I woke up in a sweat realizing that I've been leaving my hats. I've let loose two hats in the past three weeks: they're not at home with me.

This is what is known as Unintentional Mojo. It is a form of chaotic magic, which means that it is neither good nor ill; the key thing to know about it is that it is "unintentional." That is, it works at the subconscious level. It represents the actions of certain nonverbal parts of the self trying to communicate with the verbal parts of the self. So when a hat gets crushed beneath a giant stuffed bear, it's generally a good idea to look at that. And as for the other hat...well. There be dragons.

The thing about paying attention to this sort of crap is that it eventually starts to become meaningful. Then you're fucked: you can no longer say "I didn't know," because the bits of you that assemble the future are talking to you, right now, and once you hear them, there are no accidents.

Only choices.

Now there's an audio player here, over on the right and slightly down a bit. It's the thing that looks like an audio player, under the "AUDIO" title. Let me know if you can't find it.

Yeah! So, 2012 and so forth with the arbitrariness and the exploding continents and all that, I know y'all heard the stories, y'all heard the fire and brimstone from the nonsense peanut gallery, but I'm here to tell you saints that this particular year is just like any other year, and that it's in this year that you will reap what you have sown. Just like any other damn year, right? Right. And the thing you have got to dig is that even though you're gonna see the fruit of your decision tree poppin' up all ripe and shiny, it's been that way for you since that first big year when you squirted out and some doctor smacked your gooey ass, showed you to your mama, then passed you off to a nurse who stuck you in a hospital crib behind glass with twenty other tiny new sparks wearing little knit caps. You dig? You see it, saints? Yeah, right on: this year's big for you, it's big for everybody, and so was last year, and the year before that, all the way back past nailing Jesus to a tree, past Achilles being an asshole, back past that guy Og who figured out how to set shit on fire with a rock. All the way back, man! Back beyond a pool'a goo makin' amino acids at the foot of a volcano! Back, saints! I mean, shit, the year God said "Let there be light!" ain't no different from this year! Can you hear it? What's that? Gimme an amen.

I said gimme an amen!

~Billy Fidget

[From December 23, 2005: Astonished Head]

To continue the ongoing implementation of Management's fantabulous plan for transforming Astonished Head into the world's foremost purveyor of high-class not-at-all-for-cheap-tarts entertainment, we came up with even more head-bashingly unique concepts which are so incredibly wonderful that we should kill you right now to save you from the crushing disapointment that the rest of your life will inevitably become after you've been exposed to them.

Such as: equipping Company Secretary Reginald Bastard with a microphone, a camera, a handful of crêpe batter, a shoestring, and a packet of ketchup, and sending him out to talk to the Viewing Public.

This month's Man On The Street question: What's the true meaning of Christmas?

-----


Alistaire Fructose, Bricklayer

"To have as many elves as possible. In my pants."




Harry "Tiger" Watkins, Rodeo Clown
"To further the materialistic pressures of a social structure deliberately designed to keep the masses in thrall to shiny things."



Lester Bodkin, Crab Fisherman

"Last I heard, it was to keep those goddamn wetbacks on the South side of the border, where they belong. But I could be wrong, or drunk."



Lousie Pebble, Exotic Dancer

"Peace and good will towards the men with the biggest huevos."




William Juniper, Musician

"Something about cookies. And, uh, crack. Yessir, it's not Christmas without a fat rock in the pipe!"




Reuben Tishkoff, Impresario

"You gonna steal from Santa Claus, you better goddamn know. This sorta thing used to be civilized. You'd hit a guy, he'd whack you, done! But Claus...at the end of this he better not know you're involved, not know your names, or think you're dead. Because he'll kill you, and then he'll go to work on you."

-----

And there you have it. Hairy Follidays, every bloody!

Man, I rode my hulking steam-powered steel-framed liner beneath the waves because I was just too cool. Now I'm a coral reef. And that is the essence of Funk. Either that, or I've been poisoned.

~Putnam Cholay

II. The Grimoir of Artificial Personhood

[Part I is here]

The concept of corporate personhood has been bubbling up across the information swamp lately, and I'd like to get one thing out of the way: corporate personhood isn't just for Bank of America. It's also for things like labor unions and advocacy groups. A certain portion of the polity tends to forget that the legal terms of art which animate great shambling behemoths like Goldman Sachs, Enron, and Fannie Mae also give life to the Service Employees International Union and MoveOn. We've created similar structures within the legal and political realms to account for collective, coordinated action and to attempt to answer certain questions about legal responsibility (poorly, as it turns out). These structures are called creatures of statute--or of state, if you prefer--and they're everywhere. A modern corporation is a centuries-old refinement of the same organizational urge that led to tribes, village councils, towns, municipalities, cities, states, and national governments. When humans want to get big things done, they tend to band together. It's a primate thing.

Which is not to say that a modern for-profit corporation is exactly the same as, say, the Federal government. However: to see a major consequence of the common metaphysical roots shared by the two institutions, look no further than the various career paths of certain presidents and presidential candidates, vice presidents past and hopeful, secretaries of defense, and so on. No matter which party is "in power," the pathways from the boardroom to the various halls and chambers of local, state, and national power are well trod. The question of "How, exactly, is the Federal government different from a corporation?" is being asked in the public square, right now, and when trying to make such a differentiation, it is sometimes helpful to appreciate the similarities.

The United States Code is the codification by subject matter of the general and permanent laws of the United States. It's a grimoire, like the APA's DSM-IV-TR: full of words strung together to define things and move action from within the minds of its creators out into the world for the rest of us to deal with. This book of spells is over 200,000 pages long, and the law in question is 1 U.S.C. §1. That is, Title 1, Chapter 1, of the United States Code. This particular spell is, quite literally, the first law of the United States, and it declares, among other things, that:

In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, unless the context indicates otherwise [...] the words “person” and “whoever” include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals;

There it is. Not in the Constitution, no. But at the foundation of American jurisprudence, within its very definition of first principles, this concept is enshrined: the word "person" encompasses non-human entities.

Words matter. Words have power. Humans use them to define the boundaries of that power, and to bring things into being. We've given ourselves the power to create entities that can function within our society with some of the rights of naturally-born human beings, and we've given our government the power to direct and control those entities, supposedly on our behalf. All it takes to make one is some paperwork, a few legal incantations, and the exchange of some of our other great fictional creation, money.

We've been through this sort of thing before. In the 16th century, the chief rabbi of Prague was one Judah Loew ben Bezalel, and like Rabbi Eliyahu of Chelm before him, Rabbi Bezalel took a form of inanimate matter--clay from the banks of the Vltava river, in this case--and gave it life through Hebrew ritual and incantation. Upon its forehead he scrawled the Hebrew word for truth (or reality), "emet." This golem was intended to protect the Jews of Prague from the depredations of the Holy Roman Emperor. It killed a wacking great pile of gentiles, but eventually grew ever more powerful and out of control, forcing HRE Rudolph to beg the rabbi to stop his creation and promise to lay off the pogrom. Depending on which version of the legend you hear, the rabbi had varying amounts of trouble turning the thing off. He eventually did so by rubbing the "e" off of "emet," leaving the Hebrew word for death, "met." Then--again, depending on the version of the tale--he stored the deactivated golem in the attic of the synagogue in Prague, in case he needed it again.

This is of course a legend. Magic, after all, isn't real.

Yet we, as a society, have codified a long series of words, given them power, and used them to create not-human entities, great conglomerations of people that collectively do things like dump 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, destroy national economies, and "speak" to politicians. They even have certain "rights." Similarly, we've conjured a national government that, in addition to paving roads, providing for sanitation, clean food and water, and a host of other services that are in general beneficial to the polity, occasionally projects massive force out into the far reaches of the world and kills lots of people. In each case, these entities are composed of natural persons, but the consequences of the actions of these entities are not the same as the consequences of the actions of natural persons. If you or I went out on our own and spilled 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf or jetted off to Iraq to kill 100,000 people, we'd be in jail or dead. States and corporations alike operate in the world, and take real action in the world. They have power, but they're without true moral consciousness, and they can run amok.

The systems that surround and support them have become so complex that they are escaping the control of their supposed masters. As just one small example: there are computer algorithms which conduct automated trades on the world's markets at speeds measured in microseconds. Back in 2006, I did some work with a company that produced what are now considered primitive trading algorithms, code written by humans. There were also algorithms that hadn't been coded by humans, but by other algorithms. Some hadn't been designed by a human for a dozen iterations. Programmers would set them loose in simulations and see how they did, then release the most promising ones out into the electronic wild of the markets. One programmer told me, "Sometimes they exhibit really weird, emergent behavior, and we don't even know why, because we didn't write them." I thought about that last year when the Dow rapidly plunged by nearly 1,000 points and then rebounded within minutes, for no apparent reason. Why? Algorithms. In the legislative realm we call that sort of thing "unintended consequences," and we're seeing more of that as our created systems of interacting non-human entities grow ever more chaotic.

Many of our great modern economic and metaphysical challenges flow from this fundamental, structural flaw in the methods by which we conjure our institutions: our ability to use language and incant ever-more-complicated spells has outstripped our understanding of their eventual effects.

And now, we've taken that particular bit of spellworking--evocation, the ability to create an artificial entity--and we've given it to anyone with a computer. What was once arcane and occult has become common. We've dispersed the magic.

But we haven't necessarily promulgated a new grimoire to go along with it.

In Part III, I'll tell you a bit more about how you might have already conjured your own golem, and about how that could affect your weekend.

It's quite simple. I pursued him because he was unapproachable, and I fled from you because you weren't. This in turn gave me the excuse to moon about and drink too many martinis. See how that works? You really must come to appreciate the vagaries of the male neurotic mind, my dear. Otherwise we'll make no sense to you at all.

-Shelley Curtis

Because: why the hell not. I'm using it for images of bits of verse. First post is up now.

You'll still be able to come here for long-winded pedantic nonsense and general insensibility, of course. This tumblr thing is an experiment, like shooting chimpanzees into space.

Oh, and no: my online persona has proven not to be the product of a disordered mind. It is the product of a differently ordered mind. Part II of The Perils of Online Personhood for the Not Quite Psychopathic, the Possibly Sociopathic, and the Merely Neurotic will be along presently.

I. The Grimoire of Wackos Greater and Lesser

"All living things are gnarly, in that they inevitably do things that are much more complex than one might have expected."

~Rudy Rucker

The American Psychiatric Association has gathered psychopathy and sociopathy beneath the diagnostic umbrella of Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD). Its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR) puts the incidence of ASPD at 3% in males and 1% in females. So, given that 76% of the U.S. population is over 18--the diagnostic criteria specifies an age of 18--and given that the population is almost evenly split between male and female, doing the math tells us that, in the strictly diagnosable sense, there are over 3.5 million male and nearly 1.2 million female sociopaths and psychopaths running about the country.¹

Conversely, the APA has split "neurosis" into component parts, and it's no longer used in psychiatric diagnosis. Instead, we've now got a constellation of specific things that used to be neuroses which are now their very own little behavior descriptors, things like obsessive-compulsive disorder, borderline personality disorder, anxiety, and pyromania. That diagnostic reorganization hasn't been wholly embraced, with some holding on to neurosis as an umbrella term that encompasses:

...persistent experiences of negative affect including anxiety, sadness or depression, anger, irritability, mental confusion, low sense of self-worth, etc., behavioral symptoms such as phobic avoidance, vigilance, impulsive and compulsive acts, lethargy, etc., cognitive problems such as unpleasant or disturbing thoughts, repetition of thoughts and obsession, habitual fantasizing, negativity and cynicism, etc.  Interpersonally, neurosis involves dependency, aggressiveness, perfectionism, schizoid isolation, socio-culturally inappropriate behaviors, etc.²

As far as the prevalence of what used to be called neurosis: 17 million depressed, 3.3 million with OCD, 5.2 million with PTSD...the list goes on.³

I'm not going to give you the odds of meeting a psychopath or a sociopath, because I've done enough math for this thing already.  But you definitely know at least one neurotic. To a certain extent, anyway. Otherwise you wouldn't be here.

Which brings me in a neat little swinging arc to my final point for this section: chances are, a not insignificant portion of this great pile of Greater and Lesser Wackos is on the Internet. If you didn't click on that link in the first paragraph, you won't know that according to the various committees at the APA, Anti-Social Personality Disorder is diagnosed like so:

A) There is a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others occurring since age 15 years, as indicated by three or more of the following:

1. failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest;
2. deception, as indicated by repeatedly lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure;
3. impulsiveness or failure to plan ahead;
4. irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults;
5. reckless disregard for safety of self or others;
6. consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations;
7. lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another;

B) The individual is at least 18 years old.

C) There is evidence of conduct disorder with onset before age 15 years.

D) The occurrence of antisocial behavior is not exclusively during the course of schizophrenia or a manic episode.

Now then. Think about the sort of things that Rebecca Watson seems to routinely find in her Inbox. Think about the unimaginatively-named phenomenon of "cyber-bullying," which has apparently resulted in more than one teen suicide and based upon which, most likely, is at least one optioned screenplay unofficially known as "Heathers 3." Or think about trolling, minor though it is in comparison, which can best be defined as "Taking a position or making statements in an online forum or comment thread for the express purpose of seeing whether you can really fuck with someone."

The Internet has increased the accessibility of human prey to those humans who are, for whatever reason, inclined towards psychologically predatory behavior in one way or another. Some of these ways are small. Others are quite a bit larger and more worrisome.

Just to speed things along, I'd like to remind you of John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory of 2004:
 


Only, in this instance, it's not a video game. It's the whole Internet. And instead of starting with a "Normal Person," you start with a sociopath or a psychopath.

And maybe there are people who would never do such things in person, could never manage to pull off the sadistic lack of empathy required to tell someone that perhaps they need to be raped. Or that they should just die. But on the internet, behind a cloak of anonymity, they can just let that little demon out to play, can create a whole online identity that's cruel, deceptive, aggressive, irresponsible, and lacking in empathy or remorse. That is: the technology of communication and personal information exchange may have enabled the expression of behaviors that, prior to such ubiquitous connectivity, would have remained largely concealed behind the rules and facades of face-to-face interaction.

Then there are the formerly-known-as-neurotics. For them, creating an online persona can be a minefield of exposure, anxiety, flashes of panic, and general weirdness, especially if they encounter one of the aforementioned disturbed individuals.

The Internet is a vast social experiment. It's a new way of facilitating human interaction, and, as Rudy Rucker said, we--as living beings--can get pretty gnarly. The new way of interacting has resulted in the rapid evolution of various subcultures, and these subcultures are now rippling out into meatspace, some of them in rather public ways. This entire process begins with the creation of individual online personas.

In Part II, I'm going to tell you about fictional persons and a 16th-century Czechoslovakian rabbi. Doesn't that sound fun?



¹Of course, this math may be correct in the way that "1) All dogs are blue 2) Fitz is a dog, therefore 3) Fitz is blue" is correct. That is, it's logically consistent, but factually wrong. I have no idea. I'm just piecing this crap together from stuff I find on the Internet, like everyone else. Also, some of these people might be in jail. But, rhetorically, this should be enough to pique some interest, if not a bit of alarm. It's Scary Math, which is why I did it.

²Basically, all the conditions necessary to become a writer.

³Not all of them are writers.

"I don't believe a single thing you've said for the past twenty minutes," she said. "In fact, I think there's good cause for me to doubt that you've told me the truth for the past three years." She glanced out the gauzy-curtained window, without turning her head, and raised the eggshell porcelain teacup to her cinnabar lips, again without moving her head beyond perfect stillness. Out on the lawn the wolves were busy tearing apart someone they'd caught in the forest, someone who'd been wearing tactical gear of some sort. Two of the beasts were tussling over a stubby machine gun, yanking it back and forth by its sling. She sipped her tea, returned her glance to my eyes, and replaced the teacup in its saucer, her movements precise, as though driven by fine-toothed clockwork. Although she'd paused, I knew it wasn't my turn to speak. The pause lengthened. "Did you really think you could take this house with a squad of ten?"

I felt my eyes blink. But beyond that, I couldn't muster a response. My hands remained where they were, frozen to the fine linen among the various bits of silverware and tea set. "I should really just put you out on the lawn," she said. "But the wolves are occupied, and it's so much better when they haven't eaten for awhile." Her two black eyes, set deep within that pale still face, regarded me with as much interest as the eight glossy eyes of a wolf spider. "I think we're done with tea, don't you?" Numb, cautious, I nodded. "And I think you should retire to your rooms for the afternoon. You look tired." I rose from the table, knocking a sterling fork off of it in the process. My hand whipped floorwards and caught it before it hit the parquet. "Such a shame," she said, and now that sculpted head did move, a slight shake of regret. The corners of her crimson mouth turned down, just a fraction. "You were my favorite, you know."

Galvanism at Villa Diodati After the Fall