Acid West

by Joshua Wheeler

  Andrew Reinhard is the Arch Punks’ organizer and mouthpiece. By day he’s the director of publications for the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. By night he writes lo-fi anthems about punk archaeology that sound decidedly more alt-rock than punk and have names such as “Untenured” and “Miskatonic University Excavations at Innsmouth.” Though Reinhard himself is not punk in any sense that I’ve ever used the word, he has single-handedly bullied the filmmakers into letting his team participate in the dig, the result of a months-long social-media campaign that raucously questioned the crew’s ability to establish a useful methodology for the excavation and ensuing data collection. Until Reinhard chimed in, the plan seems to have been just to have a treasure hunt and not think too much about it. These guys, Zak Penn later tells me, are the only thing lending legitimacy to the whole fiasco.

  Richard Rothaus is the funny bone of the Arch Punks, a reformed academic archaeologist now in the private sector who says things like To expand on what you losers are saying … in such a jolly manner that no one would ever mistake his words for an insult. Bret Weber is a historian at the University of North Dakota who acts as a gofer for the Arch Punks. He’s a social worker and his temperament tends to level out the group when things get contentious.

  Raiford Guins is the motor of the Punks. He’s a videogame historian at Stony Brook University. He’s been researching and writing about this Atari dump for years, has videogame history tattooed all over his body and never sits still. He came to Alamogordo a few years back and tracked down a local named Ricky Jones, who claims to have busted into the dump as a teen and loaded a U-Haul full with Atari games—not just E.T. but also Asteroids and Centipede and Missile Command and a dozen others. Then young Ricky Jones drove west and sold his treasure in California flea markets for a handsome profit.

  The soul of the Arch Punks is Bill Caraher, a University of North Dakota archaeologist who first championed the application of a punk ethos to his field. His expertise is in Mediterranean archaeology but he laces his monologues about that and pretty much everything else with so many references to 1970s punk rock that it’s easy to tell where his heart lies. In Caraher I recognize a real distrust of The Man—in his eyes and shaggy beard and in the way he uses that phrase The Man when he gets worked up about the dire consequences of late capitalism.

  I loiter with the Arch Punks as the line drains and several hundred people snake toward the Pit. Zak Penn is fitted with a microphone and climbs onto the ramp of an equipment truck, where he announces the primary rule for the day: don’t go past the orange fence. This rule is in the official 106-page Waste Excavation Plan submitted to the State of New Mexico, but by the end of the day it will be broken, the fence will be ripped down by fans and tossed aside along with any sense that there had been any plan at all.

  Penn says, Let’s go, start it up! The crowd cheers as he jumps down from the equipment truck and points his hands in a bunch of different directions. A gaggle of media surround Penn and his crew, filming them as they film the excavator. Then a large portion of the crowd whips out their phones and records the media as the media record the documentary crew filming the guy in the excavator, who finally gets the monster roaring. As the teeth of the excavator’s bucket dig in, the Arch Punks snug their hard hats and velcro their safety vests and assume their positions inside the fence along the edge of the Pit, holding shovels or cameras or the Microsoft Surface tablets they’ve been asked to carry as a kind of native advertisement in the documentary. They look undeniably cinematic. I give in and snap a picture. The Arch Punks feel to me like a kind of proxy. They’re doing what I’ve always wanted to do, what any kid dreams of doing. They get to play around in the dirt and the trash. They even foster legitimacy by doing it.

  In the one dig of any consequence that I conducted in my youth—age nine—I attempted to build a swimming hole in my backyard. About three feet down I began finding things and the project transformed into an excavation. I grew up in an adobe house built by my granddaddy in the 1950s on the outskirts of Alamogordo. I’d heard him mention that, while digging the foundation and planting the pecan trees that circle the house, he’d discovered arrowheads and pottery and also that he wished he’d kept those artifacts because they might have been important. So I brought one of my discoveries from the swimming hole into the house and examined it thoroughly for days. The thing was oblong, five or six inches in length, and obviously deteriorated—the handle of a war hatchet maybe, or a whittled icon of an Apache god. I rehearsed how I would present my findings when the talk-show hosts came knocking, probably with an anecdote about my silly pool project and lots of historical facts and plenty of flourishes with my professorial wand stabbing in the direction of the artifact, which would be housed in glass: a bulletproof, climate-controlled case with the artifact glowing under soft museum-grade lights, the kind that perfectly illuminate every angle and cast no shadows. When I finally showed the artifact to Granddaddy, he asked to see exactly where in the yard I’d dug it up. I took him out to my shallow swimming hole, which I had by then filled with water. The excavation was complete and I’d been doing a fair amount of celebratory splashing around. He paced a bit, got his bearings, and then with not too big a grin said, This is the exact spot where I used to bury all the dog shit.

  I kept that fossilized turd around for quite a while, out of sheer stubbornness and a lingering sense of greed, like maybe one day it would turn into something of value and I’d have more than just an absurd story to tell. But that was the beginning of the end of my archaeological aspirations, a lesson that value is not a preordained consequence of things unearthed.

  * * *

  Eleven a.m. and the Arch Punks are elbow deep in trash. The excavator lifts out a bucketful and sets it aside and they go at it, Caraher and Reinhard with shovels, jolly old Rothaus with a tiny trowel, and Guins snapping pictures. Despite the best efforts of a water truck, 40 mph winds gust facefuls of landfill into the crowd. A layer of it cakes a family sitting in lawn chairs, chairs pulled right up to the orange fence like a sofa to a ginormous flatscreen, chairs that don’t support their obesity so their asses are actually resting on the ground. But they don’t move, don’t flinch in the windstorm, a monklike American stasis. A food truck rolls in to serve E.T.-themed sliders, and people try to eat the little burgers without parting their lips in order to keep the refuse from rushing in. Penn climbs up on the equipment truck to announce that nothing has been found. A guy in a hockey jersey says, Fuck this, and throws a tumbleweed into the Pit. The crowd thins. For a time the only entertainment is a little drone in the air, fighting madly against the wind to get an aerial shot of our eternal suffering. From up there it can no doubt pan from the Pit to the Earth Day celebration down the road and zoom even farther to our beleaguered shopping mall and its main attraction these days, the Shroud of Turin Exhibit & Museum.

  Among the lengthier entries in the Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology is one for the Shroud of Turin, the fourteen feet of bloodied cloth that holds the image of a crucified man, purportedly our Lord and Christ, Jesus of Nazareth. The shroud has been called the most studied artifact in the world, or the greatest hoax ever perpetrated. Hundreds of thousands of people pilgrimage to the Turin Cathedral in Italy each year to see the shroud in its bulletproof, climate-controlled case, glowing under soft museum-grade lights, the kind that perfectly illuminate every angle and cast no shadows. The roadside-attraction museum dedicated to the shroud is in our mall because back in the seventies a group of New Mexico scientists spearheaded the first and only Vatican-sanctioned scientific investigation into the shroud’s authenticity, the largest expedition ever formed to study a single artifact. Most of the investigators were physicists and thermodynamicists from the nuclear laboratory up at Los Alamos. They had a notion for a hobby that might balance their perpetuation of the Bomb with a little verification of the divine. They called this the Shroud of Turin Research Project. Or STURP, which is clearly not as cool a nickname as Arch Punks. But
STURP had a similarly motley team of scientists pursuing a passion project—the Passion project. After five straight days of round-the-clock analysis of the shroud in 1978 and several years of interpreting data, STURP concluded in 1981 that the shroud was the actual burial cloth of a man crucified in the manner of Jesus, that the image was not painted, and that they had no scientific explanation for how the image ended up on the cloth. Their lack of conclusions in the last matter conveniently left open the possibility for the miraculous, that resurrection light emanated from the corpse of our Lord and created the world’s first selfie. But subsequent radiocarbon testing has determined the shroud dates only to about the thirteenth century. Although, right now another team of scientists, this one from Italy, are researching the possibility that an earthquake in the year of our Lord 33 could have opened up a pit in Jerusalem and caused waves of neutron particles from deep in the earth to both imprint the image on the shroud and confuse our radiocarbon dating of it. But it’s unclear whether that finding would verify or debunk resurrection.

  The museum in our shopping mall contains a full-scale photographic model of the shroud, created by STURP, as well as all kinds of late-seventies gadgets used by the team—a 3-D spectrograph and interactive VP-8 Image Analyzer and all manner of rudimentary holograms—all vintage tech that would fit right in with our nerdgasm here at the Pit. And, of course, we’re conducting our E.T. excavation on the last day of Easter Week, a week for celebrating the shroud’s emptiness. As the Arch Punks get deeper into the dump, I think more about the shroud not because I worry our tomb will be empty but because I’m still looking for some way to understand the dig as more than a pop culture orgy, more than unearthing turds. When you encounter something seemingly meaningless, you can accept the numbness of it or ache for profundity. Whenever possible, I tend toward the ache. Wouldn’t it be something, I say to Naomi Kyle, a news anchor for Imagine Games Network, if E.T. and the Shroud of Turin are artifacts in the same vein? She frowns and declines to interview me about my shroud theories. She’s worn all black today and is busy brushing landfill off her pants to get camera ready and doesn’t buy my suggestion that filth is the original sepia filter and will make her Instagrams pop.

  Perhaps the most convincing scientific theory of the Shroud of Turin’s origin is that it is the world’s first photograph. This theory posits that some tinkerer in the Middle Ages figured out he could record the projections of a camera obscura. A camera obscura is created by passing light through a small opening in a dark room in order to project the image of an object from outside the room onto a wall inside the room. The rudiments of the camera obscura can be traced all the way back to Plato in the fourth century B.C.E. All this tinkerer in the Middle Ages would need to have done, the theory goes, is replace the inner wall of his camera obscura with a cloth soaked in a known and readily available light-sensitive mineral such as silver nitrate, then set up his crucified corpse or statue in the light and wait for the image to develop on the fourteen-foot stretch of cloth in his dark room. There would be no record of this breakthrough in photography because the tinkerer would have wanted everyone to believe the shroud was a thousand years old, was evidence of the Lord’s death and resurrection. I like this theory because it proves the hoax and adds a deeper level of intrigue, namely that we missed out on half a millennium of photography because it was a secret keeping people throwing alms at the shroud. There’s not much consensus around this theory but I like it because it means E.T. (the videogame) is maybe a descendent of the shroud, an artifact of our technological evolution, another warp in the transformation of our visual mediums that falls somewhere between the ancient camera obscura and the near-future virtual reality of Ready Player One.

  Well, alright.

  But even if they are in the same line of our technological evolution, these two artifacts have sort of oppositional existential value. The creation of the shroud is—perhaps—an early example of using cutting-edge technology (photography) to buttress Christian faith, to help us joyfully give existential concerns over to a deity we can never fully understand. Our excavation of E.T. is an example of using rudimentary technology (shovels) to revel in another relatively rudimentary technology (eight bits of Atari code) as a kind of solace in this potentially frightening age when our cutting-edge technology seems on the verge of being totally out of our control, seems on the verge of wresting from us, against our will, all existential concerns.

  I don’t mean to suggest that everyone around the Pit is worked up into a nervous fervor about the coming robot overlords. Most of the gamers probably welcome them, and the rest of us are just having fun. But these days our culture in general is undoubtedly more aware than ever of the possibility that our tech could turn on us or at least leave us in the dust. Ready Player One is a story along these lines, like The Matrix before it. But then also there are The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence and Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies and Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era—these are not sci-fi epics but nonfiction bestsellers by some of our most respected futurists. These books evidence a primary concern of our time, that in pursuing smarter and smarter technology, we are writing ourselves out of the future.

  Take, for instance, the much-ballyhooed experiments of the artificial intelligence company DeepMind, which last year created AI specifically to play Atari 2600 games such as Pong, Breakout, and Space Invaders. DeepMind says their AI “is able to master a diverse range of Atari 2600 games to superhuman level with only the raw pixels and score as inputs.” The DeepMind AI has no recourse to the games’ codes. DeepMind plays them just the way you or I would, by watching, but plays better than we could ever manage or even imagine. More than a few people, including the folks at Google who recently acquired DeepMind for over $500 million, are betting that this AI is laying the groundwork for a coming superintelligence—one that will not just play games but create them, create whole worlds for us, an AI with the ability to program and sustain Ready Player One–esque virtual realities indistinguishable from the real world so that, once we plug in, we’ll have a hard time wanting, or even knowing how, to leave—a deity-like technological power totally beyond our control. So the nostalgia that gathers us all here at the Pit is not only about a fuzzy feeling for pop culture from our youth but also about a real sense that in a recent time our technology was still quaint, unthreatening, and under control—plus the accompanying sense that that time is now almost over.

  Imagine if the Jews in the book of Exodus went digging for the molten calf destroyed by Moses at Mount Sinai right after he came down with the Ten Commandments. They know he’s soon going to come down that mountain a second time with a fresh set of ten commandments ready to proclaim that they can no longer make their own quaint little idols because now there is only one true and all-powerful god, but they’re digging up that molten calf anyway, not to learn anything but to remind themselves one last time of when they still had some control over creating their own gods, and choosing which ones to worship. Or, for a more secular analogy, we can go back to Plato in the fourth century B.C.E. and his allegory of the cave, where some of the rudiments of the camera obscura first showed up. Plato told a story of slaves chained from birth behind a wall, forced their whole lives to look only at shadows cast on the ceiling by the puppets of some sadists performing a show in the light of the cave’s fire. The slaves, chained at the neck and forced to look only at the shadows of the puppet show, would never know any reality other than the shadows and, even if removed from the cave, might reject all they found there in sunlit Technicolor base reality. Plato meant for this to be a lesson about how what we know, what we learn from birth, affects what we believe. These days the allegory of the cave seems a dead ringer for a warning about virtual reality, but like any good allegory, we can apply it to most things at hand. So the creation of the Shroud of Turin, assuming it is a photograph, was a way of convincing ourselves that the reality we’ve experienced fro
m birth is not the only one, that through Jesus we can wake up from the shadows and cast off our chains. The excavation of E.T., on the other hand, is a way of reminding ourselves that, so far as we know, we humans have always been the ones in charge of casting the shadows, and if we were ever slaves before them, it was only because we chose to lose ourselves in the entertainment, like that family in their monklike stasis with their asses resting on the ground just as close to the Pit as they can get. Here is our tomb of the Atari, the first of our technological entertainments that we enjoyed being quite literally tethered to (via the handheld game controller). But maybe also our party around the Pit is a prayer that we will forever continue to control casting the shadows, that our machines will never take over the puppet show without our knowledge, that we can bury and spurn and then dig up and worship our nonthreatening, nonsuperintelligent technology whenever the hell we please. We are forever, the sadists and the slaves, in this shadow puppet show! is a chant I don’t try too hard to get anyone around the Pit chanting with me, even though I think that assertion unlocks much of the anxiety that underlies all the frantic nostalgia of our nerdgasm.

  * * *

  Sometime around noon, when the wind and heat and general dumpiness have run off almost all of the morning’s crowd, a flurry of activity in the Pit culminates with Penn holding up a dirty but intact E.T. videogame cartridge. The moment is altogether anticlimactic, maybe because the crowd is now over half media, maybe because nobody makes a big speech about the Shroud of Turin and fending off robot overlords, and maybe because, just after the discovery, I’m standing a hundred yards away with Joe Lewandowski. No cameras are around us. We do not high-five. Lewandowski has been working on this project longer than anyone else. He was there as a garbage contractor just after the games were dumped and has put in more hours than anyone else working to locate the games and sort out the Waste Excavation Plan. Everyone agrees that he’s the only reason any of this was possible. Lewandowski’s son, Will, has driven here in his animal-control truck, which, parked by the Pit as it is, makes it seem we’re expecting to capture a few live aliens. Will stands by me, just across the fence from his dad, as we watch Penn model the excavated game cartridge for Naomi Kyle in her now spotless black outfit.