1 post tagged “jejune”

je·june (j-jn)

adj.

1. Not interesting; dull: "and there pour forth jejune words and useless empty phrases" Anthony Trollope.

2. Lacking maturity; childish: surprised by their jejune responses to our problems.

3. Lacking in nutrition: a jejune diet.

Single pages with tearaway tabs taped to telephone poles and other street furniture are a fairly common sight in the neighbourhood around the office - they advertise everything from furniture sales to "Sexy Nerd" personal training services to Hip-Hop Shoe Repair.

A couple of weeks ago I started noticing posters like these advertising "Memory to Media" services that would download your memories to

VHS tapes - "suitable for transfer to Laser Disc!" - and a url for The Jejune Institute.

Since then more posters have turned up depicting everything from Dolphin based therapy to Human Force Fields, Time Cameras and appeal for information about some sort of Goon squad.

The odd thing is that although this rash of posters is new it seems like the game has been around for a while - io9 covered it back in December for example. Rather suspiciously they claimed not to be able to find any information about it despite a 30 page thread on it from last October on Unfiction leading some commenters to suggest that it was being run by io9 themselves.

In the thread some people have claimed to have been to the offices of the Institute and captured video of the induction process - which all rather begs the question: if it's not for io9 then who's it for. If it has been running since October last year and has been renting an office on California since then, then it must be fairly well funded.

This of course presupposes that the footage isn't in and of itself planted and I suppose it's this kind of mindfuck

which is half the point of ARGs - this blurring of the line between the story and reality. It's the same thing that kept that niggling thought in the back of your head when you watched "The Blair Witch Project" that whispered in the back of your mind "What if it is real, what if this is actual footage". It's the same feeling than interrogators try to instil when you do Escape & Evasion and SERE courses - to exploit your mental and physical exhaustion make you start wondering if you have actually been picked up by a domestic terrorist cell and aren't just being held by the training cadre. Worrying away at all those instincts hard coded into the lizard part of our brain that make us question the status quo.

It's the same bit of our minds that advertisers try and exploit - it is physically impossible for us to be experts on everything yet we're expected to somehow make rational decisions on a bewildering array of topics. In the past we would defer to a trusted expert - a priest, a bank manager, a lawyer

, a policeman, the local newspaper  -   and hope that the social contract and the implicit value of mutual trust would keep each party in check.

These days however those appeals to authority are being abused and debased and so we find traders passing incredibly risky mortgages onto brokers who in turn pass them onto unwary punters who believe what they're told when it's explained to them that it's perfectly normal to buy a house that is worth 10 times their salary.  We believe the media when they believe a single scientist and claim that the MMR jab is a bad thing. We believe politicians when they tell us about

Yellowcake. And when we stop believing in politicians we start believing in celebrities to tell us what to do because we have this niggling need to have an alpha dog infront of us leading the way.

At best it's just misguided but at worst its exploitative - when marketing companies start using fake equations to fool us into thinking that we're not being advertised to then it undermines our already weakened trust in the authorities, past the healthy skepticism

needed as checks and balances. Much as I loved the T-Mobile "Dancing atLiverpool Street Station" thing the co-opting of viral marketing and, to neatly circle back to the original point of this post, ARGs I fret that we'll end up notbeing able to take anything at face value and that's just plain exhausting and leads to the kind of rampant paranoia that fuels the most labyrinthian conspiracy theories where every event, no matter how insignificant needs to be fitted into a greater whole as part of a desperate attempt to try and make sense of everything.

...

It occurs to me that I ought to try and get more sleep.