The other day as I walked through the local open-air mall, a short round man in a long white robe kept step with me. Stallholder, I assumed; he said he’d seen me often. His fervour didn’t unnerve me until he mentioned coffee. ‘I don’t drink coffee,’ I said. So, tea then. ‘No, I can’t handle caffeine,’ I explained, too gobsmacked to just say no thanks. But soft drinks? Uh, no, because, well, sugar. At a loss, he stopped. I swerved into a store to lose him properly, then exited via the back door. How had he seen me ‘often’ when I’d never once seen him in a place with a scant Muslim presence? I visit the mall twice a month on average. Down the street, I saw him talking to an older lady, who looked quite relaxed. Maybe I’d overreacted?
Yet I’ve been stalked before – in my teens, twenties, thirties, forties – by strangers: men I’d met briefly or whose path I’d crossed unawares. Loose cannon or not, the man in white fitted a pattern. Have I ever stalked anyone myself? Not yet. Whether because my fantasy life beats reality, or because I’m too sensitive to rejection, who knows? But I’ve learned to internalise my obsessions; to transmute them through creative expression. And I’m not alone.
Tales about stalkers and their victims have long been a staple of film and fiction, from old classics – Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) – to Stephen King’s genre classic Misery (1987) and its memorable 1990 adaptation, to slasher flicks like Fatal Attraction (1987) and Single White Female (1992), made by men about mad women. And with the normalisation of such stories as cautionary or just plain gratuitous entertainment, real-life cases of stalkers stuck on celebrities have increased. Some stalkers have even achieved celebrity status themselves.
Yes, the voyeuristic West enjoys vicarious thrills. As if others have no right to privacy and by shining at what you do or just by being born beautiful, you forfeit freedom from scrutiny: your drug abuse, rehab schedule, eating disorder, exercise regimen, wardrobe, spats with your spouse/ex/managers/minders/nannies on- and offline. Journalists raid your bins, papparazzi chase and shoot you with telephoto lenses or drones, and millions of fans follow you on X. The Spectacle (nailed by Guy Debord) has turned us all into passive stalkers gawking at the antics of the mega-rich, politicians, and the assorted impotent icons (royals, film/sport stars, top models, pop idols) we sacrifice on the altar of distraction.
Our culture values stardom for its own sake. Forget greatness in your vocation. Everyone wants fame: the result, not the devotion that hones talent to mastery (vs. letting it rot on the vine). Yes, everyone wants their share of the limelight, wants to be seen, heard and followed, even as they see, hear and follow so much crap that meaning collapses; wants to show you snaps of their lunch, pets, a sunset with them in front of it… Everyone burns to feel special. Yet the more you give the Spectacle, the emptier you get – prey to hidden terms and conditions, the unwitting fate of data extraction. Your data profits others while you earn nothing yet pay to have your online activity tracked, your accounts potentially hacked, your content (or discontent) used to train AI designed to replace you as, having gotten gigs reporting on news, weather and more, it learns to write not just essays (at which it surpasses most uni students already) but poems, song lyrics, fiction, scripts etc.
Big Tech is extracting the souls of its users through the sieves of their overstrained eyes, the sockets of their tone-deaf ears, the desensitised tips of their tapping fingers, the hunched spine that diverts their life force into the screens of their devices… And I’m not exempt, just moved to bear witness as I gaze down on a verdant valley resounding with bird calls (when they’re not drowned out by leaf blowers, mowers or power tools) and scrawl this lament before typing it up in a word program I fucking well don’t lease from Microsoft.
The thing is, humans once were hunter-gatherers. Our species stalked and killed wild beasts, foraged for wild plants, and revered the Sun, Moon, rivers, trees – food and water sources, natural forces – millennia before the God of Genesis gave man dominion over it all, authorising the global ruin that atheists, too, are pursuing. So, having sucked the soul out of nature and monetised its husks, we now brave the wilds of Woolies (a far cry from spearing woolly mammoths), to gather hygienically sealed symbols of sustenance with bar codes so machines can debit our cards (though a few still take cash from a wayward minority). How primitive! Won’t it be cool when we can pay with an implant?
So humans aren’t hunter-gatherers anymore, except for a few Indigenous folk and some paleo freaks in their dreams. No, we’re the hunted and gathered, the prey. We’ve all seen footage of predators – big cats, say, on David Attenborough – targeting young or injured herd members. And youth is more vulnerable in our young digital culture, while the injured is all of us, thanks to additives, pollutants, pharmaceuticals, online addiction and more.
No longer hunters or even customers, but the product itself, we allow the elite to designate our shelf life. And stalkers make us shudder: paedophiles, losers, lonely souls… No, that’s us. We’re all infantile, lost and on our own if we can’t feed ourselves when they take away our tokens and convert our cash into sums we can’t count once the power cuts out (as it soon will at shortening intervals), funds we can’t access if governments elect to freeze them.
Capitalism has rendered all meaning monetary in a few centuries; bought up/out/off what once wasn’t for sale, or buried it, to produce a progressive emphasis on ownership in a spiritual vacuum. And, reduced to fetishising petty possessions, we’ve failed to notice who or what owns us, as we gather debt. Forever, if we don’t push back. Because once money, our sole remaining raison d’être, is wholly digitised, the takeover of our souls will be fait accompli.
Soul gets a raw deal under capitalism – a system as hollow as the spiel we swallow while our body–minds get colonised so we, the desouled, can be sold degraded food and water plus drugs and supplements to treat (or increase) toxicity and deficiencies, for which ‘convenience’ we pay the price in wholesale damage to all earthly life. But the tables are being turned by the corporations we’ve enabled, surrogate parents we’ve obeyed in exchange for trifles. The lab rats are us now, with our genes modified, micro-this and nano-that invading our bodies… Karma? Poetic justice? And yet it’s not too late to wake up – unless we’re so bounded by our egos that we live in dread of death because science ordains we are nothing but bodies and their epiphenomena, at least until AI can remodel us or we can upload our minds to a virtual cosmos replete with every bland cliché a tech nerd could conceive of…
I used to imagine the Left stood for social equality; adequate support for those – old, ill, disabled, disadvantaged – in need; the sharing (and care) of collective resources and not the law of winner takes all. But in recent years I’ve seen the Left decree that some are less equal than others if they decline, say, their share of the harms inflicted by Big Pharma, and that we all must accept support even if it’s of the wrong sort (if your immune system ain’t broke, don’t nix it?), and that corporate giants can take all the resources to sell back to us extortionately, because communal self-sufficiency, off-grid sustainability and thinking independently are heresy.
observer of times 
So over it…so this month turned to Tyson Unkaporta’s ‘Right Story, Wrong Story’ to see if I could find even just a glimpse of ‘salvation’, temporary though it may be. We’ll see.
Will be interested to hear your response to Tyson. Have listened to him yarn w/ a couple of different folk in recent months & was surprised that he seemed so conditioned by (mostly) white academia. ________________________________
I haven’t actually sorted him out myself…not that that’s a negative. I read his sandtalk a couple of years ago, found it refreshing and, after the Referendum effort and results this year, needed something a bit more lighthearted to read…as I’d also been simultaneously finishing off Reynold’s ‘Why Weren’t We Told’, had begun Carlson & Farrelly’s ‘Monumental Distractions’ and was becoming too disheartened about the ‘rest of us’ ever confronting and taking our racist, anti-Aborignal history on board. I don’t watch many podcasts and haven’t followed up on his either..just the books. He’s been educated in the Western system and at the same time trying to put his experience of his own culture’s twist on it. Another one trying to do similar is Nola Turner-Jensen and her work on recovery of Wiradjuri naming, language, stories and human-land interconnectedness. I don’t think it is that easy to do because of the dominance of Western thinking and education. I’ll email you her recent post which she kindly sent me in Pdf format so I could pass it on.
Not sayin’ Tyson doesn’t have lots to offer – just that he’s a very mixed-up boy. Super-smart, provocative & (to go by the preview) a fun/funky writer. As for the ‘rest of us’, that includes a growing number of (very) recent arrivals, many of whom just want to import their own culture to a safer, comfier, more prosperous place. Saw some local pro-Palestine aggro last Sat night. Lot of folk caring only about the troubles & history of their own cultures.
Nola sounds much more deeply grounded in her roots, more right-brain than left-brain Tyson. Found her words deeply moving… heartbreaking. A lot of Indigenous folk don’t share her deep yen for & connectedness to traditional ways. ________________________________
Tyson’s books are more stories of his journeyings…stories from his culture’s elders he has met, stories from others on the Indigenous journey in their own countries and academics he has met. As he says in ‘Right Story, Wrong Story’ the Indigenous stories are presented as ‘a story’, but were not received like that…they’d be received in bits and pieces as appropriate over time. So from my point of view the books are ‘artificial constructs’ edited and pulled into line by the editor…who, Tyson admits, has also pulled his ramblings into line. He is attempting to find a way to connect what he has learned and is continuing to learn from his traditional culture to “Western culture”, a project not made easy by his late discovery of it..and his need to saturate with it. He has definitely a yearning for what was lost, especially the mindframe, as does Nola. Nola’s early research was a project on how Indigenous and non-Indigenous people approach and complete tasks when in groups – and discovered there were significant differences. She is now on the project of recovery. My network of Indigenous contacts are also definitely involved in the project of recovery…learning the language, identifying elders who still remember the cultural practices and stories from their parents and grandparents, etc…and teaching it all to the next generation. Many cultural days and ceremonies popping up around the country. I actually suspect there have been two distinct cultures surviving since 1788. The ‘rest of us’ just never knew about or were introduced to that which was hidden and silenced. And you’re right, other cultures just don’t care…we’ve done a good job of passing on our early racism to each new arrival. All self-centred.
Aren’t ALL stories artificial constructs? For the purpose, perhaps, of making ideas or teachings easier to retain? Or also for escapism/entertainment? Yet some stories contain more truth than others. This latter matter was a sticking point in those yarns I happened to hear: which stories to believe. Tyson dissed a friend who didn’t trust the ‘science’ yet who nonetheless respected Tyson’s right to his point of view. (Yet what does deep dependence on the medico-pharma complex have to do w/ Indigenous lore?)
Nola seems to write unambiguously from the heart: less judgemental? What she says re ‘Camp 2 – become like [Colonial Australians]’ – appeared to me to be an issue w/ the Yes campaign: lots of messaging about healthcare, education & jobs, which I was guessing might mean, for instance, more vaccines etc., indoctrination w/ Western knowledge systems (like statistics) & values, & corporate enslavement whether sweetened by wealth & status or not. The Indigenous community is phenomenally diverse, like any far-flung group.
Re passing on our racism, I don’t think colonial Oz or even white culture has a patent on it. 🙂
You’re right there. Says something about part of what makes us ‘human’. As for Tyson…my take is ‘why should we believe anything?’. In his writing as well, for me, he comes across as cynical as…head all over the place…which for me right now is needed after months of focussed serious advocacy.
Cynicism or realism? It’s a fine/faint line. And kudos to yours & to Tyson for his, whichever it is. Maybe his glaring blind spots evince an instinct for which side his bread is buttered on? 🙂