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Of Internets, seen and unseen
Joseph Matheny with Ian Blumberg at Mother Foucault's in Portland, July 19th, 2024
Still kicking around some original content for the "podcast," so here's one from the archives while I continue to mull it over.
The Unseen Internet
The Unseen Internet
Conjuring the Occult in Digital Discourse
by Shira Chess
In 2003, I had this idea that a book should be written chronicling the influence that psychedelic drugs and magick had on the development of the early Internet. Granted, my “evidence” was all anecdotal. However, since I was in the trenches during the “dotcom” revolution, I thought I could build a strong case. I pitched it to a couple of publishers. The publishers in question were not convinced that this was really a thing. I think we’d call them “normies.” They also could not envision a marker for such a book. So, I dropped the idea and went about my tech career.
The truth is, I wasn’t the right person for the job. I can say that now. I was too engrossed in developing tech, working on infinite game theory, and championing ARG as a legitimate art form. It would not have received the treatment it deserved as a subject.
I also feel like the time is right for this story, with the advent of LLMs and the ongoing misunderstanding of what AI is, what consciousness is, and why corporations are trying so hard to convince us we need that as a feature in our everyday lives. This book would make a great companion piece to Ong’s Hat: COMPLEAT.
When Shira called me a few years ago and said she was interested in writing such a book for MIT, I was overjoyed and quickly began rattling off names of people she should contact. I also told her stories about my own experiences developing “occult tech,” as well as the cultural milieu that literally built the Internet in the 90s through the mid 2000s. I am really glad that the right person for this job stepped up and kept this story from falling down a memory hole.
I won’t kick it to death by categorically reviewing this book's contents, but rather, I will give it a full-throated endorsement and assure you that you will be in capable hands. The book finally found the right person and the right co-conspirators to tell this tale.
Included in the interviews, acknowledgements, and profiles (besides your’s truly) are friends, aquantances and co-conspirators: Nick Herbert, Tiffany Lee Brown, Klint Finley, R.U. Sirius, and Don Webb, to name a few.
LINK: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262553889/the-unseen-internet/
Asylum Art: Artists Who Created While Living in Psychiatric Institutions (And Those Who Did Not)
I identify as an “outsider artist, or “art brut.” I have never been institutionalized, but I have enormous respect for artists who find themselves in such a situation and somehow persevere and create. Please check out this article/list and check out some great forerunners to marginalized people, full of life and talent.
The Shadowman
Fell down a bit of a Richard Hambleton rabbit hole lately. His is a story both tragic and heroic. He was tragic because of addiction, the resultant homeless situation that incured and heroic because, against all odds, including his incessant self-sabotage, he stuck to his vision and created the kind of art he wanted to the way he wanted to. My interest was renewed after reading OVERTHROW! The Autopsy of NEOISM by Istvan Kantor (Monty Cantsin)
Follow me down the rabbit hole.
Shadowman
2017 · 1 hr 22 min
TV-MA
Documentary
Born out of lower Manhattan’s street art movement of the 1980s, Richard Hambleton gets a second chance after a long, chaotic slide into addiction.
LINK: https://tubitv.com/movies/706072/shadowman
Hero in Art: The Vanished Traces of Richard Hambleton
Note: If you’re looking for a straightforward, linear narrative about Richard’s life, then this might not be a book for you. If you’re satisfied with a non-linear, mythopoeic tale of life as it was in NY’s LES in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, as told by resident shizopoet Istvan Kantor (aka neoism’s founding Monty Cantsin), then this is a book for you.It reads like a journal of events and feels appropriate to the subject matter. The book pairs well with the Shadowman movie, linked above, like a dry white German Rhine wine with a broiled duck breast.
Creator of three major multi-city street art series, Image Mass Murder, I Only Have Eyes for You and Shadow figures, RichardHambleton is remembered as a visionary underground artist, a daring pioneer of urban interventionist art, a heroic idol of graffiti artists. Esteemed to be the godfather of street art, he was one of the principal players of the new wave of visual arts that erupted in New York’s East Village and its neighboring Lower East Side in the early 80s and gave rise to a new breed of defiant guerrilla fighters striving against conformist museum art. In this biographic novel, author Istvan Kantor aka Monty Cantsin, the founder of Neoism and an early friend of Richard Hambleton, tells the eventful, inspiring but also dark story of the world famous street artist and renegade junky. Through his own, sometime very personal experiences, added with recollections by others and fused into a dramatically flowing narrative, Kantor/Cantsin reports on the art and times of Richard Hambleton, his falls and rises, highs and lows, told with honesty, passion and audacity. “He was surprised how much he enjoyed just standing there and looking at the sky above the cityscape... With towering passion and nervous excitement he threw a last glance down to the bottom. It was a powerful moment that opened up his fantasy and changed his perceptions. He left reality and flew up into the holy skies of grandeur and hallucinations, into the place he always wanted to be. It was almost like a prophetic experience. Richard was determined to conquer New York City with his art. He gave himself 5 years to accomplish it.”
LINK: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55400602-hero-in-art
How Vibe Coding Is Killing Open Source
Does vibe coding risk destroying the Open Source ecosystem? According to a pre-print paper by a number of high-profile researchers, this might indeed be the case based on observed patterns and some modelling. Their warnings mostly center around the way that user interaction is pulled away from OSS projects, while also making starting a new OSS project significantly harder.
LINK: https://hackaday.com/2026/02/02/how-vibe-coding-is-killing-open-source/
Angine de Poitrine - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)
Every once in a while, the algorithm introduces me to something I actually enjoy.
Interviews- Reviews
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit josephmatheny.substack.com
View all episodes
By Joseph MathenyJoseph Matheny with Ian Blumberg at Mother Foucault's in Portland, July 19th, 2024
Still kicking around some original content for the "podcast," so here's one from the archives while I continue to mull it over.
The Unseen Internet
The Unseen Internet
Conjuring the Occult in Digital Discourse
by Shira Chess
In 2003, I had this idea that a book should be written chronicling the influence that psychedelic drugs and magick had on the development of the early Internet. Granted, my “evidence” was all anecdotal. However, since I was in the trenches during the “dotcom” revolution, I thought I could build a strong case. I pitched it to a couple of publishers. The publishers in question were not convinced that this was really a thing. I think we’d call them “normies.” They also could not envision a marker for such a book. So, I dropped the idea and went about my tech career.
The truth is, I wasn’t the right person for the job. I can say that now. I was too engrossed in developing tech, working on infinite game theory, and championing ARG as a legitimate art form. It would not have received the treatment it deserved as a subject.
I also feel like the time is right for this story, with the advent of LLMs and the ongoing misunderstanding of what AI is, what consciousness is, and why corporations are trying so hard to convince us we need that as a feature in our everyday lives. This book would make a great companion piece to Ong’s Hat: COMPLEAT.
When Shira called me a few years ago and said she was interested in writing such a book for MIT, I was overjoyed and quickly began rattling off names of people she should contact. I also told her stories about my own experiences developing “occult tech,” as well as the cultural milieu that literally built the Internet in the 90s through the mid 2000s. I am really glad that the right person for this job stepped up and kept this story from falling down a memory hole.
I won’t kick it to death by categorically reviewing this book's contents, but rather, I will give it a full-throated endorsement and assure you that you will be in capable hands. The book finally found the right person and the right co-conspirators to tell this tale.
Included in the interviews, acknowledgements, and profiles (besides your’s truly) are friends, aquantances and co-conspirators: Nick Herbert, Tiffany Lee Brown, Klint Finley, R.U. Sirius, and Don Webb, to name a few.
LINK: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262553889/the-unseen-internet/
Asylum Art: Artists Who Created While Living in Psychiatric Institutions (And Those Who Did Not)
I identify as an “outsider artist, or “art brut.” I have never been institutionalized, but I have enormous respect for artists who find themselves in such a situation and somehow persevere and create. Please check out this article/list and check out some great forerunners to marginalized people, full of life and talent.
The Shadowman
Fell down a bit of a Richard Hambleton rabbit hole lately. His is a story both tragic and heroic. He was tragic because of addiction, the resultant homeless situation that incured and heroic because, against all odds, including his incessant self-sabotage, he stuck to his vision and created the kind of art he wanted to the way he wanted to. My interest was renewed after reading OVERTHROW! The Autopsy of NEOISM by Istvan Kantor (Monty Cantsin)
Follow me down the rabbit hole.
Shadowman
2017 · 1 hr 22 min
TV-MA
Documentary
Born out of lower Manhattan’s street art movement of the 1980s, Richard Hambleton gets a second chance after a long, chaotic slide into addiction.
LINK: https://tubitv.com/movies/706072/shadowman
Hero in Art: The Vanished Traces of Richard Hambleton
Note: If you’re looking for a straightforward, linear narrative about Richard’s life, then this might not be a book for you. If you’re satisfied with a non-linear, mythopoeic tale of life as it was in NY’s LES in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, as told by resident shizopoet Istvan Kantor (aka neoism’s founding Monty Cantsin), then this is a book for you.It reads like a journal of events and feels appropriate to the subject matter. The book pairs well with the Shadowman movie, linked above, like a dry white German Rhine wine with a broiled duck breast.
Creator of three major multi-city street art series, Image Mass Murder, I Only Have Eyes for You and Shadow figures, RichardHambleton is remembered as a visionary underground artist, a daring pioneer of urban interventionist art, a heroic idol of graffiti artists. Esteemed to be the godfather of street art, he was one of the principal players of the new wave of visual arts that erupted in New York’s East Village and its neighboring Lower East Side in the early 80s and gave rise to a new breed of defiant guerrilla fighters striving against conformist museum art. In this biographic novel, author Istvan Kantor aka Monty Cantsin, the founder of Neoism and an early friend of Richard Hambleton, tells the eventful, inspiring but also dark story of the world famous street artist and renegade junky. Through his own, sometime very personal experiences, added with recollections by others and fused into a dramatically flowing narrative, Kantor/Cantsin reports on the art and times of Richard Hambleton, his falls and rises, highs and lows, told with honesty, passion and audacity. “He was surprised how much he enjoyed just standing there and looking at the sky above the cityscape... With towering passion and nervous excitement he threw a last glance down to the bottom. It was a powerful moment that opened up his fantasy and changed his perceptions. He left reality and flew up into the holy skies of grandeur and hallucinations, into the place he always wanted to be. It was almost like a prophetic experience. Richard was determined to conquer New York City with his art. He gave himself 5 years to accomplish it.”
LINK: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55400602-hero-in-art
How Vibe Coding Is Killing Open Source
Does vibe coding risk destroying the Open Source ecosystem? According to a pre-print paper by a number of high-profile researchers, this might indeed be the case based on observed patterns and some modelling. Their warnings mostly center around the way that user interaction is pulled away from OSS projects, while also making starting a new OSS project significantly harder.
LINK: https://hackaday.com/2026/02/02/how-vibe-coding-is-killing-open-source/
Angine de Poitrine - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)
Every once in a while, the algorithm introduces me to something I actually enjoy.
Interviews- Reviews
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit josephmatheny.substack.com