Dec 13, 2022 08:51 AM
(This post was last modified: Dec 13, 2022 09:14 AM by C C.)
https://areomagazine.com/2022/12/08/spam...-internet/
EXCERPTS: The year 2022 marked the 75th anniversary of the first reported flying saucer sighting, made by pilot Kenneth Arnold in Washington State on 24 June 1947 -- but, curiously, Arnold did not see any saucers at all. The craft (if such they were) were actually bat-winged in shape. Arnold merely said that they flew as saucers would if skimmed over a lake like pebbles, but contemporary newspapers innocently misquoted him, and the notion of flying saucers was born. Thus, the saucers were a media invention, which, like the Yeti and the Loch Ness Monster, caught on quickly and sold well to the public...
[...] aliens, it seems, do have their own Internet—at least according to astronomer Claudio Maccone, co-chairman of SETI.
In 2013, Maccone proposed that the phenomenon of gravitational lensing—the way in which light rays are bent by gravity when they pass close enough to super-massive objects like stars—could be exploited to send signals across entire galaxies. By positioning spaceships at strategic equidistant points billions of miles away, on either side of stars, alien signals could theoretically be sent between them by being focused along the bent light rays, thus creating a wi-fi network whose transmissions would travel at light speed.
It would still take four years for a funny meme about cats from Alpha Centauri to reach us, but Maccone thinks this system of “cheap interstellar links” would be “quite affordable” from a power-transmission viewpoint and operate at “a reasonable Bit Error Rate”— hence space emails or video files would not become too scrambled by distance for their recipients to be able to decipher them.
Maccone calls this comms network a “galactic Internet.” But Earth’s Internet can contain viruses as well as beneficial media files and programs. What if the aliens themselves were one such species of Trojan Horse space virus?
Colin Bennett argued that “all information is media” and human culture itself is just an elaborate “advertising system.” Bennett’s New Ufology viewed reality as a subjective mental construct, which became reified—sociologically manifest—in the real world, causing fiction to magically become fact. For example, perhaps you consider Christianity or Islam to be literally untrue, but you cannot deny that these religions are a social reality for millions worldwide who think that belief in them can perform miracles. Bennett believed that UFOs operate similarly.
In his 1957 book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, written during the worst tensions of the Cold War, psychologist C. G. Jung posits something similar, arguing that saucers are technologically flavoured placebo pills, psychic symbols of desired political reconciliation appearing in the heavens. Many of those who encountered aliens in the 1950s described them as beatific blonde godmen, who promised to impose universal nuclear disarmament, making them saviours from above, updated gods for a new scientific age of atoms, not angels. The emotional appeal of this concept—the aerial advertisement—made the meme of saucers spread virally throughout the collective human imagination, whether the saucers themselves were actually real or not.
Bennett thought that these amazing flying memes may have been alive: “When we imagine, we create a form of life.” Mankind’s collective Jungian unconscious was, for Bennett, analogous to the Internet, and its in-dwelling viral life forms were competing species of “cultural advertisements,” locked in an eternal Darwinian war for survival, just like competing brands of shampoo.
The aliens that witnesses claim to meet differ with the times: in the 1950s, benign blonde Nordics wisely warned us to ban the bomb; in the 1990s, bloodless, black-eyed Greys subjected abductees to invasive anal probes—such changes parallel the way in which fashions in consumer products, TV shows, music and other media ephemera change over the years.
Bennett termed these memetic UFOs “Fast Transients”—endless, short-lived, subtly altered variations on the same basic theme, like infinite competing prototypes of the same basic chocolate bar intended to gauge just how many spoonfuls of sugar the manufacturer should add to ensure maximum sales figures. As public tastes changed, the alien memes changed with them, until eventually the cumulative tiny adjustments resulted in a major transformation, as when fish evolved into amphibians, or the classic circular saucers of the 1950s finally became rival flying triangles during the 1980s in the ufological equivalent of the invention of the Toblerone bar.
Alleged anomalies like UFOs, aliens and Men in Black typically appear suddenly out of nowhere and then disappear, leaving precious few solid physical traces of the kind sought by Avi Loeb and SETI behind them. For many sceptics, this is yet more evidence they do not actually exist.
For Bennett, however, this made them into “short media clips”—much like GIFs—trace elements of extra-terrestrial life forms that “evolved into pure media” aeons ago. Each individual sighting of these Snapchat-like, time-limited, self-deleting “ghost messages” represented “a limited simulation possessing a very short half-life, rather like a collection of discarded film-edits.”
Bennett would have found the project of dredging up an alien spaceship, as Avi Loeb aims to do, just as wrong-headed as searching for the Internet by hunting down its physical data centres, rather than by simply booting up your laptop.
Being great market researchers, these incorporeal aliens never chose to appear as little green men in centuries gone by, preferring to manifest as other, more culturally appropriate sky phantoms like dragons and gods; for aliens to advertise themselves as aliens in the Europe of 1453 would have been as anachronistic as launching Facebook via Morse Code. So, the saucers were not launched—in both the aerospace and advertising senses of that term—until 1947. But what made that such an auspicious date, marketing-wise?
1947 witnessed the following key events in the development of the military-industrial-computing complex that now dominates our lives: that year marked the first recorded use of the word computer in its modern sense; the founding of that real-life employer of shady, dark-suited Men in Black, the CIA; the creation of the Atomic Doomsday Clock; the breaking of the sound-barrier; and Bell Labs’ invention of the transistor, the indispensable widget that made all modern electronics possible.
In short, 1947 was almost made for UFOs to be born in. They were the best adapted, bestselling meme-product of the year, selling every bit as well as Doomsday cults did in AD 1000. Kenneth Arnold was just a ufological early adopter, like one of those fanboys who queue up to get their hands on the latest iPhone at one second past midnight on launch day.
[...] According to computer scientist Jacques Vallée, who was one of Bennett’s intellectual inspirations, UFOs probably represent not a physical invasion of Earth, but an insidious cultural one, as they wage the rough equivalent of Russia’s contemporary doctrine of hybrid warfare. According to Vallée, UFOs are not spaceships but a weaponised “control system” designed to manipulate human behaviour... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: The year 2022 marked the 75th anniversary of the first reported flying saucer sighting, made by pilot Kenneth Arnold in Washington State on 24 June 1947 -- but, curiously, Arnold did not see any saucers at all. The craft (if such they were) were actually bat-winged in shape. Arnold merely said that they flew as saucers would if skimmed over a lake like pebbles, but contemporary newspapers innocently misquoted him, and the notion of flying saucers was born. Thus, the saucers were a media invention, which, like the Yeti and the Loch Ness Monster, caught on quickly and sold well to the public...
[...] aliens, it seems, do have their own Internet—at least according to astronomer Claudio Maccone, co-chairman of SETI.
In 2013, Maccone proposed that the phenomenon of gravitational lensing—the way in which light rays are bent by gravity when they pass close enough to super-massive objects like stars—could be exploited to send signals across entire galaxies. By positioning spaceships at strategic equidistant points billions of miles away, on either side of stars, alien signals could theoretically be sent between them by being focused along the bent light rays, thus creating a wi-fi network whose transmissions would travel at light speed.
It would still take four years for a funny meme about cats from Alpha Centauri to reach us, but Maccone thinks this system of “cheap interstellar links” would be “quite affordable” from a power-transmission viewpoint and operate at “a reasonable Bit Error Rate”— hence space emails or video files would not become too scrambled by distance for their recipients to be able to decipher them.
Maccone calls this comms network a “galactic Internet.” But Earth’s Internet can contain viruses as well as beneficial media files and programs. What if the aliens themselves were one such species of Trojan Horse space virus?
Colin Bennett argued that “all information is media” and human culture itself is just an elaborate “advertising system.” Bennett’s New Ufology viewed reality as a subjective mental construct, which became reified—sociologically manifest—in the real world, causing fiction to magically become fact. For example, perhaps you consider Christianity or Islam to be literally untrue, but you cannot deny that these religions are a social reality for millions worldwide who think that belief in them can perform miracles. Bennett believed that UFOs operate similarly.
In his 1957 book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, written during the worst tensions of the Cold War, psychologist C. G. Jung posits something similar, arguing that saucers are technologically flavoured placebo pills, psychic symbols of desired political reconciliation appearing in the heavens. Many of those who encountered aliens in the 1950s described them as beatific blonde godmen, who promised to impose universal nuclear disarmament, making them saviours from above, updated gods for a new scientific age of atoms, not angels. The emotional appeal of this concept—the aerial advertisement—made the meme of saucers spread virally throughout the collective human imagination, whether the saucers themselves were actually real or not.
Bennett thought that these amazing flying memes may have been alive: “When we imagine, we create a form of life.” Mankind’s collective Jungian unconscious was, for Bennett, analogous to the Internet, and its in-dwelling viral life forms were competing species of “cultural advertisements,” locked in an eternal Darwinian war for survival, just like competing brands of shampoo.
The aliens that witnesses claim to meet differ with the times: in the 1950s, benign blonde Nordics wisely warned us to ban the bomb; in the 1990s, bloodless, black-eyed Greys subjected abductees to invasive anal probes—such changes parallel the way in which fashions in consumer products, TV shows, music and other media ephemera change over the years.
Bennett termed these memetic UFOs “Fast Transients”—endless, short-lived, subtly altered variations on the same basic theme, like infinite competing prototypes of the same basic chocolate bar intended to gauge just how many spoonfuls of sugar the manufacturer should add to ensure maximum sales figures. As public tastes changed, the alien memes changed with them, until eventually the cumulative tiny adjustments resulted in a major transformation, as when fish evolved into amphibians, or the classic circular saucers of the 1950s finally became rival flying triangles during the 1980s in the ufological equivalent of the invention of the Toblerone bar.
Alleged anomalies like UFOs, aliens and Men in Black typically appear suddenly out of nowhere and then disappear, leaving precious few solid physical traces of the kind sought by Avi Loeb and SETI behind them. For many sceptics, this is yet more evidence they do not actually exist.
For Bennett, however, this made them into “short media clips”—much like GIFs—trace elements of extra-terrestrial life forms that “evolved into pure media” aeons ago. Each individual sighting of these Snapchat-like, time-limited, self-deleting “ghost messages” represented “a limited simulation possessing a very short half-life, rather like a collection of discarded film-edits.”
Bennett would have found the project of dredging up an alien spaceship, as Avi Loeb aims to do, just as wrong-headed as searching for the Internet by hunting down its physical data centres, rather than by simply booting up your laptop.
Being great market researchers, these incorporeal aliens never chose to appear as little green men in centuries gone by, preferring to manifest as other, more culturally appropriate sky phantoms like dragons and gods; for aliens to advertise themselves as aliens in the Europe of 1453 would have been as anachronistic as launching Facebook via Morse Code. So, the saucers were not launched—in both the aerospace and advertising senses of that term—until 1947. But what made that such an auspicious date, marketing-wise?
1947 witnessed the following key events in the development of the military-industrial-computing complex that now dominates our lives: that year marked the first recorded use of the word computer in its modern sense; the founding of that real-life employer of shady, dark-suited Men in Black, the CIA; the creation of the Atomic Doomsday Clock; the breaking of the sound-barrier; and Bell Labs’ invention of the transistor, the indispensable widget that made all modern electronics possible.
In short, 1947 was almost made for UFOs to be born in. They were the best adapted, bestselling meme-product of the year, selling every bit as well as Doomsday cults did in AD 1000. Kenneth Arnold was just a ufological early adopter, like one of those fanboys who queue up to get their hands on the latest iPhone at one second past midnight on launch day.
[...] According to computer scientist Jacques Vallée, who was one of Bennett’s intellectual inspirations, UFOs probably represent not a physical invasion of Earth, but an insidious cultural one, as they wage the rough equivalent of Russia’s contemporary doctrine of hybrid warfare. According to Vallée, UFOs are not spaceships but a weaponised “control system” designed to manipulate human behaviour... (MORE - missing details)
