The Cybernetic Unconscious (1)
The first installment of a five-part thesis.
-1: Preface
This is a heavily edited and expanded version of a thesis essay I wrote for school about a year ago. The reasons I decided to adapt it and release it here are that it is a general thesis applicable to everyone, not one specifically concerned with my artwork or personal opinions, and my interest in disseminating the content outweighs my patience for other channels of publication. I will include a full bibliography in the last post, with footnotes included throughout those preceding.
0: Introduction
“And you don’t seem to understand
A shame, you seemed an honest man
And all the fears you hold so dear
Will turn to whisper in your ear”1
There is an insidious conspiracy to control our minds and steal our freedom. Such conspiracies exist at the highest level of every society, and, for all their differences, they all belong to the world of the occult. The occult is defined etymologically as “the hidden;”2 it encompasses all the observable phenomena in the world that we cannot—or refuse to—rationally explain: demonic possession, alien abductions, cryptid sightings, divine intervention, and many others. Instead of explanations, we settle for commandments. The Biblical prophets relay warnings from a god who refuses to announce them to all his people, as Jesus performs miracles without teaching the sick to heal themselves. Visible leaders derive authority from invisible gods.
In the historical world, the occult was highly territorial. What a society deemed comprehensible or inexplicable depended on factors specific to that society; gods of the sky, the sea, or the sun have no power in a society with meteorology, oceanography, or astronomy. In the digital world, the occult transcends all territories. At its most innocent, it writes emails, dims smart home lights, and targets consumers with ads. At its most destructive, it compels users of ChatGPT into paranoid delusions3 or cryptocurrency traders to kill themselves4. In fiction like Videodrome, Inside, Serial Experiments Lain, or We’re All Going to the World’s Fair5, the protagonists encounter the occult on message boards and livestreams, in cults and sects, and even in their own minds. These domains—the psychological, theological, and technological—all produce occult systems because they are all conscious networks. By recording information and simplifying it through communication, they produce unconscious entities divided against a conscious system6.
Networks consist of nodes, such as neurons in a brain or people in a society. Each node stores and transfers information through molar symbols. In this context, “molar” and “molecular” have nothing to do with chemistry except by way of metaphor: “molar” refers to finite, indivisible units, whereas “molecular” refers to indefinitely divisible composites7. Given finite space and time, nodes depend on finite, simplified symbols to represent indefinite, complex reality. We can define the ratio between material composition and symbolic representation as “significance.” For instance, the following image depicts an object with no connotations as to its meaning or importance:
The moment you read the caption, the image accrued significance. You also stopped paying as much attention to neutral, non-significant elements, like silhouette, coloration, or texture. The following image intensifies that same source of significance while removing the reference to a specific rock, its composition, appearance, or unique properties:
Most humans recognize each other using faces. Molar facial symbols consist of molecular elements—eyes, nose, lips, skin, hair, and others—recorded on nodes of the brain dealing with memory and recognition, mostly the fusiform gyrus8. Humans assign greater significance to parts of the face than to other parts of the body, and more significance to the face as a whole than to any part of the face in isolation. To recognize that face in the future, you would not check every molecular element, like the eyes or nose, nor would you check anything excluded from the facial symbol, like a hat or sunglasses9. You would check the entire symbol at once, “carving out a fact from a reckoning,”10 accepting a loss of information about the face as a material object, in a material world, in order to recognize others faster.
When nodes on a network share symbols, whether neurons in the brain with electricity and neurotransmitters or members of social groups with language, they combine molar symbols to represent molecular components and simulate the complexity of external reality, allowing the network to predict and respond to stimuli using “metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world.”11 This mental process has direct, physical counterparts, especially in art and science.
In Videodrome, David Cronenberg combines the molar symbol of a “hand” with that of a “gun” to synthesize a fictional model, namely the delusional cyborg Max Renn12, of a real phenomenon, namely a complex effect of technology on society impossible to describe with the symbols “hand” or “gun” alone13. The exaggerations of the cyberpunk and horror genres are just sensory recordings juxtaposed in speculative ways—VHS players with bodies, holograms with families, ticket stubs with skin diseases.
Scientists likewise combine the recorded results of past experiments to predict what they will record in new experiments. In neither the creative nor the scientific process does imagination occur without input from memory, nor do associations in memory wholly determine their associations in imagination. In fact, the ability to combine inputs without prior association differentiates human processing from AI prediction, and ingenuity from common sense: the dissimilarity between a snake and a benzene molecule, an eyeball and a box with a hole in it, or a checkerboard matrix and a written sentence is what makes the structure of benzene14, the optics of a camera obscura15, or AI transformer architecture conceivable16.
Within a network, some nodes always remain disconnected from others. The “blind spot,” the part of the eye that sees nothing, lies on the optic nerve which records everything else the eye sees17, just as mental networks, social networks, and media networks all include nodes that record and share information hidden from the nodes that produce a continuous self. Psychoanalysts call this unknown part the unconscious. Those of faith call it the divine. In the internet age, we have called it The World’s Fair18, The God of the Wired19, and The Singularity20. It is the invisible center of the occult, and the subject of this thesis.
Jasmine Rodgers, “Duvet,” by Bôa, track 1 on The Race of a Thousand Camels, released 1 Jul. 1998, Polystar, Vinyl LP.
Nicolaou Teya, “A Very Deep Dive into Reality Shifting,” Youtube, uploaded by Strange Aeons, 30 Jan. 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbWp0z5p8x.
Maggie Harrison Dupré, “People are Being Involuntarily Committed, Jailed after Spiraling into ‘ChatGPT Psychosis,’” Futurism, 28 June 2025, https://futurism.com/commitment-jail-chatgpt-psychosis.
Kharade Prathamesh, “Crypto Trader ‘MistaFuccYou’ Shoots Self to Death on Livestream After Losing His Last USD 500 in Memecoin Rug Pull; Chilling Video Surfaces,” The Free Press Journal, 23 Feb. 2025, https://www.freepressjournal.in/world/crypto-trader-mistafuccyou-shoots-self-to-death-on-livestream-after-losing-his-last-usd-500-in-memecoin-rug-pull-chilling-video-surfaces.
These four works of art will be recurring fictional analogues to the real-world phenomena I am concerned with.
For purposes of brevity and clarity, I usually discuss "the unconscious" and "consciousness" in phenomenological rather than ontological terms. I do not consider "unconscious entities" to be literal entities or "people" any more than I consider "the conscious self" to literally be a central, continuous self, but they effectively function in these ways, and it makes no difference to my thesis to refer to them as such.
Heather Davis, “Molecular Intimacy,” in Hyperobjects for Artist, edited by Timothy Morton and Laura Copelin with Peyton Gardner (The Creative Independent, 2018), https://tci-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/pdfs/library/hyperobjects-for-artists.pdf.
Nancy Kanwisher, Josh McDermott, and Marvin M. Chun, “The Fusiform Face Area: A Module in Human Extrastriate Cortex Specialized for Face Perception,” The Journal of Neuroscience: The Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience 17, no. 11 (1997): 4302-11, doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.17-11-04302.1997.
Unless you have prosopagnosia, a condition disrupting the ability to visually process faces holistically. Those with the condition generally still recognize objects and can identify people based on molecular details, like clothing, voices, or skin color, but not via the face. See Guido Gainotti and Camillo Marra, “Differential Contribution of Right and Left Temporo-Occipital and Anterior Temporal Lesions to Face Recognition Disorders,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 5, 55 (2011), doi:10.3389/fnhum.2011.00055.
Will Wood, “Mr. Capgras Encounters a Secondhand Vanity: Tulpamancer’s Prosopagnosia/Pareidolia (As Direct Result of Trauma to the Fusiform Gyrus),” by Will Wood and the Tapeworms, Track 4 on SELF-iSH, released 8 July 2016, Say-10 Records, vinyl LP.
Julian Jaynes, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (New York: Mariner Books, 1976), 55.
Videodrome, directed by David Cronenberg (1983: The Criterion Collection, 2004), DVD.
Or to summarize succinctly in this paragraph.
John Read, From Alchemy to Chemistry (Courier Corporation, 1957), pp. 179–180.
Stephen Marche, “Was Linguistic A.I. Created by Accident?”, The New Yorker, 23 Aug. 2024, https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/was-linguistic-ai-created-by-accident.
Ibid.
Daniel M. Albert and David M. Gamm, “Blind Spot,” Britannica, last modified 31 Jan. 2020, https://www.britannica.com/science/blind-spot.
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, directed by Jane Schoenbrun (Utopia, 2022), streaming.
Chiaka Konaka, Serial Experiments Lain (1998: Pioneer Entertainment, 1999), DVD.
Schoenbrun, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.