When we think of ghosts and paranormal activity, our minds usually conjure up white ephemeral shapes drifting through attics and basements, fears of possession by demonic and supernatural forces, and the echoey utterances of deeply unhappy spirits hell-bent on avenging their earthly mistreatment. Rarely, if ever, do we conceptualize ghosts as the embodiment of information, the leftover spillage of energy patterns slowly being stamped out by the inexorable passage of time.

Now that I’m in the process of making a horror film, this is what I’ve been thinking about lately. My movie, HellHouse, is not about paranormal activity, but rather a much more human terror caused by dementia and sadistic violence. The research I’ve been conducting, however, has found me revisiting a lot of old classics—The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, The Shining—and even newer films about struggles with the spirit world, including The Sixth Sense, Stir of Echos Paranormal Activity, 1408, and The Ring.

The idea of the spirit realm is not new. In fact, it’s one of the defining concepts in the collective psyche of our race. The earliest humans grappled with the idea of a spirit world. Philosophers like Descartes contemplated the divisions of the material world and the world of the mind. We are ‘haunted’ by the idea of our own mortality. Over the years we’ve struggled with the possibility that those who have died before us are not completely gone, that part of them lives on in some kind of supernatural realm that spills over into the world of the living.

simulation of dark energy distribution

I want to now lay out a concept of ghosts that is probably not new but certainly not boring. It centers around the idea of energy and information. To be sure, the physical universe—everything from galactic formation to organic intelligence—is constructed of energy and patterns of information. Underneath the velour of the macroscopic world the matrix of our reality is comprised of constantly shifting quantum particles, intertwined dimensions, and amplitude distributions the true nature of which is hardly understood. After all, over 90% of our universe is comprised of “dark energy” and physicists readily admit they have no idea what it is.

Let us consider for a minute the research that has been conducted in the last couple decades regarding the role of consciousness in the physical universe. Pioneering groups such as PEAR (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research) and the Global Consciousness Project have been working to prove that consciousness has a physical impact on the world around us, that it can in fact influence random systems. Many of the researchers involved in these projects say the evidence collected shows nothing less than powerfully comprehensive evidence that mind does affect matter, albeit in small, sometimes negligible ways. By small they mean we can’t crunch cars, fly, and telekinetically control the world, like the recent film Chronicle would suggest. However, the research shows there is a strong likelihood that mind, matter, and energy are interconnected and affect one another.

face behind face belongs to Freddy Jackson who died two days before the pic was taken

Let’s take this conversation and embed it within the context of death, the cessation of the human mind. Let’s say the PEAR researchers are right, and the human mind affects the information of the physical world around it. If our consciousness affects matter, it stands to reason that our subjective state of mind would be a factor in the nature of the affectation. We already know that death is a tremendously powerful physiological process. Could it be that people who suffer extremely unpleasant deaths, or die under extreme physical and psychological duress, could leave behind traces of that information which remains in the general flow of energy? Perhaps paranormal visitations and hauntings are real and represent interactions with poorly understood remnants of human energy. Are ghosts information patterns?

Since I have no clue as to the answer, I will simply pose the question. Don’t haunt the messenger.

click on picture for teaser trailer

Most people don’t openly profess an interest in serial killers or the subject of murder, as these topics are considered morbid and untoward. But the 24 hour news cycle has it’s own sardonic obsession with brutality, and you can see evidence of this every night on the local news and CNN. For months at a time, people crowd around their television sets, listening with bated breath for the salient details of a buried baby or a raped teenager. But we are not obsessed with violence and terror. I repeat, we are NOT obsessed with violence and terror!

But for those of us who do secretly wonder about the final thoughts of a tortured soul, or the sounds a serial killer makes when no one else is around, have I got a film for you! My film, HELLHOUSE, which I am co-writing/directing with my friend and fellow horror movie fanatic, Jared Salas. We have launched a KICKSTARTER campaign for our movie and are expecting to begin shooting principal photography in spring.

HELLHOUSE is about a financially desperate couple, Collin and Aria, who decide to start robbing houses in order to pay their bills….they pick the wrong house. What they find inside will keep law enforcement officers and scientists baffled for years to come, and hopefully moviegoers too!

Right now we need help funding this movie. We’re not asking for much and the money we do get will be used for camera equipment, lenses, and for the creation of a haunting prosthetic mask for the film’s antagonist. Anyone out there who wants to support an independent avante garde horror film in the vein of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Rosemary’s Baby, The House of the Devil, and Quarantine is encouraged to visit our KICKSTARTER page, watch the teaser trailer and get on board the HELLHOUSE production!

Could we find there’s no limit to the reach of guerilla marketing? As we hurl ourselves toward a future of sentient nanobots and global AI networks, what will become of advertising and its sneaky, drug-addled step-brother, marketing? I found myself thinking about this at the 2011 Singularity Summit, when filmmaker Jason Silva (a self-described “techno-optimist transhumanist wunderkind”) presented a film in the vein of his “The Immortalist”, a work of ‘art’ that feels more like Ashton Kutcher describing quantum mechanics at a poetry slam. This film, and in fact Silva’s entire presentation, felt curiously out of place. Smacking of hackneyed Hollywood orchestration, the film wielded roughly the intellectual curiosity of Insane Clown Posse’s “Miracles” video.

Roland Emmerich Likes The Singularity

What makes this guerilla marketing? Well, Jason Silva’s presence there, and his presentation itself, was being filmed by a documentary film crew embedded by director Roland Emmerich, who is in development on a 2013 feature film called Singularity, which has reportedly tapped Ray Kurzweil as its top consultant. My theory is that Jason Silva will play a naïve proponent who cheerleads the positive possibilities behind the singularity before being killed off by either rampant self-replicating nanotechnology or malevolent artificial intelligence. I submit that his short films and his appearance at the Summit will be featured in the film, as a fictional cautionary tale. Speaking of fictional cautionary tales, the fact that Silva is dating Heather Graham, who was present at the Summit and appeared in some of the shots, bodes well for my theory. If it turns out Graham is in Singularity you can be sure Silva’s appearance at the Summit was a cunningly leveraged marketing ploy by Emmerich that will pay off big time in 2013.

Advertising In An Accelerating Future

I found myself shocked that even a community as savvy and future-shocked as the Singularity Institute could let themselves be infiltrated by a Hollywood guerilla marketing team. While some analysts have speculated that the actual Singularity will make human endeavors such as advertising and marketing obsolete—as this staggering schism in history will surely render new industries and modalities that will fundamentally change the nature of capitalism—I have to respectfully disagree. The global economy relies on advertising and consumerism as its bone marrow. In the coming decades I see us likely to descend even further into a technocratic nightmare fueled by a savvy corporatocracy that harvests consumers like an abbatoir to lifestock, using new technologies to vacuum away the noxious fumes.

“Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work?”

-Jake Anderson

The Methuselah Generation, a documentary about life extension, biotechnology, and the doctors working at the edge of science and philosophy, needs you! Anyone interested in the delicate balance between life and death and humanity’s tenuous tightwalk rope between exponential growth and self-destruction, should take a keen interest in this film, which features Terry Grossman, Aubrey du Gray, Gregory Benford, and Robin Hanson. Please vote for it as IndieWire’s Project of the Week, and also donate to the Kickstarter campaign. There are rewards for pledging, including being a Producer on the film. Who knows, it may just grant you an extra hundred years of life, though that’s not one of the official tiers!

The hacktivist collective Anonymous, a decentralized critical mass of civil disobedients, creatives and situationists, made headlines a few years ago by launching a DDoS campaign that exposed some of the Church of Scientology’s privileged documents. In order to punish the Church for its attempts to monetize truth-seeking and intimidate followers, Anon decreed nothing less than the destruction of the entire religion. After the dust settled, rumors of collective’s death were greatly exaggerated. Now with the rise of WikiLeaks as a global force and calamitous economic conditions brewing civil unrest among the populations of the world, the second decade of the 21^st century is fertile ground for bold culture jamming, led by a technologically savvy cabal of revolutionaries with no central authority and a catch-all message broadly interpreted as being warm and cuddly with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Recently, the group has been active again, cracking a massive child pornography ring and infiltrating government and law enforcement agencies all across the world. There were even rumors afoot of an Anonymous plan to attack Facebook, which turned out to be false, or perhaps just premature. But murmurs still persist about an Occupy The Airwaves campaign to hack into the FEMA Emergency Alert System, essentially hijacking all radio and TV stations, with a pro-Occupy message.

Ideas don’t bleed…

In an alternate universe humanity is dead, wiped out by a billion-ton comet and its broken children, who slammed into the Earth in the year 1883. At least that’s what almost happened in this universe, very nearly relegating us to the same fate as our dinosaur ancestors 65 million years ago.

Scientists now believe that evidence documented by 19th century Mexican astronomer Jose Bonilla is nothing less than proof that in 1883 Earth narrowly avoided the impacts of close to 450 comet fragments. Though at the time they were obscured by a parallax, thus going largely undetected, scientists now know these cosmic fire-stones came anywhere from 373 to 4,970 miles from slamming into the Earth!

Over the weekend I attended the 2011 Singularity Summit in New York to assist my friends, filmmakers Jason Sussberg and David Alvarado, who are shooting a documentary, The Methuselah Generation, about the science of life extension. Along the way, we filmed a lively conversation between life extensionist Aubrey de Grey and economist Robin Hanson about the implications and probability of extending the human lifespan through biotechnology and cryonics. And I was lucky enough meet science fiction author David Brin (creator of the Uplift series), who agreed to give my short story about an AI charter city a shake.

Ray Kurzweil started up the Summit with a presentation about how accelerating computational powers and AI technologies will lead to the Singularity sometime during the 2040′s. Perhaps to his chagrin, Kurweil has become somewhat of a guru for technophiles who wish to herald a “Rapture for the Nerds”. To his credit, Kurzweil fans this fire only with scrupulous research and a fairly remarkable track record for predicting trends in technology. Much has been said in recent years about Kurzweil shaping the timeline of the Singularity to coincide with his lifespan (the man has openly said he does not expect to die), and there is probably some truth to this—the part not in parentheses, that is. But as far as delightful ruminations and thought experiments, backed up by hard science, Kurzweil’s a powerful force in the world of futurism.

Other presenters included Peter Thiel, Sonia Arrison, Jason Silva (who I believe was doing guerilla marketing for a Roland Emmerich 2013 feature about the Singularity—more about this theory in future blog), David Brin, and Ken Jennings, former Jeapordy champion who recently lost to IBM’s Watson. Elizier Yudkowsky presented research pertaining to problems we are encountering in trying to program friendly AI. Max Tegmark attempted to explain why he thinks we’re alone in the universe and why it will be up to humans to allow for the meaningful dissemination of intelligence throughout the universe.

Mix that in with interviewing a 16 year old cryonics customer who fully expects to be amphibious someday, screening the trailer for The Methuselah Generation (parts of which will be in 3D!), and taking an inside tour of the Occupy Wall Street encampment at Zucati Park—thanks to my new friend Sage—and I’d have to say my first trip to New York was one big miraculous mind-fuck.

Curiously enough, I saw the same meme presented at both the Singularity Summit and Occupy–”The Beginning is Near”. It seems as though both advocates of transhumanism and protesters against rabid economic inequality share subtle religious undertones: the faith in vaguely defined concepts bringing clarity to a chaotic and unjust world that is in dire need of planetary evolution. Part of me still fears that the Singularity may end up exponentially fueling the very Corporatocracy that Occupy and myself fear is currently strangling the life out of our mental and physical environments. Though, perhaps it’s nothing a few nanobots can’t fix.

-Jake Anderson

There may be planets supporting life inside supermassive black holes, according to Russian cosmologist Vyacheslav Dokuchaev at Moscow’s Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences. A civilization advanced enough–a Kardashev type III, for example–to survive the unimaginably violent tidal forces inside a black hole may be able to harness the power of the singularity itself as a source of energy supply.

Future Frankenstein

Frankenstein is about bearing the responsibility for having broken the natural order of things. And that is the source of the dark agony in this story—Victor Frankenstein breaks the natural order; he causes a rupture in the wholeness of things that no external agency could repair. But this is common in SF: characters who have broken the natural order of things. Or if not characters who have themselves broken the natural order, then characters who must nonetheless suffer the consequence—or the responsibility—of the broken order.

We assume that the factories of the Industrial Revolution had some influence on Mary Shelley’s fable. Couldn’t that be seen as a breaking of the natural order? and wasn’t there a responsibility there to be taken? Do we not continue to break the natural order?

But there are other features to consider. The vastness of external nature is here—Victor Frankenstein visits the Alps, even confronts the creature there. And in a sub-plot, we have a character trying to circumnavigate the globe, to explore the farthest reaches of vast nature. The universe will get bigger and bigger—and bigger. But never bigger than the capacity of SF to hold it. This capacity to hold external nature in a narrative is a trait that grew out of its Gothic origins.

The novel offers, too, an apocalyptic vision of the new age to come. Mary Shelley’s own impulse was somewhat conservative. Her tone is moral, as she seems to be pointing out the dangers of breaking the natural order, the unleashing of the forces that would sweep us into a new age. Yet one of the most the attractive features of the novel is the vision of that energy unleashed.

SF has never stopped flirting with the new age that is always on the horizon. But, then, neither have we.

-Steve Anderson

further down the rabbit hole we go

In a stunning possible reversible of Einstein’s once immutable law, particle physicists in Europe claim to have detected neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. The discovery raises the possibility of sending information back in time and bending the laws of the physical universe.

READ HERE