There is this notion, commonly repeated, that we should not be too focused on the negative aspects of life, and that when conversations stray towards the subject of imminent calamity, whether it be economic, environmental, or a combination of the two, there is a kind of resistance to the idea that we are headed for irreparable disaster.  There lies a gulf between those who see the immanent breakdown of the modern world, and those who, for a variety of reasons, see nothing of major concern.  But even across this line of separation exists a common perspective that points to an even greater malaise.  This unseen problem stems not so much from a lack of clarity in perceiving what lies ahead, either from the perspective of so called doomers or those who maintain a degree of optimism in the face of systems destabilization, but rather from how we define "we" and how "we" look at the world around us as it exists today.
painting: Fluidity by Luke Orsborne click to enlarge

In just the last few years the US government has, either through direct military or proxy involvement, already exported post apocalyptic living conditions to Iraq, Syria, and Libya. A large cross section of the world is currently living in an end of the world state, fueled in part by a legacy of Western imperialism, disruptive technologies, and neoliberalism. Life's breakdown is not an abstraction for babies born with birth defects in Iraq from the the US mlitary's use of depleted uranium.  It's not an unthinkable possibility for the parents of Vietnamese children born under the the lingering effects of Monsanto's Agent Orange, or the families who subsist in Pakistan under daily fear of crop failure and Obama's drone war.  It's not a ridiculous suggestion for the scores of farmers committing suicide in India from a combination of parching land, debt, and biotechnology that didn't live up to its promises.  Nor is catastrophic disaster an unknown to the families of those 250,000+ Somalis who died between 2010-2012 under a record drought, or the millions whose lives were upended in the Philippines under the changing climate's super typhoon Haiyan.  Even in a developed nation like Australia, ranchers are having their livelihoods decimated from lack of rain.  It's important for those of us who simply cannot allow ourselves to contemplate a collapse scenario or those of us who are trying to stave it off to understand that there are people all over the planet right now whose world, in a very real sense, has already collapsed.  

I've witnessed people brush off the "bad news" as if it's a kind of distasteful experience served up like a rotting piece of meat at a favorite restaurant.  Such a reaction represents the creation of a kind of intellectual caste system, where even thoughts of those whose lives have been destroyed by our way of doing things cannot be tolerated.  To be an untouchable within such a system means that sustained contemplation of your destitution and the vile conditions you must endure, represents the threat of contamination to the true and upright livelihoods and leisure time of the privileged.  To "us," those people who live under our tax funded bombs or who starve in IMF debt chains and a worsening climate, exist primarily as unfortunate statistics that occasionally ruin cocktail conversation or Facebook timelines.  This is the "we" that cannot look at the writing on the wall, when it comes to impending disaster.  This is the "we" that cannot accept the possibility that toxic, violent, and volatile living conditions that powerful nations export might come from some monstrous and shared cultural behaviors, which in the end threaten even the supposed stability of our own way of life.  In reality, "our" way of life is not threatened by such destabilization because destabilization is the modus operandi through which this lifestyle is maintained.  It just needs time to catch up.

When I think about the way people actively push aside the plight of others, I'm reminded of a kind of belief system that has gained currency within new-age and Christian prosperity doctrine circles: that faith plays a primary role in our material success, and  by extension, our material success within well-to-do nations is of primary concern.  Those who follow the so-called Law of Attraction suggest that our beliefs and feelings define our reality, and in order to change the external world, we must change our internal experience to reflect the way we would feel if the conditions we hoped for already existed.  The goals are generally geared toward obtaining financial success, romantic relationships, and personal well-being.  The method to achieve these ends is to live as though these conditions were already true.  The middle class businessman who has fallen on hard times need simply "feel" himself to be a successful entrepreneur, and as "like attracts like" the success he is projecting will manifest.  If it does not, he has simply not believed hard enough.  In the case of adherents to Christian Prosperity doctrine, God wants us all to be successful.  We just need to place our faith in Him to receive the financial rewards.  The amassed wealth of book selling televangelists serves as proof of concept.

For some, the way in which belief is thought to effect reality is staggering. I spoke to one individual who concluded, for example, that dogs have the lifespan that they do because we expect them to.  For him, the deaths of indigenous cultures around the world occurred because of some flaw in their understanding of reality.  In such a view, all limitations are merely imposed by our preconceptions.  One may scoff at the obviously delusional character of such a belief system, but it is in reality a remix of a modern commercial culture in which large segments of the world participate.   Consider the way the monetary system and stock performance, and thus the "health" of economies and the nations that they depend upon, are tied to faith.   Consider the way "bad news" cannot be long tolerated, by individuals or markets, and is addressed not with solutions, but feel-good rhetoric and advertisement driven shopping experiences, which establish a sense of stability, success, and well-being that in turn reinforce the larger system.  

But adherents to the Law of Attraction are not entirely wrong.  The way we think and feel about things does play a role in shaping the world.  To overstate that role, however, is to fall into a realm of denial, delusion, and a dangerous and narcissistic disempowerment.  To understand the effects of our belief systems in the world, without exaggerating their importance, helps us walk a line between paralyzing despair and utopian fantasies.  With our senses thus anchored and clarified, it become possible to explore and experience the Great Mystery not purely in terms of a material cage or a paradise of endless possibility, but as something none the less larger than ourselves and profound in its secrets and multiplicity.  In this regard, we can stop avoiding the "unpleasant" realities that interfere with our good vibes and our earning potential to uncover a deep and compassionate connection to the living beings of the world and the very real suffering that takes place in this sphere.  To value consciousness then, is to value dream, imagination, the living planet that fosters such possibilities, and the unknown out of which it all emerges. 

I believe this is a nexus for real human and spiritual development, for valuable artistic expression, and for truly positive transformation. Suffering is not something to be ignored or masked, nor is it something to be abjectly endured.  It is an energy and a condition existing both at an individual and a structural level, and it is something that we must work with and transmute to the best of our ability. Such a transformative process unlocks potentials that can only be realized as we both break the mold of our destructive social condition to open up to new realities, and yet stay connected to that which is unfolding around us.   When as individuals we recognize the doom that already has existed, currently exists, and is spreading, and find a way to act in unflinching accordance with our own principles or a sense of connection to a higher law for the betterment of others, then the small "we" becomes fused to the larger.   It is through that connection that we can expand.

The real we is the we that includes those of us who outwardly benefit from this predatory system, as well those who have been swept under it, those for whom "we" cannot even pause.  In the most real sense, we are all connected, though this relationship is clearly not an equitable one.   Not contemplating imminent doom from behind the curtains of Western instigated covert military operations and the walls of sweatshop produced conveniences, is a luxury for those of us who still haven’t internalized what modern culture is actually about. Catastrophic climate change, and the conflicts over increasing water and food shortages it will create, is just another symptom of a pathological root, which has been denied for too long.

Countless tribal societies have already experienced their doom, not because they weren't spiritually connected enough or because they did not deeply believe themselves to be the proper guardians of their lands, but instead thanks to the ruthless actions of the forbears of our modern life.  Their 200,000 year old world ended at the hands of a death machine whose karma we swim in today.  To brush off the genocide of indigenous people whose lands modernity stole, and to wash our hands of the whole affair even as a "coalition of the willing" killed over a million brown skinned people in Iraq in an illegal war, is to function as the bulwarks of a violent methodology that persists through an unbroken line into modern households across the globe.  To not daily work against this destructive business-as-usual is to consent to it.  We do not all equally possess the means to confront and work toward the transformation of this system, but none the less, the way we orient our moral compass is critical.  

Dealing with the reality of unfolding collapse is overwhelming, which is perhaps why personal empowerment fads and the engagement in escapist behaviors are so common.  What is clear, however, is the blind pursuit of personal gratification is both a form of avoidance, as well as form of perpetuation that acts as a kind of unconscious violence.  In the face of such intractable problems, the question remains, what is to be done?  

To sustain life, there are certain non-negotiables.  Everyone requires access to clean water, healthy food, and shelter.  In the sustenance of life in the long term, the provision of these necessities must be done in a manner that does not destroy the planet.  This requires, among other things, the widespread, decentralized understanding of methods to inexpensively and sustainably build and maintain homes and produce food.  Layered into these basic needs is also the understanding that people should have security within their daily lives, which is to say, freedom from abuse and the threat of violence at a familial as well as well as societal level.  Insecurity creates conditions for exploitation, war, and unsustainable practices.  The  modern system falls abysmally short of providing for the people of the world, and it has an economic incentive to do so.   Its methodologies ravage the living environment while intentionally destabilizing personal and collective security for profit, creating problems and then "fixing" them for financial gain.  The process inevitably concentrates wealth and power into a small number of hands.  A report from Oxfam stated that the 85 richest people in the world have as much wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion. Such a state of affairs brings about the conditions for deep destabilization and collapse on a personal, regional, and now a global level, as pressures build beyond the capacity of social, environmental, and  personal coping strategies to handle them.  In 2014, a spate of suicides within the international banking community has shown the lack of viability of this system even within its upper echelons.

While I find it rather likely "we" will endure social breakdown in our lifetime, this concern shares space with the understanding that the calamity is already here, and has been here for a very long time.  Nothing I do will change the fact that countless people will die of hunger and disease today.  Rather than wondering whether "our" situation will look like "theirs" is to ignore the view that together we are in the midst of a collapse which is beyond inevitable: it's taking place right now.

This understanding has the potential to generate needed urgency among those who have the resources to do some good, but urgency and compassion are not enough.  Nor is food aid and medical care.  From my perspective as an artist, what we need is a transformative dynamic that recognizes the certainty of death, the hardships of life, the destructive impacts of an entrenched and pathological system, and yet finds the inspiration and humanity to do what is in our power to fundamentally change the way we live.  From a raw and energetic sense, this might look like taking essence from the way sunlight moves through the foliage of familiar trees on your spring time walk, which then somehow finds its way into the inner luminescence of your sleeping vision.  On a more tangible level,  this might look like putting an end to selling arms to foreign governments, or halting the undermining of local economies with subsidized agricultural dumping and food aid that benefits multinationals rather than deriving from local markets.  The spread of inexpensive technologies like slow sand filters, earth bag and compressed earth brick built structures, and solar ovens, offer promise not only in the developing world, but to those in developed nations who are looking for cheap, low tech solutions to build a transformative exit strategy from a pathological system.  

The drive for change does not come from new age platitudes or market driven utopias, but rather from the understanding  that to ignore the situation is to both turn our backs on our fellow man and the living planet, and finally, to die a spiritual death.  On the level of mass culture's subconscious, this is already known.  You can see it in the fascination with vampires and the undead.  The collapse is unfolding, and this is the zombie apocalypse.  We are witnessing the casualty of the spirit.  The trajectory of such consciousness is reactive, unaware, and lost, and doomed to perpetuate itself until perpetuation is no longer possible.

In the realm of transformative art, paintings, music, film, and poetry need to communicate both the horrors and beauties of our mortal lives within the context of system wide pathology.  Such art should also be tied directly into the physicality of the re-creative process itself, not simply from an information sharing and culture shifting approach, but also through its ability to lend momentum and material support toward a new paradigm.  As a carrier of information, a bridge between internal and external, and locus of monetary, cultural, and symbolic value, art can serve as currency for transformation, a guidepost for those seeking that transformation, and a visible metric indicating the kind of transformation that is underway.

To see this is to recognize art's existence as a liminal creation that straddles the physical world and the world of imagination, spirit, and dream.  Within the self-conscious context of the collapse underway, art can act as both a path and a life preserver for those who are themselves at the brink of being consumed by the death machine, but who orient themselves to some extent, even if unconsciously, toward health and shared salvation.  Art serves a point within a larger constellation of cultural understanding, and can focus consciousness and tease out new understanding.  Within such a context, each creation of beauty and truth becomes both an act of and a sign of reflection, vitality, defiance, and survival.

In this valley of the shadow of death, the positive transformation that art potentiates is through the indication of human value in spite of a system that harnesses for material gain our degraded sense of self within a forgotten cosmos.  Such streams of reflection become tributaries to larger forces for action.  Cultural creators have an obligation to move beyond the mere fabrication of adornments for the walls of a militarily backed materialism, and broaden out toward dynamic practices that forge meaningful relationships, give us inspiration in times of doubt, and literally feed and shelter human beings through integrated processes that supplant the old paradigm. To embrace this process of creation even as we accept our own mortality and the mortality of everyone we love, establishes the potential to free up energies to unremittingly push back against individuals and systems that are bringing unimaginable and unnecessary suffering to this world.  Art gives us permission to both put dreams into action and set fire to those practices that are themselves engendering the ongoing embodiment of traumatic patterns.   

Understanding collective doom no more implies inaction than does a warrior's sense of possible annihilation inevitably prevent him from engaging on the battlefield.  In wealthy nations, the lack of response to what is happening is not the result of accepting the direness of the situation at hand, but is rather the latent manifestation of a culture that has conditioned us over our lifetimes to live in a state of pathological consumption, unrecognized ignorance, capitulation, denial, disempowerment, fragmented thinking, and depression, as we struggle to pay the bills.  

In the case of social transformation, a recognition of inevitable breakdown has the potential to trigger the passion of the proverbial "nothing left to lose," mindset. It can unleash compassion and give us the creative tools we need to overcome the often irrational compromises we make in the name of preserving our socially constructed behavioral prison. It allows us to reach out in ways we have not in the past, and gives us the wherewithal to re-evaluate our course of action when it appears ineffective.  But without honing awareness, such  raw energies can also be self destructive.  The challenge comes with working with the catastrophic potentials that course through life.  It is a dance with the the death that we will inevitably face, and yet in the midst of such difficulties, there is a place for meaning, direction, purpose, beauty, and fulfillment through shared alchemical wisdom.

As we approach our human made oblivion, art in its various forms, then, can help pull us back from the brink of premature material or psychic destruction.  Through the transformative pushes and pulls of these dynamics, we can begin to detect the emergence of a resilience of spirit which does not wish to hide from the truth, and is less likely to be broken by the overwhelming and devastating force of the modern man-made world.  As author Chris Hedges has put it, "I do not fight fascists because I think I can win.  I fight fascists because they are fascists."  Salvation may not look like the healthy planet that we wish for, even as we strive to protect that which we hold dear.   Rather, it may appear as the ability to look each other in the eye knowing that we reached into the wellspring of creation and confronted this monstrosity that is trying to destroy everything sacred.  Perhaps it is through this recognition, given form through refined and purposeful action, that we become vehicles for a sacredness that lies beyond the reach of both the modern death machine, and death itself.

It's common to hear words like "conspiracy theorist" or "nut job" thrown around these days in an attempt to marginalize those whose ideas lie outside the scope of accepted information.  Let's be honest, there are indeed a lot of beliefs out there that we should quickly  dismiss, unless we want to spend countless hours venturing down fundamentalist or pseudo scientific rabbit holes.  But by the same token, the interesting thing about using a word like "conspiracy theorist" to shut down debate is that implies that the accuser believes the accused to be crazy, while they perceive themselves to be firmly planted on the bedrocks of sanity and objective reality.   

But is the current Western culture, and its constituent members, truly sane?  And what indications might we look for that indicate otherwise?

Activist and author Derrick Jensen, among others, have suggested that the dominant culture is in fact insane, which is attributable, essentially, to the fact that civilization is destroying the life support systems that we depend upon. This seems a compelling enough argument.  Why would anyone in their right mind destroy the living planet and thus not only their livelihood, but the livelihoods of their children?  One answer to that question might be that the culture is collectively ignorant.  It just doesn't understand that it's technology is as harmful as it is.  But this is not an altogether convincing line of thought.  There certainly exists an element of this mindset, but mixed in are those who couldn't care less, and those who understand the conditions which we are creating, but also feel there is nothing we can do about it.  There are those who drive around in super duty pickups with pictures of Calvin pissing on the word "environmentalists," undoubtedly viewing the wolves they will be shooting from their snow mobiles as proxies for members of  the green movement.  And then there are those who will manipulate and coldly profit on inevitable planetary decline straight into the heart of oblivion.  Maybe we're not insane, but captives of a system of our collective traumas and eccentricities, actors in an ongoing survival drama gone awry.

Or maybe, as Jensen suggests, we have altogether lost it.

I think people with any compassion for human life would see the US sponsored killing sprees in foreign lands for the benefit of military contractors and access to fossil fuels as more than just a little over the top.  When we start to realize that this is done for essentially numbers housed in artificial constructs known as banks, in order to prop up an economy built on soul crushing jobs, questioning our collective mental stability starts to sound like the sane approach.

In the past, I've mused about the kinds of video games people are playing today, as a sort of window into our consciousness.  While the modern culture derides the "primitiveness" of animists and spirit world contacting nature worshipers, it has created its own parallel realms of magic and miracles.  It seems fitting that a technology and money driven culture, bereft of a sense of the sacred, would in the absence of dream work, shamanism, and vision quests, find refuge in pixelated realms of fictionalized exploration and self mastery.  Amid the ultra violent first person shooters and misogynist fantasy lands are a special breed of horror games in which the breakdown of morality and sanity plays an important role.  Take a look at the above trailers to get a taste of the kind entertainment kids, and increasingly older men, are consuming. This kind of entertainment, along with spinning wheels of fortune and a host of un-reality shows, are woven into the fabric of our consciousness.

But what recently got me thinking about the sanity of America was an article that discussed the revelations of US intelligence operatives infiltrating virtual worlds on the world wide web out of fear that online jihadists could be creating computer animated avatars of Osama bin Laden, in order to recruit extremists.  The report suggested

“The Bin Ladin avatar could preach and issue new fatwas for hundreds of years to come, as the fidelity of his likeness would be entirely believable and animated in new ways to keep him current and fresh.”

Current and fresh?  Terrorism a la Starbucks.  In a nation where drone operators drive home after a day of bombing wedding parties to catch up on the latest Disney Pixar flick with the kids, the perceived threats we are lashing out at are increasingly showing themselves to be the undying products of our own warped minds. And this was when I realized that we are officially through the looking glass. Security spooks are now haunting  virtual space, looking for digital re-animations of their own 1980′s Cold War creation, surrounded by 3d rendered penguins and dancing Star Wars creatures. The trajectory we have been following, while apparently parallel to a course of sanity and rationality in this so-called age of information,  diverged quite some time ago. As time passes along the X axis, the gulf is becoming increasingly apparent. If in our high tech delusion we are not wiped out in the short term from ecological or economic meltdown, we will soon be sucking down genetically modified drinks, whisked away to cubicles inside our self driving cars, immersed in a Google glass augmented reality of pop-up messages and floating emoticons, while unmanned heavy machinery extracts the earth’s last resources, and autonomous drones keep the desperate rest of the world scratching dirt outside of our grinning, DHS approved, commercial-break festooned eating contest.

Homo sapiens have been on the planet for around 250,000 years, and while our  saga of violence and destruction are not new, the current planet destroying scale and pathological disregard for the life system is unique.  In spite of our assertions in the West that "this i just the way things are," the last few centuries can only be viewed as a thin crust of human existence.  Welcome to the lunatic fringe.

Pittsburgh CBS affiliate KDKA recently reported on drones equipped with facial recognition technology that could some day be used to monitor the population and scan for behavior or individuals deemed suspicious by authorities.   Almost as disturbing as the implications of the technology is the scripted presentation in which the news anchors do nothing to raise the alarm of surveillance abuses in the midst of Snowden's NSA revelations, and instead normalize the "freakiness" of having one's face captured and being put "in the system."  In the end the anchors conclude that the development of this surveillance state technology is "fascinating" and "really cool stuff."  Clearly the interests that are working through this station are attempting to downplay any legitimate fears one might have from witnessing these kinds of capabilities in order to get the populace to accept constant monitoring by the State. The only question that remains is will this technology come into full implementation before the environmental and economic meltdown get into full swing?  Indeed, the mantra, it's okay to have my privacy shredded because I haven't done anything wrong, will be meaningless when the true purpose of the control grid becomes apparent in the midst of an inevitable backlash from a corporate government led destabilization of the systems we have come to depend on for our lives. 

Last Spring, upon viewing the internet video phenomenon, Kony 2012, I was struck by the extremely professional orchestration of powerful scenes interspersed with subliminally fast bouts of symbolic imagery. The emotionally charged story thus assembled told of the plight of child soldiers abducted in Uganda and their possible liberation through US empire, pressured to act by Invisible Children Inc. and it's legion of followers.  The story was certainly compelling at times, and the accounts of people like Jacob, who was victimized by the LRA under the leadership of Joseph Kony, were truly heart wrenching.   I never the less always remain skeptical when a feel-good, detail-lite narrative ties together American militarism and rapid fire imagery. It  wasn't that I doubted the authenticity of people like Jacob, but rather the outcomes which would be achieved by embracing the US military as a strategic ally.

But what at first struck me as a well done propaganda piece, very quickly had me thinking something even stranger was taking place.  I noticed patterns of images and words that suggested that the agenda of the organization was being subtly inserted into the film in a way similar to the kind of branding and manipulative subliminal messaging one would expect from an ad campaign, not a grass roots human rights organization.  I contend that the film goes even a step further than this, into a form of black magic.  I will explain.

What initially got my attention was not the barely noticeable frame (pictured above) from 27:01 in the film (more on that in a moment), but rather the repeated images of Saturn's rings, seen below, used in both the intro and final sequences.  While I will demonstrate that there are several interesting connections with this planet and the Kony 2012 film, I cannot conclude that the film, as a truly magical act, is designed consciously to be a form of ritualized supplication to the ancient god.  Ultimately, this does not matter.  What matters is the appropriation of magical and pop culture symbols, words,  imagery, and references to notions like destiny and cosmic significance, which channeled through powerful emotionalism, create a surface narrative of humanitarianism in order to realize a hidden desire for power. 

In religious ritual and occult practices, numbers are often seen as having significance and power.  Sacred dates and times and phrases like "the third time is the charm" indicates the way such notions effortlessly spill into our so-called modern world. We see both an overt, as well as an occult use of numbers within Kony 2012, whose title itself is partially numeric.  The film is a total of 29 minutes and 59 seconds, and when the intro sequence tells us that "the game has changed," and "the next twenty seven minutes are an experiment, but in order for it to work, you have to pay attention," two things are accomplished.   Firstly, through a kind verbally induced reality shift,  the doorway for our own inclusion into possibilities that would not otherwise be possible has been flung open.  We have suddenly been magically transformed from spectators into participants in an experiment, within a game whose familiar rules have changed.  At this beginning stage of the film, we are vocally compelled to "pay attention," and thus led into a state of increased suggestibility through a sort of hypnotic induction.  Just as we are told to pay attention, a series of images are flashed too quickly to consciously take in, (but which include kids running as revolutions through the streets, and a depiction of a triangle, pointed down).  Secondly, the importance of this particular time frame, attached to the number twenty seven, has been authoritatively defined for us.

The so called period of Saturn Returns is a time in which Saturn literally returns to the same position in the heavens that it resided in at one's birth, supposedly effecting one's life in significant ways between the ages of 27 and 29.  In the same intro sequence, right after the camera pans from Saturn and captures three stars appearing to fall towards Earth, there is a dramatic pause and a black screen, and then immediately we see the scene of a birth, the birth of Jason's son, to be exact.  At the end of the film, a few seconds before the promised 27 minutes (and just a few seconds after minute 29 of the film), Saturn does indeed return in similar fashion as seen at the beginning, coupled with images of earth and a counting down clock. The images of the ringed planet are fast and seemingly unrelated to the movie as a whole, and thus they are hidden in plain sight, likely only subconsciously witnessed by most viewers.  Yet their occult effect, if not to literally conjure the Roman god, is to establish a cosmic presence and a sense of arriving destiny.  The message: a new age is at hand.

After reflecting on the film's mention of 27 minutes and discovering the highly suspect placements of Saturn in the film, on a lark, I skipped ahead to minute 27.  One second later, at 27:01, situated just before another one of those dramatic pause-to-black-screen moments, was the screen shot taken above, with the word Power followed by a message in Latin.  (This portion of the film can also be seen in a youtube clip below)

Before I get to that hidden message, I want to mention a few more things about numbers. The Kony campaign was set to expire December 31, 2012, a fact which was pronounced pretty clearly in the production by US Senator Jame Inhofe (incidentally, author of The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, and member of the secretive conservative Christian C Street organization known as The Family which receives significant funding from the parapsychologically oriented Institute of Noetic Sciences founder, Paul N. Temple.)  So here we have two distinctive delineations of time, (one of which is shown twice as a clock counting backwards, accompanied by periodic appearances of celestial bodies, the other as a static date, 12/31/12) which in and of themselves suggest a sort of magical progression according to hidden, cosmological forces. 

While one of the filmmakers claimed in their recent followup film, MOVE, that 2012 was simply the year that they wanted to put all their weight behind the movement and see Kony arrested, it does seem a little odd to put together an artificial time table around something one can't really control, and which had already been going on for nearly a decade.  Unless, of course, the time frame wasn't entirely artificial.  Perhaps there was a sort of "magical" tie in to the range of dates falling around the same period, which included not only the end of the Mayan calendar, the Winter Solstice, the Christmas holy day, and the beginning of the Gregorian New Year, but also the old pagan celebration of Saturnalia, which is put at December 23 of each year.  December 31 would make the most sense to a modern Western, taxpaying audience (arbitrary date though it ultimately may be), but was there a general "end of the year" sacred symbology at work, which could make room for the old Roman god Saturn? 

To get back to the above image, the Latin words below the word Power, as a mere blip on screen, might read to some subconscious minds as a sort of ancient, magical or alchemical text.  In my estimation, this frame points to the heart of the intention behind the spell cast by Kony 2012.  The words are actually attributed to Cicero, a Roman statesman who would have been alive during a time when Saturnalia was celebrated. Today these words are commonly used as placeholders in graphic design and webpage formatting, but why they show up for a fraction of a second, probably unnoticed by most, under the word Power, into the tightly edited Kony 2012, is a bit of a mystery.  The words themselves translate to

"No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful.  Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure"

The focus in this frame, then, appears to be an appeal to ancient lost wisdom, and thus modern occultism, functioning as an arcane magical instruction on temperance, rationality, and forbearance as a means to obtain power and pleasure.  Further cementing this magical formula for power within the spectrum of Kony 2012's emphasis on time, is the fact that the film begins and ends with an alternate translation of a quote from Victor Hugo: "Nothing is more powerful than an idea who's time has come." [emphasis mine]  Certainly the urgency of time and powerful ideas go hand in hand with revolution, and a less obvious meaning of revolution is also the movement of a planet, Saturn to pick an example, around the sun.

The way this all ties together is that the film serves as a sort of multi-layered incantation for which the desired effect is one of a changing of the current power structure.  Joseph Kony, as Russel has stated, plays a critical role in lending credibility to the initial stages of this new, gathering force, and therefore the warlord himself becomes a sacred object of desire, a kind of ring of power that denotes deserved entitlement to its bearer.  On the surface, the power shift of which Russel speaks, transacted through Kony's apprehension,  is to be understood as a revolutionary  empowerment of the masses who are now able to "see each other" through the dawning of a "New World" of Facebook, in time for the yearnings of the so-called millennials. 

Millenials, referenced by Russel in MOVE, are the tech savvy, socially networked, and stereotypically purposeless young adults of today who simply need a cause to get behind in order to make their mark.  The name itself calls to mind notions of an end of days, a new era, or a sort of mystical empowerment woven into the fabric of destiny and time. The kind of power shift that these millenials and the masses at  large are supposed to achieve is demonstrated through a diagrammatic, magical reversal in the film, when the power pyramid of our current reality is flipped upside down.  In the clip below, such individuals are given a familiar guise, again with a revolutionary resonance with V is for Vendetta.  Crowds of the gathered, "now visible" American children working for the Invisible Children organization, make copious use of the peace symbol V, (a symbol which echoes the image of Russel's upturned pyramid).  Here Kony 2012 engages in brilliant symbolic appropriation,  a magical act which further contextualizes the film's scenes of radical populism in their cloak of anarchistic action, giving clear umbrage to those of a Guy Fawkes, OWS bent.  This all-night covert activism, dubbed Cover the Night, was part of the plan to Make Kony Famous, and bears all the associations of risk, fear, excitement, and magic of operating during the "witching hour".  The tension between that which is seen and unseen, occult and common knowledge, is clear in two contrasting titles.

Additionally, Saturn worship was often accompanied by child sacrifice, and the December holiday Saturnalia, with its carnival like atmosphere, was known for temporarily flipping the social power structure, in which the peasants acted as the higher ups for the duration of the festivities.  The flipped order, of course, strikes a chord with Russel's inverted pyramid, and eerily suggests a larger charade into which we are playing. As for the child sacrifices, Kony 2012 is a story about going after a brutal warlord who abducts children, but in this pursuit, Invisible Children specifically targets largely unknown children for a transformative rise into greatness.  To which group of invisible children is he referring?  As a musical actor whose career didn't quite take off, is Russel the invisible child now given the stage (seen prominently in the Fourth Estate Trailer?) And here we see yet another synchronistic opposition, in which ultimately the young minds of those incorporated into the Kony campaign are swept up and sacrificed, not simply to save those children sacrificed by Kony, but as an offering to the structures of a deep power.  When Anthropologist Ayesha Nibbe spoke to a group of young Kony 2012 campaign supporters about Ugandan history withheld from the film, she was shocked to discover that though they were unfamiliar with many facts that ran contrary to their understanding, they would none the less continue to cling to an organization which served their personal needs, rather than an authentic form of humanitarian transformation.   This represents the type of invisible hold engendered by sacrifices to the well streams of power.

And although I find the connections between Kony 2012 and magical ritual to be compelling, I also recognize the speculation that is involved in the specifics of an apparent connection to Saturn.  None the less, Russel, who identifies himself as Christian, is without a doubt using a form of occult practice in a type of magical working for very specific ends.  He is channeling a simplified and false narrative through a collection of carefully placed symbols and imagery, drawn intuitively from a vast, and now electronically connected, cross-cultural milieu.  Words like "clever marketing," or "PR" are simply masks for Russel's own obscurantism, which calls, in truth, not for an upending of the current order, but the descent of a voo doo practicing mad man to facilitate concurrent rise of a visionary Christian millenialist through, perhaps temporary, technological coronation.  The rise and fall of these characters calls to mind the intersecting up and down points of the hexagram. 

While it's possible Russel and his cadre could make headway into the halls of power, they cannot succeed in the apparent goals of pyramid inversion.  This narrative serves merely as a form of magical misdirection, to render invisible the need to gather resources for self aggrandizement.  And this, I believe, plays directly into Russel's inner demons, which are not so uncommon: the need to do something meaningful, to feel empowered and capable and accepted, while working within the confines of a corrupt power structure, trying to maintain sanity, continuity, and sanctity.  His so called psychotic break, which stunned the nation after his video became so popular so fast, was another facet to the dichotomy of what is seen and what is hidden.  Here we saw a reflexive and viceral enactment of revealing the hidden, breaking down social boundaries even as he had called for a massive shift in the social fabric.  Russel was manifesting the symptoms of his own internal divisions in a world that had at first appeared accepting of his message, and which had then abruptly turned against it.  These were the powerful currents that Russel was channeling, and ultimately the things that were not visible to him, or that he purposefully hid and hid from, which became the raw material for a psychic backlash.  When Russel addressed the conservative Christian school Liberty University in regards to his take on "hypocritical Christians" needing to get active, his millinarian colored speech invoked a call to being like Christ, and not outright drawing religious lines in the sand.  While one might applaud his tolerance for others, one can also observe the crafting of a secret, conflicted persona, ultimately steeped in both metaphysical elevation and severe judgement for those whose actions stray from unspoken doctrine.

Russel's recent film, MOVE, an answer to his critics, lacks the symbolic sophistication of Kony 2012.  Perhaps it is a drying up of funding, a retreat of creative powers, the need to meet a deadline, or a slight chastening from Russel's public meltdown, which makes this latest installment look less like a work of magical propaganda.  None the less, Russel assures us in the film that the "experiment" continues.  That same image of Power shown early on also flashes briefly within the new film.  It is clear he is there to reclaim a fallen mantle, if not as an individual, then perhaps as an apparently humbled member of a group.  If this be true, Russel will in all likelihood, unfortunately, forge ahead with plans of conjuring manhunts with the likes of AFRICOM and the Lords of Empire.  Given a long history of failed US interventionism and human rights abuses, it is not a future a sane person would envy or support, but the mesmerizing powers of the media and the clear talents and passions of Invisible Children will likely ensure it is a sacrifice that will continue to get backing.  In this unfolding illusionist's drama, in the words Sverker Finnström, from his work KONY 2012, Military Humanitarianism,
and the Magic of Occult Economies: "the “good guys” on the actual battlefields are not necessarily characterized as such because they are truly good, but rather by decree, and because they are recruited to and allied with the apparently morally sanctified side." 

For the Romans, Saturn was god of agriculture and the harvest, requiring sacrifice for good returns, and to Western civilization, Africa is widely viewed as the womb of humanity, having borne the fruit of mankind.   Now a deepening geopolitical interest for resource hungry nations like the US and China has placed countries in Africa in the role of increased exploitation.  Under Obama, in the midst of continued undeclared, illegal wars and drone strikes, military deployment to African countries continue.   What sort of harvest will this strange and violent bouquet of  offerings bring?

The recent shooting tragedy has pushed to the forefront issues around gun control and monitoring mental health, yet the elephant in the room remains the State sponsored violence that occurs on a daily basis on a much larger scale.  The pathology of lone gunmen within a pathological system is only a powerful shock when one believes the system as a whole is basically morally upright.   The outrage, fear, and frustration that people are expressing casts into strong relief the the lack of anger, action, culpability, or even interest surrounding the mass murders we are collectively funding, and the environmental violence we are perpetrating, whose scope dwarfs the growing constellation of mass killers we have witnessed over the years.  The lack of empathy for babies born with birth defects in Vietnam or Fallujah, the hundreds of thousands of children who died in Iraq during the 90's at the hands of US imposed economic sanctions, the countless civilians killed in our latest Middle East incursions,  juxtaposed against Black Friday level consumption and the teary speech of Nobel Peace Prize winning President "I have a drone," is part of the same psychological soup from which Adam Lanza emerges.  It is a world where what saddens us is not the depth to which we are all complicit in a culture of violence that spans the globe, but where instead we are fleetingly traumatized  when seemingly senseless violence outside of ourselves victimizes individuals that remind us of those humans who we do value.   

The current interdependent suffering we are wading through is a sticky societal syndrome, and cannot be "solved" technologically, when technology itself emerges not in some neutral space, but within a context of Machiavellian Realism occurring at a global scale, where, for example, corrupt forces turn the world's food commodities into gambling chips, and corral much of humanity into the futile pursuit of accumulating numbers.    Realize that our economies depend upon destabilizing weapons exports.  Realize that artificial intelligence research funding primarily comes from the military, and that the majority of financial trades come from unfeeling machines maximizing profit no matter what the human cost.  And as the UN drug and crime tzar Antonio Maria Costa laid bare,  during the 2008 financial collapse the illegal drug trade provided the needed source of liquid capital to keep our fraudulent way of life afloat.  When former UBS banker Bradley Birkenfeld revealed that 20,000 millionaire and billionaire US clients, undoubted beneficiaries of military industrial complex investments,  were illegally hiding their money from taxation in Swiss accounts, he was the only one to receive prison time.   All things intertwine, and the foundations we have built upon are rotten to the core.  

Adam Lanza is a convenient place to point our fingers, a sign post for the deepening augmented reality disconnect, in which we can tell ourselves that we as individuals and as a society are functioning in a sane manner, as we babble on about the endless fictions of pop culture.  It is because we have never deeply grappled with the fact that we are a nation built upon land grabs, extermination, and slavery, (at best a passing source of guilt, and at worst something justified in the name of progress) that we collectively ignore the criminally violent, nationally orchestrated, and technologically facilitated behaviors which continue up to this very moment.  It is also why we are simultaneously terrified by the implications of an Adam Lanza loose among us, armed with a technology far less destructive than a Hellfire missile, but for most of us living on this side of the Green Zone, far more menacing.  Similarly, it is for this reason that things like psycho-pharmaceuticals at the macro scale will at best become a means for shaping desired elite outcomes within an undemocratically forged future, perhaps helping us better cope with the suffocating symptoms of realities we dare not approach. The 2012 NDAA, the Patriot Act, the lack of meaningful reforms and prosecutions after the financial meltdown, the Wallstreet entrenched two party war system, the absence of effective social change in the face of a climate destabilization which is outstripping scientific predictions, should be indicators not of what's to come, but what's already here.  Adam Lanza is a mere ripple in the tidal wave.  And while predictive analytics search for the next crime hotspot or neighborhood psycho, further empowering our gestating Homeland Security funded police state, the pathological CEO's, international financiers, and government fat cats will enjoy all the protections money, private and publicly funded security, and a brainwashed society can provide.  Unless we are willing to make significant changes in our own lives and communities, outside of proposed gun control or health regulations, in all our moments of Shock and Awe, we will continue to depend upon the unstable order that this underlying, participatory violence creates.

The Android phone enabled app utilizes GPS tracking and Google Maps data to allow players to traverse the actual world and discover critical "portals" which are invisible to the naked eye, but anchored through code to real sites like statues, pieces of corporate art, and buildings.  The user is alerted on their smart phone when they are in close proximity to these mysterious, "energy emitting" sites, and in their bid to gain control of them, they are faced with various options.   Portals are secured by "hacking" into them, setting up "resonators," and "linking" them together to create "fields."  Users are further enabled on their quest by collecting bits of Exotic Matter (XM) as they journey throughout their locale searching for and defending these portals.  Within this context, the smartphone becomes a sort of futuristic handheld tool for navigation and techno-magical conquest, creating a sense of exploration, adventure, mysticism, and achievement for the user whose activities, in the real world, are little more than a data mine and a revenue stream for Google corporation.

The mystery that shrouds the game itself, the appeal of turning one's technological device into a powerful and unique tool, and the mystique of becoming a member of a secret society, certainly have their appeal in a society drawn in by pop culture phenomena like Harry Potter, Avatar, The Secret, and The Da Vinci Code.  And while the social enactment of fantasy world games has been around since Dungeons and Dragons, and video games have likewise been played for decades, "alternative reality games," which hold the potential to evolve into full fledged "augmented reality" worlds should be of particular concern, especially when conducted under the auspices of Google. 

Additionally, Google has been scrutinized by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, who in 2010 filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain information on Google's relationship with the United States spy agency, the NSA.  The Circuit Court ruled in favor of the NSA, who would neither "confirm nor deny" its relationship with Google and its policy on spying on US citizens, in spite of media reports that the agency and the tech giant were working together. 

Would be participants in Google's alternative reality may not consider too deeply what it means to accept identities and be defined by the parameters of a multinational corporation with ties to the military industrial complex.  And one can only speculate at this time if Ingress, or later iterations of alternate and augmented reality games will involve storyline advancement through the purchase of material goods or interactions with brands and product placements within staged zones.  But with online games already in existence, like Second Life, where it is common for users to purchase virtual real estate for "real" money and purchase real products in virtual stores, it should be clear that games like Ingress will increasingly blur the lines between what is real and what is fabricated.  In fact, Ingress made use of an actor assuming the identity of an artist named Tyco, who staged a conspiratorial outburst at a comic book convention, shouting fragmented Ingress plot hooks as if they were a real thing.  "Tyco" was subsequently hauled off by "security," and  footage of the fake outburst was later used in a story advancement video as a part of the game, demonstrating the intentional push to dissolve boundaries between the spectacle of the real world and contrived, participatory fantasy worlds.

As people in the developed world continually seek out lives of diversion and experiential novelty, relating to one another through fictional television and Hollywood productions, the division between fantasy and reality may essentially drop away altogether.  The real danger here is not only that  individuals are literally paying to have their behavior defined and monitored by multinational corporations that work closely with shadowy government agencies, but additionally, that this type of immersive fantasy play fundamentally widens the disconnect between individuals and the myriad crises that our society and the world at large face.  While augmented reality gamers may claim they understand the distinction between what is real and what is "in game," for those who are increasingly immersing themselves in the knowledge of actual events in Earth 1.0, talk of using portal keys to link portals on city streets in the US while drones piloted by civilians in Nevada kill civilians in nations across the globe, should be viewed as a manifestation of an increasingly pathological culture. 

The ancient, and so-called superstitious past, in which animistic spirits believed to inhabit a living, breathing earth were widely celebrated, has come full circle, overwritten by a techno spirit world that is inhabited by the ghosts of a brutal and manipulative reality, desperate to deny and escape itself.  In such a world, it is the few who attempt to connect the dots and understand underlying problems.  Ingress serves as a well crafted diversion, heading off and co-opting through clever fiction those who might have an inclination to look deeply into the dark circumstances being shaped around us.  Thwarting real community and transformation, Ingress provides fodder for the rantings of a diseased culture about things that only exist on pixelated screens.  Having spent years in the solitary confinement of bedrooms and living rooms in front of monitors, lacking contact with the diverse consciousnesses of a living world, the inhabitants of the Ingress game are heading outdoors, babbling about unseen portals while the planet burns.   It from this deeply penetrating CGI phantasmagoria from which we are now tasked to awaken.