Good morning.
As astute readers will observe, this substack is named after a symbol from the Thomas Pynchon novella The Crying of Lot 49. That symbol is the the muted posthorn, which looks like this:
(Look up W.A.S.T.E. if you’re so inclined!)
Within the world of the novel, the muted posthorn appears everywhere as at first as a mysterious cipher, and then slowly as a sign representing an actual, operating alternative postal service, delivering secret messages to knowing recipients everywhere. The posthorn is of course a global sign for the mail, so the mute in the horn operates something like the circle-slash figure that we’ve all grown accustomed to. There’s also a wonderfully and typically Pynchonian digression on the origins of the society in a shadowy figure named Trystero (which you will note is the the actual title of this substack, namely trysterotapes, which was originally a tape label that put out weird and obscure music). If I am remembering correctly, Trystero the heroic figure fought to establish this “alternative postal service” in the Machiavellian age of the 16th century, against the Thurn und Taxis family who had a monopoly over it, and whose crest conspicuously featured the posthorn (unmuted).
What fascinates me about the book is not only the hilarious way in which this alternative world is rendered, but the possibility for examining the very idea of right and wrong turns in the history of contemporary technology. As I said in my last post, it seems to me that critically examining the remnants of past systems offers an opportunity for thinking about real forms of communication that resemble the kind of secret society of Pynchon’s Trystero.
I came back to this idea after reading a couple of really interesting essays in the Hal Foster book What Comes After Farce? (Verso, 2020). In a chapter entitled “Machine Images,” Foster talks about the experimental artist Trevor Paglen, whose work fuses critical geography with surveillance studies: Paglen renders aesthetically-pleasing photos of secret “black sites” taken from surveillance cameras, and focuses on satellites both as method (satellite images used as art objects) and as objects in themselves, “prototypes case in pure geometries out of beautiful metals, that shift these objects from commercial and military service toward visual and aesthetic wonder: Malevich in the Sky with Diamonds” (133-34). In a lead-up to this discussion, Foster mentions the idea of a “third nature” above and beyond the usual understanding of a second nature caused by human activity. This idea of a third nature intersects with the work of Timothy Morton on so-called hyperobjects.
Foster refers to this “third nature” this way:
(T)oday, as Alexander Kluge has suggested, we face a ‘third nature,’ a world not only produced by machines but also run through networks that are largely beyond our perception, let alone our command. ‘If the public sphere, the arts, the relationship to people no longer grows with the complexity of society as a whole,’ Kluge warns, ‘then third nature arises.’ This is the complexity that Paglen aims to convey in his recent work. (p. 133, my emphasis)
Theorizing a “third nature,” then, reminds us that a “secret network” operates around us all the time, one which is sometimes described in a vague and not very helpful manner as the Internet of Things or IoT. Networked things hum along and engage in constant chatter. They surveil and administer human space without human intervention (that is, simply by internal alterations in algorithms). It could be argued that they reach into our world more often than we reach into theirs, by imperceptibly structuring and constraining human behavior.
While the discourse around IoT feels new, some of these interconnected things have been chattering away for a couple decades or more, engaging in machinic “conversations.” (machines are better at surveilling us than we are at watching them.) The sheer proliferation of new nodes of encounter and flow — pushed ever onwards of course by the endless death-drive of capital — necessarily means that some networks will get left behind, their conversations ignored. This is in part what led me to the idea that a modern version of Trystero could work, and even *should* work by a means of reoccupying old forms of networked communication. At the very least, I think there’s a good deal of opportunity for what might be called obsolete media archaeology and spelunking. This would mean disinterring old technologies and webs and using mostly forgotten protocols: follow the example of the shortwave numbers stations, which use the simplest, least expensive technology to operate, and which send messages which are almost impossible to independently decipher. One doesn’t need a room full of globe-killing computers to engage in secret dialogue or secure transactions; one simply needs to disinter and détourn existing networks, forgotten paths that are cheap, readily available, and omnipresent. Hack into the internet of things and find ways of communicating there; use old protocols like Gopher. These solutions would operate “secretly” not by sophistication but by near-absolute obscurity.