Urban Adventure in Rotterdam

Tuesday, August 26, 2025

Rüdiger Moos - a nonexistent German place in Rotterdam

Imagining a place that I did not see in a dream - it was revealed in a bus stop

And now it exists at least on the internet.

Note: This is not the best picture. Better ones are below. This should be more subtle.

A long time ago I sat in one of those glass bus shelters and waited. Then the bus came and I saw its destination mirrored in the glass of the bus shelter. The bus said: Kralingse Zoom. But in the reflecting glass I read: Rüdiger Moos. From that moment that nonexistent German place has taken root in my subconscious. If I take the right Rotterdam bus, and drive it to its last stop, then I will be in Rüdiger Moos. How will it look there?

Kralingse Zoom is a big metro and bus hub on the outskirts of Rotterdam. Many lines go there. The explanation for Moos is simple, it's just the mirror image of Zoom. It is unclear where Rüdiger came from.

There is no Rüdiger Moos in Germany and these places gave the best fit:

Rüdigheim, Neuberg

Rüdigheim, Amöneburg

Rudingshain, Schotten

Rüdigerstraße, Wurzburg

And because there is no Google street view in Germany I just tried to find the nearest Google photo to these places. Sometimes these were far away. From these random places the following photographs matched my imagination the best and clarified my ideas about this place.

It must be a place on the outskirts, at the edge of the city. There must be some semi-wild nature, preferably neglected, but also traces of urbanity.

There must be trees and some darkness. It should not be a totally open field. Preferably a clearing, with some dead trees, preferably birch trees.

Preferably at the end of the road. Where you can go no further by car or by public transport. Where it is dark and lonely at night. Like Thomas Ligotti writes in Noctuary in The Strange Design Of Master Rignolo:

"So I was going to tell you," Grissul began, "that I was out in that field, the one behind those empty buildings at the edge of town where everything just slides away and goes off in all directions. And there's a marsh by there, makes the ground a little, I don't know, stringy or something. No trees, though, only a lot of wild grass, reeds, you know where I mean?"

"I now have a good idea," Nolon replied, a trifle bored or at least pretending to be.

"This was a little before dark that I was there. A little before the stars began to come out. I really wasn't planning to do anything, let me say that. I just walked some ways out onto the field, changed direction a few times, walked a ways more. Then I saw something through a blind of huge stalks of some kind, skinny as your finger but with these great spiky heads on top. And really very stiff, not bending at all, just sort of wobbling in the breeze. They might well have creaked, I don't know, when I pushed my way through to see beyond them. Then I knelt down to get a better look at what was there on the ground. [*** see also below]

The place might even look like the view from the parking garage of the Kralingse Zoom itself. The semi neglected nature next to the highway. Even though you're just meters from civilization you're also totally on your own there. No one goes there:

It might look like the semi-wild nature that you can see from your train window. Most likely you will never walk there. You most probably ignore it as the eyesore it is. And you ignore its haunting beauty. That's how Rüdiger Moos operates. It makes itself invisible, but in the meantime its haunting atmosphere permeates the whole city.

[***] I asked an early version of ChatGPT to generate illustrations for this story. And the results are here: Urban Adventure in Rotterdam: Thomas Ligotti - The strange designs of Master Rignolo 1

The pictures are here:

Yesterday I asked Copilot to generate an image. But it is too romantic:

Copilot:

This scene captures the poetic tension between civilization and wilderness. A winding dirt path draws the eye from the moorland foreground into the hazy silhouette of a distant city, nestled among trees. Heather and gorse bloom in purples and golds, while a windswept pine tree stands sentinel, its twisted trunk hinting at years of weather and solitude. The sky glows with late afternoon light, casting a golden hue across the terrain and softening the edges of church spires and rooftops beyond.

It feels like the kind of place where you could walk for hours, letting the city fade behind you as the quiet of nature takes over. If you'd like, I can help you write a story or poem inspired by this setting next.

Copilot:

This isn’t the kind of place that gets postcards. It’s the kind of place that feels like it’s waiting for something to happen—or maybe like something already did, and no one talks about it. The clearing is rough and uneven, with stringy marsh grass and patches of standing water that reflect the gray sky like broken glass. A couple of dead birch trees stand like forgotten sentinels, their bark peeling in long strips, skeletal branches reaching out as if to snag the wind.

The bus stop is there, squat and utilitarian, with a faded sign that reads “RÜDIGER MOOS.” It looks like no one’s waited there in years, but the bench still holds the shape of someone who might’ve sat too long. Behind it, the forest presses in—dense, dark, and indifferent. You can just make out the edge of the city beyond the trees: a few rooftops, a distant tower, the ghost of urban order dissolving into the wild.

It’s the kind of place Grissul would talk about in a low voice, like it’s not just geography but memory. If you want, we could write a short story set here, or even build a map of the surrounding area. There's something hauntingly rich about this edge-space.

Friday, August 22, 2025

Strange books by ChatGPT

I suspect that ChatGPT will get enshittified soon. So I want to keep an archive of how good it once was. This is a discussion on weird books. In blue - books or authors I know and like.

This is a small quote from a Philip K. Dick biography: - When left alone, he was overcome by panic attacks. If a car happened to drive by too slowly, he became suspicious; he studied every radio antenna, trying to figure out which ones were transmitting rather than receiving signals; he threw the I Ching to learn whether among his new friends there wasn’t some agent of the powers that were plotting his demise. - I'm looking for more books, fiction and nonfiction with that strange atmosphere and view of life.

That quote really captures the paranoid-vivid atmosphere Dick often lived and wrote in: everyday life tilted into a hallucinatory, conspiratorial state, where signals, coincidences, and patterns feel charged with hidden intent. There are a number of other writers—both in fiction and biography—who cultivate a similar "strange atmosphere" where reality feels unstable, coded, or haunted by agencies just out of sight. Here are some you might like:

Fiction with a similar atmosphere

Thomas Pynchon – The Crying of Lot 49
Everyday California suburbia slides into a hallucinatory detective story about underground postal systems, secret societies, and possible paranoia. Classic Dick-adjacent paranoia.
Don DeLillo – White Noise or Mao II
Both novels convey the unease of modern life as media noise, conspiracies, and random disasters blur perception and control.
J.G. Ballard – The Atrocity Exhibition or Crash
Ballard’s worlds are suffused with paranoia and altered perception, often showing how technology and media twist inner life.
Robert Anton Wilson – The Illuminatus! Trilogy
A countercultural, surreal satire of conspiracy theories where every pattern feels like part of a hidden plot.
William S. Burroughs – Naked Lunch or The Soft Machine
Fragmented paranoia, secret agents, drugs, shadow powers—written in a fevered style that mirrors the sense of losing your grip on reality.
Shirley Jackson – The Haunting of Hill House or We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Not sci-fi paranoia but that same sense of the everyday becoming hostile, uncanny, and full of unseen judgment.
Brian Evenson – Last Days or Father of Lies
Contemporary fiction that channels paranoia, violence, and hallucinatory suspicion in a stark, unsettling voice.

Nonfiction & Memoir with that strange, paranoid intensity

Emmanuel Carrère – I Am Alive and You Are Dead
Probably the biography you quoted from—Carrère does a brilliant job of making Dick’s paranoia feel lived-in and compelling.
Hunter S. Thompson – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Not the same paranoia as Dick, but a drug-fueled hallucinatory chronicle where every movement feels surveilled and charged.
Daniel Paul Schreber – Memoirs of My Nervous Illness
The 19th-century classic of lived paranoia: Schreber, a judge, documents his elaborate cosmology of rays, divine forces, and persecution. Kafka read it. Freud analyzed it. Dick would have loved it.
Louis Sass – Madness and Modernism
A study of how schizophrenic perception resembles modernist art and literature—very much in the vein of Dick’s way of seeing signals in antennas and patterns.
John Marks – The Search for the Manchurian Candidate
Nonfiction history of CIA mind-control experiments; feels like you’re reading a paranoid thriller, except it’s real.
Mark Fisher – The Weird and the Eerie
Short essays on how certain artworks and cultural moments give us that same unsettling, reality-tilting atmosphere.

Would you like me to focus more on literary paranoia and conspiratorial fiction (like Pynchon, DeLillo, Wilson), or more on personal, lived accounts of paranoia and altered perception (like Schreber, Carrère, Fisher)? That will narrow the list.

Do you have more personal, lived accounts of paranoia and altered perception, preferably collections of biographies in one book?

Yes — if you want collections of lives that capture that strange, paranoid, reality-slipping perception (not just one memoir), there are some excellent books that bring together multiple biographies, case histories, or portraits. These read almost like anthologies of altered consciousness:

Biographical & Case-Study Collections

Daniel Paul Schreber and Others – in Madness and Modernism (Louis Sass)
Not just Schreber — Sass compares many autobiographical accounts of schizophrenia and psychosis (artists, philosophers, writers) with modernist art and literature. It’s uncanny how much these lived accounts overlap with Dick’s worldview.
Shawn McDaniel & Jeffrey A. Lieberman – The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic
A haunting book of personal stories reconstructed from the belongings of long-term psychiatric patients discovered decades later. Each life feels steeped in paranoia, secrecy, and fragile perception.
Colin Wilson – The Outsider
Less clinical, more literary-philosophical, but it’s a series of portraits of “outsider” figures (Kafka, Nijinsky, Van Gogh, Blake, etc.) whose inner lives brim with visions, paranoia, and estrangement from reality.
R.D. Laing – The Politics of Experience & The Bird of Paradise
A mix of theory and case vignettes, but full of lived descriptions of people whose sense of reality fractured in ways both terrifying and strangely lucid.
Kay Redfield Jamison – Touched with Fire
Biographical sketches of writers, artists, and composers whose manic or paranoid episodes shaped their perception of the world.

Collections with More of a “Cultural/Conspiratorial” Edge

Peter Washington – Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon
A witty, bizarre group-biography of mystics, occultists, and charlatans (Theosophy, Gurdjieff, Crowley). Many lived in a paranoid, revelation-soaked world very reminiscent of Dick’s obsessions.
Erik Davis – High Weirdness
Traces the lives and experiences of Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick himself — three figures whose paranoia and visionary states shaped countercultural thought. Reads like a triple-biography of altered perception.
Colin Dickey – Ghostland or The Unidentified
Less psychiatric, more cultural, but both explore people and communities who interpret the world through hauntings, conspiracies, and signals.

More Raw, First-Person–Based Collections

First Person Accounts in The Portable Foucault (ed. Paul Rabinow)
Scattered among the theory are discussions of case histories (via Foucault’s interest in madness and surveillance) that show paranoia as lived experience.
The Surreal Lives by Ruth Brandon
Group biography of the Surrealists (Breton, Dalí, Aragon, etc.)—their letters and diaries often carry the same manic, paranoid energy.
George Makari – Revolution in Mind
A cultural biography of psychoanalysis itself, threaded with case histories of paranoia and persecution complexes that shaped Freud’s circle.

If you want the closest in feel to Carrère’s Dick biography—that blend of intimacy and paranoia—I’d especially recommend:

High Weirdness (Davis) → countercultural visionary biographies
The Lives They Left Behind → deeply personal psychiatric fragments
The Outsider (Wilson) → literary-paranoid figures collected together

👉 Do you want me to lean more toward psychiatric/clinical life stories (patients, outsiders), or toward writers/mystics/visionaries who lived with paranoia in a more cultural or philosophical way?

One of the books above contains this quote. What does modern neurology have to say about this effect? And are there good books on that? --- Patients in these moments may have a feeling "of crystal-clear sight, of profound penetration into the essence of things," yet, typically, "there is no real, clear content to communicate." 10 The experience can involve a kind of conjoint and rather contradictory sense of meaning/u/ness and meaning/essness, of significance and insignificance, which could be described as an "anti-epiphany"—an experience in which the familiar has turned strange and the unfamiliar familiar, often giving the person the sense of deja vu and jamais vu, either in quick succession or even simultaneously.

That’s a wonderful and unsettling passage — it comes straight out of Louis Sass’s Madness and Modernism (the book I mentioned earlier). He was summarizing phenomenological accounts of psychosis, especially schizophrenia, where people describe “hyperlucid” moments: everything seems charged with meaning and at the same time empty of meaning — an “anti-epiphany.”

What modern neurology says

Today, neuroscientists and neurologists link this effect to temporal lobe phenomena, often seen in:

Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE):
- Patients sometimes experience aura states of heightened significance, déjà vu/jamais vu, or a sudden clarity that’s ineffable.
- Neurologists like John Hughlings Jackson and later Norman Geschwind documented these as “intellectual auras.”
Schizophrenia and psychotic prodromes:
- Functional MRI shows aberrant salience attribution: the dopamine system flags ordinary stimuli as unusually significant. This can create a “sense of revelation” without content.
- Kapur’s “aberrant salience hypothesis” (2003) is central here: paranoia and delusion grow out of the brain mis-tagging neutral events as meaningful.
Memory disturbances:
- Déjà vu and jamais vu reflect misfiring in recognition circuits (medial temporal lobe and hippocampus). You feel recognition or strangeness without the content lining up.

So the “anti-epiphany” is basically the brain’s pattern-recognition machinery glitching: the circuits that normally tag things as relevant or irrelevant go haywire, producing a raw phenomenology of meaning without an actual message.

Books you might like (nonfiction, modern neurology/psychology)

Anjan Chatterjee – The Aesthetic Brain
Covers altered states of significance and beauty perception, including when things feel meaningful without clear content.
Vilayanur Ramachandran – Phantoms in the Brain
Famous for case studies where perception and meaning detach from reality — includes temporal lobe phenomena and déjà vu.
Oliver Sacks – Hallucinations
Beautiful case histories of patients experiencing déjà vu, jamais vu, auras, and “visions of meaning.” Reads like lived accounts through a neurological lens.
Louis A. Sass – Madness and Modernism (the source)
Still one of the best syntheses of philosophy, neurology, and firsthand accounts of this strange hyperclarity/emptiness.
Chris Frith – Making Up the Mind
Explains how our brain constructs “significance” and how psychosis warps that construction.
Mark Solms – The Hidden Spring
More recent — about consciousness and affect, with discussion of how meaning-attribution circuits can misfire in neurological and psychiatric disorders.

💡 A concise modern interpretation:
Neurology sees this “anti-epiphany” as aberrant signal-to-noise processing. The brain’s salience network (dopamine, anterior cingulate, insula) wrongly floods ordinary perception with a sense of cosmic import. You get the feeling of revelation without any actual revelation.

Would you like me to put together a reading path (say 3–4 books) that starts with patient stories (Sacks), moves into the neuroscience (Ramachandran, Kapur), and then into more philosophical syntheses (Sass, Solms)? That way it wouldn’t feel too clinical but would give you the “full arc” from lived experience → neurology → meaning.

And in te same style, can you recommend fiction and non fiction with the same atmosphere that feature synchronicity (in the Jungian sense, or other) and coincidence.

Perfect, I see the through-line you’re after: the charged atmosphere where ordinary coincidences suddenly feel like the universe is whispering in code — sometimes profound, sometimes terrifying, often both. That sense of synchronicity (Jung’s term), or “meaningful coincidence,” is very close to Dick’s own lived texture. Here’s a list in the same style, split into fiction and nonfiction:

📚 Fiction with Synchronicity and Coincidence

Thomas Pynchon – The Crying of Lot 49
The ur-novel of synchronicity: postal horns, muted signals, secret networks. Everything connects… or nothing does.
Paul Auster – The New York Trilogy
Each novella spins coincidences into eerie loops of identity, surveillance, and fate. Auster’s whole oeuvre plays with synchronicity and chance.
Haruki Murakami – The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Everyday Tokyo life gets entangled with uncanny coincidences, dreamlike encounters, and a sense that hidden patterns underlie reality.
Roberto Bolaño – 2666
Seemingly disconnected stories echo across continents; sinister coincidences weave them into a pattern just beyond grasp.
David Mitchell – Cloud Atlas
Interconnected stories across time where coincidences, reincarnations, and echoes blur accident and destiny.
Jorge Luis Borges – Labyrinths (stories like “The Garden of Forking Paths” or “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”)
Coincidence and synchronicity become metaphysical puzzles. Reading Borges feels like dreaming in symbols.
Flann O’Brien – The Third Policeman
Surreal coincidences, looping time, and eerie logic — an atmosphere where every triviality could be a cosmic clue.

📖 Nonfiction / Essays with Synchronicity & Coincidence

Carl Jung – Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle
The classic text: Jung’s attempt to explain meaningful coincidences beyond causality, with examples from patient cases.
Arthur Koestler – The Roots of Coincidence
A strange, slightly dated but fascinating exploration of parapsychology, ESP, and synchronicity in physics and psychology.
Erik Davis – High Weirdness
Profiles of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson: all immersed in synchronicities, visions, and cosmic coincidences.
Robert Anton Wilson – Cosmic Trigger
Memoir where everyday life is flooded with synchronicities, conspiracies, and occult correspondences. Reads like a diary of Jungian coincidences turned psychedelic.
Anthony Peake – The Daemon
A modern speculative take on déjà vu, precognition, and synchronicity in lived experience.
Mark Fisher – The Weird and the Eerie
Not strictly about synchronicity, but a brilliant lens on how art and culture produce that uncanny feeling of hidden pattern.
Jeffrey Kripal – Authors of the Impossible
Four thinkers (including Jung and Charles Fort) who wrestled with synchronicity, the paranormal, and coincidences that defy explanation.

🌌 The Feel You’re Asking For

The atmosphere in all of these is:

The familiar turning strange (everyday life suddenly significant).
The unfamiliar turning familiar (the uncanny feels like a message for you).
A sense of “living inside a pattern,” but never quite grasping its meaning.

👉 Do you want me to put together a short curated bundle (say, 2 fiction + 2 nonfiction) that would give you the clearest, most immersive entry into this world of synchronicity without being too scattered? That way you’d get both the literary feel and the conceptual grounding.

And now please in line of all the above, but one more level up in weirdness. THe books may be unreadable, weird or published by outcasts, as long as that weirdness is there.

Got it — you want to push past the literary/academic guardrails and into the really out-there zone: unreadable, visionary, outsider, even slightly deranged works where synchronicity, paranoia, and “anti-epiphanies” mutate into full-on cosmic weirdness. Books that feel like they’re written from inside the signal. Here’s a selection one level deeper into strangeness:

🌀 Fiction & Semi-Fictional Weirdness

Arno Schmidt – Bottom’s Dream
1,500 pages of fragmented typographical sprawl, dream-logic, mythic coincidences. Basically unreadable, but utterly unique.
Hans Henny Jahnn – The Ship
German cult classic: hallucinatory, paranoid, suffused with death, eroticism, and inexplicable coincidences.
Clarice Lispector – Água Viva
Reads like a transmission from another dimension: fragmented consciousness, mystical epiphanies that collapse into nonsense and back again.
Kathy Acker – Empire of the Senseless
Punk-cutup fiction where paranoia, conspiracy, and hallucination blur. The “weird signal” is embedded in the form itself.
Brian Catling – The Vorrh
Visionary fantasy inspired by Raymond Roussel — dream logic, colonial paranoia, surreal synchronicities.
Leonora Carrington – The Hearing Trumpet
A surrealist elder’s novel, combining occult symbols, paranoia, feminist revolution, and cosmic weirdness.

📖 Outsider Nonfiction / Visionary Accounts

Charles Fort – The Book of the Damned
The godfather of high weirdness. A compendium of coincidences, anomalies, and cosmic jokes — “damned facts” science refuses to explain.
David Lindsay – A Voyage to Arcturus
Half mystical tract, half science fantasy. Reads like a transmission of metaphysical paranoia disguised as pulp.
Terence McKenna – True Hallucinations
Memoir of the McKenna brothers’ Amazon mushroom trip, full of synchronicities, telepathic encounters, and cosmic jokes.
Erich von Däniken – Chariots of the Gods?
Ridiculed by scholars, but has that breathless paranoid-weird atmosphere of cosmic coincidence: everything is a signal.
Hilary Evans – Visions, Apparitions, Alien Visitors
Fortean catalog of high-strangeness experiences, dripping with paranoia, synchronicities, and anti-epiphanies.
Philip K. Dick – The Exegesis
His 8,000-page journal after the “2-3-74” experiences. Pure raw Dick: synchronicities, paranoia, theology, messages from God, cut with brilliance and madness.

📚 Cult / “Unreadable but Essential”

Raymond Roussel – Impressions of Africa or Locus Solus**
Bizarre surreal novels of impossible coincidences and contraptions. Hugely influential on surrealism.
Austin Osman Spare – The Book of Pleasure
Occult outsider text — dense, strange, and obsessed with the inner signals of coincidence and will.
Eugene Thacker – In the Dust of This Planet
Philosophy as occult text. Weird, unreadable at times, hovering between horror and metaphysics.
Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz – Insatiability
Polish visionary, part novel, part philosophical tract, about mass hypnosis, paranoia, and cosmic absurdity.

✨ The Feel Here

These books don’t just describe weirdness — they are weirdness.
They collapse the distinction between text and symptom: reading them feels like falling into someone else’s altered perception.

🔥 If I were to hand you a “Level-Up Weirdness Starter Pack” that’s readable enough to enter but still deeply uncanny, I’d suggest:

The Exegesis (Dick) → raw paranoid synchronicity
The Book of the Damned (Fort) → catalog of cosmic coincidences
Água Viva (Lispector) → ecstatic anti-epiphany fiction
The Hearing Trumpet (Carrington) → surreal synchronicity with humor

Do you want me to also dip into “extreme outsider writing” (self-published, small press, cult texts — e.g. schizophrenic memoirs, fringe cosmologies) where the weirdness is less literary and more raw lived paranoia? That’s probably the furthest rung up.

In this veil, are there any books that investigate the "targeted individual" and "gang stalking" paranoid conspiracy theory?

Yes — that’s exactly the “next rung up” in lived paranoia and strange atmosphere. The Targeted Individual (TI) / gang stalking phenomenon has become a kind of folk-paranoia cosmology in the last 20 years: people convinced they’re harassed by coordinated networks using surveillance, noise campaigns, and even directed-energy weapons. It’s both tragic and fascinating, because it combines age-old paranoid tropes (persecution, hidden codes, secret powers) with the technologies and anxieties of our time.

There are some serious books that study it as a cultural and psychological phenomenon — usually in the context of paranoia, delusion, or modern conspiracy cultures:

📖 Nonfiction / Scholarly Investigations

Colin Ross – The CIA Doctors (2006)
Not about “gang stalking” directly, but often cited in TI circles. Examines real CIA mind-control programs (MKUltra), which feeds the plausibility of TI beliefs.
Joseph Uscinski (ed.) – Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them (2018)
Scholarly anthology. Several chapters cover surveillance anxieties, electronic harassment, and modern versions of persecution delusions.
Jeffrey Sconce – Haunted Media (2000)
Classic media theory book on how new technologies (radio, TV, internet) generate haunting, paranoia, and the sense of “signals aimed at me.” Anticipates TI discourse perfectly.
Tim Melley – Empire of Conspiracy (2000)
Studies Cold War paranoia, surveillance, and government secrecy — showing how these cultural anxieties shape modern conspiracy beliefs like TIs.
Colin Dickey – The Unidentified (2020)
Contemporary cultural history of UFOs, cryptids, and paranoia. Includes discussions of people who feel “targeted” and how modern folklore merges with mental illness.
Mike Jay – This Way Madness Lies (2019)
A cultural history of madness. While not TI-specific, it includes modern paranoia and how “persecution systems” evolve with new technologies.

🗂️ Case-Based / First-Person Accounts

Cheryl Welsh (online writings, not mainstream published)
A self-identified TI who writes about “non-consensual mind control experiments.” Often referenced in gang-stalking communities.
Elena Freeland – Chemtrails, HAARP, and the Full Spectrum Dominance of Planet Earth
Deep in conspiracy literature. Not about TIs explicitly, but written in the same atmosphere of total-surveillance paranoia.
Self-published TI memoirs (Lulu, Amazon KDP, etc.)
There are dozens of raw accounts by people who claim to be TIs. They’re often fragmented, repetitive, but they read like primary documents of lived paranoia — much like Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.

🌀 How Scholars Frame It

Psychiatry: TIs often present with persecutory delusions similar to classic schizophrenia (hearing voices, electronic harassment, etc.).
Cultural studies: TI belief is seen as a folk model of surveillance capitalism — a way of narrating the fact that technology really is watching, scoring, nudging us.
Parallels: Schreber in the 19th century, Cold War “microwave harassment” claims, and now TIs — always blending real technological anxieties with delusional elaboration.

Recommendations if you want the weird but serious angle:

Jeffrey Sconce – Haunted Media → signals, paranoia, and media haunting.
Tim Melley – Empire of Conspiracy → how secrecy breeds persecutory imagination.
Colin Dickey – The Unidentified → sympathetic but critical look at fringe belief.
Pick one TI self-published memoir (there are many on Amazon) → the raw, unfiltered paranoid voice, like Schreber for the 21st century.

👉 Do you want me to dig up specific TI memoirs/self-published books (with titles/authors) that are circulating right now, so you’d have concrete examples of that lived paranoid literature? That would push us all the way into the “outsider text” zone.