On 21 April, 2016, the following comment was posted by /u/_9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9 in a comment chain in a post to /r/mildlyinteresting:
a unite a stage a coup a revolution a bring a genocide a new world a
In the MKULTRA experiments, the CIA dosed unwitting subjects with LSD to see how they would react. What has not yet come to light is that MKULTRA was an intra-agency project. The CIA created new departments within the CIA and fed them steady doses of LSD and other psychoactives to see how the departments would diverge and mutate away from normal departments. Whole projects and hierarchies were created with everybody involve being more or less unwittingly under the influence of LSD. This is how the “restraint bed portals” and “flesh interfaces” were first created i.e. from a heavily psycho-mutated hierarchy. The entire thing had to be eliminated, but the technology it created has been revolutionary.
Other users reacted, understandably, with confusion, but this comment marked the beginning of one of a masterpiece of post-modern literature. Delivered almost entirely through comments to reddit posts that were, at most, tangentially related to the narrative (with a few exceptions), The Interface series tells a cosmic horror story of the discovery of “flesh portals” and the influence of a being known as “Mother” or Q on the course of human history. I do not plan on summarizing the whole narrative here, and I highly recommend reading it for yourself.
Content warnings: body horror, unethical human experimentation, depictions of Nazi war crimes, an explicit sex scene that devolves into horror, any other general warnings that would come with horror.
You can read The Interface series here. It is not a short read, and involves multiple independent narratives that are all loosely connected. The rest of this essay will contain spoilers, and assume that even if you didn’t read it, you are at least familiar with some of it, even if you’ve only looked at memes on Reddit about it.
I would like to put The Interface series in a historical context, tracing the development of horror up to its inception. I divide horror into three stages: pre-horror, which isn’t horror but contains the elements of what will become horror as a genre, modernist horror or horror proper, and postmodern horror. Pre-horror consists of all tales and mythology containing fantastic creatures and monsters designed to invoke awe. The object of fear is the natural world, and the fear is a direct and immediate one. Threats are unpredictable, but knowable: floods, storms, earthquakes, famines, war, disease. These threats are incarnated as gods and beasts: Thor’s hammer or Zeus’ thunderbolt, the raging Susanoo-no-mikami manifest as a divine storm. They are both of objects of fear and reverence, which is why “awe” is a better description of the emotion evoked than “horror.”
True genre horror arose from a Romantic reaction to industrialization and the development of science. The origins of horrors, the monstrous, no longer seemed to be the natural world, which more and more could be vanquished and wielded to the supposed benefit of humanity. The modern city, with its dim alleys and swollen crowds of unknown others, became a fertile source of terrors in the 19th century. The old monsters of myth and folklore were either forgotten, or transplanted to the city. Dracula moves to London and becomes the faceless sexual predator lurking in the fog, a reflection of Jack the Ripper. New monsters were born, not of nature, but from the human mind. Dr. Jekyll unleashes the fearful Mr. Hyde through the sciences of chemistry and medicine. Dr. Frankenstein becomes unto the gods through the powers of science, unleashing his monster. However, the old horrors were not all forgotten. Things older than even humanity, uncreated and undying, lurked in the shadows.
Cosmic horror sits at the threshold of modernist and postmodern horror. Perhaps it’s better to say it has its tentacles intertwined with both. The monsters are ancient, before ancient even, but unlike any mythological creatures before them. In the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, these ancient terrors are revealed by science, but forever beyond any sort of rational understanding. Madness, a common theme in modernist horror that represented disconnect from reality, is now a consequence of perception of the ultimate reality. Intertextuality becomes explcit – stories written by one Weird Horror author may reference those of another, building up a shared mythos of loosely connected entities, locations, events, and in-universe books, such as the Necronomicon.
Finally, we come to postmodern horror, which is more elusive to define. If pre-modern horror can be associated with awe, and modernist horror with dread, then postmodern horror captures anxiety. More varied than previous genre horror, it may pastiche and borrow from previous styles to create a disorienting collage of nauseating scenes. Anxiety is fully a product of the postmodern condition, with no precedent in previous times. Its distinguishing feature is its banality, how mundane it can seem. Anxiety is something you are expected to live with. Dread and awe are transformational experiences that drag one’s self out of the bounds of quotidian life. Fear-as-anxiety is at its clearest in the novel House of Leaves, where the (likely non-existing) monster in both major narratives reflects the anxieties of their protagonists. The body horror of David Cronenberg exhibits the concerns of postmodern horror as well; here, the monstrous results of the transformation are not the targets of fear, but the transformation process itself.
Then there is the cybernetic aspect of postmodern horror. Systems of control, automation removed from human decision, simulation and repetition. A good example is the movie Cube. Strangers are trapped in a seemingly man-made labyrinth of death traps, with no understanding of how they got there or what the Cube was constructed for. Along with more traditional horror due to the deaths of the characters at the hands of traps, the film is pervaded with a sense of paranoia and anxiety heightened by the seeming anonymity of the Cube. Their captors are not some sadists who derive pleasure from their torment, but a faceless, non-human system that replicates the brutality of slasher film kills with the hyperreality of Beaudrillard’s simulacra. The Cube may be man-made, but the moment it was activated, it became something beyond humanity.
Back to Mother Horse Eyes. The author, u/_9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9, made a self-post in a subreddit dedicated to their narrative, that I think is the clearest explanation of the themes of their work. They describe their work as a warning: “I am writing about what has never been, and what must never be.” What they describe is a dystopia more horrifying than any of the Modernist novels:
As a free species, we have seen totalitarianism before, and we have destroyed it. But when it arises again, aided by advanced information and biological technology, it will have a new and unprecedented ability to envelop the entire earth and place humanity in an unalterable state of total mental and physical slavery that will last for uncounted millennia until the earth becomes uninhabitable .
The forces of production, unleashed by the industrial revolution and allowed to run unrestricted under capitalism, become the very fetters to chain humanity in to a state of “total mental and physical slavery that will last for uncounted millenia.” If this happens, the only hope is release, at a point when all the resources of the planet have been exhausted, and the “unholy agglomeration of mindless flesh” that humanity has become dies with the planet. This, precisely, is the nature of the postmodern dystopia. Humanity enslaved, not by a single leader, or by ideology, but by the mindless systems of automation and cybernetic control they developed. For Mother Horse Eyes, the technological singularity is all but inevitable, and it is the worst possible outcome for the future.
The world of Mother Horse Eyes is bleak, and their only hope is that in some possible future the events they foresee don’t come to pass:
Not only do I believe that this outcome is possible, I believe that it is overwhelmingly likely. Out of all the trillions of possible futures arrayed before us, 99.9999% of them result in this outcome. As Christ said, “Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But narrow is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”
We must find and enter the narrow gate, but it will not be easy. It order to find it, we must sort through the many possible pasts to find the few possible futures which result in a humanity free to live and die as humans, and not as an unholy agglomeration of mindless flesh. Unfortunately, as we fight against the forces of slavery and death, it will be precisely our instincts towards the preservation of freedom and life that will lead us to destruction. In short, we live in precarious times.
Not only is this outcome almost inevitable, but our association of freedom with unconstrained growth and development, and the conflation of life with uncontrolled reproduction, leads us to the postmodern dystopia. Mother Horse Eyes offers no way out other than a vague sense that if their story is disseminated widely, enough people will take it to heart to avert the catastrophic future. There’s a feeling of being trapped in Capitalist Realism, where one can see how the situation will continue to decline, but unable to even position their opposition to the system outside of it, can only rattle the bars of the cage from within.
And then there’s the Mother: “We are about to be gathered again into the arms of the Mother, to become one flesh with her.” The entity referred to as “the mother with horse eyes” occupies the role of central antagonist in the narrative, but is elusive throughout. Only in the few narratives from the viewpoint of the author, detailing his childhood where his biological family was replaced by Mother, does she play an active role. There, she behaves like a wicked stepmother, mistreating the author while forcing him to learn a kind of magical ability to shape reality. To what end is unclear. Perhaps his experience with this “magic” is what made him able to “see” the events he is narrating to us, as described in the self-post:
I should clarify that this information is not fiction. Nor is it true. It is a mix of things which happened and things which almost happened. Things which were and things which could have been. You must understand that the present moment in which we exist is simply a nexus from which trillions of possible pasts and possible futures branch out. The important thing to realize is that these unreal pasts and unrealized futures are related to each other. By examining what might have been, we can come to understand what might come to be.
Mother is implied to be extraterrestrial, or even extra-universal, and is the well from which humanity sprang, as well as the fetid womb to which humanity returns in the vast majority of timelines. This cosmic scale shows an affinity with the entities of H.P. Lovecraft, such as the Great Old Ones and Outer Gods. Making Mother an eldritch being serves to heighten the horror of the post-modern dystopia. Unlike the modernist dystopias of 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and Brave New World, this dystopia is something beyond human comprehension, not a machine built by man, but a machine consuming all and reducing us to undifferentiated flesh and metal.
Let us conclude with some discussion of the “flesh interfaces” and “hygiene beds,” two related concepts that represent the first half and second parts of the narrative, at least chronologically. A flesh interface is a portal to an alternate reality or timeline created from the merging of multiple living humans into a kind of tunnel. Most relevant for our understanding of the relation of flesh interfaces to the postmodern dystopia is the following description, from the post “Euphoria and Terror”:
When a human body is embedded in an interface, the independent (i.e. non-human) interface glands produce massive amounts of LSD which cause intellectual mutations (i.e. time-fracturing along several dozen axes).
Meanwhile, independent hormone regulators produce a emotional oscillation between two states:
- euphoria
- terror
Thus we have the typical sound of an interface: alternating waves of giggling and screaming that move through the interface population, running along the length of the interface as the hormones travel along the independent conduits.
These successive waves of giggling and screaming create a steady rhythm that washes over the traveler as they move through the interface.
Natural empathetic responses (mirroring) prepare the traveler’s body for the process of “embrace.”
“Euphoria and Terror” is one of the most succinct and illuminating descriptions of the psychological response to the postmodern condition I have ever seen. Commodity fetishism is taken to the extreme, leading to the Society of the Spectacle. At first radio, then television, now Internet-delivered multimedia provide to us a succession of hyperreal images that provoke emotional extremes. Euphoria: a woman in poverty winning the lottery, funny cat videos, inconcievably large parades of celebration at the homecoming of a victorious sports team. Terror: suicide bombings, economic recession, global pandemics, the rise in anti-democratic politic. As we pass from one emotional extreme to another, are we not like the poor souls embedded in a flesh interface, doomed to cycle between euphoria and terror as the hormones flow through them?
The hygiene beds are the least subtle part of the entire narrative, but illustrate another aspect of the postmodern dystopia distinguishing it from Modernist dystopia. The matrix of Baudrillard has become The Matrix, a simulation that forgets it was ever a simulation. However, unlike The Matrix, there is no compulsion to enter the hygiene beds. Humanity, of their own volition, chooses to live in feedspace. As Mother Horse Eyes puts it, “it will be precisely our instincts towards the preservation of freedom and life that will lead us to destruction.” Unlike the dystopia of 1984, where a man is forced to believe that 2+2=5 through violence, fear, and the manipulation of language, humanity is brought to the Mother through their own desire for comfort, pleasure, and control over their environment. In this way, we are enslaved by our own desires and principles of freedom and the pursuit of happiness.
To end on a more positive note, what could be done to avert the future envisioned by Mother Horse Eyes? In reality, we probably have nothing to worry about an eldritch Mother turning us into abominations of flesh, but viewing her as a metaphor for the forces of production spinning out of control, we are forced to confront their seeming inevitability. The suggestions of Mark Fisher may allow us to chip away at the armor of Capitalist Realism. Events of the past several years, such as the inability of capitalist nations to respond adequately to the COVID-19 pandemic, have made these flaws even more apparent. However, if we were to turn to dogmatic Marxism, for example, we would only be repeating the same mistakes as before, replacing the womb of one Mother with that of another. We must not allow ourselves to become enslaved to such totalizing systems, whether they be ideological, technological, religious, or scientific.
In this sense, there is an uplifting subcurrent within Mother Horse Eyes. We see some of the greatest evils in human history, unethical CIA experimentation, Nazi atrocities against those they viewed as inferior, and in the case of the narrator, people struggling with addiction to alcohol and other drugs. When we give in and accept these as inevitable, that’s when the Mother with horse eyes is able to worm her way in. The narrator only returns to Mother after he has relapsed and returned to the bottle. Perhaps the only way to defeat Mother is not through a kind of hope, but rather a defiance in the face of what rationally is inevitable. Interestingly, this view would share some similarities with the philosophy of Slavoj Žižek. The postmodern dystopia is only inevitable because we choose to make it so. We can choose to not go into the hygiene beds, to not return to the womb of that horrid Mother.