Lot of coverage for <A
HREF="http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/20591.html">Wired's
piece</A> on how schizophrenics are co-opting Net ideas into their
delusions.<BR>

I wrote a (bad) play about this in 1993, called "Haslam's Key". It was based
on a book called "Illustrations of Madness", published in 1810 by John Haslam,
apothecary at Bedlam. In it he writes, with little editorial comment, a
detailed account of the delusions of James Tilley Matthews, a resident of
Bedlam who was convinced that he was being assailed remotely by Jacobin
revolutionaries. As Roy Porter says in the recently re-published edition, it's
the first book length case study of an individual psychosis.<P>

What I found fascinating is that Matthews' delusions mirror very closely
modern paranoid belief systems, mapped onto the primitive technology at the
beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. James says that the Jacobins control
his mind using a "pneumatic loom", which beams thoughts into his head using
"mesmeric rays". Nowadays, victims (victims of something) say CIA agents and
aliens control their minds using radio waves from sinister UFO machinery. Or,
as the Wired piece shows, via the Web.<P>

"Haslam's Key" suggested that these schizophrenic influences were also at
large in writers of science fiction, who often appropriate modern technology
in similar ways: that sf was as much of a product of physiological effects as
the elaborate but consistent fantasies of those suffering from mental illness.
I thought it was fun to paint the strange consistency of SF plots and habits
onto the behavioural basins of mental disorder.  It was rubbish, by the way.
I'm pleased to find the <A HREF=
"http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shadowlands/6583/project098.html">guys around
Area 51</A> have a much more intriguing hypothesis. They say that James Tilley
Matthews was the first subject of a Benjamin Franklin/Anton Mesmer/Adam
Weishaupt mind control device - that's still in use today. <A
HREF="http://www.spesh.com/lee/4/test.html">Ewige Blumenkraft!</A><P>

(Haslam's Key, by the way, was particularly gruesome piece of tech invented by
John Haslam around the same time as he was transcribing Matthews' complaints.
It was a form of flattened spoon that could used to prise open patients'
mouths for feeding them against their will. It's clear from the introduction
to "Illustrations of Madness" that Haslam's aim in documenting
Matthews was to confirm his madness 
to aristocrats who'd received convincingly sane letters from him pleading
for release. Haslam achieves this, largely, by taking the piss.<P>