I just finished listening to the podcast ‘The Left Right Game’ on Spotify. I gravitated to it semi-organically, as much as such things are possible nowadays, with so many measured clicks and algorithms tracing our desires and histories. It’s ostensibly a horror story . . . a ghost story, specifically, revolving around an urban legend about a game where you get in your car, follow certain rules, and soon . . . you arrive . . . elsewhere. But it’s also a story about following a story. In many ways, it resonates with a culture seemingly looking for something . . . to chase down.
A ghost story about entering an otherworldly realm via road trip may not have obvious cyberpunk genre footholds. But perhaps there is this idea packaged along with the story that what was once seen as spirit, as otherworldly, has gone from a realm that is both everywhere and nowhere, to something that has some kind of terminal access. Have we, through the very themes of cyberspace and the input in the back of the jacked-in user’s neck taking one elsewhere, cracked open the shell? Set fire to the veil? In any sense truly allowed ourselves able to venture into such realms through technology? In the dance of pixels and binary, now quantum, computation, is there anything left of play with our own soul? The birth of the personal computer had roots deep in counterculture. These visions eventually bringing humanity face to face with its potentialities. Has any of that survived? Or has the humanity’s indwelling spiritualism been usurped by something new? Something coming down the road?
The Left Right Game — Initial Takeaways from Cypress Butane [CyberPunks.com] Youtube
Mentioned in the Video: Jean-Paul Sartre, The Unmoved Mover (primum movens), Prima Facie reactions, The Desire To Be God, and The Type of Person Who Is In Love With Being Homeless . . .
The Haunted Typewriter 