Neither Believing nor Disbelieving: Impossible Futures, Conspiracy Theories, Aliens, and More: Part I

The internet is a seductive electric playground where alternative facts coexist with mythical truths.

I sometimes wonder if we are changing the fabric of our reality by uploading more and more of our consciousness to this incorporeal eco-system. I realize that I am engaging in magical thinking, but I suspect that we are living in magical times. Not magical as in Micky Mouse with a star-spangled sorcerer’s hat - but rather magical as in the whole astral circus is coming to town for high strangeness.

I came of age in the 1980s - a time that today’s television binge products (think Stranger Things) have been looking back on nostalgically for some time. There are things I too look back fondly upon. I remember, for example, the summer Van Halen’s 1984 came out and I listened to the record (yes a record - as in vinyl) over and over. I also remember saving up for an Atari 5200 and being amped up by what would be primitive graphics by today’s standards.

Globally, politically, and culturally things were pretty straight forward. My neighbors and I had more or less the same window on the world - available to us through one or more of the few dominant media outlets. There was that part of the world that was more or less off limits to us Westerners, but a simplistic picture was drawn up and Rocky IV (that’s the one where Rocky fights the Soviet machine, Ivan Drago) didn’t seem quite as campy as it does, today.

A related side note: I did have an opportunity to visit the Soviet Union with my high school band in 1987 (a year after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster). It was the first time I experienced culture shock - not because of anything that I encountered in the Soviet Union but because of what I expected might happen, thanks to years of American media hype. Incidentally, the shock (which to be fair, could have been exacerbated by my not having slept in 36 hours) quickly dissipated upon my first few hours within what our then president, Ronald Reagan dubbed the “evil empire.”

In the late 1990s, I once again crossed beyond what had once been the iron curtain (which separated the communist countries from the west), when I moved to Prague for a couple of years. Czech culture, which had abandoned Communism only 7 years earlier, seemed to not only embrace capitalism and all that went with it, but did the monster truck version of the free market. I remember, for example, walking down the street and seeing a billboard with a picture of a dog peeing on a green jello-mold of former Czech president, and iconic hero, Vaclav Havel’s head. A caption, in English, read, “Fuck the World.” This was an ad for shoes. Go figure.

Looking back, this billboard was probably one of the first signs (no pun intended) that reality was starting to unravel but at the time, I didn’t think of things that way. For the 1990s, these types of ads were edgy and ironic and hinted at a new frontier.

What’s notable then, about our collective online culture today, is that it seems like there are no more frontiers. Edginess and irony have no place, since the world is now far stranger than what either of these concepts signal. What were once the wild outposts of thought and expression have been colonized by ramshackle skyscrapers of colorful theories and seemingly fantastical belief systems, which it turns out, are not so fringe by the nature of how many people now subscribe to them.

I realized we had entered this new era, when I screened a video mash up of found footage clips for one of my classes a few years back. The mash up was meant as an absurdist commentary on the news. The students didn’t find the video as hilarious as I did the first time I saw it back in the early 2010s, nor did they react as gleefully as students in previous classes had. Instead, the class was fairly quiet until one student asked, “was that real,” meaning was it the unmodified news. He wasn’t being ironic. To me this lack of being able to recognize the parody signaled the dawn of an era in which the news, and by extension our political reality, had become weirder than the absurdist mashups.

***

Contrary to popular understanding, the word apocalypse, in its purest etymological sense, does not mean the end of the world or mass destruction but rather “to uncover.” What is being uncovered through the cultural shift mentioned above? I’m not sure, exactly. Could it be hundreds (maybe thousands) of years of collective subconscious anxiety? Could it be some manifestation of the truth of who we are as a species when national, cultural, and religious boundaries start to break down? Again, I’m just one node on the skin of the Earth, so I make no claims of understanding. But from my vantage point, I do perceive both seemingly contradictory interpretations of apocalypse at work. And this makes sense because it is in keeping with every other natural cycle in which destruction and creation depend on one another. In the apocalypse case, I would argue that once something is uncovered, though the entity that was doing the covering may have to die, new seeds, new ideas, and new perceptions about the world are created in the vacancy left by death.

It’s notable that modern civilization cultivates spaces that try to deny the apocalypse. Unless abandoned, office buildings, for example are likely to maintain stasis. Floors, walls, and other surfaces are scrubbed regularly to keep the apocalypse out - in stark contrast to what we would call the “natural” world, which is in a constant state of apocalypse. Cyberspace, being an exception to this apocalypse-denial in the human realm, seems to offer a lab or safe space for the creation and destruction of paradigms. After all, we can always walk away from this virtual universe back into our physical world lives with our sense of reality fairly intact - except for the fact that little by little, this immaterial realm does perhaps chip away at the barrier between the virtual and physical world.

In the next section, I’m interested in exploring the role that conspiracy/alternative theories play in expressing old mythologies in modern terms and how one can engage with conspiracy/alternative theory content in a state of “neither believing nor disbelieving.”