Aeon Magazine has an amazing article on the history of technology in paranoid delusions and how cultural developments are starting to mirror the accidental inventions of psychosis.
It’s by the fantastic Mike Jay, who wrote The Air Loom Gang, an essential book that looks at one of the most famous cases of ‘influencing machine’ psychosis.
In his article, Jay applies the same keen eye for history and culture and explores how the delusions of psychosis are carefully intertwined with culture.
Persecutory delusions, for example, can be found throughout history and across cultures; but within this category a desert nomad is more likely to believe that he is being buried alive in sand by a djinn, and an urban American that he has been implanted with a microchip and is being monitored by the CIA. ‘For an illness that is often characterised as a break with reality,’ they observe, ‘psychosis keeps remarkably up to date.’ Rather than being estranged from the culture around them, psychotic subjects can be seen as consumed by it: unable to establish the boundaries of the self, they are at the mercy of their often heightened sensitivity to social threats.
The article covers everything from Victorian delusions of electrical control, to the breakdown of novelist Evelyn Waugh, to the fiction of Philip K Dick.
It’s an excellent piece, and even those who have a special interest in the history of psychosis will find it full of fascinating gems.
By the way, it looks like Jay’s book The Air Loom Gang is about to be re-released in a newly updated version, under a new title The Influencing Machine.
Link to ‘The Reality Show’ in Aeon Magazine.
Mind Hacks 
Just re-read the Vaughan Bell story
in The Guardian about Martha Mitchell
being essentially right about Nixon
and more importantly about her
husband, the AG, John Mitchell.
Let’s see there were quite a few
top reporters who were harassed
by the FBI on orders from Nixon,
his AG and “good old boy” Pat
Buchanan Nixon’s Press Secetary.
When one of these reporters confronted
Buchanan on TV Buchanan just ran over
him basically b/ c the guy was in his
80’s. Now “the *gumment* is after me”,
is now T-Party Republican mainstream.
If I say there are actual
insidious US programs that make the
NSA’s Big Data look comical by
comparison something like that still
goes straight into the Alex Jones
“Paranoid Style” file as unbelievable.
Which is why I hope Ed Snowden has
more than what he released so far
b/c the updated non-delusional
reality is so Martha Mitchell deja vu.
1)Why? B/c it is impossible to prove
except by a private contractor insider.
2)As per Michael Hastings and the
possibility that when experts go
after you it is made sure that
everything that happens to you is indistinguishable from psychosis.
That’s why the real pros are never
caught. Another reason is that the
US GOP is so crazy that anything I say
just sounds like more T-Party nonsense.
Oh, anyone who thinks this started with
Obama is T-Party nuts. It is a permanent
bureaucracy in triplicate courtesy of
Cheney Bush after 911 but began long
before.
A better example of delusion is Ignaz Semmelweis who had the delusion peoples hands were covered in germs, even DOCTORS hands!