>I call it weird nonfiction: creative work that presents itself as journalism or nonfiction but introduces fictional elements with the intention of upsetting, disturbing, or confusing the audience.
By this definition, Blair Witch Project seems to fit. Is that right? The examples given in the article seem to indicate a different intention or tone.
> They read as if written by a ghost. It is almost impossible to spot the lie in Sebald. One of his final essays, “Campo Santo,” (2003) makes an unlikely pivot in its final moments to speak of the modern world, meditating on the place of the dead in an increasingly crowded physical world
There's this older Japanese horror movie, Pulse, which would have fit perfectly - it's about a world where hell is full and the dead 'invade' living spaces via the internet. But it's not a traditional horror movie, the invasion can also be a stain in the dark that slowly grows, until the human is swallowed up. It's weirdly meditative and melancholic, in the context of OP it's a weird documentary about how the internet invades real spaces.
important idea. a theme in these is they are variations on story forms that break the fourth wall. where literary fiction breathed life into characters and gave words to essential human experiences, the horror in these stories feels like iterating on a kind of transmissible schizophrenia, not unlike the meme virus in Snowcrash. we're into version 4.x or more of this, where the doubts about the real shown by AI are the effect earlier discoveries about the consequences of a "hyperreal" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality).
decades ago those cultural studies people (who now run our institutions) were on to more than we knew. they were reasoning about how to operate in a world that disconnected from a shared Real. we can see these weird fictions as the artifacts of devices operating on todays fragmented, narrative driven realities. i'd call it post-nihilism, where culturally we're downstream of a great unmooring and in an all against all struggle for narrative dominance with no safety in a base reality or truth. the weird fiction devices are patterns of reframing, analogous to exploits for injecting cognitive associations (or dissociations) to align other minds. It's like in the "wet cement" stage of a news event where everyone crowds in to establish the dominant meme first for their "side."
I don't indulge in these stories because I read most of PKD's "Exegesis" and it is among the works you hear about from people who shortly thereafter break down completely. I've met more than one person muttering about Jung's red book and Kripke's theories of truth, PKD's exegesis, evola, and junger, before disappearing into rehab or homelessness. some ideas are just not healthy recreation, and what they all have in common is a meme complex that causes people to dissociate with all the zeal of a religious conversion but imbued with existential horror. in short, avoid.
these weird fictions should be studied, but mainly to innoculate people to them, as what we know from LLM's is that we can now produce complete ideologies the way we used to write pop songs, where the hooks are now reframings, and if you can't explicitly source a belief from a first hand experience, it could be the artifact of one so be on guard. we may actually need to form an anti-memetics division.
This comment is itself a fine example of the form, a twist on the King in Yellow, or Necronomicon, a story about a text which contains knowledge so alien or antithetical to humanity that just reading it is enough to fracture the mind of the reader and leave them unfit for society with their fellow man
> I've met more than one person muttering about Jung's red book and Kripke's theories of truth, PKD's exegesis, evola, and junger, before disappearing into rehab or homelessness.
Of course, correlation is not causation. Also, I'm pretty sure that Youtube is 1000x more dangerous for mentally unstable people than a book by C.G.Jung.
Side note: the Red Book is truely astonishing. I saw the original at an exhibition in Zürich. A friend owns one of the faksimiles (he also owns a house and has never been to rehab :) I can also recommend Jung's autobiography "Erinnerungen, Träume, Gedanken"
> creative work that presents itself as journalism or nonfiction but introduces fictional elements with the intention of upsetting, disturbing, or confusing the audience.
A good time to mention the SCP wiki and some types of analog horror. It was this kind of thing that led me to discover "hard science fiction" which is distinct but related to the previous two.
I think i enjoy hard sci-fi, if my username is any indication of the genre - it's from "A Signal Shattered" by Eric S. Nylund.
However i am curious what sort of Sci-fi you meant, where it's plausible but there's SCP/analog horror elements. Evidently a prior comment in the thread about memetics wiped an edge on the graph that would let me infer the sorts of thing you're talking about.
"Weird nonfiction" is a weird name for it, because it still pretends it's nonfiction. I'd rather call it in a more distinct and weird way, say, "ficnontion".
>I call it weird nonfiction: creative work that presents itself as journalism or nonfiction but introduces fictional elements with the intention of upsetting, disturbing, or confusing the audience.
By this definition, Blair Witch Project seems to fit. Is that right? The examples given in the article seem to indicate a different intention or tone.
> They read as if written by a ghost. It is almost impossible to spot the lie in Sebald. One of his final essays, “Campo Santo,” (2003) makes an unlikely pivot in its final moments to speak of the modern world, meditating on the place of the dead in an increasingly crowded physical world
There's this older Japanese horror movie, Pulse, which would have fit perfectly - it's about a world where hell is full and the dead 'invade' living spaces via the internet. But it's not a traditional horror movie, the invasion can also be a stain in the dark that slowly grows, until the human is swallowed up. It's weirdly meditative and melancholic, in the context of OP it's a weird documentary about how the internet invades real spaces.
important idea. a theme in these is they are variations on story forms that break the fourth wall. where literary fiction breathed life into characters and gave words to essential human experiences, the horror in these stories feels like iterating on a kind of transmissible schizophrenia, not unlike the meme virus in Snowcrash. we're into version 4.x or more of this, where the doubts about the real shown by AI are the effect earlier discoveries about the consequences of a "hyperreal" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality).
decades ago those cultural studies people (who now run our institutions) were on to more than we knew. they were reasoning about how to operate in a world that disconnected from a shared Real. we can see these weird fictions as the artifacts of devices operating on todays fragmented, narrative driven realities. i'd call it post-nihilism, where culturally we're downstream of a great unmooring and in an all against all struggle for narrative dominance with no safety in a base reality or truth. the weird fiction devices are patterns of reframing, analogous to exploits for injecting cognitive associations (or dissociations) to align other minds. It's like in the "wet cement" stage of a news event where everyone crowds in to establish the dominant meme first for their "side."
I don't indulge in these stories because I read most of PKD's "Exegesis" and it is among the works you hear about from people who shortly thereafter break down completely. I've met more than one person muttering about Jung's red book and Kripke's theories of truth, PKD's exegesis, evola, and junger, before disappearing into rehab or homelessness. some ideas are just not healthy recreation, and what they all have in common is a meme complex that causes people to dissociate with all the zeal of a religious conversion but imbued with existential horror. in short, avoid.
these weird fictions should be studied, but mainly to innoculate people to them, as what we know from LLM's is that we can now produce complete ideologies the way we used to write pop songs, where the hooks are now reframings, and if you can't explicitly source a belief from a first hand experience, it could be the artifact of one so be on guard. we may actually need to form an anti-memetics division.
This comment is itself a fine example of the form, a twist on the King in Yellow, or Necronomicon, a story about a text which contains knowledge so alien or antithetical to humanity that just reading it is enough to fracture the mind of the reader and leave them unfit for society with their fellow man
I, too, have noticed that paranoid people all tend to read the same books in their downward spiral into paranoia.
> I've met more than one person muttering about Jung's red book and Kripke's theories of truth, PKD's exegesis, evola, and junger, before disappearing into rehab or homelessness.
Of course, correlation is not causation. Also, I'm pretty sure that Youtube is 1000x more dangerous for mentally unstable people than a book by C.G.Jung.
Side note: the Red Book is truely astonishing. I saw the original at an exhibition in Zürich. A friend owns one of the faksimiles (he also owns a house and has never been to rehab :) I can also recommend Jung's autobiography "Erinnerungen, Träume, Gedanken"
Memetic hazards can be real and strong, and you best not delve too deeply.
One of those memetic hazards is the meme that such memetic hazards do not exist. In infects politics to an alarming degree.
> creative work that presents itself as journalism or nonfiction but introduces fictional elements with the intention of upsetting, disturbing, or confusing the audience.
A good time to mention the SCP wiki and some types of analog horror. It was this kind of thing that led me to discover "hard science fiction" which is distinct but related to the previous two.
I think i enjoy hard sci-fi, if my username is any indication of the genre - it's from "A Signal Shattered" by Eric S. Nylund.
However i am curious what sort of Sci-fi you meant, where it's plausible but there's SCP/analog horror elements. Evidently a prior comment in the thread about memetics wiped an edge on the graph that would let me infer the sorts of thing you're talking about.
Nothing else to add except this was an exceptionally well written piece.
It really wasn’t. It was the kind of writing you get when someone desperately wants to be deep and profound, but lacks the skills to pull it off.
"Weird nonfiction" is a weird name for it, because it still pretends it's nonfiction. I'd rather call it in a more distinct and weird way, say, "ficnontion".
Then there's also autofiction, which sort of fits some of the examples given in the essay, even if not literary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofiction
I like your new word. It is both eloquent and awkward simultaneously. I call this quality awkloquent.
He also mentions “creative nonfiction”.