Series: Hyperreality Page 2 of 12

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.

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.

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.

I’ve seen this behavior before, particularly on Quora, where people feel the need to vigorously correct others about perceived factual inaccuracies. It seems to drive people mad at times. As the meme goes, “Someone is wrong on the internet…”

I have ambivalent and complex feelings about this phenomenon. On the one hand, I understand it and it’s only natural. And it is good to help people gain more accurate and useful knowledge. On the other, as a weapon against the hyperreal, I suspect it does not have the powerful negating impact which its practitioners probably believe that it does.

Some recent examples observed in the wild, via Reddit thread (archived).

This person wants others to be aware that you can’t “fix your life” by going through an alien portal in Antarctica. What I want to know is, how can they be so sure? Have they ever tried?

Part of me also wonders: if someone became fixated on the notion they *could* fix their life that way, and went through all the effort to *go* to Antarctica and find out for themselves, might that very effort in fact change their lives? Assuming they could find some kind of portal, of course. Or perhaps, maybe even or especially if they ended up failing to find one! At least they will have tried. I urge the curious to go find the Portal in Antarctica & test, test, test! It won’t be the portal that changes your life – it will be you!

I’ve also seen people apparently becoming frustrated with non-standard or counter-factual assessments of reality in YouTube comments, such as on this video.

Fortunately, there is a balancing force in the universe that seems to indicate for every Guardian of the Real out there, there is an equal and opposite Guardian of the Hyperreal who will themselves react and counter in appropriate circumstances. It may not be a 1-to-1 ratio, but they seem to appear where they are needed!

A similarly frustrated response can be seen here:

What’s interesting to me in these two cases is that, of all the potential inaccuracies which might be corrected or explored in the two linked videos, in both instances, commenters jumped on the more basic ones. In doing so, they left the more convoluted aspects of the stories presented more or less completely unexamined. Perhaps they feel that in attempting to debunk the low level items, they make the rest non-credible. Maybe they are right, but my instinct at least is that they are not. It’s also entirely possible that their counter-engagement actually drives further conversation & potentially up-ranks the videos.

Another quick example from Reddit:

Okay, I won’t pretend I’ve never taken someone to task on the internet for saying something that was misleading, incomplete, or which I found to be just plain wrong. So, I totally get the impulse here. In fact, I don’t discount the probability I myself will do it again at some point as well… Perhaps I will think twice about it now though. But probably not!

This definition of counterfactual definitness in quantum mechanics makes so much sense in terms of the hyperreal that I just wanted to bookmark it with its own post:

“…the ability to speak “meaningfully” of the definiteness of the results of measurements that have not been performed (i.e., the ability to assume the existence of objects, and properties of objects, even when they have not been measured).”

Applied in the context of the hyperreal, it might be something like: the ability to accept certain things as given or tentatively “real” within the context of a domain or world, etc. such that you can use them as building blocks for further development or understanding. That’s a very rough take, but there’s something here for sure…

One classic trick when working in the hyperreal online is to post your target content onto the social platform of your choice.

Then use archive.is, archive.org, or any similar public archive site to make an archived copy of that post.

Then delete the content from the platform you originally posted it on, and tell people on social media that it was “censored” by the platform, and link them to the archived version.

An easy but effective trick. Plus has the added bonus that if your content actually does get blocked, you have a backup of it.

When running a hyperreality campaign online, I’ve found that one of the key things to do is to diversify your posting strategy. You should use not only a combination of diverse platforms & multiple user accounts on each (if possible), but you should also include different grades of platforms. That is, use both sites that require full accounts with logins and passwords, but also use sites that don’t require any credentials at all to post.

Some common ones are:

• Write.as
• Telegra.ph
• Txt.fyi
• Justpaste.it

There are many others if you do Google searches, and some have greater & less longevity both as platforms, and for the content itself. Meaning content posted may be ephemeral (short-lived) or permanent, at least as long as the platform stays up.

Generally speaking, these sites have little or no filtering or other oversight. Perhaps unless they receive a legal take-down notice or similar official complaint. While this may be good or bad depending on the content, generally speaking in terms of the hyperreal it is somewhat of a boon to creators.

The only drawback of course is that Google tends to not rank the content of such sites very highly in search results. So long as you’re aware of that, they can still be very useful tools for seeing hyperreal contents. One of the best uses I’ve found has been for cross-linking. So if you have something posted on a more mainstream site requiring an account, you can link out from that somewhat legit looking account to apparently corroborating information posted on these other shittier sites. It certainly won’t pass the sniff test of determined OSINT investigators, but most people are not concerned enough to follow links or uncover sources in the first place. So it’s really not a big deal.

This technique pairs well with false backdating, spoofed sources, cross-posting into Reddit, and making archived copies. I’ve also used it pretty extensively with text spinner variations of target content, which I’ll post about some time soon (some of these examples below used text spinners, FYI).

Here are some example posts & archived versions from various hyperreality campaigns:

• Authorities Say There Is No Risk of Human Infection By A.I. Virus (archive)
• Officials Are Denying Risk of Human Infection By Artificial Intelligence Virus (Archive)
• Influential AI Researchers Smash Rumsman Record (archive)
• Timecraft Spotted Over Area Shopping Centres, Order Summoned (archive)
• Timecraft Intrusions Over Area Shopping Plazas, Order Summoned (archive)
• Tencent to pay $500M for stake in Influent (archive)
• 84 True Facts About Ancient Quatria (archive)

Oh and if you make use of Justpaste.it, you can also generate a PDF version of any page you create, which I did here with the 84 True Facts About Ancient Quatria PDF (archive).

I’ve never actually read any Nin (though I listened to some NIN in high-school), but this quote popped out at me once again for the hundredth time, as being entirely related to the hyperreal [found this time via]:

We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.

– Anaïs Nin

I’ve been watching & interacting with the phenomenon of conspiracy videos lately (some example selections here). This is kind of a hyperreal stew when you get right down to it. Or maybe like the offal from a slaughterhouse might be more accurate. It’s messy. It’s chaotic. There are bits and bobs of disembodied parts of stories floating around in it. Many of them putrid or toxic…

Conspiracy as an online subculture is of course remarkable, despite & because of all that. So much is wrapped up in it. A lot of really dark & bad, to be sure, but the kernel of something if not always good in its outcomes, then at least true as a human need is in it somewhere too. The desire to seek and ask questions, and seriously look for real answers. That’s actually noble at its core, and can be harnessed in more or less productive and impactful directions as a human or groups of humans. However, in actual practice, the art of online conspiracy artifacts is usually just this sort of weird & sometimes dumb thing of unqualified assertions and free association that people get into.

Which, don’t get me wrong is sometimes fun. I’m a writer & an artist. I love to free associate and see where things take me. To go along for the ride, as a maybe what if type thing.

How much of ourselves we put into it, I guess is the thing. How does belief even work? When we talk about projection, what is it we’re projecting? Conspiracy theories and fantasy are cut from the same cloth. Conspiracy is just like a very stilted and predictable subgenre of fantasy whose narrative mutates really rapidly as it gets networked.

It’s shitty, but it’s our modern folklore, to some extent. To ignore it or dismiss it out of hand, without gaining a real understanding of the dynamics or the needs that drive it would be a mistake for me as a writer operating already on the fringes of reality. I make my own projections into all of this. Have my own reactions and reads, my own deep dark weird needs and dreams that drive it all. I don’t know what to say about it all, and it really doesn’t matter. Because no one will read this far who isn’t carrying with them already their own assumptions, assertions, and associations about all of this. And most likely they made up their mind already.

One thing I’ve noticed at the platform level is viewer comments on YouTube within the same conspiracy subculture, and on TikTok are extremely different. YT commenters seem far more often out for blood. Hyper-critical and weirdly demanding at times, and eager to see through the veil as presented to them. Or so they seem to see it. TT commenters seem more like they want to see the veil. They are more along for the participation mystique aspect of things as presented, perhaps partly due to the rapid fire pace of browsing very short videos. At the same time, I feel less frequently that YT commenters are “playing along” in a sort of suspension of disbelief (rather than active belief) relative to TT viewers who very much do seem to be playing along. Probably due both to content & format differences, along with user base and other factors. Who knows.

Anyway, my emotional reaction, my gut feeling, after having seen a lot of activity on both platforms is that people online like & need to criticize each other. I am no different, I’m sure. One tried & true way to get engagement in a hyperreality campaign is to take the road of triggering the critics. Getting people to speak up, to correct. Directed provocation is as old as the hills. Counter-engagement is still engagement. Traffic is traffic.

To sum it all up, I guess I would say that the art of crafting a hyperreal conspiracy is, you want to leave plenty of room for the audience to speculate, to criticize, to question, to believe, to feel wonder, etc. To leave room for the broadband spectrum of human experience that makes up this hyperwebbed interworld we all live in now. And the algorithms will bring it to the people. And the people will basically do the rest. They will project any and everything into it, any which way they can. They will free associate, make assumptions, and state unqualified assertions as facts. Rinse repeat as a fractal. This is simply how online communication functions. You read something. You “like” it, you share it, you pose with it for status, etc. People reinforce each others likes. And that starts to count for more than anything. As it should be. As it shouldn’t be. And everything in between. In the future there are few answers, and also immeasurably more. We just have to ask the right questions, and undertake the right quality of investigations. Bring of ourselves everything we can, bring it to light, and examine that too. The conspiracy isn’t just outside. It is within. The hyperreal continuum.