Haunted Media: Fantasies of Electric Immortality

Jeffrey Sconce is Professor in the Screen Cultures program and a Guggenheim Fellow for 2020-2021. Back in 2000, he published Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, which looked at how electronic media and the occult have always been intertwined, right back to the telegraph. He's the guest on this episode of Still Spoken, a wide-ranging chat about horror films, Freud, Spiritualists and seances, immortalists of Silicon Valley, posthumous electronic revenge, and whether you can expect your dog (not all dogs, just your favourite dog) to greet you in heaven. 

As always, the interviewer is Elaine Kasket, author of All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of Your Personal Data; the interview took place in 2021. Jeffrey Sconce's more recent book is The Technical Delusion: Electronics, Power, Insanity (2019).

This podcast written and produced by Elaine Kasket. I do this ALL BY MYSELF with no production team, editors, or help from anyone other than my wonderful guests.

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Transcript

Jeffrey Sconce: Yeah. The book started, there was a horror film the late in the late nineties called Shocker. But the premise of  Shocker was it was a guy that was on death row. And right before he goes to the electric chair, he makes a pact with Satan to become immortal, but as electricity, basically.

And so he basically flees as he's being executed in the electric chair site. And it gives him the ability to escape through the wiring of the electric chair. And the rest of the movie is about him basically being in the electrical grid and possessing various appliances to kill people in novel ways.

So he possesses like an electric knife. He possesses a blender. He goes, he goes through the electrical system and possesses common objects. And I remember watching this thinking, well, this is a really odd premise for us just to sort of accept.

Elaine Kasket: That’s Jeffrey Sconce. He’s a professor at Northwestern University on the Screen Cultures programme. I know about Jeffrey because of his first book, written in 2000, and it’s called Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television.

Jeffrey Sconce: And obviously it's a fantastical premise, but I started thinking about why is it that we just readily imagined that people can become electricity and move that way because that's become such a scientific or excuse me, such as science fictional sort of premise that people can transform themselves into some kind of energy and there is electricity if you go to Star Trek, it's like you go on the the transporter and you become phased matter or whatever it is.

And it was also the same time that all the early virtual reality talk was just at the height of the singularity stuff, Kurzweil, all the future...and back then before people had the experience of 20 years of being administered by algorithms and data the future looked a lot more cheery with that stuff.

And first there was VR and VR was going to be this unbelievable experience for alternate realities. And that's the way all entertainment was going to go. And then disembodiment and the uploading fantasy that eventually we were all going to leave our carbon-based bodies behind and go into the mainframe and live forever as these kinds of simulations in a program.

And so that confluence of things, maybe just start thinking about, well, where did this begin? When did we just start thinking that we can just convert ourselves into energy and leave the body? And, and that's what took me back to the 19th century and Spiritualists and the Fox sisters. 

Elaine Kasket: I’m Elaine Kasket, and this is SS, a podcast about the ways in which the dead live on, through us, our stories, and through technology. In my book, All the Ghosts in the Machine, and in my presentations, I speak about how communicating with the dead using technology is far from being a new phenomenon. Virtually every communication technology humans have ever created has been pulled into service to try and communicate with the dead, and the industrial and post-industrial eras are filled with examples. The book that really sensitised me to this is Haunted Media, so I was really thrilled to speak to Jeffrey Sconce for a bit of an update two decades after its publication. 

Jeffrey Sconce: The genesis of that book, it's really a book of the late nineties, because that's when I was doing my dissertation research and like all dissertators, I was lying around, waiting for inspiration as to what I was going to write on. And I can...it's gonna sound very anti-climatic and sad and kinda pathetic where the origins of that book came from, but I was actually watching an old horror movie directed by this American horror director, Wes Craven and west. Sorry, I'll start over. I'll start over. So you can edit that part out. 

Elaine Kasket: I can do it. I can do it. It's all part of the, it's all part of the magic.

Jeffrey Sconce: That irritates me because I did exactly what I was supposed to do here. That any digital...maybe we can get later to whether or not digital technology can be haunted or just annoying.

Elaine Kasket: Or both! An annoying haunting. There've been a fair few of those. Once I started thinking about it and reading about that film that you talk about in the book, but I think of about my memory of so many films from that time, it wasn't just it was just one movie that had this kind of premise. All sorts of them. I remember being really taken with Tron in the 1980s, and that was another one a bit earlier on, and being absolutely terrified by Poltergeist and freaked out by my television, especially my grandmother's television, which looks a bit like old fashioned and stuff for like ages after that.

And I'm thinking and as you go back through these different phases, the wireless and television earlier television and the Telegraph, you saw all of this stuff, all these cultural moments. I was fascinated by the chapter, talking about television and episodes, all the episodes you outlined, if those two really popular television programs, the Outer Limits, and then the oh, do not adjust your television sets... 

Jeffrey Sconce: Twilight Zone. 

Elaine Kasket: Yeah, Twilight Zone. Yeah. And how and how those clustered around certain themes that spoke to something happening in the cultural imagination. But then yeah, this continuity that kept on manifesting in different forms about this manifesting as electricity, becoming electricity, being constituted of, transformed into, transported through, and it has very old roots. My favorite illustration in the book that I don't think it has to do with the Fox sisters, but does have to do with Spiritualism stuff that kicked off as partly as a result of their efforts, is that thing with the house? And it looks like there's some sort of, like, broadband connection or something being wired into the house, but it's actually like a shaft of light coming down from the clouds. Nineteenth century uplink!

Jeffrey Sconce: Yeah, the a lot of the, and that kind of pseudo-scientific moment, I hate to even call it pseudo-scientific because science itself didn't necessarily really even exist then, but that kind of period of active theorization of how spirits work and communicate through these kind of energies and being projected up and down. And that's really just about that first 10 or 15 years of it. And one of the things that I find fascinating with that period is the spiritualist who introduced the idea of the ‘spiritual telegraph’ and come up with these illustrations of signals bouncing off angels that are relaying them, and how clairvoyance works, and they see it all as energetic phenomena. By the time the Society of Psychical Research starts to do empirical investigations into all of this in the 1880s, 1890s, they back off that and go to a more traditional spiritual model that it's about forces we can't understand, and it isn't literally about science and electricity, because the rationalists take over, right, and then you get that great phase from about 1880 to 1920, where people like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and people like that, are actually trying to do rational inquiry. They take the fun out of it basically, right? So I think the Spiritualist, they back off some of that stuff pretty quickly.

Elaine Kasket: But there is a really interesting moment or series of years at that juncture where it is all kind of a mishmash and you get a lot of very scientific minds also believing in communication with the dead and having that real sort of Spiritualist tint to what they're doing. So there's some pretty fascinating mashups in some of these scientific figures.

Jeffrey Sconce: Yeah, I mean, that period is so amazing, I think in terms of, especially in terms of psychology and thinking about the mind and how it works, because if you think about Freud doing his early attempts to come up with a scientific account of what will become psychoanalysis, so he's doing that in the 1890s. You've got the Society for Psychical Research working in that period. And then recently for this new project I've been looking at animal psychology, comparative psychology, and all of these attempts to actually see what animals are thinking. Could animals be taught to talk, you know, the Clever Hans case where the horse that could supposedly do complex mathematics, and that's all kind of grouped right there at the turn of the century. And what I love about that is this idea that human thought is still such an occult mystery to people. And you have these kind of three different types of occults. Three ways of thinking about thought, is this occult energy that, that science might tease out in some way, is really fascinating. 

Elaine Kasket: Well that whole fascination with that which is not immediately available to us, or that which is invisible to us, or far from us, or beyond our ken, the minds of animals, the realm of the dead, what's happening with people at distance, this tantalizing promise, because it must have just, it was massive. I hadn't really thought about it before, which sounds crazy, just how significant the arrival of the telegraph was, that it was every bit, felt every bit as revolutionary to those folks as the much more complex kind of modern miracles calls that we've got now that it really and people were thinking if this is possible, Then freaking anything is possible and it really hooked into that period of time Philippe Aries, the scholar of death cultures in Western civilizations, it talked about this romantic periods around really romanticizing death and continuing connection with the dead that really came into prominence with the romantics.

And it felt like there was a real connection for me there, with that kind of preoccupation really the continuing strong romantic attachments to the dead. And then all of a sudden here's this telegraph and here's, and then later the wireless, that seems to hold open the possibility like, oh, maybe we could be reunited through this electrical marvel. 

Jeffrey Sconce: Yeah, I think the telegraph is, it's been such an old timey technology for so long, and people just think of it as this kind of dinosaur of the communications technologies. But the moment we're in, it's that boiled frog analogy, it's like technology changes in a way now where it's changing so quickly that you don't notice it. And maybe you think, wow 15 years ago we didn't have X or Y or Z, but you're just used to having those things happen. But the telegraph, there was no transition to that. That was suddenly, as has been said, the quickest way to get a message across the United States before that was the Pony Express.

 You had you would ride horses as fast as you could in 20-mile increments from station to station to get messages across the country. And then suddenly you could do that instantaneously. So yeah, the fact that people start associating it with the afterlife makes a lot of sense because that kind of way that time and space is just conceptually, just instantly reorganized to the telegraph. And even more so obviously when they put the Atlantic cable in, and now suddenly messages that took three months or whatever the the Atlantic passage was at that time to get people across, to be able to do that more or less instantaneously it made you realize that maybe space and time were not the sort of lived experiences that we thought they were, right? That there were other ways to think about time and space which I guess naturally put people in the mind of thinking about this presumed time and space that exists beyond life, right? So. 

Elaine Kasket: But yeah, I mean, before you started researching and writing this work, did you realize how much it was going to have to do with death?

Jeffrey Sconce: No, I didn't. I guess I guess in a sense, the, it seems, sounds like a weird answer, considering the original inspiration was to try to critique all of these ideas that we would become disembodied and disincorporated and downloaded into as a, s a kind of a rank materialist I went into it just thinking about there's just no end to the magical stories we will tell ourselves to believe that our egos are immortal, and here was yet another one, right? It's and I guess what I've always found fascinating about the singularity, download, upload the consciousness to the mainframe people is that they present themselves as the most kind of Richard Dawkins, like, kind of insufferable, atheist, materialist, whatever. And yet they have the most profound faith that science is going to save them from the entropy of the universe, that they really think that, that this is going to happen. So it started as as a critique of that. I guess I should have known that it was going to be about this idea of how this would cheat death, or the kind of stories that people, the systems people will put in place. 

So I guess I respect, I'm coming at it a little bit from a different angle because I think you're, I've looked at what you're saying so much is about sort of the way that the living maintain connection through grieving, through mourning and through this consolation that maybe they can still contact people through these technologies and so forth. I guess maybe I'm just more sort of egotistical and narcissistic, but I looked at it from the perspective of the stories people tell themselves about how they're going to live forever because they'll, they, we now have empirical proof that heaven exists because the Spiritualists have shown us that they can communicate through mediums with the afterlife, or the singularity crowd or the high-tech crowd thinking that...

I don't know if you've seen these articles. They're just astounding. These aren't in Haunted Media. I put a few of them in the other book, The Technical Delusion the one that's on psychosis there are people at neuro labs now who are doing digital brain mapping with the idea that if they can get enough computer power, the only thing that's holding them back is computer power, they say, and they have these amazing schematics for how they're going to take a brain and cut it into 10-micron slices and digitize each of the, each of those 10-micron slices and make a fully functional, three dimensional digital avatar of the brain. And you will be able to download your consciousness into these, you know, and it's just astounding that they still believe this stuff, you know, two centuries after the Spiritualists, right, that they still imagine that somehow they're going to capture the spark of existence in digital code in some way. 

Elaine Kasket: I think the, what four question is really interesting. And really when you talk to people who are engaged in these kinds of projects and try to get to the bottom of, to what end and what's it for, and what need does it serve and what anxieties does it assuage?

Jeffrey Sconce: Need? I'm going to live forever!

Elaine Kasket: Yeah it, you're right. There's these two different kind of ways of coming at it. And I think sometimes people who have fantasies of living on forever through electricity, through technology, through whatever medium you can have a preoccupation with immortality and kind of swerve that terrifying threat or the possibility of non-being the unimaginable kind of blinking out of the light and the scariness of that.

Then you get folks who are really not, preoccupied with wanting to be assured that they can be reunited with loved ones or pets or whatever, after they die. And for them, the prospect of an afterlife...death in and of itself might not be so scary for those folks because they've got the promise or the belief that they are going to be able to see the people that they so miss on the other side of it.

So two very different takes, or motivations for believing in these kinds of phenomena or possibilities.

Jeffrey Sconce: You would enjoy this piece of research. I recently just came across for this stuff, something I'm working on now where it has to do with that whole notion of animals and can they think, and there's a theologian, I'm sorry, his name, I don't have her here with me at the moment, but he writes a book called essentially is my dog immortal. And it comes down to that whole question again about will your dog be there on the afterlife? Your favorite dog, I guess he picked the dog you want in the afterlife. The dogs, you didn't like so much, I guess maybe they don't come along or whatever, or they go someplace else. But the dog you really liked, will it be there on the afterlife for you? And he concludes yes. And then he starts to go through all the logical consequences of that because he says he starts to anticipate what people are going to say. And they say, does that mean that say animals we don't like as much will be there? What about snakes and rats? And eventually he gets down to mosquitoes and he has to concede that yes, all those will be there in the afterlife also. There'll be in heaven as well. There will be heavenly mosquitos. And it's such a wonderful moment, because he basically talks himself into realizing that heaven will be just like earth. You'll get to see the people that you want to see and everything, but you'll still have to deal with mosquitoes and jerks and snakes. And so really there's no, it's no idealized existence. It's just more of the same on the other side!

Elaine Kasket: It's like the sort of mere existence that I feel like we could potentially be moving towards as people record and our capture so much of themselves are captured via all the media that we use, both social media and all the other things that track and surveill and passively record and ambiently record and all of those kinds of things that we build up an avatar of ourselves without even really meaning to, because of all of the information that is captured, out of which if somebody chose to, they could reconstitute something that actually is very reflective of what we were like in, in physical and physical life.

And so that's, and that, and people's feelings about the connection with something that is still somehow a bit of humanity, or the last bit of someone who is still really real, I've been really interested in people's descriptions of their attachment to ongoing social media profiles, for example, or a certain digital artifacts or digital remains that have something like this spark of life, individual brief person.

And they talk about their anticipatory anxiety about that disappearing without them being able to control it or knowing that might happen and saying, but that's the last bit of them, that's really real, more so than other kinds of things that the person might've left behind is more material artifacts.

Because I asked questions to some of my research participants and some past studies will help me understand what is different about this posthumously persistent social media profile that sits on Facebook or wherever and the scrapbook that the two of you made together, or this piece of clothing that you have, or a conversation that you could have as you sat in the person's room.

It's funny how they can't really articulate it. They're like. There's something. They said if I speak to them out loud at the grave site, or if I have a conversation in my head with them, I'm not sure if they really hear me, but if I send them a message or say something on Facebook they get that.

And it was presented as this kind of article of faith. And so many times as I was looking at things that people have felt or believed throughout all these different technologies, electronic technologies, that fascinated me because it definitely felt like a continuation of a kind of sense that electricity, or what is electrically held, has some sort of special powers.

Jeffrey Sconce: I think that's totally right in the sense that if you imagine, if you set up a hypothesis of, if somebody you know who had passed away recently, if you got a letter from them in the mail there might be something melancholy about that and you'd realize, oh, they must've posted this before they died, and it just now got here. But if you see an email update or something happens online, there is that sense that there's some kind of animated presence behind it that is a occult and living and somewhere. It's in, it's not in the computer obviously, but it's like somewhere out there in this weird nexus of wires and wireless and frequencies and electrical impulses that they're still trapped out there somewhere, or they're still able to access it in some way that's just not the same with like hard physical media.

Elaine Kasket: And it comes into people's critiques of social media platforms or the expectation that a lot of people have come to hold that social media platforms, this idea that if a social media platform like Twitter does a call of an active accounts, which of course is a delayed delete upon death policy because dead people don't tweet that they're doing something terrible. People saying things like how can they do that? They can't just, they can't do that, they can't take that down. And it's it's not data like other data. People are treating it like that. Still this constituent somehow of the person, and that these digital remains somehow have enough element of the person's humanity about it. I've even seen people say on Twitter, well, that's like a second death, it's they're murdering her again, or they use language as though it's like a second killing of the person to remove this digital corpus from a particular place that feels really vital. And you start seeing these things and people's languages and what they say, you think what, yeah. What kind of, implicit or unreflected assumptions are people having about this particular...?

Jeffrey Sconce: Right. What, how much of that though too, is just about people feeling their own vulnerability about existing as electrical avatars so that it used to be that you would put your money or your gold coins under the mattress, and you knew they were there and you would protect them from robbers and things. And this whole idea, now that you have a whole second financial identity that's out there that can be, these commercials that go after the elderly about the title of their home. I don't know if they have these in England, but there's a huge rash of these commercials now in the U S about, hackers are going to break into this system and steal the title from your home, and there's nothing you can do about it, they basically take over ownership of your home just by getting the title by getting into the computer and doing that. And so of course, this service wants to sell you some security measure to prevent that from happening, but as more and more of life gets done virtually or done that way.

I wonder how much that is about people feeling their own vulnerability about, you know, we're sitting here talking, but who knows what nefarious things are happening to our digital profiles right now, and that there's something about trying to maintain the integrity of that even if the person's dead, it's about protecting themselves at some level, too, of wanting to make sure that remains a discrete packet of data that nobody messes with at some level. 

Elaine Kasket: You know what it reminds me of it's when you were talking about this shift to there being like network, like broadcasting networks and television in everybody's homes and the broadcast networks achieve becoming very dominant and people's fears or kind of paranoia that they, or their children or whatever, were going to be controlled via the television, a theme that came out in some of the films that you talk about in the book.

And I feel like we're experiencing a variant of that now, because we're so aware of surveillance capitalists and of the fact that our data is being continually raked through to line the pockets of the platforms that we're using for ‘free’. And so we were, but we're so in meshed within the system, that just as people were all wanting televisions, they were all entertained by televisions, but at the same time they had this uneasy kind of feeling about what the presence of these machines in their homes meant, or were doing to them, or how they might be a conduit to something that wasn't so savoury. So it feels very much like a variant of that. 

Jeffrey Sconce: We’re, our relationship to media, just in terms of phenomenologically and affectively, just as we engage these monitors every day has changed so much. And it really is getting, I don't want to sound like the grandpa who's talking about the era of broadcasting because fewer and fewer people remember what that was like, but yeah, it had that sinister edge to it, that idea that there was a network over the entire country and you had a synchronized schedule of consumption so that everybody watched the same shows at the same time.

And that one of the things that was supposedly going to be so liberating about digital media - and we've moved to it, that vision has been realized - where we all consume media in our own time and everything's become so fractured and fractious and individuated that everybody has programming, niche programming for everybody, asynchronous consumption, all that stuff.

But what I've found fascinating lately is I, especially, I guess like maybe the people that are like 50 and older, is this kind of nostalgia now for the broadcast era and kind of recognizing that there was something comforting about that. And where I think it's most interesting now is in political coverage and in all the kind of unrest we've been having recently where one of the saddest things, I think, as you watch these news broadcasts, I don't know how it is with the BBC and ITV and all the folks over there, but all the American networks now, we've got to go back to a world where we have a shared world of facts. We have to go back where we can at least agree that there are certain empirical things we can all agree upon to then create social policy. And what they're really nostalgic for is they're nostalgic for the era when the news was a half-hour a day, it was read by one guy who came on at 6:30 in the afternoon, created this kind of fake idea of a public sphere that seemed like something we all shared in equally and agreed on, even though that's just a complete fiction, right, but we seem to invest in the idea that there used to be this shared reality we all had through broadcast media that's been fractured now by new media and by all the kind of siloing and ego casting as Christina Rosen calls it and all that.

And I feel sad for these people because it's that's not going to happen. I don't know what the, I don't know how we're going to adjudicate reality in the future or current terms of like policy debates and politics and that kind of stuff. But it's not by going to be about going back to some idea that we all watch some shared forum of ideas and form our opinions that way. I mean, that's gone. So yeah, so you see people that are very nostalgic for that era, where you did just have three media, three networks, or two networks back in the days of of England back in the mid century.

Elaine Kasket: It's such an interesting tension between that sort of hyper individuation or hyper individual, that hyper personal marketing, hyper tailored feed of entertainment or news to keep you maximumly comfortable and entertained and all that kind of stuff, but then this kind of yearning for but then the isolation in that the kind of feeling like what do I, where's the consensus, where's the community, where's the feeling that even with all of this individual kind of freedom, there are some things that are inviolate or shared or agreed upon, something that could feel like the ground underneath your feet that you share with other human beings.

And yeah, a minute ago, when you were talking about the fear of thinking about death or thinking about one's own frailty, I always think about how, in some ways, that it there's this, let me think of how I can express it. This particular paradox that I want to say, I feel like one of the things that is simultaneously comforting and terrifying or groundless about the internet that we currently have is that you feel so small, like such, just a, such a small speck, whether you're aware so much more aware of these millions and billions of people and opinions and voices, and everything's coming at you and it's fast and accelerated and big, and let's say you have an interest or you have a book proposal, but then everything in your Twitter feed seems to feel like, oh no, I don't.

There are no new ideas. There's too many people. There's all this things. And you just, you really, I think that interest in genealogy that it's exploded so much in recent years, isn't just because of the science of DNA that can spit into a tube or whatever. But it's like people trying to find a way like, okay, so what how am I special?

How am I particular? What does my life mean? What is my place in this gigantic, overwhelming oceanic sweep of everything, and so I feel people use the same medium to try to find their place and to feel particular. That is the that's the same media that's boiling the frog. And I was thinking about the kind of ocean and ether kind of metaphors that you're talking about in the book and how the ocean seems so much bigger even than it must have been.

But again, do we feel different now confronted with this great ocean of information and data and people and everything? Did the people facing that with television and broadcast networks and then the wireless and thinking, oh my God, it's connecting all around the world. Did they feel as ungrounded as this? I wish there were some way to know if it felt like this?

Jeffrey Sconce: I bet they wished they had a time machine, so they could go back. 

Elaine Kasket: Were people this existentially rattled by those things, as we are? 

Jeffrey Sconce: I think it's different. I think it's different because and this is something my students will often kid me about, which is, I always say that digital, I always feel like digital technology just inherently ontologically cannot be haunted.

I feel like haunted technologies are all were all analog technologies because they were about technologies that interacted with this world of continuous wave forms and the ether and the out there. And and so when I think of the etheric ocean from the era of radio, it seemed to me that was it was a metaphor for the distances involved, but also for just this inert thing that was covering everything that was like a void in some ways, it was just like this kind of cancelling idea or the network error of the blanket in some ways. The thing with digital technology that, that does insignificance you feel, I think it's almost different. It's not like a cosmic insignificance or an insig... the etheric ocean and the regular is almost like Lovecrafty. And it's Lee elder ones or something. It's like some force that's out there that you commune with. That's been there forever. And now we have these technologies that let us commune with the great, huge electromagnetic physical void that surrounds the earth.

But when we go into the internet, I was when, as you were just saying that I was thinking about the auto-fill function on Google and how no matter what, how crazy a question you think you're asking you find out that obviously it's already been aggregated because thousands of other people have asked that exact same question and you realize, oh God, I'm not the first person to think, you know, what this means, or everybody else is asking this exact same question. And there's that kind of yeah, that puncturing, that kind of like, not that you have a lot invested in yourself as an author as you're writing a Google question, but what you it's like you just realize, oh yeah, everybody's thinking the same thing.

Everybody's, there's all these patterns of thought out there that are just repetitive and predictable, and these technologies are getting more and more adept at aggregating us, quantifying us, turning us into data. And so it's ocean, but it's more of a, a depressing ocean to me. It's not it's not a cosmic ocean. It's a, it's like a purely administrative data driven ocean, you know?

Elaine Kasket: It's an ocean, but you're aware of how many other people are in that ocean with you, bbut you don't necessarily feel the closeness of the connection. So if you're if you're upset at 2:00 AM in the morning, 2:00 AM in the morning, 2:00 AM in the morning, that kind of am. And you're typing it and you've lost someone say you're in grief and you're wondering when the pain's going to get better and you're typing in, you remember something about some stages of grief and you type in, ‘what are the stages’? And then the auto-complete goes ‘of grief?’  Then because that's what immediately comes up, that there are so many other people you become aware in that second of how many people must suffer with their loss to ask this question. But whether that knowledge comes as a comfort or as just something or not in that moment is a separate, is it a separate consideration. But I was thinking about what you said about can digital media ever be, or feel haunted, and something about the immediacy and the presence and everything is right there, and there's hardly any sense anymore of something coming to you across a distance, because everything is just shrunk to just right there. And there is something about haunting that does include, almost, this contact from through the mist, across a distance, something that shouldn't be accessible that suddenly is.

But then I was thinking about Patrick Stokes's book, Patrick Stokes in Australia, Deakin University, his book, Digital Souls just came out yesterday. I think in the UK, it's an awesome book. So good. And he collects at the beginning of the book, a few more examples than the ones that I collected in mine about uncanny things that happen through digital technologies, emails received, apparent after- death communications that yes, in the end probably came from somebody who had the log in details or somebody who'd hacked or whatever it is, but at the moment they're experienced, even if intellectually you know what the explanation probably is just like back in spiritualism sometimes, or seances or whatever it is, it feels teleically possible it might as well be true in terms of the, in terms of the phenomenology, in terms of the experience of it's experienced as having a kind of truth to it. There's a, like a projection of the individual bereaved person as to what they want to be the case, or they want to be possible, and experiences like that I think, even though they do occur courtesy of digital platforms and media, can still carry that sense. 

Jeffrey Sconce: Yeah, absolutely. And I think a big word to think about here too, that doesn't get used enough, and I'm trying to bring back as well in the stuff I'm working on now, is about fantasy.

And one of the, one of the most kind of, I don't know if the there's the great bit in Freud where he talks about humans becoming prosthetic Gods, right? That we're, that McLuhan and essentially rips, I won't say rips off, pays homage to 15 years later when he talks about the media being an extension of their human nervous system.

And, but the brilliance of Freud in that, when he makes that statement, around the same time he writes about the, that wonderfully deranged book he has Beyond the Pleasure Principle, right? This is just insane, but which he admits is insane as he starts writing it after if you remember this, but he, at the beginning, he says, I'm just going to make some stuff up and see where it goes. And it just, it goes in these amazing places. But he has that great bed at the end where he talks about our evolution from single-cell organisms to human beings. And he points out how the census of all to bring in light, to bring in smell, to bring in hearing as the, to adapt to the environment. But he makes this brilliant point where he says, but we have to realize the senses evolved just as much to protect us from stimuli and data, as they did to bring data in. And the McLuhan people they always see that as yes, the, I will extend my consciousness throughout the internet, through my, you, my nervous system will merge with the media and I can see anywhere and everywhere, and I can hear anything everywhere. Now I will be this omnipotent prosthetic God and Freud being the fatalist we was, points out that I think lays the foundation for where we are now, which is that at a certain point, the impedance of the brain just can't take all this information. You just cannot process all the information thrown at you.

How do you deal with that? Through fantasy. And not that humans were ever, not that humans were ever guided by facts to begin with. And that's the other thing I love about this debate that will return to a sober debate around politics and all of that. We've never been motivated by...fantasy has always been stronger than facts throughout human history.

And so I've always, really prescient thing Freud really talks about how you can't possibly want to know everything or see everything or hear everything because it would kill you. And I feel like that's the burden that we're under with the internet, which is I don't know how it's affected your own work, but I always think back to people like these all people like Freud or people like Marx, or Nietzche, these philosophers and luminaries of the 19th and 20th century who would sit down and write something and maybe go to the library once a week to look up some reference that they'd forgotten from Aristotle or something, but that was the end of it.

And they got their thoughts on paper. And now this kind of era of just endless iterability we live in now where nothing's done, nothing's complete, nothing is known. Anything you write can instantly be dissolved into something else through another battery of facts. And so this whole notion that I was thinking about those, the genealogy thing you were saying too, it's yeah, people trying to put boundaries around themselves and their identity and their histories and trying to create realities for themselves in this kind of digital realm that's just constantly seems like it's dissolving our personal histories, our identities, our certitude.

Elaine Kasket: Yeah. And that lack of access or that relative lack of access to even bodies of knowledge that might've been created or bodies of thought that might've been created in other places or in other times, or whatever it allowed for a kind of freedom or generativity from the, all the people who were just reading this thing and then going off and thinking and creating and observing and noticing and generating these ideas and one of the things that I'm thinking, I think about all the time is how the volume of information and the ability to access all of this stuff serves as a hindrance to that playful, free, creative, less impeded kind of thinking, because everything crowds in, you get that social comparison that humans are so vulnerable to, you start double and treble guessing you think, oh there's no point because...But, and that's just on a kind of evaluative kind of point, but just on a stimuli kind of point, when something's just crowding in and filling all this space and taking up all the oxygen in the room, it changes something about that freedom and generativity.

But what does that crowd out? What does that crowd out in terms of new thought, new voices, new ideas. If somebody could take a lesson direct from, I don't know something, somebody like Stephen Hawking or something, why would they attend? Would they choose that? Or they choose the newly qualified, but possibly brilliant person who's just come along.

 So it just, yeah, the persist that when you think about what you're talking about, the fantasy, the people living forever and the mind uploading and all those folks who think won't it be great if this thought, if this mind, if this sentience can persist forever, what does that mean for our potential to evolve?

Jeffrey Sconce: There's a a great bit of science fiction. prankish poetry by Jean Baudrillard, the great court jester of the French intellectual scene in the seventies, eighties, and nineties. And he's most known for this idea of simulation that everything is turning into simulations of things, but towards the end of his life, he had this great kind of scifi fantasy about what he called integral reality.

And it describes what you're saying here, which is that once, big data’s ambition is to turn everything into data for predictable management. And at a certain point, if everything is converted into a predictable stable data set, there was no more room in the system for anything to move, because every question is already pre-answered by the data set that it evokes.

And so, he's being hyperbolic about it, but he describes it as like a, almost like a a type of freezing, like all human activity freezes because once everything has been perfectly realized as a digital data set, eery data set speaks to every other data set and there's no room for any kind of ambiguity or anything to mess that relationship up.

So all human knowledge basically coalesces around. It’s like the metaphor he loves is the event horizon around a black hole that he gets sucked towards the black hole, and at a certain point, that image has stuck forever because it's just there physically forever. That's where information and reality are heading towards, this kind of event horizon of data, right? Yeah. 

Elaine Kasket: Yeah There's just completely sediments that are silted up. You talk early in the book about it at the kind of William James talking about the stream of consciousness and the idea that, you know, like our conscious that need electricity, like the concept of flow and all this stuff.

And it feels like here we've been, data’s flowing along and flowing along, but like a river that flows along and then gets all bogged down the Delta, there's so many grains of sand and there's so much soil or whatever that kind of aggregates there. And then pretty soon know there's no way for the river to flow anymore.

Yeah. Like you're saying, it's almost if we allow that to happen, it stilts up silts up until it, is ossifies, and if the river can't find a way around that and forge a new thing, then what happens. 

No, same thing with maybe think too, of one of the things I wrote about in my book was these dead pop stars going on hologram tours. And I was thinking about it, particularly with people with really particular voices like Maria Callas. And the thing with Maria Callas is that she was such a force in the opera world and she was such a particular voice and she had such dominance that had Maria Callas lived forever and stayed in voice, maybe people would have gotten tired of it, but it was interesting how her resurrection I'm thinking, oh, does this then return us back to thinking, okay, Maria Callas is opera and we have this association with Maria Callas, does she squeeze out newer styles, newer voices, younger up-and-coming opera singers that maybe somebody buys a ticket to see them, nobody knows their name and then, or they could go see the hologram of Maria Callas. Which do they have and how that kind of continues her big impact on the opera world in a way that maybe deprives us of something. 

Jeffrey Sconce: No, you are speaking to the choir here about that because, and my students get really mad at me about this because they don't like to have their their favorite pop idols and things attacked. But think about how much the novel changed from like 1880 to 1920, right, or 1930, right? How you went from high realism to through these, all these various schools of modernism and all all the kind of amazing stylistic play and change and things that happened in that 15 year period or so. Star Wars is now 50 years old. 

Elaine Kasket: Nearly!

Jeffrey Sconce: I'll kick it back and say, Star Trek. 

Elaine Kasket: That scared me. I was like, oh my God. Oh, I'm 50 this year. So I'd probably still, I was 50 last year rather. So I'd probably still dealing with that. I was like 50 years old. Don't wait. I'm sure. I was seven. That was a very personal reaction. 

Jeffrey Sconce: Oh yeah. You’ve just glimpsed your own mortality there! No, I think no. And I'm one of the, one of the things I have in my, one of my slide for my slides for my haunted media class is. You can get a Star Trek coffin, right? There's a coffin, that has the Star Trek emblem on it. And you can be buried in a Star Trek coffin and all that. And so if you think about, okay if you had from 1880 to 1930 or whatever, you had all this amazing kind of cultural change and tumult in terms of stylistic change and so forth, we're not just in an age of kind of entertainment franchises and kind of stagnation there.

But how is it that one, let's say two franchises, Star Wars and Star Trek have colonized the minds of three generations? Not one, not two, three generations. And they and every so often there'll be an attempt like there'll be The Matrix or Avatar. There will be somebody who will try to  introduce some new, big sci-fi property and it'll have legs for a little while, but then star wars and star Trek always come back.

And they're the ones that seem to be the mythemes at the center of that. So for all of our talk of how volatile and fast changing the world is because of digital media and how it revolutionizes everything in a weird way, culturally, it has led to this kind of stagnant pocket of I I think the thing that made me it really just got me, was I, a couple of Christmases ago, the star wars people had a movie coming out and there was some toy tie in and it showed some parent taking their child to go buy star wars toys, like at the toy store.

 This is back when toys R us still existed. And it was like this happy, wonderful, cheery moment where they were both sharing their love of Chewbacca and how much they love star wars. And I remember thinking that kid should have their own star wars. Why do they have to like, live with dad's...I don't want to pass judgment on Star Wars, but it's not like it's the end-all be-all of all the human culture. But it's, it’ll last a century. There'll be a century of Star Wars people!

Elaine Kasket: You're right. That's crazy. And that is another one of the many paradoxes here because that's your, we have that discourse.

Oh, fast moving changes so quickly, all that kind of stuff. What we're talking about there often is the pace of technology itself in terms of the medium, either the media and that evolution of that, and all the possibilities. And now we have deep fakes and oh look, James Dean can start a new movie because we can re animate him for the purposes of this Finding Jack film or whatever.

And so all of the media create these new possibilities, but in terms of the content and the kind of cultural forces or things like that. Yeah. There's...that's a fantastic example because that's a kind of silting, that's a sort of silting up, that's a kind of stagnation that I'd had never thought about it in those terms before.

Jeffrey Sconce: Yeah. I mean it, and it's interesting that it is around kind of cultural issues that, cause it's the same with music. I would say The fact that are the rolling stones really doing another tour? I think they're going out again, come next year, they're all like 80 or whatever.

And just the inability to the last kind of dramatic moment and the change of the popular music vocabulary was the introduction of like rap and hip hop back, like in the early eighties, late seventies, early eighties. And it's just been 50 years of people treading water for I don't know if that's just because people are very conservative around their cultural choices.

And so one of the ways they deal with the insecurity of the world and the fast changing pace of the way the economy is changing and the way society is changing is they really invest themselves in these artifacts that made them feel good when they were killed when they were children. And so there's a kind of nostalgic investment in these forms that keep them from changing.

 I don't know. We'd have to talk to them. Sociologist and a psychoanalyst about that, yeah. But if Rudolph Valentino or a sort of silent screen, kind of people had died, not in the 1920s or whatever, but in the, at the time that television era or a then you think about how celebrities are preserved it on the internet and how Marilyn Monroe, for example there's a cult of Marily Monroe that continues and...

Elaine Kasket: and James Dean being recreated or kind of puppeteers for through technology for a new film and in 2021 stars that are a little bit earlier than that 1920s, 1930s, 1910s, or whatever that doesn't happen to them. It only happens to a particular kind of category of star that comes about in a particular time, but it makes you wonder as well.

 There aren’t that many people today that are Marilyn Monroe fans that were contemporaneous with Marilyn Monroe. We're like moving past that point and yet this kind of cult a personality continues. It just like the Star Wars thing. It makes you wonder how long is that going to be perpetuated?

But there's no question about the mechanisms via which it's perpetuated - it's death is prevented. 

Jeffrey Sconce:  Here's my question to you. So now you have a midlife crisis when you're about 40 or 35 or 40, you think, oh my God, half my life's over. What am I doing with myself? Have I applied myself? My living my best life. So if you go into a computer and then you realize, okay probably got about 20,000 years to be an entity in this computer.

Wouldn't you just have the same midlife crisis when you're about 10,000 years old. When aren't you just pushing all of these kind of if you really believe your ego is going to. Survive intact. And somehow you're going to be able to amuse yourself for 20,000 years as your side. I think I've got a hundred years of abusing myself and then I'm done because I CA I just think I'll 

Elaine: go, oh God.

Yeah no, absolutely. I feel like I'll be lucky to get it to that long before, before I tire of it all. But I think this is the thing is that I don't think I understand a lot about death and the digital, and I understand a lot about people's mentalities with respect to this, the thing, the folks that I probably understand the least, even if I've had conversations with them is the folks who are really heavily invested or have a really deep personal stake in the idea of surviving forever in some kind of form.

I they seem to have a little bit of trouble or reluctance either accessing or describing what anxieties or fears that is about for them. It's almost, so there's, I think there's a huge, again, oceanic almost nameless fear that underpins that. But I think in conversations with them, it can sometimes get either dressed up in really utopian language, all these sort of utopia possibilities, or just think about all the ills of the world that can be solved if like minds like carried the knowledge of what, they'll talk about those sorts of things in highfalutin terms, but it doesn't there, there seems to be something missing there, either in self-awareness or in a willingness to disclose what they're really scared of. So the really deep, scary, existential fear underneath all of that kind of, isn't it cool because we can, or like the miracle of technology, or utopian fantasy sort of stuff.

And then sometimes the folks that talk like that, they are just hugely narcissistic. So I guess, so convinced of their importance and their significance in the world that they just think that eternal persistence is like clearly the way to go for somebody like them. 

Jeffrey: The universe can't do without me, so I have to survive.

Elaine:  Yes, exactly. Exactly. Wouldn't it be terrible to think of a universe without me. So it's so I think I have trouble connecting on a level that I really relate to a human-to-human way about, but I think the same thing happens sometimes when I'm talking to developers and maybe developers of like legacy platforms where they encourage you to sign up and leave all these recordings and live on forever and invoke all these vocabularies around eternity and everything. And of course the, they often go out of business as soon as they start up. So eternity doesn't end up coming into it at all, but but you talk to them about why they have this particular startup and they will have really hard time understanding that the thing that feels important to them because often it's rooted in an experience they had, there was somebody that they lost, that they wished they could have had that last conversation with, or they wish they could have known what the person was thinking, or they really miss that contact, but they can't see that maybe that need, or that wish that they have doesn't necessarily generalize to all of the consumers they think are going to find that idea attractive.

So I think one’s feelings about death is one of those areas of human existence where people find it hard to understand how people, other people feel about it differently than they do. So then when they like base a business model on it, it doesn't necessarily do as well as they think.

Jeffrey: I'm curious from your work with these people, what they think in terms of, I have the people who think you just die and turn into some kind of abstract energy. I have patience with those people because I feel like, okay, that seems like physics and whatever, that's fine.

 And I'll come back and I'll come back as a cricket leg or atoms that becomes something else. But these people who literally, and this is where the Freudian aspect of it is so important, I think, these people who literally think that their exact ego will survive after death as their own ego. Do they ever think through what that would mean in terms of, okay, now you're in the afterlife with that shitty abusive aunt you had or that like all these kind of, your ego can only exist because of the personal relations that formed it. And is everybody just on their best behavior in the afterlife? Suddenly everything's forgiven and you're with all these people who are like I just, I wonder do they think that through or they just think, no, it'll just be great.

Elaine: Given all the pain and anxiety and suffering and difficulty one experiences in life, it is kinda weird to think oh, then there's this fantasy of it carrying on forever. Is there, is it actually connected to some kind of fantasy that in some kind of way it gets better?

It's almost like people think what if it could get better eventually, but get better without my having to die first. It's almost like, in a way there's maybe some sort of weird optimism, like there's got to be more than this. It's got to get better than this, or I want to have a better experience than this, but I don't want to roll the dice that it's going to get better after I die.

So maybe there's some sort of way that I could not die and it could get so much better. Because a lot of the people who are really the immortalists like the Silicon Valley immortality type mentality, they're often also really preoccupied with like physical health and fitness and youth and optimization on like productivity and ever PR you know, so it's it's almost like they're running from yeah, some of that sort of difficult stuff that they they've got to experience just like every other human being. And they want, they really want things to be better. They want to feel better, but they don't want to have to die before that happens in case it doesn't work out. So it's like really trying to hold on to control.

Like it's a very, very, very strong attachment to controlling your fate or kind of getting one over on the universe. And that there's some pretty deep fears and insecurities at the heart of that. I think. Yeah. 

Jeffrey: I'm glad you mentioned that because. And in the second book, The Technical Illusion, when I talk about these people, I talk about how, yeah, that's like key to it as yoga too. It's like there's some combination of yoga diet and digital technology that will them forever. And it's such a California thing too. You could really see that it comes out of that whole weird all the various weird cult...now I'm not the first person to say as clearly the there's Fred Turner has that great book where he talks about all the hippies in San Francisco who eventually become the founding members of Silicon Valley and Timothy Leary, these people that kind of take those hippie valleys of hippie values into the tech age, and there's still that in that same kind of sense of psychedelic transcendence. The last thing I'll say about this. And I'm sure there must be people planning to do this there was this artist I worked for briefly who sadly since passed away. One of his projects was he had a questionnaire that he was asked to fill out for his first insurance policy when he was a teacher at Cal State or Cal Arts or something like that.

And one of them was like, why do you want to do what they want you to, what do you want to be done with you if you die and all this stuff, in case you pass away while you're teaching? And somehow he'd written on this thing, like when he died, he wanted to make sure he was a burden to the state. Which was a great artist response, right? And it's and I think he went on in this really ghoulish detail about how he wanted his body, he wanted his hands and head chopped off and be dumped in a ditch so the state would have to spend money identifying who he was, and he would become a burden on the state. And he had this whole fantasy about how it was going to cost the state money to deal with him, right? 

Elaine: Oh, you know, it, that that's a crazy concept, but not too far off, because it's like, if you think about how cyber warfare is be going to the way you mess with people most effectively my friend, Geoff White talks about a little bit, in Crime.com, his book that came out last year about this when you think about cyber warfare yeah, can you imagine that you die, and then something's triggered off to harm the organizations or the persons that you have a beef with, the kind of vengeance kind of fantasy wreaked after you're dead, and there's no consequence to you. Yeah! 

Jeffrey: And there must be people that are plotting their death digitally to like, how am I going to fuck up the system as much as I can digitally after I die. What can I do to just set off all these bombs, right?

Elaine: So from Wes Craven’s Shocker to posthumously taking down the state, we seem to have begun and ended with a kind of electronic revenge. I’m Elaine Kasket, author of All the Ghosts in the Machine, the Digital Afterlife of your Personal Data, and you’ve been listening to Still Spoken. I’d love to hear whether you aspire to live on in the ether. You can follow and comment on Twitter on my feed, elainekasket, and at spoken underscore still. If you’ve been enjoying this podcast, please do review, like, and share, it helps a lot. Huge thanks go out to my guest, Professor Jeffrey Sconce of Northwestern University, who I think I could have spoken with for all eternity. Thanks for listening.