Parasocial Activity

A Memoir in the Key of Science Fiction

Parasocial Activity is a memoir in the key of science fiction. This is the tale of a wild twenty months in my life, in which the people in the TV started talking to me via secret, coded messages embedded in their videos and episodes. It’s my story of what it’s like to get labeled delusional, and maybe even to be a bit crazy—especially if trying to change the world by upsetting the current economic order is a crazy thing to attempt. This is the story of telling the truth to your doctors, and of being disbelieved.

This is the story of how I lost the thread.

And this is the story of what happened next.

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A pink, ballon-shaped creature, holding a megaphone at a protest (wearing a pussyhat).

A Note on Genre and Truth:

This book, the only one I’ve ever written, is the true-to-memory story of what happened to me in early 2024: I started seeing secret messages, just for me, in videos from Jon Stewart and John Oliver, and when I told that to some doctors I got locked up for a little while as a crazy person. Not that you can really blame them for being rather skeptical of my story.

Now, I’ve called this book a memoir “in the key of science fiction.” But, importantly, this book is not, as a general rule, fiction. This book should be understood as a crazy-sounding memoir, conveying an absolutely wild, but true, story—a story that feels like science fiction at times, but which is true nevertheless (at least in the opinion of the author).

To be clear, I recognize that the contents of my book are extremely hard to believe.

But I believe this story. It aligns with my memories, and I think it is true, in the general, best I can make it. Even if I got some of the details wrong. Even if there are parts I may never be sure of. Even if I did take some creative liberties with language and order-of-events, to help tell a cohesive and accessible story.

Even if certain doctors don’t believe me.

The same creature, looking rather righteously angry.

A Content Warning:

The story contained in this book, in addition to being difficult to believe, is also often quite troubling. It is emotionally trying, and psychologically complex. It deals at times with deeply traumatic events and memories, including all manner of things that young readers—readers of all ages, really—might find challenging to handle. Topics like gaslighting, paranoia, psychotic breaks, substance abuse, possible patient mistreatment, and memories of sexual abuse and misconduct, will all come up, sometimes as critical features of the story. And this is, quite self-evidently, from the very first pages, an exceedingly political book. If those things are not topics you’d like to read about, take this as your warning.

Still, despite this book’s darkness and difficulty at times, which were true to my experiences and life, I honestly do find the story as whole both uplifting and hopeful in the end, even if it’s a very hard road along the way. This is, among many other things, a story of learning to rebuild yourself after disaster.

This story has helped change who I am for the better, and it has made me dare to love myself again, after many years astray.

Example Excerpts

  • “We live in strange times, here in the future, a few stumbling steps across the veil and into the temporality of revolution. Automation continues to liberate the machinery of capitalism from its reliance on the finite resource of human labor hours, and, as an inevitable consequence, we stand at last within sight of the days of post-scarcity.”

    —Chapter 1: "A Man Walks Into a Corporate Lobby”

    This book has quite a lot of political pontifications, along with a heaping helping of what my dad calls “Writing with a Capital ‘W’.” It gets a little self-important at times.

  • “I’m kind of a terrible person. At least, I feel like that a lot of the time. Don’t get me wrong, I have noble goals: in the long run, I aim to accelerate the liberation of humans, at scale, from the conditions of compulsory labor that characterize the present economic order. But I’m still a terrible person and an unfit messenger for a worthy project. A great talent and a miserable failure—a complete mess, a drunk and a stoner with a terrible temper and horrendous impulse control…I still often cry myself to sleep, lamenting my wasted life, and dwelling on the ways in which I have demonstrably made the lives of others worse. I truly hate myself.”

    —Chapter 2: “Imperfect Messenger”

    I do a lot of doom-spiraling. I was not in a good place, mentally or emotionally, when the story started. Then things got worse in a hurry.

  • “But on that cold January morning last year, when I walked into the lobby of the CBS Broadcast Center in New York, and I politely requested a meeting, and then left the building when asked to do so? Had I blown up, or screamed, or thrown something? Had I ignored Security’s instructions? Had I expressed any dangerous or threatening intent? Hell no. None of that. I didn’t do anything that morning even remotely close to meriting police intervention. So, I find it rather puzzling, to say the least, that some random doctor, who wasn’t even there, wrote down otherwise in my medical file…before signing his name to it, and locking me up as potentially dangerous”

    —Chapter 3: “A Little Different”

    I get righteously aggrieved quite a few times, and I have quite a few thoughts to share about the patient experience.

  • “I am a citizen dissatisfied with the performance of my government, and I am here seeking peaceful redress of certain grievances, by means of reasonable political discourse.”

    —Chapter 5: “Principles, Privilege, and Impulse-Control Problems”

    I tend to soapbox about certain principles I hold dear, and I’m often stunned when the world doesn’t work the way I think it should.

  • “And then…there was that that terrifying, underlying, destabilizing thought, which began at last to stir, beneath all the principled irritation: what if maybe…just maybe…I really was crazy? I mean, I had been thinking some pretty strange things on the trip down here. And, I had to admit…if I explained this situation to almost anyone else on Earth, it would seem crazy. And, worse yet, if almost anyone else on Earth tried to tell me this, I might well think it sounded crazy to me, too. Every person I had even tried to talk to about all of this had told me I was probably imagining it. So…wasn’t it possible?”

    —Chapter 28: “Sticky Notes”

    I walk you through what it’s like to question your own sanity.