You're listening to Unexplained, Season six, episode twenty eight The new Sphere, Part two of three. In February twenty eighteen, thirteen Russian nationals were indicted by the FBI for their alleged role as part of widespread Russian governmental interference in the twenty sixteen United States presidential election. The defendants were charged with creating fake social media accounts in which they posed as US citizens to ferment distrust about the candidates
and generally undermine the democratic process. The indictment pointed the finger squarely at companies such as Facebook and Twitter. Both are routinely accused of allowing fake news to spread, giving credibility to false narratives through a complicated system of algorithms that enables some stories to be promoted above others on account of how popular they are, regardless of whether they
are true or not. In March twenty seventeen, Google, the world's most widely used search engine, was also accused of spreading fake news by promoting false narratives through its featured snippets in search function, which gives short answers to common queries through the company's speaker device, Google Home. If users of this device back in twenty sixteen, had asked is
President Barack Obama planning a coup? For example, Google Home would have replied, according to details exposed in Western Center for Journalism's exclusive video, not only could Obama be in bed with the communist Chinese, but Obama may in fact be planning a communist coup de etat at the end of his term in twenty sixteen. This was, of course a complete fabrication and a little ironic considering what later
came to pass. On January sixth, twenty twenty one, concerned by this trend, ex Google engineer Giome Shallow built a program to investigate bias in YouTube content. Talking to Paul Lewis for The Guardian newspaper in twenty eighteen, Shallow concluded that quote fiction is outperforming reality, and the channel's algorithmic preferences frequently pushed videos that are divisive, sensational, and conspiratorial. One such example was what happened when the name David
Hogg was typed into the search engine. Hog was a student at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School when, in the afternoon of February fourteenth, twenty eighteen, then nineteen year old Nicholas Cruz walked into the main building and shot dead fourteen children and three staff members. Hog had not only been caught up in the shooting and knew some of the victims, he'd also become a vocal advocate for gun
control legislation in the wake of the horrific incident. According to many of the videos that popped up on YouTube search results, however, Hog was in fact a completely made up person who was being played by an actor. When a YouTube spokesperson responded to Guillaume Shallow's findings, they rightly made the point that the results were not confirmation of a bias in the system's algorithm, but merely a reflection
of viewers interest. If you then engaged with these videos, the results of your subsequent searches are then skewed toward videos displaying similar content. But perhaps this is even worse. What this reveals is that frequently when we engage with the online space, the world we find staring back at us is not one that is necessarily real, but simply
one that mimics or justifies our world view. Our instinct to forge social groups with like minded people only helps to service this further, resulting in the online experience often being little more than an echo chamber that distorts or outright hides other points of view. It becomes a place where what we suratively think to be right will trump
what is actually true almost every time. In response to this, throughout the world, governments are being urged to clamp down on platforms that, through their propensity to spread misinformation, are deemed detrimental to the health of democratic societies. Yet by doing this, governments would be imposing the same real world restrictions on the online space that many have come to
resent in the offline world. It is a clash of two polarizing ideas of what the Internet should be, either something that is open source, unregulated, and libertarian, versus something which is more controlled and stable but less egalitarian, governed by elite and I don't necessarily use that term pejoratively
gatekeepers who decide what should or shouldn't be published. Certainly, as the old authorities appear increasingly undermined, when citizen journalists with no obligation to ethical standards can become as popular and trusted as longstanding media institutions, it can often feel to some that's, rather than offering utopia, the Internet has delivered chaos, a place where nothing is stable, and where it no longer matters what it's true, only what people
believe or want to be true. It is a world where fact and fiction become progressively blurred, and as our lives become increasingly influenced by what we experience in the digital space, those online fictions don't just stay online, They bleed into the real physical world, with real physical world consequences. One bright spring morning in twenty fourteen, in the quiet leafy city of Waukeshire, Wisconsin, local resident Greg Steinberg set
out for his usual weekend cycle. Right a short time later, approaching the back of David's Park, he spotted what looked like a young girl crawling out of a nearby wood. As he drew closer, he found, to his horror that she was covered in blood. Please help me, she cried, reaching out in pained desperation. Gregg leaped from his bike and rushed to help. As the girl collapsed to the ground, Greg did his best to comfort her as he hastily called nine one one and relaid the necessary nation to
the operator. The girl gave her name as Bella, but was reluctant to say who attacked her until the Waukeshire Fire and Police Department arrived moments later, and she eventually gave up the information. The twelve year old Bella, whose birth name was Peyton Lautner, was rushed straight to Waukeshire Memorial Hospital and immediately operated on. She was found to have nineteen stab wounds in total, with two entering major organs and one missing a major artery by a matter
of millimeters. With the name and description of a suspect, the Waukeshire Police, along with the help of the County Sheriff's Department and an emergency helicopter, mounted an immediate search of the area, but failed to find the perpetrator. Later that afternoon, a Waukeshire County Sheriff deputy spotted two young girls no more than twelve years old sitting on a grass verge by the I ninety four highway. Pulling up beside them, he stepped out of the car and asked
them what they were doing out there. The pair gave their names as Morgan and a Nissa, and calmly explained that they had just stopped for a rest while on their way toward the Nicolay Forest, which was located about two hundred miles away. Not quite sure what to make of it all, the deputy ordered the pair to stand up and hand over their bags for inspection. When they did, he noticed then the blood spatterings on Morgan's hands and sleeves.
The girls passed him an old purse and a large rucksack they'd been carrying, and watched blankly, making no attempt to flee as the deputy opened the purse to find a five inch steak knife inside, sticky with blood. The girls were arrested and taken into custody, where a further search of their bags revealed items of clothing, granola bars,
bottles of water, and photos of family members. If things weren't already askew on that warm Saturday afternoon in that ordinarily quiet, upper middle class Milwaukee suburb, they were about
to get very strange. Indeed, as twelve year olds Morgan and a Nissa were grilled over a combined total of nine hours, both would confess their involvement in Bella's stabbing, and, after taking the detectives through the events of the last twenty four hours, revealed a motivation for the attack that was nothing that any of the officers could possibly have imagined. The three girls, it turned out, were best friends only.
The day before the incident, they'd celebrated Morgan's twelfth birthday together at the local ice rink before returning to her house for a sleepover. The following morning, they'd eaten breakfast together before heading out to play at David's Park, a neatly kept playing field on the corner of Southeast and Garfield in the south of the city. After messing about for a while on the swings, Enissa suggested they head into a small patch of nearby woodland to play hide
and seek with the others. In agreement, the three of them made their way past a row of large houses on a strip known as Big Bend and across the road into the small pocket of trees on the other side. As they stay through the tree line, Nissa and Morgan looked around hurriedly to make sure that they were totally alone. When Bella turned to see what they were doing, Ennissa
shouted suddenly for Morgan to do it. Morgan then pulled a knife from under her plaid jacket and plunged it into the chest, arms, and legs of her best friend. Before she even had time to react, Bella screamed in agony and begged for their help as she staggered about before falling finally in a bloody heap on the ground. Nissa then calmly asked her friend to try and keep quiet and to stop screaming. Bella had little choice to do otherwise, as she struggled to breathe and her vision
started to blur. Then her body began to get cold. She tried to stand and with all her strength, managed to plant her feet. Morgan and Nissa watched blankly for a moment as Bella stumbled towards the edge of the forest, then fell back down. She begged again for their help, Appearing to finally come to their senses. Morgan and Nissa seemingly came to her aid and pulled her to her feet again, only to then turn her round and frog
march her deeper into the woods. A few moments later, Morgan and Nissa ordered their friend to lie down on the ground before turning their backs on her once and for all and heading home, leaving her there to die. Back in their separate interview rooms at the Walkesshire County Sheriff's Department. Having detailed the circumstances of the brutal attack, Morgan and Nissa were each asked why they'd done such a thing. The answer was simple. They said they'd done
it to please the Slender Man. When asked later where it was exactly that they were heading to when the deputy picked them up, their response was even more astonishing. The girls believed that buried deep within the seven hundred thousand acres of Nicolay Forest, they would find slender Man's mansion, where he'd be waiting for them with open arms. Morgan and Nissa had discovered slender Man separately through Creepy pasta wiki which had become a major repository for the mythos.
Most of the slender Man based creepy pas tended to adopt the style of reported sightings or true life encounters that people claimed to have had with the entity Before long, the two young friends adopted a similar approach with each other, insisting that they'd both seen the figure a number of times throughout their lives. Reinforcing each other's delusion, the pair decided they wanted to gain his approval, and in order to do so, they would have to murder their best friend.
Morgan later insisted they had no particular ill will towards Bella. She was just the most convenient means to an end in their efforts to prove themselves worthy of the slender Man. As journalist Alex May noted in an essay she wrote for VQR in twenty seventeen, the girls had convinced themselves that the very act of killing their friend would also
be the thing that conjured slender Man into existence. Mercifully, Bella survived the ordeal, while Morgan and a Nissa were both arrested and charged with her attempted murder and placed in separate areas of the Washington County Jail for Juveniles. Morgan was judged to have been the instigator of the attack, and in an effort to determine her capacity to stand trial, she was moved to Winnebago Mental Health Institute in the
autumn of twenty fourteen to be kept under observation. After completing a twenty four hour psychiatric test, it was found that she was suffering from early onset schizophrenia and ordered to remain at the institute until her trial in December twenty fourteen. However, the case judge perversely declared her fit to stand trial while simultaneously ordering her to return to
the Winnebago Mental Health Institute for further treatment. Unfortunately, having been judged fit for trial, the institute was then not legally obliged to take her, and so Morgan was moved back to the Washington County Jail for Juveniles. By late twenty fifteen, despite being diagnosed with early onset schizophrenia over a year before, Morgan had yet to receive any treatment
for it. At first, Banissa was not determined to have suffered from any type of delusional psychiatric disorder, but was instead thought to have become complicit in Morgan's delusions through a process known as shared delusional beliefs. This was said to have been enabled through the unique and intense feelings of loneliness and alienation that Morgan and Nissa shared with each other, which in a Nissa's case, was considered to have been exacerbated by her parents' divorce and bullying at school.
As Alex Mar also noted, these shared feelings are thought to have contributed to Morgan and Nissa developing a shared perception of the world that only the power of them could understand which in turn served to reinforce their unique perspective. In September twenty seventeen, Nissa Were was judged not guilty by mental disease or defect and sentenced to a minimum of three years in a psychiatric hospital. This was later extended to twenty five at her final sentencing on twenty
first December of the same year. Were was eventually released four years later in twenty twenty one, under a series of strict conditions that included a complete ban from all social media. In October twenty seventeen, Morgan Geyser pleaded guilty to attempted first degree murder, but was also found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. In February twenty eighteen, she was sentenced to spend her next forty years in a psychiatric hospital. Morgan remains locked up under
psychiatric supervision. Without wanting to justify or conflate the experiences of the three girls, or indeed dilute the severity of the crime, it is possible to see in twelve year old Morgan's and a Nissa's obsession with slender Man, a desperate desire to be accepted and understood in a world that seemed increasingly to want nothing to do with them.
For many of us, the transition from childhood to adulthood is a perilous and treacherous journey, one that can often leave us feeling dangerously cut adrift, as the illusory permanence and innocence of childhood is lifted to reveal a more complex world, far less fixed and certain than we had once believed it to be. Though we might struggle to know where we fit into this new world, most of us will find our place in a world that many
collectively hold in common. Some will forge their own paths, imagining new worlds into which others can follow where they feel they belong. Some of us, however, are fated never to find either. After news broke of the Posies are incident, an almost inevitable moral panic ensued, the desperate human urge to find a reason for how and why something so terrible could happen, followed by the all too predictable pointing of the finger at the first bogeyman that could be found.
Walkeshire Police Chief Russell Jack urged parents to restrict and monitor their children's Internet usage with one Australian news agency, declaring creepy pastor an Internet horrorcult that almost caused a killing. Many other media outlets were quick to join in the hype, only helping to fuel the legend even further. However, what they found in slender Man was not the perpetrator, merely
a personification of their fear of the Internet. He was the faceless city, of the faceless technology that has come to dominate our lives, the haunting specter of a world rapidly evolving and changing from the one we thought we
once understood. Maybe the police were right to urge parents to limit their children's Internet usage, if indeed it is leading us toward a disastrous end point, or, as some contemporary thinkers argue, if such is our fate, better yet to harness the speed of technological change to bring about this end even sooner, since, after all, according to them, it is only when we get to this moment that will be able to start again and realize a better future.
It was critical theorist Benjamin Noise who coined the term accelerationism in twenty ten, taking it from Rogers Alasne's nineteen sixty seven novel Lord of Light. The book drawing heavily on the mythology of Hinduism and Buddhism tells the story of a planet colonized by the last survivors of Earth, who have gained control over its native inhabitants by using technology to turn themselves into gods based on Hindu mythology. In this guise, the Earthling come God's hoard technology to
suppress the planet's indigenous races. One former Earthling, known as Sam, the last Accelerationist, effectively plays out the role of Buddha by rejecting the status quo. Believing technology should be available to all. It begins to revolt against its godlike compatriots, and eventually succeeds in claiming technology for the masses so
they can escape their subjugation. Although there are a number of approaches to the idea, the roots of accelerationism can be traced back to the early nineteen nineties to an extraordinary academic group known as the Cybernetic Culture of Research Unit or CCRU. The collective saw the capitalist model, specifically as inseparable from self propelling technology, arguing that the two
should be accelerated since they were already unstoppable. Much like the Bill Hicks joke in which he implores advertisers to kill themselves, only for the advertisers to then become excited at the prospect of being able to market his new angry anti marketing persona. The members of CCRU believed that the Internet is a slave to capitalism and all its worst,
most destructive features are a direct result of this. C CRU first spawned in Warwick University's philosophy department sometime in October nineteen ninety five, primarily led by renegade philosophers Sadie Plant and Nick Land, a leading proponent of the concept of hyperstitions, as explored in Chapter two of The Unexplained Book. They were described in a nineteen ninety eight article by music journalist Simon Reynolds as occupying an uncanny interzone between
science and superstition. As writer Andy Beckett put it in a twenty seventeen Guardian newspaper article, their intellectual esthetic owed as much to Land's deep fascination with the occult and h belove crafts CTHULEU Mithos as it did to the work of pioneering post structuralists Shield LUs and Felix Gatari. To their detractors, operating beyond the normative expectations of academic practice.
Their work was too thin in research and amounted to little more than a highly intellectualized game of cultural pattern recognition to Enthrall, to pop culture and Alister Crowley, they said, Yet for the five manic years that CCRU was active, they produced a vast emporium of works and ideas. Today those ideas form the bedrock of some of the most radical, challenging and terrifying ideas in philosophy and cultural theory, with much of it being dispersed through their wants defunct but
now thankfully archived website ccru dot net. To the uninitiated, such as myself, stumbling upon cec ru dot net is akin to being a crew member of the Nostromo from Ridley Scot's alien, stepping foot into the strange, abandoned spaceship of the enigmatic Engineers for the first time. Like many forgotten websites, cut off from the present bloodline of the active net, there's a sense of stumbling upon an ancient relic.
The words comprised of an almost impenetrable loose circuitry of cryptic phrases and insider references feel at once both arcane, while simultaneously as though they have been delivered to us from the future. They warn us darkly and spell like of the impending apocalypse. There is the sense too, that perhaps they've been entombed and buried in the bowels of the intert for a reason, as if they are too dangerous to be allowed out lest they conjure into existence
the very thing they are warning us about. Only having read them, do you realize with horror that it is too late. The words are very much alive, and something has got out, the true horror being the realization that we may already be living through the exact apocalypse they were trying to warn us about. Take these passages, for example, from a piece titled cyber Hype six Dark Side of the Wave discussing the inevitable boom bust cycle of capitalism.
Social innovation requires that existing arrangements and hierarchies are thrown into disorder and shattered, and in the depths of the economic dark side, the world becomes a p for things yet to come. It is here that disruptive technologies are spawned. Where labor, capital and markets are cheap to acquire. The high magicians of demand management try to prevent the new economy from sliding into darkness, but it is already too late for that. Even as the shadows thicken, something unimaginable
is arriving from the edges of the world. Everything is always in flux, only now never before has that change been so rapid and disorientating, and so Where others might have heralded the digital Age as ushering in a bright, utopian future, arriving just in time to fix humanity's greatest problems,
CCRU saw something far more disturbing to them. The digital Age, when coupled with the capitalist instinct, amounts to nothing less than the final phase of a capitalistic death drive, speeding as ever nearer to some kind of great cataclysm, a system that, rather than offering us weighs out, is in fact accelerating us to a final and inescapable end point. You've been listening to Unexplained Season six, episode twenty eight The new Sphere Part two, the third and final part,
will be released next Friday, February seventeenth. If you enjoy Unexplained and would like to help support us, you can now do so via Patreon to receive access to add three episodes. Just go to patron dot com Forward Slash Unexplained Pod to sign up. Unexplained, the book and audiobook, 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 Orward Slash Unexplained Podcast