-
Baz posted an update 8 years, 9 months ago
Stray Thoughts and a request for some brainstorming.
Being new to the GDS site I don’t know whether this subject has been broached before: A few years ago I read “The Air Loom Gang” by Mike Jay. It describes the sad life and madness of one James Tilly Matthews who lived in London in the 1790s. Possible spy, diplomat, political activist and paranoic Matthews was incarcerated in Bedlam and claimed that his mind was being controlled by an evil machine; the Air Loom. He believed this machine was a means by which pneumatic, electric and mesmeric (magnetic ?) influence was generated and disseminated to his detriment. His delusion seems to have been the first case of mind control by technology recorded in English psychiatric medicine. I found it to be a fascinating and rather moving story. I was reminded of something I read in Whitley Strieber’s “The Key”. In this very provocative little book Strieber says something about a mysterious super-cooled gas that will revolutionize computing. Strieber says ‘The Master’ alluded to this gas in their singular conversation. Before I re-read both books can any GDS members help with connecting my spurious dots ?
The Giza Forum (Legacy)
Closed Archive of The Old Forum
Didn’t know about this case but the theme may tie in with transhumanism (see the book on Shelley by Scott Douglas de Hart) and with Walter Bosley’s reseach about early airship technology (mid 19th cent.) and by extension on the research milieu underlying it
Strieber identifies the gas as nitrous oxide. He “explains” thus: reoxidized nitrous oxide as a gate dielectric for charge-trapping non-volatile memory. And then he goes to say that high density ultra cold atomic gases can be used as media for photon storage in quantum computing. Clear as….
Interesting that you mention Transhumanisn; if I remember what Jay writes of Matthew’s tormentors, one of them might have been a man appearing to be a woman (or maybe the other way around) . This intersexual character was the one pulling the levers of the nefarious Loom. My mind is racing towards a peculiar speculation; was there a group of cross-dressing post-Venetian Nymza affiliated techno-sorcerers bending reality (weaving an interference grid) in 18th century London ? CERNtainly possibe. 🙂
Have just ordered the book!
There is probably a lot of suppressed science involving what is classified as mesmerism, which had its heyday in the 18th century followed by a decline. Though it survived here and there over the 19th century, perhaps taken over by an early form of “breakaway science”, that went public in odd ways such as the novel “Frankenstein”.
I was thinking the same thing.
You talking about the Black Knight again Baz.. The Air loom sounds a lot like what the BK did to PKD…
🙂
Nymza got ground pounded by Big Oil. didnt they?