BETALEVEL

Memory Technology has Always been Paranoid

Sounds and Lecture
This Incident: BAT COUTRY
Thursday, Nov 29 at 8pm
Free

It was when I read the backstory of the song “Exit” that I realized U2’s 1987 album The Joshua Tree was a necromantic ceremony. Did it “work” in some sense? Hard to say. I mean, did the 1982 movie Tron *really* release a cybernetic culture virus into the world? Maybe! Did the mass-paperback publication of the Necronomicon in 1980 *really* rupture the seals to the elder realms, ushering in an age of chaos? Perhaps! When Bono sang “I stand with the sons of Cain,” was he *really* allying himself with the murderers of history? Well, signs do point to yes on that one.

Look. It’s a mess. But what we can do is try to map the lines connecting things to each other. Which is what the Mormons did as they carved roads through the Mojave, set down the lines on maps, created the first grids through the desert, dividing and connecting. The Mormons, who named the Joshua Tree after the prophet Joshua supplicating Heaven as they first came west in the 19th century… except that story is fake. The name Joshua Tree wasn’t in frequent use until well into the 20th century. Don’t believe everything you hear!

Anyways, it’ll take about 45 minutes or so to explain all of this, preceded by some oogy noises and drinks.

. . .

Hi. I’m Jason Brown.

For the last twenty years or so, I’ve been trying to understand the “paranoid” nature of memory technology from its ancient origins to its latest mutations, using the movie Tron as a mythopoetic scaffold to explain everything.

Investigating these fringe interests was once a quirky hobby, with the true lunatics yodeling to be heard in the shadows of society. But now these obscurantist fantasias are tools of power, and objective reality itself has to fight for its survival in the weird wizard battle of daily life. Come to our basement, an let us experience it together.