There is this fascinating aspect of media that has taken me engaged for quite a while—like decades quite a while—and so I have had some new thinkings and a name. Let’s write about this shall we?

I have always had much thought and a form of curiosity about the notion of reality. But on a fundamental level I surmise the feeling has been of fright and horror. There are two forms of reality that I have seen in my life: The Reality and the Hyper-Message. Some thing that I will explain as best as I can right now.

What happens in the woods and the forests and under and above the sea is the reality. The world that Animals live in. In reality, there is only facts and the now. There is no notion of good or bad; no past; no future; there is always only the two. Some animals have mechanisms to endure during winters; or prepare things for periods but I have a hard time associating their actions to their mindful planning rather than their instincts. For animals never show any signs of being stuck in the past or afraid of the future.

In the real world we never see an animal think about the ethics and morals of killing for their food, their treatment of each other and the all else. Yet we have all such qualities in Humanity. In all of this; there are things that I find interesting but as said; immensely disturbing.

As humans; we see ourselves as good or bad people. That is one of the most crucial aspects of human identity: Am I a good boy? Will Santa bring me gifts this year? Have I been a nice girl? Does God love me? Will I go to heaven? And then we have people who are family persons; people who try to go to the community activities; people who donate; people who protest against wars; who sacrifice themselves for others; who never get anything because it is not fair.

But they probably all eat meat.

In Islam people believe certain species are made by god only to be eaten by humans. (How they can worship a god that could have made them proper food that did not require the suffering of an animal in the first place is another topic for my nightmares).

So imagine this: donating, sacrificing, lovely person with dead meat in their hand preparing food for their loved one’s birthday. That can be any of us; any of our friends, family, anyone we can think of. Most of us, regardless of how kind we are, we still kill animals; worse, we all eat industrial-farming’s produced meat which means those poor animals were living in torture, basically suffering and suffocating their whole lives.

I told you this first example to show how immense the difference between the ideas we live in our minds are to the actual realities of life. Most people are proud they have never killed anyone and that they can not even imagine how can anyone kill another person. How can they sleep at night? And then we have all of these frightening stories about killing and murder; like the ones where the killer is crazy and takes away sleep for some good days from you. In all of those movies; all those series; all those stories; they kill a handful of people. But my dear reader, can you count how many animals do you eat this week alone? Can you workout the total number in your whole life? Do you think wars are bad and how anyone can kill so many people? Well, how many animals were killed just to feed you? The number is perhaps either tens of thousands or maybe on a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand scale. Suddenly you realize the ones committing war crimes were not that different from you. (That is if you are not racist). Humanity to think the animals don’t count.

So what is it then? Why don’t we all kill ourselves out of guilt for all the atrocity that was done by us? Why do we still believe in the good and fair although they mean nothing? Because of the Hyper-Message: The most powerful side effect of all human creations; the hidden message of the communication itself. Something that my disconnect from the internet has prevented me to check if I am the genuine discoverer. But I am sure I am!

When I listen to Rachmaninoff’s music; I think I am in a world that does not exist. This is something that I had since I was a child and everyone else had and has too. I used to have this arctic LEGO’s and I would pretend @madar’s white table was the north pole. Once I was playing I was detached from reality. I would have really felt I was there. I knew it was pretending but then it was real.

For me some mental effort was required as the whole rest of my reality was shaped as not Arctic. Yet; there was an arctic in my mind. This showed itself in almost all other places of my life but then very differently. Only I see it now.

I have written volumes about this already so please do forgive me if I am repeating: Take the idea of religion. To a cut it means nothing; but to religious people it means everything; not because it is real; but because there is so many people believing in it that it seems legit. A religious person goes to any place and chances are 90% to 20%. The others believe in the same thing; there are religious buildings; the whole world works based on calendars that either c-aval the birth of this religious prophet or the migration of the other. It is different than me playing LEGO because it requires the minimum effort in imagination. And so this is the Spectrum for it: Imagining it all and shape the world around you in your head or have the world to it for you.

But both of them are essentially the same. They are imposing imagination into the world.

I love the movie “Coda” (2014). It is about a pianist, Henry Cole and a New Yorker journalist, Helen Morrison. The film is all about classical music. It is the force that connects everyone together there. Helen trying to be nice talks music to Henry; Felix, the hotel person shows how he feels classical music to Henry and they become friends. It feels religious at some point. You see people who are in this world of music; like nothing else exists. At some point in the movie Helen asks Henry if he ever gets lonely; to which he replies: “German Composers Are Good Company” that he never gets lonely when Bach exists. That is exactly like a religious person saying they never get lonely because God is with them in their hearts. That insane! And I must confess that I also find the same comfort in this classical fantasy. It is amazing.

Zea has told me that she used to be in love with Houshang Moradi Kermani’s stories and wished to someday visit the village in his stories. Once she had traveled to Kerman and she told me that while she was there she had passed before this village; and then saw his statue, was she realized it was the legendary village, only it was this normal, ordinary, and even a bit ordinary place. She once told me this to say “Mr. Kermani made a place out of there.” I always wished to have lived. I even knew the map of the place by heart. It was amazing. Have his imagination and make dark moments beautiful for yourself." It seems to me that imagination is way more in your life than you can possibly realize. Mr. Kermani lived in a vision he had of the reality and others joined him (in something like his reality).

And it is important to notice the fantasy is the mask we wear on the reality to escape its darkness. All the “God will protect its children”, “a good person will go new execution but they will never be hanged. Things like that”.

These are all the same in that we live inside shared dreams. Now the shared dream is what people have noticed —they do, when they haven’t the relation between this and the Debord’s “Spectacle”.

Guy Debord rightly described Spectacle as a stream of images, fragmented:

Thinking about it, it is that we detach from the world we live inside into this shared world of abstractions. And the Spectacle is our collection of fragmented images. But then think of something else, and as interesting: There is a parallel to the spectacle world that is not about more images but the simulated realities that we live in our heads. Our shared dreams and not their images. When we are at a concert, everything seems to make sense. It feels like a giant reality and when we get out it loses that meaning. This is not also Jean Baudrillard’s Hyper-Realities. Although it certainly is a very similar concept. It is taking the reality and masking it. Day dreaming about a version of reality that does not exist.

Talking about the Hyper-Message is still hard for me; so bare with me. There is this feeling when you watch a film that is for some of the time so pleasant. We know the sets and costumes are designed in advance with color harmony in the mind of their creators; we know the cast are almost always the most beautiful and handsome of the living people; that it is all pretend; but then we cannot help but love them. I watch Coda and wish to be in that beautiful and majestic realization of being a Pianist.

This is while I do a Pianist and I’d rather do anything else but to touch the instrument in most days. It is extremely hard to touch the Piano. You have to practice for hours on end; only to play something trivial. But that sense of being like Maestro Rachmaninoff or Henry Cole. I love to live in the fantasy. Very nice outfits; very controlled manners. One thing I adore about Maestro Rachmaninoff is that while others might have had his dream for a while; he refused to wear anything but his gentlemen suits, even when he was doing the garden work. Writing such symphonies and concertos and being the best damn Pianist of all times requires huge immersion in the story you see?

Now that you have all the prerequisites of knowing the concept; allow me to explain it to you: What is a medium? It is the interface with which we communicate information to one another. It exists because we have separate minds. In communicating our ideas we form the spectacle; and in the fragments of the spectacle or the meta-reality or the cumulative collection of communications (what ever its name is) we create worlds of stories that are nicer than our brutal worlds. Through mass communication and construction of our reality based on these stories; we mask the reality around us. Back when my friend Shokoufeh had this English class for us; I was forced to explain an idea; and suddenly a vision came to me of the reality of a society. We have this world in which there are farmers and butchers; killing animals; and politicians doing the same for people. To them there is no law or rule and there is no idea of ethics for the one killing the animals. They see the brutality of the world. But there are people like me, in the middle; who live in the city; have never seen an animal being murdered; and has rules and ethics because there is Police and Politicians above him. But who is there to stop a politician? No one. It is like this:

And so you see; people like me in the city who have never had any idea what it is like to kill or live without tap water we are effectively living in a giant reality that is shaped artificially to ignore the world that really exists. It is not natural to find electricity and WiFi where ever that [yan]; but we have them. And just as much there is no notion of [qadi]; good; and bad; but we live in so one huge multi-billion member dream that we have accepted such a thing exists.

And that is Hyper-Message: Through trying to communicate we have created such messages that instead of reaching the destination with information; they have created lands and worlds in the middle that have taken the whole world in them.

Instead of communicating information; we create universes and reside in them. They all like each other are forms of religious and cults. From the people at the military thinking about God; me imagining the ever-human thing that goes into making 2 Concerts and playing it; the teenagers obsessing over a band or their sexy singer; we all are constantly living in group-wide sleeps to forget the reality. Weeks ago once I first put my foot into this military camp full of religious crazy people I thought I have entered into a parallel world. And this happened elsewhere as well. I used to have this vision of Newton being great and amazing and all. Then I understood he was a person like all of us and actually did terrible things. I realized the scientific dream I was at.

And then all of it connects to the “Threshold of the Reverse Viewpoint” idea that I wrote about previously and the Graph Environment of the recent theory I am at the verge of putting to words. Take this graph:

In one end of the spectrum is the person who has little control over their environment, and it has little tooling and elemental support for them. In such situations, the person is hyper-aware that they must impose their story; their imagined world into the reality. But at the other end of the spectrum is a world in which the person is born into a reality filled with stories that they take as reality. The money story, for example. It is one story we all believe in. If the world is at war and you are cold, I bet money is the last thing you burn to get hot.

And so the threshold of the reverse viewpoint comes into the play here:

If you know something is pretending or stupid in the left side; you will see it as part of reality on the right side. Take talking through headphones in public. When I was a child it was strange. Now it is the norm. And so there are many other things. It is so strange how we can live in these universes. Take the person who sits in a dark room with all these screens before them just to look like a hacker. Or the CEO who wears suits, sits strangely at a chair and talks so seriously. These roles we play, the “Genuine Pretending” and the “Profiles” Hans-Georg Moeller talks about. The “Games People Play” Book. It is strange and quite bizarre.

To me it seems that all mediums have had a message. The one hidden inside them that we could not have seen. And the message of the communication itself has been all the imagined realities in which we somehow genuinely live in. the hyper-message, the meta-message. The thing that shapes the humanity.

In the TV series “Pluribus”, humanity is seen as a unified being, without any need for our media-centric communication and one thing they did well has been the capturing of the absence of all hyper-messages.