Speaker 1: You're listening to Unexplained, Season six, episode twenty eight The
Speaker 1: new Sphere, Part two of three. In February twenty eighteen,
Speaker 1: thirteen Russian nationals were indicted by the FBI for their
Speaker 1: alleged role as part of widespread Russian governmental interference in
Speaker 1: the twenty sixteen United States presidential election. The defendants were
Speaker 1: charged with creating fake social media accounts in which they
Speaker 1: posed as US citizens to ferment distrust about the candidates
Speaker 1: and generally undermine the democratic process. The indictment pointed the
Speaker 1: finger squarely at companies such as Facebook and Twitter. Both
Speaker 1: are routinely accused of allowing fake news to spread, giving
Speaker 1: credibility to false narratives through a complicated system of algorithms
Speaker 1: that enables some stories to be promoted above others on
Speaker 1: account of how popular they are, regardless of whether they
Speaker 1: are true or not. In March twenty seventeen, Google, the
Speaker 1: world's most widely used search engine, was also accused of
Speaker 1: spreading fake news by promoting false narratives through its featured
Speaker 1: snippets in search function, which gives short answers to common
Speaker 1: queries through the company's speaker device, Google Home. If users
Speaker 1: of this device back in twenty sixteen, had asked is
Speaker 1: President Barack Obama planning a coup? For example, Google Home
Speaker 1: would have replied, according to details exposed in Western Center
Speaker 1: for Journalism's exclusive video, not only could Obama be in
Speaker 1: bed with the communist Chinese, but Obama may in fact
Speaker 1: be planning a communist coup de etat at the end
Speaker 1: of his term in twenty sixteen. This was, of course
Speaker 1: a complete fabrication and a little ironic considering what later
Speaker 1: came to pass. On January sixth, twenty twenty one, concerned
Speaker 1: by this trend, ex Google engineer Giome Shallow built a
Speaker 1: program to investigate bias in YouTube content. Talking to Paul
Speaker 1: Lewis for The Guardian newspaper in twenty eighteen, Shallow concluded
Speaker 1: that quote fiction is outperforming reality, and the channel's algorithmic
Speaker 1: preferences frequently pushed videos that are divisive, sensational, and conspiratorial.
Speaker 1: One such example was what happened when the name David
Speaker 1: Hogg was typed into the search engine. Hog was a
Speaker 1: student at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School when, in the
Speaker 1: afternoon of February fourteenth, twenty eighteen, then nineteen year old
Speaker 1: Nicholas Cruz walked into the main building and shot dead
Speaker 1: fourteen children and three staff members. Hog had not only
Speaker 1: been caught up in the shooting and knew some of
Speaker 1: the victims, he'd also become a vocal advocate for gun
Speaker 1: control legislation in the wake of the horrific incident. According
Speaker 1: to many of the videos that popped up on YouTube
Speaker 1: search results, however, Hog was in fact a completely made
Speaker 1: up person who was being played by an actor. When
Speaker 1: a YouTube spokesperson responded to Guillaume Shallow's findings, they rightly
Speaker 1: made the point that the results were not confirmation of
Speaker 1: a bias in the system's algorithm, but merely a reflection
Speaker 1: of viewers interest. If you then engaged with these videos,
Speaker 1: the results of your subsequent searches are then skewed toward
Speaker 1: videos displaying similar content. But perhaps this is even worse.
Speaker 1: What this reveals is that frequently when we engage with
Speaker 1: the online space, the world we find staring back at
Speaker 1: us is not one that is necessarily real, but simply
Speaker 1: one that mimics or justifies our world view. Our instinct
Speaker 1: to forge social groups with like minded people only helps
Speaker 1: to service this further, resulting in the online experience often
Speaker 1: being little more than an echo chamber that distorts or
Speaker 1: outright hides other points of view. It becomes a place
Speaker 1: where what we suratively think to be right will trump
Speaker 1: what is actually true almost every time. In response to this,
Speaker 1: throughout the world, governments are being urged to clamp down
Speaker 1: on platforms that, through their propensity to spread misinformation, are
Speaker 1: deemed detrimental to the health of democratic societies. Yet by
Speaker 1: doing this, governments would be imposing the same real world
Speaker 1: restrictions on the online space that many have come to
Speaker 1: resent in the offline world. It is a clash of
Speaker 1: two polarizing ideas of what the Internet should be, either
Speaker 1: something that is open source, unregulated, and libertarian, versus something
Speaker 1: which is more controlled and stable but less egalitarian, governed
Speaker 1: by elite and I don't necessarily use that term pejoratively
Speaker 1: gatekeepers who decide what should or shouldn't be published. Certainly,
Speaker 1: as the old authorities appear increasingly undermined, when citizen journalists
Speaker 1: with no obligation to ethical standards can become as popular
Speaker 1: and trusted as longstanding media institutions, it can often feel
Speaker 1: to some that's, rather than offering utopia, the Internet has
Speaker 1: delivered chaos, a place where nothing is stable, and where
Speaker 1: it no longer matters what it's true, only what people
Speaker 1: believe or want to be true. It is a world
Speaker 1: where fact and fiction become progressively blurred, and as our
Speaker 1: lives become increasingly influenced by what we experience in the
Speaker 1: digital space, those online fictions don't just stay online, They
Speaker 1: bleed into the real physical world, with real physical world consequences.
Speaker 1: One bright spring morning in twenty fourteen, in the quiet
Speaker 1: leafy city of Waukeshire, Wisconsin, local resident Greg Steinberg set
Speaker 1: out for his usual weekend cycle. Right a short time later,
Speaker 1: approaching the back of David's Park, he spotted what looked
Speaker 1: like a young girl crawling out of a nearby wood.
Speaker 1: As he drew closer, he found, to his horror that
Speaker 1: she was covered in blood. Please help me, she cried,
Speaker 1: reaching out in pained desperation. Gregg leaped from his bike
Speaker 1: and rushed to help. As the girl collapsed to the ground,
Speaker 1: Greg did his best to comfort her as he hastily
Speaker 1: called nine one one and relaid the necessary nation to
Speaker 1: the operator. The girl gave her name as Bella, but
Speaker 1: was reluctant to say who attacked her until the Waukeshire
Speaker 1: Fire and Police Department arrived moments later, and she eventually
Speaker 1: gave up the information. The twelve year old Bella, whose
Speaker 1: birth name was Peyton Lautner, was rushed straight to Waukeshire
Speaker 1: Memorial Hospital and immediately operated on. She was found to
Speaker 1: have nineteen stab wounds in total, with two entering major
Speaker 1: organs and one missing a major artery by a matter
Speaker 1: of millimeters. With the name and description of a suspect,
Speaker 1: the Waukeshire Police, along with the help of the County
Speaker 1: Sheriff's Department and an emergency helicopter, mounted an immediate search
Speaker 1: of the area, but failed to find the perpetrator. Later
Speaker 1: that afternoon, a Waukeshire County Sheriff deputy spotted two young
Speaker 1: girls no more than twelve years old sitting on a
Speaker 1: grass verge by the I ninety four highway. Pulling up
Speaker 1: beside them, he stepped out of the car and asked
Speaker 1: them what they were doing out there. The pair gave
Speaker 1: their names as Morgan and a Nissa, and calmly explained
Speaker 1: that they had just stopped for a rest while on
Speaker 1: their way toward the Nicolay Forest, which was located about
Speaker 1: two hundred miles away. Not quite sure what to make
Speaker 1: of it all, the deputy ordered the pair to stand
Speaker 1: up and hand over their bags for inspection. When they did,
Speaker 1: he noticed then the blood spatterings on Morgan's hands and sleeves.
Speaker 1: The girls passed him an old purse and a large
Speaker 1: rucksack they'd been carrying, and watched blankly, making no attempt
Speaker 1: to flee as the deputy opened the purse to find
Speaker 1: a five inch steak knife inside, sticky with blood. The
Speaker 1: girls were arrested and taken into custody, where a further
Speaker 1: search of their bags revealed items of clothing, granola bars,
Speaker 1: bottles of water, and photos of family members. If things
Speaker 1: weren't already askew on that warm Saturday afternoon in that
Speaker 1: ordinarily quiet, upper middle class Milwaukee suburb, they were about
Speaker 1: to get very strange. Indeed, as twelve year olds Morgan
Speaker 1: and a Nissa were grilled over a combined total of
Speaker 1: nine hours, both would confess their involvement in Bella's stabbing, and,
Speaker 1: after taking the detectives through the events of the last
Speaker 1: twenty four hours, revealed a motivation for the attack that
Speaker 1: was nothing that any of the officers could possibly have imagined.
Speaker 1: The three girls, it turned out, were best friends only.
Speaker 1: The day before the incident, they'd celebrated Morgan's twelfth birthday
Speaker 1: together at the local ice rink before returning to her
Speaker 1: house for a sleepover. The following morning, they'd eaten breakfast
Speaker 1: together before heading out to play at David's Park, a
Speaker 1: neatly kept playing field on the corner of Southeast and
Speaker 1: Garfield in the south of the city. After messing about
Speaker 1: for a while on the swings, Enissa suggested they head
Speaker 1: into a small patch of nearby woodland to play hide
Speaker 1: and seek with the others. In agreement, the three of
Speaker 1: them made their way past a row of large houses
Speaker 1: on a strip known as Big Bend and across the
Speaker 1: road into the small pocket of trees on the other side.
Speaker 1: As they stay through the tree line, Nissa and Morgan
Speaker 1: looked around hurriedly to make sure that they were totally alone.
Speaker 1: When Bella turned to see what they were doing, Ennissa
Speaker 1: shouted suddenly for Morgan to do it. Morgan then pulled
Speaker 1: a knife from under her plaid jacket and plunged it
Speaker 1: into the chest, arms, and legs of her best friend.
Speaker 1: Before she even had time to react, Bella screamed in
Speaker 1: agony and begged for their help as she staggered about
Speaker 1: before falling finally in a bloody heap on the ground.
Speaker 1: Nissa then calmly asked her friend to try and keep
Speaker 1: quiet and to stop screaming. Bella had little choice to
Speaker 1: do otherwise, as she struggled to breathe and her vision
Speaker 1: started to blur. Then her body began to get cold.
Speaker 1: She tried to stand and with all her strength, managed
Speaker 1: to plant her feet. Morgan and Nissa watched blankly for
Speaker 1: a moment as Bella stumbled towards the edge of the forest,
Speaker 1: then fell back down. She begged again for their help,
Speaker 1: Appearing to finally come to their senses. Morgan and Nissa
Speaker 1: seemingly came to her aid and pulled her to her
Speaker 1: feet again, only to then turn her round and frog
Speaker 1: march her deeper into the woods. A few moments later,
Speaker 1: Morgan and Nissa ordered their friend to lie down on
Speaker 1: the ground before turning their backs on her once and
Speaker 1: for all and heading home, leaving her there to die.
Speaker 1: Back in their separate interview rooms at the Walkesshire County
Speaker 1: Sheriff's Department. Having detailed the circumstances of the brutal attack,
Speaker 1: Morgan and Nissa were each asked why they'd done such
Speaker 1: a thing. The answer was simple. They said they'd done
Speaker 1: it to please the Slender Man. When asked later where
Speaker 1: it was exactly that they were heading to when the
Speaker 1: deputy picked them up, their response was even more astonishing.
Speaker 1: The girls believed that buried deep within the seven hundred
Speaker 1: thousand acres of Nicolay Forest, they would find slender Man's mansion,
Speaker 1: where he'd be waiting for them with open arms. Morgan
Speaker 1: and Nissa had discovered slender Man separately through Creepy pasta
Speaker 1: wiki which had become a major repository for the mythos.
Speaker 1: Most of the slender Man based creepy pas tended to
Speaker 1: adopt the style of reported sightings or true life encounters
Speaker 1: that people claimed to have had with the entity Before long,
Speaker 1: the two young friends adopted a similar approach with each other,
Speaker 1: insisting that they'd both seen the figure a number of
Speaker 1: times throughout their lives. Reinforcing each other's delusion, the pair
Speaker 1: decided they wanted to gain his approval, and in order
Speaker 1: to do so, they would have to murder their best friend.
Speaker 1: Morgan later insisted they had no particular ill will towards Bella.
Speaker 1: She was just the most convenient means to an end
Speaker 1: in their efforts to prove themselves worthy of the slender Man.
Speaker 1: As journalist Alex May noted in an essay she wrote
Speaker 1: for VQR in twenty seventeen, the girls had convinced themselves
Speaker 1: that the very act of killing their friend would also
Speaker 1: be the thing that conjured slender Man into existence. Mercifully,
Speaker 1: Bella survived the ordeal, while Morgan and a Nissa were
Speaker 1: both arrested and charged with her attempted murder and placed
Speaker 1: in separate areas of the Washington County Jail for Juveniles.
Speaker 1: Morgan was judged to have been the instigator of the attack,
Speaker 1: and in an effort to determine her capacity to stand trial,
Speaker 1: she was moved to Winnebago Mental Health Institute in the
Speaker 1: autumn of twenty fourteen to be kept under observation. After
Speaker 1: completing a twenty four hour psychiatric test, it was found
Speaker 1: that she was suffering from early onset schizophrenia and ordered
Speaker 1: to remain at the institute until her trial in December
Speaker 1: twenty fourteen. However, the case judge perversely declared her fit
Speaker 1: to stand trial while simultaneously ordering her to return to
Speaker 1: the Winnebago Mental Health Institute for further treatment. Unfortunately, having
Speaker 1: been judged fit for trial, the institute was then not
Speaker 1: legally obliged to take her, and so Morgan was moved
Speaker 1: back to the Washington County Jail for Juveniles. By late
Speaker 1: twenty fifteen, despite being diagnosed with early onset schizophrenia over
Speaker 1: a year before, Morgan had yet to receive any treatment
Speaker 1: for it. At first, Banissa was not determined to have
Speaker 1: suffered from any type of delusional psychiatric disorder, but was
Speaker 1: instead thought to have become complicit in Morgan's delusions through
Speaker 1: a process known as shared delusional beliefs. This was said
Speaker 1: to have been enabled through the unique and intense feelings
Speaker 1: of loneliness and alienation that Morgan and Nissa shared with
Speaker 1: each other, which in a Nissa's case, was considered to
Speaker 1: have been exacerbated by her parents' divorce and bullying at school.
Speaker 1: As Alex Mar also noted, these shared feelings are thought
Speaker 1: to have contributed to Morgan and Nissa developing a shared
Speaker 1: perception of the world that only the power of them
Speaker 1: could understand which in turn served to reinforce their unique perspective.
Speaker 1: In September twenty seventeen, Nissa Were was judged not guilty
Speaker 1: by mental disease or defect and sentenced to a minimum
Speaker 1: of three years in a psychiatric hospital. This was later
Speaker 1: extended to twenty five at her final sentencing on twenty
Speaker 1: first December of the same year. Were was eventually released
Speaker 1: four years later in twenty twenty one, under a series
Speaker 1: of strict conditions that included a complete ban from all
Speaker 1: social media. In October twenty seventeen, Morgan Geyser pleaded guilty
Speaker 1: to attempted first degree murder, but was also found not
Speaker 1: guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. In February
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen, she was sentenced to spend her next forty
Speaker 1: years in a psychiatric hospital. Morgan remains locked up under
Speaker 1: psychiatric supervision. Without wanting to justify or conflate the experiences
Speaker 1: of the three girls, or indeed dilute the severity of
Speaker 1: the crime, it is possible to see in twelve year
Speaker 1: old Morgan's and a Nissa's obsession with slender Man, a
Speaker 1: desperate desire to be accepted and understood in a world
Speaker 1: that seemed increasingly to want nothing to do with them.
Speaker 1: For many of us, the transition from childhood to adulthood
Speaker 1: is a perilous and treacherous journey, one that can often
Speaker 1: leave us feeling dangerously cut adrift, as the illusory permanence
Speaker 1: and innocence of childhood is lifted to reveal a more
Speaker 1: complex world, far less fixed and certain than we had
Speaker 1: once believed it to be. Though we might struggle to
Speaker 1: know where we fit into this new world, most of
Speaker 1: us will find our place in a world that many
Speaker 1: collectively hold in common. Some will forge their own paths,
Speaker 1: imagining new worlds into which others can follow where they
Speaker 1: feel they belong. Some of us, however, are fated never
Speaker 1: to find either. After news broke of the Posies are incident,
Speaker 1: an almost inevitable moral panic ensued, the desperate human urge
Speaker 1: to find a reason for how and why something so
Speaker 1: terrible could happen, followed by the all too predictable pointing
Speaker 1: of the finger at the first bogeyman that could be found.
Speaker 1: Walkeshire Police Chief Russell Jack urged parents to restrict and
Speaker 1: monitor their children's Internet usage with one Australian news agency,
Speaker 1: declaring creepy pastor an Internet horrorcult that almost caused a killing.
Speaker 1: Many other media outlets were quick to join in the hype,
Speaker 1: only helping to fuel the legend even further. However, what
Speaker 1: they found in slender Man was not the perpetrator, merely
Speaker 1: a personification of their fear of the Internet. He was
Speaker 1: the faceless city, of the faceless technology that has come
Speaker 1: to dominate our lives, the haunting specter of a world
Speaker 1: rapidly evolving and changing from the one we thought we
Speaker 1: once understood. Maybe the police were right to urge parents
Speaker 1: to limit their children's Internet usage, if indeed it is
Speaker 1: leading us toward a disastrous end point, or, as some
Speaker 1: contemporary thinkers argue, if such is our fate, better yet
Speaker 1: to harness the speed of technological change to bring about
Speaker 1: this end even sooner, since, after all, according to them,
Speaker 1: it is only when we get to this moment that
Speaker 1: will be able to start again and realize a better future.
Speaker 1: It was critical theorist Benjamin Noise who coined the term
Speaker 1: accelerationism in twenty ten, taking it from Rogers Alasne's nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty seven novel Lord of Light. The book drawing heavily
Speaker 1: on the mythology of Hinduism and Buddhism tells the story
Speaker 1: of a planet colonized by the last survivors of Earth,
Speaker 1: who have gained control over its native inhabitants by using
Speaker 1: technology to turn themselves into gods based on Hindu mythology.
Speaker 1: In this guise, the Earthling come God's hoard technology to
Speaker 1: suppress the planet's indigenous races. One former Earthling, known as Sam,
Speaker 1: the last Accelerationist, effectively plays out the role of Buddha
Speaker 1: by rejecting the status quo. Believing technology should be available
Speaker 1: to all. It begins to revolt against its godlike compatriots,
Speaker 1: and eventually succeeds in claiming technology for the masses so
Speaker 1: they can escape their subjugation. Although there are a number
Speaker 1: of approaches to the idea, the roots of accelerationism can
Speaker 1: be traced back to the early nineteen nineties to an
Speaker 1: extraordinary academic group known as the Cybernetic Culture of Research
Speaker 1: Unit or CCRU. The collective saw the capitalist model, specifically
Speaker 1: as inseparable from self propelling technology, arguing that the two
Speaker 1: should be accelerated since they were already unstoppable. Much like
Speaker 1: the Bill Hicks joke in which he implores advertisers to
Speaker 1: kill themselves, only for the advertisers to then become excited
Speaker 1: at the prospect of being able to market his new
Speaker 1: angry anti marketing persona. The members of CCRU believed that
Speaker 1: the Internet is a slave to capitalism and all its worst,
Speaker 1: most destructive features are a direct result of this. C
Speaker 1: CRU first spawned in Warwick University's philosophy department sometime in
Speaker 1: October nineteen ninety five, primarily led by renegade philosophers Sadie
Speaker 1: Plant and Nick Land, a leading proponent of the concept
Speaker 1: of hyperstitions, as explored in Chapter two of The Unexplained Book.
Speaker 1: They were described in a nineteen ninety eight article by
Speaker 1: music journalist Simon Reynolds as occupying an uncanny interzone between
Speaker 1: science and superstition. As writer Andy Beckett put it in
Speaker 1: a twenty seventeen Guardian newspaper article, their intellectual esthetic owed
Speaker 1: as much to Land's deep fascination with the occult and
Speaker 1: h belove crafts CTHULEU Mithos as it did to the
Speaker 1: work of pioneering post structuralists Shield LUs and Felix Gatari.
Speaker 1: To their detractors, operating beyond the normative expectations of academic practice.
Speaker 1: Their work was too thin in research and amounted to
Speaker 1: little more than a highly intellectualized game of cultural pattern
Speaker 1: recognition to Enthrall, to pop culture and Alister Crowley, they said,
Speaker 1: Yet for the five manic years that CCRU was active,
Speaker 1: they produced a vast emporium of works and ideas. Today
Speaker 1: those ideas form the bedrock of some of the most radical,
Speaker 1: challenging and terrifying ideas in philosophy and cultural theory, with
Speaker 1: much of it being dispersed through their wants defunct but
Speaker 1: now thankfully archived website ccru dot net. To the uninitiated,
Speaker 1: such as myself, stumbling upon cec ru dot net is
Speaker 1: akin to being a crew member of the Nostromo from
Speaker 1: Ridley Scot's alien, stepping foot into the strange, abandoned spaceship
Speaker 1: of the enigmatic Engineers for the first time. Like many
Speaker 1: forgotten websites, cut off from the present bloodline of the
Speaker 1: active net, there's a sense of stumbling upon an ancient relic.
Speaker 1: The words comprised of an almost impenetrable loose circuitry of
Speaker 1: cryptic phrases and insider references feel at once both arcane,
Speaker 1: while simultaneously as though they have been delivered to us
Speaker 1: from the future. They warn us darkly and spell like
Speaker 1: of the impending apocalypse. There is the sense too, that
Speaker 1: perhaps they've been entombed and buried in the bowels of
Speaker 1: the intert for a reason, as if they are too
Speaker 1: dangerous to be allowed out lest they conjure into existence
Speaker 1: the very thing they are warning us about. Only having
Speaker 1: read them, do you realize with horror that it is
Speaker 1: too late. The words are very much alive, and something
Speaker 1: has got out, the true horror being the realization that
Speaker 1: we may already be living through the exact apocalypse they
Speaker 1: were trying to warn us about. Take these passages, for example,
Speaker 1: from a piece titled cyber Hype six Dark Side of
Speaker 1: the Wave discussing the inevitable boom bust cycle of capitalism.
Speaker 1: Social innovation requires that existing arrangements and hierarchies are thrown
Speaker 1: into disorder and shattered, and in the depths of the
Speaker 1: economic dark side, the world becomes a p for things
Speaker 1: yet to come. It is here that disruptive technologies are spawned.
Speaker 1: Where labor, capital and markets are cheap to acquire. The
Speaker 1: high magicians of demand management try to prevent the new
Speaker 1: economy from sliding into darkness, but it is already too
Speaker 1: late for that. Even as the shadows thicken, something unimaginable
Speaker 1: is arriving from the edges of the world. Everything is
Speaker 1: always in flux, only now never before has that change
Speaker 1: been so rapid and disorientating, and so Where others might
Speaker 1: have heralded the digital Age as ushering in a bright,
Speaker 1: utopian future, arriving just in time to fix humanity's greatest problems,
Speaker 1: CCRU saw something far more disturbing to them. The digital Age,
Speaker 1: when coupled with the capitalist instinct, amounts to nothing less
Speaker 1: than the final phase of a capitalistic death drive, speeding
Speaker 1: as ever nearer to some kind of great cataclysm, a
Speaker 1: system that, rather than offering us weighs out, is in
Speaker 1: fact accelerating us to a final and inescapable end point.
Speaker 1: You've been listening to Unexplained Season six, episode twenty eight
Speaker 1: The new Sphere Part two, the third and final part,
Speaker 1: will be released next Friday, February seventeenth. If you enjoy
Speaker 1: Unexplained and would like to help support us, you can
Speaker 1: now do so via Patreon to receive access to add
Speaker 1: three episodes. Just go to patron dot com Forward Slash
Speaker 1: Unexplained Pod to sign up. Unexplained, the book and audiobook,
Speaker 1: featuring stories that have never before been featured on the show,
Speaker 1: is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes,
Speaker 1: and Noble Waterstones, among other bookstores. All elements of Unexplained,
Speaker 1: including the show's music, are produced by me Richard McClain smith.
Speaker 1: Please subscribe and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts,
Speaker 1: and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts
Speaker 1: or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show.
Speaker 1: Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like
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