Episode 203: It’ll Only Feel Like An Eternity

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• Penny Lane's Documentary 'Hail Satan?' Explores Satanists Who Don't Believe In Beelzebub

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  Penny Lane is an indie filmmaker who makes provocative and funny documentaries that explore big ideas. Her latest film is called “Hail Satan?” and it’s about a group that calls itself the Satanic Temple but does not actually believe in the existence of Satan.

  “Modern Satanists are essentially atheists at their core,” Lane told WPR’s “BETA.” “They don’t believe in spirits in the sky or demons underground. They do believe in the power of myth and allegory and art and ritual. Those are things that we associate with religion that the Satanic Temple and Satanists want to keep. The Satanic Temple wants to start from a position of acknowledging the essential kind of mythological function of religion. So they want to participate in a now 2,000-year-plus cultural conversation we’ve been having that Christianity gave us. These stories that we’re all familiar with, from the Garden of Eden right on.

  “And they want to suggest that perhaps Satan is not the bad guy but perhaps Satan is the good guy because Satan stands up to this authoritarian figure, God, and questions these kind of edicts that come from above,” Lane continued. “Satan doesn’t fall in line. Satan kind of wants man, wants humankind to seek knowledge and to look to themselves for guidance, not to sort of authoritarian, tyrannical, invisible beings.”

  Lane’s film contains many funny moments, one of which Lane describes as “the origin story of the Satanic Temple, which is somewhat mind-blowing.”

  In January 2013, some members of the Satanic Temple staged a rally at the Florida State Capitol in Tallahassee.

  They showed up to show their support for a bill that then-Gov. Rick Scott had signed into law in 2012 — Senate Bill 98, which allowed students to lead prayers at school assemblies. The Satanic Temple members said that because the bill did not mention any specific religion, the prayers could be led by a student from any religious denomination, including Satanism.

  “So it was kind of meant as a satirical kind of stress test to the First Amendment,” Lane said. “We say in the First Amendment, the government can’t privilege one religion over another. But within weeks or months of that event, which was very successful and kind of got a lot of media attention, people started showing up and saying, ‘How do I join?’ So what you see in my film is kind of how could it be that this really, rather silly idea meant as a political prank amongst a few friends in 2013 has blossomed into an internationally-recognized religious movement with over 100,000 members?”
  

  The Rick Scott rally is just one example of the Satanic Temple’s ability to manipulate the media.

  “They know that if they pull certain kinds of pranks and use certain kinds of images, they’re likely to end up on the nightly news,” Lane said. “Probably the campaign the Satanic Temple is most well-known for is their Baphomet campaign.

  “So this is a case where in Oklahoma, a big monument to the Ten Commandments was put up. And the Satanic Temple … kind of showed up and said, ‘Great, now that you opened up this state house lawn to religious monuments, we would like to place our religious monument next to the Ten Commandments.’ And the monument they designed was a 9-and-a-half-foot tall kind of goat-headed, angel-winged, sort of partly male, partly female figure that incidentally has Iggy Pop’s chest.”

  Lucien Greaves is the co-founder of the Satanic Temple. He is featured prominently in “Hail Satan?”, as is Jex Blackmore, a performance artist based in Detroit and a former longtime member of the Satanic Temple. She is known for her controversial performances in public spaces, such as at state capitols and outside of women’s health clinics.

  “Jex was very involved in the Satanic Temple from the very beginning,” Lane said. “She’s based in Detroit. She’s an incredible artist. She’s an incredibly inspiring and charismatic person. She is no longer with the Temple. The reason for her leaving the Temple is covered in my film. And it essentially boils down to difference in tactics. Do you want to be the kind of Satanist who works within the system or do you want to be kind of Satanist that wants to kind of rebel from a position outside the system? And you see that conflict play out in my film.”

  Instead of the Ten Commandments, the Satanic Temple has seven fundamental tenets.

  “The seven tenets are the kind of baseline, doctrinal text of The Satanic Temple,” Lane explained. “The first one is ‘One should act with compassion and empathy towards all creatures in accordance with reason.’”

  “And I haven’t memorized them all,” she continued, “but the seven tenets emphasize things such as the importance of aligning your beliefs with the best scientific evidence; the willingness to change your mind in the face of new information; the importance of standing up for what’s right, the struggle for justice being an ongoing and necessary pursuit that is more important than laws and institutions in certain cases.”

  Who are the members of the Satanic Temple and what do they have in common?

  “The first thing is obvious: you have to be a certain kind of person to announce that you are a Satanist to the world. You have to be OK with the fact that most people are going to misunderstand you, most people are going to not like you, most people are going to be offended by your existence,” Lane said. “Not a lot of people are willing to sort of occupy that position. So you have to kind of enjoy that on some level, you know? Another interesting level is that the people I met in the Satanic Temple are some of the most well-read people that I’ve ever met. They’re really open-minded, curious, truth-seeking people.”

  Lane’s role model is the anonymous British street artist, Banksy, and she is an avid fan of his 2010 documentary, “Exit Through the Gift Shop.” So how did that influence her approach to making “Hail Satan?”?

  “I think that I really want to make films that are about really big ideas, like the biggest, most important philosophical ideas of our time,” Lane said. “But I want to do it in a way where nobody notices that’s what I’m doing. I really want my audience to just have fun and be entertained and laugh and feel joy in their heart and really only later realize the tremendous amount of intellectual labor they have just expended.”

• Musician T Bone Burnett's 'The Invisible Light' Explores How We're Now Products

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  Joseph Henry “T Bone” Burnett is known for many things. He worked with the Coen Brothers on the critically-acclaimed and best-selling soundtrack for “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” He recently composed and produced music for the HBO series “True Detective.” And he’s produced albums for many artists including the BoDeans, Elvis Costello and Sara Bareilles.

  On top of all of that, Burnett has also released several of his own albums — his most recent, “The Invisible Light: Acoustic Space,” is the first album he’s released in over a decade. It’s unlike any of his previous music, it’s a fusion of trance, folk, tribal and global music.

  Burnett told WPR’s “BETA” where the title comes from.

  “‘The Invisible Light’ is from ‘Choruses from The Rock’ by T.S. Eliot, which is an extraordinary beat poem and one I aspire to. And it’s the way he refers to divinity. But it also comes from this notion of this record takes place in a very dark space. But we’re generating a lot of life from within that dark space,” Burnett said. “So if you can listen in to it, you hear the mirth, you hear the humor in it and you hear the love in it. And you hear the optimism of not ignoring the dark space we’re in but actually looking at it. Because as the book says, the darkness runs from the light.”

  The album’s subtitle — “The Acoustic Space” — comes from Canadian media visionary Marshall McLuhan.

  “McLuhan said in acoustic space, there’s no center and there’s no border. So everywhere you are is the center,” Burnett said. “And the thing about visual space is visual space is the space of the predator. You know, we look for the thing we want to eat. Whereas acoustic space, audio space, is the space of the prey. So that if we’re walking through the woods and a twig snaps behind us, we need to know that. So we hear from every direction.”

  McLuhan’s idea of “acoustic space” is of special interest to Burnett because he’s said that everything he does, he tries to do with a sense of place.

  “That’s always been the most important thing to me,” Burnett said. “When I was a kid … there was a beautiful record that my parents had of a song called ‘Begin the Beguine.’ And that song would come on and I would be transported to another land. And I thought the power of music to do that was well, extraordinary, and it’s something I wanted to do the rest of my life, and I now have.”

  Burnett recently gave the keynote address at South by Southwest in which he spoke against the increasing power of big tech “surveillance capitalists” like Facebook and Google. He also quoted from Shoshana Zuboff’s book, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.”

  So what exactly is surveillance capitalism?

  “Surveillance capitalism is a new form of capitalism,” Burnett explained. “It’s a new economic model where private data, private information, is confiscated without the knowledge of the people from whom the data is being confiscated. And it’s monetized without the understanding that the data is being monetized. And none of it is shared with the people from whom the data has been confiscated. We have become the product.”

  This idea of surveillance capitalism plays out on “The Invisible Light” through the idea of conditioned responses and electronic programming.

  “We’ve gone through over a century of electronic programming as a race,” Burnett said. “And it’s led to a whole plethora of different problems, some of which are neurological, like Alzheimer’s and autism and Asperger’s, those sorts of neurological disorders. But also a whole range of psychological disorders. But even beyond that, it’s led to, you know, a technology that was sold to us as a way to connect us all has, in fact, disconnected us all from each other and driven us further and further into these screens. I mean, how often have you walked into a room full of people and seen them all staring at their hands.”

  Burnett worked on the album with drummer Jay Bellerose and keyboardist Keefus Ciancia. Bellerose’s drums are very prominent in the mix and Ciancia created several strange and disturbing sound effects that combine with Burnett’s heavily processed voice to create a very Orwellian vibe.

  “A lot of this music grew out of the film scores we’ve been doing, especially the ‘True Detective’ scores,” Burnett said. “It’s a blending of that sort of electronic film score type approach with a very tribal, heavy rhythm vibe. It’s in a sense, a soundtrack or a score for a film that hasn’t been made.”

  Burnett, Bellerose and Ciancia have already recorded two more albums to create a trilogy. They plan to release the second album six months from now and the third album six months after that. Burnett said there could be even more albums after that.

  The second song on “The Invisible Light” is called “A Man Without a Country.” It ends with two minutes of very quiet, very soft ambient sound. We wondered if this was Burnett’s tribute to John Cage, kind of a cover version of “4’33” in cut time or a speed metal version.

  “Yeah, a speed metal version of ‘4’33,’” Burnett replied, laughing. “I don’t know what John Cage was up to with that. He certainly opened the door to this sort of thing. In a way, I’m sure it is, it certainly comes after Cage. The idea behind it was with all of this electronic programming, we’ve become victims of a very arcane behavioral modification that has shrunk our attention spans to, you know, three seconds. I think I read recently that the average attention span is under three seconds.”

  As you read this sentence, three seconds are passing by unless you’re a really fast reader.

  Are you still paying attention? If you are, great. We’ll include a little more content.

  Burnett has worked with guitarist Marc Ribot many times. When Ribot was a guest on “BETA,” he talked about the difference between “protest” music and “resistance” music. Does Burnett see “The Invisible Light” as protest music or resistance music or something else entirely?

  “I don’t know what it is,” Burnett replied. “To me, it’s a repository of everything I’ve learned. It’s a place for me to put what I’ve learned down. I don’t want to put it in a book. I don’t want to write a memoir. That’s not what I do. I’m an author. So this is the place I’m going to put it down.”

• Learning To Code: Clive Thompson On The Life Of Coders

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  From your favorite apps to your social media scrolling to your car, chances are you interact with the work of a coder daily. Software shapes nearly every component of day-to-day life and it needs to be written by a coder.

  Tech journalist Clive Thompson set out to investigate just who makes up this community of programmers and to explore their impact in his book, “Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World.”

  “Coders” sifts through the history of coding and its ramifications to our present and future. The book also pulls back the curtain on the mentality it takes to code. Thompson told WPR’s “BETA” that he unlocked a through-line across the philosophical traits that draws people to this line of work.

  “People who get drawn to coding … they’re pretty good at being logical and systematic. They love solving puzzles by breaking them down into little steps,” he said. “They’re very precise people. You have to be when you’re coding. If you put a semicolon in the wrong place, 10,000 lines of code can just stop working instantly.”

  Coders are also obsessed with efficiency according to Thompson. Unlike other practices, coding is binary. Either it works or it doesn’t. The cleaner, quicker, or more efficient way to get things to work is how coders separate themselves.

  “They love getting in there and figuring out how to automate that, how to speed it up, how to torque it up and it just brings them a special spiritual joy,” Thompson said. “They feel appalled when they see something being done inefficiently and they love the feeling of ‘Hey I wrote the code that sped this up.’”

  Thompson also deconstructs the image pop culture paints of the coder as a hooded mastermind sitting with a laptop creating the next revolutionary app. He suggests that a large percentage of coding work entails mind-numbing detective work of fixing or improving existing code.

  “Most of them are just showing up at work and something stopped working or someone tried to add a new feature and it broke everything and they are just in there trying to figure out what went wrong,” he said.

  Thompson explains the curious mindset coders need to have to excel at this kind of work. He likens it to the “flow state” that MIT professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined.

  “It requires you to sort of build this mental palace in your head,” Thompson said. “It can take many minutes or even many hours of looking at the code and stepping through it in your mind to be able to inhabit exactly what’s going on. And it’s only at that deep, deep, deep immersion that you can begin to really do the hard work. And once you’re in there you want to stay there.”

  That can be tough in the typical office environment.

  “I would hear coders tell me that they go to their job during the day, but because of all the meetings and people tapping them on the shoulder, they really can’t get any of that deep dive work done. So they do little bits of work during the day but the hardcore stuff happens at eight o’clock at night. They get home and they get in that trance and they’re there until three or four in the morning and that’s when the real work gets done,” Thompson said.

  Thompson likens this trance-like state to similar creative episodes that most artists go through. He compares coding to poetry in the sense that they’re both attempting to express so much while being very economical with words.

  “There’s this elegance and economy and parsimoniousness to good coding that is really a delight and joy to a lot of coders,” he said. “You know who would’ve been great? Emily Dickinson.”

  While the famous poet may not have learned to code, Thompson thinks having a basic understanding of coding could elevate any profession.

  And while learning to code might be good advice, earlier this year it became a nasty social media taunt to troll laid off journalists. As a journalist working on a book about coding, Thompson thought that was a bad faith argument.

  “They took something that you know was otherwise a perfectly inoffensive and even nice piece of advice and they were just using it to mock what they perceived to be the uselessness of journalists,” Thompson said. “As it happens I actually think a lot of journalists would be quite good at it.”

  Coding has also seen its fair share of underrepresentation when it comes to diverse and female coders. Ironically, this wasn’t always the case, especially with women. Women were some of the pioneers of coding.

  “In the early days, no one knew how to code,” Thompson said. “So if you were a university or company that had a computer and you needed coders, you would hire anyone who was just kind of good at solving puzzles or logic and then train them on the job. That meant it was a very open door and a lot of women were perfectly good at puzzle-solving and logic walked in.”

  That dynamic shifted as software became more crucial to the infrastructure of companies and software experts needed to be vice presidents. That’s when the opportunities for women hit a wall. Thompson said it has been a long journey back for women, but there’s been an uptick in recent years.

  “There’s definitely way more women flowing in to study computer science right now,” he says. “What remains to be seen is whether or not the industry itself can evolve to accommodate all the women who are graduating and want to move into those significant roles.”

  There’s a similar concern when it comes to African American and Latino coders and Thompson argues that underrepresentation is hurting major sites and software.

  One reason for such delayed reactions to harassment on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook is mainly that the coders and designers were young white males who didn’t “deal with a lot of systematic abuse heaped on them because of their identity,” Thompson said. “If you’re designing software for the broad mass of the public and the world you really want to have people involved in creating it and coding it and designing it who understand all those different use cases.”