Explaining the name of this blog seems like an appropriate first post. Besides being so edgy of a name that it's almost embarrassing, the Black Iron Prison is a concept I borrowed from Philip K. Dick's 1981 novel, VALIS. PKD was a prolific American science fiction author who suffered from hallucinations, paranoia, and likely schizophrenia. His novels and short stories often dealt with the nature of reality - What's real, what does it mean for something to be real, and is there anything more real than what we normally perceive?
VALIS is a semi-autobiographical work about a fictionalized version of Dick named Horselover Fat (a literal, anglicized translation of "Philip" and "Dick"). Fat receives a message from the Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS), an alien satellite that reveals information about the true nature of the universe to him by beaming the information directly into his brain. After his revelation, or theophany, Horselover Fat/Philip K. Dick comes to the realization that the reality we live in is false, and that we live in something called the Black Iron Prison. According to Dick, the Prison is a system of social control that obscures the true nature of reality. A description from VALIS:
"Once, in a cheap science fiction novel, Fat had come across a perfect description of the Black Iron Prison, but set in the far future. So if you superimposed the past (ancient Rome) over the present (California in the twentieth century) and superimposed the far future world of The Android Cried Me a River over that, you got the Empire, as the supra- or trans-temporal constant. Everyone who had ever lived was literally surrounded by the iron walls of the prison; they were all inside it and none of them knew it."
PKD was a Gnostic. He believed that the material world (the Black Iron Prison) we inhabit is false and was created by a malevolent god (in some interpretations, the God of the Old Testament), while the path to salvation is through understanding this false reality and coming to know the true, hidden God. I think about this concept a lot, in less literal terms. We exist in the world, but we don't interface with the world as it actually is.
What do I mean by this? I know that the computer I typed this on or the phone you're reading this on was assembled by overworked and underpaid workers in a city like Shenzhen, where the employees live in dorms and the factory has nets outside the windows to catch suicidal workers. You know this too. The metals that are used in our devices were mined by people in places like the Congo, many of them children, and many of them suffering from lung diseases as a result of breathing in the cobalt and lithium dust. On another level, we know that the United States, its military and various agencies, organizations, and allies are responsible for many, many crimes, both abroad and at home. Coups in almost every country in South America, aiding and abetting genocide in Indonesia, the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment, MKULTRA, shelling Fallujah with depleted uranium, the Pruitt-Igoe experiments, assassinating civilians in Vietnam, the domestic spy program of the NSA, torture at black sites in Chicago. Truly, the list goes on. And of course we know that rarely, if ever, are the perpetrators of these crimes actually brought to justice, even after these crimes are publicly admitted. I know all of this, and you know this too.
We know these things, and we know that we know them, no matter how hard we pretend otherwise. And yet we continue. This is the Black Iron Prison.