Good evening, Penguin,

In 1980, I stumbled on human zoos in my boss’s library which included his massive personal archives (documents, drawings, illustrations, photos, newspaper clippings, books, articles etc.).

My shock was visible, and Herb spent a considerable amount of time sharing the history of our discipline (exhibition design). In our first hours together, the seriousness of our work settled into me, and never left.

If not for Herb, I would have been wealthy, even famous. Oh, how fun it is to imagine myself oblivious again, blithely forging a career without woe or care for its impact. Alas, that would never come to pass. Once blithe oblivion is gone, it is gone forever.

Over the years, I continued to research human zoos in libraries and archives all across the country (where I oversaw the installations of my projects). In time I realized I was looking for the wrong thing. Instead of the human zoos themselves, the real story was the “intellectual” environments that had produced them.

Researching those intellectual environments turned my world inside out, upside down and backwards. As things turn out, walking upside down and backwards on the outside of the world is far safer, than walking right side up and rightwards, on the inside of the world.

As we struggle, fight, argue and try to understand the internet and all its “applications” we are missing the real story. The “intellectual” environments that produced these technological wonders, is the source of our dismay, our confusions and our ever-mounting symptoms of mental disturbances and moral decay. Until we rip these “intellectual” environments apart, dissect them and examine them under microscopes, they will continue to manufacture our slowly disintegrating world. And time is running out.

Penguin, you wrote a piece, titled “Is Now The Time To Tell A White Slaves Story?” and I asked you about zoos. They are inexorably linked, but I’m still not sure you see that.

The internet, slavery and racism are the products of the “intellectual environment” that produced them. Shutting down the internet, cannot end propaganda. Ending slavery, could not end racism. Racism is an entirely separate product line. To destroy racism, we must destroy the “intellectual environment” that continues to produce, market, sells and make a “killing” off it.

In my mind, we must turn our attention to intellectuals.

What I call the “intellectual environment” is, in fact, a factory. These thought factories, commonly known today as “ThinkTanks” and Ivy League Universities produce thought and that is all they produce. Factory employees, who call themselves “thought leaders” work to plant their thoughts in the heads of everyone on earth – including the rich, the powerful and the elected. Today, the millionaire and billionaire factory owners are in a fierce competition and spending billions to shove their thoughts straight into our heads, through the internet, film, music, textbooks, literature, theatre, newspapers, research centers, and libraries.

24 hours a day, the news media channels think tank thoughts straight into the heads of hundreds of millions of people while they are relaxing on their couches, watching tv and eating popcorn.

The media has connected my brain to Charles’s brain (both King Charles and Charles Koch who is dead and still connected).

We are still in danger of “thinking” like them. Through the centuries, we’ve succumbed repeatedly to their thoughts. As their thoughts became our thoughts, we acted on their thoughts and repeated their thoughts to our children.

As I said, we are running out of time. If you should decide to investigate human zoos further, I suggest you focus on the “intellectual environment” that produced them. If you do, bundle up, or it will chill your penguin bones.