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.
Deep in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, a group of disgraced scientists and counter culturists gathered to do tests on a mysterious object called The Egg. And they would make a startling discovery: a way to travel to parallel worlds. This includes a parallel Earth devoid of humans. Realizing governments and others would want this technology, the scientist decided to move to this other world mostly permanently. Or at least, that’s what the books Incunabula: A Catalog of Rare Books, Manuscripts & Curiosa, Conspiracy Theory, Frontier Science & Alternative Worlds says, and a book wouldn’t lie, would it? Okay, maybe they would. See, Ong’s Hat was one of the first internet fiction projects, an ARG before we even got close to creating their term. Created by Joseph Matheny, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Nick Herbert, and James Koehnline in the 1980s, the fist version of the story would appear in Edge Detector magazine. But after this, the group would spread this story in numerous ways, from leaving photocopied versions of the original article in coffee shops, to mail-order zines and even in-character radio show appearances. However, with the birth of the internet the project would only grow in scope. Not only did it allow the creators to tell the story in new ways via message boards, fake blogs, and even making emails and homepages for the story’s various characters. It also led to the project taking on a mind of its own, to the point that Ong’s Hat became a frequent talking point of real conspiracy theorists and it wasn’t uncommon to see web users cite the books as factual rather than fictional. Thus, after having people literally camping out on his lawn demanding secrets to inter-dimensional travel, Joseph Matheny ended the project and came clean about the whole thing in 2001. Ong’s Hat is a crucial part of internet history as not only is it a fun art project, the fact that the story, despite its weirdness, was able to embed itself in actual conspiracy lore foreshadowed our modern misinformation problem, years before anyone would talk about it. It is enough to make you want to move to the alternative-reality pine barrens. Deep in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, a group of disgraced scientists and counterculturalists gathered around a mysterious object called The Egg, and discovered a way to travel to parallel worlds, including a version of Earth entirely devoid of humans. Realizing what governments would do if they found out, they quietly relocated there. More or less permanently. Or at least, that’s what the book Incunabula: A Catalog of Rare Books, Manuscripts & Curiosa says. And a book wouldn’t lie. Well. Ong’s Hat is one of the earliest ARGs ever made. created by Joseph Matheny, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Nick Herbert, and James Koehnline, in the 1980s, long before anyone had a word for what they were doing. The first version of the story appeared in a magazine called Edge Detector. From there it spread through photocopied articles left in coffee shops, mail-order zines, and radio appearances where the creators would pretend to be people who were involved with, or saw the fallout of the things that happened at Ong’s Hat. Naturally, when the internet became a thing, the creators quickly leaned into this new medium, seeding the story on message boards, as well as making numerous fake blogs and webpages. But the audience that found it wasn’t treating it as fiction. Ong’s Hat quickly embedded itself in actual conspiracy theory circles. People cited Incunabula and the other Ong’s Hat books as actual facts, and started to include the Things quickly spiraled out of hand, to the point that Joseph Matheny had people literally camping on his lawn demanding the secrets to interdimensional travel. He called it quits in 2001, coming out and explaining the history of the project and making it clear the whole thing was just art, nothing more. #arg#internethistory#internetmysteries#weirdhistory#conspiracytiktok
That a group of renegade Princeton physicists and mystics, working in secret at Ong’s Hat, New Jersey, used chaos-theory and consciousness research to build a machine (the “Egg,” and later the “Gate”) that opened a doorway to parallel dimensions, that they escaped into one of those worlds, and that the story was suppressed rather than invented.
