I just finished planting one of my two urban garden plots here in Southern New Mexico. The circles had been left unattended and later covered with weed-control fabric that I topped with rock a few years ago when I visited from our Arizona home and discovered a vexing and disturbing collection of items buried in the soil. There was a child’s ball, a partially melted white candle, some marbles, a variety of small bones and strange animal remains, indeterminate masses of red and brown, unusual feces, and large pork chop bones. A shrine to strange, ancient deities? The remains of an ancient civilization? Our security camera coverage and the gates and fencing ruled out human activity. So we were left with wild animals, specifically gray foxes with long bushy tails that appear integrated into our little downtown community. We see them on the cameras early in the morning hours, typically, and they do some rather odd things, so the notion that they were collecting interesting items and burying them did not seem unreasonable. We also observed one fox flipping a piece of torn paper plate in the air in front of an unimpressed cat crouching nearby. Foxes will sometimes do similar jumping behavior as a method for mesmerizing their prey, but why bury a melted candle? Perhaps it smelled just enough like food that the fox thought it might come in handy during lean times later. And the child’s toy ball? Plastic odors might also resemble food. Maybe.
The New Mexico foxes, skunks, raccoons, and, I’m informed, some formerly pet coatimundi that wander in the area (but we’ve never seen), as well as the javelina, coyotes, deer, bobcats, and foxes around our Arizona forest home, are certainly influential in my Tusker Long project that tries to tackle an alien world where the worker slave animals have broken from their chains of servitude and simplicity to dominate society and come to grips with their own limits, prejudices, and historical animosities (perfectly wrong word, that). One of the challenges of the project is finding a voice for the epic poetry component of the core narrative, a voice that is rooted in nonhuman perspectives yet is understandable enough that a reader can find purchase. There is a necessary mystery, though, in the perspectives and motivations that is meditated only at the intersections with a shared biology. We all love, eat, mate, piss, and shit, after all.
I found this Washington Post piece by game designer Reed Berkowitz to be instructive about how mysteries and reality can collide. Reed draws parallels between modern conspiracy theorists and live action role-playing and augmented reality games. He also applies the obscure cousin of the word apophenia, apophany, to explain the mystery-discovery circuitry. But there is more to the mystery for QAnon folks. There is a looming existential crisis of religious dimensions.
Extremism and cultic attachment seem to play at the edge of this human desire for belonging to an epic mystery, and it seems worth a bit of time to prognosticate how technology will potentially change and enhance these tendencies. We clearly see the communications frameworks of social media as essential to binding together the QAnon people. Their ability to post pictures of water and wood—clues and portents—back to the community ties into Reed’s gamification concept where the individuals see an opportunity to participate in the grand struggle against their political and religious enemies. If it is sometimes hard to take such people seriously it is exactly because they seem like they are trying to stay in character in a cosmic play, rather than studiously and coolly analyzing current events.
The accelerating surveillance of public spaces through mobile phones and cheap surveillance cameras might lead to a reduction in the mysteries of other people’s lives and activities, but with deep fake technologies the same imagery can be used as a manipulative weapon. The availability of social media disinformation channels sidelines the filtering effect that traditional news and fact checking served to a degree, and we know that “flooding the zone with shit” is the newest wave of propaganda. This will accelerate, but we should also see the rise of additional gamified augmented reality experiences that pull people into mysteries. I expect that there will be a detached cynicism that will grow up around augmented reality and LARP-y (Live Action Role Playing) efforts as they mature. The drivers for distrust and dismissal will be the same as what we see in social media. Just as influencers have been co-opted into marketing and commercial efforts, so will grand conspiracies on the interwebs. While social media remains new for most people, it will just be a fact of life for generations to come, like television commercials in the past. The majority of people will continue to refine their bullshit and manipulation detectors and extremist communities will be just objects of scorn and fascination.
So this turbulent period of technologically-charged social and political change will normalize over time. Few people like to be manipulated by mysterious unknown forces that seek to profit from their gullibility, and I can only hope that that is the theme of a more cynical and indifferent future people.
Minor edits