1: their sponsors adverts, rather than one that delivers us something useful.

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Speaker 1: If algorithms decide which content deserves to be more visible

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Speaker 1: than others, it stands to reason that people will also

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Speaker 1: create content that serves the algorithm, rather than look to

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Speaker 1: create something genuinely innovative. This, in fact, is something that

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Speaker 1: many companies now devise entire business models around. This model

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Speaker 1: also leads to an explosion of advertising in our personal space,

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Speaker 1: as anyone who's ever tried to read an article online

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Speaker 1: while having to contend with a tropical sunset emerging out

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Speaker 1: of the third paragraph, or the sudden appearance of the

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Speaker 1: latest scoder speeding across the top of the page will attest.

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Speaker 1: As we become enveloped by advertising, even our freedom to

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Speaker 1: choose the things we want to buy becomes restricted thanks

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Speaker 1: to the clever use of algorithms to decide what you

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Speaker 1: need based solely on your previous search history or something

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Speaker 1: you might have liked on a friend's Facebook page. There

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Speaker 1: are few things that unsettle me more than one terrifying

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Speaker 1: scene in Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Minority Report. It's the

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Speaker 1: moment the central character, John Anderson, is bombarded by targeted

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Speaker 1: adverts popping up on every adjacent surface as he strides

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Speaker 1: through a building on his way to work. What unsettles

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Speaker 1: is how preposterous that seemed in two thousand and two

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Speaker 1: and how commonplace it feels today. Perhaps it could be

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Speaker 1: argued that as long as this model dominates, we might

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Speaker 1: still find innovative ways to do things within it, but

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Speaker 1: we will always in some way be constrained by it.

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Speaker 1: In a sense, it would be as if we'd become

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Speaker 1: trapped inside a Zeno's paradox of false progress. Where once

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Speaker 1: the Internet appeared to offer us an infinite potential of

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Speaker 1: creative possibilities, we discover it isn't the infinity of an

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Speaker 1: ascending whole number scale moving vertically from one to two

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Speaker 1: to three ad infinitum, but instead merely one that moves

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Speaker 1: laterally from naught to naught point one to naught point

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Speaker 1: one two, and so on, appearing to increase, but fated

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Speaker 1: never to get higher than one. The late Mark Fisher,

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Speaker 1: cultural theorist and early member of the Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit,

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Speaker 1: as mentioned in last week's episode, tragically committed suicide in

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Speaker 1: twenty seventeen. Towards the end of his life, he grew

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Speaker 1: increasingly concerned though we might never escape the trap of

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Speaker 1: what he termed capitalist realism, and that, especially since its

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Speaker 1: hijacking of the digital sphere, we are becoming increasingly entombed

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Speaker 1: by it. Fisher examined this through the concept of horntology.

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Speaker 1: The term a portmanteau of haunting and ontology, the philosophical

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Speaker 1: study of the nature of being, was coined by French

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Speaker 1: philosopher Shaq Derrida in his nineteen ninety three book Specters

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Speaker 1: of Mars. The term is a play on the temporality

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Speaker 1: of ideas, or, more precisely, the impossibility of eradicating knowledge

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Speaker 1: or ideas. Once they've been conceived. From the moment they exist,

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Speaker 1: they remain forever a part of our collective knowledge, haunting

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Speaker 1: our perception of both the past and the future. Like

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Speaker 1: in the way that something new is discovered learning the

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Speaker 1: Earth revolves around the sun, for example, it is no

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Speaker 1: longer possible to conceive of a time when this idea

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Speaker 1: was not understood. The implication is that only by returning

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Speaker 1: to a time before the idea was conceived could we

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Speaker 1: hope to imagine an alternate future unshaped by it. It

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Speaker 1: is through concepts such as hauntology that we might better understand,

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Speaker 1: if not support, the despotic fixation for burning books, or

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Speaker 1: when rebellious forces advocate for the destruction of ancient cultural artifacts.

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Speaker 1: Such practices form the practical reality of attempts to expunge

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Speaker 1: the past in the hope of creating a different future.

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Speaker 1: Back in the naughties, Mark Fisher and a number of

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Speaker 1: other cultural theorists found evidence that in socio cultural terms,

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Speaker 1: at least we were approaching an evolutionary could sac by

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Speaker 1: applying the idea to emergent trends in art and pop culture,

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Speaker 1: in particular with regards to the growing sense that westernized music,

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Speaker 1: especially electronic music, had already reached this creative dead end.

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Speaker 1: If electronic music, he thought, was supposed to evince a

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Speaker 1: sense of the future, it seems only now to evince

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Speaker 1: a sense of nostalgia. As he put it in a

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Speaker 1: twenty twelve essay titled what is Horntology, there was simply

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Speaker 1: no leading edge of innovation anymore. In the accelerationist interpretation,

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Speaker 1: the Internet can be viewed as a mechanism in service

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Speaker 1: to our restrictive social and economic models that is hastening

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Speaker 1: our arrival to the end of this colder sac. For example,

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Speaker 1: consider the way in which the TV drama Stranger Things

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Speaker 1: has been universally acclaimed. As much a fan of the

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Speaker 1: series as I am, it's hard not to see it

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Speaker 1: as symptomatic of a cultural dead end, a sort of

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Speaker 1: televisual backway of almost every trope and idea from the

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Speaker 1: genre of horror and science fiction, imaginable reassuring in its nostalgia,

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Speaker 1: but ultimately trapped by the limits of its language. If

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Speaker 1: we choose to see slender Man as the Internet's own monster,

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Speaker 1: something that embodies all that is to be feared about

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Speaker 1: where the Internet and digital technology is taking us as

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Speaker 1: a species, it's not surprising that he's associated with the

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Speaker 1: idea of luring us, and particularly children, to their doom.

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Speaker 1: It's the perfect metaphor for a damned future as we

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Speaker 1: become ever more tightly wound up in a feedback loop

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Speaker 1: of diminishing imagination. The slender Man, that creature that at

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Speaker 1: first seems so strange and new, only to then, like

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Speaker 1: a long forgotten old one, be steadily revealed to have

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Speaker 1: been with us all along, stands silently in the shadows,

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Speaker 1: waiting to smother us with his tentacle embrace. Slender Man's

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Speaker 1: association with children has often seen him compared to the

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Speaker 1: Pied Piper of Hamelin. In the German folk tale thought

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Speaker 1: to date back to the thirteen hundreds, the people from

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Speaker 1: the town of Hamelin are struggling to rid themselves of

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Speaker 1: a troublesome rat infestation when a mysterious stranger arrives, promising

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Speaker 1: to take care of it in return for a modest fee.

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Speaker 1: The townspeople accept his help, and the following day, the stranger,

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Speaker 1: using his skills as a pipe player, leads the rats away. However,

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Speaker 1: when he returns for his fee, the citizens refuse to

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Speaker 1: pay him. In retaliation, the Pied Piper lures or the

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Speaker 1: children from the village to a mountain from which they

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Speaker 1: will never return. It is easy to see the comparison

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Speaker 1: with the slender Man, since both characters are considered monstrous,

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Speaker 1: unknown others who are said to commit the most heinous

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Speaker 1: crime imaginable, stealing our children away. If slender Man is

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Speaker 1: to be compared to the Pied Piper, we might as

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Speaker 1: well read this as reflective of our wider concerns about

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Speaker 1: the Internet. Where once we saw it as a magic

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Speaker 1: technology that we hoped would improve our lives, like the

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Speaker 1: piper with this mysterious pipe. Now suddenly it had turned

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Speaker 1: on us, corrupting our children and robbing us of all

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Speaker 1: hope for our future. Not an unfair analogy if indeed

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Speaker 1: slender Man embodies the worst of the Internet. But is

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Speaker 1: there another way to look at it? Something frequently overlooked

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Speaker 1: in slender Man's parison to the Pied Piper is that

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Speaker 1: it isn't the Piper who is the villain, but the townspeople.

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Speaker 1: Not only do they double cross him and refuse to

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Speaker 1: pay for his services, we could say that in the

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Speaker 1: Piper's final act, he isn't stealing the children away, but

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Speaker 1: merely protecting them from the rat infested world that their

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Speaker 1: forbears had created. In other words, the problem is not

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Speaker 1: the Internet. The problem is us. If I may be

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Speaker 1: allowed to add my own creepy pass to entry to

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Speaker 1: the myth of slender Man, it would be to betray him,

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Speaker 1: not as an emblem of the terror of the unknown

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Speaker 1: that lurks on the horizon of an uncertain digital future,

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Speaker 1: but rather as a messenger from that future sent back

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Speaker 1: to guide us. How fitting that it would be the

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Speaker 1: younger generation, the children who are most aware of the

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Speaker 1: slender Man. Not only are they the ones who will

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Speaker 1: be most harmed by a failure to correct a doomed future,

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Speaker 1: but it will be them who will save us from it.

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Speaker 1: That being said, for all the fear of how the

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Speaker 1: Internet might be damaging us, we've barely got the Internet

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Speaker 1: out of the box, let alone plugged it in. Should

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Speaker 1: we not expect a few teething issues? The simple fact

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Speaker 1: may be that as a species, we just haven't figured

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Speaker 1: out how best to work it yet to our advantage,

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Speaker 1: although of course best to our advantage as a wholly

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Speaker 1: subjective phrase in any case, In this sense, we shouldn't

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Speaker 1: always fear online behavior that we don't understand or feel

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Speaker 1: threatened by, but instead try to see it as merely

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Speaker 1: the growing pains of an entire species learning how to

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Speaker 1: use a new tool. Humanity has always fought with itself

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Speaker 1: in the offline world, establishing laws and rules to create societies.

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Speaker 1: Why should we expect it to be any different in

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Speaker 1: the online world. As these online battles play out over

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Speaker 1: how we might best use our latest tool, it is

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Speaker 1: worth examining what it is exactly that scares us about it.

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Speaker 1: Where once the internet was thought to offer something akin

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Speaker 1: to a beneficial newsphere, something in which we could all

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Speaker 1: pool our best ideas, many have instead been left fearing

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Speaker 1: it has merely opened a door to chaos, disrupting established

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Speaker 1: orders and threatening all the so called progress that such

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Speaker 1: order has contributed to. Is this sphere warranted or is

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Speaker 1: it simply born from the inconvenience of hearing other voices

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Speaker 1: and perspectives that aren't like ours, voices that have been

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Speaker 1: made louder and given more potency thanks to the Internet.

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Speaker 1: For all the uncertainty of a post truth, more fluid world,

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Speaker 1: could something like the Me Too or Black Lives Matter

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Speaker 1: movements have been successful in a pre Internet age. For all,

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Speaker 1: those who talk about a return to a more stable,

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Speaker 1: simpler time, do they really mean a time where they

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Speaker 1: don't have to be confronted by ideas such as white privilege?

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Speaker 1: For example? That sense of fear and uncertainty could simply

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Speaker 1: be the feeling of being inside the paradigm shift of

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Speaker 1: a changing world. Indeed, for many, in spite of the disruptiveness,

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Speaker 1: the immediate consequences of a digitally accelerated cult remain profoundly appealing.

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Speaker 1: The feminist philosopher Donna Harroway was an early accelerationist before

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Speaker 1: the term had been adopted. Her nineteen eighty four seminal

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Speaker 1: essay The Cyborg Manifesto, provides an idea of what a

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Speaker 1: post accelerated world in which our bodies and minds become

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Speaker 1: more and more entwined with the digital sphere might look like.

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Speaker 1: Harroway's essay invites us to imagine the human evolving into cyborg,

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Speaker 1: a hybrid of machine and organism, as she describes it,

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Speaker 1: that might usher in a post gender world. Since the

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Speaker 1: cyborg is not human in the traditional sense, it is

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Speaker 1: transcendent of restrictive social conventions to do with perceptions of gender,

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Speaker 1: a transcendence which by extension, could be applied to all

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Speaker 1: restrictive perceptions such as race, disability, and sexuality, among others.

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Speaker 1: What cyber utopians had hoped was that the Internet and

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Speaker 1: the virtual space would help us escape the worst aspects

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Speaker 1: of ourselves. Yet this virtual space is nothing, if not

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Speaker 1: just an extension of ourselves. It was always going to

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Speaker 1: be subject to the same stresses and to complications we

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Speaker 1: experience in real world societies, and like those real world societies,

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Speaker 1: it will always be evolving through the ongoing processes of

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Speaker 1: different ideas and perspectives rubbing up against each other. As

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Speaker 1: unsettling as it may be, there are positive reasons to

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Speaker 1: challenge seemingly stable established orders. Take one fairly recent example.

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Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety one, as Speaker of the United States

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Speaker 1: House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich gave an to view to

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Speaker 1: influential broadcasting and a cable magazine telling advertisers not to

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Speaker 1: sponsor radio stations that played what he described as rap music.

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Speaker 1: Gingrich's stance was one adopted by many US government officials

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Speaker 1: that sought to demonize a growing trend that they didn't understand.

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Speaker 1: Concerned that hip hop was a threat to the country's

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Speaker 1: moral values, instead of seeking to understand it, they tried

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Speaker 1: to destroy it. In twenty seventeen, R and B and

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Speaker 1: hip hop surpassed rock music to become the biggest selling

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Speaker 1: musical genre in the United States and one of its

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Speaker 1: leading cultural exports, although as a genre it was already

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Speaker 1: well on its way there before the Internet really took

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Speaker 1: off its dominance. Those much to the free spirited sharing

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Speaker 1: and streaming culture of the Internet. Interestingly, as Thomas Pettit

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Speaker 1: acknowledges in his Guttenberg parenthesis theory, hip hop, much like

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Speaker 1: the oral nature of pre printing press culture, is a

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Speaker 1: medium that thrives on the mutability of ideas and the

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Speaker 1: fluidity of sampling. Once dismissed and maligned as an inferior

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Speaker 1: art form, hip hop and its myriad offshoots are now

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Speaker 1: widely regarded as superior modes of innovative and creative expression.

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Speaker 1: Many continue to voice their concerns over web two point

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Speaker 1: zero platforms and the cult of the noble amateur which

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Speaker 1: it engenders, as well as the drift toward a way

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Speaker 1: of thinking which seems to be prioritizing the wisdom of

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Speaker 1: the crowd over the authority of individual experts. However, it

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Speaker 1: seems often the primary concern is not the diminishing quality

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Speaker 1: of creative content, but more to do with the fear

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Speaker 1: that people won't be individually rewarded and recognized for their

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Speaker 1: creative ideas. Yet, in the grand scheme of things, what

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Speaker 1: does it matter who it is that first has an idea? Exactly?

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Speaker 1: Is it not more important that the idea exists in

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Speaker 1: the first place, that it is used well and propagated widely,

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Speaker 1: so that it can be better understood and improved upon.

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Speaker 1: As for questioning the quality of work that might emerge

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Speaker 1: from a culture no longer chained to the obsession of

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Speaker 1: authorship and ownership, we might consider the work of one

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Speaker 1: of literature's greatest pilferers, William Shakespeare, routinely regarded as the

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Speaker 1: finest writer of all time within the English speaking world.

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Speaker 1: Unlikely ever to be surpassed, Shakespeare is a pure product

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Speaker 1: of the pre printing press age, having apparently lifted liberally

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Speaker 1: from texts written by Greek philosopher Plutarch, English chronicler Raphael Hollinshead,

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Speaker 1: and French Renaissance philosopher Michel du Montanes, among potentially many others.

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Speaker 1: In twenty eighteen, a book written by a self taught

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Speaker 1: Shakespeare's scholar Dennis McCarthy and professor of English June Schleiter

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Speaker 1: revealed that one manuscript in particular had proved a source

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Speaker 1: of inspiration for up to eleven of Shakespeare's plays. The

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Speaker 1: pair made the discovery after applying the plagiarism software w

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Speaker 1: copy fined to a late sixteenth century text aptly titled

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Speaker 1: A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels. The unpublished manuscript,

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Speaker 1: written by a mine, a courtier of Queen Elizabeth the

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Speaker 1: First called George North, was found to include source material

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Speaker 1: for plays including King Lear, Macbeth and Henry the Fifth.

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Speaker 1: Not only did Shakespeare use quote the same words as North,

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Speaker 1: but often used them in scenes about similar themes and

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Speaker 1: even the same historical character. There's no reason to assume

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Speaker 1: our digital fate is sealed, that we are a species

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Speaker 1: hurtling towards the destruction of our own making. Locked in

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Speaker 1: by the tools we've made, it is far more likely

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Speaker 1: that in a thousand years time will be discussing the

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Speaker 1: problems of a new technology that'll make the Internet look

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Speaker 1: like two cups joined together by a piece of string.

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Speaker 1: Whether by considered choice, survival, instinct, or pre determined genetic compulsion,

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Speaker 1: we are a species of explorers, primed always to be

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Speaker 1: looking for new ways and new ideas, never more productive

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Speaker 1: than when confronted with the problem that threatens our existence.

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Speaker 1: But if ever we should fear that we might be

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Speaker 1: losing our way, perhaps it might be useful to bear

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Speaker 1: in mind the words of historian Aaron Sachs, as featured

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Speaker 1: in Rebecca Solnits, A Field Guide to Getting Lost. In

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Speaker 1: responding to a query of Solnits on the subject of exploration,

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Speaker 1: Sachs replied, explorers were always lost because they'd never been

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Speaker 1: to these places before. They never expected to know exactly

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Speaker 1: where they were. In my opinion, their most important skill

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Speaker 1: was simply a sense of optimism about surviving and finding

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Speaker 1: their way unexplained. The book and audiobook, featuring stories that

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Speaker 1: have never before been featured on the show, is now

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Speaker 1: available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes,

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Speaker 1: and Noble Waterstones, among other bookstores. All elements have Unexplained,

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Speaker 1: including the show's music, are produced by me Richard McClain smith.

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Speaker 1: Please subscribe and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts,

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Speaker 1: and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts

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Speaker 1: or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show.

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Speaker 1: Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like

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Speaker 1: to share. You can reach us online at Unexplained podcast

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Speaker 1: dot com, or Twitter at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at

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Speaker 1: Facebook dot com. Forward Slash Unexplained Podcast