In 1932 hot weirdo (see above) Orson Welles released a “found footage” radio broadcast version of HG Wells’ popular science fiction story.
A great depression era Cloverfield.
The broadcast was so real that people lost it.
There was chaos on the street as people panicked about aliens. ( some of this may have been overreported by Orson Welles’ hyped machine).
I think I encountered this story too young.
It was formative in a way that may not have been helpful for my worldview — I can track its influence in many of my life decisions, from getting obsessed with power on the internet to spending years helping pull off huge activist media stunts.
Because to me the moral of the war of the worlds broadcast story is:
reality is fake.
So it’s easy to change.
smarter more interesting people have said this before.
Reality is a collective agreement, a shared set of beliefs both unconscious and conscious.
And when someone bends that agreement — things get weird.
But here’s something that I didn’t think about for the many years I implicitly understood reality as fake and thus… kind of bendy.
And I’m starting to think that it’s a really big part of what has made my work and life more challenging than it’s needed to be.
reality is fake.
but biology isn’t.
( don’t freak out, i’m not gonna get biological essentialist here, or say there are only two genders.
Biology is still fake. At least, all of the Latin words in the Western medical industrial complex are.)
But the body, the nervous system?
That shit is real.
Not only is it real, it’s…
Fucking complicated.
Every trans person who’s gotten really into somatics will tell you — it’s liberating to explore and understand your body and nervous system, something that has messed with you for your entire life.
But part of that exploration is understanding just how complicated your body truly is.
If someone offers you a choco taco and you get mad or overwhelmed by this, there could be 3000 different reasons why.
Maybe the microexpression on their face is reminding you of something fucked up that happened to you yesterday.
Or Choco tacos are something your great great great great grandfather invented, had stolen from him by a corporation, and carried the feelings of failure with him into all the generations after.
Maybe the microflora in your gut are reacting in some sort of esoteric unknowable way to this choco taco as a prehistoric threat.
Or: maybe you’re just hungry.
Who knows where feelings come from? They just appear.
So:
We can absolutely change the world, bend reality.
You can tell people aliens are taking over whenever you want.
That part is easy.
(By the way: as much as I obsessed about this story as a child, it’s not a great strategy for positive social transformation, as we can see from Qanon.)
But what we can’t do is control or predict nervous systems — either ours, or other peoples’.
There is so much unknowable shit in the world — even in your own body.
So if you’re going to fuck with reality, you should probably start there.
No fake alien invasion required.
^^^ Kai Chen Thom writes abt this much better than I do. This one is good to start with.
^^ For the rest of April I’m doing “imagining hopeful futures” writing workshops (including tonigbt, though its abrupt) on Wednesdays at 7 CST.
They are pay what you want, suggested donation $10. 20% goes to @AssataDaughters — the workshop is abt imagining hopeful futures for ourselves + the world.
Originally published at https://notesonfeednet.substack.com.
