At three o'clock EST on New Year’s Day 1984, Good Morning Mr. Orwell was broadcast live via satellite TV to an audience of over 25 million viewers. Famously marred by technical complications — which were embraced by its creator, Nam June Paik, for enhancing the mood of the ephemeral medium — Good Morning Mr. Orwell was designed as a lively rebuttal to the bleak portrayal of television as a singular propagandistic device in George Orwell's genre-defining dystopian novel. Today, you can watch an edited recording of this broadcast as an archival totem, but you cannot truly absorb it in its entirety, as its integral "liveness" is decoupled from your decades-later retrospective experience.
About two weeks later, in mid-January 1984, the U.S. supreme court announced a historic decision that gave television viewers the legal right to record television programs to watch outside their allotted timeslot, in a ritualistic practice coined timeshifting. To put it dryly, timeshifting was defined by the supreme court as "the practice of recording a program to view it once at a later time..." While this is functionally accurate, the legalization of timeshifting also had the more esoteric consequence of giving audiences autonomy over their own media program, which necessarily increased the ubiquity of subliminal messaging and led to both an altered audience identity and a stranger relationship with time itself than was characteristic of the early days of broadcast media.
Sony Corporation released Betamax in 1975 as the first consumer-grade recording magnetic tape technology, or Video Cassette Recorder (VCR). Betamax was eventually discontinued as JVC’s VHS tape took hold in the mainstream, but its legacy lives on through the landmark decision in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., or “the Betamax Case” — finding home video recordation protected under the precedent of fair use because of the specific element of timeshifting.
When it first burst onto the scene, Betamax was considered by studios to be a direct threat to the film and TV business. Executives perceived Sony to essentially be facilitating copyright infringement on a macro scale by encouraging their audience to "Watch Whatever Whenever" — as one particularly sly Betamax advertisement suggested. Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) President Jack Valenti even said in 1981 that VCRs "are to the American film industry what the Boston Strangler was to women."
True, Sony's marketing campaign was fresh, edgy and seemed to encourage their potential buyers to casually bootleg televised programs — a PR move that clearly intimidated the more stilted executive personalities left over from the golden age of Hollywood. But the assumption by Sony, which turned out to be correct, was that VCR technology would serve as a mutually beneficial relationship with established studios and programmers, as they would suddenly be granted the opportunity to reach an audience at an alarmingly exponential rate impossible within the framework of live broadcast. This was part of the reason for the supreme court’s ultimate decision, and after 1984, the home video market swiftly cascaded into a multi-billion dollar industry.
Famously, the children’s show host Mr. Rogers was brought in to testify during the Betamax case proceedings. He voiced his support of the technology, stating that it would likely give families autonomy over their own schedules and that, in principle, he was opposed to people being “programmed” by others. In this case, he indicated that strict adherence to live broadcast and an injunction against VCRs would support top-down social and cultural programming — an acutely Orwellian framework of control.
Modern-day bootlegging takes its most ubiquitous form as peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing piracy. Because of the Betamax timeshifting precedent, there is very little defense against downloading or sharing intellectual property this way, and this has actually opened up a predatory industry known as copyright trolling — entities that extort settlement fees by threatening lengthy and expensive legal battles to those unlucky victims suspected of copyright infringement. Such serial litigators need only prove that it is more likely than not (often interpreted as 51% likely) that copyright infringement occurred in the vicinity of the victim’s IP address, making for odds that would intimidate any internet user who might have stumbled naively into a potentially criminal arena.
This is where it gets murky. You cannot legally torrent Robert De Niro’s Angel Heart. But, in the case of the somewhat nebulous legal concept of fair use, you can take that film, slice it up, and post fragments of it to popular video-hosting platforms while providing a voice-over analysis relating Johnny Favorite’s tormented soul to the Nietzschean concept of eternal return. And this is being made all the more complicated through the weedy landscape of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their insatiable appetite for crawling potential training data, vacuuming up intellectual property indiscriminately along the way — an issue that is currently evolving while AI companies attempt to invoke fair use. The key ingredient that is missing in their arguments is, of course, timeshifting.
The handover from passive to participatory engagement through both personal programming decisions and the temporal act of popping in a tape and hitting “record” (and doing whatever else with what you’d recorded later on, often unspeakable acts in the dead of night) also transformed the previous media audience into more of a media user. An audience is there to absorb passively, without providing much friction. A user is there to personalize, refine, and decide — a mode that is very much in play today within the current framework of media designed predominantly to gather and study user preferences.
But time for the user has gotten weirder, too. Chronos, the mythological godhead charged with overseeing death, endings, legacy, and those things for which time is most responsible, was effectively challenged within the supreme court. Though studio executives are (ostensibly) without the same mythic power as Chronos, the power transfer to the governed was palpable. You get to choose what you watch and when you watch it. For the modern mind, it’s difficult to comprehend exactly what it meant to be able to absorb media outside of the designed time for that absorption.
Previously, television programs were chronological, sequential. TV and radio broadcasts were known to be coupled with sign-on and sign-off songs and celebrations, as the broadcasts would go live along with typical sleep-wake rhythms of the general population. The timing of programs was strategic — soap operas during the day for housewives, news in the evening and sporting events over the weekend for husbands home from work, and so on. The daily media program for the average citizen was decided for them, and advertisements were slotted in between programs or else subtly and logically incorporated into the narrative of the show. Media programming, as well as the viewer’s schedule, was excessively predictable — as regimented as the sun’s dutiful daily rise and fall.
Unfortunately for us, the legalization of timeshifting didn’t lead to a death-beating superpower. It did, however, begin to blur the boundaries between what is culturally and psychically appropriate and when — leading to an assault of media and advertising in spaces previously considered sacred. Because just as you were given the autonomy to watch something after it aired, the infectious power of media swirled and grew into spaces previously untouched. Until, if you are like most modern people, the last remaining sacred space is maybe just the shower. And even then, your thought patterns are often dominated by psychic and subliminal chatter which burrows into the mind like a supernatural beetle. You’re not sure which voice to lend credence to. Do your favorite cultural talking heads actually believe what they’re saying? Or is this a paid sponsorship they’ve chosen not to claim? Or, perhaps worst of all, are they at the mercy of psychic assault that they’re totally unaware of and simply espousing someone else’s views freely? We have entered, dear user, the frontier of fractal time.
Fractal time, as distinct from sequential time (as in the case of early TV programming) or cyclical time (as in the case of lunar cycles and seasonal patterns), is about the relationship between various timescales, what is designed/anticipated, and what happens "organically" or from a place of "free will." What occurs because of fate intertwined with choice or chance folded into planning. This is, incidentally, also the relationship between pre-determined media programming and the selection of things to watch, listen to or read at a later date — a practice so ubiquitous now that it cannot even be seen – through bookmarking, labeling, categorizing, downloading, streaming and subscribing.
The uncertainty surrounding what you’re being sold and when was not really an issue when product placement as a marketing technique peaked, in its most classical sense, in the 1990s. The following quote from Space Jam (1996) basically sums up the assault of the eager, toxically self-aware and ironic advertising voice of the era: “Put your Hanes on, lace up your Nikes, grab some Wheaties and your Gatorade, we'll go get a Big Mac on the way to the ball park.” It was an obnoxious assault, which mercilessly attacked the most impressionable forming minds of the time, but at least assaults are noticeable and can therefore be guarded against.
The frontier of fractal time tapped into by both the user of the media tech and the source of the media (which are increasingly one and the same, another indication of the current nested quality of timespace) is seemingly endless. Strawberry Mansion (2021) is an independent film set in a reality where dreams are audited by an administrative governmental body. While, in reality, the federal government is likely decades behind figuring out how to reap profit through financial punishment for “unauthorized” dreaming (as much as they’d like to), the tech startup world seems just around the bend as Targeted Dream Incubation (TDI) technologies are growing, which insert advertisements into your dreams for tokenization. Such “innovators” behind TDI are especially interested in hypnagogia, which is that in-between phase which new-thought gurus espouse as a prime manifestation space, comparable only to near-death experience, orgasm and (depending on who you talk to) certain psychedelics.
The quality of time, as we experience it through constant technological mediation, has become more personalized yet simultaneously impersonal; more nested yet less deep. Although former-viewers, current-users have seemingly been given the opportunity to program their own lives — as Mr. Rogers alluded to during the Betamax case — the media landscape has shifted away from the top-down, highly directional and predictable Orwellian propaganda model to one where the governed controls the degree to which their life is “personalized.” This is a much trickier predicament, and one that isn’t exclusively irksome or liberatory; not essentially procedural nor excessively gamified or multiplicitous.
We are spectators within the tapestry of our own lives, which broadcast live in the direction of the media sources, confounded in algorithmic synchronicities and the consolidation of sacred space with relentless discourse. Though the boundaries between media and self continue to blur to a point where one thing cannot possibly infringe upon another as they are already essentially unified, attempts are still being made to claim copyright infringement or a degree of media and intellectual separateness. At this point on the timeline, the idea of having a truly “live” experience is considered novel, and a return to Good Morning Mr. Orwell analogues is imminent, though they may be better titled — Good Night to the Users.
The thing that is coming is already here. There have been three post-modern periods of Saturn in Pisces moving into Aries. The first was 1936 into 1938, ending in 1940; the second, 1965 into ’67, ending one year before the Manson murders in 1968. Finally, the most recent transit: 1994 into 1996 & 1998. To divide history by Saturn epochs is to look at culture. To divide history by Saturn in Pisces and Saturn in Aries is to understand what it looks like when one thing dies and its replacement has both already arrived and not yet been born.
The experience of moving between a Pisces epoch into an Aries one is the experience of being born, which is a physical and spiritual experience only understood by those who have already gone through it. The act of being-birthed is not recognized by the subject as a beginning but rather a terrifyingly consequential ending from which we move from one understanding of personhood (none) into another (the violent rupture of individuation). We wonder if death feels the same way, if by some mathematical rule both states must intersect at a distant, dark point and lead either into each other. Or, if the directive is stranger: of two becoming one becoming an unthinkable, numberless eventuality. The only way to know is to survive death long enough to look back.
The hero of Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca is a nameless woman but she is also the titular Rebecca. We watch the Hitchcock film (1940) and refer to her as Rebecca in our minds, because that’s what the movie is called and Joan Fontaine is playing the woman in the movie. This is what happens before we remember that we don’t know her name, that Rebecca is the name of her predecessor in her new marriage and new home. We never actually meet Rebecca because she is dead.
Tupac Shakur is a celebrity who is not dead. He was killed in 1996, driving with Suge Knight through the glowing streets of Las Vegas on September 7. Tupac Shakur is alive and he lives in Cuba, people have seen him since. Kim Kardashian has seen Tupac Shakur in the years since his death, Suge Knight talks about how he was laughing in the hospital. He says “with ‘Pac, you never know.” Tupac was sitting in Suge Knight’s passenger seat when he was shot by Duane Davis. Shakur spoke about his own death, said he knew that he was going to die young. How many young people feel that way, especially now. We talk about the frogs boiling, now. Tupac is still alive and he lives in Havana.
As if by mathematical rule, the states of birth and death intersect at some dark and distant point. Either, they lead to each other (which means they are the same) or, they converge and split into another branch or a multiverse in which the two states are the same passage into a realm of even further consequence, or perhaps no consequence at all.
In 2016 I went to the Jewish Museum on Lindenstraße in Kreuzberg and walked along a long, fluorescent hallway. The exhibition was, if memory serves, about the survivors of the Holocaust and the family members they left behind in Berlin. Black and white pictures inlaid into paneled recesses in the wall, possessions left behind and a large black and white photo of the split families. I looked at the years of departure. 1934, 1935. Those who saw the Berlin sun rise on the advent of Saturn in Aries had fared less well than those who had the prescience to see past Saturn in Pisces’ delusions of security. I was, in short, victim blaming at the Jewish Museum. How long does it take to know what Saturn in Aries has done? It might take almost one hundred years. Or, if you are a prescient victim, you feel the change in the air two years before the doors to survival begin to close.
How long into her stay at Manderley did Joan Fontaine realize she was not Rebecca? How long into her life did Daphne DuMaurier realize she was also not Rebecca? At the beginning. As Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine drive up the long and winding road to the imposing cliffside manor, it begins to rain. Which, in a film, is always a sign to turn back. Daphne DuMaurier dressed in boy’s clothes as a child and was dismayed to discover womanhood and the strictures of what that would have to mean. She left her daughters behind in the United States and did not regret it. Daphne DuMaurier liked to take walks in the rain with a full face of makeup. DuMaurier was born in 1907, under Saturn in Pisces.
The experience of moving between a Pisces epoch into an Aries one is the experience of being born, which is a physical and spiritual experience only understood by those who have already gone through it. Lena Riefenstahl’s Olympia opens in cloud and mist. Behind the mist are the ruins of Altis, the grove of Zeus, in Olympia, Greece. Immediately one thinks of the Nazi architectural concept of Ruinenwert, ‘ruin value’, coined by Albert Speer during the planning of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. The design of a building incorporates the aesthetic qualities of that building’s demise as a part of its architecture, it is a building that is made to die and become myth. The fascist preoccupation with the mists of time that blur history’s edges, an engagement with the past that keeps it at arm’s length, or at least far enough that you have to squint. The fascist preoccupation with the future as something already over or never coming. Hitler designed a building, the Monsterbau, whose ceiling’s were vaulted so high that they would contain their own distinct atmosphere. I imagine clouds gathering under a great dome and spontaneous weather events, a Harry-Potter-esque level of fantastical invention, the great building that generates its own rain storms.
Altis sits at the foot of the “Hill of Kronos”; Kronos, or Saturn. Fearing he would be overthrown like he had overthrown his own father before him, Saturn/Kronos ate his children. A birth-in-reverse performed in the hopes of avoiding history’s inevitable repetition, one that he himself had initiated; a paranoiac’s closing of the loop. In her book Desire to Desire, theorist Mary Ann Doane refers to the spate of gothic “women’s films” that appeared in the early 1940s — of which Rebecca is one — as the ‘paranoid wife’ genre. It’s true: the nameless Rebecca is driven into paranoid madness by the silence of her husband and the looming, blatantly sapphic desire of Mrs. Danvers for her predecessor. “Every day I realize all the things that she had that I lack,” Fontaine says, “beauty and wit and intelligence, all the things that are so important in a woman.” Her scene partner responds, “None of us want to live in the past. It’s up to you, you know, to lead us away from it.” Frogs boiling, as we have liked to say for the last decade and a half.
Joan Didion believed the world was going to end in her essay about 1968, “The White Album”, by observing circumstantial disturbances similar to the ones upsetting Rebecca’s Fontaine: a glow of domesticity fractured by senseless shocks and tremors. All is not what it seems, etc. In “White Album”, Didion plays the paranoid wife of freewheeling Hollywood, shaken by the innocuous (overly presumptive guests) the grave (violent murders), and the meta-textual. Because more than anything else, Didion is disturbed by the disappearance of narrative. Or, more accurately, the disappearance of her apparent interest in narrative cohesion. She has simply stopped believing in it any more. The act of being-birthed is not recognized by the subject as a beginning but a consequential ending. How does one thing lead to another? Nobody can say, least of all Joan, or Rebecca.
The year that Saturn moves from Pisces to Aries is the space in between histories and also the year we became convinced the world would end and we were proved right. They are the years of the Gothic Heroine, both dead and not dead, split from the narrative and even her interest in being included. Adrift and nameless, barreling downwards and up into an immovable future hoping the ends connect and knowing they won’t for another thirty years when we look back and go right, that was the year it all started.