Oh No, My Post is Horsecrap
Hmm, what’s this thing?
I think it's perhaps not only commendable that good sci-fi comments on the current moment, but perhaps is almost inevitable. If an author manages to write something that semi-predicts a part of the future, in a way they've risen above the mind of their own time.
But of course we won't know that until the future, when we can look back and judge how things turned out. And even then maybe it's survivorship bias or a scattershot method, if the sample size is large enough.
Lemme give you an example of what I mean.
I've had the picture of the "steampunk train" from the header photo saved for nearly ten years. I used to have a TV next to my desktop, and its screensaver was a slideshow of fun, interesting, and thought-provoking photos I'd found. I found this depiction of what a 19th century person considered plausible when imagining a "machine god," and I thought it was cool as heck. This is the steam era, the Industrial Revolution. Of course, when someone thinks of capital P "Progress" in that era, they naturally think of the power of steam and trains, and extrapolate that out into the future, combined with a popular conception of Greek mythology. Ta da, not just a machine god, but a "steam god." I've been fascinated by this photo for years, and the concept of how one's ideas are shaped by the pressures of their time.
Is this like “one horsepower” or like “infinity horsepower”?
Or ... unfortunately, that's what this post, and that photo, USED to be about. Then I started writing this post and couldn't simply submit half-remembered ideas.
Stupid me, I wanted to verify my information.
It took nearly an hour of searching every permutation of "train god" and related topics before I had my "Oh no, I may believe horsecrap" moment, and turned to TinEye, the reverse image search, and what emerged then was a different story.
This much is true, and wacky as heck: there was a fella who “tried” to “make” a machine god. His name was John Murray Spear:
Behold, your new god’s dad.
He seemed to be a pretty dapper chap, and a rather progressive fella for the mid 19th century. Then one day, he got the crap kicked out of him by a group of people, BECAUSE REASONS. He was nursed back to health by a friend, who died shortly after, and then Spears got a message from his dead friend, from HEAVEN, because angels thought it would be a convenient way to get in touch with him to tell him to build a new messiah, a machine messiah, a new technology bridging the gap between the living and the dead. His friend told him this through his own handwriting, when Spear's hand began writing all on its own.
Sounds like Spear, if nothing else, presaged AI prompting.
You may have wondered what that OTHER picture above is, the one that looks like Thomas Edison designed a karaoke machine. THAT -- not the charging steam stallion -- is the 19th century machine messiah.
The short-short version: With the help of instructions from angels, and $2000 old-timey dollars from his new group of followers, it took Spears a couple years to build this messiah -- built with an equivalent human heart and lungs and brain -- but when it was finally done it didn't quite work. Thus the angels sayeth unto John:
“Unto your Earth a child is born. Its name shall be called the ELECTRICAL MOTOR. It is the offspring of mind — of the union of mind with matter impregnated by invisible elements. It is to move the mortal, scientific, philosophic, and religious worlds… It is now thoroughly, electrically, magnetically, chemically, spiritually, and celestially, impregnated. It needs material care, like other newborn babes.”
So then there was some funky, sexy, strange times where the wife of one of his richest supporters "connected" to the machine SPIRITUALLY. Then the machine worked a little bit. It did a little of what the machine god was supposed to do, which was like, move some dials, or get imbued with some kinda galvanizing force for a few seconds. The usual. Then, conveniently, angry villagers destroyed the machine, so it never reached its full potential. Mankind remained electrically, magnetically, chemically, spiritually, and celestially unsaved.
Here's a couple articles about that. I've only scratched the surface:
Father of the Mechanical Messiah: https://www.strange-phenomenon.com/john-murray-spear...
The Living Machine of John Murray Spear: https://strangenewengland.com/podcast/livingmachine/
So, all that is pretty neat, but that's STILL not what I had originally come to make a post about, as suddenly what I had come to post about was bullcrap. Because it was extremely easy to get a wrong idea in my head, and then really non-easy to shake that idea out.
Ohhhh, I could so start digging through current news articles right now.
It's difficult to find information you're looking for when you have the wrong starting point. In this case, it was a FUN idea that I had WANTED to believe.
Ohhhh, I could so start dredging up a gazillion examples of ancient aliens and Graham Hancock bullshit archaeology right now.
I've had this wrong idea in my head about the steam train photo because someone thought it'd be a cooler photo to use than Spear's actual "New Motor," which he perhaps could just as well have marketed as a new-fangled horseless carriage motor/taffy puller. It was a blog called "Dark Roasted Blend," which was difficult to verify as the post from 2009 no longer exists. Luckily, a contributor in 2014 seems to have copied the post entirely:
https://hotcarwashnew.blogspot.com/.../the-new-motor-or...
As you can see, the blogger correctly attributed the photo of the train to its creators, Vladimir Tsesler and Sergei Voichenko.
(Here's their concept and more in the same series: https://earthlymission.com/amazing-steampunk-locomotives.../ )
But because the blogger thought the train was a way cooler photo than the actual "machine Messiah," and put it first in the article, and made it the cover photo, when some reposter came along and yoinked it for clout somewhere else, the reposter probably didn't bother to read much else than the headline. It then got reposted a gazillion times as "a 19th century conception of a machine god."
But nope. Just a cool steampunk train.
What lesson am I trying to impart here? Ya know, I dunno. I'm disappointed in Spear's super unsexy Jules Verne penis pump/coffee maker. The horse train is a WAY better story -- which I've long realized is my weak spot. I WANT to believe the better story -- which is why I used to read those cruddy occult Time Life books as a kid -- and why I now reexamine every crumb of knowledge I come across. Is that fun? Wouldn't it be more enjoyable to just raw-dog new ideas and Joe-Rogan that dumb shit all over yourself every day?
Crud, I'm going off the rails.
Heck, people believe soooo much dumb crap that isn't true. Americans should exhume the corpse of Washington Irving and teabag him on the steps of the Smithsonian.
For reference sake, he thought Americans needed a mythology to tie the country together and so just started … MAKING STUFF UP.
Heck, it sorta worked. Half of what you believe about American traditions and folkways, including that Columbus believed the world was flat, and most Christmas traditions, probably popped into Irving's mind while he was squatting over his chamberpot.
Behold, your new Satan.
It should be a national holiday: Teabag Washington Irving Day. Make effigies of him grinning and just bag that tea all over his stupid face. He deserves it.
Now the wheels are coming off as well.
Maybe there'd finally be a squeak from the "museum" where what's thought to be Spear's "New Motor," the "machine messiah," sits today in New England. It'd be the galvanized spirit voice of the author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and promoter of “romantic history” indignantly clearing his throat from beyond the grave. The wheels would spin. The horns would honk. A dumb dapper voice would be like: "Get ... your ballsack ... off my face."
Anyway, this post got away from me. What started as a post commending authors for being able to step out of their present moment and presage the future became a diatribe about how difficult it is to even recognize the bad ideas pushed on us by the laziness and shortsightedness of the past. Maybe we should create a new messiah based around updated citations on Wikipedia, and the idea that accurate historical information is more fun than wacky hi-jinks and clout.
Every $3 donation to Wikipedia helps fund an eternity in the Galactic Archive.
Every shitpost earns you a spot in “Biblically accurate Heaven.”
I should probably go back and remove the swears from this post if I want it to be seen. But that wouldn't be accurate.
I hope you're having a lovely day.
Now, that's, finally, an accurate statement from me.
Cheerio.