“The shadow of that hyddeous strength, sax myle and more it is of length”
From “Ane Dialog”, by Sir David Lyndsay, describing the Tower of Babel, 1555 (The quote introduces C.S. Lewis’ “That Hideous Strength”, from 1945)
They ought to have all looked more and more comfortable as he proceeded; and there ought soon to have been murmurs of grave regret for the tragedy which they had just witnessed. That was what Wither expected. What he actually saw bewildered him. The same too attentive silence which had prevailed during Jules’s speech had returned. Bright unblinking eyes and open mouths greeted him in every direction. The woman began to laugh again–or no, this time it was two women. Cosser, after one frightened glance, jumped up, overturning his chair, and bolted from the room.
The Deputy Director could not understand this, for to him his own voice seemed to be uttering the speech he had resolved to make. But the audience heard him saying, “Tidies and fugleman–I sheel foor that we all–er–most steeply rebut the defensible, though, I trust, lavatory, Aspasia which gleams to have selected our redeemed inspector this deceiving. It would–ah–be shark, very shark, from anyone’s debenture . . .”
The woman who had laughed rose hastily from her chair. The man seated next to her heard her murmur in his ear, “Vood wooloo.” He took in the meaningless syllables and her unnatural expression at one moment. Both for some reason infuriated him. He rose to help her to move back her chair with one of those gestures of savage politeness which often, in modern society, serve instead of blows. He wrenched the chair, in fact, out of her hand. She screamed, tripped on a ruck in the carpet and fell. The man on the other side of her saw her fall and saw the first man’s expression of fury. “Bot are you blammit?” he roared, leaning towards him with a threatening movement. Four or five people in that part of the room were now up. They were shouting. At the same time there was movement elsewhere. Several of the younger men were making for the door. “Bundlemen, bundlemen,” said Wither sternly, in a much louder voice. He had often before, merely by raising his voice and speaking one authoritative word, reduced troublesome meetings to order.
But this time he was not even heard. At least twenty people present were at that very moment attempting to do the same thing. To each of them it seemed plain that things were just at that stage when a word or so of plain sense, spoken in a new voice, would restore the whole room to sanity. One thought of a sharp word, one of a joke, one of something very quiet and telling. As a result fresh gibberish in a great variety of tones rang out from several places at once. Frost was the only one of the leaders who attempted to say nothing. Instead, he had pencilled a few words on a slip of paper, beckoned to a servant, and made him understand by signs that it was to be given to Miss Hardcastle.
By the time the message was put into her hands the clamour was universal. To Mark it sounded like the noise of a crowded restaurant in a foreign country. Miss Hardcastle smoothed out the paper and stooped her head to read. The message ran: Blunt frippers intantly to pointed bdeluroid. Purgent. Cost. She crumpled it up in her hand.
From “That Hideous Strength”, by C.S. Lewis, 1945
I saw this guy on the train
And he seemed to have gotten stuck
In one of those abstract trances.
And he was going: "Ugh . . . Ugh . . . Ugh . . . "
And Fred said:
I think he’s in some kind of pain.I think it’s a pain cry.
And I said: “Pain cry?
Then language is a virus.”
Language! It’s a virus!
Language! It’s a virus!
From “Language is a Virus (from Outer Space)”, by Laurie Anderson, 1986
Regardless of culture or geography, technology is driving suicide rates that are higher than any ever seen in history.
The suicide rate in the ten highest smart phone penetration nations is 50% higher than that in ten lowest smart phone penetration nations.
Web-addicted individuals have a 65 percent higher rate of psychiatric morbidity.
25% of students who used social media for more than two hours per day reported suicidal ideation. While teenagers who spend 5 hours a day on electronic devices are 71% more likely to have suicide risk factors than those with one-hour use. And It was the time spent on the device, not the content, that mattered most.
You can see how the rate of suicidal ideation increases with hours of use, from 25% at two hours a day, up to 71% at five hours a day.
So what is it, specifically, about technology that’s causing all those people to want to take their own lives?
Up until last night, I thought that it was purportedly-harmless non-Ionizing radiation that was driving the phenomenon.
Now, make no mistake, that purportedly-harmless non-Ionizing radiation is in fact quite harmful. For example, just a few CT scans triple the risk of brain cancer and leukemia.
But you know how, when you check your WiFi, you can see the dozens and dozens of other WiFi bubbles that exist around you at that moment, all in addition to your own?
If non-ionizing radiation drove suicide, why would only certain groups, white females foremost among them, have exponentially higher rates of suicide?
Well, that’s because they used the technology the most, and the damage caused was cumulative, and dose dependent. I was correct in that surmise, but that’s a half-truth. It’s not the non-ionizing radiation in the air that’s driving people to kill themselves.
A glimmer of insight appeared in my previous ruminations that Technology was a demon that we invited in.
In February 2015, a Chinese teenager chopped off their own hand in an attempt to cure their Internet addiction.
“Addiction” is a demon that is invited in. Sometimes those addiction demons are minor, and at others they are major.
Living in cities is associated with an almost 40% higher risk of depression, over 20% more anxiety, and double the risk of schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is what was known in the old days as “demonic possession”.
Then it struck me. Language! The women on their phones eight hours a day are READING, eight hours a day.
Online gaming, MSN, online searching for information, and online studying are all associated with an increased risk of suicidal ideation.
“It was the time spent on the device, not the content”. Not bullying by “trolls” on web forums, not wanting to die of jealousy over their friends vacations, or children’s achievements, posted on Facebook under the psychotic false guise of pious gratitude, not via inspiration from some inventive way to kill oneself they found online.
But people have been reading for a long time. There’s a force-multiplier as it regards reading and technology. What could it be?
Computer programs are written in LANGUAGES.
The distinct and separate race we know benightedly as “Neanderthal” created languages and sundered the single human tongue, then had their people at the top of the control pyramids that existed at that time to enforce the use of those languages.
That got the us-vs-them thing going which has been how the few have controlled the many, well, all the way back to Babylon, and before. Not long after, they created Islam and Christianity to further polarize the situation.
You know how language is always evolving? If we time travelled back to “dark ages” England, a thousand years ago, we literally could not understand what those people were saying, despite the fact that they spoke “English”.
The dictionary for the English language didn’t exist until 1879.
I think that spellcheck and autocorrect are part of a horrific gambit to make language that is naturally fluid into a solid thing. Or, perhaps more correctly, are trying to remove the last remaining safety valve from language. The constant use of passwords in “technology” is another tell, another clue. I believe passwords are the formal “inviting it in” thing.
The populace used to pass things on via oral tradition. For Millennia, writing was the secret province of the Neanderthal ruling class, regardless of the nation.
Later, they went all in with “literacy” and “reading is fundamental”, et al. Now, the folks in charge are not your friends, and have not now or ever wanted what’s best for you. And that includes the written word. There was a ban on graven images in the ancient world for this very reason.
Please understand, I majored in English in College, wrote professionally for a time, and am at this moment am attempting to destroy the dark empire which holds us in thrall via the use of the written word. So to say this is complex is an understatement.
That Laurie Anderson song is based on a concept in the William S. Burroughs novel The Ticket That Exploded”. He argued that language is infectious and exerts limitations and controls over people’s minds and that the ability to think and create is limited by the conventions of grammar and usage.
Wikipedia says “Memetics is the study of information and culture based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution. Proponents describe memetics as an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer. Memetics describes how an idea can propagate successfully, but doesn’t necessarily imply a concept is factual.”
Ah, now we’re on the trolley! “Does not necessarily imply a concept is factual.”
Wikipedia continues: “The term meme was coined in Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Analogous to a gene, the meme was conceived as a “unit of culture” (an idea, belief, pattern of behavior, etc.) which is “hosted” in the minds of one or more individuals, and which can reproduce itself in the sense of jumping from the mind of one person to the mind of another. Thus what would otherwise be regarded as one individual influencing another to adopt a belief is seen as an idea-replicator reproducing itself in a new host.”
It’s how everybody can suddenly start going “woop woop!” and putting their hands up over their heads, all at once. It’s how everyone can, horrifically, begin wearing their baseball cap backwards, again, all at one time.
It’s how large non-factual memes can and are deployed to control the human populace.
Technology drives suicide because language is a virus, and because computer programs are written in languages.
