This completes the COMPLEAT Broadcast series. It will remain here on this Substack so you may revisit it or share it. If you’d like a print copy of the book section of this work, it is available through https://compleat.store
Synthesizing research from Kendall Haven (DARPA’s Narrative Networks project), Carl Jung’s theory of synchronicity, Jeffrey Kripal’s concept of the Super Story, and Joseph Matheny’s transmedia ARG experiment (Ong’s Hat), Jose explored how human attention is hardwired by story structure. A powerful narrative environment organizes human perception, expectation, and search behavior so effectively that meaningful coincidences and anomalous events become active, trajectory-shaping realities for the participant.
They’re just never gonna let this one go, are they? I guess that was kinda the point. 😜
(Hint: Some things are more fun if left a mystery)
Queued up at the relevant point in the video, but feel free to watch the entire thing.
Their mission: retrieve a 1975 IBM 5100 computer with a hidden function that almost nobody outside a handful of retired engineers knew existed.
Over 4 months, the user made 151 posts under the name John Titor.
He described the time machine down to serial components. Posted photographs and what appeared to be pages from an operations manual. Cited real theoretical physics..
He answered hundreds of questions with a patience and consistency that pointed away from a hoax.
Then on March 24th, 2001, he typed one final sentence and disappeared. Nobody using that name ever posted again.
4 years later, a journalist tracked down one of the original IBM 5100 engineers.
Bob Dubke confirmed the hidden function was real!
It was his personal contribution to the machine and IBM suppressed it.
