I’ve been puzzling over this Sophia Stewart stuff for a while now. One of the most bizarre aspects of what she says during an interview has to do with the world being taken over by satellites in 2010.

First she’s talking about the corruption of Hollywood and the shift they’ll be forced to make, then she says:

[…] cause you’re going out of business cause once digital come into place in 2010 and the whole way of life is going out and they are going to have to find another way of making a living the satellites are gong to rule the earth just like the internet it will not be dominated by anyone; free enterprise and trade will come upon the earth again and everybody can make money like they’ve done always.

As I’ve said elsewhere, the interviewer didn’t even ask a follow-up question here. Which fucking mystifies me. In any event, Fantastic Planet has struck upon a plausible explanation of just what the hell she might be talking about. Well, I don’t know if “explanation” is the right word, “connection” might be better.

It seems that 2010 is the target date for conversion from analog to digital television, because various satellite leases for regular tv run out at that point. Different countries seem to have different policies and target dates, but 2010 comes up again and again. So this might at least be what she’s referring to in terms of digital coming into place in 2010.

The biggest question, of course, is how that connects to satellites taking over the earth. FP brings up the connection to Philip K. Dick’s VALIS & Radio Free Albemuth, wherein an ancient alien satellite transmits information to people on the planet, but is shot down by the archonic rulers.

The other clue would be Skynet in Terminator and the rise of the machines in the Matrix. Both these trilogies are said to have been pirated from Stewart’s original work. In this case, I’m imagining some kind of scenario where these digital tv satellites become sentient, and then start creating and transmitting false images to people through their tv sets. Perhaps these satellites would send us erroneous images of our leaders being assassinated, cities destroyed, things like that to subjugate us. I believe there is also a Philip K. Dick book (though I don’t know the title) where the rulers of the world live above ground and transmit messages to people cowering below that the world above has been destroyed and ravaged. Meanwhile, the rulers are living in a virtual paradise above ground.

The confusing thing with that interpretation though is that Stewart suggests above that this “Satellitocracy” will actually be a positive thing. Which throws me back to the idea of VALIS, the divine galactice intelligence manifesting in a satellite form. Maybe when Ms. Stewart’s original story was stolen and turned into a series of Hollywood blockbusters, it distorted her original intent. Perhaps in her original story, the satellites were benign, but the archons decided to condition people through these movies to believe they would be a threat. But then, I’m also reminded of the Pentagon’s plans to enact a secured “internet in the sky” in order to help them wage war. Which goes back to making the satellites seem evil. Maybe there will actually be some kind of war between the evil Skynet-type satellites and the good VALIS-style ones.

No satisfactory answer seems to exist. At the heart of this whole controversy around Sophia Stewart is a series of completely illogical data points. Which, in my opinion, is what makes it so very compelling.

This is illustrated very well, by the following quote on Claude Levi-Strauss:

How does myth think? Myth thinks by providing “a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction”. Since this is an impossible achievement, myth “grows spiral-wise until the intellectual impulse which has produced it is exhausted. Its growth is a continuous process, whereas its structure remains discontinuous.”

I tend to think personally that if/when there is a divine inbreaking into our reality, it’s not necessarily going to be constrained by rationality - rather it would be transrational, exploding what we know and understand. I’m not saying I necessarily believe all this satellite business, but it’s interesting to think about from that perspective.