Stationary Carousels and Chain Letters: The Ego-Technic Media of the Official World

This chapter sets out the infrastructure of the official world: its staging media and anthropotechnics. It sets outs the “vicarious life” of the official world and the interactive character of its forms of life. It describes the somatic biographies of the lethal and reincarnative individuals who come to life in it: opportunistic, projective, stress-driven. The chapter details the built architecture of “the auto-hypnotically closed counter-worlds”—air-conditioned chambers, space capsules, high-rises, concrete islands, institutional settings for the self-enhanced—the sites in

The scene of the crime in the age of social systems and crime fiction are shown to test out modern distinctions between real and fictitious persons and real reality and fictional reality, and a good way to locating its modes of transmission, observation, and connection: modes of vicarious crime. Via crime stories and crime films, and belief systems such as Scientology, this part details the medium of suspense as a worldview—focusing on one the suspense novel’s great practitioners, Patricia Highsmith, and on one of the suspense motion picture’s great strategists, Alfred Hitchcock. A central focus on the novel and the film Strangers on a Train.