One of my favorite stories by Lovecraft is called "The Picture in the House". It's short, 10 minutes, but it contains all the horror of the modern age. The narrator wanders into an old, decrepit house to find shelter from a storm... 
In the house he finds a rare old book, Pigafetta’s Regnum Congo, with a gruesome illustration of a cannibal's butcher stall, and he meets a strange old man with an anachronistic way of speaking. The man seems to enter an ecstatic state as he talks about the book
As the narrator talks to him, he realizes that although the old man cannot read the book, its pictures have inspired him to commit acts of human butchery and cannibalism. Of all of Lovecraft's stories, I find this one especially haunting; hplovecraft.com/writings/texts…
Its single point of focus is the harmful perception, a contagious madness found in an old book. When Lovecraft was writing, the infohazard was slow and hidden, and to find it you had to wander into some cursed or forgotten place.
But if Lovecraft were writing now, the old man in the story would have posted the pictures of the book on his twitter, and it would have gone viral, and the whole world would be steeped in the blood of cannibal butcheries without measure or pause until the death of death
We romanticize Lovecraftian madness, but HPL's treatment of the subject is exactly the opposite, it's a genuine terror that seeps into the remotest crevasses of the mind. Maybe we are less afraid of madness because we are saturated in it.
How often have you been told to "read old books", and how often have you seen this exhortation disparaged as a kind of inactivity? But real, authentic readings of old books are dangerous, and they very well ought to give us strange impulses, otherwise, what was the point?
We live in the era of software, so the temptation is to think about everything in terms of computers and code. A philosophy is a computer program for the body: a system of precise abstractions orchestrated to produce effective actions
In software we have an idea we call "dead code" — code that exists as part of a program, but it never runs. Dead code is bad because it distorts the domain of discourse. I claim that philosophy ends up being mostly dead code to most people.
And yet, we have found some ways to put the dead code in our philosophies to good use. It's often not so important to believe something as to say that you do. We use the dead code in our minds to signal affiliation and fashion
So you could read a book of philosophy—something by Deleuze, perhaps—and even though you never act on it, you still get a lot of value from putting it on display. Fashionistas may also wear jackets in the summer time.
There's nothing wrong with using beliefs as gang signs and nothing I could say could stop you from doing it. Most people who read old books just pick up a lot of dead code, and that's for the best. The horror I feel comes from the other sort, the ones who run the code they find
What happens if you download a bunch of random applications from torrent sites and run them? You get a virus, and your machine can become compromised. Well, it was a lot harder to get a computer virus before the internet, and also a lot harder to get a mind virus
But nowadays, anyone can just go online and read an old book, and if they're really unlucky, they'll understand it and put it into practice. You should not consider this activity to be benign.
Here's a way to test if you downloaded a book as dead code for fashion, or if you are actually using it: can you convey it to others in a way that changes them, too? If not, you're a hipster in an ugly vest. And that's good. Hipsters get laid.
But not all change is good, and in fact most of it is harmful. This is true of both biological and ideological evolution. We forgot how to fear madness, because we are steeped in madness. We forgot how to fear change, because we are steeped in change. But fear is healthy.
Fear is unhealthy when it becomes hysterical, but prior to that, it's prudence. And I want you to know the fear in the fact that most people don't really act on their beliefs, the fear that, if they did run that old code, the result would be butchery
Another test is that people who run the old code they find in books are afraid; things that change you are authentically terrifying, but people who use them for fashion are instead full of bravado.
Heidegger made the point that any man who could look upon the (then new) photographs of Earth taken from low orbit and not be afraid was probably an idiot. Lack of fear at least signifies a dearth of meaningful religious instinct, a kind of blissful thoughtlessness
In online life we all goad each other to take our fashionable dead code beliefs and run them, and we are fortunate that most people don't. But the more they do, the more the madness takes hold.
Programmers understand another danger of dead code. It is not routinely exercised, so if it ever does run, it can be fatal to the application. Every time we spread a fashionable idea, there's a chance someone will take it seriously.
Because most people don't take their ideas seriously, bad ideas can spread very widely without consequence, until one day, one day...
There is another terrible allegory in "The Picture in the House". The old man looks at DeBry's picture of the cannibal before butchering a sheep, as if it were pornography.
Lovecraft didn't write about sex, but he did write about hideous appetites, found in enthrallment to an image. This is something we all know well. How many terrible images do we see every day, images we should never have seen?
Images of sex and violence can distress us in obvious ways, but the real madness comes from images that elicit pity, which I will once again remind you is a form of contempt. Can you think of an image that precipitated a descent into madness?
Madness may not feel like madness to a man in the grips of it. In fact, it may feel like ecstasy. Shestov wrote that the sun of truth blinds the inhabitants of the kingdom of darkness with its brilliance
This is to say that there is no special quality of truth that makes it a midwife to sanity. The trick of religion is to transmute individual madness into collective peace, just as the trick of a market economy is to transmute individual selfishness into collective wealth
Everyone who accidentally runs the philosophy they find on the internet has a similar experience, you may find this familiar: they ran some strange code and now they feel like the whole world is on the brink of "waking up"
It can take years to see that this is not the case, and to realize that you are now stuck with a weird operating system that makes it hard to interface with everyone around you. But nor can you just unsee the "truths" you have seen
This is the true meaning "the only way out is through". Being in the grips of madness, we have to find a way to all share the same madness together.
