Nomad Codes

and the point was to build sufficient coherence that a birth was possible, the birth of a species into space.” Firmage’s ZPE hypothesis is thus a species of technological apocalypse, if we remember that apocalypse does not mean fire and brimstone but revelation. “People will instantly and viscerally understand that there is a far grander scheme, that they are part of a Star Wars script. Then they will start to behave in ways that naturally tend to self-organize a new type of vision.”
    If the flying saucers of the late 1940s and 1950s were manifestations of nuclear anxiety, our current crop may be tied to the more pervasive if ill-defined sense that we are making mincemeat of our lonely orb. In his book Passport to the Cosmos , Harvard Medical School psychiatrist John Mack writes that one of the central themes of the alien encounters he studies is the conviction that Gaia is on the brink. Mack has worked with over 200 abductees, whose experiences tend to be far more freaky than Firmage’s bedside chat, and he is convinced that we cannot explain the phenomenon within our conventional categories of reality. “There is some kind of intelligence that we are connecting with,” Mack told me. “It’s not simply the imagination of people.” This intelligence seems particularly obsessed with the ecological crisis, as if it were a cosmic feedback loop that kicks in as the world decays, breaking through our scientific materialism in the only way it knows how: waking dreams, persistent myth, and supernatural anomaly. ETs are the new elemental heralds, the elves and leprechauns of a dying global forest. And while encounters with these critters are often traumatic, Mack insists they can be transformative as well. “This experience shatters people’s constricted world views, which can then connect them to a larger reality. It opens their pores to the divine, to home, to source, to what we once called God.”
    Firmage has certainly had his pores pried open, and is willing to weather the slings and arrows of outraged commentators because he thinks he’ll get a ringside seat at the glorious eschaton ahead. But for the moment, the truth has yet to materialize outside his web site, and so Joe Firmage carries on. He is hunting down offices for his International Space Sciences Organization, which will quietly fund research efforts and his own proselytizing. A glossy, full-color print version of The Truth is in the works, and will hopefully lie under hundreds of thousands of Christmas trees. He’s also finishing up an hour-long film that he plans to take on a twenty-city speaking tour, a spectacular “History of The World According to Joe,” brought to life by the Bay Area’s best, and most expensive, computer graphics artists. Firmage has also become something of a star in the UFO community, a martyr for the cause who has used his authority to chat up millions on the Art Bell show and to launch public attacks on Richard “Face on Mars” Hoagland, one of Ufology’s reigning charlatans.
    For all his messianic fervor, Firmage is too smart to ignore the possibility that he’s backed the wrong horse. “Whether I am right or wrong, I think that this will serve a valuable function for society. If I am wrong, it will be the most clear case yet with which to tear down the fiction of this whole domain. If it has infected someone as promising as me, then it should be taken down.” After all, The Truth did not catalyze any of the official announcements that Firmage expected, and he admits that if nothing happens he will be extremely disappointed. “I genuinely feel like I’ve leaped off the cliff, and I hope that there’s a parachute when I pull the ripcord.”
    1999

MELANCHOLY MACHINES

    Boards of Canada

    Even since Luigi Russolo bent his avant-garde ear to trains and bombs and automobiles, declaring the arrival of a new “art of noises,” the music of machines has been the site of future shock. As the British critic Kodwo Eshun argues in his book More Brilliant Than the Sun , today’s samplers, synths, and drum machines breed “sonic science fictions,” rippling portents of the technocultural tsunami to come: high-speed, recombinant, and thoroughly posthuman.
    At the same time, a deep strain of nostalgia runs through electronic music, a wistful melancholy often bound up, in strange, indeterminate ways, with childhood and nature—in other words, with loss. Electronic music often makes melodies of these moods,