It is a sad state of affairs, a “sign of the times,” that even our most intrepid augurs, divination rods, omens, oracles and forecasts were hushed. And so we offer, albeit with much reddening of our facial regions, a retrograde prophecy:  Amidst a dionysian videodrome populated by those attuned and within the Portland Metro Area of the local group, an unfettered unfurling of free-floating pixels.  Of beams brought on one’s own to inhabit in spectral pallor the parlor known as New American Art Union.

To humanoids fumbling for a suitable reference, the event-scene was whispered as something of a “photo booth.”  Emphasis, mine, then, on “john wilkes,” and the assassinations of character  inflicted in textbook vampler tradition—-sweet talking the vampling in waiting, then subjecting said vampling to the process of any old vampire’s scheme: vidsonic nutrients ripped out of context and left adrift—like derelict data bodies who then wander the walls of this and that establishment.

In ficto-quizzical quarters, vampladelia, or, vampling used to engender a psychedelic affect, is metaphorically speaking, a black box device, system or object which can be viewed solely in terms of its input, output and transfer characteristics without any knowledge of its internal workings.  Being liminal has also been– of late– the favored geo-political posture of interactors found lurking in the outer regions of mankind’s information ecosystems.

Call it interactive decay —-a process by which an unstable liminoid loses energy by emitting compromising articles. The emission is spontaneous, in that the decay is emergent even without collision with another article.  Post collision and collusion: The mental maw of many netizens is lockjawed: nibbling news where once there was gluttony, haphazardly patching up leaks with Pentagon Papers. Factoids protruding from these neutered networks much like parts of a corpse will protrude from an ill-made grave.

In the 19th c., proto-noir was more or less identifiable in the mode of gloom–the intrinsically murky.  It was when Claude Chappe’s semaphore lines were all the rage and blow-hards like N. Bonaparte dotted the lands with a complex network of these optical telegraphs that murky things, too, started getting interesting.   “Three hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets,” he famously proclaimed, boasting the power of the press, foreshadowing the impact of blogospheric bombardments we know today.  Signal and noise became grayed out, inaccessible in either extreme. Evident it was that operating an optical telegraph in the vicinity of a marsh or bog, quag or swamp would provide frequent collisions with fogginess and subsequent bouts of interference.  Organized crimes would soon follow.

While imbibing such non-normative nourishment would actually be, and indeed still is, vital to survival and resistance to a monocultural diet-tribe, Napoleonic types are so often rattled by decentralized modes of meaning that such optical elusion is a real chagrin!  Night fall, let alone trolls, swamp things and other such shadow beings who provided then, as they do today, a bevvy of provocative perils for unsuspecting netizens.

As Quagczar’s very hideous existence reminds us daily, there are marshlands amidst this info-dimensional vortex, too.  Embrace the murk, friends.  You can carry a gun and a rope to scare off snakes and avoid quicksand if you please, but marvel at the info-marsh before it dries up!

Net neutrality debacles, should they fall forward to the neutering of the Net,  will force mass migrations of variously strange life-forms into the physical realm.  Of this Noahchian flooding of virtual life-forms into the terrestrial lands, it is the data bodies who may be particularly mischief-inclined. Doppelgangers of the virtually enthralled populace, data bodies already rifle through feebly firewalled minds of plugged-in mammals who peruse the networks unconscious of their heightened vulnerability.

At land, mental file transfer will continue with mechanisms that are as of yet unknown to humanoids.  Like second-wave vampling without the altruistic agenda, a mode of mind-jacking will materialize, one that is in cahoots with unfathomably dark and labyrinthine forms of panopticonsciousness.

Indeed panopticonscientious objection is concievable, the system itself  is capable of considering how and when to blink.