You, yes you, can

Interrupt Pathological, Media-Simulated Social Interaction

...in your spare time!

If you’re like me, you’re surrounded by astonishingly-lifelike representations of people who are encouraging you to buy things, mocking you for having not already bought things, or enacting some manipulative pantomime of human neurosis or fantasy.

Sadly, our poor primate brains frequently respond to these flat, artificial stimuli as though they were actually people like ourselves, with shared values and experiences!

In 1966, psychologist Harry Harlow constructed an experiment in which baby rhesus monkeys were raised by a milk-emitting, mother-monkey-shaped golem made of wire or cloth, rather than by a real monkey mother and in the presence of a band of other monkeys.

The results were, as you might guess, that the poor monkeys turned out quite badly.

We’re performing a similar experiment on ourselves. In recent decades, we and our children have had increasing exposure to artificial simulations of human society.

The results are, as you might guess, pathological.

The counter-experiment described below is designed to interrupt pathological, media-simulated social interactions by distorting mediated human faces in such a way that they no longer successfully simulate human faces. At the same time, the method of distortion comments on the sinister nature of the interrupted mind-fuck.

I discovered this method in use in San Francisco, California, in the late 1990s, but have never met its inventor.

Anyone can play!

Directions