In the Crazy Place

by Richard Thieme

The internet, like a kaleidoscope, unceasingly juxtaposes images in different patterns. Turning on the computer in the morning is almost like casting the I ching or throwing bones.   Sometimes the images form a coherent picture of everyday reality, but sometimes . . . sometimes, they illuminate a crazy place.

Three translucent images came to the desktop the other day to be tilted into an architect's model.

One came from a Wall Street Journal science column by Sharon Begley earlier this year. Begley wrote about videotapes and how the field of focus skews what we see.

It sounded like a simple idea: videotaping police interrogations and letting juries see the raw footage so they could evaluate confessions for themselves.

[S]tudies show that we assign responsibility based on what we think we see, and that in turn is determined by the field of focus of the camera. It's called “illusory causation,” and it means that we ascribe causality to people in the foreground and not to people we can't see.

But studies show that we assign responsibility based on what we think we see, and that, in turn, is determined by the field of focus of the camera. It's called “illusory causation,” and it means that we ascribe causality to people in the foreground and not to people we can't see.

When the video shows an individual answering questions, we give undue weight to the words of that person. When the camera shot shows an interrogator, too, as he asks questions, responsibility is diffused.

In one case, according to the Ohio State University psychologist who conducted the study, “the simple change from an equal-focus confession to a suspect-focus confession doubled the conviction rate.”

In other words, when we see the bigger picture, we realize that the context is the content of what we see. That's a metaphor, of course, for how we are led to focus on what we are meant to see and why those in the background never enter our thoughts. Out of sight, out of mind.

I was thinking of the disconnected images presented to us without any context, the juxtaposition of stories about biological attacks and stories about lost dogs, and beginning to feel as if I lived in the crazy place, when another clipping popped up.

The Spanish newspaper El Pais (according to the Sydney Morning Herald ) reported that historians had uncovered the use of modern art as a deliberate form of torture. Mind-bending prison cells built by anarchist artists in Spain during the Civil War in the thirties turned the work of Kandinsky, Klee and Dali into inspiration for secret cells and torture centers.

Alphonse Laurencic, according to the report of his trial by the Fascists in 1939, invented a form of “psychotechnic” torture, creating “coloured cells” inspired by ideas of geometric abstraction, surrealism and avant garde art theories on the psychological properties of colours.

“Beds were placed at a 20-degree angle, making them hard to sleep on, and the floors of the 1.8 metre by 0.9 metre cells were scattered with bricks and other geometric blocks to prevent prisoners from walking backwards and forwards. The only option left to prisoners was staring at the walls, curved and covered with mind-altering patterns of cubes, squares, straight lines and spirals, which utilised tricks of colour, perspective and scale to cause mental confusion and distress. Lighting effects gave the impression that the dizzying patterns on the wall were moving. A stone bench was similarly designed to send a prisoner sliding to the floor. In addition, some cells were painted with tar so that they would warm up in the sun and produce asphyxiating heat.”

We see what we are intended to see.

Life in the 21st century is a Laurencic cell, its walls alive with moving images and whirling patterns. Try to sit still and chairs dump us onto the floor. Tell someone that the walls are crawling toward the door and they'll think you're crazy. They can only see you, they can't see the crazy place in which you are sitting so they can't know you are simply describing the world around you, that you are in fact bitterly sane.

We keep reading Kafka because he was one of the first to describe the crazy place. A neurotic Jew in the hostile environment of eastern European Christendom, he disclosed our alienation in a way that turned insiders into outsiders. In the crazy place of his skewed vision, roads turn back on themselves like Möbius strips, and we never reach our destinations. Kafka transformed the environs of Prague into a Laurencic cell, shifting the angle of the camera ever so slightly so we could see the walls and the ceiling.

Kafka would love the digital world where nothing is what it seems – except when it is. He would love an internet brimming with pixilated symbols as transitory as mist.

The next digital clip came from the Washington Post . According to a recently released Syrian prisoner, another person named Mohammed Haydar Zammar – a Syrian-born naturalized German citizen who had lived in Hamburg and functioned as al Qaeda's prime recruiter there – was being held in Damascus at the Far' Falastin detention center run by Syrian military intelligence, “a warren of lightless cells each barely three feet long, three feet wide and less than six feet in height.”

Zammar was arrested in Morocco in November 2001, then flown secretly to Syria two weeks later, his detention a result of cooperation between the United States and Syria, a nation otherwise condemned as a sponsor of terrorism.

Zammar thought his German citizenship would force Morocco to send him home. Instead he found himself shipped off to the crazy place where tiny cells prevent prisoners from lying down. Forced to remain upright or hunched over, they suffer crippling degeneration of the bones in addition to having nothing else to do but listen to the screams of the damned when it isn't their turn to be tortured.

One can imagine Zammar, a loud arrogant man who stood six feet tall and weighed 300 pounds, as his grandiose illusion of self-control collapsed into the realization that he was in the crazy place. An image of Zammar on the nightly news would show him sitting there all alone, shooting off his mouth on behalf of jihad. It would not show his keepers shooting electricity into his genitals. That might mitigate the feeling that the scumbag deserves exactly what he gets.

It's hard to believe in straight lines when you keep sliding onto the floor. How can people who can lie down at night understand people who can't? What do you think, dear reader? Are the streaming images, ideas, and symbols downloaded into our brains every day from the Net, the networks, the newspapers intended to disclose the bigger picture? Or are they intended to show us a close-up of a single man, his guilt obvious from his expression, so we can draw the appropriate conclusions?

Just as IBM assisted the Nazis in sorting and shipping those to be slaughtered, state and non-state networks that obliterate borders are coming alive everywhere in nebulous clouds of power, transforming alliances that shift with the wind.

Terrorism, whether carried out by states or non-state actors, is the dark side of digitalization, network-centric life and globalization, just as fascism was the dark side of mechanization and industrialization. Just as IBM assisted the Nazis in sorting and shipping those to be slaughtered, state and non-state networks that obliterate borders are coming alive everywhere in nebulous clouds of power, transforming alliances that shift with the wind. All the bets made by prior technologies are off; assassinations are the rule, not the exception, and the back alleys of the dirty business of spy against sky are now the open courtyards in which we all walk.

To become conscious of life in the crazy place is to become conscious of dread. No one in his right mind wants that. Besides, who reads Kafka anyway?

Better to acquiesce, better to believe that prisoners are all crazy, monsters without antecedents, better to believe that we live in a nightmare with no history, a meaningless mix of cubes, squares, straight lines and spirals that move across the wall, slide down to the floor, and crawl in the night into our brimming brains.

Richard Thieme speaks and writes about technology and the human condition. He has written for Wired, Salon, Information Security, CISO, Forbes, Secure Business Quarterly, Village Voice, Asia Times Online, Counter Punch, many others. A collected edition of his writings, Islands in the Clickstream will be published in July 2004 by Syngress Publishing. He may be reached by email at rthieme@thiemeworks.com .