Have you ever seen The Ring?
It came out in 2002. A remake of a Japanese film from 1998, The Ring is a ghost story. The shortest and least capable explanation of the plot is this: A haunted VHS tape exists. If you watch it, you die seven days later, killed by the ghost who haunts the tape. The tape itself is comprised of short surreal clips reflecting the ghost's warped memories and experiences.
The tape features short video clips, a disconnected and jarring series of creepy images that are either outright disturbing or seem impossible: A chair that moves by itself. A huge centipede. A ladder to nowhere. A box of severed, spasming fingers. A woman staring into a mirror and brushing her hair, filmed from a supernatural angle, providing a view from behind her own eyes. This collection of images absolutely signals to the viewer that something is wrong and that whoever made this tape is fucked up and dangerous.
This series of images was certainly inspired by the original Japanese film, as was the rest of the American remake. Both versions also owe a clear debt to Salvador Dali's first film, Un Chien Andalou, made in 1929 with Spanish director Luis Buñuel. The surrealist film featured imagery from Dali's paintings, including decomposing animals and a severed hand. Making use of crude special effects, the film opens with a man sharpening a razor and then using it to slice open the eye of a young woman, who sits placidly and awaits her obvious fate.
Un Chien Andalo and the cursed VHS tape have the same narrative goal: to be disturbing by way of surrealism. We see violent and graphic imagery all the time, and while the experience of viewing that imagery may be intense, the context in which the imagery occurs usually makes at least rudimentary sense in real-world terms. The viewer can actively place what they are seeing in a frame that references reality as we understand it. A car crash is a car crash, an assault is an assault, and so long as they seem to take place on Earth among people who appear to have normal reactions to these events, we're disturbed by the content and not the context.
With surreal imagery, the discomfort is deepened by a sense of additional, inarguable, Lovecraftian wrongness. With Dali's film, we don't just see a decomposing donkey, which would be unpleasant, but rather a decomposing donkey inside of a grand piano. The severed hand is hard to look at, but when ants start crawling out of a hole in the palm, the experience becomes much more unsettling.
Likewise, when a chair at a table moves of its own accord in the sequence from The Ring, it feels wrong. When an impossibly enormous centipede emerges from beneath the table and then keeps going, growing beyond any length that matches the sizes of insects we know, the horror mounts, increasing from moment to moment of unreality.
The level of discomfort is different because surreal imagery isn't just disturbing. It crashes into our understanding of objective reality, causing cognitive friction that is somehow worse than simple horror. Surreal imagery makes us question our understanding of what reality is, and how the world works, and what people are capable of doing.
I've thought about surrealism at great length since the 1/6 Insurrection. I needed a break from swimming around on the bad guy internet because, after four years of work on disinformation, I was fully burnt out. I probably still am. While I have decided to change how I write about disinfo and political risk, it isn't something I'm ready to put down altogether. American democracy is still in danger, from an unyielding supply of disinformation and all the many risks associated with it. That danger is worse now than it was that morning in January, and it isn't close.
The huge drive to pass voter suppression laws in Republican state legislatures, the political fighting about public health and the pandemic that continues to endanger American lives, the numerous and poisonous show-audits of settled election results, and the utter insanity of 2021's Republican Party are all direct results of disinformation. They are signs of a new reality that allows elected officials and mainstream media types to introduce and perpetuate a nonstop theater of the surreal. We know something is very wrong. We can feel it every time we say, in exasperation, that we can't believe what happened today, even though we can.
At the end of The Ring, the lead character thinks she's broken the curse because the most imminent lethal danger passes. In short order, she figures out that she hasn't broken the curse at all, but rather has mistaken her understanding of the curse for a resolution to it. This deepens her horror: she can't stop it, and she can't fix it. She can only pass on what she knows about the curse in an effort to keep other people safe.
I spent most of the 2020 election cycle working on ways to fight disinformation. I have to stop doing that. Even though I was pitching mitigation strategies to people who could actually do something about it, trying to make the case that disinformation was an existential threat to western democracy was one unforgiving frustration after another.
It could be that I was the wrong messenger, but I don't think that's the whole issue. What was a tough sell before the election was called for Biden became an impossible sell after that. The simple truth is that the people who can solve this problem think this problem is too big to solve. They are wrong.
I am getting out of the solving business, but I'm hoping someone will figure out how to work on disinformation in a meaningful way, with teeth and real power behind the solutions they derive. (And I sincerely hope they figure it out in the next year or so, which is probably all the time available.)
Instead of trying to fix it myself, I'm going to write about it, and analyze it, and try to chart the risk environment for American politics and western democracy. This posture allows me to broaden what I'm looking at, and will hopefully allow me to produce useful contemporaneous writing and analysis on what we're experiencing here in America, as opposed to narrow, tactical, operational memos that mostly go unread.
My goal is to try and defend objective reality by writing about what is happening to our ability as a polity to observe it. My planned frequency is to look at one or two events or stories per week and to analyze them within the context of the current American political and information environment.
If this kind of thing is for you, I hope you'll come back. If I'm doing a good job, maybe tell your friends about it.