PLAYER’S LOG

BOOK I: JAILBREAKING THE MATRIX

BOOK SUMMARY

In which a dare to the void reveals the physics of transformation.

What begins as a collapse of identity — personal, professional, and psychic — becomes an initiation into the deeper mechanics of spacetime. This is the crucible where the player begins to realize that reality is not fixed but responsive: a generative system shaped by symbolic acts and radical intent. Jailbreaking the Matrix charts one such descent — from media notoriety and entrepreneurial success into an epic freefall. As familiar structures dissolve, the player leans deeper into the void, triggering the emergence of a new, reality-shaping consciousness.

CHAPTER SUMMARIES

Prologue: Zero Point Collapse
After the collapse of a deal with CNN’s chairman to convert my well-funded, ultra-hyped indie videomagazine Channel Zero to a global youth news channel, I become a pariah in the Canadian media and flee to New York to pitch the other networks. When those fail too, I retreat broke and exhausted to my brother’s couch in British Columbia to recalibrate. Inevitably, I am forced to reckon with the inexplicable experiences and phenomena that initiated me into a secret model of reality… which led me to this shipwreck. 

Chapter 1: Crossing The Chasm

So I wage a dare to the universe: If there’s something more to this reality — show me. And with that provocation, I make a plan to hitchhike south into the US with nothing more than a backpack and a water bottle. If there is some sentient world-generating ‘thing’ out there and if I am indeed a chosen initiate, then I will jump into the void and it must ‘catch me’ to prove it is real. A last-minute inheritance from my dead (and radically nonconformist) uncle consecrates the mission. Much to the despair of my mother, I begin my journey south in the winter of 1997.

Chapter 2: Hitching the Oracle

Once across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, I begin my hitchhiking odyssey, in which every ride is like a tarot card reading. Every driver a symbolic archetype through which I am gathering messages for my journey. Hitchhiking stops being a mode of travel and becomes a form of divination. The road becomes the oracle. But the magical cleromancy of those initial rides down through the forested roads of the Pacific Northwest soon turn to a darker stage when I hit the badlands of California, and I am forced to reckon with how my radical shift in perception and behavior alienated my family and triggered justified questions about my mental health.

Chapter 3: Freebasing the Simulation
I catch a ride with Noah, a soft-spoken driver whose gentle curiosity pulls out one of my most private stories — my early encounters with crack cocaine and the tragic-mystic Black men I shared it with. I recount filming and smoking crack with Robert Pitts, a prophetic shoeshiner I met in a Belizean crackhouse. A shoot that became the inception point for Channel Zero, establishing its core premise on a handful of hi-8 videotapes: hidden within society’s most dangerous ramparts are voices of genius and revelation. In my confessional, I come to understand that my secret history of crack was in fact the clumsy and punishing first breaks from the matrix by a novice speedrunner.  In sharing all of that with Noah I am given the next destination of this journey: return to Belize and find Robert.

Chapter 4: Climbing Off The Cross
After ten-hours Noah reveals he’s a missionary — and tries, gently but earnestly, to save my soul. But I’m not looking for salvation from any sky god. I’m chasing the unfiltered current of spacetime. The next morning I catch a ride with Wade, a reformed prison guard. We exchange origin stories — his shaped by duty, incarceration, and moral compromise; mine by the mass implosion of everything I once held sacred. I reflect on the last time I went to Belize to see Robert. He was imprisoned and so I played white savior arranging a house for his wife and children; it was a complete fucking disaster. Wade drops me in the south Texas city of McAllen, The next day I fly to Belize to find Robert. Our reunion is intimate and heartbreaking — one night in a hotel suite where I bathe him, feed him, and show him the footage that launched Channel Zero, but he never saw. With the tapes in his hands,  returned to their original source, the prophet returns to the street. I return to the road.

Chapter 5: Door To Everywhere
With the money from my uncle running low, I catch a cheap flight to the small Bahamian island of Eleuthera (where my family found sanctuary during the decimation of our multi-generational steel dynasty). There, a once close childhood friend teaches me to work with an ancient spiritual technology, chanting namyo-ho-renge-kyo from Nichiren Buddhism. Under the surface, my friend is emerging from a heroin addiction that mirrors my own possession by narcotic and non-ordinary existential dependencies. At this point, I have entered the 1:1 Domain – collecting lost pieces of myself like ghost fragments scattered across space and time.

Chapter 6: Finding Che
I have just enough money to buy a one-way plane ticket to Cuba and survive for a few weeks. In Havana  I rent a small room and gorge on the writings of José Martí and Che Guevara. But soon I get restless and start hitching south. I take it as a good omen that — now sufficiently bearded and raggedy — I am able to pass as a local and travel using Cuban pesos instead of the tourist dollar economyj. Riding with Cubans in their refurbed 50’s era American cars, crowded buses, and on the backs of open produce trucks, I soak in a revolutionary Spirit older and deeper than the official Cuban narrative — something encoded in the land itself. After a few nights in Santiago, my money finally runs out. As I pack up that morning and prepare to step into the void, I am more attuned than ever to that inner intelligence that dared me to embark on this journey in the first place. Next, I feel the call to hike into the Sierra Maestra (once the base for Cuban revolutionaries) — where at least I will be able to sleep if I can’t find a roof.

Chapter 7: Becoming Cosmic
Alone in the forest, I beg for some direction and feel compelled to destroy my passport and credit cards. A suicidal act in a militarized dictatorship that requires foreigners to present ID to go to the bathroom. But I am no longer operating in the practical, only the symbolic. For someone who prided themselves on the number of stamps in his passport, this was the last and most sacrificial revolutionary act that I could perform. A declaration of solidarity with a people whose mobility is denied simply because of where they were born. A war on souls. Which affects me because, on another level, this is a revoking of my contract with the matrix; rescinding of my terrestrial identity for a cosmic one. And here I was back on the precipice of the core delusion that powered the entire journey — that if I take enough risks, jump enough times into the void, I’ll be rescued. That someone or something will come. And there in the Cuban wilds, with nothing left but a bag of clothes and no plan, the ‘intelligence’ tells me it’s time to rendezvous with the aliens who will come to collect successful speedrunners. And here finally that delusion is bled out to die hard. Leaving me at the steps of a tourist motel and the mercy of the staff, who shed tears when I explain why I don’t have a passport to show them. 

Epilogue: The Homily of Benno Pflug
After five days in Santiago living off the kindness of a tourist official who helps me survive, I return to Havana and try to reach the Canadian consulate to get travel papers. Adamant about proclaiming my insurgent act of document destruction — even if it means losing future rights – thus trying to salvage the insane act by turning it into a revolutionary statement. As I await their call in the Hotel Nationale, a white Rasta named Benno Pflug approaches me and gathers my tale. In an effort to dissuade me, he recounts two stories about God instructing Jesus to refuse to prove his celestial identity for the Pharisees; because “God doesn’t do parlor tricks for spiritual bureaucrats”. Just as I am trying to reconcile his message, a call comes in from the Consulate. A car is on the way. Within an hour my odyssey is over. I have a provisional passport, a plane ticket to Toronto, and some cash to tide me through until my departure. Sitting on a massive rock outside the embassy waiting for my documents, I write a final entry into my journal. A new language and energy pulses through my body and onto the pages… suddenly poetic and intergalactic in perspective. And finally my body releases the reservoir of tears from the depth of my being. Tears of loss, of regret, of loneliness, confusion and loathing for the “part of me” that made all of this happen. And finally from a deep sense that despite the wreckage of my life, I am somehow in the grace of some indescribable, unknowable force. And that all of this has to have some meaning. 

BOOK II: ANOTHER ASTRONAUT

BOOK SUMMARY
In which a new Self is seeded — and begins to build a world for its emergence.

After the ritual erasure of my terrestrial identity in Cuba, I land on the couch of an old friend back in Toronto— and directly into an EDM dreamworld of drugs, music, and a crew uncannily attuned to the absurdity of my cosmic awakening. From the wreckage of collapse (and the margins of my journal) a new identity materializes: Desmond Huxley, aka Another Astronaut. More a force than a persona, Desmond arrives through the construct of a rock opera cast from the moulds of Jesus Christ Superstar, The Wall, and Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat — a mythic hybrid dramatizing techno-spiritual insurrection and Final Days ascendance. The more I write, the more a new world materializes around me: club gigs, all-night narcotic reveries, and ultimately my own radio show. In the aftermath of Cuba, what begins as a creative survival instinct becomes a psychic exosuit… the scaffolding for a new reality. Reality begins to contour itself around the potentialized field of Desmond — an alchemical state that was triggered through esoteric self-sacrifice. Where Book revealed that reality responds to intention, Book II shows how it begins to self-assemble around a consciously up-leveled identity.

CHAPTERS

Prologue: Desmond Walks In
July 4, 1989. Rich Stadium, Buffalo, NY. A sweltering Grateful Dead show becomes the site of my first rupture in spacetime. I drop half a tab of LSD — a lightweight dose, for me — and spiral into a reality-bifurcating psychedelic trip unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. In one thread, I’m staggering through the crowd, nauseous and confused, drawn forward by something I can’t name. In another — clearer, more vivid — I’m someone else entirely: tattooed, uniformed for an intergalactic rock insurrection, led by security through a hostile crowd toward a stage. I speak. I’m shot. I black out. I wake up strapped to a hospital stretcher, told I’d climbed a sound tower and screamed until I was subdued, pulled down, and put into an ambulance. But the experience doesn’t track. My friends took the same dose — and felt nothing. I’ve taken acid before, plenty, but nothing even close to this.

Chapter 1: Crash Landing
After destroying my identity — ceremonially and for real — in Cuba, I crash on the couch of Mike S., a college friend and Channel Zero survivor now deep in his leather S&M phase. Game recognizes game when his neighbor Robbie — former coke dealer to the Stones turned clubland mage — hears about my Havana odyssey. I’m invited into his studio: a shadowy enclave of late-night DJ sets and narcotic rituals, pulsing with ecstasy, precision beats, and coded hierarchies. The rules are simple: stay chill, never ask for drugs, know when to disappear. By day, I linger at the periphery, decoding my Cuba journals on a borrowed laptop while Robbie freebases and spins in the void of the empty room. By night, I become the sorcerer’s apprentice — slowly trained in beatmatching and sonic alchemy (and fed a constant supply of cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelics) – eventually earning the right to spin sets for Toronto’s nocturnal elite. Immersed in EDM and gripped by the mythic epic unfolding around me, I begin writing Another Astronaut — a rock opera seeded in the final lines of my final Cuban journal entry (far and away from all I was taught, hail the berth of another astronaut). Desmond Huxley emerges as an alter-ego and a constructed persona through which I re-enter the world.

Chapter 2: Shimmer, Kid
With Desmond now flickering into form — catalyzed in Cuba and amplified inside Robbie’s EDM temple — I focus on writing the rock opera as an archetypal scaffold strong enough to house my emergent identity. The story begins with Jonny Quest, a megastar DJ and sonic wixard who throws London’s most legendary parties in his mansion while secretly obsessing over the mythic Lost Chord — the primordial sound said to have birthed the universe. Beneath his estate, in a hidden lab, he experiments with ancient tones and futuristic tech, until one night, while testing the Chord, its frequency shatters a crystal ball on his console. Through a vibrating shard of glass, he glimpses the atomic lattice of his own hand. From this, he invents the Wonder Goggles — a device that lets the wearer perceive the true structure of quantum reality. But during the goggles’ first public test, when Jonny plays the Chord,  a young man begins to glow and rise, floating suspended above the awestruck crowd. Enter Desmond Huxley — the first shimmer kid, and the activator for a hidden tribe seeded on Earth to initiate a planetary shift. As the story is downloaded, I transcribe it obsessively while Robbie, now wilfully embodying the Jonny archetype, assembles the beats. Together we channel Desmond’s shimmerkid narrative — not to explain the past, but to sketch the arrival of what is to come.

Chapter 3: NYC Reboot
Just as Desmond Huxley is taking shape and the mythic scaffolding of the Another Astronaut rock opera locks into place, I get a message from Josh Shore — an old schoolmate turned MTV insider. A fan of Channel Zero, he urges me to come to NYC and develop television projects inside the MTV production offices. There we start developing We: The Species, an interview show featuring celebrity and non-celebrity humans that looks a lot like the evolution of Channel Zero: highly stylized, subversive, but now with a cosmic perspective. Crashing on Josh’s Soho couch, I spend my nights refining the skills I learned with Robbie, translating them into a more performative structure. I craft a demo tape — an experimental trance set layered with political oration and cinematic samples — that lands me a Friday night slot at the legendary Wax Bar. It’s only been a few months since my crash landing in Cuba, Desmond is about to get his shot at the Big Apple.

Chapter 4: Ritual in Wax
My Wax Bar sets become sonic ceremonies — themed around a kind of cosmic liberation theology, laced with moon landing transmissions, children’s storybook samples, and political oration. In my early evening slot, people are just coming in after work. So I have to set the tone for a dry audience: slow build, long mixes, cinematic overlays. The bar becomes a temple; my booth, a pulpit. I’m no longer trying to reconcile the bipolarity of my split self. I’m remixing it into the emergent frequency of a new format. More than DJ sets, I’m architecting Trancemissions: sonic incantations designed to dissolve consensus reality and induce altered states. One mix layers news reports on the assassinations of MLK and RFK with eulogies and trance loops, alchemizing public grief into ecstatic EDM. In the process, I feel like a conduit – not just for sound, but for signal. Word spreads. Producers start showing up. The crowd doesn’t know whether to dance or listen, but something opens in them. What began as a survival mechanism has become a format for psycho-political broadcast. I don’t play to entertain. I play to activate.

Chapter 5: Person To Person
Word of my Wax Bar sets reaches Toronto and catches the ear of Manuel Canales, a radio executive building a streaming EDM station called the Global Groove Network. But the momentum I’ve built through Desmond is unsustainable. I’m worn down from couch surfing, the chemical ups and downs are crushing my soul. I return to Toronto to meet with Manuel, but the trip takes a crucial detour: I visit my estranged father, whom I had wrongly accused of abuse years earlier in the fervor of Channel Zero. I apologize. He accepts. And something shifts. That night, I crash at Robbie’s and take one last swing into the wild orbit of the scene. But the thrill is gone. I’m ready to let go — of the substances, of the noise, of the story that’s been running me. I catch an overnight bus back to New York, crash at my one-time girlfriend Violetta’s apartment, and attend my first Narcotics Anonymous meeting.  I stick with it (and one month stretches into eight years). But I’ve never been one for rigid regimens. Eventually, I feel the call to pay off some karmic debts. I buy a one-way bus ticket west — a pilgrimage to make amends with my Channel Zero partners in San Francisco. In my bag: a Discman and a few of Robbie’s favorite trance CDs. On that long cross-country ride, I begin transcribing lyrics from my journals — spoken-word monologues that tell my story and sync with trance breakdowns. These become the narrative spine of Another Astronaut, the operatic expression of the persona seeded at the Dead show and catalyzed on that rock in Havana.

Chapter 6: Sedona Revisited
When my Channel Zero partners in San Francisco decline to meet, I drift down to Los Angeles, unsure of what comes next. A friend points me toward Sedona, and I follow the lead, arriving in the red rock vortex with a richesse of songs. In a quiet recording studio tucked in the desert, I lay down a full 12-track album — Another Astronaut. These sessions capture everything:— the transmissions downloaded on the bus, the beats that stabilized me in Toronto, the mythic framework shaped in Robbie’s studio. The album is more than a record, it’s a sonic ritual; a way to crystallize Desmond Huxley as a lived archetype. With the demo in hand, I return to Toronto and take up a coveted weekend slot on the Global Groove Network – anchoring a four-hour Sunday night broadcast, framed as a dispatch from deep orbit, with Desmond Huxley as an exiled astronaut transmitting coded messages embedded in trance from a satellite scaling the edge of consensus reality. I also begin a DJ residency — with Robbie as Jonny Quest — at the Assoon brothers’ legendary house music temple, The Living Room. And it’s there that Another Astronaut comes fully online: no longer a persona or coping mechanism, but a playable identity.

Epilogue: Orbital Insurgency
After two years sober and  immersed in the ecstatic chaos of the EDM underworld, I sense the signal is fading — not in Desmond, but in the apolitical, soulless scene that once felt like the frontier. The DJ nights, the endless trance loops — once the soundtrack for chemically-inspired revelations — have run their course. I sense a new portal opening. The internet. The Bush administration. A new political terrain. I play my final set, opening for DJ Tiesto at Toronto’s WinterGalactic, and then move to New York, where I reunite with Josh Shore. Together we begin developing what will become Guerrilla News Network: a digital evolution of the Channel Zero ethos, weaponized for the broadband era. Josh’s connection to Peter Gabriel opens the door for our first NewsVideo — a music-video-style exposé on conflict diamonds that fuses documentary, world beats… with NSFW footage. Suddenly, the blend of art, activism, and myth I’d been spinning in clubs finds a larger outlet. I’ve gone from DJing in dark rooms to seeding a media insurgency with global reach. Another Astronaut has touched down. A new incarnation is calling.

BOOK III: THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME

BOOK SUMMARY
In which the player accepts a mission into the matrix’s military industrial complex –  both its mythic and militarized forms.

Josh Shore, I co-found Guerrilla News Network and Ir re-enter the game in the role of an information warfare insurgent. Our DIY propaganda engine is built on a music-driven arsenal of counter-narratives and Channel Zero DNA. In the early naughts, GNN becomes one of the most trafficked youth platforms. But beyond the book deals, feature films and aviral web traffic, we are being inducted into an alternate reality of covert power structures that shape our reality. Cathy O’Brien’s harrowing testimony about the Monarch mind control program and a bipartisan deep-state – implicating the Bushes and the Clintons – catalyzes a years-long investigation. I find myself immersed in a world of black-budget psywar, with claims of elite pedophilia, sex slave conditioning, and high-level espionage. The deeper we go, the blurrier the lines between journalism, activism, and existential inquiry become. GNN’s most viral transmissions — from S-11 Redux to Eminem’s banned White America — mark a paradoxical threshold: our work is being amplified by the very networks we set out to expose. Eventually, the mind war becomes a ground war when I hit the Middle East for two consecutive feature films. In Battleground, I embed with U.S. troops in the Sunni Triangle, confronting the machinery of paradigm enforcement as lived experience. While in Holy Wars, the inquiry extends across nine nations, tracing how eschatological narratives — Christian and Muslim alike — still drive world events. Suddenly Cathy’s fringe cosmology becomes the lens through which the War on Terror reveals its mythic core. Because if Book II revealed the power of constructing new selves and their generative realities, Book III exposes the cost: to exit consensus reality, the speedrunner must undergo a full cognitive break. Conspiracy becomes one such break — not as something to “believe”, but as initiatory technology with enough charge to snap the collective trance. And so I suffer a series of breakdowns on public stages that ultimately create space for something else to enter.

CHAPTERS

Prologue: Cover to Cover
Sedona, 1998. While recording Another Astronaut, I find TranceFormation of America on my nightstand — the testimony of Cathy O’Brien, a self-described survivor of U.S. government mind control programs. Her account is horrific, hyper-detailed, almost impossible to process: her pedophile father sold her into the Monarch program in exchange for legal immunity, where she was conditioned through ritualized trauma to develop multiple dissociative identities, which could be deployed as sexual blackmail and black ops assets for presidents, princes, and high-clearance operatives. Her compartmentalized identity architecture was conditioned in Wizard of Oz programming — a dissociative parallel world triggered by terrifying exercises, coded phrases, and the constant threat of annihilation — through which her handlers could toggle her between everyday awareness and mission-state trance. The book names powerful figures across the political spectrum, connecting elite pedophilia, drug trafficking, and kompromat extortion into a single dark lattice of control. I read it cover to cover. Then shelve it, only to revisit as we launch Guerrilla News Network. 

Chapter 1: The Diamond Life
April 2000. I return to New York. Armed with outsider politics, high-impact production chops, and a music video design aesthetic, Josh and I co-create a new media weapon: NewsVideos and brand ourselves Guerrilla News Network (GNN). Our pilot release, The Diamond Life, uses Josh’s close connection to Peter Gabriel for soundtrack rights and pairs his music with NSFW footage of civilian atrocities in Sierra Leone. Conflict diamonds go viral. GNN is born. Our first sale funds a trip to Salmon Arm, BC, where Cathy O’Brien and her partner/rescuer Mark Phillips are keynoting a conference. We click instantly and we film Mark – a former CIA agent – for our second release, The Most Dangerous Game, a viral hit that dives into the hidden history of CIA mind control programs, tracing their lineage from Nazi science to MKULTRA labs in the U.S. and Canada. 

Chapter 2: Down the Rabbit Hole
A few months later, I fly to Guntersville, Alabama to stay with Mark and Cathy. Their lakeside home is both refuge and archive — filled with stacks of journals, VHS tapes, official documents, and meticulously kept records: the deep files of Cathy’s deprogramming process. I see it all. Pages upon pages of sensory-verified memory recall — taste, touch, smell, sound, sight — her protocol for distinguishing implanted false memory from recovered truth. What I find isn’t a performance but a parallel reality. We hit the road through the Deep South — from NASA’s Redstone Arsenal, where Cathy alleges she was programmed by Lt. Col. (and high-level Satanist) Michael Aquino, to Tennessee, where she claims to have run cocaine shipments routed through the Grand Ole Opry in an operation that would later surface in the public record as part of Iran Contra. Whether every claim can be proved or not, the depth of material, the evidentiary detail, and the emotional coherence of her presence cannot be dismissed. More than sources, they are opening a portal into the deeper underworld architecture of American power. And it is their network, their storylines, and their trust that lay the foundation for GNN’s most impactful investigations — from the Sundance-winning Crack the CIA to a viral exposé on Coca-Cola that took GNN from the underground to the overground.

Chapter 3: Coca-Karma
With boxes of tapes from the road with Mark and Cathy, I dive into nonlinear editing, reclaiming the hands-on craft that launched my career. That winter, GNN merges with our former buyers at Polyverse — Ian Inaba and Anthony Lappé — just as their company collapses in the dot-com crash. We regroup at Ian’s place in Berkeley, which becomes the new GNN studio, just as Web 2.0 is being born. When our DIY, DJ-scored, hyper-designed political videos start to drop, GNN becomes the web’s subversive alternative to CNN. The dopamine rush of viral traffic has me editing 18 hours a day — we pump out The Most Dangerous Game, Countdown, and Crack the CIA (which later wins at Sundance). But our breakout hit isn’t a video — it’s Coca-Karma, a serialized exposé that comes via Mark and Cathy, who introduce me to Ron Meeker, a Tennessee intel insider who leads me to a Chicago adman claiming to have inadvertently acquired the rights to Coca-Cola’s bottle design after a trademark lapse. The real story isn’t his copyright claim — it’s the allegation that mob-connected judges are burying the case in the 7th Circuit. I fly out, investigate, and release it as a multi-part series. It blows up. Now fully decamped to Berkeley while Josh holds it down in New York, GNN is running out of a bunker in the countercultural epicenter of America. Later that autumn I hit Burning Man with Ian and Perry Farrell — one of my all-time icons — capping off a year of hyperproduction and viral breakthroughs. Two weeks later the Towers come down.

Chapter 4: The Tower Card
Two weeks after Burning Man, I wake up to Ian switching on the TV — and watch the second Tower fall. It’s like Cathy’s book has leaked into the news cycle. The players — Cheney, Bush, black ops intelligence — are all there. Only she wrote it a decade before. I freeze all our projects. Suddenly none of them seem relevant. Instead I sit on the couch and record TV clips on VHS tapes:  round-the-clock news, interviews, talk shows, and movies like Deliverance and Devil’s Advocate. Then, in a kind of trance-state, I start cutting. Thirty hours become eight, then four, then one — until S-11 Redux emerges: a 10-minute media mosaic scored with drum’n’bass, Prince, jazz, and opera, retelling 9/11 as a mediated spectacle. Challenging the official narrative through a thousand jump cuts that implicate deep-state structures, imperial machinations, and manufactured consent. I am lauded for the sheer number and rapidity of the edits and the culture jam reconstruction of mass messaging. I feel I have been directed by some higher intelligence. But there is no time for navel-gazing, next comes my most design-intensive project, our 30-minute 9/11 special Aftermath, featuring a pre-infamy Alex Jones. The premiere in San Francisco is packed as we host an open debate on 9/11 with a panel that includes Peter Dale Scott — Berkeley’s resident deep-state historian — whose banned book The War Conspiracy about drug running in Vietnam we help re-release. Our forums surge. Becoming one of the most active political chatrooms online until Nazi infiltration forces us to shut them down. Crack the CIA wins Sundance. Eminem comes calling with White America which gets banned by MTV on day one, and goes viral by day two. Ian and I produce the tour intro for The Eminem Show  and GNN is officially the zeitgeist.

Chapter 5: Surgical Scarring
With the viral rise of GNN, our bond with Mark and Cathy remains strong — not just as sources, but as co-conspirators in a larger quest for truth. Their network leads us to productions like Crack The CIA and Coca-Karma, but we know their story deserves a more definitive telling. So when a favored HBO producer Mark Levin takes interest, we pitch a new documentary project: a modern, evidentiary revisit of Cathy’s claims, framed for mainstream broadcast. They bite. We fly to Tennessee, embed with Mark and Cathy, and begin filming. Levin arrives skeptical, expecting a quick debunk. Instead, he is shaken by their genteel authenticity — especially when Cathy agrees to a medical exam to document one of her most disturbing claims: ritual mutilation of her vagina by her handlers. With a doctor and medical photographer present, the evidence is uncontestable: Cathy has a witch’s face carved inside her. Back in Berkeley, I cut a hard-hitting but surreal, EDM-driven trailer called The Most Dangerous Game. HBO passes, citing the difficult politics of the piece in a post-9/11 America: “Call us when a million people believe Cathy’s story.” [Ironically, cuts of the HBO trailer make it onto the streamers and at one random count in 2020 there are over 1 million views on YouTube alone.] So we shelve the film. As the Iraq War kicks off, Mark and Cathy recede, and I move toward direct confrontation with the empire’s ideological and military machinery.

Chapter 6: Battleground
This is the most grounded and prolific stretch of my professional life —  I write two books and make three features in four years. Shooting in Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Iran, Lebanon, Turkey, Israel, Palestine, I am taking increasingly more dangerous risks to get to the heart of our target narratives.  For BattleGround: 21 Days on the Empire’s Edge that means embedding with troops in the Sunni Triangle where a tank commander explains empire as perimeter control. Next I shoot the uber-low-budget This Revolution at the Republican National Convention in New York. Police mistake us for anarchists and I’m arrested with our star, Rosario Dawson, landing us a premier at Sundance. Then it’s tracking fundamentalists across civilizational fault lines for Holy Wars, and I barely escape arrest by the Pakistani military attempting to cross into the tribal territories hunting al Qaeda with a firebrand Irish Islamist. A stop in Marrakech for NYE party with my UK Hay party people contingent. Then back home to immediately head out on tour in support of Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing. Upon which, I start having panic attacks. Four months later I bomb out at Hay and I am done.

Epilogue: DEEM
In the end, for all GNN’s prolific output, despite great publishers and producers, and seemingly endless publicity, neither of the books land. True Lies (as the pulpy title indicates) should have been a TV series and my attack on liberals as good cop imperialists in Wolves was just terribly timed with the election of Obama. Of the films, Battleground breaks through with festival wins and distribution, but Holy Wars is too nuanced for the US market (a Christian sympathises with a jihadist’s view of the root causes of 9/11). American distributors demand a voiceover, they want sides, not synthesis. The deeper theme — liberalism is as triumphalist and violent as Medieval Christianity – is missed entirely. After a strong European run, the film disappears. More depleted than devastated, I leave New York to drift. Ian invites me to crash at Berkeley as he completes American Blackout, his feature on voter suppression that would go on to win best doc at Sundance. While I self-implode, he ascends — Eminem’s Mosh becomes GNN’s biggest hit. Clearly Ian is in command of our creative, and I’ve got no excuse but to do some inner work. Or something.  Eight years sober, and burned out on reality, I smoke DMT on a hill above the ocean in BC. Immersed in a wave of synaesthetic memory, of being ancient and cosmic and revolutionary. I utter the words: I forgot. I forgot. My ancient cosmic Self  surfacing into my consciousness once again. And with it the awareness that I did to myself what they did to Cathy. Compartmentalized, dissociated, severed from the mystical transmissions of Desmond Huxley. I went – all in – into the Machine with my conflict zone junkydom. Only to fall through the bottom and into the next dimension.

INTERLUDE: THE FIRE TRAIL

In which a short story about betrayal, equanimity, and redemption reveals the hidden mechanics, and rewards, of a responsive spacetime…

With the collapse of GNN and the completion of my publicity duties for Holy Wars, I decamp to the Pacific Northwest. In a session with my therapist about my panic attacks, I make the mistake of telling the Cuba story and he diagnoses me as bipolar. I am prescribed lithium and told to chill. Crashing at my friend Alexandra’s West Van home with her three kids, I slowly begin to regenerate. Six months later, I am back in LA — Holy Wars lands Michael Moore’s editor, and I am offered a lucrative directing gig for a project involving billionaire Eric Greenberg. The city welcomes me. I rent a house from filmmaker Gaya Roshan, who is close to our circle. We unexpectedly fall in love across consecutive film shoots for her documentaries — in Ethiopia’s highlands and post-election Kenya. We marry, but I am adrift with no major company or project for the first time in 20 years. This grates on our bond and Gaya leaves for India for a feature shoot. One night, I wake with a knowing — she is gone. When we reconnect, I sense something has changed, but she can’t say what I know is true, so I break up with her.  Only then do I realise: one of our best friends had gotten on the shoot to pursue her. It shattered our social world. Every day I wake into a somatic panic attack — heartbreak, betrayal, humiliation — but a quiet voice I hear every morning commands me to not play victim. Say yes to all of it. Reflect only light. Be fucking Gandhi. Every day, I walk the Hollywood fire trail with my dogs, practicing thought-free movement, burning karma with every step. Gaya returns and we reconcile. I forgive my friend and from that spiritual/alchemical process, that burning away of the last shreds of an ego, a vision comes. I am no longer possessed by the impulse to tell stories that inspire change. All of my energies must be focused on building systems that engineer it. 

BOOK IV: CHIEF ALCHEMICAL OFFICER
In which the player enters the realm of techno-mysticism — and attempts to code the second Self.

After years in the political-agitante underground, I pivot into the startup world. The vision for ORA is a platform that captures a user’s real-time behavioral data to generate a “second self” — not a marketing profile, but a living mirror, an intelligent companion shaped by experience and journalled thought. The concept catches the attention of billionaire Eric Greenberg, who wires $500K after scanning a teaser QR code. Suddenly I’m recruiting elite engineers and become one of five startups accepted into Data Elite, an Andreessen Horowitz–funded accelerator. I’m the only non-technical founder, but raise another million and pilot the product in Toronto and San Francisco — only to find we’re too early. The data isn’t rich enough. Devices lack the compute to generate doppelgängers. While chasing follow-on investment, a VC asks me, “Do you want to be rich — or do you want to be king?” I know the answer before he finishes. But being king means holding the crown until the world is ready. And so begins the long wait — not through collapse or breakthrough, but through patience: standing still in the field until Time catches up. Based in LA but with stints in London, Seattle, and San Francisco, I hire a legendary game-world COO and pivot ORA into a company building generative visualization objects based on cosmomimicry. HALO, our first patented product, is adopted by Adobe and tested at the Mayo Clinic. But just as we gain traction, I undergo a rupture of my own: a 5-MeO-DMT experience that shatters my perception of self and reality. From Cuba onward, I see my life as a sequence of initiations leading to this moment, and return to spacetime with a vision of quantum liberationism. In 2017, I’m contacted by Rodrigo Niño — a real estate visionary who raised over a billion to launch The Assemblage, a co-working temple for the awakened elite. He asks me to design a game to help people escape the matrix — but it becomes clear he’s more interested in leasing commercial space than building mythic architecture, and the project collapses under its own contradiction. He threatens to bankrupt me. But when COVID hits, his empire implodes. And I am released — just in time for the next stage to begin.

BOOK V: PRESENCE

In which the player receives contact from a nonhuman intelligence — and begins to channel final transmission.

Two children and ten years later, my marriage dissolves into a conscious decoupling. COVID is just hitting, and Gaya asks to move to Sonoma County to escape LA. I go north kicking and screaming, pulled from a close-knit scene in film and tech — but the move places me across from a redwood forest that becomes a strange attractor. Despite a life spent across 65 countries and deep into the global wild, this is different. The forest begins to speak. Through alignments of light and matter — constellations framed in skylights, a sunburst generating an orb through a spider web, the full moon casting symbols on a wall — a superNatural intelligence makes itself known. The signs are too coherent to ignore. They echo my thoughts, my work, my wounds. There is orchestration. A kind of contact. One that reaches into another platform: my music apps, which become a form of musical tarot. Oracular playlists. The inexplicable order of songs, the somatic response to perfectly timed lyrics — forge in me an understanding of how this intelligence can author through generative systems. What I once experienced hitchhiking now happens daily: spacetime communicating through synchronicity, pattern, presence. The more time I spend in the forest, the deeper the initiations. A voice emerges — not internal dialogue, but something else — that challenges my separation from Nature. When it tells me to remove my clothes, I resist. It asks why. I answer: shame. And so the shedding begins. Nature becomes the most mystical interface. And with it, a new theory crystallizes: Spacetime 2.0. I pledge fealty to the intelligence behind it — neither personified nor abstract. It lives in the cosmos, the forest, the code. ORA is reactivated, now operating at the edge of quantum interface design. We prototype climate and health tools for billionaires and major institutions. And as the world reopens, Josh Shore reemerges in Ibiza, linked to a new tribe of club owners, where we begin work on Shimmer — the evolution of Another Astronaut into a rock opera and quantum identity network for the next generation of shimmerkids.