Back in the heydey 2000-2002 of the Sci Fi Channel / Atom Films partnership, I was addicted to the bizarre and divers short films hosted on its online portal. Films such as Antebios seared themselves into my adolescent permanent visual memory.
Antebios is popular, and remembered. It’s pure MT AvP hurrah. But there was another film I never forgot – one I’m unable to find anywhere online. It too features a large insect, but has a very different message. A Thal message.
The film is shot in black and white, from distorted, delirious camera angles. A solitary, tortured cartoonish slaves, obsesses, compulsively drawing on the walls of his apartment. With precise, flawless black pen strokes, he makes numberless cheerful, chatty cartoon people. Each speaks a perfectly-formed, empty thought bubble. Thousands upon thousands of them cover every surface of the apartment.
At last, the camera zooms back from the wall. We see that the density of the cartoon people creates a pattern – a giant cockroach. It twitches slightly in characteristic insectoid fashion.
And thus we learn the truth that has broken the cartoonist’s mind.
—
I have evolved my “void”" koan from “no mind” to its ultimate form – “evo psych”. This is true nihilism: it merely acknowledges what is. The sum of collective human action is nothing more than a robotic metacockroach: scurrying through garbage, eating shit, dying, breeding indiscriminately. A twitchery of action, signifying nothing; all according to the predictable, predetermined responses of a primitive neural network.
This is the ultimate shield, shunt, and heatsink for pain and negativity, because all is meaningless. At the same time, it gives a powerful comprehension of the motives, actions, and expected outcomes in any situation. Humanity ceases to be a mystery.
The MM looks at the cockroach and warmly feels it is as beautiful as a tan moth, and needs only a higher consciousness to guide it.
The MT sees, with difficulty, the cockroach for what it is, and goes mad trying to fight it, or dark becoming like it.
The TT senses the cockroach intuitively and wants to leave it.
The TM sees a tan moth, but senses a cockroach, so he is always loving and leaving it.
The Cro Mag does not see the cockroach, because he is himself no more than a twitching limb.
The Geth of Mass Effect, though of limited individual intelligence, achieve emergent consciousness via high bandwidth digital network. Humans are rather the opposite: relatively greater individual brainpower for some, but low bandwidth monkey network that produces an emergent cockroach. The internet begins to change this; before that, books. Mass human society is an abomination.
Lest you think that this insight is wholly negative, recall that a cockroach is untroubled by metaphysical inadequacy. The monkey network offers untold pleasures – RSD’s “state”, Illuminatus’ higher circuits. The party is under the fridge.