Bootstraps

With weird online claims, it doesn't take much to get the ball rolling

A recent post, about the viral claim that a mass-produced painting of a crying child had caused people’s houses to catch fire, spurred a conversation with a friend about the nature of the internet.

As useful as it is—many of us spend a significant fraction of our waking hours connected to it—it has its downsides. I had made the point in the “crying child” post that stuff like this would never gain the traction, spread, and longevity that it does without the complicity of popular media (at the point of this particular claim, my finger was pointed at print media, more specifically the British tabloid The Sun). My friend pointed out that the global reach and nearly instantaneous transmission time of the internet makes the problem dramatically worse, something that I could hardly argue with. The web is a fantastic conduit for knowledge, an amazing repository for factual information—and a dreadfully efficient facilitator for the distribution of bullshit.

My friend, though, went one step further.

“The way the internet is set up,” he said, “it not only acts as a conductor for bullshit, but it actually creates it. There’s a self-referential quality to the internet that makes the generation of loony nonsense inevitable. It’s why I wasn’t surprised when generative A.I. started ‘hallucinating’—basically, making shit up that sounded so plausible that people believed it, like the A.I. mushroom foraging guide that recommended eating Amanita mushrooms with your t-bone steak. It takes almost nothing to get the ball rolling, and pretty soon you’ve got some serious craziness to deal with. Then, once it starts, how do you get people to stop believing? Their belief expands the craziness, and around and around it goes. It’s the snowball effect on steroids.”

I asked him if he could give me some examples, and he said he’d send me some links.

The result sent me down a rabbit hole, which I’ll share a bit of with you here.

One of the most persistent and long-lived examples of this phenomenon is one I had never heard of before. It’s called Markovian Parallax Denigrate, after the subject line of hundreds of messages posted to Usenet all the way back in 1996. The message texts were a random list of words, such as the following real example:

jitterbugging McKinley Abe break Newtonian inferring caw update Cohen air collaborate rue sportswriting rococo invocate tousle shadflower Debby Stirling pathogenesis escritoire adventitious novo ITT most chairperson Dwight Hertzog different pinpoint dunk McKinley pendant firelight Uranus episodic medicine ditty craggy flogging variac brotherhood Webb impromptu file countenance inheritance cohesion refrigerate morphine napkin inland Janeiro nameable yearbook hark

Well, it’s a seemingly random list. *raises one eyebrow in a meaningful manner* Even though most people believe that the MPD messages are nonsense and were either produced by an early experimental text generator or chatbot, or else someone trying to troll everyone and get their fifteen minutes of fame, there are people who are still trying to “decode” the messages and figure out what they “really mean.” After everyone got all stirred up, it seemed so damned anticlimactic to say it was just a list of words. Interestingly, no one has ever claimed responsibility; an article on The Daily Dot called it “the internet’s oldest and weirdest mystery.”

Then there’s Cicada 3301, a set of seven puzzles posted between 2012 and 2014 on the weird, conspiracy-ish site 4chan. The first two puzzles were solved; the others remain unsolved (and there are still people working on them today). The stated purpose of the puzzles was to “recruit intelligent individuals,” but for whom or what? Various people suggested the source of the puzzles (and therefore the recruiting agency) could be the CIA, the NSA, M16, Mossad, a free-agent mercenary group, or a “Masonic conspiracy.”

One person who successfully solved the first puzzle was invited to join a private forum, where he was questioned about his knowledge of cryptography and his attitudes toward online freedom and censorship. He played along for a while, but eventually got spooked and quit the forum—and later inquiries found that the site itself had been deleted.

To this day no one knows for sure who Cicada 3301 is or what the website’s purpose was—but there’s still an online community of people discussing it, over a decade later.

The best example of something on the internet taking on a life of its own, though, is “This Man.” Back in 2008, a website popped up called “Ever Dreamed Of This Man?” It was accompanied by a sketch:

Along with the image was a story about a “well-known New York City psychiatrist” whose patient reported seeing “This Man” repeatedly in his dreams; when a second patient came to him with a similar tale, the psychiatrist forwarded the sketch to colleagues, and found that a number of them had patients with recurring dreams about the guy—some neutral, some sexual, some violent. In some dreams he was the dreamer’s father; in others, a teacher; in many of them, he was a stranger. The one common thread was his appearance—and the extreme vividness with which people recalled him.

Well, responses started pouring in. Thousands of people reported dreaming about him, and posted lengthy descriptions of what they’d experienced. How could this be? How could people from all over the world suddenly find themselves dreaming about the same man? Who was the mysterious man, and what could it mean that he was appearing in dreaming minds worldwide?

As you might already be suspecting, the whole tale had been a lie right from the get-go. There was no “well-known New York City psychiatrist,” and the entire set-up of the story was a hoax. It had all been the brainchild of an Italian online marketer named Andrea Natella to get clicks on his website, and to drum up notoriety for a marketing campaign.

The responses, however, were very real. Even when Natella more or less got caught at his game and confessed in 2008, people kept saying they’d dreamed about This Man, and No he’s real really he is. Natella was interviewed by Vice in 2015, and described the whole thing—how he’d gotten the idea, how he’d been found out, and so on—and despite that, he is still receiving hundreds of emails and letters every week from people who claim to have dreamed about This Man—or, weirder still, to have seen him in real life. A few claim to know who he actually is. (And we reach weirdvana with an Indian guru named Arud Kannan Ayya, who contacted Natella to tell him that he is This Man and that’s why he has magical guru powers.)

So even shouting “HEY Y’ALL I ADMIT IT I MADE THE WHOLE THING UP” isn’t enough to put the quietus on this phenomenon. Once it starts up, it’s like these online claims lift themselves by their own bootstraps, and at that point they’re unstoppable. And I have to admit that my friend has a point; without the internet, it’s hard to imagine how any of these could have gotten the traction they did.

In any case, we’re pretty well stuck with the internet, for good or bad, at least until the next Miyake Event comes along and blows the whole thing to smithereens. Myself, I’ll put up with stuff like This Man, Cicada 3301, and Markovian Parallax Denigrate rather than having to deal with the aftermath of that.