[motohagiography]

Where reading PKD and absorbing his worldview ends and a career in infosec begins is incresingly vague. I've been in it since the 90's and tbh, sometimes I think cybersecurity is just a way of collecting undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenics and setting them against one another for sport. If it weren't, how would we know?

There is a great talk by him from about '77 where he outlines the basic idea that we are living in a simulation that became the basis for the plot of The Matrix movies, and the logic is pretty classic psychological disassociation and paranoia you get from using drugs over time. Not to diminish his huge contributions, but there's stuff that's right on the edge. One of the beautiful elements of the "Mr. Robot" series is that this underlying question is also a major plot point. You can see him in the video here (sorry, the better versions seem to haven scrubbed) https://youtu.be/_U6lgSbPj8Q?t=47 , and he's got the kind of blunted affect that is typically associated with decline. His book "Exegesis," which were the letters he was writing to people at the time are consistent with indications something was going wrong as well. When I was just learning synths and a new sampler over the pandemic, I produced a track from a live session with samples from the speech, albeit they were in reference to the "Computer Controlled" logo on the 303 bass synth I used in it: https://soundcloud.com/n-gram-music/exegesis , but I sampled just the best parts.

This is to say, neither PKD nor hackers concerned about surveillance dystopia today may have a reliable picture, as paranoia can be really enveloping. That said, of course that's what They would say - you can see how this becomes an inescapable spiral. Paranoia is the iterated logic of an idea and unless you uproot the foudational one, by virtue of perfectly reasonable and consistent logic, it's going to creep back.