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Another Epiphany
Jan. 6th, 2014 01:04 amNPR featured a three-years-running mystery of the Internet that, remarkably, I had never heard anything about. Apparently in 2012 and 2013 an unknown organization posted on January 3 or 4 a number of puzzles to solve, with the understanding that anyone who decrypted the first message would be led to sites with still more stuff to decipher. Those who made it to the final destination were the sort of people these mysterious folks were looking for.
Two years running, perhaps a dozen people have made it to the website in question, which both years has been shut down as soon as these few first arrivals have made their presence known. So far in 2014, the various puzzles put up have all been hoaxes.
None of the people who made it to the end of the rainbow (as it were) have been contacted by the organization. They didn’t say they were recruiting candidates, now did they? if the paraphrase on NPR was correct. If in fact the whole story wasn't a fiction, or a legend of the internet era, like the rumor forty-five years ago that listeners who could decipher the puzzles on the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour album would be taken to the Beatles' secret island.
I suppose these days people think of the internet mystery as a parody of a Dan Brown novel, but of course some of us are more reminded of George Gurdjieff’s Meetings With Remarkable Men, or all those pre-Dan Brown fictions in which the trail leads to something as stunning and extraordinary as Gurdjieff’s (also imaginary) World Brotherhood and Sarmoung.
I suppose that in spite of a fondness in adolescence for the (then almost impossible to acquire) fictions of H. P. Lovecraft, I was shaped by the lessons of Blow-Up and The Magus to suppose that the trail might lead nowhere...that at a certain point the tracks had been covered, and the multiple possibilities thereafter so overlaid with false clues leading nowhere and real ones that led to preplanned dead ends, that connecting all the dots would result in nothing but an attractive but meaningless network of connected dots.
I do wonder if the point wasn’t to make the seeker become an expert in connecting just those particular dots, resulting in information and technical skills that would be useful in other endeavors. The folderol, mountebankery and mystification would then have been part of a teaching exercise, akin to the traditional story of the ne’er-do-well sons whose father told them his treasure was buried in a large field. The sons dug up every corner of it after the father’s death, and having found nothing decided that since the ground was all plowed up, they might as well plant something and make a little money for their wasted effort. The next year they did the same thing on the assumption that maybe they just hadn’t dug deep enough the year before, and after the second year of farming they decided they were doing well enough at it that they might as well keep planting crops. This would-be edifying tale neglects the likelihood that the sons would be incapable of bringing a crop successfully to harvest, but there is a story that addresses that difficulty, too.
There is more than one Great Game, and probably more ludibria than we have ever suspected.
Two years running, perhaps a dozen people have made it to the website in question, which both years has been shut down as soon as these few first arrivals have made their presence known. So far in 2014, the various puzzles put up have all been hoaxes.
None of the people who made it to the end of the rainbow (as it were) have been contacted by the organization. They didn’t say they were recruiting candidates, now did they? if the paraphrase on NPR was correct. If in fact the whole story wasn't a fiction, or a legend of the internet era, like the rumor forty-five years ago that listeners who could decipher the puzzles on the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour album would be taken to the Beatles' secret island.
I suppose these days people think of the internet mystery as a parody of a Dan Brown novel, but of course some of us are more reminded of George Gurdjieff’s Meetings With Remarkable Men, or all those pre-Dan Brown fictions in which the trail leads to something as stunning and extraordinary as Gurdjieff’s (also imaginary) World Brotherhood and Sarmoung.
I suppose that in spite of a fondness in adolescence for the (then almost impossible to acquire) fictions of H. P. Lovecraft, I was shaped by the lessons of Blow-Up and The Magus to suppose that the trail might lead nowhere...that at a certain point the tracks had been covered, and the multiple possibilities thereafter so overlaid with false clues leading nowhere and real ones that led to preplanned dead ends, that connecting all the dots would result in nothing but an attractive but meaningless network of connected dots.
I do wonder if the point wasn’t to make the seeker become an expert in connecting just those particular dots, resulting in information and technical skills that would be useful in other endeavors. The folderol, mountebankery and mystification would then have been part of a teaching exercise, akin to the traditional story of the ne’er-do-well sons whose father told them his treasure was buried in a large field. The sons dug up every corner of it after the father’s death, and having found nothing decided that since the ground was all plowed up, they might as well plant something and make a little money for their wasted effort. The next year they did the same thing on the assumption that maybe they just hadn’t dug deep enough the year before, and after the second year of farming they decided they were doing well enough at it that they might as well keep planting crops. This would-be edifying tale neglects the likelihood that the sons would be incapable of bringing a crop successfully to harvest, but there is a story that addresses that difficulty, too.
There is more than one Great Game, and probably more ludibria than we have ever suspected.
