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Here’s a talk I gave at the Digital Futures community arts seminar in May 2008 for Information and Cultural Exchange.

In 2006 I met a remarkable 90-year-old woman in Hong Kong. She was a Chinese herbalist who once worked in the Kowloon Walled City — the infamous, anomalous zone of Hong Kong where no government actually ruled, with all the possibility and danger this might imply in such a context, and where life was a series of alleyways and tunnels that burrowed into an almost solid mass of interconnected buildings. I wrote about it here.

I interviewed her for a new media oral history project that approached this area of Hong Kong in terms of people’s memories and feelings of space, place and movement. What are our histories of coming to a place that becomes home? What do we bring with us, and what do we leave behind? What moods does our home have? This old woman had remarkable stories. Of being a field doctor during the Second World War, and seeing rivers of blood in the wake of battles between the Kuomingtang and Japanese armies. Of arriving in Hong Kong, and carving out spaces in the Walled City for her extended family to live. Of having patients who still saw her, decades after she cared for them as kids growing up in the Walled City.

After recently sending her a belated birthday card, this week I found out that she died last year. I’m still working on my project. I think she has finished hers. I guess this is a reminder to keep our links alive, in all the ways that this could mean.

As a teenager, did you ever have a wild, wild crush on somebody, a person whom you put on a ridiculous pedestal and transformed into a perfect, fetishised object who occupied all your waking thoughts? And did you ever have a conversation with them that didn’t add up? Perhaps they misremembered an incident — its time, location or relationship to others — and you tasted the possibility of an inexplicable hole in their representation of it. Did your whole world come crashing down in a wild panic? Was your object of desire ensnaring you in an improbably complex web of deceit? The spiral of paranoia that comes with infatuation.

This is how I think of compulsive conspiracy theorists. Yes, conspiracies undoubtedly happen, and yes, the powers that be indeed have nefarious designs, but these are embodied in more systemic rhythms, and on a granular level are characterised by a trillion little incompetencies. Meanwhile, those with a repeated compulsion to uncover improbably expert conspiracies are actually secretly in love with the State. They have a wild, wild crush on it. Every time they encounter an inexplicable hole in representation, they have an epistemic crisis, because the mean, beautiful girl who routinely humiliates them and steals their lunch money also absentmindedly said that she was at the movies with Linda three weeks ago when in fact she was cruising in Dan’s car. Forget the humiliation and the theft — glutton for punishment, these are the things an unrequited crush overlooks or endures — she lied about Dan!

Security forces have attempted to transform Sydney’s central business district into a ghost town for the APEC summit.

(Original photo here.)