We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

Ever since the earliest astronomer tried to make sense of the endless night sky, human beings have sought order in systems of chaos. We’re driven to control disarray by understanding it, either scientifically or poetically. Both of those widely divergent approaches to the unknown have been boosted by the last century’s giant strides forward in technology.

Not only can we now map the human genome and access centuries of human thought at the click of a mouse, but technology has also introduced vast new quarries of chaotic, random material for artists and poets to obsess over. And that’s just what Glitch: Designing Imperfection is about– it’s a book celebrating the anarchy of distortion, the creativity intrinsic to grisly computer crashes.

This illuminating volume meditates on the meaning and meaninglessness of glitch– the beauty and the terror of pixelated, involuntary abstraction– through enlightening interviews and work from dozens of rad digital media wizards like Johnny Rogers and Cory Arcangel. Sifting through 900 submissions, the curators of Glitch: Designing Imperfection have spent four years compiling the definitive resource on the visual art of synthetic chaos.

Before Google, inquiring minds had to rely on the local library to research such intriguing topics as Opus Dei, Area 51, Skull and Bones, the Illuminati, and other such perennial areas of interest. Then Google arrived, and same minds had to rely on their crack research skills to distinguish the factual material from the bogus.

Now, inquiring minds need nothing but Arthur Goldwag’s Cults, Conspiracies & Secret Societies, a bible of data about anything that ever contained a whiff of exclusionary intrigue. Goldwag breaks down the information with measured analyses, defining cults the way a social scientist or psychologist might, to denote “a coercive or totalizing relationship between a dominating leader and his or her unhealthily dependent followers. What makes a cult cultish,” Goldwag goes on, “is not so much what it espouses, but how much authority its leaders grant themselves–and how slavishly devoted to them its followers are.”

For the Conspiracy section (which covers Tupac Shakur, 9/11, Marilyn Monroe and everything in between) Goldwag uses the word as “more of a metaphysical than a legal concept,” noting that “when used in conjunction with “theory,” the word “conspiracy” is practically synonymous with “determinism”, and a malign determinism at that: it is the paranoid certainty that nothing happens by accident, that somebody bad is pulling all the strings.”

As for secret societies, Goldwag demystifies those hidden orders by stating straight out the gate that “Here in the real world, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the closest kept secret of many secret societies is the fact that they haven’t got all that many secrets worth keeping. Much of the solemn claptrap and mumbo-jumbo associated with fraternal orders is just that–stagecraft, juvenile secret-decoder-ring stuff, designed to foster the sense of the group, to strengthen its members’ sense of shared identity.”

With such a sensible and well-informed guide, you’ll never turn to Wikipedia again for those late-night Stealth Blimp research junkets.