016 WTFUture - VIDEO Interview - Dr. Shira Chess - Cyberculture, Avatars and the Occult

Dr. Shira Chess is a professor who is having a lot of fun investigating the intersections of video games, gender,  digital culture, and the occult.  Being digital pioneers and spiritual explorers ourselves, we were very curious about her latest findings, discussed in this interview and with great detail in her latest book, “The Unseen Internet - Conjuring the Occult in Digital Discourse.”   One of the funniest and most endearing revelations of the interview is her current “cathartic and just a touch crazy” gaming obsession: meticulously recreating the 90s Mondo 2000 cyber-culture scene (in which we personally participated in the early 90’s) inside the  life-simulation game Tomodachi Life. She admits to forcing the little digital avatars of real-world internet pioneers to refer to her as “editor,” taking immense joy in capturing photos of ‘Mondoids’ like Tim Leary and Terence McKenna spontaneously playing together on a virtual see saw. :-) Dr. Chess expresses concern over the loss of authentic human connection online and the anxiety younger generations feel toward a future dictated by financially driven algorithms.  We do look at how  occult traditions can connect to contemporary technology, including parallels between conjuring spirits and communicating with AI’s.  Questions like how do we address them and what we request from them are broached.  Upcoming events this summer, like “The Gulf of Deliria,” with Dr. Chess and R.U Sirius will take us to the brink with these and related issues, tearing a hole in the fabric of reality itself!  Enjoy..