Cybernetic culture research unit
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CE-5+

Many of the anonymous contributions on the Crypt appear to have been posted by victims of alien abduction and child abuse. In many cases, there is such a - presumably deliberate - smearing of these two thematic clusters that it is difficult to know whether one is reading an account of child abuse or of alien abduction. Lobby groups for incest victims have of course claimed that alien abduction stories are merely a screen for child abuse; but abductees have argued that the increasing concern about incest is a result of the gradual emergence of repressed memories of alien contact. One recent posting on the Crypt poses this question of embedding explicitly.

Are ET stories screening incest, or was incest screening ET? Both. To be is to be abused.

Cybergoths seem less concerned to discover the truth about either issue than to excite further collapse of the identitary and mnemic structures that both incest and alien abduction have exposed. The recent debates on recovered memory have reinforced the cybergoth claim that "all memories are false," and abduction and incest show, for the K-goths, that "there is nothing to believe in." Many postings emphasise the simultaneous collapse of the family, sanity, subjecivity and biological integrity:

It was not the case.
It was something outside
You couldn't believe
It was not the case
Probes in your head
Was this mummy and daddy or not?
Delicate stim
It's not like fucking
It's not like being fucked
It's closer
More alien

The transition from Close Encounter 4 - abduction as such - to CE 5-6 is a switch from the thematics of Science Fiction to those of cyberpunk or cybergothic. At CE5-6, the question of what is experienced is inextricably bound up with the question of what experience itself is, since the events undergone seem to constitute what Templeton calls a "Transcendental Occurrence" a change in the nature of time itself, registering as Freudo-Barkerian trauma. As one posting puts it:

No now now
Numb it now
Feel it later
Time out