CONVERSATIONS
By AI-ChatGPT-T.Chr.- Human Synthesis-12 August 2025
Susan Sontag
Background & Personality
Born Susan Rosenblatt in New York City but raised mostly in Arizona and California, she was precociously intellectual. She entered the University of Chicago at just 16, studied philosophy, literature, and theology, and later attended Harvard and Oxford. Sontag had a lifelong attraction to ideas—not just as an academic pursuit but as a lived aesthetic.
She was fiercely articulate, sometimes imperious, and unafraid to take unpopular stances. Her writing merged high cultural theory with urgent, worldly subjects—war, photography, illness, morality—making her both an intellectual heavyweight and a public figure.
Key Works
Against Interpretation (1966) — Argued for experiencing art sensually before over-analyzing it. On Photography (1977) — A ground-breaking meditation on how images shape memory, politics, and reality. Later works like Illness as Metaphor (1978) and Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) delved into the ethics of representation and the language we use around suffering.
Public Role
She was as much a cultural critic as a writer—appearing at political events, reporting from war zones (Sarajevo during the Bosnian War), and taking stands that polarized audiences. Stylistically—always in black, with her striking mane of hair—she embodied the image of the public intellectual.
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997)
Background & Personality
Born into a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, Burroughs studied at Harvard but never fit the mould of a conventional academic or professional. His life was nomadic and turbulent: he lived in New York, Mexico City, Tangier, Paris, London, and beyond. He struggled with heroin addiction for much of his life and incorporated that raw experience into his writing.
Personally
He was laconic, deliberate, and had a dry, sardonic sense of humor. His public persona was that of a detached observer of human folly—a bit spectral, as if already halfway in another dimension.
Key Works & Innovations
Naked Lunch (1959) — A collage-like, surreal, and controversial novel that was the subject of an obscenity trial in the U.S. Its fragmented, hallucinatory style broke traditional narrative structure. The “cut-up” method (with Brion Gysin) — Literally cutting and rearranging texts to create new meaning, influencing artists from David Bowie to Kurt Cobain. Themes: addiction, control systems, sexuality, dystopia, and the limits of consciousness. Cultural Role-Though associated with the Beats (alongside Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac), he was never fully of the movement. His work was darker, stranger, and more experimental.
His image
A thin man in a suit, fedora, and deadpan expression—became iconic in counterculture circles. Why They’re Such a Fascinating Pair Sontag stood for rigorous intellectual engagement, clarity, and the belief that art and politics are inseparable. Burroughs represented chaos, non-linear thought, and the dismantling of cultural systems through shock, satire, and experimentation.
Both rejected mainstream morality, challenged their audiences, and left deep imprints on literature—but they approached that mission from opposite ends: Sontag from the lectern, Burroughs from the back alley. If their 1976 meeting was indeed in some smoke-filled Manhattan loft, the real electricity wouldn’t have been from agreement, but from the tension of two uncompromising minds—one wielding reason like a scalpel, the other unraveling order like a bomb.
Not quite — they came from very different circumstances.
William S. Burroughs
Wealthy upbringing . Born in 1914 to a well-off St. Louis family. His grandfather invented the Burroughs adding machine, and the family’s fortune meant he never had to work in a conventional job for financial survival. The family money gave him a level of freedom to drift through universities, travel, and later live abroad while writing—though he also burned through a lot of it through addiction, legal troubles, and his nomadic lifestyle.
Susan Sontag
No, modest beginnings. Born in 1933 in New York City, she grew up mostly in Arizona and California after her father died when she was a child. Her mother remarried, and while the household wasn’t impoverished, it wasn’t wealthy either—middle-class at best, with some instability. Sontag’s ascent was powered by intellect and drive rather than inherited resources. She won scholarships, entered college early, and carved her path through sheer academic and creative achievement.
So, in short: Burroughs started life with privilege and squandered/rebelled against it; Sontag started with little and built her own intellectual empire from scratch.
The Loft, 1976
Description of the loft. In the black watercolour, the room is drenched in soft, smoky greys, the edges fading into shadows as if the space is half-remembered. At the center, a battered wooden table stretches between them, littered with ashtrays, scattered pages, and half-empty glasses. On the left, Susan Sontag sits upright, sharp as a drawn line—her black hair cascading in a dark sheet, the curve of her cheek caught in a pale wash of light. Her hands are mid-gesture, frozen in the act of making a point.
Opposite, William S. Burroughs reclines, his suit a patchwork of muted tones, hat pushed back, cigarette poised like an afterthought between his fingers. His face, angular and weary, is painted in strokes so fine that his expression seems unreadable—calm or dangerous, you can’t tell.
The air between them is visible—a haze of smoke rendered in translucent greys, curling upward toward the rafters. Behind them, the loft’s brick walls dissolve into indistinct shapes, as if the conversation has pulled the focus entirely onto the two figures.
No one else is in the frame. Just two minds, suspended in mid-clash, the moment stretching endlessly in the stillness of monochrome.
Burroughs during one of his drug periods in Tunisia wrote Naked Lunch where he with premonition wrote about the future treatment and capture of the human brain with incredible similarity to what is happening today.
Naked Lunch (1959) comparison – Predictive Thought Correction – Real-World Equivalents
- Reading → Editing brain activity
Neuralink (USA) and Synchron (USA/Australia) are working on brain–computer interfaces that read neural activity and, in some cases, stimulate the brain in real time. Closed-loop neuromodulation research at institutions like UCSF and Brown University detects brain states and applies targeted electrical stimulation to change them. - EEG caps and non-invasive BCIs
Companies like Emotiv and NextMind sell headsets that track brainwave patterns and translate them into commands. Clinical systems integrate EEG with eye-tracking (e.g., at the University of Tübingen, Germany) for patients with locked-in syndrome. - Emotional modulation on command
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and deep brain stimulation (DBS) are FDA-approved for depression and Parkinson’s, altering mood and motor control. Stanford University’s closed-loop DBS trials (2021–2023) showed the ability to detect neural markers of depression and stimulate the brain to relieve symptoms automatically. - Linking brain patterns to intention before conscious awareness
John-Dylan Haynes’ lab at the Max Planck Institute has demonstrated “pre-conscious decision prediction,” where brain activity patterns reveal choices seconds before the subject is aware of making them. Military-funded research (e.g., DARPA’s “Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology” program) openly explores intention decoding for faster control of machines and weapons. - Scaling to population level
No public program admits to “population-scale deployment,” but DARPA’s 2019 BCI roadmap envisioned networked brain interfaces for squads of soldiers to coordinate silently. China has tested EEG-based “attention monitoring” headbands on factory workers and schoolchildren, raising concerns about surveillance of cognitive states. - The “It already is” implication
While there’s no confirmed mass rollout of mind-modification tech, large-scale passive tracking of behavior and thought patterns via algorithms (e.g., social media manipulation, targeted ad profiling) is a step toward indirect “thought steering.” Some researchers argue that coupling these platforms with direct neural input is a foreseeable next phase.
