Amazing Stories in Empirical Phenomenology

The third leg of the triangle—myself and others

I patterned my journey out of psychosis as the very-gradual integration of three elements. In Part I I wrote about the relation of myself to the material world. Part II looked at how other people related to the world. Now we complete the triangle, with my relation to other people.

Building my Brand

My research into computer history and McLuhan was solitary work. My family and the people in my home town couldn’t help me with it. I really wanted to talk to some experts, but felt weird calling them out of the blue. And, so, I decided to create a podcast.

Nobody, I figured, would just talk to some rando. But lots people enjoy being interviewed! I had made some introductions to interesting people through my eclectic and somewhat esoteric online social groups and started there.

First some friends of mine from a subreddit dedicated to a defunct psychology blog offered to help me rehearse and chat for a while. That was my first episode, in August of 2018. Then my friend Bob introduced me to Harold Channer. Harold was a prolific interviewer with a decades-old local-access television show in Manhattan. He was the second person in America to get a portable video camera, the Sony Portapak, from the first shipment from Japan in 1967. The first was Nam June Paik.

Harold and I hit it off in our own strange way, and he took me under his wing, best as he could, giving me advice about how to do my show. I became a reoccurring guest on his television program, calling into the television studio via webcam.

In turn, Harold appeared on my podcast. It was a strange turnaround for him to be the guest for once!

After that, I reached out to a total stranger I noticed who had made some interesting comments online. He was attending school for applied media studies, and had been learning all the Stanford University “captology” techniques for creating addicting phone apps. It bothered him, and so our discussion of that, and his reading of Neil Postman's books made up episode three. I would repeat this technique of poaching random internet posters a few more times.

Becoming an amateur pod-caster was a great step toward re-establishing something of an identity. I needed to have a “front” for my interests—I said it was a hobby of mine, even though it was more like a lifeline.

Talking about my podcast at the bar, my retired signaler friend Greg took great interest and invited me over to his place to study up for my interview technique. That lead to many great nights drinking beer and watching re-runs of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. I'm no Carson, but his way of taking a genuine interest in his guests and their topic helped me immensely.

It was the forth episode that would constitute the next major change.

Amazing Stories and the Symposium

I decided that my podcast was reasonable established enough to break out of my comfort zone and try to bag a bigger guest. Out of the blue, I emailed a well-known McLuhan scholar, Paul Levinson from Fordham University, and asked him to record a show with me.

What made the interview with Paul special was that it was scheduled for recording a few days after a very important event he would be attending—in Toronto.

It was the relaunch event for the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, originally founded by Hugo Gernsback (of Hugo Award notoriety). Paul had written a story for the first new issue. Since I lived Ontario, he welcomed my attendance.

This would by the very first time, then, that my real-life and my crazy internet life actually intersected—I'd meet a McLuhan scholar in the flesh!

This was a very major moment in reality testing. My radical skepticism regarding everything outside of my “baby steps” approach was about to be challenged directly.

My paranoia, as it does, lead to terrifying speculations. In darker moments, I’d question the odds that all this would just be happening, spontaneously. That the former president of the Science Fiction Writers Guild of America would be a major McLuhan scholar, and the first guy I meet with. Or, rather, make “first contact” with. Feeling “alienated,” the joke was just too good to be a coincidence. My existentially-skeptical side was calling bullshit.

I had long become used to suspecting that I had been, as was much later coined, “heaven banned” to my own private simulation of the internet. That everything I was doing online—the people I was talking to, the work I was reading—everything was safely enveloped away from the larger world. It’s a common delusion of simulation theorists—which I am not, but with whom I can deeply sympathize.

But how could an event like this be faked? Was I really about to meet a real person from the online-world I had so-often disavowed the reality of?

One Small Step for Man

My father commuted to Toronto, so I rode into town with him that day on his way to work. I killed some time during the day before the event—I don't even remember what—and soon I was at the library branch where the relaunch was taking place.

The people attending were an interesting sort—they lived and breathed sci-fi in a way which I hadn't encountered before. We were in the particular wing of a particular branch of the Toronto library system which housed all the old pulp sci-fi classics in a very climate-controlled environment. This expensive infrastructure was necessary given the fragility of the extremely cheap paper.

I introduced myself to Paul, and I told him that it was very reassuring and grounding to meet him after a long spell of living in "acoustic space." That was a McLuhan term which I chose as a euphemism for my psychosis. He understood my meaning immediately. With grace he mustered a cheery and welcoming demeanor, and regaled me with some funny anecdotes about McLuhan and himself. Thereafter we walked around as he introduced me to a few other writers and the editor of Amazing Stories.

The rest of the evening is a technicolor blur. It was the first time I had been out at such a public event in years, and I was quite overwhelmed. But I was greatly impressed by the speech the editor gave. I only remember the strong finish. The theme of it weighed heavily on me, and I can provide the gist of it.

He lamented the ubiquity of depressing, post-apocalyptic and dystopian sci-fi. The gritty, drab realism of everything on television in the wake of the Battlestar Galactica remake had spoiled the genre. The constant PKD paranoia and Kafkaesque absurdism of Black Mirror was soul crushing. Science fiction today, in the public imagination, was nihilism and terror.

He emphasized, over and over, that what society needed most of all was visions of a world they'd want to live in. The world that should be created. The future cannot perpetually be depicted as a damnation into totalitarian hell, a struggle for survival in a barren wasteland of earth or sky, or a Lovecraftian horror show of sadism and helplessness.

Science fiction must give hope, inspiration. Our visions for the future must be of something to reach for, to aspire to—something we are driven to make real.

Building to a crescendo, he concluded with bombast. He leaned toward us over the lecturn, almost on tippy-toes, finger jutting up to the sky. He boomed "At Amazing Stories, the future is AMAZING!"

It knocked the wind out of me. I admit I don't remember anything else about the evening. I think “acoustic space” largely overtook me again with all the resonance. I'm sure I must have milled about a bit smiling, shook Paul's hand again, and then wandered the city streets for a while until meeting my father at the end of his shift for a ride home. My little bout of empiricism left me shell shocked. I took no pictures. The memory of it, like many memories from that time, is more of a cartoon than a the reliable episodic kind sane and sober people used to.

Yet that's what happened. And it really did happen. My world, my map of reality, was greatly expanded that night, to include one more living, somewhat larger-than-life character who provided undeniable, affirmative evidence for my reality testing. Yup, this was all really happening.

Getting the right proportions would come later.

The conversations with my friends in the trades work and skilled labour—my home town provides many such acquaintances—continued to ground me in material reality. But the world of writing, of fiction, was a different craft entirely. It was suitable that the trip was all the more disorienting—I went deep in the world of the mind, of media content, of dreams of non-existent worlds spring produced from the imagination.

People from the world of desk-work—be it imaginative desk-work or number crunching—are in a different universe from people who work with their hands. My meeting with Paul was a big leap into the abstract and cerebral heights from the concrete comfort of handiwork.

A few days later, Paul was on my podcast as promised. My first “major” guest!

Many McLuhans

Around the same time, I learned that the University of Toronto was hosting a Marshall McLuhan symposium. UNESCO had dedicated his personal archive to its Memory of the World program. McLuhan’s personal documents have long been here in Ottawa, at Library and Archives Canada, where I am free to visit them whenever I like. But McLuhan’s reading library, his private collection of thousands of books which were full of his hand-made annotations, had just been accepted by U of T’s Fisher Rare Book Library.

Marshall's son Eric has enlisted the help of his own son, Andrew, in meticulously cataloguing all of Marshall’s books and their level of annotation. After the symposium, anybody could now go to the Fisher Library and request to read Marshall's books, marginal notes, and additions. I've done it many times since, and try to do so on my every trip there.

Unfortunately the symposium was long sold-out by the time I learned of it. So Andrew hatched a plan. Since I had a podcast, he reasoned that I may be able to get in on a press pass.

I registered my podcast with Apple Podcasts and Spotify to make it more official, and wrote a short bio. And I set up Audacity on my PocketCHIP portable computer to record interviews using a good XLR microphone.

As far as anyone was concerned, I was now as legitimate as a “podcaster” could be…Make way for the press?

I did thank Ms. Sharma, and will do so again here. This second opportunity to go into Toronto and touch the ground of my online obsession marked a major turning point in the final leg of our triangle—that between myself and other people.

Until then, I had been passive and observational—terrified of the responsibility of making any major moves in my life. I had to rely on friends and my parents to watch out for me. I was leaning on lots of people, and I often felt like a burden.

The assumption of responsibility was important to me. I had known myself to be an unreliable judge of reality, and so had long hesitated and worked on my computer-history stuff as a side-project. I knew I had that stuff correct, as impersonal and far-removed and historical as it was.

Sure, my real life was a collapse, but this non-fiction study of mine was serious and useful and the world needed it, and so it was my responsibility while I groped, in baby-steps, for stability through my triangle of myself, the material world, and others.

Well now I had a mission. I was press! I had to talk to people and introduce myself. I had to ask them to talk with me for my podcast, explain what it was about. And I had a role.

Throughout the day, I became more and more self-conscious. I had a very-old, musty thrift-shore button up shirt with a very wide collar and strange cuffs that probably made me look like a weirdo amid the crowd of academics in their natural semi-formal wear. I also knew a whole lot about the subject, but found myself floundering in many conversations with people, who probably found me quite odd, or didn't know where I was coming from. They'd ask me what school I attended—I didn't. I dropped out of computer science a decade prior. A few people gave very obvious vibes that they were needed elsewhere—anywhere else, I'm sure, but talking with me.

It didn't bother me much—I was used to it and, as a grown-ass man, could live with it. Being a sane misfit is eminently more bearable than being psychotic. The afternoon was a good gauge for where I was at in my recovery and informed my mission to relate better with people.

One the one hand, these were my people—people who loved McLuhan as much as I did! I had been voraciously reading his works for over a year, like a fanatic getting into a new pop fiction universe, consuming the lore and the like.

But, on the other hand, they clearly weren't. Or, rather, wasn't one of them.

One friend I had made early online was a graduate student named Adam who was the first person I introduced myself to when I recognized him out front of the campus library. We spoke a little about the various people attending, and about Marshall McLuhan's conversion to Catholicism. We had entered the ground-floor of the library, where all the guests were assembled talking.

After I got my first interview and spoke with some more people, Adam and I were among the first to take a seat in the audience for the introductory speech. I turned to him and began to say, nonchalantly, something like, "What I find interesting is the difference between how McLuhan saw religion and how Jordan Peters..."

Adam's shoulder hunched up like a cat. In a single complex movement, his head dipped toward me, his brow furrowed, his eyes squinted, and his hand raised, slightly closed, between our faces to signal the arrest of my speech, mid-sentence. As he relaxed, he casually drew his hand back to his side, while moving his head closer to mine, so as to whisper. “Careful. You're in enemy territory.”

“Oh.”

Of course! Why didn't I think of that? Adam's relation to the scene was far more in tune than mine was—it was all new to me, and I had to enter his frame.

Abstractly, somehow, I knew it. I had followed the drama, the rise of Peterson to international celebrity on the wings of overwhelming internet attention. Nothing the institutions or the mainstream media said could detract from the energy of hundreds of thousands, then millions of people cheering him on at home, sharing his videos out of their own excitement. They all knew what he said made sense, and that what activists and administrators and other humanities professors said did not.

But I was actually here in person. I mean, this was not just a university campus, but the university campus. What the hell was I doing, spouting off my internet spectator peanut-gallery opinions amid the people whose actual careers were impacted by campus politics and the global spectacle of Peterson every day? I wasn't on the campus to rustle jimmies. I was press. I quickly decided, thanks to Adam's hint, that that role was plenty enough for me to be that day.

I met up with more internet friends, Brian and Nigel. They've been in the scene a long time, living in Toronto as they did. We were, more or less, the young odd-ball group—the interlopers on the otherwise formal, professional scene. We weren't attending or working in academia like many in attendance. Brian and Nigel were in street clothes, and the three of us, I came strongly to feel, were the artists giving the whole proceeding some much-needed street cred.

Brian had helped Professor Paolo Granata workshop his new McLuhan-inspired board game, The MediuM. Prof. Granata invited me to play a few hands with him, and I remember being particularly pedantic regarding a tetrad on “smartphones” which I insisted was a computer and he had interpreted as a telephone. I challenged him on his answer—probably the same one he’d given over and over again through work-shopping and demonstrating the game—and he graciously acquiesced to my nit-pick and gave me the point.

Psychology has a diagnostic tool called "The Big Five," presenting five roughly-orthogonal dimensions of character. On the agreeableness axis, between friendliness/compassion on the one hand, and criticism/judgement on the other, I actual score very critically. I am not agreeable—I think I just compensate with diplomacy and reserve. I definitely felt more in contact with my disagreeableness that day, and stumbled on and off with keeping decorum. Not that anybody complained mind you—but I was watching myself socialize and I learned a lot.

The final arm of the triangle, the relation of myself to others, gelled in this interesting meeting of many different groups. McLuhan's family had their thoughts, McLuhan's former students and alumni their own, the scholars of other strains of humanities—especially those versed in critical theory—had their own take. Prof. Sharma certainly picked the perfect name for the day: the Many McLuhan's Symposium. To everyone attending, Marshall McLuhan was a completely different person, meaning something completely unique and irreconcilable with everyone else's take on him.

That's likely a major reason I glom onto him so much. The issue of my own identity was mirrored in this mirage McLuhan intentionally made of his own public image. He'd often shorten the phrase “quest for identity” down to “quiddity,” according to Prof. de Kerckhove. “Violence is the quest for identity,” McLuhan explained in War and Peace in the Global Village.

Well, disagreeableness is violence in a world of social construction—the global theater. While it was a major relief to experience the reflection of my online life within social realities which actually existed out in the world at large, I was now awakening to recognize how I was still a very bad fit.

But who isn’t?