In the early years of Wake Island, around 2020 and 2021, we talked constantly about portals. The pandemic felt like an exit from one era and an entry into another. Eventually we stopped talking about them. Maybe because nothing had changed as completely as we imagined or maybe because we’d already passed through the portal and forgotten there was ever a door.
Lately, I’ve started to feel another one opening. For thirty years we rebuilt huge parts of society around the assumption that everything would eventually move online, that the internet would become this infinite, searchable repository of human knowledge. Instead, the information itself is becoming synthetic, generated and regenerated by machines, mixed back into the human material it was trained on until the distinction starts to collapse. We may be approaching the end of the information age not because information becomes scarce, but because it becomes infinite and useless.
Which makes this a good moment to talk again with Jarett Kobek, one of the great obsessive writers/journalists working today. His first novel, Atta, originally published in 2011 and now being reissued, enters the consciousness of 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and follows the architecture, ideology and alienation surrounding him toward his horrific conclusion.
His more recent book, Invocation of My Demon Brother, begins with Kenneth Anger’s eleven-minute 1969 film of the same name and expands outward into Anger himself, the occult, Bobby Beausoleil, the Manson orbit, and the strange network of people and ideas moving beneath the surface of the late sixties.
They’re very different books, but both are acts of obsession: taking something seemingly contained and following its connections until an entire hidden world opens around it.
The last time Jarett was on Wake Island, we talked about the Zodiac Killer and the death of the idealistic sixties. This time we move from Anger and the occult, through Atta and 9/11, into AI and an internet that may have already died without us quite noticing.
Intro music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius.
Outro music: “Balancine” by Black Polygons.
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