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REALITY BREAK

Philip Speakman

You can listen to this work on our dedicated page here.

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Introduction

Nina Davies

You're listening to Future Artefacts FM , a bi-monthly podcast/broadcast featuring speculative fiction audio works by artists and writers produced and presented by Nina Davies,

 

Rebecca Edwards

Rebecca Edwards

 

Niamh Schmidtke 

and Niamh Schmidtke, on RTM 

 

ND

and also available on podcast channels. 

 

NS

The programme focuses on fictional works intended for broadcast to carve out a better understanding of the now by exploring various interpretations of the future. 

 

RE

Together with guests we discuss the mechanics of different types of storytelling to reveal the complexities of contemporary culture. Let’s get started.

 

All

Let’s get started.

 

Artist Introduction

ND
Ok, welcome back to Future Artefacts FM. As per usual, I'm your host, Nina Davies 

 

NS
And Niamh Schmidt. This is episode 23.

 

ND
And if you are a regular listener, you will have probably noticed that we have a new addition to the team, which is Rebecca Edwards, who we've had on the show once before as a guest host. She passed the test, and here she is for the first episode. The first official episode.

 

RE
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to join this wonderful team.

 

NS
This is the start of a new era where we're going to be moving between hosts, so today it's going to be all three of us. Rebecca's about to introduce our lovely guest for today, but you might be hearing Rebecca and Nina, Rebecca and myself, me and Nina over the next few episodes. 

ND
Yeah, exactly. And sometimes it will be all three of us. 

NS
Like today. 

ND
Yeah, like today. So you never know what you're gonna get. 

 

RE
So today we're here with Philip Speakman. Welcome, Philip. 

 

Philip Speakman
Thanks. Very excited to be here.

 

RE
So, just by way of introduction, Philip Speakman's practice explores fiction as a technology and how the imaginary transgresses its unreality through media communication and narrative technologies of its times. In the last year, he has screened a work at Flat Earth Film Festival in Iceland, delivered a workshop titled a self induced hallucination at the Lethaby Gallery in London, and presented Katabasing a mixed reality performance for Gossamer Fogg's Alt-R virtual reality studio. His essay, it may start out as a game, but it ends up a whole world: Creepypasta, QAnon and the Anomalous tales of the Internet, is to be published in a special issue of the journal Contemporary Legend later this year, which is really exciting. He graduated from MA fine art at the Slade in 2023. So welcome, Phil.

 

PS
Thank you. Yeah, big fan of the podcast. 

 

ND
We’re a big fan of you. We've wanted to have you on the show, like, probably for a year, maybe even more than a year. 

 

NS
It's been longer. I remember your submission for the open call in 2022, I think it was. 

 

ND
Yeah, yeah, probably. And then your name keeps coming up, we're always like, “Phil, we need to get him on the show!” 

 

NS
Yeah, I think we've been trying to figure out a theme and funding and being like, okay, this would work, this would work. And then, thankfully, the stars aligned finally. 

 

PS
Thanks. It's a very exciting theme as well.

 

NS
And speaking of, we’re going to introduce it. So this is the first episode of a few on a new theme called The New Weird. And we won't read you our full text, you can read about it online, but to whet your appetite ahead of hearing more about Phil's work, we'll introduce some of the key questions that we're thinking about in relation to the new weird: what kinds of anarchy, activism, or being the other might create an emancipatory place to build new worlds from. This includes who gets to make worlds, what kind of worlds they are, and who do they serve? 

So we'll be exploring this over the course of a few episodes and with different artists. But today we're going to be looking at Philip's new work, Reality Break, which is a 15 minute audio piece.

 

ND
Phil, before we listen to the work, is there anything that you want to say about it or any sort of way you want to introduce the work for the listeners? 

 

PS
Yeah, not massively, except for maybe just that sort of thing of headphones, if you can. As you mentioned Rebecca, there's some more delicate bits of sound design and bits that I think probably only come out in headphones, but, yeah, apart from that, enjoy, I guess.. 

 

ND
I guess this is also worth saying that this is also a new work as well of yours. So it's being premiered on the show, which is quite exciting. Great. Well, we'll see you back in 15 minutes. Enjoy the work.

Reality Break

Work 15:54

 

So where, where does this begin for you? I guess, I don't know. Maybe in some ways, like, it begins with a feeling that maybe I shouldn't have taken that job. So my name's Jeff.

It didn't really. And this started, it was, I think, summer 2020. I was working on Facebook.

It was one of the really hot summers we had, which I think maybe Lentz to the atmosphere. It was a bit too hot to go outside.

 

My name's Rachel. I work as a developer at Facebook. Gatherings have just been allowed because it was locked down. So everyone was sort of in this already, like heightened, weird mood of having not been in public spaces, sharing space.

Billy. And I'm a programmer at Facebook now. Meta programming, the kind of the VR element of the metaverse, coming from a history of game design.

And I guess it kind of started with the sort of work event that we had, and they took everyone from the London office up to the Lake District. It was the launch of the Metaverse, the kind of the Facebook idea of having this sort of virtual reality and augmented reality meeting space and basically commercial space. A commercialization of reality, you could say.

And we got to the point where we were going to soft launch it. So it wasn't going to be announced to the public yet, but we were announcing it within the company. We'd gone to this. It was kind of like a hotel spa. We were going to do kind of team building exercises. Wasn't really that into.We were sort of having drinks and getting ready for this event that was happening the next day. So, I mean, our team leader Danny, was the one who had to give the speech, but we'd all been involved in it from the start. Anyway, the evening rolls around, we're in the conference room.

Danny, I think, was very nervous about it. I mean, that was quite a funny thing. He's a little bit lacklustre, and when he gets nervous, he's very funny.

Yeah. We are at the beginning of the next chapter for the Internet, and it's the next chapter for our company. Two, when Facebook started, we mostly typed text from websites.

When we got phones with cameras, the Internet became more visual and mobile. As connections got faster, video became a richer way to share experiences. We've gone from desktop to web to mobile, from text to photos to video.

But this isn't the end of the line. The next platform will be even more immersive, an embodied Internet where you're in the experience, not just looking at it. We call this the metaverse, and it will touch every product we build.

The defining quality of the match first would be a feeling of presence, like you're right there with another person or in another place. Feeling truly present with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology. That is why we are focused on building this.

So the sort of conference workaway thing ends, the four of us, Jess, Billy, Rachel and me, and we get in Billy's shitty little car and we drive maybe half an hour away to this little Airbnb we booked just to, like, have a bit of a holiday, basically. It was really nice. It was, you know, if you looked at the window, you just can't.

You just couldn't see anything, especially when it got dark. There was no signs of life, as it were. It's just kind of a little rural cottage in the middle of nowhere.

I think the Internet was really dodgy and I don't think there's any phone signal. And it was just, like, a bit crap. But also, you know, you don't really give a shit because you're with your friends and it's gonna be nice.

Fire? No, there wasn't a fire because we had the, you know, you can, like, get YouTube of fire up. So we had that up. Low ceilings.

I think it had been extended maybe in the past couple of hundred years. It's one of those ones that I think would have been one or two rooms initially for, like, a farmer and the family. Yeah.

And that's obviously, that's where the thing happened. So had a few drinks and decided to play some d and D because we've kind of got a campaign going, the four of us. I play character called alabaster, who is this, like, really ancient wizard sorcerer who's really powerful and has this really cool armour, but also can't really remember anything.

He's getting really confused all the time. And I think Rachel plays bog or something like that. So my character's name is Mog, and I'm this kind of brutal, kind of orcish creature. And I kind of grew up in the wasteland. So I've got a lot of suspicion and paranoia and a little bit of naivety about the world. But I've teamed up with these other three.

Danny's character's this really mad, like, half Birdman character. I don't think he was actually that happy about being. But, yeah, I was a sort of Birdman type creature. I came from a bird people place and I was a bureaucrat or something like that. Worked in the court of the King and got cast out, got banished because I had some issues with the way that place was run. The beak thing I never really got. Was never really comfortable with having a beak. Billy's obviously dungeon master. Yes.

So I started the campaign. So on the age of town, there's like a. You can get into this tunnel system.

Which I think Billy, who was dming, devised this campaign that was, I don't know, consciously or unconsciously about what we had been doing at work. Basically, this sort of. So the campaign was.

We discover this lair long. You can kind of smell the. Kind of the methane and sulphur that's kind of down there. But damp walls where it's the kind of the water drains through from the topsoil. But mixes with all the minerals and kind of goes quite thick on the walls. And you.

This is stalactites. And then at the end of the chamber is this big door with these two kind of unlit fires on either side. And I remember this vividly because I was like, we shouldn't burst through.

Because I don't know if there's something on the side, we should open it slowly. And we burst in. And there's this really odd scene.

I remember Billy being like. There is this mass of kind of figures lurking in the dark almost. There's lots of them. Really odd scene where these people are in some sort of religious ceremony. Hundreds of these sort of worshippers. With a glazed over expression on their face. Sort of. They seem blind. I don't know if they.

I don't think they actually were blind, but they were blinded or mesmerised by this big sort of central. It's almost suspended. So it's at this altar. But there's a sense that it's kind of part of the room as well. Almost like hanging from the ground. Stones or skulls or something very big and round that's kind of shimmering days like people consumed into a virtual world or something like that.

 

Slightly ambiguous sense of what it is. Like a mode medium for connection. But you are aware that they are linked in some way. But I can say that the people seem to be content within. What we then sort of found out was a kind of collective dream or something. Because one of us got touched.

 

And then Jess touches it and she sort of disappears. And, well, she's still there. But, like, mentally elsewhere, we're, like, sucked into this other space.

 

And it was like we're already in it. We're really concentrating on it. There was just this, like, sound.

And we all stopped. And I don't even know how to, like. It still makes me feel, like, really, really weird.

But it was like noise, that cloud. It was. Yeah, it was like nothing I've ever heard before.

And so loud. Humanoid, humanoid, slash, animal. The beginning bit is a bit hazy to me because I think we were sort of, like, in denial about that happening.

 

It happened again, and this time felt like it was responding to the fact that we tried to ignore it. I don't know how that makes sense, but it was. You just got this sense that he was talking to us sort of thing.

The noises it was making from afar that sounded like this kind of groaning thing that, like the call of a child or a baby that is demanding of you something and you don't know what. But the quality of that speaks to needing a response. So this thing of demanding a response.

So there's agency there. But there was no kind of semantic meaning to it. It was a kind of. And the sound is really loud now. Little phrases or, like, words and phrases about how it sounded to me, like they were maybe things that I'd heard at work or things I'd said or heard from other people. I'm pretty sure I heard the speech that I'd given to Facebook. Like, parts of that. I don't know if it was my voice, but that was obviously, like, really disturbing for me. And I think maybe Billy was like.

I remember him going to that front door and just, like, stopping. And I'm just, like, looking really, really confused. Yeah, this was. This was part of the weirdness of the whole thing. There was a basement, or there came to be a basement. There's a door. I think nobody wanted to admit that it might have appeared out of nowhere, but kind of cupboard under the stairs. And it sounds like the noise is coming from that door, but it also kind of weirdly sounds like it's directed at us. We ended up opening it after struggling to reckon with the idea of doing that.

I can't remember who went first or if we all kind of crept out together. We. I think we stayed at the top of the stairs for a very long time. So we go down the stairs into the basement, and in the corner is this, like, human, slumped, humanoid shape ish, a big bag of organs, but that aren't connected or that don't really resemble a human. The inside of a human body. A kind of. I mean, the way I've been thinking about it and actually, the way it kind of appears to me now, sort of unbidden, you know, on and off through the years, is a kind of, like, amniotic sack, a kind of something that's been birthed or not yet birthed something that's kind of growing in a. Yeah, like, ectopic womb. Something like this, but it's transparent. You can see inside, and there's sort of organ like structures. Machinic, some metallic, sort of sinuous. You know, when you take off, like, the back of a computer and there's, like, a circuit board, and there's, like, all this, like, mesh of, like, wires. Like it looks like a mechanical thing, but it's. It's almost like it's not there. Like it's there, but it's like it's not there.

 

Like, when you're like, I don't know if I can. I don't know. It's almost like holographic or something.

I know that sounds mad, like a shadow or like this flickering mass of light, but it has this kind of, like, the flicker gave it the sense that this thing was writhing ever so slightly. And it has almost a discernible shape of a anthropomorphic figure. But I also don't know if that's just what something kind of post rationalised onto it, you know, came up with afterwards to kind of make sense of it.

It was this scaly light that flickered with all these different, like, images. Almost like a tv had been left on or multiple tvs had been left on. I think Billy. I think Billy touched it. I think he reached out. I think he went to touch it. And it was almost like it just. Like it just disintegrated. Like it just stopped. Like it just, like, turned into nothing. Just kind of going from the memories of it, which were all just memories of feelings, really. How it felt.

It felt like that thing was there for us in the way that it was addressing us with this sound from when we were in the other room. It was horrific and scary. That feeling of somehow that we'd done this was strong.

Yeah. This idea of it being somehow our fault or it was there for us. Yeah.
 

Conversation

ND  

Welcome back. Hope you enjoyed Reality Break by Phil Speakman. To start things off, Phil, I was wondering whether you could just introduce us a little into how the work was made and the references to D&D.

 

PS  

Essentially, the work was kind of made through creating a D&D structure in which the four characters kind of played through it. So they're all friends of mine. They're all their actual names. So you begin in this hotel in the Lake District, and you set it up like you would D&D, I'm basically, like dungeon mastering their experience, describing the environment, giving them choices, and then it moves into the Airbnb, and then into the actual traditional dungeon dragon style thing, where, again, they're sort of playing this environment. And then they kind of encounter… And so we kind of did this as one session, and then I recorded each of them individually recounting this story, like a week later. So hopefully, once it's sort of set into memory, kind of the idea being that, like it's once it's in memory, I don't know, does it exist in maybe the same state of reality, is something you've actually experienced in some way? Or, I guess that's the kind of thing I wanted to have, like, this kind of thickness, this tangibility. 

 

I remember playing Dungeons and Dragons and I remember being stuck in a tunnel as a troll because my character was too stupid to open the door and this kind of, like, I don't remember the situation of actually playing D&D in lockdown on zoom with people. I kind of remember that thing. And I guess it's the sort of… what the work was trying to work out like, as we kind of live more in virtual spaces, or, or at least some part of our interactions happen in virtually the digital spaces, again, less like Metaverse, or just even the way that we can summon these spaces up into being through the kind of collective imagination of four people sat around a table. 

 

One of the things that’s kind of important with the Dungeons and Dragons setting is to retain some of the dungeon setting, kind of based on this idea that… so the first kind of virtual spaces, in a way, were dungeons.

 

ND

Could you explain a little bit?

 

PS

Yeah, the first kind of spaces that were virtually inhabited online were what's called MUD’s, which stands for multi-user dungeons. And basically it was a digital version of the tabletop role playing games that you sort of understand in Dungeons and Dragons, but through text-based. So the sort of thing like “move north, slay dragon”. The first multiplayer games which people could inhabit on the same network were these… spaces that people could interact with each other in a kind of virtual environment were actually dungeons. And I guess, almost like, to some extent, the dumb thesis for the work is this, sort of, like, “What if we never left the dungeon”, kind of, in a way, or at least, maybe thinking about the dungeon as a weird virtual space. That… has some relationship to the strangeness of the metaverse and things like that. 

 

But also, like, I don't know, the way that, again, even in those models, it's just text based describing a space. It's the same thing with Dungeons and Dragons, where you are summoning spaces into being that have a tangibility just through the words and the act of collectively imagining into that space. I think these things are interesting, because I do think that there is possibility for real experiences and real encounters that have a sort of emotional and transformative kind of effect in there, I guess.

 

NS  

I guess that's also part of what happens in the piece, or what you're kind of proposing to us in the piece as well, is that, what's that point where that kind of gamified reality enters into memory, or enters into kind of like the physicality of your body, or like how the emotion kind of plays out in the body. 

 

ND  

Because, yeah, even the characters in the work, they'll say something like, “and then the door opens, but not the real door”. Like, maybe it's not that line exactly.

 

PS

I kind of wanted, it's almost like, I don't know that the thing keeps sort of eating itself, in a way, you keep going deeper in, and maybe you miss the moments where they're transitioning from one space into another, but it's kind of pulling you through in some ways.

 

RE  

I feel like that's something that your work does really well. I remember when I first encountered your work, was at the Slade degree show. And I remember watching the film that you presented there, and kind of really honestly not remembering the start of that film. It felt very labyrinthine. It felt very kind of like a deep dream. And I think this is also what this work does, is it kind of presents a series of parameters, or boundaries, and then you kind of get sucked through different levels of it, and it's like you can't escape, you can't find your way back to the top. 

 

PS  

Thanks. That's, yeah, I guess that's what I want it to be in some way, like immersive, like that. 

 

NS  

I think Nina, you had this good description when we first spoke as a group of the work of like, it's D&D inception, you know, like recounting of a D&D game, but also even the structure of how you made the work as well. So it's kind of all these layers of of the dungeon

 

ND  

What's great is there's actually sort of two dungeon masters… There's a dungeon master within the game that's led by another Dungeon Master, which is you. And you do know that because you start off the work with your voice.

 

PS  

Yeah, yeah. I guess that's kind of the thing that it's like, in a way, it's letting you be aware in some way, of the artifice of the things that are being set up. But just because something's artificial doesn't mean it doesn't have the ability to still pull you through and transport you. In some way. 

 

I remember ages ago doing my BA and a tutor being like “your work is all affect” and pointing me towards Brecht and being like “do you need this moment of distancing” or something. And I guess I kind of get that. But at the same time, I don't think that necessarily affects the ability to be pulled through something that precludes you from being able to analyse the experience that you've had. I think that the nature of encountering information or just existing online… you're kind of always inside of it. But that doesn't mean you can't also be critical of it. 


 

NS  

Now that we've kind of revealed, I guess, the D&D inception of the work, that they're your friends, but in this they're kind of characters within characters. So on the one hand, they're all working in Facebook at the end, kind of during covid, but they're also these D&D characters. Can you talk a bit about the relevance of them working for Facebook, or, sort, why was it important to link Facebook specifically with this D&D world?

 

PS

Yeah, I guess. So I was sort of thinking about how you create narratives around I guess, like, a bit like what we were talking about before, with the people who actually are having a large effect on the way that we experience the world. I don't even use Facebook, but you can't deny that Facebook has a huge effect… and the moderating of how we experience life and more than that. 

 

So, how do you make stories about these things when the kind of sites in which they happen are, I don't know, just Silicon Valley offices or they're like immaterial exchanges of information in the processes of coding these things. How do you make good stories about that in order to be able to actually kind of make some sense of it in some way. 

But I've always been really interested in these kinds of mythologised examples of people coming together through, maybe through chance, or just that kind of then having these ripple effects in culture. 

 

So, one example would be like the story of how Mary Shelley came up with Frankenstein, when her and her husband, Lord Byron, were stuck on the edge of lake Geneva for three days in this villa where there wasn't any daylight because of this volcanic eruption, meant that they spent three days in night, and they had this competition to write the scariest story they can. And that's where, supposedly, where Frankenstein came from. 

 

These sort of mythologised moments that had these ripple effects. And so I kind of wanted it to function a bit like one of these stories where you maybe start to, I don't know, maybe you can, through narrative, engage with what's actually being done in the process of constructing the metaverse or, I don't know, implementing the Groups feature and these things that you now kind of recognise the effects they have upon the way those platforms work and the way they affect the political and polarisation and things like that.

 

ND  

I guess looking a little bit more at the sort of Facebook and meta reference that you're making in the work. I know that there's also sort of another reason why you specifically used this company, and I was wondering whether you could speak a little bit more about some of your research material. 

 

PS

I guess, yeah. So the other thing which maybe hadn't been mentioned was this thing that, in the way that the metaverse was launched, it kind of happened at the same time as the release of the Facebook files, which was this leak by Francis Haugen which was essentially detailing the way that Facebook better than anybody as well… it was basically saying how they were aware of all the damaging effects they were having upon society, from enabling genocide in Myanmar to the damaging effects upon young people's mental health through Instagram. 

 

But like, not even just that, their tools were being used in these ways, but the way that their changes in the algorithm had made stuff worse. It's not just a case of you can't blame the tool, you can blame the people … they basically produced evidence to say you can blame them for it, because they are incentivizing hate speech, because that's how they've adjusted the algorithm.

 

NS  

But didn't they… They had this thing where it's like, an angry emoji was weighted higher than like a positive so, a negative emotion, a negative response was higher than a positive one. 

 

PS  

Yeah, I think one of the effects, apparently, was that it changed the way that political parties advertised an election. So previously, a party would spend 50% of their funding on adverts saying, like, what they're going to do and what good they're going to do, and 50% on attacking the opponent. And the algorithm changed it so that they basically realised it was much more effective to spend 90% of your revenue on attack ads. So the whole thing becomes about division and hate. And I mean, that's something I think we can all feel the effects of..  but then Meta kind of gets released in this weird state where it doesn't really make sense as a product. I feel like the main response was just Mark Zuckerberg in this weird… yeah. So it kind of functions as this smoke screen or distracting from it. 

 

And within Dungeons and Dragons, you have this spell called “permanent illusion”, which basically a high level enough wizard can cast. And it produces an illusory object or thing, or mirage, which is so perfectly constructed that you can't tell it's there. And I was sort of [questioning] what does that mean inside of something that is already inside Dungeons and Dragons, it's already a kind of like this consensual illusion or hallucination that you create.

 

RE 2  

So it's kind of like Francis Haugen maybe brought Facebook into the realm of the real. Because I feel that before that it was a mythologised place. I just drove through Mountain View, Silicon Valley and, there's a lot of awe around that place. It's a very weird… it's a very weird place, actually. But like, just thinking about how people think about big companies, they're impenetrable, so you mythologise them, and then with people like Francis Haugen coming out and being like, “well, actually, they're dirtbags, and they've done all of that stuff…

 

PS

And they know! It's like, it's not this impenetrable place, like no one understands how the algorithm works. It's too complex, you could only understand it through the logic of magic. But yeah, it's exactly right.

 

RE

But just thinking about that, I mean, your work often looks at how fiction informs the real through rumour and superstition that's expressed by collective desires and fears. So in your work, Reality Break, is it the desires and fears of these Facebook characters, or is it those of other platform users that sort of tumble around the idea of fiction and fact? Yeah,

 

PS 

Yeah, I guess, I don't know, I do sort of see there may be, like, a good fiction or a reason the story takes off is because it crystallises on some sort of collective desire or some anxiety or fear, and that's why it connects and why it works. And I guess… whatever the thing is that emerges, you can sort of take as some sort of embodiment of these things, but maybe it's also to do the way that we all use it, and the sense that in us having social media profiles, but also, just like navigating the net, where you're aware that companies are collecting these data points on you. There is something you're putting out there that is being made, but then I don't know, maybe that also something is in that there's something being taken from you as well, which is, I don't know, in terms of  fear and superstition, how these things come up in relation to storytelling or fiction. 

 

When I was making it, when we were doing this session, there were bits where, like, they were laughing too much, and you had me as a dungeon master being like, “No, this is supposed to be the scary bit”. When the engine comes they're like, “why are they laughing? It's not working”. And then, but then, when it came to them, they all managed to unsettle themselves in the act of retelling it. It's almost that like when they were telling the story, when they get to the bit where this something happens, they all managed to freak themselves out a bit and almost like this thing of by telling the story, was almost like summoning that thing back up, even when something exists in a imagined, virtual space of fiction. This felt like an example of how those things can affect your feeling, or, I don't know, have consequence outside of that. And I don't know, maybe that almost relates to the idea of sympathetic magic, this idea from magic that like attracts like and I guess the logic of the Voodoo Doll, that the cause resembles the effect in some way, and that there is some relationship between, or at least in this telling of something and the actual thing.

 

ND  

You mentioned in a talk you'd done before about whether our sort of stories are playing out through us rather than we play our stories. I guess that, like stories and fiction have their own agency on that they use on us rather than we use in creating these stories.

 

PS

Yeah, there's a kind of version of that that Mark Fisher calls hyperfiction, which is these stories that, under the right conditions, start to run away with themselves. And he talks about that in these instances, like you almost, you have an escape of agency from the author and the people telling it. It's almost like there's this animistic quality of the story starting to work by its own accord. 

 

ND  

A good example, actually is sort of, I don't know we're going all around, but I think it's good. But you know, an artist that we've wanted to have on on the show for quite a while, Maude Craigie, who made a documentary film about the police interrogation system in the States. And how, in this sort of training, they use scenes from The Wire to train these aspiring interrogation officers, but that, like, it's a clear example, I guess, a really clear cut example especially where fiction is informing reality.

 

PS

Yeah, yeah.

 

NS  

Made mildly hilarious by the fact that The Wire is also showing how dodgy the police can be. 

 

ND

Yeah, exactly.

 

NS

And then training that back on the next generation police force. 

 

ND  

I don't know you're kind of talking about something that's maybe a little more slippery than that. 

 

Speaker 1  

I guess actually, like Lawrence Abu Hamden’s work gets that thing as well, doesn't it? The way… people produce testimony of things. You might be someone saying it sounded like… in the way that we understand what a punch sounds like, because we've heard it in Hollywood films, which actually will be somebody dropping a Yellow Pages. And so like, when people… when he's listening to what people are describing, or people saying what they thought they heard, it doesn't sound like what actually the violence was, because the only way we understand or we have a register for understanding that violence is through the fictional representations of it, like through film and through radio and things.

 

ND  

Oh, we could do a whole episode on this. Maybe we should.

 

RE

But I feel like there's also something in there about… I mean, I mentioned in your bio that you know, you're looking at creepypastas, which I don't know if you want to give a quick description of?

 

Speaker 1  

Yeah well, I guess one of the other things for this episode was thinking about the way that games or play or storytelling structures can actually run away themselves and produce real outcomes. An example that can be in the way that, yes, like this kind of online community creepypasta, which I guess, kind of peaked, probably more or less like 10 years ago, in which people write and share scary stories. A convention within this is, at least on “no sleep”, that's the biggest Reddit forum, is people post as if it's true. So you always write in the first person, and people always respond also in the first person, as if it's a real thing. So you'd respond saying, like, “oh God, that sounds terrifying, man”. Not like, “well, that sounds unbelievable”. So this is kind of, what's like, a type of LARPING,, live action role play, but basically the exact same. 

And so this, I don't know… one way this runs away with itself is in the example of like Slender Man, which had this moral panic around it when it kind of got people from outside this start to see it and thought that people actually believed this and thnt there was this horrible violent incident. 

 

But then basically, in another parallel example of this is that essentially Qanon came out of 4chan message boards using exactly the same mechanics, where people were posting in the style of a government operative, and before there was Qanon, there was CIAanon, and FBIanon. And within that community, people understood it as a LARP and they understood it as like this kind of participatory storytelling exercise. But then when it moves on to Facebook and outside of the people within the know, it starts to be taken as real and starts to become something wholly different and as kind of like how Qanon exists now, which is this cultish conspiracy-theory-worldview that's sort of all now becoming something else as well.

 

RE  

Yeah, there's something really weird about the fact that 4chan was founded by literally, a group of 15 year olds who, around them had their own superstition and myth. This guy called Moot, who no one knew who it was. Have you seen that documentary about it?

 

PS

I saw one of the recent ones. It was on Netflix…

 

RE

…They introduced moot. And everyone's like, “that's not Moot”, he’s such a normal guy, yeah. But I think there's something interesting that I was thinking about with the dissemination of this information, and how it it feels like a kind of flip of the poor image, Hito Steyerl’s poor image, where it's like, the image loses quality the more it's shared, whereas this is more like, the story gains more traction. And it gains something the more it's shared, the more it's retold, especially on the internet.

 

PS

Yeah, I guess it's just like we were talking to - this is a bit of sideline - Ben Cook, the director of Lux, and he was saying  traditionally, art gains value through scarcity. How does that work in something like moving image, in terms of the internet, where actually maybe it's about presence and it's about the more something is seen in terms of Moving Image works, quite often now become known or famous because they've taken up almost a certain… because their availability… everybody's kind of aware of them, and so that kind of flips that. 

 

But in the instance of creepypasta or conspiracies, it's once they've reached a certain critical mass that they can then start to like, I don't know. I guess is that escape of agency from the author or from the intent? I guess that's the whole thing of why these things get discussed as open source or decentralised myth making. Because it's kind of about the way they emerge from, spontaneously, from collective contribution, instead of one person being able to have any say over its direction in some way.

 

NS  

But I think there's also this thing, and I guess this circles back to the kind of conversation you're having before on Facebook, of what happens when these kind of groups, these LARPs, these, let's say, common points of knowledge of we're LARPing here, or we're creating a world here, when that gets transferred to another space where all that context is law, such as with Qanon, which then, through these shifts in the algorithm of Facebook, then starts to become this very violent uprising and takeover in the US. 

 

So it's, I guess there's also this kind of question of, or maybe something I'm thinking about, because there's, like, these responsibilities that are held by these, let's say larger media platforms, in containing that in a way. But then also what happens to those who initially start these spaces or start these groups or start these forms of lore, and then see it being abused in these ways. 

 

And so I guess thinking about these forms of, let's say, responsibility by spaces like Meta, or even if we're going to open up the branch to kind of larger tech companies such as Google as well. And this results of the weird, in terms of the new weird as something that these Facebook workers are using. How can weird become an emancipatory tool if it's kind of being abused in this way. Also, how can it like, reclaim that kind of power back? Maybe?

 

PS

Yeah, the thing for me is maybe… we have used analogies from supernatural things to describe things like capital for a long time. Marx writes about the vampirism of capital, the invisible hand of the market. That's a weird metaphor, but, like, central to understand trying to communicate how that works, and things but, and I guess, like, for me, maybe the weird can function as a way to find analogy or deal with complexity or the nuance of something like how social media or how networked life changes in maybe in a way that… if magical realists like Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Ben Okri, these people writing in formerly colonised countries like a skewed realism, and use magical realism in order to better articulate the kind of absurdities and contradictions of life in those places. Then maybe, like, the weird offers a way to talk about, talk about, maybe, contemporary kind of complexities, I don't know. Do you know the novel The City & the City by China Miéville?

 

ND  

I've heard of it, but isn't it like two different cities existing in one?

 

PS

Yeah. It's this detective novel set in two cities that occupy the same space, and they kind of, they have this kind of way of not acknowledging each other. So if you see somebody, you can't acknowledge it, and it's sort of like this… I mean, some ways you can think of that, and it has some relationship to the Palestine/Israel thing. But I think maybe it’s more useful for thinking about, I don't know, the way that we are constantly connected. If that's like, I don't know, to live in a Western society, you are aware that our societies exist because of cheap labour in the Global South, and these things… The entanglement that we face or to have a social media profile or to use the internet is to exist both physically but also in this other digital space. And maybe weird fiction offers analogies for understanding those things in a way that is more apposite than traditional realism or the more historicised modes of the supernatural, like the Gothic or the ghost story, it kind of escapes some of those trappings in a way.

 

NS  

I guess, even, like, even within the world, that we would understand as well, offering those moments of realisation for how how strange, how weird this is that, for example, we don't know the quality of life of the person who's made the clothing that we wear every day, for example, but drawing attention to those kind of links and forms too. 

 

RE

Yeah, I think around this idea of the new word is also what you're kind of talking about as being the anomalous. So this kind of idea of something being maybe more free to move away from traditional ideas of the Gothic, which is what you were just saying. But yeah, maybe we could look at how the anomalous figures into the new weird as well. How are they different, separate, similar? Because I think there's something quite interesting there at that point of tension between them.

 

PS

Yeah, you could say that those things are roughly analogous, but I don't know, maybe I was sort of end up using this term the anomalous, maybe because it escapes some of the, I don't know, the unfortunate Lovecraftian association, but also I guess, of the traditional weird, these kind of weird tales of the early 20th century.

 

For me the anomalous, or I describe it like …so I kind of was looking at this in terms of Deleuze & Guattari, who talk about the anomalous, not as denoting a specific set of categories, but more as a phenomenon. And they talk about a phenomenon of bordering and that it doesn't have characteristics, it only has effects. And the anomalous effect is to do with that which breaks boundaries or cuts through and has a transformative effect. 

 

And I guess the weird does do that in a way that maybe, for me, the weird has some idea, some relation to outsideness or exteriority or which precipitates the breaking of what you thought were the fixed rules in some way. So maybe one example is that is this sort of thing about in instances of creepypasta or Qanon, where you could maybe describe these as anomalous tales that through contact with them, they have a transforming effect on those who come into come into contact, but also they transform through the their sharing and through their telling and things. And this becomes a kind of vector for transformation through these fictional kinds of quantities in some way.

 

NS  

Which goes back to what you were saying before Nina the talk, how the story, how kind of we're living through the story, rather sorry... “we're living through the story, rather than the story living through us” is kind of inversing the relationship you typically expect with fiction.

 

PS

Yeah, I think that's what…  I don't know if it's just a romantic idea that I am into this idea that sometimes we're not telling the stories, but the stories are working through some way that there's, there's some reversal of agency or or an agency in something like a piece of fiction that you would usually think of as, in some way inanimate or not be able to possess of agency.

 

ND  

I there's also something about, I guess, a lot of these fictions or stories beginning in these sort of chat rooms, but then also, like a sort of materialisation f of them as time goes on, they kind of start to enter and become more and more part of the real world, which is also going back to your work as well. Maybe we are kind of talking in circles here, but with the characters, kind of making reference, even though it's kind of two versions of the game, there's a version of the game which is reality, and there's a version of the game which is D&D, even though we know it's all a game. But, and I guess, what's your interest in how they develop into and through the real world? 

 

PS

I mean, I guess the reason is because, for me, they represent the, I don't know, the most pressing or contemporary instances of myth informing or making itself real in some way… We're talking about the way they can be participated in, in a mass way, and also like, I guess that thing of that, it's another weird example of  where teenagers, or… the adolescent imagination are able to play out and have these ripple effects of that. I don't know it's, I don't know, something to do with the wildness of that? 

 

RE  

Well I think it's maybe something to do with the networkedness of it, the meshwork, the Tim Ingold meshwork idea. Or maybe, you know, I think in the pre chat, we were talking about this new book by Yuval Harari called Nexus, which is really looking at the way that AI is kind of hacking this system of human civilization. So by making stories, by generating stories, they're kind of becoming part of the future, which is exactly what we've kind of been saying, is like this inversing of the story telling us, or we're telling the story. But maybe we should, kind of, you know… we started talking about groups and about this collective idea of sort of storytelling and myth making. But I'd really like for us to talk about the end of the work and what you think they are looking at.

 

PS

So I guess maybe even the it-ness of it was something I was kind of interested in. Because if it remains a weird object, then it can be malleable in multiple things. And it's almost like it's ungraspableness, I feel like has some, I don't know, allows it to be more.

 

But I don't know whether it's this work. And what it maybe could relate to is this idea from the occult of an egregore, which is basically the name in occult practices for a kind of thought form or the kind of collective unconscious that emerges when a group of people come together to enact a magical working and kind of the egregore is sustained through the kind of the desires and energies people put into it. But it also kind of takes back in some way.

 

And so this, I don't know… you can think of supposedly the Knights Templar had this powerful egregore, but you can also think of corporations functioning like an egregore. Once it becomes this model that's bigger than any one person. It's sort of moving of its own accord and its own agency. And even say that a Facebook group of people joined together around a particular purpose, it could be said to produce its own egregore or it starts to move. I don't know if it's even physicalising of the fears of them or that it's the result of them having to face the repercussions of maybe what's being built through Facebook in some way.

 

NS

Yeah, I was thinking about it on the way here. In almost this form of collective guilt, perhaps, of we've built this thing. And I guess going back to when you were talking about the whistleblower as well and all the documents that she had leaked from this internal Facebook network as well, knowing the harm, knowing the adjustments, the changes to that network, them knowing that, and then having this thing, creature apparition, revealed to them as being that form of…

 

PS

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because maybe that's the thing that when you have all these people working together on one thing, it's hard for anybody to be like, well, “I was only one of many”, but actually, there's not many people in the world who do have an effect on these things and the people that Facebook do. And so, I don't know, even if you are only one software developer. Like how… I don't know. It's kind of slightly sticky… Well, I don't know if that is a sticky moral question, but it becomes a question of..

 

RE

Well, it feels like they get close. It's almost like they get close to figuring something out and then one of them touches it and it's gone. It's this very quick moment of being on the precipice of really unearthing something quite significant and then back to reality. “Oops, I woke up from my dream” kind of story. 

 

ND

It definitely has an image of something that I've seen not something that I've seen, but, like, I felt there was maybe something quite cinematic about that moment at the end where I'm kind of there and I can't think of what film it is that I feel like I've seen something. 

PS

Maybe that's like, the point again, that the only references for describing something that is ultimately unknowable is through the cinematic. Or do you know what I mean? You have to rely on some other construction of a.. And that maybe that's why I sort of almost don't want to talk about it. Because you can't talk about it without drawing, of course, to, I don't know, the alien or the ghostly or whatever. I don't want it to.. Maybe it is a ghost story, but I don't want it to be a ghost story at all. But I don't know.

 

ND

I don't see it as a ghost story. 

 

NS

Well, it's kind of, I guess reflecting on it now, it reminds me of sometimes at the beginning or the end of a horror film when you have this thing happen, you'll have that moment where you're kind of interviewing the people who this horror has occurred to and kind of their recounting or their attempt to rationalise what's happened, perhaps, which is also kind of what's happening here, because all of the characters are recounting through the emotions or the feeling of fear, but none of them are sure. They're all kind of like, this thing happened and it's sort of also unclear. Are they recounting this a month after they've had  this experience? Are they recounting it a year, five years, ten years? The timescale is quite skewed and also strange. I'm kind of wondering a bit about the choice to not give us a time in which this is recounted perhaps, or is it set in a particular time for you? 

 

PS

I guess…I don't know. In terms of the actual thing, it's not happened like that long ago and it's set in that moment in Covid. Well, it's set specifically because of its time point in relation to the launch of Meta and the release of the Facebook files. I guess, I don't know.

 

There was a bit of me that was like, should the whole thing be set in a moment that is already a bit further away and that we started to historicise even?  I don't know, something like 2012, when you still have that idea of Facebook being something that's only just come out of Mark Zuckerberg's dorm room where it is the innocence of this period or something. And does that bring you to offer more through being able to have more historical relief? It functions in a different way, but I don't know. I actually hadn't thought that much in terms of when the recounting happened in relation to the thing, partially just maybe because initially I was like, I think this is going to be hard to get down to 15 minutes because… there's no reflection on it as well in the work. It's almost like they're just doing the event. There's not really any space for them to rationalise it or go into it. And maybe that's also a thing which I think is kind of, I don't know if that's characteristic of  weird fiction, that there's not even an attempt that is impossible in some way.

 

NS

But I think that's what really works about the piece as well, is that you don't attempt to. We're given a time about when this event happened, but we're not given anything else in terms of where we are now when we're listening to it, which I guess leaves the possibility for us to be listening to something in the future, in a way.

 

PS

Yeah. I guess I almost just wanted to be like, okay, you know, they've been at this Facebook launch event. They work there. They've been doing this. They've been doing this Dungeon & Dragons, which is in itself a type of seance or the summoning of something. And those are the two things that you have as possible causes for this thing, and you're allowed to make that connection yourself. It doesn't need to be any more explicit than that.

 

ND

I think we're gonna have to wrap it up there. Thank you so much, Phil. 

 

PS

Thank you.

 

ND

Thanks so much for sharing your work with us. 

 

NS

Before we wrap up, is there anything that you have coming up or that's online that you want to draw listeners attention to? 

 

PS

Maybe only that article,it may start out as a game, but it ends up a whole world, which I guess is actually just a kind of writing up of a lot of these ideas. And the connection between the evolution of creepypasta and QAnon is coming out in this journal, Contemporary Legend, supposedly soon, but yeah

 

ND

It will be on your website?

 

PS

Yes, I'll share it. 

 

RE

And can we all join your D&D group now? 

 

PS

Yes. Yeah, I do want to do it more.

 

ND

We'll do an extra special episode when we join Patreon for the Patreon subscribers we don't actually have yet, but great. Thank you so much. 

 

PS

Thanks so much.

 

NS, RE

Thank you. Bye.

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