Anti-Environments are not anti-environmental

Media environments, particularly the most current, may be invisible via envelopment, or paralysing with info-overload (anesthesia as form of in-visibling). Mcluhan stressed the importance of anti-environments to balance out one's sense of place. Anti-environments are not anti-environmental but a means of understanding connections. Latent are conduits that lead to other spaces, if at once accessible and restricted. They are beyond allotted intervals of error (the errors needed to inform operation of various control mechanisms). Beyond known realities. Like the unforseen things glimpsed in H.P. Lovecraft's weird fiction. Generally, Lovecraft's tales included recluse adventurers tinkering at the limits, uncovering irrational or non-euclidean modes or reality. Everywhere around us are revealed interdimensional access points to forbidden knowledge. Between life and death, this world and that.

"Everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset." (The Call of Cthulhu)

One could argue that Lovecraft's schtick was unfurling ever maddening cosmic horror to all those who were too curious. Still, there's a trace of symmetry in the sort of curiosity and courage needed to operate under the daunting global networks of control that gird our non-fictional world. Foucault described heterotopias as counter-sites to the impracticalities of Utopia/Dystopia. Heterotopias are anti-environments, counter-sites waiting in the margins of error. Previously imperceptible swathes of knowledge are revealed in accessing and/or being restricted. Heterotopias and Anti-Environments are simultaneously real and imaginary, mythic and mundane, dangerous and compelling.