“Irreparable violence toward all secrets, the violence of a civilization without secrets, hatred of a whole civilization for its own foundation.”
-Jean Baudrillard, from “The Precession of Simulacra”
In medieval Europe, the Changeling was a fairy replica of a child, swapped out for the living human babe while weary parents slept. After the cursed exchange, the faeries were said to raise the original child safe and healthy in the fairy realm, while the Changeling remained with the distraught humans, often sick, ill tempered, or deformed. Frightened parents would try and return the Changeling to the faeries, leaving it to die outside, the parents safe in the knowledge that the real child, their precious lad or lassie, prospered in some other realm. In this mythic delusion, the real was dissimulated and then sacrificed to its own imperfection. For us, when the real is dissatisfying or unbearable or impossible to understand we declare it fake and stitch the wound over.
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The word glitch first came into the widespread social imagination in the 1960s. The astronauts used it to note something gone wrong, without knowing exactly what: usually a sudden surge of electricity manifesting in a flickering or sputtering. Before that, the term was used unnoticed in the production of broadcast radio to describe a fault in the transmission. Today, many aspects of the paranormal also involve static or electrical phenomena: the sky flickering with cosmic fire, tracer rounds of alien libido, or the static on the ghost hunters’ tapes.
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William Reich wryly explains that the material of the unconscious is constantly changing at the same rate as technology “by the interesting clinical fact that with the development of technology the unconscious acquires new symbols; for example, many patients at the time when Zeppelins were in the news dreamt of airships as representations of the male sexual organ.”
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In a split in the flicker of the Wikipedia page exists a dimension of frothing broadcasters intoning salacious descriptions of minor waveform disturbances and habits, whole vocabularies forming around machine irregularities. Here, humanity as broadcast-race interpreting glitches, immortal forever. Or better yet— God as the mad broadcaster swatting the glitch of humanity. Funny, effervescent, dark, darker. Fissures. Smooth surfaces.
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With the release of the new Matrix film, two cultural currents combine: nauseating nostalgic callbacks as well as the idea that the original film solidified in the American consciousness: we are, or might be, like Neo, living in a simulation. The “Simulation hypothesis” sloshes around the culture like gonorrhea. It is incredibly tedious and in these imaginings the “outside” is almost always bare, dirty like our own most popular futures. At its most rigorous, it doesn’t really exceed the understanding of the average soft-shell wonderings of a stoned Youth.
Less than a theory and more than an idea, it functions like an ideological formation, born from fear. That we are living in a simulation developed by human computers far in the future, that have been programmed to, for whatever reason, replay ancestral time. Everything around us is simply code, not “base” reality. Computers have become the Hegelian progenitor of the past, the creators at the end of history, spinning time and consciousness through models based on some idea of original biological humanity, long evolved, or dead.
As many have noted, the hypothesis itself is meaningless, within it age old moral questions largely remain the same as they have since morality became woven in the social fabric: the question of the creator, of mind and individuality, just as unanswerable. That Elon Musk, our unfortunate, ugly excuse for a figurehead fervently believes this theory is reason enough to ascribe it to a useful fiction, one that promises another reality above ours, that relegates occult beauty to the glitch. Through this lens, people feel the need to see things odd, or beautifully wrong, or revelatory and register it as a “glitch” in their existence, their perception. The insistence on the bad glitch wishes the world clean like a boring mass produced operating system.
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Symptoms that plague us are often results of fanciful refusals. Not of “reality”, but the materials and puzzles of life put in front of us, the occult experience, instances of primal decadence, weird love. Freud’s famous Wolfman, the subject of a study of infantile neurosis, relied on symbols and dreams to cover over inconsistencies between what he expected and what he saw. The weirdness of the dream seems to blanket over the weirdness of the psychic rupture. Freud, at one point in the analysis, stops and notes thoughtfully that the Wolfman had been looking at the clock constantly through the sessions. Later, when questioned, the Wolfman tells Freud his distraction was not because he was bored but because he saw in the clock other worlds invented as a child. The protective function of fantasy. The powers of the dream become banal in the face of some nameless rupture blanketed over in our past, welded over by a dreamy metal veil that only suggests the shape of some cosmic challenge.
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Blake Butler has spoken in more than one of his writings, which spurt uncontrollably like a cut artery, about trying to interpret the weird symbols inexplicably lining the bottom of white paper from a household printer. Christians used to look slack jawed at animals running around missing legs or babies born with extra appendages. The boring assign the off to the wrong, to the devil. The slightly less boring think they are being directly addressed. For Moses to see the burning bush, it had to have been raining. Obsessives are bowled over by Baudrillard’s “vertigo of interpretation.”
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It’s boring to imagine humanity’s future as one in which we feel obliged to create ancestor simulations. Or, if we imagine this, and we are the fantasy of some future computer, what unreality are we made to avoid? If we are God’s fantasy what horror or obligation are dreamt up to distract from?
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The more likely situation, as in Baudrillard, is probably that we are not living in an existence where experience itself is simulated, but one so saturated with imagistic interpretations, and interpretations of interpretations, that the effect is one of unreality.
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“’You know what it is. W.W.W. On on on on on. Everything on on on until nothing is ever more real than real again. Soon, on your world, Direct Current will lock in and there will be no escape. It is only the Between that can help you. You must be careful. Dream at the right time. Wake at the right time. Make something known so others can escape; but keep something secret or the door will close and there will be nowhere anymore to escape to.’”
Here is the recollection of a dream narrated by Gary Weber, the neurotic subject of Quentin S. Crisp’s recent novel Hamster Dam. The above is relayed to Weber by a gerbil—a wily protagonist in the illustrative dreams Weber has relating to a 70’s animated television show (Hamster Dam) that doesn’t verifiably exist. The gerbil tells Weber that certain “between” spaces outside the system are being extinguished. And while Weber dives into this world instead of dealing with the problems of being censured at his work for the inappropriate relationship with a patient who died, he does not use the engagement of the show as a shirking, but instead endeavors to follow the signs and recreate the feeling and ethic of Hamster Dam in the secret space of a condemned library’s bamboo groves. Brian Warfield, the narrator, colleague of Gary Weber, illustrates a vision of reality in which the glitch is the only real escape from the pummeling ubiquity of the system.
“ ‘Have you ever noticed that when you suddenly have an idea, make a discovery perhaps, and think you’re original, suddenly it starts to mushroom here and there on the internet? Have you ever had that?’”
The difference between Alternating Currents and Direct Currents on the surface seems banal, but the language of the present is used to express old truths, and Weber’s anxiety again signals something deeper. Glitches, invented or not, leave space for instructive refuge apart from the whole. In this, Crisp turns the simulation hypothesis on its head, or at least looks to the gaps as refuge, and not reasons to invent heaven. Art and madness still seek reasonless locales of psychic existence remote from joyless irreality where the glitch is only an indication that the whole is functioning improperly.
But what’s the difference between the refuge Warfield seeks and those who seek to get beyond the reality of the simulation? Well, building a half-dreamed hamster utopia in a sandbox sounds much more fun than dreaming of boring future simulation makers, but that’s just me.
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It’s entertaining that some proponents of the simulation hypothesis insist we must make our world as worth it as possible in order to not be unplugged but then simply plug into simulations of their own.
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Baudrillard: “The confinement of the scientific object is equal to the confinement of the mad and the dead. And just as all of society is irremediably contaminated by this mirror of madness that it has held up to itself, science can’t help but die contaminated by the death of this object that is its inverse mirror.”
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“It’s hard to think of the future. I think of obscurity instead. I must perfect the ways in which the in between things that Gary spoke of can survive. Everything else is secondary,” reflects Warfield after Gary Weber disappears, on the run from the autoimmune response to his pricking of the system. Gone, Gary’s image sinks into the twisted self-referentiality of the internet. The choice of words and comparisons, the seeming banality of the “currents” and the childlike veneer of his fantasy become stilted, epic in the carbon traces of Weber’s painful dissolution into the fantasy of the machine. Crisp’s inversion of the simulacra summons an occult in which the content is secondary to the refusal of the ideology of simulation and ever-presence of a vampiric mass simulation society.
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Ignoring the fountains of beauty that spill through the quickly sealing seams of our world from the dimension of broadcasters, we take the products of the between, wrap them in shawls and leave them deep in the forest to die. Genuine weirdness and inspiration gets lost in the warp of interests and amusements. The glitches exist widely and we trace them, leading ourselves not into interpretation but into the eyes of evil. Look! Look, it frays. Tasseled drapes of gold, blown by a breeze from nowhere, brush against the cold stone floor. People scan the internet to find enough errors, Mandela effects, to buy themselves a clever ticket to the top floor, but life above the clouds is barren, the sky gets old! Ironically, the desire for ascension into a clearer space is often one of the most deluding things there is.
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It would be easy to say that technology points to infantile, avoidant fantasies while writing or storytelling point to an embracing of the “glitch.” However, technology is just the chariot of our delusion and ignorance. It’s not enough to note the glitch or to desire a world without glitches. Some are reading the signs while others are casting them. We must create the glitches, better yet step into them, or even better still: make the world a glitch, a singular bastion of the beautiful shimmer, wrong and un-ignorable.
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Face the glitch. Make it. Bring the Changeling close to your chest, feed it fine meats and cheeses.
Cover image by Paul Hertz.
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