On the first of January 2000, something happened that changed the world forever. Nothing happened. Predictions of a global digital breakdown failed to come true. The problem known as Y2K anticipated that, despite expensive measures taken, many life-saving and peace-maintaining computers in among others hospitals, banks and security headquarters would shut down because of the quaternary digit change overlooked long ago by our engineers. Overnight the year 00 would succeed the year 99, as a token of technology’s reductionism. The millennium was to start with a tabula rasa, an appropriately spectacular start of the digital age. Today we barely remember the fuzz and the build-up.

The morning after, things seemed to go on as usual. I claim they did not. Questions about the deep anxiety and how willingly we had diffused it globally were conspicuously absent in the media and on the streets, buried under a heavy silence. Unprepared computers functioned anyway. The millennial angst had at short notice made US companies and government invest an estimated 300 billion USD to fix ‘the millennium bug’, much of it considered unnecessary afterward.Footnote 1 In today’s currency that exceeds the entire globe’s investment in clean energy in 2018.Footnote 2 Clearly, once a sense of urgency is planted, global interventions can succeed rapidly.

What were the factors strong enough to put thought into practice and activate the masses? The prediction was framed in an experientially relevant story. It managed to simplicate, translate through condensed meaning what latently lived in the population. Part of our collective reason, a subconscious warning the species, is that the information society and its knowledge economy have no solid basis. The Y2K investment tapped into this intuition, that the edifice which we had falteringly bet our future on could that easily crumble.

The translation of this collective reason into a massive computer crash was inaccurate. It could circulate through the entire social network due to elements that lubricate in a simplex society. The prediction set a concrete date of trouble. (Millennial movements also have that obsession with a point in time.) The trouble was clear and could be assessed on that date. The one-layered atomism attracted. In analogy, if everyone goes by bike twice as much for a year and the impact is less glaciers melting, measurable in millimeters less sea-level rise, we will continue biking and make sure to do better next year.

The fin-de-siècle atmosphere lent impetus to the craze. The moment of uncertainty, worrying us at the time for disrupting markets and hospital care, as much as beguiling for the prospect of a new start toward a ‘post-information age’, a bit like the corona pandemic later, was thought to recede soon. But the collective sense of urgency remained.

A Brief History of Digital Distress

Came 911. Facing the images of those twin towers iconic of modernity’s success tumbling down, one could only feel horror, together with millions of viewers. Only? Many of us were taught something terrifying about themselves as well. In the corners of their anguished face a trembling could be detected that resembled the buddings of a grin, suppressed as soon as bodies jumped out of the skyscrapers. The sensation of witnessing an iconic event, the big idea, allured. ‘Emporned’ with imagery planting compulsory interest, the mismatch between meaning and feeling took root. Everybody who watched the collapsing towers live on CNN went through the horror, and survived. Whether Islamist or American, artist or journalist, nobody differed in diffusing the visions that terrorized. From then onward, visions became news. Post-truth is that. The images spread meanings with fixed affect and thus dissociate themselves from our feelings. Already before finishing to text our indignation, we are not sure anymore what we feel.

A century earlier, works of fiction had announced the spectral side of modernity. In the aftermath of Y2K, the hunt for ghosts in apocalyptic craze returned with a vengeance. At the turn of the millennium, aided with the multisensorial sophistication of Internet technology, audiences had discovered the pleasure of contaminating each other with fear without feeling the consequences. In the following decade, we witnessed ecological and financial catastrophes, and watched movies on the pending drama of the Anthropocene, and yet we chose, voted and lived pretty much as ever before. Climate change is real, it won’t happen.

Information technology started as an extension of our perceptual apparatus. Today as cultures globalize into a simplicating social network, the subject is placed in the arduous position of registering without intervening. With every simplex, we pass the heat on as soon as we can—hit the keyboard, frozen on our chairs to tell the news. Still bodies powerlessly watch stray bodies. Information technology standardizes decisions and downgrades social negotiation. Anthropologists silently withdrew from public debate on the challenges of globalization and cultural difference, as they could not keep the secret, an awareness after fieldwork they spent much effort in disbelieving and which prevented them from saying too much regarding exactly those issues the public is concerned about and, quite frankly, has been paying for to know. The secret discovered through cultural comparison is that we—anyone reading this text—have been building on this planet the first society where people benefit from the death of others; where the purpose is not to cherish the swarm (ethnos) or conserve the group by controlling tensions but to tacitly raise tensions; not to keep all members of one’s personal network alive, but as that network extends to the globe: to stress others out through reports of threats and incalculable risks, and achieve a natural selection that keeps the expanding network in check; to kill the relevant other slowly, pile up the stray bodies, and make up for it through education into mechanisms of selection, through development work, through ever more selective critique, artistic anarchy, uniqueness. The younger generation has had to build on the make-believe, that we care about life, that as atomists we can tacitly count on the holistic miracle of organic redress to continue our atomistic interventions.

Holism is the cosmology befitting the swarm and its (intraspecies) communication.Footnote 3 Yet, atomism is what we have learned to reward. Both environmentalists and the media therefore feel compelled to not only show statistics but also diffuse images of disaster to incite transformative shock, in the hope of summoning near-death-like experiences changing a person’s life forever. A cataclysm. Tangible loss. To reach affect, campaigners look for the equivalent of Neil Armstrong’s sudden insight about Earth’s vulnerability when viewing our blue marble from the dark of space. After the serial betrayal of simplexes feeding emotions, characteristic of the network channeling myriads of symbols, people are losing their sense of, and interest in, what is real. Part of the entropy, we have seen, is the futility of statements in sealed-off spheres carved out from the global network. Amidst the flows of information, we vainly await the shock of the real that could rekindle a sense of urgency and motivate an ultimate decision.

Reasons for Optimism

Fascinating exercises have taken place in the last decade to raise environmental consciousness. Studies in multispecies anthropology organize immersions in the lifeworld of animals and plants that can change the reader’s attitude.Footnote 4 If what we call forest is a city for the animals inhabiting it, what are loggers razing to the ground? Entire cities. Organized mass destruction. The oil palms of agribusiness replace biodiverse forests with plants that ‘refuse to be hugged’.Footnote 5 The anthropological exercise of translating alterity permits to see in the thousands of acres of mono-cultural fields the desert it is for bees; to see in the exploitation of resources along the equator the destruction of livelihoods of numerous beings, large and small, many of whom we cannot perceive. The shift of perspective leads to the discovery of other worlds that are our planet’s too. Entering a sphere to take the other’s perspective can transform things more lastingly than factual statements about degradation. Frameshifts channel energies. Through multispecies studies, the reader gets to see sources of production distributed among spheres of exchange, and this from a post-humanist standpoint. Life is more than that of one species.

A frameshift permitted the breakthrough in abolishing slavery in the mid-nineteenth century, as the general public recognized the shared humanity, among others via Biblical references in pamphlets asking ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ above a drawing of a chained half-naked black man.Footnote 6 A hundred years later, the change toward decolonization and legal independence of colonized countries was possible thanks to perspectival extensions acknowledging local communities with histories and socio-political systems in their own right. Against European leaders picturing the colonies as parts of their realms, African intellectuals such as Nyerere, Nkrumah and Senghor wrote their critical analysis for the wider public, in fact for the entire globe. Ethnographies evoked for the educated what other societies looked like. In the 1950s, Max Gluckman talked every evening on BBC radio about African political systems to familiarize British families at home. The independence of African countries within less than a decade was unlikely. But it happened.

From Europeans and Africans realizing their shared human fate, their tapping from the same sources of production, a lesson can be learned for ending the present subjugation, that of the social and natural environment by unregulated market, information network, finance and industry. The humanities have a role to play in the change of attitudes, as they did during colonization, by embracing ethnography as a tool to understand those personally affected. In climate change, the future generations are affected. Can the ethnographer let their voices be heard? Or should the future generation address us? This chapter rounds off my essay by letting the phantoms talk.

An overture was made recently in the streets of Stockholm and Brussels, as the youngest demonstrators ever flocked together to bombard the cameras with appropriately sarcastic slogans on carton: ‘There is no Plan(et) B’ or ‘Ride dicks, not cars!’ The protestors defend the rights of their future grandchildren who will hopefully get to see their own grandchildren grow up healthily. At stake in the protests is the future of life, in engagement with distant generations. The assuredness with which collective reason spoke through educators in the 1960s to decolonize can be repeated for the eco-social challenge, were it not blocked by contemporary society’s simplexes and bubbles. That is the particular situation this book cautioned about. I do not advocate one frame or another, but the capacity to shift between them. That is how we step out of the matrix and into the tensor.

Pre-ception and Intraspecies Communication

The artist, diviner, football fan and speaker-in-tongues of the previous chapters got hunches, about forthcoming events. Rapper Afande Sele sung in Swahili about the artist’s darubini kali, ‘sharp binoculars’ that read the signs of the times. The hunch determines what to do. Where does the hunch come from? How do we know it ain’t make-believe? The Sukuma society of elderhood initiates adolescents into receiving hunches. The traditional healer is specialized in them. Particularly famed for this kind of ultra-far vision is the aforementioned Chwezi medicinal spirit cult that played a central role in the precolonial history of Interlacustrine Africa. Initiation in the Chwezi cult illustrated to me how far one should go in trial and error, experiments of the real, to exercise one’s intuition. The other experiment that stood out in my life the epilogue recounts.

In mid-1997, after my village initiation together with Sukuma peers and having lived in a healer compound, Masanja and I conducted a long interview with Malamala, the head of the Chwezi society. A month later we were invited to complete our first initiatory cycle in the cult. Although developed independently from mass civilizing traditions such as Christianity, Hinduism and Islam, the cult exhibits traits that relate to the religious sphere. One is the experience of union with a spirit. It is biologically not impossible for certain neural connections to give way to mystical sensations.Footnote 7 Everyone at some point in life may have had an experience of being in unity with the universe, perhaps without making a big deal out of it later. However, when several people share the same delusion at more or less the same time, either or not induced medicinally, then we observe in separate cultures that this sensation is usually associated with action of the dead, with ‘spirits’. We need not believe in their influence from yonder to identify an underlying meaning that makes sense.

Mediums claim to know when possession is near. The medium-diviner signals the arrival of the spirit to her client by drumming. The Chwezi mediums sing at night about the pending event: ‘The great cooling snake emerges when the moon appears. It instils pains in my back. Maybe it has accepted.’ The spirit announces itself as a ‘great snake’ (liyoka) through convulsions starting from the spine. Sukuma dancers move their hips with a slight jerk of the spine. The medium depends on the snake’s goodwill and on the moon cycle. The medium no less earns the blessing through readiness. If no ritual can command the spirit, how can possession be initiated? This paradox is the point of mediumship. The novices have to accept that what they are doing, and what accounts for a consciousness of consciousness deeper than that of the non-initiated, is that they are ‘stalking the stalker’ (ukusuutila lusuutila). The spirit whom they are after is itself stalking them. Two separate systems can meet at the right moment, and with the right training. In their passionate encounter the difference fades between intraspecies (human spirit) and interspecies (snake spirit) communication. What the ritual training does is to take away the novice’s inhibition so that, as another Chwezi song goes, ‘On the road lies nothing but fate.’ Feeling in synchrony with what intrudes implies a sense of destiny. How else could something pre-ceived be instigated that cannot be commanded?

Chwezi spirit possession exposes, in a magnified way, what conscious perception does every day. Our mind pictures ‘reality’ as the brain links up with a chunk of spacetime. Animals specialize in sensory modes, the exteroceptive (see, hear, smell, taste, touch), interoceptive (intestinal movement) and proprioceptive (sense of balance).Footnote 8 Might there be an ulteroceptive sense?Footnote 9 The human species has developed foremost the sensory mode of vision to perceive afar. Hearing covers less distance in space than smell, itself not being as near as touch. ‘Hunches’ are no less neural and no less perceptual, so why not do the experiment of treating them as the next sensory mode? Someone receiving a hunch is touched by sense data that reach further than the edge of vision because a hunch adds a temporal dimension. Its ultra-far vision senses what shall be in the near future.Footnote 10 To accept this view we should picture our environment not as a space but as a spacetime from which our sensorium picks up impulses. Treacherously resembling premonition, this sense which we may tentatively set apart with the previously introduced term ‘pre-ception’ and for which no formal training exists in the Global North is incredibly common among animate beings. It surfaces in the creative impulse during an improvisation, in music, sports, art, performance, spirit possession, revolution, hunt and much more. In each of these, the impulse received with remarkable confidence by the self anticipates the successful bridge in a song, the flick of a heel to score a goal, the compilation of scenes that inspires awe, the silence that penetrates souls, the trance that engulfs audiences, the mobilization of minds, the shot from a distance right between the eyes of a wild deer motioning acceptance of its fate. All these moments nourish our experience of the real and for that reason are tensors undoing the simplex frame. The human swarm’s dazzlingly creative Murmuration also manifests itself in the collective hunch of a spatiotemporal nearby event.

The reason why I mention pre-ception is to illustrate the conspicuous preclusion of possibilities by the educational system in our simplex society where information comes first. For each of the listed sensations a simplex awaits, respectively the solmization of a song, the tactical scheme of a match, the storyboard, the cue, the brain scan, the pamphlet and the phrase ‘lucky shot’. These reductions simplicate the tensors all too roughly because they obscure the bulk of what happens, omitting the unforeseen of events and the visceral of skills, like the astrophysicist overlooking dark matter, 90% of the universe. Parallel to the local sphere whose frames of experience can be described and concretized through individual reason, humans feature in a speciated history full of blind spots. Therefore, as an anthropologist I must take the collective imaginary seriously, those intense convictions whirling in the undertow, about improbable events such as great conspiracies and the apocalypse. Or aliens.

Aliens

The phantoms preoccupying nineteenth-century spiritists in search of contact were not those of the twentieth century. The anxiety and fascination concentrated on nocturnal sounds and on the absence or vagueness of visual perception in deserted houses and attics. Evolutionist, dystopic philosophies were voiced by the spirits, noted down by mediums such as Allan Kardec in the 1850s. The phantasies reflected collective affects, permeating later through symbolist works of art. At the turn of the century followed H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds about a Martian invasion, broadcasted in a radio play by the young Orson Welles in 1938. It famously scared listeners into a panic. After the Second World War the interest rose in extraterrestrial (ET) intelligence and UFOs. The phantoms of the era had changed, but were no less expressive of collective preoccupations. The traits of imagined aliens have a certain salience, an ongoing significance. Allow me to have a go at interpreting the traits of the alien as a case of ulteroception in action—yet another optimistic attempt of mine at translating collective reason at some point in history.

Suspected to hold both a higher intelligence and an inclination to abduct innocent earthlings for research, aliens and their UFOs are as ambiguous as spirits. They have the unique complexion of little green (and sometimes grey) persons, with tiny mouths and noses. Their eyes are large and almond shaped, yet mostly (except for Hollywood’s ET) entirely black, hence with only pupil, no iris or sclera. They have no clear gender, no nipples. Their body is very thin, their head oversized. They have fetal features, despite their association with advanced technology enabling them to travel from a distant part of the universe. The concept of time that separates beginning and end vanishes in them. Common discourse associates aliens with life from another planet.

However, does the imaginary figure not speak for itself? Going over the traits, a very different idea seems to be expressed. The aliens are us, terrestrials, in a distant future. Their bodies picture the ultimate outcome after numerous scientific revolutions, intermarriage and cultural creation. A romantic hypothesis recurring in science fiction speculates on a voyage back in time by human visitors from the future. With increased schooling and information technology a million years later our brain will have expanded very much, the eyes becoming highly receptive screens. The origins of some facial traits like the cheek bone, eye shape and chin would already be detectable currently in the growing proportion of Asians in our globalizing world. Global demographic growth and limited natural resources will have selected small stature. Due to population pressure and exponentially risen life expectancy, new births would be rare and controlled. Gender difference would be obsolete both socially, because of gender sensitivity, and biologically, given the demography.

Amazing what one could infer from this one prototypical image of the extraterrestrial. Those wondering about the green spacesuit might have heard about the twelfth-century legend on the two green children of Woolpit speaking an unknown language. Probably the aliens’ holy preference for the color has a deeper reason, evoking the green pastures and forests forever lost after the inevitable destruction of our environment in the not so distant future—an information brought to us a million years from now, give or take a few thousand years.

After all, that seems the point of the visit and the image. Who doubts still that first and foremost the alien visitor lives within us, terrestrials? The alien image ‘preceives’ what awaits our descendants, were we to let the slot pass of radically changing our way of life in this century. Actually, does the alien ever part the lips? Our descendants present themselves at the foot of their spaceship without saying a word. ‘Look at us. Is this what you want?’ You and I ask the question through our collective imagination, tapping into spacetime.

The spectral image of the alien is our descendant appearing. Not a deceased ancestor. The upshot of this difference with the phantoms of the nineteenth century is somewhat chilling. This time we are the deceased, visited by our descendants.