I collect spores, molds, and fungus.

Who you gonna call?

Egon Spengler was never my favourite Ghostbuster as a kid, it was Peter Veckman.

And yet it is Egon’s line when Janine asks about his hobbies, that has stayed with me.

Janine Melnitz: You're very handy, I can tell. I bet you like to read a lot, too.

Dr. Egon Spengler: Print is dead.

Janine Melnitz: Oh, that's very fascinating to me. I read a lot myself. Some people think I'm too intellectual but I think it's a fabulous way to spend your spare time. I also play racquetball. Do you have any hobbies?

Dr. Egon Spengler: I collect spores, moulds, and fungus.

Spoiler alert. The next paragraph discusses a major plot point from Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021).

Harold Ramis, the actor who wrote Ghostbusters along with Dan Ackroyd (Dr Ray Stanz) Egon, died in 2014. In Afterlife, the clue is in the title, he comes back to help his descendants bust some ghosts.

The way this has been done is extremely convincing¹. This long-promised technology is now here, and beyond its use in Hollywood and the film industry, there are more nefarious applications. We must be ever more cautious about what we see on a screen and discern between truth and fiction. Between news and propaganda.

I don’t know how to do this. There have been times when I have been taken in by Deep Fakes. On the other hand, some are very obvious.

Whichever way we look at it, using digital clones is becoming more common.² But it is the blurring of the line and for what ends these videos are being created that is the crucial and often unknown factor.

In 2022, 82% of global internet traffic came from video.³

Seeing things via a screen creates a disconnect because we are so accustomed to that type of media being fictional = It’s not us that this is happening to, its them. The person or people in the images don’t seem real. We are so accustomed to consuming entertainment through a screen that whenever something real is happening, there is disbelief, disconnect, and a feeling of powerlessness.

We are saturated with content. I might compare it to a tidal wave and we humans are expected to determine whether it is real or not. How dangerous is it to disbelieve what we are seeing, how dangerous is it to believe it? And ultimately who do we trust to tell us the truth?

I’ll end with a quote from a book I finished recently. It is about the micro of our own bodies that we inhabit, and the macro of us as part of nature itself. In essence, whatever happens to one of us, is happening to us all.

Of course we cannot experiment on a human lung, and so we use the cells of fungi. Fungi are eukaryotic, which means that their DNA is similar in its form and processes to our own, and to those of all mammals. This is why it is difficult to treat fungal diseases: their bodies are too much like human bodies. When we try to define an animal, if we go to this micro- micro-level, it can be confusing. You look very much like a fungus! And so in the context of an experiment, when I speak of a fungus I am speaking of a human, OK?

The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard.⁴

I think Egon would love this quote, don’t you?

Photo by Andre Moura

1. https://www.mpcfilm.com/en/news/how-mpc-brought-back-the-late-harold-ramis-in-ghostbusters-afterlife/

2. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/06/chinese-influencers-using-ai-digital-clones-of-themselves-to-pump-out-content

3. https://thesocialshepherd.com/blog/video-marketing-statistics

4. https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/the-second-body