John Titor

There's a little bit of everything on the internet these days.  There are probably forums where people discuss their collection of silly straws, and youtube videos featuring stop-action animation of little stick figures someone has made from their fingernail clippings.  There are probably sites dedicated exclusively to photos of pregnant Siamese twins soaking their feet in yogurt, if you're in to that sort of thing.  Heck, you can probably find a separate site if you insist on the yogurt being non-fat.  It's a real human carnival.  So, it's probably inevitable that sooner or later a time traveler was going to stop by for a visit.

His name is John Titor, and in January 2001 he claimed to be from the year 2036.  He claimed that a third world war will break out in 2015, killing billions of people.  He claimed that he traveled back to 1975 to find an IBM 5100 computer, which they apparently will need in the future to fix some sort of computer problem that's due to crop up in 2038 that's similar to the Y2K problem.  I guess his time flight had a layover in the early 2000's, so he made a pit stop here and shared his story with the world via the internet and the Art Bell radio program.  He even saw no danger in sharing the colonel's secret recipe for time travel. (You'll be happy to know, Doug, he claimed that the multiverse theory is correct.  So, you have at least one possible authority in your corner.)

Do I believe any of this?  Is this the silver jumpsuit guy?  Well, while it would be a tragedy to be dismissive of anyone claiming to be a time traveler, and thereby missing the opportunity to appreciate having one right in front of us, I'm definitely a little skeptical...to say the least.  The story is a little Terminatoresque, don't you think?  Plus, 2036 seems like a fairly ambitious deadline for cracking the secret of time travel, even without a third world war and the death of billions providing a bit of a distraction.  With the struggle to survive and the effort to dig the bodies of loved ones out of rubble, you wouldn't think there would be a lot of time on their hands to figure out how to manipulate the space-time continuum.  After all, there's a reason they weren't splitting the atom back in the dark ages.  Also, since he ascribed to the "multiverse" theory, you'd think he'd be trying to stop this coming world war, instead of mooing about mad cow disease.  At the very least, he could have warned us about 9/11.  I'm just scratching the surface.  These are just a few problems I see at a glance. 

There are plenty of people who do believe him, though.  Of course, there are always people out there that will believe in anything, no matter how crazy it is.  I'm sure there are people that would believe it if someone told them that shoving pyramid shaped sugar cubes into their rectum was the secret to immortality.  You'd think that the fact that the things he's predicted up to this point haven't happened would lay the whole thing to rest, but we live in a society where people are led to believe that it's a virtue to hold fast to your stupidity...errr, I mean faith in the face of reason.  So, really, is it any wonder that some refuse to let it go?

The Titor Time Line

He predicted that the 2004 election would lead to "civil unrest" that would erupt in 2008.  I suppose that all depends on what you call, "civil unrest".  Are people pissed off?  Sure.  Is there war in the streets?  Ehhh.  He claims that he was a soldier in the "Fighting Diamondbacks" when he was 13 in 2011.  Well, the year is still young, but most of the 13 year-old boys I see are still playing their Xbox.  Maybe he was referring to a new Halo game.   He predicted that mad cow would be a "pandemic."  I just ate a hamburger this morning, and I'm not too worried.  He predicted that the U.S. would split into five different territories, but I'm not sure when this is suppose to happen.  Apparently some time before 2015.

At any rate, if it's a hoax, it's a pretty good one.  As a part time fiction writer, I can always appreciate the imagination that goes into a good lie.  I just wish I would have thought of it first. 

(This Post is also available in extra cheesy version.)

The Matrix: A Study of Internet Identities

For about 11 years now, I have gone by the name "nuclearheadache" on the internet.  I have used the name for websites, forums, email, and of course, as the title of this blog.  I came up with the name on the spot, without giving it much thought.  I was creating an account, I was prompted to choose a username, and I had a really, really bad headache at the time.  There wasn't much more to it than that.  Since then, though, the name has become a persona, a projection of my personality, or at least a projection of those aspects of my personality that I chose to share on the internet.  The name suggests something that a name like, say, hellokittysuperfan116 would not.  

In real life I am Bryan White.  I'm a 35 year old factory worker.  I'm married.  I have a daughter.  I'm left handed, and I have grey eyes.  My identity in the real world is at the mercy of countless things which are beyond my control, not the least of which is my name, picked for me at birth and not a matter I had the slightest input in.  My hair has decided to abandon me for the most part, also without consulting me at all.  This undeniably affects my image in the world, again, in ways that are beyond my control.  Although nuclearheadache  is not my real name, and although the persona it encapsulates is an artificial construction by virtue of the fact that I can select and choose what constitutes that persona, in some ways these things are more real precisely because my choice was involved.   A username is a creative expression.  A given name is an outfit someone else dressed you in.   A virtual avatar is an artistic choice.  Your face in a random accident of genetics.  

Yet, there is honesty in a face.  A lifetime of choices, good and bad are written there.  A face displays your virtues and your faults.  There is a paradox here.  On the one hand, our internet identities are more genuine expressions of ourselves because they are more deliberately chosen and they are less subject to factors  beyond our control.  On the other hand, our real life identities are more genuine because we can not hide our faults behind an artificial construction.  You might say that a  person who knows us in real life is much more likely to see us at our worst because they are more  liable to see us under pressure as we deal with real problems and we struggle in the real world.  But yet, there are times when a person uses the anonymity of the internet to reveal hidden sides of themselves that they usually keep hidden in normal society.

If you're reading this, that means you're on the internet just like I am.  We all have a foot in either of these two worlds, and we all possess these dual identities, and so the question becomes:  Which one of these worlds is more real?  Which one has more of our true selves invested in it?  Who really know us better; the people we interact with online, or the people we interact with in life?  And in turn, which of these people are more real to us?  The consideration of these questions is one of the major themes of the movie The Matrix. 

Years ago, I used to have this friend that was very suspicious of the internet, and of computers in general.  I'm sure you've all known someone like this at some point.  I was sitting around with him one night and we were talking and he said that some day aliens might land here and they would find the streets deserted, the buildings empty, and everything rotting and rusting away.  There would just be silent desolation everywhere.  Eventually, these aliens would find their way to our homes, where they would find each and everyone of us in some back room plugged into a virtual world of easy and infinite possibilities which we had long since chosen over the limiting confines of the real world.  I wasn't sure that I agreed with his pessimistic outlook, but as an aspiring writer, I appreciated that there were some intriguing possibilities for fiction there, if someone could figure out how to make a story out of the idea.  So when I heard about The Matrix, my first reaction was a smile that someone else had had the same idea.  

On its surface, The Matrix seems to be a simple story of people being freed from an artificial, virtual world so that they can live in the real world.  This would appear to be the primary struggle of the characters in the film.  The virtual world appears to represent a form of bondage, and the fight is for the freedom of reality.  A straightforward reading of the narrative suggests this unmistakably.  But if you look a little closer and dig a little deeper, you find it's a little more complicated.  Beneath the obvious surface, you find that the real world and the online world have been switched.  Each one represents the other in the reality of the film.  This is a mirror image of our world, through the looking glass and flipped around backwards.   

The first and biggest clue to this switch is in the names.  In the film's virtual world Keanu Reeves' character is named "Thomas A. Anderson", while in the film's real world he is known as "Neo."  However, the name Neo is clearly recognizable as a type of internet username, as are the names of the other characters, "Morpheus", "Trinity", "Tank", and so on.  A big point is even made, during the climax of the story, of Reeves embracing the username over the Anderson name, which is clearly recognizable as a type of real name in our world.  The point being that "Anderson" is a kind of slave name that belongs to his former life of captivity. 

On the surface of the story, this captivity involves being held prisoner by the artificiality of the Matrix.  But the juxtaposition of the name-types reveals a deeper level.  The captivity that the Anderson name represents is the captivity of the circumstances of the material world.  It's the captivity of his job, the suit and tie he has to wear, the neighbor's garbage that Smith mentions.  It is the captivity to the mundane realities of life.  The Neo identity, as Smith again points out, is another life, lived in computers.  It is Anderson's online persona.  As Neo, he has a much grander purpose and a far less restricted existence.  It is  breaking these chains of reality's restrictions that defines Neo and ultimately leads him to the realization of his true self. 

Since this scenario suggests that the Matrix represents our physical reality, this might seem as though it is contradicted by the superhuman feats of agility and bullet-time virtuosity displayed by the characters within the Matrix.  However, the dividing line in the symbolism between the real and online worlds is not simply between the Matrix and outside the Matrix.   The actual point of demarcation between real and online is the moment when Neo wakes up from the Matrix.  By following Neo's path to becoming the "one", as opposed to the zero he apparently was in his former life, The Matrix explores the duality between the limiting realities of real life and the possibilities of the online life.  From the soul-crushing dullness of corporate America Neo is initiated into a realm of instant downloads, customizable options, and fantasy role-playing.

That is the real trick of The Matrix.  Although it plays like a dire warning and an indictment of the virtual world, it is actually an endorsement of it and exploration of its place in modern life.  In the question of where our true selves lie, it falls firmly on the side of the persona that we create by choice.  The society of the real world, it argues, is a system that keeps us under control with its agents checking our every step.  The internet provides our minds with an opportunity to break free and become the person we were actually meant to be.  You may agree or disagree with this, but the hidden secret of the film remains.  The Matrix is the real world.                        

This is a Dictionary; Don't Make Me Smack You with It.

A few years ago a couple of co-workers of mine got into a conversation about gun control one night.  One of them went off on the typical conservative rant on the subject, and I pretty much kept quiet and stayed out of it.  It's not that I have particularly strong opinions about gun control.  Sometimes it's the thought process, or lack of it, that went into the formation of a person's opinions that's more of a problem than the actual opinion itself.  It's like having a guy tell you that they shouldn't have trials for rapists; they should just execute them on the spot.  It's not that you're pro-rape.  You just know that you'd be wasting your breath arguing the merits of due process with a person like that.

There's a 30 day waiting period, Comrade.

So anyway, at one point, as this guy was ranting along at a nice pace, he mentioned something about gun control being "communist."  He kept hammering away at this point.  After he had dropped the word for the fourth or fifth time, I couldn't restrain myself any longer from throwing my two cents in.  "Communism is an economic system", I told him, "It really has nothing to do with gun control at all.  You're thinking of 'totalitarianism'.  People usually confuse the two terms, because communism in practice tends to lead to totalitarianism, but it's not the same thing.  Communism is just the equal redistribution of wealth.  That's it."  Naturally these guys looked at me like I had just landed here from another planet, and eventually the whole thing somehow led to me having to have this stupid conversation with someone yet again.  I probably should have just kept my mouth shut. 

But as a writer, I get very annoyed when people abuse the language and carelessly throw words around without knowing what they mean.  It seems like it happens the most with derogatory terms, or at least terms with derogatory overtones.  It's the overtones that people really enjoy.  They just love how insulting a word sounds, and they're not going to let a little thing like meaning slow them down when they're really on a roll.  Some people even have their favorite term of reproach that they use to pass judgment on nearly everything.  My mother is a very religious person and she throws around the term "humanistic" as though she were being paid for every use.  The pastor at the church we went to when I was kid gave a sermon on Humanism once, and she's been entralled with the term ever since.  Any type of idea, theory, or practice of any kind that leaves God out of the equation is denounced as "humanistic" in her book.  The IRS is probably humanistic for not praying before they send out our 1099 forms.

 The internet is a fertile breeding ground for misused words.  "Irony" alone has a long and confused history.  At first it was used indiscriminately to describe any coincidence, cleverness, or circumlocution.  Any chain of events that fell together in a neat way was applauded for being "ironic."  This vast electronic market of words was flooded with the term.  But then the backlash set in.  These days it's the in thing to instantly attack anyone who uses the word.  Whisper the word "irony" in even the most obscure corner of the web and someone will immediately pop up and dismiss you as idiot.  Ironically, there seems to be no acceptable definition of the word that anyone can agree on.  To be fair, irony is a somewhat elusive concept and I've yet to find a dictionary that really does the word justice.  I've always thought of it as a twisted connection between cause and effect, but I'm not sure that really covers it either.

The internet even struggles with its own special terminology.  There are not enough bridges in all of the kingdom to provide shelter for everyone that gets labeled as a "troll" on a message board.  The word was useful enough to begin with, and it designated a certain specific phenomenon.  It's a person who deliberately irritates and mocks people on a forum, solely for the sake of getting a reaction.  There's no real sincerity behind anything they say.  They just want to piss people off.  Period.  That's a troll, plain and simple; nothing more, nothing less.  Yet, people call anyone they don't like or anyone who irritates them a "troll", and the word has become completely devalued as a result.  It's like "Epic Fail"; it's become a cheap insult, ready at hand, and easy to use....and virtually meaningless at this point. Someone gets mad, and the "T-word" starts flying.  Yeah!  That'll show 'em! 

I try my best to be conscientious with the words I use.  I confess that I also have a special affection for certain words; I just like the way they sound.  But I try to make sure I know what the word actually means before I use it, especially if I'm preserving my own words in writing.  There are times in the course of working on post like this that I'll have a word that I'm planning to use, and I'll be pretty sure I know what it means or I'll kind of have a vague idea.  In those cases I'll always look it up.  In fact, I've done it three times during the writing of this post, and no, I'm not telling you which words.  Some things are best kept a trade secret.  Anyhow, I have to say, I have an almost perfect track record.  The word nearly always means just what I thought it meant.  But it's always better to double check and be sure.  I'd hate to get caught with my pants down and end up looking like an idiot because I confused the difference between "affect" and "effect".  Which brings me to another story:

About nine years ago I was working as night security guard at a salt mine.  It was just a few months after the Sept. 11th attack.  One night, just around shift change, a semi truck pulled into the lot.  There were two Arab men in the truck, and they got out to ask me for directions to a nearby town.  As we stood there and I gave the men directions, the 2nd shift miners were leaving and they all stared as they passed us in the parking-lot.  Tension was running high then, of course.  A few hours later I got a call from one of the miners, and he starting going into this whole thing about how he had noticed that the semi's trailer wasn't properly sealed.   "I don't mean to sound like a pedophile.", he told me.  Well, the thought hadn't really crossed my mind until then.  I didn't have the heart to explain his mistake to him.  I can only hope that he doesn't find himself feeling paranoid around the wrong people.

Anyway, so I do my homework.  Big deal.  Still, I feel like I owe it to myself and to anyone else who has the misfortune to be listening to me, to try to know what I'm talking about if I'm going to bother opening my mouth.  At the very least, I can get the words right.  If I started tossing around any multi-syllabic gems that I've picked up in my travels with reckless abandon, then I'd risk the possibility of exposing myself as a fool and coming off looking pretentious.  And don't even get me started on that word.