by Jesse Walker
Jamie Kane was a character in an alternate reality game, or ARG. The first major ARG was The Beast, an elaborate puzzle created to promote Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film A.I. It was widely regarded as far superior to the movie it advertised, and it wound up setting the template for the ARG genre.75 In the words of the game’s designer, Jane McGonigal, The Beast “co-opted real environments.” Among other things, that meant thousands of Web pages planted throughout the Internet, clues dropped unannounced into newspaper and TV ads, real-world phone calls and faxes to players, packages in the mail, even carefully placed bathroom graffiti. Some ARGs have dealt directly with conspiracies: Plot 49 was inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s paranoid novel The Crying of Lot 49, and The Secret World’s story includes the Illuminati, the Knights Templar, and other staples of secret-society literature. But even when a game’s story wasn’t especially paranoid, it required the sort of attention to potential connections that comes naturally to the conspiracy theorist. “The Beast recognized no game boundaries,” McGonigal wrote; “the players were always playing, so long as they were connected to one of their main everyday networks.” It had a devilishly paranoid slogan: “This Is Not a Game.”76
By asking players to live simultaneously in the real world and the game world, ARGs required the sort of double vision encouraged by the ironic style. (Operation Mindfuck was, in its way, a precursor to ARGs, even if it offered no puzzle to solve.) In the case of The Beast, the lines became so blurry that when terrorists took down the World Trade Center, a forum dedicated to solving the game’s puzzles began to buzz with plans to “solve” 9/11 as well. A characteristic post argued that “this sort of thing is sorta our MO. Picking things apart and figuring them out.”77 Eventually, the founders of the group felt obliged to intervene, pointing out the difference between “clues hidden that were gauged for us” and clues left in the wake of the attacks.78
At least the would-be terror sleuths knew that 9/11 wasn’t really a game. In the case of Jamie Kane, the ARG’s puppet masters dropped pieces of their puzzle into places that were supposedly off-limits to play. If you Googled “Jamie Kane,” you could land not just at a fake fan site with girl-friendly publicity stills or a fake official site with samples of Kane’s music but at the aforementioned Top of the Pops report of his death; Kane also appeared in a Radio 1 directory that otherwise excluded deliberate fictions. When the blog Boing Boing revealed that people had placed entries for Kane and Boy*d Upp in Wikipedia, the news produced such an uproar that the BBC was forced to deny that it had been responsible for the posts; it blamed them on two fans acting independently, one of whom “happens to work for the BBC” but had posted his disinformation “without the knowledge of anyone in the Jamie Kane Team or BBC Marketing.”79 That might be true and it might be false, and it might be a deeper sort of deceit. There is, after all, a subspecies of marketer who believes that all buzz is good buzz. As one observer wrote at the time, “Did the Beeb just turn BoingBoing into part of the game?”80
In the middle of the twentieth century, several psychologists and psychiatrists, notably Eric Berne and the pre-psychedelic Timothy Leary, pioneered the theory of transactional analysis, which treats social roles as gameplay and social behavior as a series of games. Leary held on to the metaphor after he started experimenting with drugs: When Robert Anton Wilson interviewed him for The Realist in 1964, Leary referred casually to Harvard’s “verbal game,” his guests’ “visiting game,” and his countrymen’s “nationality game”; describing his first trip on magic mushrooms, he declared: “The space game came to an end, then the time game came to an end, and then the Timothy Leary game came to an end.”81 In 2005, the Jamie Kane game, aimed at telling a story and attracting public attention, clashed with the Wikipedia game, aimed at presenting truth rather than fiction.
It also exposed the viral marketing game, a form of advertising that declares This Is Not an Ad as defiantly as an ARG announces This Is Not a Game. As the furor gained momentum, an anonymous reader wrote to Boing Boing: “I can’t say who I am, but I do work at a company that uses Wikipedia as a key part of online marketing strategies. That includes planting of viral information in entries, modification of entries to point to new promotional sites or ‘leaks’ embedded in entries to test diffusion of information.”82 If you think you see a similarity between the way a game’s puppet masters scatter clues, a viral marketer scatters buzz, and an intelligence agency scatters disinformation, you’re not alone.
When Beast players tried to solve the real-life murder of three thousand people with the same techniques they had used to decipher a high-tech narrative, it wasn’t the only time someone confused a recreation with the much more byzantine complex of games that constitute human society. I’m not just thinking of the fellow from the Georgia Skeptics who unwittingly wandered into a live-action role-playing game at PhenomiCon. Stephen Dollins, a John Todd–like figure who claims to be a former priest of Satan, has given talks about Illuminati: New World Order, one of Steve Jackson’s Illuminati games. Dollins highlights a card captioned “Terrorist Nuke,” which features an illustration of an explosion at the World Trade Center; it resembles an image of the Twin Towers in the short period after the buildings were struck and before they collapsed. Another card depicts an explosion at the Pentagon. Those pictures, Dollins decided, were clues linking the Illuminati to the attacks.
“Remember,” he claimed to one audience, “in the 1990s, the word ‘Illuminati’ was not even a household name. Nobody knew what anybody was talking about, except just for a chosen few. You had people out there, evangelists like John Todd, some of the other ones that were out there, showing about the seal, the Great Seal on the back of the dollar bill, and telling you that this was the seal of the Illuminati and telling you what it stood for. And he also came out and told what some of their plans were for future events. And people thought at that time that he and all those other people were crazy. Now they look back at him and say, ‘Gee, we should have listened.’ . . . We’ve seen a lot of things that they said take place exactly as they said they were going to. They’re right on schedule.”83
Dollins isn’t the only one to see precognition rather than satire in Jackson’s cards. “Since 9/11 there has been a thread, mostly online, of people who find similarities between the card titles and images and real-world events. Or at least events in their real world,” Jackson told me in an e-mail. “Typically, these people post Web pages showing some of the cards and their interpretations, much as if they were trying to interpret a Tarot deck, and ask ‘How did he know?’ Sometimes they post YouTube videos in which they zoom in and out of card images and play portentous music.” In addition to 9/11, theorists have claimed that the cards have predicted everything from a Japanese earthquake to the 2012 massacre at a Colorado screening of The Dark Knight Rises.84
The Internet gave Illuminati buffs an unprecedented ability to exchange ideas, even more than in the era that produced alt.conspiracy and Conspiracy for the Day. With “the rise of broadband Internet,” the pop critic Jonah Weiner wrote in 2011, “Illuminati conspiracies have enjoyed the same steroidal super-boost as pornography and cat photography.”85 Anytime an entertainer died, Internet forums lit up with speculations that the secret society from Bavaria was to blame. (“Donna Summer, latest illuminati sacrifice victim?”)86 Thanks to platforms such as YouTube, it is now relatively easy to rip and post clips from movies and TV and highlight the Masonic symbolism allegedly concealed within them. And people have found that symbolism everywhere, from music videos to superhero movies: a massive clue hunt across the entire pop-culture landscape.
You can attribute part of this increased interest to some relatively high-profile conspiracy theorists who made a habit of invoking the Illuminati, such as the radio host Alex Jones. You can attribute part of it to the long shadow of the Illuminatus! trilogy, whose direct and indirect influence touched a lot of the pop landscape. And you can attribute a great deal of it to the hip-hop community, which hasn’t forgotten the
New World Order lore that Afrika Islam was spreading in the 1990s. Illuminati allusions have appeared in the lyrics of rappers ranging from Dr. Dre (“Ain’t tryin’ to stick around for Illuminati,” he announced in 1996)87 to Common (“Eye on a dollar like Illuminati,” he rapped in 2012).88 Prodigy’s 2008 track “Illuminati” featured this chorus: “Illuminati want my mind, soul, and my body/Secret society tryin’ to keep their eye on me/But I’ma stay incogni’/In places they can’t find me/Make my moves strategically.”89
By the time Prodigy accused Jay-Z of being a member of the Illuminati, Adam Weishaupt’s organization had become the stuff of celebrity gossip; tattoos, hand gestures, and video imagery all became fodder for fans determined to figure out which performers were initiates of the order. You can get the flavor of the fears from an exchange the rapper 50 Cent had on a Philadelphia radio station in 2009.
TARSHA JONES: Have you ever been approached by the secret society that, when a rapper—and I’m talking about musicians, black artists—reach a certain level, this secret society still wants to infiltrate and control the minds of our youth, and so they incorporate you into the secret society, and so secretly you put out messages, but you don’t go against their grain? It’s like you’re dressed like us, but you speak for them.
50 CENT: I haven’t been approached by anybody like that.90
Jay-Z reacted to the rumors by rapping the line “I said I was amazin’, not that I’m a Mason.”91
Hip-hop records weren’t the only pop artifacts alluding to the secret society. A 1999 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer set the show’s heroine against an order of the undead called “El Eliminati.” The New Avengers: Illuminati comic books borrowed the name “Illuminati” for a secretive supergroup that included such iconic costumed heroes as Iron Man and Doctor Strange.92 In movie theaters, the Illuminati were the villains of the 2001 film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and the suspected villains of the 2009 film Angels & Demons. The latter was based on a novel published nine years earlier by Dan Brown, who followed up his Illuminati thriller with what might be the single most widely read English-language conspiracy novel of the twenty-first century thus far, The Da Vinci Code.
The Da Vinci Code’s plot, which owed a heavy debt to the conspiracy tracts Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Templar Revelation, hinges on the notions that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, that they spawned a holy bloodline, and that the Vatican has engaged in a long, bloody cover-up to hide the truth.93 (Curiously, the plot also hinges on the idea that the truth has already been exposed. Rather than uncovering an unknown secret history, the protagonists learn it in dribs and drabs from a well-informed character who claims that the “royal bloodline of Jesus Christ has been chronicled in exhaustive detail by scores of historians.”)94 The novel was released at a propitious time: 2003, right on the heels of the biggest uproar to hit the Vatican in decades. The book’s fan base included many Catholics who had been disillusioned to learn that their church had been hushing up priestly pederasty and who were now primed to believe in all sorts of Vatican cover-ups.
Yes, believe. It is common for thriller writers to drop hints that parts of their story might be real, allowing readers to enjoy not just the pleasures of vicarious sex and gunplay but the frisson of suspecting they’re getting a glimpse of a hidden truth. When Brown placed a note at the beginning of his novel claiming that various elements of his story really exist, he was probably doing this standard scene setting. Inadvertently, he landed in the perfect position to launch a cult. Since it doesn’t claim to be the literal, infallible truth, The Da Vinci Code isn’t easily damaged by the sort of skeptical inquiry that digs out contradictions or obvious inaccuracies in holy texts. Like H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Anton Wilson before him, Brown wrote a yarn that will attract believers no matter how many times its author assures them that the tale isn’t true.
The characters in The Da Vinci Code are constantly deciphering puzzles. In that spirit, the publisher sponsored a somewhat ARGish contest to promote the novel, announcing that several codes were concealed on the book’s jacket. They turned out to include a phrase from Freemasonry and the coordinates of a sculpture just outside the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia.95 Even on the cover of a best-selling potboiler, anything might turn out to be a clue.96
In June 2008, some Web surfers came across a curious site called Notes to Mary. It featured several threatening letters from one high school student to another, and it was, they quickly concluded, an alternate reality game. Word spread through the Internet hubs where ARG fans congregate, and the players set to work deciphering the puzzle. The site’s owner “began interacting with players,” an observer recalled at the Web forum MetaFilter, “sending them strange messages and several series of numbers that appeared to be some sort of code.”97
After a while, a log-in link appeared at the Notes to Mary site. The players worked hard to figure out the password, and finally they seemed to solve the puzzle. They eagerly logged in, and there they found the object of their quest.
It was a video of the eighties pop star Rick Astley singing “Never Gonna Give You Up.” In 2008, this was the Internet equivalent of a joy buzzer.
There had never been a game. The man behind the site “just thought it would be funny to put up some creepy notes and see what sort of attention they got,” the MetaFilter writer explained. When people decided it was an ARG, “he decided to play along. The numerical ‘codes’ he sent out? Random numbers and dates plucked out of the air.”
He provided the noise; the players perceived the pattern. They imagined a labyrinth as elaborate as bin Laden’s legendary fortress in Tora Bora. They found an empty cave.
EPILOGUE
THE MONSTER AT THE END OF THIS BOOK
We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice and good will to everything that hurts or pleases us.
—David Hume1
As soon as Mark Phillips heard that the World Trade Center was on fire, he ran to the roof of his Brooklyn home. He didn’t know what had set the building ablaze. He just knew, as a journalist, that he needed to photograph what was happening. He took his first picture right after the second plane crashed, and within half an hour the Associated Press was distributing his images to the world.
It wasn’t till later that week that he learned what people were seeing in that first photo. “Mark,” his agent told him on the phone, “you have a face in your picture.”
Phillips took another look, and there it was. “The image I saw was distinct,” he later recalled. “Eyes, nose, mouth, horns. It was an image from a nightmare, leering at us, triumphant in its evil as it hung onto Tower 2 of the World Trade Center.”2 There, in the contours of the smoke, he found the face of Satan.
Search online and you’ll see still more 9/11 pictures where people perceive the shapes of demons. Some of the photos are fakes, but not all. And if some of them require you to squint pretty intently to see the spirits allegedly encoded within them, there are others, like the photo Phillips took, where the face isn’t hard to see.
© 2001, Mark D. Phillips, markdphillips.com
There’s no shortage of theories about what the faces mean. “An act of hatred and violence is a thrill ride for a demon,” one website suggests. “Demons knew what was going to happen in New York and they gathered there to jump in at the point of the impact, like a human jumping onto a moving train to have a thrill.”3 The Christian conspiracist Texe Marrs identifies the imagery with the Enemy Outside: “Just as the Arab terrorists led by the Devil left their own trail of evidence, wanting the world to know their names of infamy, so, too, does the Devil, as proven in this photograph, cackle out loud and boast, ‘I did it—and I’m proud of what I did!’”4 Another writer, on the other hand, sees the Enemy Above at work: “Don’t these photos of Satan at the world [sic] Trade Center catastrophe tell us that the current seat of Satan’s power is the World Trade Center? Don’t t
hese photos depict Satan being awakened from his hiding place in the World Trade Center? For it is the international bankers who operate from Fed, the CFR and the World Trade Center who create first, second and third world debt.”5
Some even see the face as a signal from a Benevolent Conspiracy, or at least from a benevolent power. One website calls the image “a much needed edict from Allah—a final ruling from the highest authority possible which decrees once and for all that the use of terrorism is never permitted in Islam.”6
Then there’s the explanation I prefer. The faces are the result of apophenia, the process of projecting patterns onto data. More specifically, they are pareidolia, in which those patterns are perceived as meaningful shapes or sounds. It is pareidolia that allows us to see a man in the moon, to hear a Satanic incantation when “Stairway to Heaven” is played backward, or to conjure the image of your subconscious choice while taking a Rorschach test. Indeed, pareidolia makes the whole world a Rorschach test. The Web is filled with delightful pareidolia-themed photo sets, where unexpected forms appear in mountains, pasta, fire, clocks, clouds.
The apparitions in the pictures range from an octopus to an angel, but we are especially prone to seeing faces. That sink’s knobs and spigot look like two eyes and a nose. That house’s windows and door look like two eyes and a mouth. That cloud of smoke billowing from an unimaginably evil attack looks like the author of evil himself.
Spotting such images is an act of creativity, though it’s a kind of creativity that is often invisible to the creator. It’s easy to believe the face is really there in the photo rather than in the interaction between the photo and the observer. Remember what Robert Anton Wilson said about Nesta Webster: “She was so modest that she didn’t recognize herself as the artist creating all that.”