LET’S TALK ABOUT CHATGPT-INDUCED SPIRITUAL PSYCHOSIS:

Responding to the recent New York Times article that depicted people such as an accountant becoming convinced via ChatGPT that “he was trapped in a false reality and could escape by disconnecting from this simulated world—eventually believing ChatGPT when it told him he could jump from a building and fly,” Katherine Dee writes, “this always happens with new communication technology:”

And with similar severity, too!

Twenty-five years ago, media scholar Jeffrey Sconce traced this history in his book Haunted Media, showing how we have consistently linked new communication technologies with the paranormal and esoteric. It’s not a random coincidence or sign that we’re in a “uniquely enchanted” age1 but rather a predictable cultural response, one we’ve been replaying over and over for hundreds of years.

Spiritualist mediums claimed to receive messages from the afterlife through Morse code. These operators saw themselves as human receivers, bridging the material and astral. The technology that sent messages across continents without physical contact made it easy to imagine messages crossing the veil.

Radio seemed to throw every word into what Sconce calls an “etheric ocean,” a limitless and invisible sea where messages bobbed about like bottles adrift. By the late 1920s, the big broadcast companies tried to “net” that ocean with fixed frequencies and scheduling. Sconce writes about how fiction reflected this taming of the radio waves. The wistful romances of amateur “DXers”2 scanning the dial gave way to sinister tales of mass hypnosis, government mind-control rays, and Martians commandeering the airwaves.

Television, again, added another layer, perhaps most iconically portrayed in the 1982 film Poltergeist:

Read the whole thing.