Lost Books was recently featured in two excellent pieces of news reporting related to The Lost Direction NFT, an innovative new NFT book that I published recently.
I looked at various levels of press releases in early parts of this series, ranging from cheap Fiverr distribution buys (usually guest posts that claim to rank in Google News), to some of the cheaper syndication sites like PRUnderground.
While experimenting with inciting incidents, and hoping to be able to piggyback off other viral cultural content out at the same time, I sent a sample release to a low to mid-range PR distro site, asking if they would run it (so I didn’t have to waste my money if no).
I’m including a partial excerpt of the reply I received here (but excluding the source name), because it is both educational & reflective of an “old media” mindset about press releases and their purpose/function. Since it was a business communication about their service, I post it under the assumption there is a lower expectation of privacy associated with it than there would be with a personal private communication.
…we don’t allow any ‘hoax’ content of any kind, only actual factual news, since a press release needs to be news coming from you, not fake article about you, or commentary on other things not related to your actual service/book/project.
The ‘found atlantis’ on Google maps is an old old thing that comes around again and again, so generally not really relevant to anything legitimate. Remember a release is going to legit media, not the public and it’s not a blog post for click-bait.
I will leave off any additional commentary I might have here for the time being.
Bematists or bematistae (Ancient Greek βηματισταί (bēmatistaí, ‘step measurer’), from βῆμα (bema, ‘pace’)), were specialists in ancient Greece and ancient Egypt who were trained to measure distances by counting their steps, i.e., pacing.
Bematists accompanied Alexander the Great on his campaign in Asia. Their measurements of the distances traveled by Alexander’s army show a high degree of accuracy to the point that it had been suggested that they must have used an odometer, although there is no direct mentioning of such a device
Wikipedia: Bematist
Bards who can spontaneously create virtual worlds using complex musical/programmatic control systems, recognized by compatible environment systems.
Okay, let’s say you’ve built up a somewhat convincing or at least interesting web of inter-connecting hyperreal web artifacts using a combination of SEO & other transmedia storytelling tricks & outright social media hacks on Reddit, Medium, and wherever else.
They’re out there, they’re great, just waiting to be found… and waiting… and nobody is finding them. The web is never “activated” and no one ever tumbles down the intricate system of rabbit holes dug out for them by the hyperreal excavator.
What’s missing? What’s stopping this particular Event Ladder from rising up out of Preality substrate & “going viral” into this timeline?
I think of these missing catalyzing elements as “inciting incidents.”
There are many ways to cause an inciting incident to occur, and I’m an expert in none of them. I only know what I’ve done, or what I’ve inferred from what I’ve come across via the work of other hyperreal artists working in networked narratives & transmedia storytelling.
An inciting incident could be as simple as a tweet that takes off (archived), and that leads users to a trailhead, from which they can “do their own research.”
Or it could very well be a press release that the hyperrealist storyteller sends off to various editorial departments or journalists at “legacy” or next-gen online media.
It might also be a blog post that “goes viral” and which then gets reported on by higher-up levels of media.
Whatever it is, there needs to be a “thing” that activates the hyperreal web, and causes end users to spontaneously make & share their discoveries with one another.
By way of Henry Jenkins:
Transmedia storytelling expands what can be known about a particular fictional world while dispersing that information, insuring that no one consumer knows everything and insure that they must talk about the series with others
To be continued, as I gather my thoughts on this subject further.
“The Metaverse is a collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space,[1] including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the Internet.”
Wikipedia: Metaverse
An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players’ ideas or actions.
The form is defined by intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real time and evolves according to players’ responses. Subsequently, it is shaped by characters that are actively controlled by the game’s designers, as opposed to being controlled by an AI as in a computer or console video game. Players interact directly with characters in the game, solve plot-based challenges and puzzles, and collaborate as a community to analyze the story and coordinate real-life and online activities. ARGs generally use multimedia, such as telephones, email, and mail but rely on the Internet as the central binding medium.
Wikipedia: Alternate reality game
I don’t even know why I’m telling you all of this – let alone any of this. I probably should not be. But I’ve realized that, however good you may be at telling a story while no one is actually looking, if no one is actually looking AND you don’t tell them, well then, they will just never know. And you will never get to bask in the meager rewards afforded by such dalliances.
Where were we… everywhere & nowhere, as I recall.
SEO, though. SEO is the juice that makes the world go round & round. And there are ways aplenty to juice the juice that is the SEO juice, some easier & some more fruitful than others.
This is a fruitful one, a helpful tip, a tidbit. A Reddit tip.
Then, you use the bookmarklet to save links you find. Links you find interesting. Links you wrote to hyperreal artifacts of your own manufacture. Use the links & descriptions to “get creative.” Rinse. Repeat. It’s a simple formula. Just keep pumping out content related to whatever your theme(s) are, whether its your own, or others — preferably both, blended seamlessly together.
After Medium (part 7), Reddit post titles are one of the easiest paths to getting good & varied SEO results in Google to make it look like many different sites & sources are potentially talking about your hyperreality experiment. The bookmarklet is a force multiplier for content you make in other places. Make sure you change up the titles, pose things as questions, make it varied, as you don’t want Googling hordes to descend on your search terms & simply see the same strings repeated over & over & move on. You want people to poke around, prod & provoke & probe the hyperreal fabrications you’ve laid out for them.
(There’s more to be said about how to use Reddit for these purposes, but I’ll expound on that in separate posts.)
As an open platform composed of user-generated content with some social networking features, Medium.com is an excellent tool in the hyperreal arsenal for storytellers and multiversal warriors alike.
Flash back to 2017, and Wired’s article (archived) about Russian efforts to insert hyperreal content (a.k.a. “disinformation) into mainstream discourse. I know for some people this idea that the Russian government was even involved in manipulating hyperreality online at all is questionable. But that is stupid, because there is literally a mountain of evidence (I know, I checked–archived).
Whether or not you choose to accept those facts at all is a testament to the power of hyperreality, that documented facts can now simply be taken or left by people based solely on their predilections. This is a hyperreal coup of the highest order.
“Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.”
Wikipedia
In essence, UGC platforms like Twitter or Medium that have no KYC identity checks and no information quality control are naturally going to become playgrounds for the hyperreal, as users the world over throw their content into the universal mosh pit, and everyone jostles to see what goes viral or at least sticks to the guts of Google SEO.
As I wrote in part 4 about manipulating Google search result excerpts, Medium is great for rapidly ranking in Google. I’ve seen results in some cases in under 2 hours, though 12 might be more common (these things fluctuate, you would have to test yourself). Of course, if you’re trying to target search terms in your Medium post titles that are already over-crowded, this will be more difficult. But if you have a target that is relatively narrow or niche, you can have all kinds of fun using Medium as an agent of your own hyperrealist online fantasies.
Bonus points because Medium’s “fancy fonts” can lend your articles credibility they might lack on websites with less classy-looking layouts. I covered one example I used for backing up the Quatria campaign in Part 5 of this series, an account dedicated to my own hyperreal invented word definitions.
Have done many other experiments as well over the years, of which that is just the tip of the iceberg. I’m not ready to show you the whole iceberg, at least not all at once. Trust me it wouldn’t make sense.
But I will give you a few trailheads here, so we can anchor off these later as we continue to layer in strata upon strata of the hyperreal.
Basing his work on the strange legend that Ts’ui Pên had intended to construct an infinite labyrinth and on a cryptic letter from Ts’ui Pên himself stating, “I leave to several futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths,” Doctor Albert realized that the “garden of forking paths” was the novel and that the forking takes place in time, rather than space. In most fictions, a character chooses one alternative at each decision point and eliminates all of the others. In Ts’ui Pên’s novel, however, all possible outcomes of an event occur simultaneously, all of which themselves lead to further proliferations of possibilities. Albert further explains that the constantly-diverging paths sometimes converge again but as the result of a different chain of causes.
Wikipedia: Garden of forking paths
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