When you deliver subliminal or cryptic messages to large populations, you can create effects that seem unexpected and magical. Songs that you listened to years ago may suddenly resonate with stinging clarity and change your behavior in unexpected ways. To those around you, it may seem that you have been bewitched.
Internet algorithms can have even more magical effects, as when two people begin haunting the same information space and consuming the same ideas. Such shared consumption patterns can draw people together in ways that no one expects.
To some, this is merely the magic of advertising. To others it seems like the chaos magic of the scarlet witch in the Marvel comics movies. She was imbued with the power of the mind stone and could change the fabric of reality itself by changing the way in which she thinks about reality. Nevertheless, she still has to deal with others who wield similar powers.
I do not have magical powers, but if I align myself with a collective attitude adjustment which is about to emerge, it may appear as though I do. For example, if the red witch in the film is a representative of a collective change in the way women think about science, in her battle with Thanos, the representative of scientific greed, she embodies a sea change in womens’ attitudes about technology.
Women are angry that they have been poisoning themselves and their children with neurotoxic triclosan and that the antifungal agent used to keep their bread from molding has been reducing their IQs. They are angry that their antidepressants and allergy medicines are giving them dementia. They are angry that their husbands have been turned into unhealthy, zombie slaves of a STEM machine. They are angry that they are surrounded by smartphone addicts and angry that when they enter the hospital to have a baby, there is a high probability that they are going to be fileted like a fish on the operating table. Don’t even get me started about scoliosis surgery. My point is: the ghosts of the people we have sacrificed on the altar of tech are angry.
When we create art, we release spells or spirits that haunt or heal these ghosts. Of course, that is not the only reason that we create art.
From a light hearted perspective, art creation is all about sex appeal. It is just an evolutionary adaptation used to attract mates and stabilize our social groups. We do it because it makes us feel good when others like what we make.
We use art to manipulate each other and change our society. Art reaches from one mind into another and stirs.
From a more psychological perspective, we create art to reduce the discomfort caused by the randomness which surrounds us.
I realized that I create a narrative to reduce the discomfort caused by the randomness I see within my memories. I also realized that pattern recognition and love fulfill the same function as narrative creation.
When you see a person playing candy crush, they are trying to alleviate the discomfort of the randomness of their thoughts. When you see a person falling in love, they are protecting their mind from the discomfort of random, free-association, of meaningless connections, or lack of purpose. A writer of stories is protecting herself from the discomfort of disordered memories and lack of purpose.
Love, pattern recognition, narrative creation, it is all the same thing. I fall in love with a person in order to attempt to create a meaningful narrative – meaning, in this sense, is something which will have an effect on the future and which makes us feel alive.
From a more spiritual perspective, sometimes I see something that rattles me deeply and I can’t process why the emotional response is so strong, so I interpret it as an omen designed to teach me something important even when I know that it is just an emotional response to some sort of physical artwork. It still feels like being visited by a spirit. Maybe that is what we do when we create art. We set spirits free so that they may find new homes. At least that is the illusion we love – the illusion that we can exorcize our feelings by getting them outside of our bodies into the collective unconscious so that they can haunt and heal others. This song rattled me: Suede Lyrics – The Invisibles
In the imaginary realm, I feel guided by such a spirit. In this realm, I have never met him, even though I write to him through my books.
Art is an expression of the spirit of a time. Medieval art with its cartoon-like figures who are lifted above their bodily suffering through religious thought, Islamic art with its focus on geometric figures, and Renaissance art with its full-figured emphasis on voluptuous anatomy in harmony with nature each represent spirits of times during which knowledge was carried by a small group of people within elite religious communities.
When you see the scroll in baby Jesus’ hand, you are being told that the church is in possession of knowledge. Whereas, in the birth of Venus, you see a representation of a rebirth of classical knowledge and a rush to cloak it in a veil of modesty.
Despite the violence of their times, the elite religious communities largely maintained a cohesive whole and a continuity of tradition which lasted until the reformation, a time defined by destruction of art and a divergence in the forms of artistic expression. Art in the Protestant Reformation and Counter-Reformation
Compare this to the effect of the industrial revolution and world wars on our collective consciousness. Through industrial-scale printing and information distribution, knowledge became available more widely, causing the old institutions to fragment in a violent, traumatic fashion as the monarchy and church gave way to industry. This fragmentation achieves its most vivid representation in the abstract art of the early 1900s.
A traumatic experience for the collective consciousness is expressed through the art of the time. In Medieval art, the focus is on the bodily suffering of the Christ figure and a mind elevated and encircled by a halo. In Renaissance art, the focus is on the anatomy of healthy bodies at one with nature. In modern art there is an expression of abstraction and psychic fragmentation.
We heal from traumatic events by knitting together the the fragmented pieces of our memories into a coherent whole which defines our identity and this process is still continuing today. Every abstract representation is an expression of our attempt to heal from the trauma of technological transformation. How long this process will go on is uncertain since many new technological disruptions are on the horizon.
In the meantime, I would like to see a modern remake of the movie/book 1984. The last filmed version of 1984 was fantastic, but it was made to be true to the original, 1949 book. Everything was grey, crumbling, and with old technology.
It would be neat to see a more colorful version set closer to the present day. For example, the cafeteria would look like the sparkling, modern, silicon valley cafeterias. The food wouldn’t be slop, as in the original. It would look attractive, but upon closer inspection, it would turn out to be a few basic foodstuffs pressed into different shapes and consistencies, giving the illusion of variety and choice. The “two minutes hate” would consist of a mandatory news report broadcast to everyone’s phones, followed by mandatory “voting” with a flurry of angry, newsfeed emojis. The news would be about the tragedies unfolding due to global warming and those traitors who are responsible for it.
The main character is charged with scrubbing the internet clean of accurate chocolate price histories and replacing them with party sanctioned histories. Later, one sees him erasing scientists’ names and faces from history and replacing their names with those of up-and-coming party leaders or people who died heroically in the war. The desired effect is that people believe that all scientific advancements came from the party.
In the original 1984, people don’t have sex because the party discourages it, but in a new version, addiction to electronic devices and virtual sex has replaced real relationships.
The main character would remember some physics he had learned as a child and realize that it doesn’t match at all what is being taught on the internet. 2+2=5
He realizes that the party was not only keeping people in the dark about the war on global warming, but also about basic science. This is when he gets taken in for a doctor’s appointment and given a brain film implant which will ‘help’ improve his mental health. He now experiences physical pain when he thinks certain thoughts. Because he is resistant to ‘understanding’ the ideas of the party, he is subject to public ridicule and, through photoshopped images, accused of all manner of perversions: bestiality, pedophilia,.. His love interest is dosed with dopamine blockers which cause her to develop Parkinsons and dementia, losing any drive to influence society or maintain a connection to him.
I would definitely keep the ending the same with the idea that he is ‘the last man’, alone in a bar with a chess-board. All of the other free-thinkers were already eliminated.
It is said that art imitates life and life imitates art, but what if art sometimes prevents bad things from coming to pass? That is why I wrote my books. You can only avoid a freight train if you can see it or hear it coming and while some can hear it as a high pitched singing of the tracks, others only hear the roar of the engines when it is almost upon them.
This was composed from some of my answers on quora.com.
I am trying to cast a magic spell of my own… buy my books!
Here are some videos in which I attempt to bewitch you!
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The underwater photo is from Jason deCaires Taylor http://underwatersculpture.com/
Kirsten Hacker 
When dad died in 1995 Mum was never quite the same again within a couple of months I had moved her much nearer to me and we could visit her on a regular basis.
Poor old Mum she tried so hard to put the past behind but she had an old black and white picture of Dad enlarged and framed. I had never known him like this , young and slick with wavy hair ; I have the picture still.
Now I can see myself doing the same thing should my beautiful wife be taken first. Her youth has faded but she still carries a beauty with her that captures me every time I set eyes on her. So we make the random rawness of life sweet and ordered , fulfilling and meaningful.
Yesterday morning not long after sunrise I was walking my little dog along the wet puddlefull track when the tall thin figure of an old lady came towards me with her dog.
We occasionally meet and have a few brief words but this time she asked me how old I was , and I returned the question thinking she was probably in her early seventies.
Ninety four — I was thunderstruck , her face wrinkled into a smile yes she said and I’ve always lived here by the sea.
She pointed to the near coast to a large white house ,
‘ I walk him three times a day ‘ . I made no more intrusions on her privacy but the love of that dog exuded from her .
Orion is now rising in the evenings and is very beautiful especially the great sword handle with its misty nebulous light. I always think of Dad when I see it because he first pointed in our to me as a young lad when we loved just north of London. His favourite star was Betelgeuse which he would tell me was a huge red giant much bigger than the sun. In those days I thought of it as beetlejuice ah the infantile mind.
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