Media Theory Books

“Eliza flips open Weird Tales March 1999, Hey I just had a fun lil spark of inspiration. I know you're busy this summer but I was wondering if maybe at the end of summer you would be interested in doing an afterward for my new book Satanic Panic & the Very Special Episodes. The book is a materialist counterfeit reality. The book was inspired by my 400th viewing of one of my all time favorite movie The Truman Show and I was thinking about the psychological implications of that flick, about how even after Jim Carrey's escape from the dome would he ever truly be able to trust his surroundings. I don't think so. I'm also reading some classic madness-caused-by-society texts like Anti-Oedipus and Foucault's Madness and Civilization. And I'm also reading about all of the classic kinds of schizo delusional thinking like delusions of reference, fregoli syndrome (in my opinion the scariest of all delusions), stuff like that. The book is a meta tavern confession. These two guys are sitting in a super shabby tavern and they've both basically forgotten how they got into this shabby tavern and they both kind of convince themselves and each other that they're on a set that's meant to look like a shabby tavern. The shabby construction they believe exists to give them a hint that they exist in a counterfeit reality. There are some fun neoplasms in the book like omniscinditus. One of the characters invents that word and says the word means "special secret purpose or message hidden inside common objects and concepts." The two characters basically convince themselves that everything has omniscinditus. And as I've been writing this book my mind has wandered back to mediation technology because my mind always wanders back to mediation technology. For the afterword I was wondering if I could give you a prompt for an essay that I want to be both a thing that informs Satanic Panic and the afterword. I need an expert. My prompt is, if you are down (and if you are not down I totally understand and will not be offended), about mediation technology in the hands of hypercapitalists and the algorithm as a delusion machine. I don't know what the prompt question(s) would be here. It's not necessarily a question about truth or falsity. Or maybe it's not quite a question of is this a possibility? Maybe the question(s) are about a composite of the old world and our new mediation tech as a behaviorism machine that tricks us into loving the machine. And maybe the question has something to do with the Descartes demon and tech and the old saying about how everyone throughout history has thought-demons lived in tech, but what if mediated tech became so advanced a "demon" could be invented. My thoughts always return to "well if a corporation or government or intelligence agency (some overflowing with incompetence and other silliness) can send people to a south american country or a middle eastern country or elsewhere and those people can, part of the time, successfully rally citizens and do a coup, why couldn't a technology successfully psychologically manipulate on a mass level as well? Is that what we are saying? That peepers in foreign lands can be easily tricked into coups and stuff like that? Are we talking about mind control and the Air Loom? If so, why is it when we speak of mass mind control happening in the US, scoffs happen? And why wouldn't money-powers go out of their way to create a delusion machine? Is having your masses ebb and flow between slight delusion to full to peace and tranquility and back to delusion beneficial to the money-powers and capitalism? I feel like the arrival of anxiety meeting the hope of tranquility and having that move back and forth over and over must be beneficial. And even if a psychological manipulation technology that advanced is far off, does that mean that powers-that-be are not working on making that a reality? In the book, I'm attempting to frame all of this in a materialist way without any mediation technology…”
― Chase Griffin