Hi Nicholas! I actually read this after forwarding you Koch's piece building on the Eisenstein one that you start with. I feel like, in this current series, you are putting down on paper (metaphorically speaking, although maybe you write longhand first?) some things you've been carrying. Maybe the result of that will be that you'll be able to step back from them and look from various angles, or just go for a walk and leave them there. I don't know, but that's one of the things writing sometimes does for me, to take a set of thoughts out of my head and place them somewhere else and see what happens (or doesn't happen) as a consequence.
My other thought is that I'm struck by the resonance between your thinking about traps and two other Substack pieces that landed in recent days. First, Paul K's latest essay:
I thought of it when you wrote that "pointing out such power gets you accused of celebrating it". What marks Paul's writing out from Eisenstein or Solnit is that he does point out the power of the Machine and has little truck with cheering noises about "the new narrative", let alone "saving the world". I sometimes get a little grumpy reading the passages in which he emphasises the overwhelming power of what he is opposing and how hardly anyone really wants to reject it. I guess I'm drawn to an in-between position, from which it can look as though Paul is taking the power claimed by the Machine at face value, more than it deserves to be taken. Yet, in the end, the differences between the two of us are more differences of style and temperament than any great distance in where we land. And in this latest piece, he lands on the idea that what we're looking for is not a victory but an "escape hatch".
Then yesterday, Jay Rollins had a post at The Wonderland Rules called The Return of Houdini, which was all about his "weird little field of interest":
"I learned how esoterica like rapid-induction hypnosis and subliminal influence techniques worked competently enough to use them on strangers in the subway when I felt like it over a period of three decades spent on various brain-melting drugs, more or less as a hobby. It feels roughly equivalent to having learned how to reliably solve all of those bar puzzles made of horseshoes and steel rings connected with short lengths of chain with my eyes closed, while being shelled by an artillery battalion for thirty years. Now that I’m off the drugs myself, I unpack and reorder people’s brains more or less instinctively.
"I want to be crystal clear about the results of getting into that weird little field of interest: I live a state of perpetual moral dilemma every time I go out in public (one that people like Halpern seem to have no awareness even exists) because I find it something of a challenge not to do magic tricks with people’s brains when I’m bored in line at the DMV. What brings me down to earth is letters like the one Phetasy published. The methods I use to bring myself up short when I find myself considering a career as a supervillain all involve the recognition that most people do not know how to do this stuff themselves and the awareness that running a professional-grade game on an unsuspecting person will put a look on their face like they’ve been shot in the solar plexus with a beanbag gun. Like the bottom dropped out of their world.
"I’ve seen that look before. I don't want to see it again.
"I'd like to be clarify something else, too: I know it’s not that everyone else is stupid and I’m smart1. It’s that normal people take at most a couple of survey courses in psychology while in college, whereas I did a long, deep dive into the weaponizable aspects of the field, in part because I thought it was cool and in part because both drug dependency and drug withdrawal lead to periods of unemployment. There are days where it's all you can do to read a few chapters of your favorite book about famous con men and practice card tricks in the mirror."
So here are three interesting, rather different characters who I cross paths with on Substack, all thinking in terms of traps and the possibility of escape. I had a chat with Jay in the comments on his post about the relevance of what he is writing about to Paul's piece, and we found ourselves in agreement. Now it strikes me that it might be fun to bring you and Jay together to talk traps and escape sometime, maybe when you've got to the end of laying this particular series of traps?
Hi Nicholas! I actually read this after forwarding you Koch's piece building on the Eisenstein one that you start with. I feel like, in this current series, you are putting down on paper (metaphorically speaking, although maybe you write longhand first?) some things you've been carrying. Maybe the result of that will be that you'll be able to step back from them and look from various angles, or just go for a walk and leave them there. I don't know, but that's one of the things writing sometimes does for me, to take a set of thoughts out of my head and place them somewhere else and see what happens (or doesn't happen) as a consequence.
My other thought is that I'm struck by the resonance between your thinking about traps and two other Substack pieces that landed in recent days. First, Paul K's latest essay:
https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/the-savage-reservation
I thought of it when you wrote that "pointing out such power gets you accused of celebrating it". What marks Paul's writing out from Eisenstein or Solnit is that he does point out the power of the Machine and has little truck with cheering noises about "the new narrative", let alone "saving the world". I sometimes get a little grumpy reading the passages in which he emphasises the overwhelming power of what he is opposing and how hardly anyone really wants to reject it. I guess I'm drawn to an in-between position, from which it can look as though Paul is taking the power claimed by the Machine at face value, more than it deserves to be taken. Yet, in the end, the differences between the two of us are more differences of style and temperament than any great distance in where we land. And in this latest piece, he lands on the idea that what we're looking for is not a victory but an "escape hatch".
Then yesterday, Jay Rollins had a post at The Wonderland Rules called The Return of Houdini, which was all about his "weird little field of interest":
"I learned how esoterica like rapid-induction hypnosis and subliminal influence techniques worked competently enough to use them on strangers in the subway when I felt like it over a period of three decades spent on various brain-melting drugs, more or less as a hobby. It feels roughly equivalent to having learned how to reliably solve all of those bar puzzles made of horseshoes and steel rings connected with short lengths of chain with my eyes closed, while being shelled by an artillery battalion for thirty years. Now that I’m off the drugs myself, I unpack and reorder people’s brains more or less instinctively.
"I want to be crystal clear about the results of getting into that weird little field of interest: I live a state of perpetual moral dilemma every time I go out in public (one that people like Halpern seem to have no awareness even exists) because I find it something of a challenge not to do magic tricks with people’s brains when I’m bored in line at the DMV. What brings me down to earth is letters like the one Phetasy published. The methods I use to bring myself up short when I find myself considering a career as a supervillain all involve the recognition that most people do not know how to do this stuff themselves and the awareness that running a professional-grade game on an unsuspecting person will put a look on their face like they’ve been shot in the solar plexus with a beanbag gun. Like the bottom dropped out of their world.
"I’ve seen that look before. I don't want to see it again.
"I'd like to be clarify something else, too: I know it’s not that everyone else is stupid and I’m smart1. It’s that normal people take at most a couple of survey courses in psychology while in college, whereas I did a long, deep dive into the weaponizable aspects of the field, in part because I thought it was cool and in part because both drug dependency and drug withdrawal lead to periods of unemployment. There are days where it's all you can do to read a few chapters of your favorite book about famous con men and practice card tricks in the mirror."
So here are three interesting, rather different characters who I cross paths with on Substack, all thinking in terms of traps and the possibility of escape. I had a chat with Jay in the comments on his post about the relevance of what he is writing about to Paul's piece, and we found ourselves in agreement. Now it strikes me that it might be fun to bring you and Jay together to talk traps and escape sometime, maybe when you've got to the end of laying this particular series of traps?