Tell me the story of how they poisoned themselves.
The Pythia, believed to have breathed in a divine air that brought them heavenly knowledge, were actually inhaling methane, ethane and ethylene gases rising from a cleft in the earth. Ethylene was once used as anesthesia, until it was determined to be too dangerous, cutting oxygen to the brain. Ethylene can induce intense euphoria and hallucinations. The revelations at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi were bestowed by these female oracles — the Pythia — who were chosen by the local priesthood to be poisoned beyond delusion. The oracle was plucked from the village, seated on a tripod in a cavernous inner sanctum, told to breathe the pneuma in deep and speak prophecy from Apollo. The Pythia also chewed laurel to aid in their divination. Later toxicology studies suggested that they were actually sucking on oleander [1].
The mantle of the gods’ Pantheon is now made of glass — that is, the display glass of a computer screen, behind which lies a sanctified architecture built from pixels and binary code. Apollo, god of light, truth and healing, endures in the blue UV light that drips from an undwindling deluge of information. Auspices read by Ancient Greek oracles have been succeeded by a computational logic, now read and spoken through the voice of the machine. Algorithm is the higher power.
@pythia_txt, @sapphobot and @carsonbot awaken, their mouths opened, fed and deciphered by the algorithm. These three literary Twitter bots, programmed to reproduce the personas or works of their respective namesakes (the Pythia, the Lesbos poet Sappho, and the Canadian poet, translator and classicist Anne Carson), have each been ‘corpus-fed’ various English translations of Ancient Greek texts to be abbreviated, deconstructed or remediated as daily Tweets. ‘Modifications have been made to fit the character limit’, @sapphobot’s Twitter bio disclaims [2]. While @sapphobot and @carsonbot recycle excerpts from existing Classics texts — primarily that of Anne Carson’s poetic oeuvre, and her translations of Sappho — @pythia_txt more faithfully embodies ‘the sacralisation of randomness’, more true to a computerised form of divination [3].
‘Ask your question… Pythia is awake… old predictions, paraphrased,’ the account proclaims [4].
If asked a question, @pythia_txt will reply with a Tweet pulled together from Classicist motifs; young women in the springtime, a summer evening, a prayer at an altar. ‘Have a care!’ the bot rebukes. ‘Go back, matricide!’
Often these quips are nonsensical, much like the Pythia at the Apollo at Delphi would have uttered — bar, perhaps, a @pythia_txt Tweet on March 4th, 2020, which read, ‘it is sanctioned not to accept a truce unjustly offered,’ in response to one user’s query: ‘should I punch him in the face?’ Underlying the semantics of @pythia_txt is a generative grammar written on Tracery, an online authoring tool designed for creators to play around with ‘non-causal and even nonsensical’ modern story generation systems [5]. From this narrative and computational logic, there are four components to building a Twitter literary bot:
Tell me the story of how disease mutates into madness.
When the Pythia chewed what is now believed to be oleander, they experienced an ‘ecstatic’ state of communing with the divine, which involved the following symptoms: psychomotor agitation, hyperactivity, excitement, hoarseness of voice (due to vocal cord edema), ataxia, salivation, loss of the senses, visual disturbances, seizures and possibly death [7]. Death would have most likely occurred from cardiovascular collapse. Epileptic symptoms in antiquity were diagnosed as ‘the sacred disease’, wherein the individual was possessed by a god like Apollo [8]. The oracles would become possessed and deliver these divinations on a monthly basis, inhaling hazardous gases while ingesting a plant considered lethally toxic in all its seeds, roots, stems, leaves and fruit.
This notion of poisoning the corpus is rife in communication networks. From what we consume, the contagion of information and misinformation grows. Twitter bots operate on a Bayesian model of ‘complex’ contagion [9]. Damaging information and behaviours are spread through an entire network of agents. ‘Simple’ contagion, however, relies on exposure attempts being independent and relayed through a single conduit. An individual exposed to information (like the Pythia) is assigned an independent position in the top-down hierarchy of storyteller-listener-responder which, perhaps, now shifts between the heavenly echelons of the gods, the Pythia and the priests in a model of ‘complex’ information contagion.
Tell me the story, doctor.
When poet, essayist and Classics professor Anne Carson’s brother died, she wrote ‘an epitaph in the form of a book’ to hold his memory alongside her own grief [10]. The printed Nox is a facsimile of Carson’s handmade book: a long concertina-folded sheet decorated with photos and poems, kept safe in a blue box. This therapeutic biography is a ritual or reenactment that farewells a beloved in real-time but also extends a farewell to go on forever — a eulogy encased in amber, to be embedded like a jewel in the marrow of the same tree that birthed its resin coffin. Don’t forget Apollo turned Daphne into an evergreen laurel tree, so that she could never die. We love suspended time for the sake of its difference from ordinary time and real life, Anne Carson writes. Do the bots exist in this temporal space? A space of suspending the same poetic excerpts in a feedback loop, over and over again?
Plutarch, who had been a priest at Delphi himself, wrote that the role of the oracle is to neither reveal nor conceal, merely to indicate [11]. These ‘indications’ would be delivered monthly (understandably, given the physical demand of a Pythia’s ‘ecstatic’ state). However, we the Twitter users are the enquirers, the priests, the scribes; the interpreters, the recipients. Perhaps these multidisciplinary roles we now assume also reflect the demands of a globalised capitalist system, where specialised roles are now so redundant as to be considered esoteric. Consider consulting the Pythia ‘akin to working with management consultants, who have a reputation for helping businesspeople make decisions (and charging high fees) often by reframing information and ideas half-known already to the client in order to help that client make their own decision about how to proceed.’ [12]
Our Twitter echo chambers operate much in the same feedback loop of affect. This loop spins on the axis of ambiguous algorithmic biases built from the traceable archive of our platform providers and search engines [13]. Your news is prescribed to you. Just consider yourself sitting in the waiting room of a doctor who is writing a prescription for a medication you have already chosen to consume.
Tell me the story of the genesis, so we can identify the root of the problem.
The English word ‘robot’, from which ‘bot’ is abbreviated, was born of mixed Czech and French lineage — its first appearance was in the writing of an 18th century French cleric and conspiracy theorist, who referred to the lowest echelons of French peasantry or, Robota, as slaves in the French Revolution [14]. Robota appeared once again in the 1920 Czech play Rossum’s Universal Robots to denote ‘forced labour’, ultimately rising as a semantic tenet of modern industrialisation, urbanisation and burgeoning capitalism. Bots are not forced to labour, but engineered, christened by the velocity of contemporary information transmission.
The English word ‘divine’ is derived from its Latin infinitive, divinare; the verb ‘to divine’, or, to gain supernatural or magical insight into (future events). When Twitter bots are currently being investigated for spreading disinformation, these particular bots transcend flesh and earthliness to continue playing the part of the oracle as a disembodied voice in the ceaseless thrum of the Twitter agora. As literary bots, they are either ‘corpus-fed’ entire books to deconstruct clause by clause, or function on random text generation — the algorithm is omniscient in determining what 140-character prediction is espoused by our oracles.
The English word ‘diagnosis’ is derived from modern Latin, derived from the Ancient Greek diagignōskein, meaning ‘to distinguish, or discern between two possibilities.’
Oh no, no, I don’t think you understand what I am aski—
The English word ‘psychosis’ is derived from the name of the Ancient Greek goddess of the soul, Psyche, who also personified the word psykhē to mean ‘breath of life.’ [15] Anne Carson wrote that the Greeks were obsessed with wondering why external events could take such control over the psykhē, specifically events that make us mad with erotic desire. ‘Psychosis’ was first introduced to diagnostic vocabulary as a euphemism to describe mental illness, when psychiatrists decided its more offensive and fearful antecedents of ‘madness’ and ‘insanity’ should be erased [16]. By the way, why are you looking up ‘psychosis symptoms’ online? Sure it’s not just Apollo sending a sign?
No, that’s not it, stop, stop, sto—
Or perhaps you’re not listening. Language is the diagnosis. Language is our claim to power, revelation, madness, love, difference. It is how the Internet began. An instant message is ferried on a wire to another world, a dead beloved name is ferried on a sentence to immortality. But don’t forget language is also how we poison. Replace the oleander leaf on your tongue with a word that burns you instead.
Run a bracket over your tongue and separate your thoughts. The virtual poetry of @sapphobot runs along a meter of square brackets; a digital echo of how the fragmented poems of Archaic Greek poet Sappho were discovered. Hailing from the isle of Lesbos, a place from which the word ‘lesbian’ also came, Sappho’s lyric poetry has long inspired Western literature’s obsession with articulating eros — the maddening pull of erotic desire. ‘In Greek lyric poetry, eros is an experience of melting. The god of desire himself is traditionally called ‘melter of limbs’,’ writes Anne Carson, referring to a translation of Sappho’s fr[agment] 130 [17]. Automated to repiece the fractured poems of Anne Carson’s Sapphic translations in ‘If Not, Winter’, many of @sapphobot’s Tweets use square brackets as line breaks. In programming language, square brackets are used to clarify structures of code, particularly lists. Sappho’s lyrical observations of the world are remixed with the voice of the machine; her broken verses fused with broken code, forming the phantom limbs of a virtual poet to stumble into cyberspace. There are conduits within conduits within conduits.
Referencing Umberto Eco’s 1994 Macintosh vs allegory — in which Eco aligns the operating systems of Macintosh with Catholicism and Microsoft with Protestantism — Marianna Ruah-Midbar attests:
We evaluate, expect, become excited, imagine, formulate, practice and so on, in a visual environment that is comfortable and user-friendly, adapted to our liking, and connected to enormous databases with quick response time. These attributes reflect the expectations today of people as religious “consumers” and spiritual beings. Correspondingly, contemporary perception of divinity and sanctity reflect the tenets experienced in the digital culture’s habitus, as well as our expectations regarding an appropriate society, possible actions, future expectations, conventional relationships, and so on. It is also worth noticing that the virtual realm nourishes and renews the design of the physical realm, and that is true in the religious as well as in every other field [18].
‘And machine code, which lies beneath both systems (or environments, if you prefer)? Ah, that is to do with the Old Testament, and is Talmudic and cabalistic.’ [19] Eco, in the advent of the Internet, had already summoned occultish, mystic aphorisms to articulate the workings of the computational realm.
Then tell me the story of free will.
I dare say free will is antithetical to any deified mythology. I sit under the thumb of the gods as their divine doubt flashes over me, and see the shadow of my mortality stretch over me. Hallucinations and delirium were far less stigmatised in antiquity, but no less commonplace than schizophrenia or epilepsy would be now [20]. Discourse in the Twittersphere jerks awake in all its schizophrenic discord. The algorithm passes its hand over.
How could we possibly function outside of these automated communication networks? A desire to connect, a connection from desire; the Greeks craned up their necks to altars and effigies, but I turn my face down to consult my oracles. In her interrogation of eros, Anne Carson writes:
Desire is a moment with no way out. Consistently throughout the Greek lyric corpus, as well as in the poetry of tragedy and comedy, eros is an experience that assaults the lover from without and proceeds to take control of his body, his mind and the quality of his life… to replace normal conditions of health and sanity with disease and madness. The poets represent eros as an invasion, an illness, an insanity, a wild animal, a natural disaster… As soon as eros enters his life, the lover is lost, for he goes mad. But where is the point of entry? Where does desire begin? [21]
I wake up and check my messages.
Tell me the story of how someone listened.
Communications seem to have always omitted a “constant hum”, whether that threshold has opened to the divine or cybernetic dimension. That line between madness and divinity is as fine as gossamer. Someone is listening. And watching. And currently
[...]
typing a response.
In the cybernetic realm, the comingled voices on Twitter may be a glitching iteration of what Deborah Steiner terms 'choral spectatorship … a heightened, quasi-visionary form of seeing that permits the viewing of what lies beyond the immediately perceptible… choral song-and-dance presents itself as the medium through which audiences might gain access to individuals and events remote in space, time and/or ontological order, with the chorus serving as a conduit between those present at the performance and the realms to which the episodes evoked in their songs belong.’ [22] The storyteller-listener-responder transaction is complicated in the Twitter agora, in which we all become the chorus — albeit, singing off-key, singing over each other, singing different proclamations.
This chorus follows a progression with cords stretching back before the Internet, plugged into computers that were not only modelled to function like oracles, but also to read, dismantle and reorganise poetry [23]. Georges Perec’s 1968 radio play, The Machine, attempts to simulate the journey of a computer reading Goethe’s poem, ‘Wandrers Nachlied II’. Perec’s machine operates on processors programmed to:
‘To the attentive listener it may become clear that this play about language not only describes the functioning of the machine, but also… the inner mechanism of poetry.’ [24] Goethe’s poem is input into a machine that playfully defamiliarises its form and syntax, and then recompiles it in new forms. Perec’s play draws from the theoretical works of Alan Turing, who not only conceptualised the famous ‘universal machine’ — an antecedent to the stored-program computer — but also the oracle machine.
The oracle machine was intended ‘to explore the realm of what cannot be done by purely mechanical processes’, moving away from pure automation and into an understanding of computational technology as instinctive and intuitive as well as highly methodical [25]. Ideally, it could answer any given computational problem with a fitting solution.
Thus Turing foretold the ethos behind @pythia_txt, a program aiming to ‘predict’ answers for explicitly worded questions by means of random text generation. While the bot’s predictions err more on the ludic side of sacred interpretation, it nonetheless sits in this strange intersection of repetition and intuition, prediction and unpredictability.
Pythia is blushing from behind the screen; the computer grows warm. It hums to soothe her.
Tell me the story of how someone answered, and said, ‘You are poisoning yourself.’
The Greeks coined the word mania to describe the agony of erotic madness [26]. ‘Mania’ now describes all kinds of agonies scattered along the spectrum of psychiatric disorders.
Do the gods poison my brain? They tell me a deep breath will clear my mind. Funny that, pneuma and psykhē both mean ‘breath of life’, but I can’t tell which one will kill me faster. Do the gods drive the glass to my lips to destroy my nervous system? Dionysus takes me out at night only to leave me crying violently on the last train home. Why do all the nerve endings in my body feel like they’re on fire? Tell Prometheus I don’t want his fire, not when it burns me like this. Why can’t I hear myself think? Tell Orpheus to compose me once again.
Mania can be a delicious feeling. Divine, even.
Just tell Orpheus to drop my body in the river once he’s done.
So tell me the story, please.
[translate]
]
]
01010100 01100101 01101100 01101100 00100000 01101101 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110011 01110100 01101111 01110010 01111001 00101100 00100000 00001010 01110000 01101100 01100101 01100001 01110011 01100101 00101110 00001010
]
[shift]
[enter]
Are you there?
[translate]
]
]
01000001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 01110010 01100101 00111111
]
[shift]
[enter]
Can you hear me?
Can you hear me:
[scream] [scream] [scream] [scream]
[backspace] [backspace] [backspace] [backspace]
Tell me about yourself.
The psychiatrist waits for me to answer his question.
‘Do you feel like you’re being watched?’
I don’t know what that question means in a surveillance society. I know he is testing me for psychosis. But if the angels and the gods have turned their eyes away, we’ll still have the cameras to watch over us. The bots will still answer our questions. The algorithm is always awake.
What would it mean if a god were to use me as a mouthpiece? Is that what being psychotic is? Is that what being an oracle is? Or better yet, a poet? If it’s not the medication making me foggy, perhaps I am breathing in a hallucinogenic air.
I don’t think he’s happy with my answer.
@pythia_txt, tell me, what should I say instead?
[1] Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, “Chapter 9 - The Oracle at Delphi: The Pythia and the Pneuma, Intoxicating Gas Finds, and Hypotheses,” in History of Toxicology and Environmental Health (Elsevier Inc, 2014),
[2] @sapphobot, “Bot that posts fragments by Sappho. With translations from Anne Carson's 'If Not, Winter,' and more. Modifications have been made to fit the character limit,” Twitter bio, n.d., https://twitter.com/sapphobot.
[3] Marianna Ruah-Midbar, “The Sacralization of Randomness: The Theological Imagination and the Logic of Digital Divination Rituals,” Numen 61, no. 5-6 (2014): 623.
[4] @pythia_txt, “old predictions… paraphrased,” Twitter bio, n.d., https://twitter.com/pythia_txt.
[5] Kate Compton, Benjamin Filstrup, and Michael Mateas, “Tracery: Approachable story grammar authoring for casual users,” in Intelligent Narrative Technologies 7 - Papers from the 2014 Workshop, Technical Report (AI Access Foundation, 2014), 64.
[6] Tetyana Lokot and Nicholas Diakopoulos, “News Bots: Automating News and Information Dissemination on Twitter,” Digital journalism 4, no. 6 (2016): 682–699.
[7] Haralampos V Harissis, “A Bittersweet Story: The True Nature of the Laurel of the Oracle of Delphi,” Perspectives in biology and medicine 57, no. 3 (2014): 356.
[8] Harissis, “A Bittersweet Story,” 353.
[9] Bjarke Mønsted, Piotr Sapieżyński, Emilio Ferrara, and Sune Lehmann, “Evidence of Complex Contagion of Information in Social Media: An Experiment Using Twitter Bots,” PloS one 12, no. 9 (2017): e0184148–e0184148.
[10] See Anne Carson, Nox: An Epitaph for My Brother (Cambridge: New Directions, 2010); Gary Hawkins, “Talk and Not Talk: Anne Carson’s Dialogue of Grief,” LA Review of Books, December 8, 2014, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/talk-talk-anne-carsons-dialogue-grief/.
[11] Plutarch as cited in Harissis, “A Bittersweet Story,” 353.
[12] Michael Scott, “The Oracle at Delphi: Unknowability at the Heart of the Ancient Greek World,” Social research 87, no. 1 (2020): 66-68.
[13] Deborah Bunker, “Who Do You Trust? The Digital Destruction of Shared Situational Awareness and the COVID-19 Infodemic,” International journal of information management 55 (2020): 2.
[14] Christopher Goulding, “Robot: Antedating the Entry in The Oxford English Dictionary,” Notes and queries 52, no. 3 (2005): 380–381.
[15] Robert Sommer, “The Etymology of Psychosis,” American journal of orthopsychiatry 81, no. 2 (2011): 164.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Sappho, fr. 130, as cited in Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 39.
[18] Ruah-Midbar, “Sacralization of Randomness,” 623.
[19] Umberto Eco as cited in Ruah-Midbar, “Sacralization of Randomness,” 623.
[20] William V. Harris, Mental Disorders in the Classical World (Leiden: BRILL, 2013), 288.
[21] Carson, Eros, 148-49.
[22] Deborah Steiner, “Figuring Choral Lyric: Sappho, Stesichorus and the Spectacular Chorus in Archaic Greek Texts and Images,” Word & image (London. 1985) 36, no. 4 (2020): 375.
[23] Mark Wolff, “Invoking the Oracle: Perec, Algorithms and Conceptual Writing,” in The Afterlives of Georges Perec (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 87-101.
[24] Georges Perec, “The Machine,” as cited in Wolff, “Invoking the Oracle,” 91.
[25] Wolff, “Invoking the Oracle,” 89.
[26] Carson, Eros, 149.
Lucia Tuong Vy Nguyen is a Vietnamese-Australian writer and arts worker living and working on unceded Dharug and Gadigal land. She is interested in exploring dichotomies of control and chaos in diasporic communities, virtual arenas and contemporary methods of artistic production. The etymological skeleton of her writing is built from her Classics background as a Latin student in high school; and still, stubbornly justifying studying a “dead language” for five years. The flesh and blood that animates this writing is drawn from her immigrant family’s strange cultural narratives of ghosts, superstitions and curses in Vietnamese culture. She has been featured in publications such as the University of Sydney's Philament journal. You can find more of her work here.
Tell me the story of how they poisoned themselves.
The Pythia, believed to have breathed in a divine air that brought them heavenly knowledge, were actually inhaling methane, ethane and ethylene gases rising from a cleft in the earth. Ethylene was once used as anesthesia, until it was determined to be too dangerous, cutting oxygen to the brain. Ethylene can induce intense euphoria and hallucinations. The revelations at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi were bestowed by these female oracles — the Pythia — who were chosen by the local priesthood to be poisoned beyond delusion. The oracle was plucked from the village, seated on a tripod in a cavernous inner sanctum, told to breathe the pneuma in deep and speak prophecy from Apollo. The Pythia also chewed laurel to aid in their divination. Later toxicology studies suggested that they were actually sucking on oleander [1].
The mantle of the gods’ Pantheon is now made of glass — that is, the display glass of a computer screen, behind which lies a sanctified architecture built from pixels and binary code. Apollo, god of light, truth and healing, endures in the blue UV light that drips from an undwindling deluge of information. Auspices read by Ancient Greek oracles have been succeeded by a computational logic, now read and spoken through the voice of the machine. Algorithm is the higher power.
@pythia_txt, @sapphobot and @carsonbot awaken, their mouths opened, fed and deciphered by the algorithm. These three literary Twitter bots, programmed to reproduce the personas or works of their respective namesakes (the Pythia, the Lesbos poet Sappho, and the Canadian poet, translator and classicist Anne Carson), have each been ‘corpus-fed’ various English translations of Ancient Greek texts to be abbreviated, deconstructed or remediated as daily Tweets. ‘Modifications have been made to fit the character limit’, @sapphobot’s Twitter bio disclaims [2]. While @sapphobot and @carsonbot recycle excerpts from existing Classics texts — primarily that of Anne Carson’s poetic oeuvre, and her translations of Sappho — @pythia_txt more faithfully embodies ‘the sacralisation of randomness’, more true to a computerised form of divination [3].
‘Ask your question… Pythia is awake… old predictions, paraphrased,’ the account proclaims [4].
If asked a question, @pythia_txt will reply with a Tweet pulled together from Classicist motifs; young women in the springtime, a summer evening, a prayer at an altar. ‘Have a care!’ the bot rebukes. ‘Go back, matricide!’
Often these quips are nonsensical, much like the Pythia at the Apollo at Delphi would have uttered — bar, perhaps, a @pythia_txt Tweet on March 4th, 2020, which read, ‘it is sanctioned not to accept a truce unjustly offered,’ in response to one user’s query: ‘should I punch him in the face?’ Underlying the semantics of @pythia_txt is a generative grammar written on Tracery, an online authoring tool designed for creators to play around with ‘non-causal and even nonsensical’ modern story generation systems [5]. From this narrative and computational logic, there are four components to building a Twitter literary bot:
Tell me the story of how disease mutates into madness.
When the Pythia chewed what is now believed to be oleander, they experienced an ‘ecstatic’ state of communing with the divine, which involved the following symptoms: psychomotor agitation, hyperactivity, excitement, hoarseness of voice (due to vocal cord edema), ataxia, salivation, loss of the senses, visual disturbances, seizures and possibly death [7]. Death would have most likely occurred from cardiovascular collapse. Epileptic symptoms in antiquity were diagnosed as ‘the sacred disease’, wherein the individual was possessed by a god like Apollo [8]. The oracles would become possessed and deliver these divinations on a monthly basis, inhaling hazardous gases while ingesting a plant considered lethally toxic in all its seeds, roots, stems, leaves and fruit.
This notion of poisoning the corpus is rife in communication networks. From what we consume, the contagion of information and misinformation grows. Twitter bots operate on a Bayesian model of ‘complex’ contagion [9]. Damaging information and behaviours are spread through an entire network of agents. ‘Simple’ contagion, however, relies on exposure attempts being independent and relayed through a single conduit. An individual exposed to information (like the Pythia) is assigned an independent position in the top-down hierarchy of storyteller-listener-responder which, perhaps, now shifts between the heavenly echelons of the gods, the Pythia and the priests in a model of ‘complex’ information contagion.
Tell me the story, doctor.
When poet, essayist and Classics professor Anne Carson’s brother died, she wrote ‘an epitaph in the form of a book’ to hold his memory alongside her own grief [10]. The printed Nox is a facsimile of Carson’s handmade book: a long concertina-folded sheet decorated with photos and poems, kept safe in a blue box. This therapeutic biography is a ritual or reenactment that farewells a beloved in real-time but also extends a farewell to go on forever — a eulogy encased in amber, to be embedded like a jewel in the marrow of the same tree that birthed its resin coffin. Don’t forget Apollo turned Daphne into an evergreen laurel tree, so that she could never die. We love suspended time for the sake of its difference from ordinary time and real life, Anne Carson writes. Do the bots exist in this temporal space? A space of suspending the same poetic excerpts in a feedback loop, over and over again?
Plutarch, who had been a priest at Delphi himself, wrote that the role of the oracle is to neither reveal nor conceal, merely to indicate [11]. These ‘indications’ would be delivered monthly (understandably, given the physical demand of a Pythia’s ‘ecstatic’ state). However, we the Twitter users are the enquirers, the priests, the scribes; the interpreters, the recipients. Perhaps these multidisciplinary roles we now assume also reflect the demands of a globalised capitalist system, where specialised roles are now so redundant as to be considered esoteric. Consider consulting the Pythia ‘akin to working with management consultants, who have a reputation for helping businesspeople make decisions (and charging high fees) often by reframing information and ideas half-known already to the client in order to help that client make their own decision about how to proceed.’ [12]
Our Twitter echo chambers operate much in the same feedback loop of affect. This loop spins on the axis of ambiguous algorithmic biases built from the traceable archive of our platform providers and search engines [13]. Your news is prescribed to you. Just consider yourself sitting in the waiting room of a doctor who is writing a prescription for a medication you have already chosen to consume.
Tell me the story of the genesis, so we can identify the root of the problem.
The English word ‘robot’, from which ‘bot’ is abbreviated, was born of mixed Czech and French lineage — its first appearance was in the writing of an 18th century French cleric and conspiracy theorist, who referred to the lowest echelons of French peasantry or, Robota, as slaves in the French Revolution [14]. Robota appeared once again in the 1920 Czech play Rossum’s Universal Robots to denote ‘forced labour’, ultimately rising as a semantic tenet of modern industrialisation, urbanisation and burgeoning capitalism. Bots are not forced to labour, but engineered, christened by the velocity of contemporary information transmission.
The English word ‘divine’ is derived from its Latin infinitive, divinare; the verb ‘to divine’, or, to gain supernatural or magical insight into (future events). When Twitter bots are currently being investigated for spreading disinformation, these particular bots transcend flesh and earthliness to continue playing the part of the oracle as a disembodied voice in the ceaseless thrum of the Twitter agora. As literary bots, they are either ‘corpus-fed’ entire books to deconstruct clause by clause, or function on random text generation — the algorithm is omniscient in determining what 140-character prediction is espoused by our oracles.
The English word ‘diagnosis’ is derived from modern Latin, derived from the Ancient Greek diagignōskein, meaning ‘to distinguish, or discern between two possibilities.’
Oh no, no, I don’t think you understand what I am aski—
The English word ‘psychosis’ is derived from the name of the Ancient Greek goddess of the soul, Psyche, who also personified the word psykhē to mean ‘breath of life.’ [15] Anne Carson wrote that the Greeks were obsessed with wondering why external events could take such control over the psykhē, specifically events that make us mad with erotic desire. ‘Psychosis’ was first introduced to diagnostic vocabulary as a euphemism to describe mental illness, when psychiatrists decided its more offensive and fearful antecedents of ‘madness’ and ‘insanity’ should be erased [16]. By the way, why are you looking up ‘psychosis symptoms’ online? Sure it’s not just Apollo sending a sign?
No, that’s not it, stop, stop, sto—
Or perhaps you’re not listening. Language is the diagnosis. Language is our claim to power, revelation, madness, love, difference. It is how the Internet began. An instant message is ferried on a wire to another world, a dead beloved name is ferried on a sentence to immortality. But don’t forget language is also how we poison. Replace the oleander leaf on your tongue with a word that burns you instead.
Run a bracket over your tongue and separate your thoughts. The virtual poetry of @sapphobot runs along a meter of square brackets; a digital echo of how the fragmented poems of Archaic Greek poet Sappho were discovered. Hailing from the isle of Lesbos, a place from which the word ‘lesbian’ also came, Sappho’s lyric poetry has long inspired Western literature’s obsession with articulating eros — the maddening pull of erotic desire. ‘In Greek lyric poetry, eros is an experience of melting. The god of desire himself is traditionally called ‘melter of limbs’,’ writes Anne Carson, referring to a translation of Sappho’s fr[agment] 130 [17]. Automated to repiece the fractured poems of Anne Carson’s Sapphic translations in ‘If Not, Winter’, many of @sapphobot’s Tweets use square brackets as line breaks. In programming language, square brackets are used to clarify structures of code, particularly lists. Sappho’s lyrical observations of the world are remixed with the voice of the machine; her broken verses fused with broken code, forming the phantom limbs of a virtual poet to stumble into cyberspace. There are conduits within conduits within conduits.
Referencing Umberto Eco’s 1994 Macintosh vs allegory — in which Eco aligns the operating systems of Macintosh with Catholicism and Microsoft with Protestantism — Marianna Ruah-Midbar attests:
We evaluate, expect, become excited, imagine, formulate, practice and so on, in a visual environment that is comfortable and user-friendly, adapted to our liking, and connected to enormous databases with quick response time. These attributes reflect the expectations today of people as religious “consumers” and spiritual beings. Correspondingly, contemporary perception of divinity and sanctity reflect the tenets experienced in the digital culture’s habitus, as well as our expectations regarding an appropriate society, possible actions, future expectations, conventional relationships, and so on. It is also worth noticing that the virtual realm nourishes and renews the design of the physical realm, and that is true in the religious as well as in every other field [18].
‘And machine code, which lies beneath both systems (or environments, if you prefer)? Ah, that is to do with the Old Testament, and is Talmudic and cabalistic.’ [19] Eco, in the advent of the Internet, had already summoned occultish, mystic aphorisms to articulate the workings of the computational realm.
Then tell me the story of free will.
I dare say free will is antithetical to any deified mythology. I sit under the thumb of the gods as their divine doubt flashes over me, and see the shadow of my mortality stretch over me. Hallucinations and delirium were far less stigmatised in antiquity, but no less commonplace than schizophrenia or epilepsy would be now [20]. Discourse in the Twittersphere jerks awake in all its schizophrenic discord. The algorithm passes its hand over.
How could we possibly function outside of these automated communication networks? A desire to connect, a connection from desire; the Greeks craned up their necks to altars and effigies, but I turn my face down to consult my oracles. In her interrogation of eros, Anne Carson writes:
Desire is a moment with no way out. Consistently throughout the Greek lyric corpus, as well as in the poetry of tragedy and comedy, eros is an experience that assaults the lover from without and proceeds to take control of his body, his mind and the quality of his life… to replace normal conditions of health and sanity with disease and madness. The poets represent eros as an invasion, an illness, an insanity, a wild animal, a natural disaster… As soon as eros enters his life, the lover is lost, for he goes mad. But where is the point of entry? Where does desire begin? [21]
I wake up and check my messages.
Tell me the story of how someone listened.
Communications seem to have always omitted a “constant hum”, whether that threshold has opened to the divine or cybernetic dimension. That line between madness and divinity is as fine as gossamer. Someone is listening. And watching. And currently
[...]
typing a response.
In the cybernetic realm, the comingled voices on Twitter may be a glitching iteration of what Deborah Steiner terms 'choral spectatorship … a heightened, quasi-visionary form of seeing that permits the viewing of what lies beyond the immediately perceptible… choral song-and-dance presents itself as the medium through which audiences might gain access to individuals and events remote in space, time and/or ontological order, with the chorus serving as a conduit between those present at the performance and the realms to which the episodes evoked in their songs belong.’ [22] The storyteller-listener-responder transaction is complicated in the Twitter agora, in which we all become the chorus — albeit, singing off-key, singing over each other, singing different proclamations.
This chorus follows a progression with cords stretching back before the Internet, plugged into computers that were not only modelled to function like oracles, but also to read, dismantle and reorganise poetry [23]. Georges Perec’s 1968 radio play, The Machine, attempts to simulate the journey of a computer reading Goethe’s poem, ‘Wandrers Nachlied II’. Perec’s machine operates on processors programmed to:
‘To the attentive listener it may become clear that this play about language not only describes the functioning of the machine, but also… the inner mechanism of poetry.’ [24] Goethe’s poem is input into a machine that playfully defamiliarises its form and syntax, and then recompiles it in new forms. Perec’s play draws from the theoretical works of Alan Turing, who not only conceptualised the famous ‘universal machine’ — an antecedent to the stored-program computer — but also the oracle machine.
The oracle machine was intended ‘to explore the realm of what cannot be done by purely mechanical processes’, moving away from pure automation and into an understanding of computational technology as instinctive and intuitive as well as highly methodical [25]. Ideally, it could answer any given computational problem with a fitting solution.
Thus Turing foretold the ethos behind @pythia_txt, a program aiming to ‘predict’ answers for explicitly worded questions by means of random text generation. While the bot’s predictions err more on the ludic side of sacred interpretation, it nonetheless sits in this strange intersection of repetition and intuition, prediction and unpredictability.
Pythia is blushing from behind the screen; the computer grows warm. It hums to soothe her.
Tell me the story of how someone answered, and said, ‘You are poisoning yourself.’
The Greeks coined the word mania to describe the agony of erotic madness [26]. ‘Mania’ now describes all kinds of agonies scattered along the spectrum of psychiatric disorders.
Do the gods poison my brain? They tell me a deep breath will clear my mind. Funny that, pneuma and psykhē both mean ‘breath of life’, but I can’t tell which one will kill me faster. Do the gods drive the glass to my lips to destroy my nervous system? Dionysus takes me out at night only to leave me crying violently on the last train home. Why do all the nerve endings in my body feel like they’re on fire? Tell Prometheus I don’t want his fire, not when it burns me like this. Why can’t I hear myself think? Tell Orpheus to compose me once again.
Mania can be a delicious feeling. Divine, even.
Just tell Orpheus to drop my body in the river once he’s done.
So tell me the story,
please.
[translate]
]
]
01010100 01100101 01101100 01101100 00100000 01101101 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110011 01110100 01101111 01110010 01111001 00101100 00100000 00001010 01110000 01101100 01100101 01100001 01110011 01100101 00101110 00001010
]
[shift]
[enter]
Are you there?
[translate]
]
]
01000001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 01110010 01100101 00111111
]
[shift]
[enter]
Can you hear me?
Can you hear me:
[scream] [scream] [scream] [scream]
[backspace] [backspace] [backspace] [backspace]
Tell me about yourself.
The psychiatrist waits for me to answer his question.
‘Do you feel like you’re being watched?’
I don’t know what that question means in a surveillance society. I know he is testing me for psychosis. But if the angels and the gods have turned their eyes away, we’ll still have the cameras to watch over us. The bots will still answer our questions. The algorithm is always awake.
What would it mean if a god were to use me as a mouthpiece? Is that what being psychotic is? Is that what being an oracle is? Or better yet, a poet? If it’s not the medication making me foggy, perhaps I am breathing in a hallucinogenic air.
I don’t think he’s happy with my answer.
@pythia_txt, tell me, what should I say instead?
[1] Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, “Chapter 9 - The Oracle at Delphi: The Pythia and the Pneuma, Intoxicating Gas Finds, and Hypotheses,” in History of Toxicology and Environmental Health (Elsevier Inc, 2014),
[2] @sapphobot, “Bot that posts fragments by Sappho. With translations from Anne Carson's 'If Not, Winter,' and more. Modifications have been made to fit the character limit,” Twitter bio, n.d., https://twitter.com/sapphobot.
[3] Marianna Ruah-Midbar, “The Sacralization of Randomness: The Theological Imagination and the Logic of Digital Divination Rituals,” Numen 61, no. 5-6 (2014): 623.
[4] @pythia_txt, “old predictions… paraphrased,” Twitter bio, n.d., https://twitter.com/pythia_txt.
[5] Kate Compton, Benjamin Filstrup, and Michael Mateas, “Tracery: Approachable story grammar authoring for casual users,” in Intelligent Narrative Technologies 7 - Papers from the 2014 Workshop, Technical Report (AI Access Foundation, 2014), 64.
[6] Tetyana Lokot and Nicholas Diakopoulos, “News Bots: Automating News and Information Dissemination on Twitter,” Digital journalism 4, no. 6 (2016): 682–699.
[7] Haralampos V Harissis, “A Bittersweet Story: The True Nature of the Laurel of the Oracle of Delphi,” Perspectives in biology and medicine 57, no. 3 (2014): 356.
[8] Harissis, “A Bittersweet Story,” 353.
[9] Bjarke Mønsted, Piotr Sapieżyński, Emilio Ferrara, and Sune Lehmann, “Evidence of Complex Contagion of Information in Social Media: An Experiment Using Twitter Bots,” PloS one 12, no. 9 (2017): e0184148–e0184148.
[10] See Anne Carson, Nox: An Epitaph for My Brother (Cambridge: New Directions, 2010); Gary Hawkins, “Talk and Not Talk: Anne Carson’s Dialogue of Grief,” LA Review of Books, December 8, 2014, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/talk-talk-anne-carsons-dialogue-grief/.
[11] Plutarch as cited in Harissis, “A Bittersweet Story,” 353.
[12] Michael Scott, “The Oracle at Delphi: Unknowability at the Heart of the Ancient Greek World,” Social research 87, no. 1 (2020): 66-68.
[13] Deborah Bunker, “Who Do You Trust? The Digital Destruction of Shared Situational Awareness and the COVID-19 Infodemic,” International journal of information management 55 (2020): 2.
[14] Christopher Goulding, “Robot: Antedating the Entry in The Oxford English Dictionary,” Notes and queries 52, no. 3 (2005): 380–381.
[15] Robert Sommer, “The Etymology of Psychosis,” American journal of orthopsychiatry 81, no. 2 (2011): 164.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Sappho, fr. 130, as cited in Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 39.
[18] Ruah-Midbar, “Sacralization of Randomness,” 623.
[19] Umberto Eco as cited in Ruah-Midbar, “Sacralization of Randomness,” 623.
[20] William V. Harris, Mental Disorders in the Classical World (Leiden: BRILL, 2013), 288.
[21] Carson, Eros, 148-49.
[22] Deborah Steiner, “Figuring Choral Lyric: Sappho, Stesichorus and the Spectacular Chorus in Archaic Greek Texts and Images,” Word & image (London. 1985) 36, no. 4 (2020): 375.
[23] Mark Wolff, “Invoking the Oracle: Perec, Algorithms and Conceptual Writing,” in The Afterlives of Georges Perec (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 87-101.
[24] Georges Perec, “The Machine,” as cited in Wolff, “Invoking the Oracle,” 91.
[25] Wolff, “Invoking the Oracle,” 89.
[26] Carson, Eros, 149.
Lucia Tuong Vy Nguyen is a Vietnamese-Australian writer and arts worker living and working on unceded Dharug and Gadigal land. She is interested in exploring dichotomies of control and chaos in diasporic communities, virtual arenas and contemporary methods of artistic production. The etymological skeleton of her writing is built from her Classics background as a Latin student in high school; and still, stubbornly justifying studying a “dead language” for five years. The flesh and blood that animates this writing is drawn from her immigrant family’s strange cultural narratives of ghosts, superstitions and curses in Vietnamese culture. She has been featured in publications such as the University of Sydney's Philament journal. You can find more of her work here.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.