The glitch in the system
On the trail of narrative belief
The Broken Veil podcast weaves a kaleidoscope of collective stories together with a drafty, double-exposure soundscape.
You’ll tread endless corridors, unsettling end-of-lines, wrong turns, and things that don’t add up. You’ll visit medieval churches, bunkers, and the deep folkloric Essex countryside, on what writers Will Mclean and Joel Morris call “a psychogeographic journey into the strangeness close at hand.”
The stories reference the Mandela effect, shared beliefs between friends that build a narrative of what may or may not have happened. No spoilers, but what do you want to believe?
Mandela effect: A phenomenon where people hold false collective memories. It’s named after the widespread belief that Nelson Mandela died in prison during the 1980s. He didn’t. He was released in 1990 and lived until 2013.
The Mandela effect resonates too through my shared stories about Radar Hill: the uncanny hyper-realism of the bluebells, the cattle that give chase, the otherworldy criss-cross of imposing electricity lines.
“The sheer size and lethal power [of high voltage cables] make them unpopular neighbours.
Only in the edgelands do these giants look at home, with their sagging skipping ropes and the ominous crackle and hum as you approach them.”
Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness
Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts
These episodic memories exist in a time and place we can only verify through revisiting that memory together.
In Infinite Loop, Venkatesh Rao (see too: The Art of Gig) argues that memories shape our world – through the narrative-led rational thought that follows them,
“The narratives we craft out of unreliable memory form the context from which we do our more rational thinking. So the context of rational thought is narrative.”
Everything on the Hill happened, and it lives on. Our belief builds the narrative.
Sensemaking
Each memory is a vignette that shapes what’s next. A join-the-dots origin map unfolds by extrapolating Rader Hill across a broader bunch of porous yet parochial-feeling places.
If rational thought is built on what did (or what didn’t) come before, we’re on the cusp of something audible, tangible – but just out of reach.
With the Hill at its heart, the story passes along canal paths in Roydon to the Woodham fens, the creek, and the Three Rivers. It drops pins in drafty village halls, prefab temporary (but permanent) classrooms, orchards, scout huts, bus stop shelters, endless alleyways, and caravan parks.
Characters in these places oscillate, rolling eggs down hills or throwing walkmans out of bus windows on the A12. They flash between cats, red-eared sliders, hamsters, a blue-eyed dog, and packets of sea monkeys, born from dust.
[Credit: STRAT_SCRAPS]
These old narratives exist in an analogue grey zone.
They’re a roll call of media and the mediums of the time that set our minds alight: Gameboys and cartridges, portable Sony skipping CD-players, phones with wires, deathly slow dial-up, Eliza as your therapist, gig stubs, fanzines, posters, magazines, flyers as both currency and litter and collectible stickers dusted with sticks of dry, pink bubblegum.
Eno said it best in 1995: We mostly recall the glitches, and it’s the glitches in these mediums that build the narrative.
Shared low-rise stories spun from a collective mental map seem to miss a piece that could explain more, one that would bring that space and time into focus.
Tipp-Ex: The art of the seamless error correction
Rational thought originates from each memory, unreliable as it stands.
The lo-fi DIY-ness of growing up was, by one token, very real. You could grasp it in your hands. The glitches weren’t invisible, rather, they were visibly covered.
One metaphor. Correction fluid was the currency of the times. Its uses were endless.
I had a flyer made of tin foil and Tipp-Ex. My dad ‘fixed’ the back of my dog-chewed Gazelles with Tipp-Ex. Fountain pens leaked as standard, and you’d keep Tipp-Ex – to the absolute state-of-it rescue – in your pencil case. It made even more f**king mess, but the point was, well, you tried. I remember now that everyone was visibly, constantly using Tipp-Ex.
An aside (but perhaps related) that a plastic solvent designed to erase and rewrite over mistakes in the 90s would later be called out error-ridden – a potential inhalant drug and an ozone-depleting substance, it was reformulated in the year 2000.
Rewinding the tape (with a pencil)
Today, glitches are harder to discern, but narrative belief is a glitch in the system we can identify.
Hallucinations aren’t marked as such – they hide in plain sight. Intentions and relevance were easier to decode when errors wore a visible strikethrough, and authenticity was in the air rather than captured on a double-speak creative brief.
We’ve erased the hypothetical Tipp-Ex. But as we shift toward pattern-matching over meaning-making at the societal level, is our sense of reality collapsing or just catching up?
A handful of humans celebrate circling space on a performative press trip, and the void feels close at hand. Something’s ‘off,’ but its entirety never quite reveals itself.
On earth, the hum and crackle of the giants among us continues. And so, too, do the ghosts of our narrative belief.