Witch hunts and the weaponisation of moral panic

In his history of European Witch Hunts, historian Norman Cohn traces the history of demonic moral panics and delves “deep into the sociology and social psychology of persecution”. The story he tells is one of gullibility, ignorance and the abuse of power that seems particularly relevant to our outrage-prone hyperconnected age. It is also a lesson on the long term consequences of fuelling moral panics and how cottage industries grow to sustain them.

Infographics of Doom

While the world reels in horror at the latest atrocities committed by Islamic fundamentalists, we should not forget that in the United States brews an ideology that is in many ways far more disturbing. “Dispensational Premillennialism” — a form of evangelicalism thought to be practiced by between five and forty million Americans — teaches that an impending apocalyptic war will bring about the end of the world. After which, Christ will rule the world for a thousand years from his throne in Jerusalem.

Hashtag Mythology

John Waterhouse, Echo and Narcissus

While the world becomes increasingly complex and flooded with exabytes of often contradictory information, our minds are still lumbered with deep rooted “mythic” narrative-based methods of making sense of the it. But today the “myths” or narratives we collectively build are no longer directly connected to our immediate survival, as is the case with, say, the Dreamtime myths of Aborigines. So we are free to pluck information out of this digital abyss, label them “facts” and construct any new mythology we wish with them. Relation to empirical reality is useful, but far from necessary.

Agents of Apophis

The great serpent had no eyes, no ears, indeed no senses at all. All it had was a mouth with which it screamed unendingly into the eternal night of the netherworld. This is how ancient Egyptians imagined the demon Apophis; Lord of Chaos; a malevolent entropy-like force that forever threatened to wear down the mechanisms of the state and bring about the collapse of civilisation. To combat Apophis’ erosive force, the priesthood undertook elaborate daily rituals to ward off the demon, in Temples that were to them engine rooms of cosmic stability, operated by the user interface of word-magic and sacrament.

The Age of Unreason

The Internet was meant to usher in a new enlightenment, instead it is became the breeding ground of ideas increasingly at odds with reality.

Jim Clark’s Manifesto for a New Civilization

A dystopian singularity looms on the horizon like the Eye of Sauron, but can we do anything to escape its pull? The founder of the World Technology Network thinks… maybe. But only if we act now.

A story of information entropy

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In the late 19th or early 20th century, billions of photons ricocheted off the face of this small boy and through the aperture of an early camera. There, the energy contained in the photons initiated a chemical reaction that burnt his image on a piece of photographic film.

Months or even decades later, this negative was laid down on a rough block of wood next to a series of others, images that presumably had some shared significance. Perhaps this was done by his parents, perhaps by himself in his old age, or even his children or grandchildren, but whoever did so photographed the negatives again, seemingly as some crude method of replication. But while the image itself was saved, its meaning was not.  An unknown span of time later the negative was detached from its original context, and the identity of the boy was lost.

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I found this negative-of-negatives amongst hundreds of others in an antiques fair in Old Spitalfields market. A few days later, I placed it on my scanner, where a band of LEDs radiated photons across the image, after which they bounced back through a series of mirrors and lenses onto the scanner’s CMOS sensory array. From there, his face streamed through the microcircuitry of a computer to be rebuilt as a pattern of electricity rippling across a film of liquid crystals. The haunting visage stares now from your device for the first time in perhaps a century. An echo of a life long passed.

The image itself, stored now both on the vast server farms of Google, Facebook and Tumblr, will endure now for an unknown time into the future even if the “original” should perish.  Now part of the exponential abyss of the deep web it will in time be comprehended and scrutinised by future intelligences both human and otherwise. Through advanced facial recognition algorithms and other exotic means of inquiry yet to be devised it will be woven back into an intricate lattice of information that will ultimately span all of human knowledge.

Will it ever be possible for the identity of this boy to be retrieved? Or is his name to be forever lost; worn away by the corrosive forces of information entropy?