Posthuman Blues

I succumbed and bought R.E.M.'s "Fables of the Reconstruction" tonight. This is the CD I lost (see earlier entry if you're interested in this particular tragedy). My email dialogue with fellow R.E.M. fan and science fiction writer Peter Watts necessitated this purchase. I have an almost visceral need to hear "Maps and Legends." "Old Man Kensey" is playing as I type. I'd missed this one, too.

Today was devoted to reading 1.) "Maelstrom" and 2.) Keel's "Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings." Keel suggests, fairly convincingly, that the UFO/paranormal intelligence wages a kind of psychological warfare against humans. Its primary motive appears to be deception. But to what end? Is this "intelligence" really intelligent in any meaningful sense of the word or simply the by-product of Vallee's "unattended clockwork"? If we inhabit a computer simulation, as argued by Peter Gersten, then a built-in psychosocial conditioning system might be...

("Green Grow the Rushes" is playing now -- I'd forgotten what a good one this is...)

...necessary to keep us from learning the Horrible Truth. Upon learning What's Really Going On -- i.e., that we don't exist in any sort of ontologically palatable form -- we just might shed the confines of Gersten's "Cosmic Computer System" and go on to infect some unthinkably vast cosmic Internet. Perhaps terrestrial intelligence is akin to a sample of isolated germs used for occasional research purposes. Or maybe we're being allowed to evolve into something more hardy and virulent. "Someone else" -- in this case, a kind of godlike hacker -- might have big plans for us. Transcelestial biowarfare? A nifty experimental screen-saver like Rudy Rucker's Boppers? Something like the quantum-level consciousness-merging suggested in Strieber's "Communion" and subsequent books?

"Stay off that highway; word is it's not so safe."

--R.E.M., "Green Grow the Rushes"