“AUGUSTINE Virgil,” author of a new book, Inferno, reimagines Dante’s famous hellscape as a journey through modern media and alt-media, with dizzying circles of “truths and untruths; dialectics and kayfabes; influencers and assets.” From an excerpt on Substack:
To understand the media spectacle in its totality then one could do far worse than beginning with Dante’s vision of Hell. Lamenting expulsion from his much loved Tuscan homeland, the good Florentine envisaged an underworld of concentric rings of torment: when the world seemed strange and foreign to the Poet, he sought to descend through the mire in the hope of finding eventual respite in the summum bonum, the highest good. Which modern searcher of truth could not relate? Naturally for his guide he chose the most modern of the ancients, Virgil, to shepherd him through the fire and ice of a Hades where fraud and treachery, naturally, occupy the lowest circles.
It is a not a perfect but nonetheless useful analogy to conceive of what is best termed the simulacrum – namely the media and alt-media (composed of the largely online podcast based “truthers”) – of occupying similarly a malign Inferno. It is one comprised of concentric rings, burning not with fire but with narrative. Each has their varying degrees of torment reflecting their varying degrees of fraud and treachery. Or, if one would prefer (for optimism’s sake): each possessed of varying degrees of “truth”, floating spectral throughout the ether of the respective rungs of this Hadean ladder. It is pertinent at this point to add that each ring, whilst operating as a discrete and deliberate pen of isolation, also can facilitate mobility to other rings: one may find one’s way to one rung of this waking Hell only to then be shepherded by a denizen of that ring to another ring unawares, as we shall see.
Let us then retrace the footsteps of the laurel wreathed Poet and enter into that Hell writ large on the canvas of modernity: that Hell broadcast, wi-fi’d, and fibre-to-the-premises’d into the homes and pockets of us all, thence to be refracted through scrying mirrors sigil’d with the forbidden apple. It is from that black obsidian screen that Hell does then stream relentlessly into our souls, borne on by the wings of the Prince of the Air. So let us now ascend and descend, whirl and swirl and oscillate; through truths and untruths; dialectics and kayfabes; influencers and assets: and in doing so hope, that like the Florentine and the Roman, we should one day find our way out.
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