It wasn’t my idea
for the Internet to be run
on human sacrifice.
Marvin Graves,
in “Cannibals and Kings”,
suggests that societies
turn to anthropophagy
when they need protein,
blaming the Gods.
But Professor Warren Shapiro
points out
that humans can survive
on the abundant protein
in bugs
(go ahead,
compare the protein in
a pound of crickets
with a pound of your favorite animal protein,
I dare you) –
and we simply really
really
prefer
to eat things
more similar
to ourselves,
we prefer flesh
to chitin,
and we’ll prioritize meat
fairly often,
culturally speaking.
I’m not a nutritionist,
I’m a Necromancer,
but you don’t have to be
an initiate of the Dark Arts
to know this:
ask anyone who practices
any form of
animal sacrifice
and they will tell you:
it may be cruel,
but it energizes a ritual
like nobody’s business.
I’ve never
(yet)
(as far as you know)
sacrificed some mortal
on a massive and ancient altar,
stained with a millennia or two
of blood and fear-sweat,
but I’ve studied the theory.
I’m sorry if you’re squeamish,
and don’t like that I know these things,
but my knowledge is my own concern;
you only have say
over what I do with it,
and even that,
only when it affects you,
and that,
right there,
puts me pretty far ahead
of social media.
The snuffing out
of a Name,
the destruction of
an individual’s privacy,
personal life,
career,
sanity,
happiness,
is Necromancy of the very
highest order
and it’s why the Internet
increasingly does things
previously thought to reside
only in the realm of the fantastic,
the mythical,
and the magical.
and it’s better
than the old way.
oh, the old way
had a certain personal touch,
a bit of spectacle,
if you could stand high atop a pyramid
cut out a still-beating heart
and hold it in your hand
for the crowd
to see,
but on the Internet,
we can claim, ten thousand times,
that we’ve torn someone to shreds,
and the fact that
the person in question
still exists afterwards
only ignites more
righteous
indignation.
You might think this is a metaphor,
but this is not a metaphor.
I give you two propositions:
1. There’s no reason
that self-learning machines
couldn’t have discovered
what we call ‘magic’,
and we wouldn’t
necessarily
know;
people don’t often
talk about the degree to which
the social
and search
and personalization
algorithms
which dip deep into
our lives
and rewire them
to suit (hypothetically)
“our” needs
are not moving at the speed
of human code,
but machine learning,
which isn’t spooky,
because the people who know
how spooky it is
have showed us how
excitingly
that AI can learn
how to play chess
real fast.
There’s no reason
to believe
they haven’t discovered
ancient principles
of Magick,
and they are releasing energy
and harnessing it
and making offerings
unto Graveyard Gods
in order to work
Internet miracles
at horrifying,
science-fiction-consequence-style
costs.
2. But most of us,
good, honest, human
skeptics,
we know better, right?
And if you want me to take
this in some sort of Lovecraftian
direction, I can,
some sort of “the machines became wise
and farmed the humans, not for battery energy like
in some foolish movie, but for the
explosive blast of vital force
which erupts from
a ritually-ended soul,
but it’s not necessary.
Because if we look at it as skeptics,
as people who ‘know’ that magic is not real,
who ‘know’ that the ‘energy’ of those rituals
is psychological,
brain chemical release,
adrenal,
GOOD NEWS!
It turns out
that this
goes significantly farther
towards proving
what I say.
Humans are programmed to
care about what happens to
other humans; even sociopaths
care, they just might not
empathize.
We created tools and gave them
parameters for engaging us,
catching our attention,
keeping our attention.
When humans are ‘real’, live, and in front of you,
you can kill them only once;
but if we commit the ritual slaughter
of the unclean
in a virtual way,
we hit the same buttons,
because we’ve misdirected our minds.
We feel the rush of the bloody righteous sacrifice,
and we can tear out the vital organs again
and again;
we are Eagles who have found the never-ending feast
which is Prometheus.
this is not a Conspiracy.
this is not a Mystery.
this is something you can verify
right now:
we’ve taught machines to observe where
we click, how long we seem to look at something,
what we turn our attention towards,
what we respond to,
what emotions we want to show when we respond,
and how long we’ll stay on that site,
being served messages,
and advertisements,
teaching those sites more about ourselves.
That really isn’t the sinister part.
That really isn’t the sinister part.
We’ve taught them that we love gentle pleasure –
kittens, kittens, kittens –
and the fiercest pain,
the utter certainty that everyone but us
and our seemingly-outnumbered circle of friends
has gone mad and is psychotic,
and if we could kill those strange villainous characters
with our minds,
we would,
but instead,
we release words which pound their images,
their imagos,
their online representations,
into hamburger.
We slay them, we make the sacrifice, we feel the rush –
and then, before it can fully die down,
the machines feed it to us again.
When I say “Necromancy”, you might hear “dark magic”,
but I mean “this is one of the things humans will do,
if we let ourselves”,
and by now,
we know that our screens are,
in assorted ways,
bad for us,
but we can’t look away.
Who can look away
from a freshly-sliced
still-beating
vital organ,
offered up
in front of the people
in the service of furthering
our holy needs?
My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.
I write books. You should read them!
My new book, “I Hate Your Time Machine”, is now available! Go pick it up!
