I’m going to start with a trigger warning. Well, three.
There’s a picture of a great big spider at the bottom of this blog. He’s called Sputnik. He’s probably a Giant House Spider. The mirror clip he’s next to is two and a half centimetres long (about an inch).
That’s one trigger. The next is a trigger warning for trigger warnings. Time was the mention of them would make me roll my eyes. Just don’t look at stuff you don’t like, right? Well… have you seen the news any time in the last four years? Even sources I trust have shown horrific images.
The last trigger warning is for the long, rambling nature of this post. There are films in here, eventually, but I’m off the chain this time, so apologies. It’s 3,500 words long. I know I’m just shouting into the void anyway, apart from the few (lovely) people who are interested in my nonsense (hello Mum).
The photo of Sputnik was taken last month, in my home office. I spent three days living with him… at least that I know of. He’s disappeared… for now.
It’s Autumn. In the UK and similar climes, it’s the time of year you’re most likely to see the fellas that come hurtling out from underneath your furniture. They’re horny males looking for a willing partner. Autumn is Springtime for House Spiders.
That means this time of year is a waking nightmare for arachnophobes. Years ago, I couldn’t have looked at the photograph below, much less taken it. And no, I didn’t use zoom and I haven’t edited it, save cropping it a little.
I’m not cured, but I’m better than I used to be. Well, I was, at least until this year.
The definition of phobia in the Cambridge online dictionary is, “a type of anxiety disorder (a mental illness that makes someone very worried and affects their life) that involves an extreme fear of something”. Other definitions say sufferers will actively, and irrationally, avoid any chance of meeting spiders.
Irrational? Of course, it is. Even more so now. The tiny thing that poses a threat to us in 2020 isn’t a spider, at least not in the UK.
It’s an atavistic phobia, one that evolved from a time in our history when we all lived in a place with venomous, potentially lethal spiders. It was irrational when I fled a room with a spider in it, though. It’s not something I could control. It was as automatic as breathing.
And yes, I avoid places and activities because of it. I always wanted to go potholing until I learned about these.
Throughout most of my life, I’ve also had a recurring nightmare about spiders in my bed. Frankly, I’d rather not write about that. Suffice to say they follow me from sleep. The waking period afterwards is harrowing.
A spider in real life was the ultimate horror for me, but I couldn’t bear to see photographs, film or even toy spiders. A close-up of a spider’s face on a David Attenborough documentary scarred me for months. I mean, how many eyes do you need? That’s just wrong. Even Charlotte’s Web gave me the willies.
My oldest friend helped reduce the intensity of my phobia.
One day at primary school, they introduced a bloke with a tarantula. We were all supposed to sit there calmly as this – palpably sadistic – man brought it round in his hands. I disappeared through the wall. For my buddy though, it started a lifelong fascination. Not long after that, he had his own tarantula at home. Soon afterwards, a corn snake.
It’s not like he forced me to visit the spider, he’s not that much of a maniac. But just knowing it was in the house when I was there was a constant subsonic thrum at the back of my skull. Sooner or later, morbid fascination and the fact that the beast was securely contained behind glass meant that I would voluntarily go and look at it. Sometimes, I’d watch as he fed it, seeing a doomed cricket flee for its life in a forlorn chase around the vivarium. I learned a little spider body-language – essentially it all amounts to, “Run”.
This didn’t mean I was fine with UK spiders, far from it. But when Arachnophobia came out in 1990, we went on opening night. That was inconceivable a few years previously. It’s a great film, even though I find it tough to watch.
So, I’ve attempted to become braver with these wee beasties as I’ve grown, to the point of touching some of the smaller ones that I see around the house.
Then 2020 happened.
This year has been the worst resurgence of my fear that I can remember for maybe two decades. The obvious explanation is the underlying anxiety of this year that many are experiencing, perhaps combined with the sense of being trapped at home. I’ve had sleepless nights, and self-inflicted spirals of fear, obsessing over them. And it is a spiral. My mind torments me. My eyes play tricks on me. An unexpected sensation on my skin isn’t the breeze or a hair… it’s one of them. It’s like my mind has become my enemy, casting me in an extreme horror film I’d never watch.
Interestingly, arachnophobia is defined above as mental illness. As an adult, I’ve suffered – and often continue to suffer – with depression and anxiety. Anyone who’s known depression will know that sense of your mind as your enemy. There’s no delineation in my mind for it, no terminator between ‘happy’ and ‘depressed’. But I’ve begun to understand it. This fear though, this phobia has been with me always. I don’t know there was an incident when I was very young. I certainly have a memory of one, in my bed or my cot. But did it happen? Or did the phobia instil it in me as a rationalisation, an excuse? I don’t know. I know memories are less trustworthy now. That fact is unfortunate, but understanding it is a privilege. Maybe my phobia plucked Jeff Daniel’s experience, magpie-like, from the film version. Or maybe it happened.
Whatever triggered it, it’s been here for my whole conscious life. And now it’s back like a trashy reboot, unwanted, unloved, over-hyped.
When Sputnik first appeared, he scared the s**t out of me. He was where he is in the photo that first day, he seemed to like it there. Maybe so he could keep an eye on me (he has enough spare). I spend all day in my office these days, just grateful that I still have work while so many others don’t. I was determined to live with him, not to run, not to get my Wife to put him out. I wanted to learn.
He moved around quite a bit, mostly in the evenings, mostly when the lights were out. I came in one evening and found him eating… it was a Cronenbergian nightmare in miniature, like an explosion in an abattoir. If you Google ‘serrated chelicerae’, then you’ll get a pretty good idea of what seemed to be happening. His victim was a large fly I’d noticed flitting around the light earlier. After he’d finished dining, the wings and one leg were left over.
Exposure therapy. Live with your fears. Can’t say I’m a fan. I don’t know if it helped, to be honest. Now that he’s out of sight, it’s worse.
But I think by trying to understand this thing that frightens me, maybe I’ve laid the foundations of a bridge to my fear, a way of conversing with my anxiety as an equal, rather than a victim. And if that’s pretentious, consider it in the context of 2020 for a second. Knowledge of inevitable loss is part of the human condition, but now, we’re drowning in it. And our best way to combat it? Lock ourselves away from the people we love.
Part of what makes spiders so terrifying to me is their total unrelatability. It’s why the face-huggers in Alien and Aliens resemble spiders… that scuttle makes my skin want to crawl away and hide in a dark corner.
Just look at the bloody things. For a start, they’re all predators. No such thing as a vegan spider. Fangs first, then a nightmarish, multi-eyed, segmented body, suspended by eight hairy, creeping, scuttling legs. They’re slower than I thought. Sputnik and his kin can get up to just over one mile an hour, so we can outwalk them, but that’s easier said than done when they charge at you in a confined space. Anyway… talk about a face only a mother can love. Moreover, this creature dissolves prey alive then… slurps.
When I asked my friend, the spider-man, he said that his feelings towards them were ‘interest and … fascination. They really are interesting animals to look after.’
‘Interesting’. In 2017, I went diving with sharks. I was always fascinated by them, but then I learned about tonic immobility, about sharks in ecstatic paralysis having their chins scratched. For anyone who knows dogs, it’s impossible not to see parallels. It’s that ‘start the motorbike’ fixation. The three-metre sand tiger sharks I met were like big, wet German Shepherds. They were interesting, sure, but somehow relatable too.
It’s probably (slightly) more rational to be afraid of sharks than spiders, but they are easier to understand. We evolved from life in water after all. Spiders… they’re about as relatable as the heat death of the universe.
Which brings me to Donald Trump.
2020 is … well let’s just say it, it’s a rancid stack of shit, 366 days high, towering over us like tumescent sewage.
There are people my age who will tell you that the Eighties were a far more frightening time to be alive and that we lived in greater existential danger. There were more nuclear weapons then, and the US and USSR were like a couple trapped in a loveless marriage, both terrified of divorce, but unable to communicate. Global thermonuclear war was prevented more than once, not just by better angels, but also blind luck. The dominant ideologies existed in total opposition. But at least they had ideologies. They believed in something bigger than themselves. How many of the world’s dominant leaders can we say that about today?
Worse, the world wide web, thirty years old this year and possibly mankind’s single greatest invention has become, according to some, our greatest threat.
Even when those nuclear stockpiles were so high, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction meant that self-preservation prevailed. It’s Game Theory on a terrifying global scale; nuclear weapons don’t kill people, people do. In the best cinematic depiction of Game Theory, The Dark Knight, one of the prisoners throws the detonator away. Unilateral disarmament. To date, only Costa Rica has had a policy of full unilateral disarmament, though South Africa gave up its nukes when Apartheid ended.
The point is no-one had the will to push the ‘end the world’ button. Those empires in their loveless marriage didn’t want to destroy the house they lived in and burn each other to death in the process.
But social media and trolling as a way of life has once again pushed the world into different camps. And what do they believe? That the other side is wrong. That’s it. The vitriol is rising like the pink gloop in Ghostbusters II, but globally. Hatred is becoming a universal language.
Better writers have long expressed the irony that our greatest ever communication technology has rendered us more alone than ever. Is there too much information? Too much reliance on it? By becoming a cybernetic society, are we losing our humanity?
Two films on Netflix have recently examined these themes, The Great Hack (2019) and The Social Dilemma (2020).
They’re not perfect. I’d encourage viewers to do their research and make up their minds, but the fact is that data, data about you, is more valuable than oil. Corporations have finally turned ‘human resources’ into a reality, creating the richest companies that have ever existed.
The Great Hack looks at the Cambridge Analytica scandal, while The Social Dilemma looks in more detail at social networking itself and how our data is exploited. The former is the more successful film, in my view. The latter spends about half its running time with a dramatization of its themes, which doesn’t particularly work and talks down to the audience.
Technology, like spiders and the death of our universe, is both ambivalent and inevitable. It doesn’t care about us, hate us, or wish harm upon us. However, unlike spiders, it can easily be manipulated.
Nor is capitalism, of itself, inherently malign. But it is unchecked. In the global climate emergency, it is failing us. With access to technology, it becomes more dangerous daily.
Donald Trump is capitalism with its mask off. The prospect of another four years of his rule frightens me much more than Sputnik. But he’s a symptom. He’s not the centre of this, as much as he’d like to believe it. He’s the ultimate demonstration of ‘trolling’, and genuinely smart people around him exploit his data as much as ours for their own ends… power at any price.
The same is happening here in the UK. While not as advanced, it is gathering pace.
The world is a terrifying place. It’s no wonder we need trigger warnings, or that mental health conditions are on the rise.
Knowledge isn’t a cure for terror, but it is a salve. Living with Sputnik for three days didn’t cure my fear, but it helped me to understand and respect him and his kind a little better.
The thing about knowledge is, the more you learn, the more you learn about learning. Understanding the difference between a primary and secondary source, for example. Or about the difference between subjective and objective data. About empiricism. The Rashomon effect.
The web is the ultimate democratisation of data. But the sheer deluge of data now is overwhelming to the point it has become frightening itself. We must work harder to understand.
Believing something you read on the internet, whether it’s here, Facebook or anywhere else is like unquestioningly believing a piece of graffiti. But plenty of us do it, I know I have. We rightly value reading, but it doesn’t come with a critical mindset built-in. Clever people manipulate information, appealing to a hangover of respect and credulity afforded to sources that meet formal criteria.
Learning to distinguish between fact and opinion is increasingly vital. Learning to debate. Seeking multiple quality sources to confirm facts. Staying open-minded, respecting other opinions. Find your truth, but don’t inflict it on others.
I’m opinionated. I’d hardly be writing a blog otherwise. I enjoy arguing about things especially films and I’ll sometimes get carried away. But opinions aren’t facts. Just because I think every Michael Bay movie apart from The Rock sucks balls, doesn’t mean that someone who rates his films above Scorsese is wrong. I’ll argue, but it’s your money and your choice, enjoy it.
It goes further. I believe facts, in the words of CP Scott, are sacred. But the truth is transitory. What can be proved within the event horizon of a person’s experience? If you want to believe that the Earth is flat, go for it. I’m unlikely to change your mind, and frankly, I’d sooner spend the energy more productively.
The closest thing we have to objective truth is mathematics, and every time we learn something new through that, it just generates more questions. Often amazing questions, but questions, nonetheless. Ultimately, I think there is no ‘destination truth’, no shining, unifying fact that will appear one day like a giant black obelisk and ‘level up’ humanity. A significant proportion of the world’s population will find that sacrilegious, that saying there is no one truth is the one true ‘wrong’.
But whether it exists or not, we should keep looking. We must. It’s what dragged us from the slime in the first place, it’s what makes us write, it’s what makes us tell stories. It’s what built the printing press, took us to the moon and created the World Wide Web.
A social network hosted by technology is a lens, a frame of reference. Those lenses exist in all our interactions, whether it’s over a garden fence to your neighbour on a Zoom call in 2020 or through an Instagram post. We absorb data just like the data companies do, but we have both a smaller sample size and a vastly different array of sensors. Five senses, maybe one or two others of which we’re unconscious, or led by instinct. And we process them in real-time.
Talking to your neighbour, you can hear her words, her nuances, her accent. You can smell what she’s cooking and whether she’s had a shower today, you can see the narrowing of her eyes as she struggles with something, or the genuine smile when she talks about her kids. If it wasn’t 2020, you might get a hug.
Cambridge Analytica understood all of this deeply. They understood phobias, too. They applied that lens at scale through our social media feeds, like Sauron staring back through the Palantir. They helped others use these instinctive reactions to increase their power and wealth.
The lens effect is very real. If we define reality by what we see through a screen, then, inevitably we put a reality TV star in charge of the free world.
Cambridge Analytica is gone. A multitude has replaced them. The data we give them grows daily. Your Fitbit, all the purchases you make in an increasingly cash-less world, every photo you store in the Cloud for free, in fact, anything you store in the Cloud for free, every Google search, every post, every online purchase, all your real-time location data as well as all the journeys you make using Google Maps. It’s all grist for the mill. It’s all beautifully expensive data that others are making trillions from. It’s all searched to identify the things you fear and the things you love, which are then used to influence you, to make your choices for you.
A reality TV star runs a world that seems more unreal every day, that seems more like a movie, and not a movie many of us like: “One star, thumbs down; loathed the lead actor.”
I used to believe there was a moral requirement to watch and read the news. No more. I need to protect my mental health. But in this insane reality, is there a moral duty to understand? To look deeper, to stare at the things that frighten you in the face and try to come to terms with them?
I think there probably is, but we must be careful. Walk, don’t canter. Opening the wrong door at the wrong time would be akin to opening the wrong hatch on a deeply submerged submarine.
There is certainly a moral duty to understand your data and decide how much you’re willing to give away. Data is the new oil. Look where blind use of oil brought us. We’re at the dawn of this age and we have huge power to make changes now. It’s easy too. DuckDuckGo, for example, is a search engine that respects your privacy, unlike Google. It has become much better in recent years and continues to improve. You can always use Google occasionally if you really must.
There are many changes we can and should make. Many of them are incredibly straightforward and will effect real, positive change right now. Just like fossil fuels, the more reliant we become on this technology, the harder it will become to change in the long run. Your data, your choice. All our futures.
Whether that moral obligation extends to confronting our fears, to understand the things that truly frighten us… that must be a strictly personal choice. Some things are too horrifying to consider.
I mean, spiders liquefy their victims, which include their mates and even their mothers. But at least they’re not Dominic Cummings.
I finished this last weekend. On Saturday night, I was standing in the lounge wearing shorts with bare feet when a spider ran up my leg. He was smaller than Sputnik, but big enough. My reaction amazed me … there was none. I just put him back on the floor and protected him from our curious, clumsy dog while my Wife found a glass and put him outside.
Sure, if he’d been Sputnik, it would have been different. But in this small way, by naming, learning about and living with my fears, I’ve taken away some of their power.
If it’s films you’re looking for on this, er, film blog, then I’ve just reviewed a movie called Huracán for my friends at the excellent Live for Films. You can find it here.
Sputnik alert..! Don’t scroll down if you’re phobic.
Seriously, don’t.
