Category: Other Page 100 of 177

This is an add-on to Time & The Hyperreal (part 6B), which was very half-baked.

One way that OSINT investigators use to establish timelines in social media is via official timestamps on content as it was published onto social media networks.

Now, in the world of the hyperreal, normal people don’t think like OSINT investigators, so such concerns are largely irrelevant to the hyperreal artist. It should be considered instead as just another value to be manipulated.

Spreading networked/transmedia content out across platforms & in time is always a good idea though, since it will make the content look more authentic if its distribution is not all clustered on one day or site.

That said, there are other simple ways to play havoc with time-stamps.

One great one is actually WordPress. As part of the publishing process, I can put any time-stamp onto it that I want, whether its in the past or the future. I can also even pay someone to guest post my content on other sites (via Fiverr, etc) and have them manipulate the time-stamps as well.

A skilled OSINT investigator might be able to catch you up by doing a date-range search for your content within the alleged time-stamp period. But not finding the content doesn’t necessarily equal proof that it did not indeed exist at that time. It may just have not been indexed, or its URL could have changed for various reasons.

But again, normal people don’t care. They don’t operate like that. They click like & retweet, and that’s it. So you might spend a lot of effort trying to manipulate data points that don’t amount to the difference between an inciting incident & a dud.

A short path to manipulating time as a perceived value is simply to just POST THE TIME-STAMP YOU WANT IN THE PUBLISHED CONTENT. In a sense, press releases already do this. You’ll see the location, source, and supposed date of the event or of publication. So you can literally do the same thing when you post hyperreal artifacts: invent the time & date that suits your narrative best, and embed it into the body of the artifact. Done.

Won’t necessarily bear inspection if someone challenges the time-stamp, but 1) probably won’t need to, and 2) you could always say the discrepancy is because of when the content was re-published to the given platform (versus its [non-existant] source having published it at a different time-stamp).

Here’s an example artifact with an invented date published onto a no-password UGC site called write.as (archived). Interestingly, this website doesn’t even seem to publicly expose the “true” time-stamp anywhere at all on this page (perhaps its in the source code somewhere?). So the invented one will likely be all most people ever concern themselves with (if they even notice at all)

This example actually uses quite a few different techniques though, so I will have to come back to it later & expand on all of them.

This will be a short entry, but a potentially important one.

While authors in the US have to buy ISBN numbers to publish books (or get one via a company they publish through, like Amazon, etc.) in Canada, Canadian authors get ISBNs distributed to them for free through an agency called Collections Canada.

What’s interesting here is that not only can you get an ISBN (or many) for free from the government, enabling you to publish books & other media “officially” (whatever that means now, I’m not sure), but that you can do so without even having your mailing address verified.

Yes, you have to enter an address and presumably it has to be located within Canada (I didn’t test if you can enter ones from outside), but at no point are you sent a piece of mail at the address to prove you live/work there. So, in practice, the system is wide open to abuse. Perhaps the risk is deemed relatively low in relation to the cost of having to send out mailers with verification codes, but it’s there nonetheless.

So basically, once you have your book published with you free ISBN and your unverified and potentially false & untraceable address, you can then also pretty much publish whatever you want on self-publishing sites, and then sell them “officially” through global distribution. Provided nobody reports the content to the printer, and that it doesn’t obviously break whatever their content guidelines are, we live in an age where ANYONE CAN SAY ANYTHING IN A BOOK.

Perhaps we already lived in that age, but at one time the barriers to entry were much higher, even for self-publishing or “vanity” presses as they were once more commonly called. There were much higher costs involved (Lulu.com for example lets you get set-up for free, and only takes a cut on sales), and for conventional publishing, there were editors, proof-readers, and people who would at least to some degree vet or approve content so that it at least fit within their brand or business.

Now it is just a hyperreal free-for-all.

So once you’ve published your book that can literally say anything, including counter-factual or hyperreal assertions, you can then use that as a reference during your more mutable online campaigns. People can even go and check the reference, and get a copy for themselves to examine.

Of course, the shorter path through the woods in all of this is just to invent arcane or difficult to find alleged “sources” and scatter references to them throughout your hyperrealist campaign. Most people won’t check your sources anyway and will just take it on faith that they exist, or it won’t matter to them in a hyperrealist sense whether they exist or not.