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.

Another brush with fame for Weird Fiction. This time it’s Desmond Mawk’s obscure series “Night Time In the Cosmos” on nebulous cosmic entities and associated fauna.  This episode leaves something to be desired in its cursory overview of second-wave vampling and the Hertzian depths plumbed by our dear friend Irving Bleak. But, you never really could trust the fleshy minds of mammals as safe havens of veracity!  It’s edutainment, as always, from that supreme cad Desmond Mawk.

Vampling, in certain quarters, is an affectionate term for infant vampires, too. These little ones, as Wikipedia notes are “born of the unions of mortals and vampires, which only happens when a spell is placed on the vampire.” Again, attention to the spell, or more precisely, the spelling out with keystrokes, the cyborg variant of the late, great Lettrist Isidore Isou shot through with vampiric yearnings.  This is our first hint.

Such synthesis is second nature for a nocturnal predator like myself, wikipedians, and truly the webmaster of vampler.net who does relate the undead to dead media in an admission that vampling is “a young art and it does have a tendency to feed from its own likenesses”

Our embedded journalist recently aligned Weird Fiction with the tropes of Cosmic Terror. Following this formulation one wonders if the vample, the “video sample” itself, is another node in a vast numinous system, a key component of some hideous cultural interface. The vampler, then,  as an operative in somewhat of a Eshunian alien abduction scenario.  The vampler (video sampler and/or vampire youth) possessing its onlooker with an amped up version of Dracula’s spellbinding trance.  Aided by unidentified craft, and resultant in much more explicit forms of captivity than mere hypnosis.

Close encounters with these children of the night are likely underwritten by unfathomable Cosmic hosts, these occurrences augment the efforts of the mental transmission schemes so dear to the Great Old Ones.  Cosmic Terror aside, vamplers operate essentially like any old vampires.  vidsonic nutrients ripped out of original context–what beautiful music they make!–and then it’s night of the living dead media all over again.

A curious and increasingly frequent “second wave” of vampling has been gaining ground, an adaptive strategy against read-only cultural forces.  The vampler is already a prosumer (producer-consumer) but reports of ruptured consciousness amongst everyday media users suggests an evolved species is, and has long been, hovering overhead.

An artist in the information environment, Tom Sherman, early on tuned into this, explaining it as a psychological condition in his theory of “blanking,”:

“There is a new psychological phenomenon emerging in this era of hyper- telemedia, information abundance and overload. People of all ages and walks of life are ‘blanking’_______that is, they are shutting down or experiencing momentary ruptures of consciousness…People…gather data from multiple sources simultaneously. Instead of simply listening to the radio or watching TV, [they] read a newspaper, magazine or book while listening and/or watching while [they]have something to eat and [they] have a conversation on the phone…they choose to compose [their] immediate information environment from multiple sources, mixing [their] multi-layered reality on the spot.”

Picnolepsy is a similar condition discussed by Paul Virilio and tellingly pieced apart in Ryan Dirks’ dispatch “Interrupting the Future.”  Weird Fiction opts for alternative readings as well, namely a vampire infused echo of previous revelations: time-travelers may already walk among us!

A second-wave vampler, with prosumer (proffesional consumer) gear is operating on the innards of future minds.  This sort of vampler arrives from the past to nourish itself on future likenesses.  Harvesting the cluttered consciousnesses, that are loaded down with so many incoming signals, euphemistically we could call this time-shifting.  Hypermediated minds ruptured, a psychological condition and, or,  a sign that second wave vampling is afoot!

With the public domain diminishing rapidly, new resources are sought to replenish the dwindling storehouses of likenesses, so vital to the vamplers existence. Equipped with time travel devices, the second wave vampler shifts from grave-robbing to mind-jacking, snatching images from the future, straight from the multitasking mind, pre-mediated.  Creative Commons liscenses are immediately attached to these intellectual properties as a reverse-engineered subterfuge redolent of other such activities that fly in face of the (copy)rites of passage required to re-animate present day dead media images.

Vampling is Dead, Long Live the Vampling!