Weird Nonfiction
lareviewofbooks.org
lareviewofbooks.org
decades ago those cultural studies people (who now run our institutions) were on to more than we knew. they were reasoning about how to operate in a world that disconnected from a shared Real. we can see these weird fictions as the artifacts of devices operating on todays fragmented, narrative driven realities. i'd call it post-nihilism, where culturally we're downstream of a great unmooring and in an all against all struggle for narrative dominance with no safety in a base reality or truth. the weird fiction devices are patterns of reframing, analogous to exploits for injecting cognitive associations (or dissociations) to align other minds. It's like in the "wet cement" stage of a news event where everyone crowds in to establish the dominant meme first for their "side."
I don't indulge in these stories because I read most of PKD's "Exegesis" and it is among the works you hear about from people who shortly thereafter break down completely. I've met more than one person muttering about Jung's red book and Kripke's theories of truth, PKD's exegesis, evola, and junger, before disappearing into rehab or homelessness. some ideas are just not healthy recreation, and what they all have in common is a meme complex that causes people to dissociate with all the zeal of a religious conversion but imbued with existential horror. in short, avoid.
these weird fictions should be studied, but mainly to innoculate people to them, as what we know from LLM's is that we can now produce complete ideologies the way we used to write pop songs, where the hooks are now reframings, and if you can't explicitly source a belief from a first hand experience, it could be the artifact of one so be on guard. we may actually need to form an anti-memetics division.
Can you name three?
In the real world, I can't think of any writing that was/is dangerous on its own. There are some texts people colloquially accuse of having historically caused trouble - Mein Kampf comes to mind - but those were arguably just nucleation sites, themselves little but random objects around which preexisting moods and sentiments crystallized.
(I specifically don't want to say "catalyst", because that would imply the writing had to be very specific to the reaction its introduction caused. Nucleation, in contrast, can be trigger by whatever random impurity that happened to be the right size.)
I mean, the continued existence of the Internet kind of disproves the idea of outright dangerous texts.
Personally, without reading the rest of your comment - because I glimpsed one title that makes the list - these are the things I would tell my child not to read without talking to us first:
- Main Kampf
- Just about anything by Ayn Rand
- This one is a bit of a cop-out because it's very generic, but certain online message boards & Facebook groups. When they're old enough to start browsing on their own - which is probably now, come to think of it - I want to make sure they don't start reading something that reads vaguely plausible on the surface, but quickly plummets into weird racist/fascist rhetoric.
> I mean, the continued existence of the Internet kind of disproves the idea of outright dangerous texts.
I don't think it does, and I would argue that anti-COVID, anti-global-warming, and the other radicalization stuff online is a point to me. Nucleation is a good analogy, I guess, but some people are impressionable enough that they'll glom onto something that'll glow like a horrible pearl in their mind until they think that tampons in the boys' bathroom means that China is, uh, I don't know, turning the frogs gay with Bill Gates' vaccines? I'd wager almost everyone here can personally name one relative who's effectively lost their grip on factual reality in the past five years.
> Can you name three?
the parent comment by motohagiography gives 3 examples, quoted above.
i'm not well-informed enough to agree or disagree with motohagiography, but i am interested in your analysis, if that's why you want examples.
Of course, social conformity as the criteria for mental health means that existential texts and socially activist texts are both rightly categorized as hazards to the status quo, meaning that repression of ideas will repress both good and bad writings. Liberation theology is in this way as dangerous an idea as brain in a vat radical skepticism or whatever the hell wittgenstein was on about.
If we did live in a world where people readily acknowledged that ideas were occasionally (or even more often than that) dangerous, we'd be much less welcoming of changes to status quos.
You can't disprove radical skepticism, but you can take the Moorian shift and look at your hands, believe that they exist, and thus disprove radical skepticism well enough to get on with life.
Of course, correlation is not causation. Also, I'm pretty sure that Youtube is 1000x more dangerous for mentally unstable people than a book by C.G.Jung.
Side note: the Red Book is truely astonishing. I saw the original at an exhibition in Zürich. A friend owns one of the faksimiles (he also owns a house and has never been to rehab :) I can also recommend Jung's autobiography "Erinnerungen, Träume, Gedanken"
"Reality" is the temporary resultant of continuous struggles between rival
gangs of programmers. When a paradigm shift occurs—when we go from seeing
things one way to seeing them another way—the whole world is remade. All
that we "know" is what registers on our brains, so what you perceive (your
individual reality-tunnel) is made up of nothing but thoughts—as Sir
Humphrey Davy noted when self- experimenting with nitrous oxide in 1819,
and as Buddha noticed by sitting alone until all his social imprints
atrophied and dropped away.
Rejecting the notion that knowledge is purely empirical and cumulative,
Gergen has argued that “truth” is always value laden and, therefore
(drawing from critical theory), “reality” is not immutable, but always is
understood via interpre- tation. More attention, then, should be given to
the outcomes implied by any given assertion of reality, rather than to its
“accuracy” as measured by its supposed correspondence to absolute truth.
A good time to mention the SCP wiki and some types of analog horror. It was this kind of thing that led me to discover "hard science fiction" which is distinct but related to the previous two.
However i am curious what sort of Sci-fi you meant, where it's plausible but there's SCP/analog horror elements. Evidently a prior comment in the thread about memetics wiped an edge on the graph that would let me infer the sorts of thing you're talking about.
What a great book. I read it before I read the book that it's a sequel to. Maybe I'll re-read them this week.
There's this older Japanese horror movie, Pulse, which would have fit perfectly - it's about a world where hell is full and the dead 'invade' living spaces via the internet. But it's not a traditional horror movie, the invasion can also be a stain in the dark that slowly grows, until the human is swallowed up. It's weirdly meditative and melancholic, in the context of OP it's a weird documentary about how the internet invades real spaces.
By this definition, Blair Witch Project seems to fit. Is that right? The examples given in the article seem to indicate a different intention or tone.
> If you are wondering whether or not something counts as weird nonfiction, consider its weirdness. Modern mockumentaries do not work because there is no uncertainty; the documentary element is used to advance the plot, mug at the camera, key the viewer in.
I read this as: non-fiction elements in service of advancing the plot is a strike against.
Really, "weird nonfiction" is whatever the author wants it to be. The examples are a total grab bag IMHO.