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“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. 3
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and characterbuilding experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.” —Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
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CONTENT: BOOK TWO INTRO
SCIENCE & HISTORY
ART & CULTURE
RELIGION & ETHICS
Forward, pg. 2
Can light exist? pg. 4
Defining the dark, pg. 32
Interview, pg. 48
The importance of darkness, pg 12
Sounds in the dark, pg. 36
Goodbye meatbags, pg. 52
Darker than space, pg. 18
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Ten things, pg. 24
Draped in darkness, pg. 42
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FORWARD intro
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forward
It isn’t easy to study darkness. Try it. Next time you’re outside on a clear night, look up. You might see the winking lights of an airplane, the glow of an orbiting satellite, or even the bright trail of a meteor. Of course, you’ll see lots of stars. What about all the space between the stars? Is something hidden out there in the darkness? Or is it merely empty? Is there anything in the dark areas between distant galaxies? There’s nothing for the human eye to see, but astronomers are finding ways to detect what lies between the stars. And they’re discovering that most of the universe is made out of mysterious, invisible stuff. They call it dark matter and dark energy.
“We’re just now beginning to peel away the darkness,” says Robert Kirshner, an astronomer at Harvard University. “We’re beginning to see what things are really like, and it’s a funny, very unsettling picture because it’s so new and unfamiliar.”
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Although they can’t see it directly, scientists are pretty sure this weird stuff exists. Figuring out exactly what it is, however, remains a work in progress.
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SCIENCE AND HISTORY
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can light exist
CAN LIGHT EXIST WITHOUT DARKNESS? To the great dismay of the great existentialist thinkers, scientifically speaking, this is not that difficult a question to tackle. From a physics perspective, “light” is just a series of particles zooming through space, a little beam of radiation heading outwards in the cosmos. An individual particle of light usually doesn’t care whether it’s surrounded by lots of other photons, or whether it is off on its own in the universe, travelling a unique path.
The question here is asking if you can have only radiation—only light—and skip the “no radiation” part entirely. If you remove darkness, could you still have light? If you’re thinking about darkness and light in terms of a yes/no toggle, then this is perfectly possible. You just hold the toggle at “yes” at all times. The individual light particles won’t care that they’re not letting “not radiation” not have its times—they’re simply travelling forwards.
There are two major reasons for darkness in the universe. The first is to be in shadow. The physical blocking of light by an object is an easy way to be in darkness. That’s all night is on Earth, after all—you’re in the shadow of the planet. The second is that the universe hasn’t existed for an infinite amount of time. If the universe had already existed for an infinite amount of time, our skies would be brilliant with light both day and night, as the light from every star in the universe streamed towards us, brightening our skies. In that case, the only sources of darkness would be the shadows. In that universe, perhaps we would be asking the question the other way around—is there any darkness without the light?
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Darkness is usually described simply as the absence of light; this description also works pretty well as a physical description. By this standard, “light” and “darkness” are just a binary toggle between “radiation” or “not radiation”.
The ways that our universe produces light are also independent on a lack of light nearby. Stars form light as a by-product of the incredible pressures at their centers, and are most often formed in clusters—with tens to hundreds of other stars forming nearby. New stars only unveil themselves to our eyes by using the light they give off to burn away the dust and gas that hid them in darkness.
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can light exist
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can light exist
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Blank Space, Series of 11 by Robert Cybulski
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If asked to make a list of your basic needs for survival, what would come on top? Food and water, perhaps? Or a warm shelter? Darkness is an unlikely contender—the closest you might come is sleep.
vision system to an earlier stage of development when it is more adaptable. Cancer treatment, too, could benefit from total darkness. A recent study compared the effect of the drug tamoxifen on cancer cells in mice. In one arm of the study, the mice were kept in cycles of 12 hours of light followed by 12 hours of complete darkness. In another, the dark stage of the experiment was replaced with 12 hours of very dim light –roughly equivalent to the light that might creep in under a hospital door. Even in such low levels of light, the cancer cells became resistant to the drug. Although the experiment was in mice, the team from Tulane University in New Orleans believe this could have important implications for the way cancer patients receive their treatment.
helps explain what happens during mammalian hibernation, but might also have relevance in humans, not least because the genes that regulate circadian functions are all highly conserved between human and other mammals. “There are primate species that can hibernate, so I believe the biological processes are most likely conserved in humans,” he says. The switch might make a good target for treating obesity and type-2 diabetes.
One remarkable experiment in 2013 showed that a period of complete darkness could help restore bad eyesight. Kittens were given amblyopia, a condition better known as lazy eye, where the vision in one eye is impaired because of poor connections to the brain. It affects about 4% of the human population and if left untreated can lead to blindness. The team,
Lee’s own work has shown that plunging mice into darkness seems to trigger a change in fat metabolism, switching from burning glucose to fat. The mechanisms behind the switch
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THE I M P O R TA N C E OF DA R K N E S S
According to the latest science, that could be an oversight. Cheng Chi Lee, who studies circadian rhythms at the University of Texas Medical School, says there is now a growing body of evidence suggesting that we should revel in darkness because it can have surprising effects on health and behavior.
from Dalhousie University in Canada, deprived seven kittens of visual input to one eye and measured their vision in both the good and bad eye. They were then kept in complete darkness for 10 days, after which vision in the damaged eye made a startling recovery. The researchers suspect that darkness somehow resets the
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INTO DEEPER AND DEEPER DARKNESS infinite static & timeless
DARKER THAN SPACE science & history
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In the early 1990s, one thing was fairly certain about the expansion of the universe.
Eventually theorists came up with three sorts of explanations. Maybe it was a result of a long-discarded version of Einstein's theory of gravity, one that contained what was called a “cosmological constant.� Maybe there was some strange kind of energy-fluid that filled space. Maybe there is something wrong with Einstein's theory of gravity and a new theory could include some kind of field that creates this cosmic acceleration. Theorists still don't know what the correct explanation is, but they have given the solution a name. It is called dark energy.
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It might have enough energy density to stop its expansion and recollapse, it might have so little energy density that it would never stop expanding, but gravity was certain to slow the expansion as time went on. Granted, the slowing had not been observed, but, theoretically, the universe had to slow. The universe is full of matter and the attractive force of gravity pulls all matter together. Then came 1998 and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations of very distant supernovae that showed that, a long time ago, the universe was actually expanding more slowly than it is today. So the expansion of the universe has not been slowing due to gravity, as everyone thought, it has been accelerating. No one expected this, no one knew how to explain it. But something was causing it.
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“ STARS, HIDE YOUR FIRES; LET NOT LIGHT SEE MY BLACK AND DEEP DESIRES.” 20
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—William Shakespeare,
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Changes in the Rate of Expansion over Time Universe Dark Energy-1 Expanding Universe This diagram reveals changes in the rate of expansion since the universe's birth 15 billion years ago. The more shallow the curve, the faster the rate of expansion. The curve changes noticeably about 7.5 billion years ago, when objects in the universe began flying apart as a faster rate. Astronomers theorize that the faster expansion rate is due to a mysterious, dark force that is pulling galaxies apart. One explanation for dark energy is that it is a property of space. Albert Einstein was the first person to realize that empty space is not nothing. Space has amazing properties, many of which are just beginning to be understood. The first property that Einstein discovered is that it is possible for more space to come into existence. Then one version of Einstein's gravity theory, the version that contains a cosmological constant, makes a second prediction: “empty space” can possess its own energy. Because this energy is a property of space itself, it would not be diluted as space expands. As more space comes into existence, more of this energy-ofspace would appear. As a result, this form of energy would cause the universe to expand faster and faster. Unfortunately, no one understands why the cosmological constant should even be there, much less why it would have exactly the right value to cause the observed acceleration of the universe.
Another explanation for dark energy is that it is a new kind of dynamical energy fluid or field, something that fills all of space but something whose effect on the expansion of the universe is the opposite of that of matter and normal energy. Some theorists have named this “quintessence,” after the fifth element of the Greek philosophers. But, if quintessence is the answer, we still don't know what it is like, what it interacts with, or why it exists. So the mystery continues. A last possibility is that Einstein's theory of gravity is not correct. That would not only affect the expansion of the universe, but it would also affect the way that normal matter in galaxies and clusters of galaxies behaved. This fact would provide a way to decide if the solution to the dark energy problem is a new gravity theory or not: we could observe how galaxies come together in clusters. But if it does turn out that a new theory of gravity is needed, what kind of theory would it be? How could it correctly describe the motion of the bodies in the Solar System, as Einstein's theory is known to do, and still give us the different prediction for the universe that we need? There are candidate theories, but none are compelling. So the mystery continues. The thing that is needed to decide between dark energy possibilities—a property of space, a new dynamic fluid, or a new theory of gravity—is more data, better data.
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“ A last possibility is that Einstein's theory of gravity is not correct.”
Another explanation for how space acquires energy comes from the quantum theory of matter. In this theory, “empty space” is actually full of temporary (“virtual”) particles that continually form and then disappear. But when physicists tried to calculate how much energy this would give empty space, the answer came out wrong— wrong by a lot. The number came out 10120 times too big. That's a 1 with 120 zeros after it. It's hard to get an answer that bad. So the mystery continues.
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More is unknown than is known. We know how much dark energy there is because we know how it affects the universe's expansion. Other than that, it is a complete mystery. But it is an important mystery. It turns out that roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest—everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter—adds up to less than 5% of the universe. Come to think of it, maybe it shouldn't be called “normal” matter at all, since it is such a small fraction of the universe.
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DARK MATTER? DARK MATTER? What is Dark Matter? DARK MATTER? DARK MATTER? DARK MATTER? DARK MATTER? DARK MATTER? DARK MATTER? DARK MATTER? DARK MATTER? DARK MATTER? By fitting a theoretical model of the composition of the universe to the combined set of cosmological observations, scientists have come up with the composition that we described above, ~68% dark energy, ~27% dark matter, ~5% normal matter. What is dark matter?
One of the most complicated and dramatic collisions between galaxy clusters ever seen is captured in this new composite image of Abell 2744. The blue shows a map of the total mass concentration (mostly dark matter). However, at this point, there are still a few dark matter possibilities that are viable. Baryonic matter could still make up the dark matter if it were all tied up in brown dwarfs or in small, dense chunks of heavy elements. These possibilities are known as massive compact halo objects, or “MACHOs�. But the most common view is that dark matter is not baryonic at all, but that it is made up of other, more exotic particles like axions or WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles).
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We are much more certain what dark matter is not than we are what it is. First, it is dark, meaning that it is not in the form of stars and planets that we see. Observations show that there is far too little visible matter in the universe to make up the 27% required by the observations. Second, it is not in the form of dark clouds of normal matter, matter made up of particles called baryons. We know this because we would be able to detect baryonic clouds by their absorption of radiation passing through them. Third, dark matter is not antimatter, because we do not see the unique gamma rays that are produced when antimatter annihilates with matter. Finally, we can rule out large galaxy-sized black holes on the basis of how many
gravitational lenses we see. High concentrations of matter bend light passing near them from objects further away, but we do not see enough lensing events to suggest that such objects to make up the required 25% dark matter contribution.
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10 THINGS YO U S H O U L D KNOW ABOUT DARK M AT T E R Dark matter may be one of the most unsettling concepts that modern physics has brought us: the idea that everything we’re familiar with in the Universe — galaxies, stars, planets, gas, dust, plasma, etc. — is just a tiny fraction of the matter that’s out there. That most of what exists in the Universe isn’t made out of the same stuff that we are, but is rather some new type of matter that’s different from everything we’ve ever discovered.
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“ dark” doesn’t just mean we don’t see it.
“ matter” doesn’t just mean it’s stuff.
It means it doesn’t emit any electromagnetic radiation for all we can tell. Astronomers haven’t been able to find neither light visible to the eye, nor radiation in the radio range or x-ray regime, and not at even higher energies either.
What physicists classify as matter must behave like the matter we are made of, at least for what its motion in space and time is concerned. This means in particular dark matter dilutes when it spreads into a larger volume, and causes the same gravitational attraction as ordinary, visible, matter. It is easy to think up “stuff” that does not do this. Dark energy for example does not behave this way. science & history
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it’s not going away.
You will not wake up one day and hear physicists declare it’s not there at all. (Well, you will, but those claims are rare, and those physicists are wrong.) The evidence is overwhelming: Weak gravitational lensing demonstrates that galaxies have a larger gravitational pull than visible matter can produce. Additional matter in galaxies is also necessary to explain why stars in the outer arms of galaxies orbit so quickly around the center. The observed temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background can’t be explained without dark matter, and the structures formed by galaxies wouldn’t come out right without dark matter either. Even if all of this was explained by a modification of gravity rather than an unknown type of matter, it would still have to be possible to formulate this modification of gravity in a way that makes it look pretty much like a new type of matter. And we’d still call it dark matter.
Though she was the first to recognize its relevance. A few decades before Vera Rubin noticed that stars rotate inexplicably fast around the centers of galaxies, Fritz Zwicky pointed out that a swarm of about a thousand galaxies which are bound together by gravity to the “Coma Cluster” also move too quickly. The velocity of the galaxies in a gravitational potential depends on the total mass in this potential, and the too large velocities indicated already that there was more mass than could be seen. However, it wasn’t until Rubin collected her data that it became clear this isn’t a peculiarity of the Coma Cluster, but that dark matter must be present in almost all galaxies and galaxy clusters.
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Gravitational lensing caused by galaxies distorts the shape of galaxies farther away. From the distortion, the total mass inside the galaxies causing the lensing can be inferred.
rubin wasn’t the first to find evidence for dark matter.
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dark matter doesn’t interact much with anything. If it did, it would slow down and clump too much and that wouldn’t be in agreement with the data. A particularly vivid example comes from the Bullet Cluster, which actually consists of two clusters of galaxies that have passed through each other. In the Bullet Cluster, one can detect both the distribution of ordinary matter, mostly be emission of xrays, and the distribution of dark matter, by gravitational lensing. The data demonstrates that the dark matter is dislocated from the visible matter: The dark matter parts of the clusters seem to have passed through each other almost undisturbed, whereas the visible matter was slowed down and its shape was noticeably distorted.
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The same weak interaction is necessary to explain the observations on the cosmic microwave background and galactic structure formation.
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it’s responsible for the structures in the universe. Since dark matter doesn’t interact much with itself and other stuff, it’s the first type of matter to settle down when the universe expands and the first to form structures under its own gravitational pull. It is dark matter that seeds the filaments along which galaxies later form when visible matter falls into the gravitational potential created by the dark matter. If you look at some computer simulation of structure formation, what is shown is almost always the distribution of dark matter, not of visible matter. Visible matter falls into, and hence, is assumed to follow the same distribution at later times.
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physicists have lots of ideas of what dark matter could be.
and they know some things it can’t be.
The presently most popular explanation for the puzzling observations is some kind of weakly interacting particle that doesn’t interact with light. These particles have to be quite massive to form the observed structures, about as heavy as the heaviest particles we know already. If dark matter particles weren’t heavy enough they wouldn’t clump sufficiently, which is why they are called WIMPs for “Weakly Interacting Massive Particles.” Another candidate is a particle called the axion, which is very light but leaves behind some kind of condensate that fills the universe. There are other types of candidate particles that have more complex interactions or are heavier, such Wimpzillas and other exotic stuff. Macro dark matter is a type of dark matter that could be accommodated in the standard model; it consists of macroscopically heavy chunks of unknown types of nuclear matter. Then there are several proposals for how to modify gravity to accommodate the observations, such as MOG, entropic gravity, or bimetric theories. Though very different by motivation, the more observations have to be explained the more similar the explanations through additional particles have become to the explanations through modifying gravity.
We know that dark matter can’t be constituted by dim brown dwarfs or black holes. The main reason this doesn’t work is that we know the total mass dark matter brings into our galaxy, and it’s a lot, about 10 times as much as the visible matter. If that amount of mass was made up from black holes, we should constantly see gravitational lensing events — but we don’t. It also doesn’t quite work with structure formation. And we know that neutrinos, even though weakly interacting, can’t make up dark matter either because they are too light and they wouldn’t clump strongly enough to seed galaxy filaments.
it’s probably not smoothly disturbed. Dark matter doesn’t only form filaments on super galactic scales, it also isn’t entirely smoothly distributed within galaxies — at least that’s what the best understood models say. Dark matter doesn’t interact enough to form objects as dense as planets, but it does have ‘halos’ of varying density that move around in galaxies. The dark matter density is generally larger towards the centers of galaxies. Since dark matter doesn’t rotate with the disk of stars we observe, solar systems like our own constantly move into a “wind” of dark matter particles.
“ for the moment we might very well can them DUNNOS (for Dark Unknown Nonreflective Nondetectable Objects Somewhere).”
—Bill Bryson
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but we have no direct experimental evidence Despite decades of search, nobody has ever directly detected a dark matter particle and the only evidence we have is still indirectly inferred from gravitational pull. Physicists have been looking for the rare interactions of proposed dark matter candidates in many Earth-based experiments starting already in the 1980s. They are also on the lookout for astrophysical evidence of dark matter, such as signals from the mutual annihilation of dark matter particles. There have been some intriguing findings, such as the PAMELA positron excess, the DAMA annual modulation, or the Fermi gamma-ray excess, but physicists haven’t been able to link any of these convincingly to dark matter. After everything the Universe has told us about itself, we’re convinced that some type of dark matter must exist: matter that’s different from any of the known particles in the Standard Model. This dark matter outmasses all other particles and radiation in the Universe by a factor of five or so, but has yet to be directly detected. We know it exists, but we don’t know exactly what it’s made of. Until we do, this will remain a mystery in need of a more complete solution.
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ART AND C U LT U R E
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defining the dark
DEFINING THE DARK The term dark culture, also called dark or alternative scene, is an umbrella term, used to describe a summary of parts of several subcultures. In this context the “culture” is not to be understood as closed subculture, but as social environment, a milieu, which comprises people with similar interests and preferences
The term dark culture, also called dark alternative scene, is an umbrella term, used to describe a summary of parts of several subcultures. In this context the “culture” is not to be understood as
Common interests include music, art, and fashion as well as philosophy, new religious movements, or themes perceived by society as negative or taboo. Against backdrop of individualism, confrontation in particular with themes such as death, mortality, sadness, mourning, melancholy, psychology and psychopathology takes place. The scene is not to be understood as a musically or aesthetically closed and homogenous group. It is composed of many different currents, some of which may be diametrically opposed in their musical or fashion ideals. The lowest common denominator is the color black with all its associated symbolism. It is seen as an expression of seriousness, darkness and mysticism, but also of hopelessness and emptiness, melancholy, as well as its association with mourning and death. The dark scene is a community which defines itself through its internal symbols, the characteristic fashions of the different currents, as well as through its media and meeting places, especially events and dance clubs.
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the goth and dark wave culture electro subculture (with genres like electro-industrial, aggrotech and dark electro) parts of the neofolk and post-industrial subcultures The scene’s origin lies in followers of dark wave and independent music, but over the decades it has developed to a social network held together by a common concept of aesthetics, self-representation, and individualism. The musical preferences of the dark scene are characterized by a mix of styles ranging from futurism, electropop, early music, (neo-) classical,and folk music to punk rock, rock, techno and ambient music.
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Photo series: Deila, series of six by Marta Bevacqua
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SOUNDS IN THE DARK A REQUIEM FOR CRYSTAL CASTLES
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sounds in the dark
The first time I saw Crystal Castles was in 2007, when they were just an obscure opening act for the muchmore-famous band Metric.
A pale wisp of a girl appeared on stage, clutching a megaphone. For the next hour, she screamed undecipherable lyrics into the void, backed by the ghostly keyboards and lo-fi synths of a shadowy figure standing in the back. Their sounds were electronic, abrasive—even catchy, in their own doom-and-gloom way—but this was worlds away from the hyped-up electro that was dominating popular dance music at the time. Let’s not forget this was the era of hedonistic kings like The Klaxons, Crookers and Boys Noize, of scene queens like Uffie and Ellen Allien. When the 8-bit bleeps of “Air War,” came on, maybe it sounded for a second like the lo-fi party music filling the airwaves—but as the song swelled with childish voices yammering in gibberish, hissing and muttering to themselves, I realized that Crystal Castles was swimming into a space weirder than any of their contemporaries.
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I was a fresh New York City transplant, just a few weeks into my freshman year in college. When the lights went low, everyone was still looking at their flip phones. Then, an assault of strobe lights and razor-edged distortion sliced through the air. Everyone was forced to look up. I didn’t know it yet, but what I was about to see would send waves of repercussions far into my future. Many years later, I would be able to look back and be like, “You know, that was the moment that changed everything.”
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Alice Glass climbed up the speakers, conveying more urgent despair with her high-pitched whelps than most vocalists can achieve with actual words. Ethan Kath’s productions, whether charged with jagged brutality or melancholic beauty, never failed to be the perfect foil. I gazed up at Glass in total surrender, letting her urgent gibberish swallow me whole. To watch Crystal Castles perform live is to watch a throbbing heart open itself raw and baptize you with anarchic glee. By the end of their short set, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to fuck Alice Glass or be her. But I knew that I loved her. This week, after ten years of making some of our generation’s most hauntingly beautiful music at brain-splitting volumes, Glass announced on (where else?) Twitter that the duo is dunzo. Her first tweet cut straight to the chase:
Who knows what really transpired between Glass and Kath, the producer who she met when she was just fifteen years old. I was bummed, but not exactly surprised; the duo hadn’t played a show together in almost a year, and there hadn’t been an announcement about their next release since their last album in 2012. Instead, they’ve both been performing DJ sets separately— Glass recently appeared alongside Jupiter Keyes of Health, Mike Simonetti and Prince Terrence at a party in New York City, while Kath DJed at Atlantic’s Imagine Festival in August. But the announcement signaled a definitive end to their decade-long collaboration— and to me, the end of an era.
“I am leaving Crystal Castles.”
“My art and my self-expression in any form has always been an attempt towards sincerity, honesty, and empathy for others.”
Glass’ third tweet was the most enigmatic:
“For a multitude of reasons both professional and personal I no longer feel that this is possible within CC.”
But she ended on a more hopeful note:
“Although this is the end of the band, I hope my fans will embrace me as a solo artist in the same way they have embraced Crystal Castles.”
“ My look is more grandmother’s leftovers than heroin chic.” —Alice Glass
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The second one was a statement that few could argue with:
fucking cum gun coming on fucking children.” But the greatest Glass quote is also the most direct: “I hate homophobic, racist, misogynist dickweeds.” Alice Glass was one of the first feminist musicians I looked up to for her nobullshit attitude towards misogyny. While other women might try to mince their words for the sake of good PR, Glass would just straight up say, “we need an army because the mainstream hates women.” In interviews, she would fret over abortion clinics getting shut down, or blast Katy Perry for her over sexualized image. Actually, what she said was, “Fucking Katy Perry spraying people with her fucking dick, her
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Crystal Castles taught me that the best music doesn’t have to sound shiny and polished. In fact, their first single, “Alice Practice,” was actually kind of a mistake. As the story goes, Glass and Kath were recording songs in in a local Toronto studio in 2004, and one of the studio’s techies secretly recorded Glass’ mic test. If you listen carefully, you can hear her say “Hi!” as the song starts up.
Crystal Castles also taught me that music at the dark, gritty end of the spectrum can rise above pure nihilism and meaningless melancholy. Despite Kath’s shaggy black hair and Glass’ eyeliner-smudged raccoon eyes, they weren’t play-acting at being goths for the sake of cool pictures. They even called themselves “an axe in the face of emo.” In fact, Glass probably would’ve kicked you if you called her a #sadgirl. Instead, her bleak lyrics railed against social injustices with the vigor of a punk poet, and neither of them were ever afraid to be political. The album for their third (and last) album, III, is a striking picture of a woman in a burka, craddling her wounded son in a way that distinctly recalls the Virgin Mary and Jesus in Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture. It was taken at an anti-government protest in Yemen.
Most of all, Crystal Castles taught me that music that makes you dance can also make you think. That songs with chopped up, distorted or incomprehensible vocals can blast more emotion than even the most eloquent lyrics. That you can talk about social issues through “party music.” That you can be earnest and fierce at the same damn time. And that you can do it all with swagger.
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The story of Crystal Castles begins not in some smoky club or bar—but a stint of community service. Glass and Kath were both charged with reading stories to the blind atonement for undisclosed crimes, and they started talking about how they felt like no one was really doing anything new in the contemporary music scene. Glass was a teenage runaway in an all-female crust-noise band with the amazing title of Fetus Fatale. Kath was also in various bands, playing bass or drums. They decided to get together and “try to create a new sound and genre as best we could,” as Kath put it. They cribbed their name from a commercial for She-Ra toys—based on the animated female superhero from the 80s TV series. “The fate of the world is safe in Crystal Castles. Crystal Castles is the source of all power,” the ad jingle went. (None of them had ever seen an episode.)
“ I ALWAYS GOT CALLED A GOTH AND A WITCH AND SHIT, JUS T BECAUSE I WASN’ T IN A CATSUIT.” 40
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CLOAKED IN DARKNESS ALEXANDER MCQUEEN’S MOST DARK AND TWISTED MOMENTS
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though McQueen’s collections were a triumph in technique and theatricality, they often left members of the audience with a sense of unease, in a combined state of wonder and repulsion. He rendered models’ eyes blood red, attached skeletons to their ankles and placed one in a glass case filled with moths. He drew inspiration from the dark and the twisted: Victorian mental asylum patients, 19th century serial killer Jack the Ripper, the gothic fairy tales of the Grimm brothers, the atrocities committed by the British in Scotland and one of his ancestors who was hanged during the Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692. As visitors to the V&A’s just-closed retrospective of the designer’s work will attest, McQueen’s vision was one of profound but deeply transgressive beauty. With Halloween just a day away, we look back at five times McQueen drew on horror. McQueen’s dark approach to design was evident from the very earliest stages of his career. His Central Saint Martins MA graduation collection, which debuted in 1992, was inspired by Jack the Ripper—the serial killer who preyed on and murdered prostitutes during the 1880s. Not only did McQueen grow up in the area where these crimes were committed—London’s East End—but one of his relatives allegedly rented a room to one of the Ripper’s victims. Each garment in this collection had a lock of the designer’s hair encased between two layers of acrylic, paying homage to the Victorian custom of exchanging hair with lovers—many people would buy hair from prostitutes rather than taking it from their own heads. A human skeleton joined the fashion journalists on the front row of McQueen’s AW96 show, which was staged at Christ Church Spitalfields—a building designed
by Nicholas Hawsmoor, a known Satanist. The show was named Dante, after the 14th century Florentine poet who was known for his religious iconography and images of conflict. With war and peace as the main themes, male models were dressed like the gangs of Hispanic teens in Paul Morrissey’s 1984 film Mixed Blood. Their female counterparts had antlers
and horns sprouting from their heads, one wore a crown of thorns, another’s face was masked in silk with a skeleton’s hand fixed to the side of her head. As well as one of the most visually arresting shows in terms of its beauty looks—models wore bald caps and red contact lenses—Joan had a darkly political overtone. As the name suggests, the show was inspired by Joan of Arc who led the French army to victory in a battle against the English in the 15th century. She was later captured, found guilty of heresy and burned at the stake. Industrial lamps swung spookily
“ i find beauty in the grotesque”
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She wore a metal mask fitted with birds’ wings and a tube that sprouted from her mouth—the box was filled with moths. Then, the sound of a heartbeat which had been accompanying the show was replaced with an eerie flat-line alarm. “It was about trying to trap something that wasn’t conventionally beautiful to show that beauty comes from within,” the designer commented. Another show with a frightening beauty look was What A Merry Go Round, which saw models’ faces painted like the clowns from your darkest childhood nightmares. “We show children clowns as if they are funny,” the designer said, expanding on the make-up. “They’re not. They’re really scary.” The set for the show resembled above the catwalk as models walked an eerie children’s nursery, complete down it wearing chain mail, armor made with rocking horses, ventriloquists’ dumfrom silver-plated metal, elegant dress- mies and giant teddy bears—all covered es, sharp suits and floor-length coats. in a fine layer of cobweb. A golden skelFor the finale, a masked model walked eton clasped the ankle of one model as to the centre of the catwalk as a ring of she made her way down the catwalk, if fire burst into flame around her. that wasn’t creepy enough, the show was With padded walls and a white-tiled set to the sound of the child catcher’s catwalk floor, Voss was a inspired by a voice from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Victorian mental asylum. Models’ heads were bandaged, some had their arms pinned down by richly-embroidered coats-come-straight-jackets, others had taxidermy birds perched in their haywire hair. A box stood in the middle of the room and, at the end of the show, its sides fell away revealing a glass case with a naked woman reclining inside.
“ we show children clowns as if they are funny. they’re not. they’re really scary”
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RELIGION AND ETHICS
AN INTERVIEW WITH AN EX CULT MEMBER
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cults will always be associated with the big names. Your David Koreshes, your Jim Joneses, your Charlie Mansons—the guys you’ll have seen hogging half the Netflix documentary section like they’re the only megalomanic sociopaths to ever grace a fortified compound. But there are plenty of other, more humble, groups out there still suckering people in and fleecing them for all they’re worth. Ian Haworth, an ex-cult member, has been running the UK-based Cult Information Centre since 1987. There, he and his team provide information, guidance, and assistance to those who want to leave a cult, those who have already left one, and to concerned friends and families. I caught up with him recently to get an insight into how a modern-day cult operates.
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That was quick. How did you eventually end up leaving? I was a completely different person, but of course I didn’t know that. Friends knew that, my roommate knew that. People were scared of me, people felt sorry for me, people had a variety of emotions but didn’t know what to do. People at work were stunned that I’d handed in my notice because I was doing well. When I was working my final month, the group [PSI Mind Development Institution—now non-existent]
Do you believe intelligent, educated people are more likely to be recruited than people who may be considered unstable? This idea of troubled people is the eternal myth. People want to imagine this is the case because they don’t want to consider themselves as “vulnerable.” I don’t use the word vulnerable very often, but I’d argue that we’re all vulnerable to the techniques used by these groups. The late Dr. John G Clark, who I quote a lot, said the safest people are the mentally ill. The easiest people to recruit are ones with alert, questioning minds who want to debate issues with other people. You take a strong-willed, strong-minded person and put them into a cult environment and the techniques used will break a person down very quickly. The smarter, the healthier the mind, the quicker and easier you are to control. It’s just one of these tragic realities. What have you found to be the primary motives for setting up and recruiting people into cults? The common denominators would be people and money. Some may just enjoy the power they have over a mass of people; others may well be wanting, from the word go, to acquire financial benefits and amass great wealth; others may have other ambitions of taking over the world. Then there are some who may well actually believe they are God, or whatever. I think those are the ones who are quite often mentally ill, infinite static & timeless
I then decided to go for a cigarette, when someone rushed over and said, “Oh, we didn’t know you smoked. You can smoke out here, but have you ever thought about quitting?” About a month before this my doctor had told me I’d probably die by the time I was 40 if I didn’t quit smoking, so she’d hit my area of interest. The course spanned four days and they guaranteed success. At the end of the course I’d given them all the money I had, decided to dedicate my life to them, and handed in my resignation at work.
were exposed in the media. I hadn’t yet been programmed against the media, so I was open to media input. It reactivated my critical mind and I managed to leave. I then went through 11 months of pretty severe withdrawal.
so there’s quite a mix of leaders and they may well have slightly different motivations. But, again, the common denominators are people and money. You estimate that there are currently between 500 to 1,000 cults in the UK. Are they on the rise? Yes. If someone is recruited into a cult, that person—among other things—is going to be going out to recruit other people. Either in a formal way or an informal way, they’ll be obeying instructions from the group on how to do that. Or they’ll simply do it because they’ve been radicalized, are on a high, singing their praises and can’t wait to recruit. So, as each person recruits others, you’ll get an exponential growth of that organization—and the same applies to all the others. Then you get power struggles and splits in some of the groups. You get other groups, from different parts of the world, setting up branches in the UK, so it’s a phenomenon that is growing. Do you ever infiltrate cult meetings to acquire information? No, that would be foolish. We’d never recommend going to any meetings that cults have because the techniques they use work on anybody, including me. What usually triggers a member into wanting to leave a cult and to seek help from you? Because cults use mind control techniques to recruit people, a person’s mind is controlled by the group. Therefore the person no longer has control or normal thought processes; they are impaired, and the person can no longer critically evaluate. You become someone else. What is common is that something reactivates the critical mind of the cult
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Hi, Ian. How did you end up joining a cult yourself? I was doing some shopping one day [in Toronto] and met a lady who asked if I could help her with a survey. I agreed. She then told me I’d probably be interested in joining a community group she represented, saying “Isn’t it time you considered giving something back to the community instead of taking from it all the time like most people do?” The meeting consisted of a talk, followed by a coffee break, followed by a film. When the break was called, people started to come into the room with all kinds of food. I’d paid $1.50 to attend, so I thought I’d get my money’s worth.
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member. It could be something you see or hear that you’re not supposed to see or hear within the group; it could be something that somebody—when you’re out recruiting or soliciting funds—says to you. If you’re programmed to understand that people are evil and will be hostile toward you, and then they’re kind and gentle in dealing with you, that will upset the apple cart.
Are these techniques always psychological, or have you encountered any instances of violence or physical threats? I’ve dealt with people who have come out of cults and who have died. There was a case that was supposed to go before the courts—the government was looking at a particular group and possibly looking at removing its charitable status—and a key witness, who was an ex-member of the group, was found hanging from a lamppost. Some people say it was murder, other people say it was suicide. I don’t know.
Ex-members of cults are great sources of information. People who are perhaps captured as extremists can be counseled back to reality as well, so a lot can be done in that area. I think a lot needs to be done in terms of public education on this topic, but it all starts with the government recognizing what’s going on. I think there needs to be an educational program in general to help British society become aware of how cults operate, what to watch out for and, therefore, avoid, and how to help current and former members to back to reality.
One chap I spoke to in Canada had fled from an organization and was really shaken up badly. I normally just speak to people on the phone, but I offered to meet up with him. He was at university and had a lot of work to do because he was just about to start his exams, and I said, “Well, can I have somebody phone you once or twice a week while you’re going through your exams, just to make sure you’re OK?” He said fine, and that happened. After the exams were over he was found with his throat cut from ear to ear and, again, some said it was murder, some said it was suicide. The police said it was suicide. His family suggested it was murder. Perhaps you could say the family would, but his father was a doctor and said there wasn’t enough blood at the site where his body was found for it to have been suicide.
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During this period, how active are the cults in trying to get members to return? It varies. If you consider what it’s like to be in a cult, you’re programmed to think that this group is the be-all and end-all, and that anyone leaving this group is going to suffer horribly. So you would see it as helpful, as a cult member, to try and contact somebody who is an ex-member and try to pull them back in. So it’s not unusual for someone to be pursued.
If cults are rising in the UK, what can be done to curb this? What preventative measures can be put in place? The sooner the government realizes what cults are all about, they will then realize how much more can be done to combat terrorism. Not just the terrorist groups that are operating abroad, but also those that are radicalizing people in this country. If we start to recognize what cults are about and apply it in this area then we can perhaps be a lot more effective in trying to help people who want to come back to this country from Syria, or wherever they’ve been to, and return to normal and then be great sources of information.
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“ T HE SOONER THE GOVERNMENT REALIZES WHAT CULTS ARE ALL ABOUT, THEY WILL THEN REALIZE HOW MUCH MORE CAN BE DONE TO COMBAT TERRORISM.” infinite static & timeless
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GOODBYE, M E AT B AG S Mind Uploading Will Replace the Need for Religion
When you think about it, trying to wrap your brain around how digital technology and all its wonders are even possible is simply bizarre. Only a tiny fraction of the world’s population understand such things in any depth. And an even smaller amount of people actually know how to design and create the microchips, circuit boards, and software that constitutes this stuff in the real world. Human beings are a species dependent on a tech-imbued lifestyle that none of us really understand, but accept wholeheartedly as we go on endlessly texting, Facebooking, and video conferencing.
As a non-engineer atheist grappling with the implications of 1s and 0s manifesting all digital reality, I have at least this much in common with religious people— because they can’t understand the spirit world either, even if they insist it exists.
The major difference between the religious spirit world and the digital world is that engineers—technology’s high priests—can recreate software, microchips, and virtual environments again and again. They can also test, view, change, manipulate, and most importantly, improve upon their creations. They can apply the scientific method and be assured that the worlds they built of bits and code exist—as surely as we know the Earth is spinning, even if we can’t feel it.
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I hear a lot of philosophical complaints suggesting that being alive in a computer as an uploaded version of oneself is quite different than being alive in the physical world. While that is open for debate, one aspect of the issue people often forget about is that the so-called spirit world of Abrahamic faiths—which approximately four billion people follow—is based on something at least as odd as the bits in software code that will make up any virtual existence.
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“ I ’m looking forward to having an exact copy of myself online one day, both as a companion and as a form of personal immortality in case my biological self dies”
People of the planet’s major religions can’t do this with their spirit worlds. They can only make leaps of faith, and elaborately describe it to you. One either agrees or disagrees with them. Amazingly, proof is not necessary to them.
Already, interaction between microchip and the brain are occurring all around the world in the form of cranial implants helping the deaf, blind, and mentally ill. Furthermore, telepathy, accomplished last year between people in India and France, is the communication medium of the future. We’re just in the infancy of all this, but progress is accelerating. I’m looking forward to having an exact copy of myself online one day, both as a companion and as a form of personal immortality in case my biological self dies. Atheists may not believe in God, but as Sam Harris’ recent bestseller, Wak ing Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion points out, we are still deeply spiritual creatures, searching for answers, trying to do good upon the world, and pondering the mysteries of the universe. All this is very healthy, and not that different than some core
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Being able to upload our entire minds into a computer is probably just 2535 years off given Moore’s Law and the current trajectory of technology growth and innovation. If we can harness the power of artificial intelligence in the next 15 years, then we might get there quicker, as AI will likely make the research and progress happen far more rapidly. But mind uploading is generally considered possible by experts. After all, humans are just material machines, striving to create other machines that mirror ourselves and desires.
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It’s that shape of the world that I care about. It’s that shape that affects our lives and gives form to our society, nations, and deeds. For millennia, society has been controlled, guided, and manipulated by religion—often for the worse. As a rule, the more fundamental a particular religion was, the better it steered its populace in the direction the leaders of the religion wanted. I often refer to this steering as baggag e culture, pieces of social structure, cultural conditioning, and archaic rules passed on from generation to generation with little philosophical change or growth, despite the fact that society evolves every year. Eventually, such baggage culture weighs us down so much that society becomes lethargic and hopelessly burdened with nonsense in its many actions. This can be seen in the United State’s monopolistic two-party pretend democracy system. It can also be seen in Islam—one of the world’s fastest growing religions— whose main sacred text, the Koran, is often seen as being at odds with basic modern day women’s rights. Of course, one of the most embarrassing examples of baggage culture I know of is America’s Imperial measurement system, which favors obfuscation instead of the better metric system.
So what can we do to eliminate our baggage culture? I’m afraid that little will happen as long as we are exclusively biological. Our instincts for vice, petty behavior, and superstition are too strong. There has certainly been a shift towards moral fortitude, reason, and irreligiosity in many developed countries, but it is slow, very slow. The sad truth is we’ll be uploading ourselves into machines long before rationality and agnosticism become truly dominant on Earth. The good news, though, is as people begin uploading themselves, they’ll also be hacking and writing improved code for their new digital selves—resulting in “real time evolution” for individuals and the species. It’s likely this influx of better code will eliminate lots of things that, historically speaking, religion has attempted to protect people from— namely stupidity and social evil. Take Andreas Lubitz, the co-pilot who likely intentionally crashed Germanwings Flight 9525 in the Swiss Alps, tragically killing all the people aboard. Lubitz is suspected to have been suffering from depression. In the future, we may all have avatars—perfectly uploaded versions of ourselves existing in the cloud or in chip implants in our brains—and these avatars will help guide us and not allow us to do dumb or terrible things. In the Germanwings plane incident, the avatar would have been able to eliminate the depression in itself, and then could’ve conveyed that to the other, real life self. In this way, the better suited person would’ve have been given the task of taking over and flying the plane.
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hopes of the religious-minded. In fact, the only real difference between religious people and atheists is the fact that religious people insist an all-knowing deity is outside of themselves and controlling the shape of the world. Atheists see no God and believe unconscious universal forces and human will are responsible for the shape of the world.
The sad truth is we’ll be uploading ourselves into machines long before rationality and agnosticism become truly dominant on Earth This may serve what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature, which we all have but often don’t use. Now, with digital clones participating in our every move, someone trustworthy will always be in our head, advising us of the best path to take. Think of it in terms of a spiritual trainer, leading us to be the best we can be. A good metaphor or comparison of this type of digital assistance will already be happening in the next few years when driverless cars hit the road. In the same way driverless cars will help lessen drunk driving, perfected uploaded avatars will also lead us to be more judicious, moral, and reasonable in our lives. This is why the future will be far better than it is now. In the coming digital world, we may be perfect, or very close to it. Expect a much more utopian society for whatever social structures end up existing in virtual reality and cyberspace. But also expect the real world to radically improve. Expect the drug user to have their addictions corrected or overcome. Expect the domestic abuser to have their violence and drive for power diminished. Expect the mentally depressed to become happy. And finally, expect the need for religion to disappear as a real-life god—our near perfect moral selves— symbiotically commune with us. In this way, the promising future of atheism and its power will reside in achieving this amazing transhumanist technology. Code, computers, and science will one day replace formal religion and its God, and we will be better as a species for it.
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