Spook Central (Part One)
Artificial intelligence, stochastic resonance and the Internet of Things are making the unseen worlds more visible. Now what?
First, I apologize for my long absence. Thank you for all of your well wishes and prayers.
As I’ve mentioned before, I strongly believe that 2024 will shape up to be the weirdest year of any of our lives. We still have a long way to go, but the recent string of Clownworld circus acts seems as good a prologue as any for what’s on deck.
I had a lot to say about these events. But every time I sat down to write about one, Something Happened.
For all those who’ve been aching for Something to Happen, Christmas has come early and often, I suppose.
But instead of trying to chase down all these swarthy swans, or pick them off from the tree line, I wanted to take a step back and write about a different Something that is Happening. It’s a Something that’s been Happening all our lives, but which now seems to be reaching its inevitable crescendo.
Introduction
What do people mean when they say the “unseen” worlds?
Religious people have an answer. So do artists, spiritualists, occultists and woo-woos of all stripes. They’re not quite the same answer, but they’re all in the same meta-category of answer. What they generally point to is a kind of parallel reality; an Elsewhere inhabited by beings that convey intelligible form and meaning but lack a traditional substance. Some of these answers go even further, and say they lack a “substance” entirely, or merely exist as archetypes or ideals. Others claim the forms in the unseen world are powerful, intelligent entities who maintain an active interest in human events.
The smarter Elsewhere seer understands that the unseen world isn’t to be toyed with, or utilized for material advantage.
Unfortunately, this person is on the verge of extinction in our time.
The sciences have come up with a meta-answer of their own. For most modern scientists, the unseen world means something akin to the God of the Gaps; the fraction of mystery that still lacks a mechanical explanation. The inhabitants of the unseen world are therefore not only creatures we haven’t yet discovered, but the array of forces, laws, principles and other conceptual entities that humans can’t fully model or explain. The territory of the scientist’s unseen world is therefore always shrinking, in lockstep with his scientific inquiries and experimental proofs.
The smarter scientist understands that his method has limits, and that there are unseen parts of reality he cannot see or know.
Unfortunately, this person is on the verge of extinction in our time.
A third category of seer is a kind of crime detective. The unseen world they investigate and expose is one of material evils shrouded by powerful interests and agents, a world of encrypted communications and bloody secrets, of elite stringpullers and psychological warfare, of black markets trafficking in poisons and human flesh. It’s also a world of ancient mystery cults, secret societies and their postmodern descendants, summoning the Beast from behind masks of managerial politics, corrupted science and other institutional forms. The lifeblood of this occluded underworld is extortion, bribes, blackmail, and other the carrot-stick tactics that undermine and capture all public agents and officials. The detective sees this world by gathering clues from the crime scenes, which he uses to connect dots and name names.
The smarter detective understands that some secrets will never be fully unearthed, and that hunting the rabbits on the field is more important than diving down the bottomless rabbit hole of paranoia and suspicion.
Unfortunately, this person… you get the point.
There are other kinds of seers. Over the past two centuries, a whole ecosystem of -ologists and -ographers has sprung up, drawing connections between visible form and unseen function. The best comedians also see unseen parts of reality, typically in the suppressed and obscured angles of the human soul. Stand-ups point an occlusion lens at society, memelords firebomb weak hinges in the noos. Turns out there’s plenty of ways to skin a cat, and explore its hidden workings.
From the 6GW warrior’s perspective, these observation methods are all simultaneously valid. To him, the unseen worlds they describe not only exist, but are more real than the finely crafted illusions others mistake for reality. And not only are the observations true, they exist in alignment with each other. Our goal is to use our God-given discernment to incorporate the best of these methods, so we go to battle with every tool in hand.
Our current crop of truth-seekers often don’t see it that way, unfortunately. At worst, they’ll dismiss all other ways of seeing and knowing as a dangerous delusion, and make enemies of natural allies in that process. The cleric and the barbarian are so busy arguing about whose method is superior, the horde of monsters eats them. That sounds like a funny ending to a story, in a game of Dungeons & Dragons. But our game has much bigger stakes.
That’s one of the thorny problems that dissidents need to solve, and quickly. Because we are all in the drink.
We are bathed in artificial signals of all kinds, now, in a way that no previous generation of mankind could ever imagine. These signals are real and physical, blasting through your body at an escalating number and rate. Each phantom bullet is illegible in transit, encrypted and compressed beyond human recognition. At the receiver nodes, they unfold into all manner of illusions, the complexity of which are accelerating over time. For instance, people now regularly talk to things, and those things talk back.
This signal bath is having repercussions. Some of them are good, and present new opportunities. Some of them are very, very bad. But one neutral effect is becoming almost impossible to ignore.
The Veil between the seen and unseen worlds is getting thinner.
This is true no matter how you look at it. Corrupt institutions of science are bleeding trust like a stuck pig. Long running scams and psyops are unraveling in real-time, in front of worldwide audiences. Whether you aim the lens at politics, the sports world, Hollywood, corporate media, the arts, medicine or digital technology, the thinning effect appears to be accelerating. What was once hidden is being revealed.
For the average player, this effect can be harrowing. The illusions were designed to provoke, confuse, distract and terrify him. But they were also designed to comfort him in a way, to make reality seem altogether more stable and predictable than it ever was. Even events of outrageous destruction could be incorporated into the spell’s refrain: Everything is under control.
For people still under the spell, watching these illusions unravel is like watching the ground begin to disintegrate beneath their feet. Not all at once, but stone by stone, forcing them to skitter from one patch to the next, trying to escape the inevitable fall.
The Knight sees all these illusions and narratives differently from the start. Instead of being terrified or provoked, he sees more deeply into their meanings and connections, and teases true signals from noise. He rejoices in watching them implode and dissolve, and does his best to be a dissolving agent. He doesn’t worry about the stability of the ground beneath his feet; he walks in two worlds, and neither of them are the elecrified dancefloor of surreal lies the Enemy projects.
The Knight also understands that he ultimately serves for the glory of God Almighty. There are no atheists in his foxhole, and can’t be. No matter how strong, how noble, how competent in his material means and methods, the atheist is doomed to be lured away eventually, by some shimmering illusion that he confuses for the truth.
But the Knight recognizes that to serve God is also to respect His mystery. Although the Veil may be thinning, that final mystery will remain incomprehensible to mortal minds. Instead of demoralizing the Knight, this propels him to improve his vision and expand his awareness. Given our Enemy’s unending parade of ever more grotesque illusions and agents, he can’t risk being shocked by the Next Big Thing to come shambling around that corner. He’s humbled by all that he doesn’t know, sure. But he has readied himself to see literally anything.
Or has he?
Which brings me to the topic of this new series.
Like so many concepts in our deracinated Babeltongue, there is a cluster of poorly and/or circularly defined words orbiting around it. Words like “paranormal” and “supernatural” and “otherworldly phenomena,” and all the baffling jargon that typically accompanies them.
You get the picture though. We’re talking about spooks and specters: intelligent entities that seem to lack traditional bodies, yet are somehow able to interact with the material world.
To witness one of these things in action is quite an ordeal. It’s the kind of experience that tests you spiritually and mentally. It even tests you physically at times, because it demonstrates the ability to collide with stable matter, and to manipulate it in complex ways. Just to be clear, we aren’t talking about “cold spots”, or microscopic movements captured on time-lapse film. We’re talking major shit-your-pants Hollywood nightmare fuel.
When you’re confronted by this part of the unseen world, the dangers threaten to exceed the boundaries of the encounters themselves, leading to all kinds of paranoid delusions and life-deranging obsessions. In a worst case scenario, a witness might completely snap his cap, and enter a gravity well of debilitating madness.
My theory is that the latter outcome is happening much more than we tend to think, and at the same accelerating pace as… well, everything else, these days.
When you put them side by side, many of these trendlines — economic, industrial, biomedical, psychiatric — fall into obvious alignment. In fact, the slope of several trendlines seems to align so neatly, one can’t help but search for a common denominator. That’s a good thing. That’s 6GW battlefield vision in effect — not just connecting dots, but scanning for the connective tissue and weak hinges. But the technique’s explanatory power has its limits. Some things just need to be seen to be believed, let alone understood and explained. And even then, we must accept that some degree of impenetrable mystery will remain.
In fact, if I had any advice for the front line troops, in the Weird War III to come, it would be just that. Leave room for a quantum of mystery in your appraisals, for Chesterton’s “tiniest imp, though it may be hiding in a pimpernel.” At the very least, it may help keep you sane, when faced with something that would otherwise be mind-shattering.
That said, I am not a man who is content with total mystery. God did not make his children as a hive of identical clones. He gifted us with independent minds and unique talents, with the understanding that we would hone them to solve problems in spacetime. Sloth is a deadly sin for good reason. We should apply our skills and knowledge when we can, and to the best of our abilities.
In reflecting on my own encounters with the unseen world of the “paranormal”, I plan to do exactly that. Some details I describe may disturb or alarm you, regardless of your metaphysics or religious beliefs. Meanwhile, my material-atheist readers might reach a different conclusion, and provide a clinical diagnosis from afar.1
But my analysis involves more than just my personal experiences. When coupled with other more “visible” phenomena and trends, I’ve come up with the outlines of a theory. It’s not a full explanation, and isn’t intended as one. But if it’s even partially accurate, it might explain why experiences like mine are becoming altogether more commonplace and intensified, and particularly over the past twenty years.
All that said, I’m no belly-lint miner or theoryCel.
For my money, the main value in any scientific inquiry — or even a pseudoscientific one — is rooted in application. My goal isn’t just to shine a light on this quadrant of the unseen world, but to devise tools and techniques to combat its worst inhabitants.
All that’s to say:
Strap in tight, boys and ghouls!
We’re going on a little hayride, to the Other Side of Reason.
The Dust Collection
There are no bad things, but only bad uses of things. If you will, there are no bad things but only bad thoughts; and especially bad intentions. . . . But it is possible to have bad intentions about good things; and good things, like the world and the flesh have been twisted by a bad intention called the devil. But he cannot make things bad; they remain as on the first day of creation. The work of heaven alone was material; the making of a material world. The work of hell is entirely spiritual.
— G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox
A few weeks back, I was charged with writing and delivering my dad’s eulogy. I knew I’d be asked, and did my best.
One thing I’ve realized on my halting, imperfect journey back to God is that He wants us to always do our best, to use every tool in our toolkits to maximum effect. That may sound like a platitude, but as I’ve gotten older and (hopefully) wiser, I’ve realized that many platitudes convey the deepest truths. Call it the K.I.S.S. rule of axiomatic wisdom.
Anyway, I began my eulogy by describing my dad’s favorite clothes. I didn’t mean the threads he bought off the rack, but his birthday suit: the dynamic, shapeshifting material of his body. It was a metaphor. But it also wasn’t a metaphor.
The clothing of a living body is a self-tailoring fabric, the cellular threads of which autonomously die and are reborn. A given thread’s lifespan varies widely based on its location and purpose. Certain threads — in the central windows of the eyes, in the gray matters of the brain — may persist for the duration of a creature’s life. This should tell even the most implacable materialist something about the importance of sight and thought, which are the cyclical actions that allow a stable reality to cohere at all. Only the most godless version of Hobbesian Nature would dare gamble on respinning such precious threads. These materials constitute our divine birthright, the closest approximation of both pattern and Patternmaker on this side of the Veil. So we wear them much longer than the rest.
If we look at the climax of the Eden story through this lens, I think something interesting happens:
The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.
Genesis 3:21, NIV
Whatever else you might think of it, the Genesis story is dense with meaning.2 So dense, in fact, that it might be telling more than one aligned origin story of reality simultaneously. For example, the Edenic arc is typically told as taking place in the material world. Even non-literalist readings place it there, imagining Man’s fall as a time-lapse depiction of his evolving mind and physical powers. But could it also be the tale of the immortal soul, choosing to express itself through the medium of finite matter?
That would make sense, given how God describes the new limitations imposed by our metabolic bodies. Now that you are “clothed” in flesh, you are forced to maintain it. To do that, you must toil, must eat, must feel pain, up to and including the pain of death. No garment lasts forever, no matter how form-fitting and finely spun. Even if you take exemplary care of it, re-stitch every seam and patch up every hole, eventually it will fray and fall apart. Dust to dust.
It’s not just our bodies. One way to look at any physical “object” is as a local concentration of dust, gaining temporary coherence in spacetime. That coherence is eventually lost, whether due to an extreme mishap or entropic decay. In that sense, loss of coherence is another way of saying the object was “destroyed.” All material forms we own are therefore temporary possessions. While many will cohere much longer than our clothes, they are still Death Row inmates, slated for destruction. Yet we still attach value to them, and sometimes for reasons that are hard to explain.
For example, I am in possession of certain physical objects that I’ve come to refer to as my Dust Collection. Most are old tools that once served some material interest of mine. I used them for work and play, to communicate remotely, and to perform other mundane tasks, like paying bills and ordering pizzas.
But in their current state and position in spacetime, they are essentially garbage: fleeting concentrations of dust that lack any ongoing purpose or function.
Here’s one example:
With the exception of my wife, I have never shown this object to anyone before. But she doesn’t really count, since she was present at its “creation”. When she recently brought it to my attention during a chaotic move — one of several we accomplished in this year alone — her intent was to return it to the building manager along with our other keys.
I wouldn’t allow it.
If its shape looks familiar to you, it should (and if not, scroll up have a glance at the top-left corner of this post). Did this object inspire my logo? No. It joined my collection long after I started writing The Cat Was Never Found. But its new, uncanny shape isn’t even the weirdest thing about it. That’s more like what comedians call a “tag” — an extra punchline after the punchline.3
The object’s original function was to open a door with a song. Not anymore. The lock it was mated to has since been reprogrammed to answer to a different song. There’s nothing special about the fob’s form, either, which could be quickly and cheaply refabricated. They even have machines at convenience stores that’ll copy that sucker’s song lyrics, and mail you a replacement in just a few days time. I should know.
Now that no door will requite its RF love ditty, I can’t think of any logical market value that could possibly attach. It wouldn’t even cut it as a paperweight, frankly. On the other hand, markets don’t operate in strictly utilitarian terms. Neither do the human minds and choices that collectively feed and steer those egregores. So even if it’s only worth something to me, and me alone, that’s still value.
The main value I attach to this useless hunk of plastic and silicon is that of a storytelling aid. Like other items in the Collection, the key is intimately entwined with my own experience of the unseen worlds. You might even call it a “magic” key, because the story it helps me tell lacks any “rational” explanation. All I can say for sure is that it was touched by something that I don’t fully understand, and which I struggle to explain.
That’s the basic criteria for entering my Collection. Each object helps me tell a story that’s inexplicable by modernity’s baseline storytelling framework. Apart from a bit of “fun” speculation at the margins, like exorcism documentaries, or Zak Bagans’ Museum of Whatchamagoo, that frame doesn’t include room for ghosts, demons or other immaterial entities that can physically interact with the material world. Everything else is just Hollywood bullshit, or a scam. If you want to tell a ghost story that’s widely believed, then you better build a time machine, or move to the Amazon jungle.
A few years ago, I more or less subscribed to that framing. While I allowed that there could be unexplained phenomena lurking outside of it, my default opinion was that basically all research into the paranormal was either the product of some racket or hoax, or a misunderstanding of some mundane occurrence. I held the normie skeptic’s position, essentially. Prove it, or fuck off.
And even if there were such things as ghosts and Bigfeet and whatnot, I assumed the fake or misinterpreted encounters would exceed the real ones by multiple orders of magnitude. After all, if the phenomenon wasn’t rare, then its proponents wouldn’t be so ghettoized and ridiculed in our mass media.
The subject matter probably also wouldn’t be so popular in Hollywood, either, which diverges from common opinions and experiences by default. Horror movies are moneymakers because people fear the unknown, much more than the known. If the majority of people saw ghosts everyday, ticket sales would plummet.
But the bottom line is this: almost everyone living in the ironic, postmodern, 21st century West was raised a skeptic, and will remain one absent a direct experience to the contrary.
Maybe that’s where you’re at, too. That would stand to reason; if you haven’t seen anything especially weird, why would you try to cram such destabilizing concepts into an already complicated and unstable picture? You all have bills to pay and pizzas to order, too.
But consider this strange development:
Reports of “paranormal” activity — ghost sightings, demonic possessions, and the corresponding beliefs in both — have risen sharply over the course of our lives, particularly over the past two decades. So has the accompanying chatter. In fact, the explosive Ngram for the term “demon” is a signal in itself.
The strict material-reductionist might find these trendlines perplexing, since it correlates so well with the growth of consumer digital technology and other general indicators of scientific “progress.” If he’s a God-of-the-Gaps aficionado, this should logically lead to an overall reduction in superstition, as it has done with religious belief (which he regards as a sort of meta-superstition complex).
It’s worth noting here that I’m still not a “superstitious” guy. I don’t collect crystals or amulets, don’t read horoscopes, don’t mix up magic potions (unless you count vodka martinis). I’ve never put any stock in numerology, or astrology, or any other -ology that promises truth-by-proxy. It’s okay if you do, but that’s not how I roll.
I’m not a sentimental guy either. I hate having too much useless crap just lying around. In fact, I have a generally low tolerance for material “stuff” in general, these days. Just about everything I own can fit into the back of a mid-sized SUV, and I like it that way. As a result, I don’t feel any emotional attachment to the junk in my Collection. They aren’t propped up and spot-lit in a glass trophy case; the fob’s current home is a small plastic bin, alongside some spare reading glasses, a bottle of vitamin D, a tube of store-brand burn gel and some other random crap. I’ll eventually find a proper storage solution for all these Dust Collectibles, where they can collect dust of their own.
What I am, and have always been, is a curious guy. Yes, that has gotten me into trouble, and probably more times than I can count. But it’s also led to the sorts of experiences that enrich and edify, and which have made me competent across multiple domains. Some of those domains actually require curiosity and experimentation, because there really are no “experts” who can teach you how to build the toolkit and surf those waves (I’m looking at you, Comp Sci and Fine Arts majors).
Unfortunately, “paranormal research” doesn’t count as one my toolkits. On the advice of certain readers, I tried to absorb some of the most popular source material. I eventually gave up, finding its jargon too alien, obscure and unwieldy for me to master. That’s not to denigrate the people in these fields. I’m sure there’s been some worthwhile insights. It’s just not in my wheelhouse, and playing catchup at this point strikes me as a waste of time. It’s an old dog, new tricks sort of thing.
What is in my wheelhouse are the toolkits of art, technology, and their various intersections in the marketplace. And because the God I am coming to know wants me to do my best with what I’ve got, I began to pursue a certain theory along those lines.
My hypothesis is that a paranormal event is neither purely “spiritual” nor “material” in nature, but rather indicates a confluence or nexus point, at which the information exchange between them is dramatically heightened or distorted. My guess is that the most observable exchange medium is signal traffic, expressed as a volume of normally diffuse energy being compressed and strategically focused for point-to-point transmissions. Collectively, we tend to call this medium the Internet, although the both the signals and signalers that comprise it are often undercounted. There’s more “Internet” out there than you probably know, and more of it generated on a daily basis.
By this theory, the reason for the spike in paranormal reports could be that we are now generating these signals beyond some unknown capacity or threshold. For example, the increasing density of the traffic may be forming the basis for a coherent texture — a “clothing” — that can be worn and used by creatures that lack coherent or specific bodies. The content of these encrypted signals may matter as well; like the lock that only answers to a particular song, each creature may favor certain kinds of signal-cloth over others.
And if such a creature also happens to be intelligent?
Then a lot of freaky shit could happen.
And if it happens often enough, and with enough intensity, you might even get a guy named “Mark Bisone” to tell you all about it on the Internet. But before we get to that, let’s strap on our 6GW night-vison goggles, and assess our freaky new battlefield with this hypothesis in mind.
The New Deluge
One of the reasons I struggle to explain the “thing” that touched my Dust Collection is that the most useful languages for doing so were poisoned or discarded long before I was born. I can only explain it using my own limited and debased terminology. But I’m still inclined to define those terms, as anyone should do when they are explaining a novel theory.
First and foremost: What do I mean when I say the key fob was “touched” by something?
My own definition of touch requires the collision of least two dense, independently intelligible bodies. This definition holds firm even if you’re talking about the wind touching your face, or the song touching your eardrum. Both “wind” and “song” are intelligible as bodies, even though their compositions aren’t as integral, dense, or independently coherent as, say, a turtle, or a rock. When we hear these words, we know what people mean by them, and can even recreate the sensation of contact in our minds.
The same can be said of a “body of water.” Such a body has measurable properties like weight and density. It can even be said to have lengths, widths and depths (depending on your ruler and methodology, of course; natural bodies don’t subscribe to standard, linear measurement). Similar properties attach to other, even less coherent bodies. For example, although the “body” of a song doesn’t have a density per se, its requisite property does.
Sound has a density of 1 joule per cubic meter. Soundwaves travelling at certain frequencies can therefore exert visible, macroscopic force on other dense material in their paths, through a process called acoustophoresis. When you see this happen up close, it looks like spooky magic. You probably wouldn’t even guess the magic’s source, since the frequencies applied are well out of range for human hearing.
Does sound have mass? If we take for granted that energy and mass are equivalent, yeah, of course it does. But even absent conversations about relativity, quantum mechanics and particule-wave duality, recent experiments suggest sound carries a miniscule amount of mass even by the old Newtonian definition.
While we can’t say magnetism carries “mass” by the same principles, it does have density, measured in flux. And electromagnetism could be said to include multiple densities, measurable by current, energy and momentum. Electromagnetic energy is also partially how we account for and measure the density of photons. But like the “colors” at the extremes of the UV spectrum, all of these signals are mostly undetectable by our naked senses, even when they are in physical collision with our own bodies.
We can only say “mostly” undetectable, however, because what is unintelligible isn’t necessarily the same as that which is currently undetected. In other words, just because we don’t realize something is happening, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. That tree you can’t currently see may still be falling — and could fall on your head if you’re not careful. That’s why the experimenter in the video wears ear protection, even though his mind can’t identify and interpret the waves. He knows the soundwaves are still touching him, and could do real physical damage to his body. In a different age, he might have feared other kinds of damage, such as being burned at the stake.
When I used to think about stake-burnings, witch-drownings, and other executions for supernatural crimes, I could only conceive of them in two mutually exclusive ways:
The killing was purely political in nature. The verdict was handed down in a kangaroo court, including all the specious claims and railroading that implies. All supernatural aspects of the crime were either concocted out of thin air as a rationale, or resulted from a moral panic, mass hysteria or other sociogenic virus. Or both, more likely, each set of witch-hunters scratching the other’s back.
The victim displayed a genuine supernatural ability, or was in close enough proximity to a supernatural event to draw suspicion. The trial was therefore not technically without merit, even though its verdict could still be wrong (e.g. the supernatural source was God and not the Devil, and so they burned not a heretic, but a saint).
These days, I think that both analyses could be simultaneously accurate, yet also incomplete. What could be happening is that a given individual, location, event or some combination of these might alter aspects of an exchange. Either independently or by confluence, the local material serves to attract, conduct, focus, recieve and/or transmit information in an unusual way. By “unusual” I don’t mean necessarily unnatural, but deviating so much from the mean signal output that most observers will notice (and perhaps be terrified or outraged).
And while the spiritual component of these deviant transactions is necessary (more on that in a bit), that doesn’t mean it's sufficient. Unless God Himself intervenes directly (i.e. a miracle), there must be some local medium of exchange, and energy to power it.
For instance: if you see a sword levitate across a volume of air (medium), there’s a good chance that energetic exchanges between dense bodies are taking place in that air, no matter how lightweight or imperceptible they might be. Whether we understand those colliding bodies as particles or waves, they are clearing “touching” the sword. But, broadly speaking, we can’t observe what’s directing those bodies to move and collide in a strategic ways. Like neurons firing around in our brains, we can only measure the aftermath of motion, the effect. We can’t measure what is aiming or shooting the gun. It’s too fast, too weak, too light. But whatever “it” is, we know it must collide with particle-waves, at some unseen level of transaction.
It’s worth noting here that our modern global communications network, including all of the endpoint gadgetry that ties it together, operates mainly by these forms of undetected touch. And, much like the experiment’s levitating balls, the products tethered to the ends of this network likewise comes off like magic, to most of the people who use it. This group includes many of the engineers who produce the various components. Vertical integration of hypercomplex, hyperfragile systems has created a development environment that’s like Friedman’s Pencil on steroids. It’s not just that “Nobody makes a computer.” It’s that nobody makes one single part of a computer. Not even a screw. Absent a few hobbyists, no one even writes a whole computer program anymore. Just bits and bobs, slotted into some multidimensional version-control matrix.
Speaking of programs, there’s also the matter of the native unintelligibility of their code. No need for analogy or metaphor; it’s right there in the word itself. Before it can become an intelligible body, the encoded information must be transmitted, received and decoded. For instance, you could stare at the raw binary code of a Netflix streaming series for the rest of your life, and never glimpse the mysteriously tanned face of a Slay Queen Viking.
The reason has to do with the kind of exchange that’s occurring, and the song that’s being sung. It’s very different than the information exchange between, say, an axe handle and your hand, or your shoe and your foot. These exchanges are the result of intentional, unparsed, one-way transmissions. The axe handle doesn’t grasp your hand, the shoe doesn’t put on your foot. Nor do your hands and feet command your mind to make contact with these items, nor does your conscious mind need to decode the procedure in advance of operation. Like that old Nike ad, you “Just Do It.”
That’s the order of communication for living creatures. Via the mysterious work of our unseen minds, we transmit our will into ever more distant forms of living and non-living material.
Mind → Body → Axe → Tree
Even when the transmissions appear to run in both directions, there is no encoding or occlusion inherent in the exchange itself. For instance:
Lion’s Mind → Lion’s Body → ←Zebra’s Body ← Zebra’s Mind
There’s still feedback and exhaust at every transfer node of the exchange (or exchanges, I should say, since there’s an incalculable blizzard of those occurring in even the simplest macro-collision).
But, while we might say the larger “story” of the lion-zebra encounter involves elements of deception (the lion’s tall grass, the zebra’s stripes, etc.), the exchanges of energy/information are fundamentally transparent. Whatever else happens in the tale, we know the zebra isn’t going to suddenly decrypt or decompress into a herd of wooly mammoths. The language of Mother Nature is frank, in other words, even when the kids are fighting.
This isn’t the case for our worldwide network of singing, flashing, fluxing gadgetry. The forces which concentrate and cohere our everyday mediated experience of reality are encoded by default. And although the physical flow of this data carriage appears to our minds as mute, weak and invisible, it is in actuality incredibly loud and ferociously strong in its totality.
For example, if you ask a current-gen AI something like “What is the average daily combined force of all RF signal traffic in the world?” it won’t even try to guess an answer. It’s apparently not in the training set, maybe because no human being has ever tried to guess that before. The number may not be totally unobtainable, but it would probably require a lot of diligent work to get anywhere close to an approximate figure. In that sense, modelling the datasphere is a lot like so-called “climate modelling.” Devising a satisfactory ruler alone would constitute a serious project.4
What’s certain is this: In the year 2024, these seemingly “immaterial” forces of sound, electromagnetism and light constantly flow all around us, and through us. They flood the atmosphere with information that is potentially intelligible but is strictly illegible (e.g. encoded, encrypted, compressed, ciphered) during transit, rendering it functionally indistinguishable from noise. The signals entombed in this noise pulse through us constantly from all angles, but their bodies don’t become recognizable until they reach their destination portals.
This cryptic, ethereal, globetrotting conversation is happening twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three-hundred-and-sixty-five days a year. The heaviest, densest elements of its anatomy — the towers, satellites, server farms, consumer gizmos, etc. — go on chattering even while we sleep, and often even when we “turn them off.”
The result is that the total signal throughput of our global communication grid grows in size, density, strength and complexity at an unknown rate. Using sales figures, energy consumption and other proxy data, the best we could say is that growth and distribution of the signals generated by these and other “portals” started trending exponential around the middle of the millennium’s first decade. Not only are there more signals and signalers now than every previous age combined, but the non-human versions outnumber the human ones by an unfathomable amount. Consider that the global distribution of smartphones alone currently exceeds 7.2 billion, with a projected growth to nearly 8 billion by 2028. Now extrapolate to modems, consoles, GPS systems, satellites, towers and every other wireless transmitter and receiver on Earth.
The same goes for the various AIs, algorithms and electronic spies “haunting” these devices. The population size of these digital gremlins is equally unobtainable, but all signs point to a rapid, metastatic growth. To make matters worse, many of these programs are engaging in autonomous exchanges at an unknown rate and volume, often based on a feedback ecosystem that involves no human input, permission or oversight. And that makes sense, because no human mind or group of minds could possibly keep up.
And lest we forget, the Internet’s human users are also signalers and feedback nodes. Once a user’s data origami is unfolded and unpuzzled into an intelligible form, the mind(s) on the other end(s) responds by folding up a noisy puzzle of its own, and launching it back into the labyrinth. Like every other signal category flooding the datasphere, the number of these transactions is inconceivable, and probably incalculable. You’d need a second Internet to keep track of them, and a duplicate human race to compile and visualize the data.
And none of that even accounts for the “loss” (really, dispersion) inherent in every energy transfer. As we find and deploy more resources to power our transactions, the net available energy for “other” agents to power their own transactions also grows. One result of this 24/7/365 invisible maelstrom is that there’s a lot more energy and information in the air than ever before. A lot more “stuff” to collide with.
Did we really think there’d be no consequences?
Don’t worry. This isn’t a rant about the dangers of 5G. At least, not about the biological hazards (though there’s a mountain of evidence that those exist). It’s not specifically about sonic weaponry either, although we’d be worse-than-foolish to assume our Enemy doesn’t regularly deploy such weapons, even against its own intramural warring factions.
The point is rather this: In a very short period of time, the planet Earth has quietly become a absurdly noisy place, and with no significant change in the sound absorption ratings of its living occupants. The noise that’s being generated involves enormously powerful exchanges of energy, which are nonetheless imperceptible and incoherent to us by default. If one of us were to consciously detect and comprehend even one-millionth of this signal traffic, for even one millisecond, the result wouldn’t just be disorienting. It would drive us totally insane.
In fact, I suspect it might be doing that regardless. Not everyone, surely, and not all at the same rate or depth. But it seems like an ever growing fraction of the population are losing their minds. This signal seems to be especially strong among those with little to no pre-Internet experience of life.
The rate of individuals reporting symptoms consistent with major depression in the last 12 months increased 52 percent in adolescents from 2005 to 2017 (from 8.7 percent to 13.2 percent) and 63 percent in young adults age 18 to 25 from 2009 to 2017 (from 8.1 percent to 13.2 percent). There was also a 71 percent increase in young adults experiencing serious psychological distress in the previous 30 days from 2008 to 2017 (from 7.7 percent to 13.1 percent). The rate of young adults with suicidal thoughts or other suicide-related outcomes increased 47 percent from 2008 to 2017 (from 7.0 percent to 10.3 percent).
Are there other correlations that could potentially explain this tragic trendline? Of course there are, and many of you reading this have done excellent work in exploring those. Since I joined Substack, I’ve learned much from many great writers about the competency crisis, the replication crisis, sociogenic infections, institutional capture, Ponzi banking, 5G psyops, the looming money bubble and much, much more. They still amplify the Internet’s worst effects, and spawn bad network effects of their own. They therefore continue to be useful topics of investigation in their own right.
But when it comes to the post-millennial tidal wave of ghosts, demons and general spook-ery, I think it all began with this cryptic little jingle:
To be continued…
I wanted to publish this as a single article, but it turns out I had much more to say than I initially thought. That said, I plan to publish the next part soon. It will touch on a number of topics pertaining to the hidden worlds of espionage, Luciferian cults, the managerial elite, and the increasingly obvious connections between them all.
We will also discuss the latest craze in tinfoil hat design, and why you probably should be wearing one of those. Should be fun, right?
Till then, God bless you and yours,
Mark.
The Cat Was Never Found is a reader-supported blog. I don’t publish much paywalled content, so your generous patronage is very much appreciated. As a reminder, a paid subscription will also grant you access to Deimos Station; the happiest place in cyberspace!
P.S. If you found any of this valuable (and can spare any change), consider dropping a tip in the cup for ya boy. It will also grant you access to my new “Posts” section on the site, which includes some special paywalled Substack content. Thanks in advance.
That’s okay. I still love you rascals!
This doesn’t necessarily indicate that all of the meanings are truthful. The Devil has a way of slipping a lie into even the most profound human workings, quietly inverting or sabotaging the picture.
Not that I thought the joke was particularly funny at the time. Thanks to additional data points, I’ve since reconsidered.
I’d sign up for one of them juicy grants, but I have a feeling most funders wouldn’t want the answer to get out.
"Leave room for a quantum of mystery in your appraisals, for Chesterton’s “tiniest imp, though it may be hiding in a pimpernel.” At the very least, it may help keep you sane, when faced with something that would otherwise be mind-shattering."
Perhaps an aspect of madness, of falling into the dark void, is a demand that ALL make sense...an absence of tolerance for mystery or the inexplicable.... We have come up against so many rips in the fabric of reason--things that don't make sense--and though we seek answers, we have collected evidences rather than whole explanations since it is clear there are afoot multiple sources attempting to entrap humanity. We have found ourselves terrified on occasion, sitting at our computer or talking and feeling an almost physical push AWAY from our investigations, which we have continued to pursue, despite those experiences of such fear. In pushing through that fear we have made early (2020) discoveries and collected evidence of some of the plans and mechanisms that have been put in place to capture and control the entire world. Our 2020-2021 work is gathered in our book: COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We are the Prey. We are working on our next book since that one was published. Turning strongly to God and embracing His Grace has rescued us again and again in this journey.
I think your comment alluding to the endlessness of rabbit holes is very true. We have to stop expecting solid ground, solid answers and expect to be making our way through quicksand, some of which is planted to entrap us.
Finally, I want to say I am very sorry about the loss of your dad. I lost my father in 2007, and it was a singular moment in my life; I too, delivered a eulogy and was at peace with how I did for myself, my mother and siblings and for the memory of my father. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and insights with us. ~ Ginger Breggin
Welcome officially back! And redebuting with a bang(er).
Re: software, every day I am more convinced that any program too big to be comprehended, let alone written by, a single person, is one too dangerous to exist. I joke somewhat, but trying to understand what's wrong in an interaction with an API with the surface area of the Sun is a mortal infohazard. As I'm lately rediscovering. Small programs that do one thing and do it well, maintained by one individual, is The Way, and things the scale of Windows, let alone AWS, are the devil incarnate.
I've been on a continuing project of replacing colossal bloatwares with small programs written by me and tailored to my specific use case for a few years now and the sanity levels of my computer interactions are improving therewith. For people who can't or won't do this I recommend judicious application of a hammer, and thereafter touching grass (but be sure to remove the battery before you smash it - funny how they've made that task needlessly complex lately).
Speaking of devils incarnate, here's hoping this new series dovetails with that one.