Season 06 Episode 28: The Nous Fear (Pt.1 of 3)

Although an abstraction, Tilhard to Chardin imagined this thinking layer, as he called it, much like the atmosphere and the biosphere, to be as integral and real as any material aspect of the planet. Borrowing a term from the pioneering biochemist Vladimir Vanatsky, Tilhard de Chardin called this space the new sphere,

taken from the Greek NEOs, meaning mind. He believed that through this organized web of thought, as he termed it, our disparate cultural knowledge and perspectives would become so diffused and universally understood that they would effectively converge into one

singular point of human awareness. In late October nineteen sixty nine in the University of California's computer lab, twenty one year old UCLA student and programmer Charlie Kleine sat on the phone in front of a keyboard connected to a computer so large it would barely fit inside a garage. Shortly before nine thirty PM, Kline pressed the letter L

on the keyboard and waited. A moment later, the voice of fellow programmer Bill Duval came down the line from his base at the Stamford Research Institute, letting Cline know that the L had been received. Next, Kline typed the letter O. After a moment's pause, Bill came back on the line to confirm that it too had been received. The following attempt to send another letter resulted in a complete system meltdown, but by then the test had already

been a success. Klein and Duval were working on a project set up by the US Department of Defenses Advanced Research Projects Agency, also known as DARPER. Their aim was to help build a digital communication network that could accommodate more than two computer terminals at one time and transmit information across large distances. They'd been attempting to send the word loggin before the computer crashed as it tried to

process the third letter, like a biblical proclamation. The resultant low became the first communication across what would later be known as Arpernett, the foundation for what we know to day as the Internet. It shouldn't surprise us that, like many of our most advanced technologies, the Internet began as a military project. However, it is fairly certain that the Pentagon had not envisaged the opening up of their secretive

systems of communication to the wider world. So although we have them to thank or blame for developing the structural underpinnings of the Net, the spirit that gave rise to the Internet as we broadly understand it today is more closely related to the utopian ideals of Pierre Tilhard de Chardin emerging from the fertile corridors of the European strategy

for particle physics is cern Laboratory. The Worldwide Web was first proposed by Tim berners Lee as an open system whereby we could all store and share information freely and globally without interference. On the sixth of August nineteen ninety one, berners Lee launched the world's first website at HTTP. Colon forward slash info, dot cern Dota, which explained the concept of the web as an open invitation to all, even providing instructions on how you might get started on building

your own website. Teel hard to Chardin was criticized for his erroneous reading of evolution as a process which leads inevitably to a singular point of higher intelligence. It is a common misconception evolution is simply a process in which the cumulative mutations of a species will result in an organism that is better suited to its environment. There's no

guarantee that it would be intellectually smarter than any previous iterations. Nonetheless, it is hard not to see something of teel hard to Chardin's so called thinking layer, at least in the functionality of the Internet, this networked repository of data from which we now store, share, and receive so much of our information, our personal lives and minds becoming increasingly merged and atomized into this space, all our records, experiences, and

even thoughts backed up on clouds, shared and available for all to see. Furthermore, with the rise of web two point o, a term coined by web pioneer Dale Doughty, that describes platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit, which facilitate user generated content. It has never been so easy to share that information. Never before, as a species have we been so interconnected and exposed to each other.

In an echo of the new sphere concept, tech writer Tim O'Reilly, in his two thousand and five article what is Web two point o published on O'Riley dot com, describes the leading Web two pointoo companies as those that embrace the power of the web to harness collective intelligence.

Visionary utopian thinking, as media scholar Ethan Zuckerman notes in his twenty fifteen book Digital Cosmopolitans, drawing on the work of historian Langdon Winner, is often catalyzed by the emergence of major new technologies, and never more so than when those technologies promise to make the world more connected. As Zuckerman states, today, the Internet stands alone as the fundamental component at the heart of most of our visions for

a world made better through connection. Such cyber utopianism can be seen in mission statements like that of Facebook, an archetypal platform of Web two point zero, which read simply bring people closer together. Much in the manner of the new sphere. The cyber utopian sees the Internet as the medium through which we will globally combine us one no longer restricted by status, class, power, wealth, and geography. As Heather brooknotes in her twenty twelve book, The Revolution will

be digitized. It will be a promised land, they believe, where all of our oppressive and arbitrary social barriers will finally be transcended. However, as our lives become ever more entangled with this digital realm, some have been left fearing that, rather than providing us with the tools of our next evolutionary step forward, the Internet is in fact ensnaring us in an evolutionary colder sac, a trap from which we

might struggle to ever escape. Amplified by the accelerated nature of technological development, many have become unnerved at the way the tools of the Internet seem to be undermining the old, more stable ways, as some see it, fearing that the familiar, supposedly solid world they once knew is disintegrating before their eyes, ushering in a much less certain one, governed by processes that are out of our control and beyond the comprehension of most It is as if from that laboratory at

the University of California back in nineteen sixty nine, when that first digital message was sent, a portal to an abyss was opened, and from its depth the siren call of a hopeless future emerged that has been growing steadily louder ever since. That feeling of uncertainty is the true horror of the unknown, the fear of chaos, and a fear of all the monsters that we are convinced a lurking in the shadows, just waiting for that chaos to descend.

In two thousand and nine, something monstrous did materialize on the Internet that might yet prove our worst fears about where this new world is taking us. He is the personification of the unknown, a messenger of the medium, at once new but also strangely archaically familiar. Some say he first appeared one night centuries ago in Germany's Black Forest of Baden Wurtemburg. Others that he lives in a mansion deep in the heart of Chiquamigan Nikolay National Forest in Wisconsin.

He is unnaturally tall, dressed in a dark suit with distended limbs, and in some cases has grotesque cathonic tentacles emanating from his back. His face is blank, but some claim it appears differently depending on the observer. It isn't clear exactly what he wants, but the triggering a profound nausea and nose bleeds when he is near suggests that whatever it is, it isn't good. Some also believe it is only possible to see him in the brief moment

before he takes your life. His name is the slender Man, and one way or another he is coming for us. Awe you're listening to Unexplained and I'm Richard McClean smith. The first evidence of slender Man came in the form of two deeply unsettling, low resolution black and white photographs posted to a forum thread on the website Something Awful. Something Awful was created in nineteen ninety nine by Richard Kyanka,

better known by his screen name low Tax. It began life as little more than a website for Kyanka to share his comedic and irreverent take on the world, primarily through the lens of Internet cultures and video games. As the site grew in popularity, its forums became a breeding ground for irreverent, in jokey Internet humor. Long before Twitter

and Facebook. Something Awful forum users, self described as goons, pioneered, for want of a better word, the care stick and mocking humor that has come to define much of online culture, regardless of whether you find the material on Something Awful funny or not. The website, whose motto is the Internet Makes You Stupid, has been described by Daily dot Com as one of the single most important websites in the

history of Internet humor. Given or that and its relatively archaic status in the life of the Internet, it feels a somewhat fitting Locusts for the birth of slender Man. The first picture claiming to show him appeared on June tenth, two thousand and nine. The photograph seemed, at first glance to depict twelve anguished children walking towards an unknown destination. The odd, disturbed look on their faces was unsettling enough, but what was really creepy was the wraith like figure

standing behind them. Dressed in a smart black suit with strangely distended limbs and a faceless head. It appeared to be shepherding the children on their way like some kind of ghoulish pied piper. The caption below declared we didn't want to go, We didn't want to kill them, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time. The photo was marked nineteen eighty

three and accredited to photographer unknown, presumed dead. The second photo to appear, which again seemed fairly innocuous at first, showed a young girl climbing to the top of a slide in a small park in Sterling, Australia, while other children play happily around her. An authentic looking watermark for the City of Sterling Libraries Local Studies collection is printed

in the corner. Looking closer, however, you'll find a mysterious shape, shrouded in darkness, standing under the trees at the back of the shot. Once more, the figure who appears to be keeping a watchful eye on the children is oddly elongated and dressed in a black suit. But here there was something else, a set of cephalopodden arms reaching out from behind his back. This time the caption came with a little more detail, one of two recovered photographs from

the Sterling City Library Blaze. It said, notable for being taken day which fourteen children vanished, and for what is referred to as the slender Man. Deformities cited as film defects by officials. Fire at library occurred one week later. Actual photograph confiscated as evidence photographer Mary Thomas missing since

June thirteenth, nineteen eighty six. As much as they may have looked like unearthed pieces of a peculiar lost history, the pictures were in fact the work of regular Something Awful forum user Victor search birth name Eric Knudsen, who'd posted them as part of a paranormal pictures contest set up by another user. The caption for the second photo marked the first direct mention of the terrifying that was

soon to become a global phenomenon. For the next few days, Surge continued to post further images and allusions to the entity, from hysterical police reports to an archive newspaper article about a young boy from Whichita who'd apparently gone missing in two thousand and four. Within hours, Surge's creation started to draw attention from other forum users, and before long the

legend was spreading. Other Something Awful members suggested modifications and refinements to the physiognomy, while others made changes themselves or chimed in with their own apparent experiences and found pieces of evidence. Throughout all of this, something extraordinary was taking place, although this creature had only come into existence a few

days previously. Through the repetity of proliferation enabled by the Internet, as more people began to add to the mythology with every passing day, it was as if it were being inserted into pockets of history stretching back centuries. One particularly striking image, posted a few days after the original, showed a bizarre sixteenth century woodcutting print titled de Ritter that was claimed to have been unearthed at a Haltzburg castle in eighteen eighty three, Purportedly made by famed artist of

the day, Hans Frekenburg. The picture appeared to show a night doing battle against the skeleton of a mysterious creature with distended limbs not too dissimilar to those of slender Man. Over the next few months, the slender Man universe expanded way beyond the Something Awful forums onto various social media and content sharing networks in all digital mediums, from photoshopped images,

text to videos, and online games. Today, the breadth of the tentacle like reach of the slender Man mythos has left many, including Slender's original creator, Eric Nulsen, and academics like folkloreist Jeffrey Talbot, suggesting that the slender universe could reasonably be considered the first genuine example of digital folklore, a myth that has been realized almost entirely through the

utility of the Internet. Certainly, if you ask anyone who's heard of slender Man to explain what he is, they would describe something much like any other folk legend, his origins vague and timeless, the story mutating as it is passed from person to person, both wildly or subtly, but always with the central figure remaining consistent, much like tales of the Slavic witch Baba Yaga, who sometimes flies in the pestle and mortar other times on a broom. One moment,

she's benign, while the next monstrously wicked. To think of her today, it might feel, like slender Man, that she's always been there, lurking in the darkest peripheries of our nightmares. Many academics have bought at the idea of something so recently conceived as slender Man being considered folklore, despite their apparent timelessness, Even the most ancient tales had an origin,

but traditionally this ageless sense of time is significant. A term first thought have been coined by writer William Toms in eighteen forty six. Folklore, as the Oxford English Dictionary has it, is broadly considered to encompass the quote traditional beliefs, customs, and stories of a community passed through the generations by

word of mouth. Such stories can be waited in old superstitions, serving to impart useful life lessons, or merely the passing on of rituals, customs, and traditions shared through a common ancestry. As the term denotes, it is quintessentially about the folk the people, but more specifically about the passing down of the shared histories of specific cultures through oral transmission. In the traditional mode of thinking, folklore is passed down vertically

through generations. How then, might the myth of slender Man, conceived as recently as two thousand and nine, possibly constitute such a thing. Two academics from the University of Southern Denmark proposed an extraordinary theory that, although not specific to the slender Man, mythos goes some way I think to explaining how he might consider it a true example of folklore in the digital age. Their idea has profound, unsettling,

and for some truly terrifying implications. In May two thousand and seven, Thomas Pettit, associate professor of English at the University of Southern Denmark, presented a paper at an MIT media conference titled before the Gudenburg Parenthesis Elizabethan American Compatibilities. Pettit's paper marked the first formal outing for the Gutemburg parenthesis,

a controversial and radical understanding of the digital age. The phrase, coined by Pettit's colleague, professor Lars ole Sauerberg, encapsulates the idea that the five hundred year period following the invention of Johannes Gutenberg's printing press in the fifteenth century was not the beginning of a change in the way that we share information, but was in fact an anomalous blip.

Inherent in this neat phrase is the idea that, if we imagine the history of communication as a sentence, everything leading up to the invention of the printing press comes before the parenthesis. The five hundred years or so following its invention is the interruption within the parenthesis, and anything since the emergence of the Internet comes after, in effect

continuing the historical sentence from before. Many believe that Johannes Guttemberg's ingenious invention, which provided the means to mass produce and share information, marks the true beginning of the information age, of which the Internet is simply the latest phase of

its evolution. What Thomas Pettit and Lars O. A. Soerberg recognized, however, was how the Internet, albeit in a far more rapid and advanced manner, through its various mediums the mechanisms through which information is shared on it, has not been a progression into the future, but rather has returned us to

a more medieval and unstable past. In effect, according to the Guttemberg parenthesis theory, rather than providing us with the place we confined the true fixed truth of everything, the digital age has in fact returned us to the fluid, mutable way in which information used to be shared before mass print and the supremacy of fixed authoritative texts reigned supreme. As Thomas Pettitt noted in his two thousand and seven talk, prior to the printing press, most knowledge was shared orally.

It was, as he said, sampled remixed, borrowed, reshaped, appropriated, and continually recontextualized the worthy authorial texts of religious institutions, and for a select minority access to authoritative academic texts. But broadly speaking, for most people, from the plays and the songs we wrote to the sharing of news and life events, knowledge was communal, with no fixed origin, and

subject to severe mutation. Its provenance was always questionable. The expansion of the slender Man mythos was fueled in part by our copy and paste meme sharing culture, which epitomizes the way in which information is often shared online, in particular through the phenomena of creepy pasta, which first emerged in the early two thousands. Creepy pasta is the sharing and proliferation of short form horror stories, usually in the tone of an urban legend, written as if true events

are being recounted. Creepy pasta can take the form of anything from prose to multipart video, but serves only one purpose to freak you out. One famous example is a video titled the Scariest Picture on the Internet Brackets Reel, uploaded to YouTube sometime around twenty ten. The video depicts a painting of a young woman with long brown hair and azure blue eyes that was purportedly drawn and then uploaded by a teenage girl from Japan shortly before she

committed suicide. Viewers of the video, which runs at just over five minutes, are warned that quote it is hard for a person to stare into the girl's eyes for longer than five minutes. There are reports that some people have taken their own lives after doing so through websites such as creepy pasta dot com, created in two thousand and eight and later creepy Pasta dot Wikia. Users are encouraged to make their own contributions, create mashups of other stories,

or extend the universe of someone else's original idea. Creepy Pastor therefore thrives on the fluidity of information, unofficiated, unverified, and passed around from person to person in the manner of the oral tradition, where the story is free to mutate with no discernible author. Key to the fluid transference of information in the digital age has been the dominance of web two point er platforms that facilitate user generated content.

Platforms such as TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have for many been a liberating tool. Many argue that it allows thoughts and ideas to be heard, regardless of financial means or the necessity of having to satisfy by the gatekeepers of old, be they publishing companies, record companies, TV executives, or the stringent ethical codes of conduct which might otherwise

have dictated what content can be seen or heard. Some, however, have voiced concern over the way in which Web two point zero, rather than broadening our awareness and understanding of the world, is in fact making us more stupid and

diluting culture. In the Cult of the amateur, how today's Internet is killing our culture, Internet critic Andrew Keane argues that rather than enabling us to pool our intelligence, the explosion of amateur user generated content has given us a world in which sketchy Wikipedia entries are given prominence over the perceived erudite authority of the Britannica Encyclopedia, which, as Keene says, is leading us to superficial observations of the

world around us rather than deep analysis. What the Gutenberg parenthesis theory suggests, and what Keen is alluding to, is that prior to the rise of the Internet, as noted by media critic Deek Starkman in his twenty twelve paper The Future Is Medieval. Information came with a degree of permanence and containment, which is to say that, regardless of how undemocratic and elitist it was, information was set, meaning the receiver of it could hold it to account and

interrogate its veracity. The printed words that stemmed from Gutenberg's printing press, as Starkman puts it, were unalterable and thus given a new author authority, whether it was deserved or not, that oral communication didn't have in its own way, though

not nearly as much as the Internet. The printing press was also hugely democratizing and egalitarian, to fueling literacy and empowering people by allowing for a wider access to the words that had previously been controlled by the authorities of the day. For the first time, many people who hadn't had a voice before could spread their ideas and be heard.

This in turn allowed for more solid foundations from which to build our collective knowledge, which, as Starkman also suggests, led directly to the Enlightenment, the foundations for democracy, and a rapid explosion of scientific advancement, as well as allowing for challenges to the authority of the religious and feudal

author oxyes of the period. A post Guttenberg parenthesis world, however, some believe we are now living in, is one in which, through the manner in which information is exchanged on the Internet, the authoritative, immutable word has been completely untethered. It is a return to a world in which there is virtually no way of confirming a story's origin or, in other words,

it's truth. It is a world in which the so called stable, reassuring authority of the old established orders are being undermined and replaced by gut feeling and entrenched tribalism. A place where for some people things might feel a little less certain than they did before. A world, you might say, in which the specter of the Slender Man can be felt pushing in from the shadows, and if you listen now through the silence, you might just hear

him coming. You've been listening to Unexplained, Season six, episode twenty eight. The new Sphere, Part one of three, Part two will be released next Friday, February tenth. If you enjoy Unexplained and would like to help support us, you can now do so via patroon to receive access to add three episodes. Just go to patron dot com Forward Slash Unexplained Pod to sign up. Unexplained, the book and audio book, featuring stories that have never before been featured

on the show, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes, and Noble Waterstones, among other bookstores. All elements of Unexplained, including the show's music, are produced by me Richard McClain smith. Please subscribe and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an

explanation of your own you'd like to share. You can reach us online at Unexplained podcast dot com or Twitter at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at Facebook dot com. Forward Slash Unexplained Podcast