Joseph Matheny's Blog, page 11
September 15, 2022
Hortus Semioticus 9/2022 – 07 – Ong’s Hat
ONG’S HAT and the construction of a suspicious model readerJorge Flores
[PDF]
Abstract. In the late 1980s, an art collective led by writer Joseph Matheny created a multimedia narrative eventually known as Ong’s Hat about a supposed group of scientists who had achieved interdimensional travel and a subsequent persecution and concealment by of a dark conspiracy. Unfolded through printed documents sent by post, BBS (bulletin board systems) and later blogs, videos and radio, the Ong’s Hat textual complex managed to create a community of believers who discussed and amplified the narrative, appropriating it and disavowing its original creators. This article proposes to approach Ong’s Hat through Umberto Eco’s semiotics of interpretation, particularly his ideas on textual cooperation between reader and text and, starting from there, the textual strategies through which Ong’s Hat created its Model Readers. For this, concepts linked to transmedia are used, as well as the methodology developed by Margrit Schreier to evaluate how certain texts manage to confuse their readers about their reality status.
Keywords: transmedia, interpretation, textual cooperation, textual strategies, Model Reader, BBS, ARG
Entire article: https://www.hortussemioticus.ut.ee/hortus-semioticus-9-2022-07/
[PDF of article]
September 6, 2022
Ong’s Hat: Abandoned Town or Time Portal?
American LoserLP is in Aruba…so Joe Conte keeps his chair warm while KP tells Kahuna and Joe about the mysterious abandoned town of Ong’s Hat, NJ….ghost town, time portal…work of fiction…government cover-up??? You tell us when you need to hop off the train…we all know it’s coming. ENJOY!
Ong’s Hat: Abandoned Town or Time Portal?Page Link: https://player.fm/series/american-loser-podcast/ongs-hat-abandoned-town-or-time-portal
August 10, 2022
The Liminal Cycle (A Trilogy) by Joseph Matheny
It is presented in three acts across multiple mediums.
Part 1Liminal: By Cameron
Liminal by CameronA novella presented as a movie treatment for a movie that was “suppressed.” Written under the pen name, Cameron Whiteside.
Part one of The Liminal Cycle.
Available as a Kindle, print, or audiobook
Archive.org ebook and audio versions.
REVIEWS“This autobiographical novella could easily be compared to some of the best cyber-punk science fiction available to us. Over his journey, throughout this period of his life, Cameron is confronted by symbols from Ancient Mesopotamian and Buddhist theology, goth and punk subcultures, and anarchist traditions, all the while confronted by questions that are both strange and common to us all – “what is going on?”, “what is happening to me?”, “what do I trust as real?”, etc.” – From a review by Julian Langer, author of Feral Consciousness: Deconstruction of the Modern Myth and Return to the Woods and other great works
Possibly the best story I’ve ever experienced. (not just read, as it is an Experience}. I tip my hat and bow. –Brent Keala Kekua
“It was a lovely May Day gift receiving this book as part of an email giveaway. A quick enjoyable read with so many literary counter-culture touchstones from Conrad to Burroughs. You can use this book as a shopping list or as a synopsis synchronizing us for the next step.” –Andrew Ceyton, Goodreads
“I made the mistake of reading Liminal before going to bed. It really influenced my dreams = every person and everything has a hidden purpose some of which you are in on and some not. After I had finished the “proposal” I saw my collection of laptops and pads as sinister apertures into a clinging needy system that only wants to do me good (your buying habits indicate that you’d probably like this new Wampus) at an indeterminate price (you’re basically nobody unless you own a Limulus D).
It’s a scary piece of writing. And a nice logo too: reminded me of my early algebra classes — draw a circle of radius R on the Cartesian X-Y plane in such a way that it encloses the origin but is not centered there.
What is the equation for this circle?
Where does this symbol come from?
A preview of a slice of madness.” – Nick Herbert
“Reading this is like learning to write with your non-dominant hand. It opens new pathways in the brain.” – Reader/Winner of the print book giveaway
“I shit you not, I’ve seen that sigil in Glasgow. Probably a few weeks before the quarantine. Plus Cameron is a Scottish name so maybe they’re from here?
I’ll check it out and see it I can get pics of the symbol once lockdown is over, but I’m 100% sure it’s the same one.” – The Weirdnet (@TheWeirdnet) April 28, 2020
All of this is a strange combination of intriguing and silly, but that range is completely dependent on the weather and the time of day. Read those same words at night in a rainstorm, and you end up with a different emotion. That’s true of all fiction… or non-fiction masquerading as fiction… or fiction masquerading as non-fiction masquerading as fiction… My head hurts. – Bots and Bee
Part 2Xen: The Zen of the Other by Ezra Buckley
Xen: The Zen of the OtherXen: The Zen of the Other is a work that confronts the questions of identity, modernity, life, the other, and the place for rites of passage in the modern world.
This audio-play version of Xen includes a fully hyperlinked ebook for reference use. Presented as a series of audio notes left by the protagonist on his phone. Written under the pen name of Ezra Buckley.
Available as an audio drama with ebook accompanment.
Digital Album
Streaming + Download
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC, and more. Also includes ebook in multiple formats.
“I enjoyed reading Xen: The Zen of the Other, but the audio radio play is even better. Its gusto voice acting, hypnotic musicscapes, and mystical plot all add up to a transporting experience that’s beyond what we normally expect from a book recording.” – Joe Nolan, The Contributor
“…wildly creative experiments with form…through a down-to-earth lens and with a sense of humor. … I felt spoken to many times as Ezra articulated his own frustrations with life and with his own expectations of the world.” –, award-winning Actor. Writer, Producer, Director of Antrum
“This is tantalizing, intriguing, and weird stuff and we recommend it highly.” -Original Falcon Newsletter“What I appreciate about Buckley’s book is the sense of desperate and furious will-to-life/power, coupled with a playfulness that is wonderful.” – Julian LangerPart 3Statio Numero
Statio NumeroStatio Numero: an interdisciplinary media experience.
This limited series is the third and final act of The Liminal Cycle, a meta-trilogy.
Knowledge of Liminal and Xen, which make up the first two parts of the trilogy, will be necessary for understanding this work.
Statio Numero
A story about persona, identity, liminality, and voice.
Coming in the future.
Watch this space or sign up below to be notified.
Sign up to be notified when Statio Numero is released
07-27-2022: If you’d like to read an outline of the work, check this out.
You Can Leave Your Hat On – Joseph Matheny, Ong’s Hat and Alternate Reality Games
Sometimes the fabric of our world thins out, and people slip through – either from another dimension or into one. So some people think, while others claim it happened to them. Come along on a trip through different times and places, visiting 12th century England, 19th century Germany, Spain, Japan, Mormon mythology and, of course, the United States, including Ong’s Hat, New Jersey – site of the very first internet conspiracy theory.
32:13 – You Can Leave Your Hat On – Joseph Matheny, Ong’s Hat and Alternate Reality Games (ARGs)
More info and lots of links can be found in the episode description here: https://conspiracyclearinghouse.podbean.com/e/accidental-tourists-interdimensional-travellers/
August 2, 2022
PORTAL EN ONG’S HAT HISTORIA REAL SOBRE VIAJES INTERDIMENSIONALES
Diversas teorías pretenden comprobar la idea de que existen numerosas realidades y dimensiones de forma paralela a la nuestra, y que de vez en cuando estas realidades se solapan. Aquí también cabe el concepto de que los viajes interdimensionales son posibles y los portales, algunos abiertos desde hace tiempo, garantizan el acceso a estas realidades. Estos portales pueden resultar aterradores, intrigantes e invariablemente extraños, pero siempre terminan atrapando nuestra imaginación y provocando que nos cuestionemos: ¿si realmente existen estas dimensiones alternas, qué podemos hacer nosotros, simples mortales, para comprobarlo?
0:00 PORTAL EN ONG’S HAT HISTORIA REAL SOBRE VIAJES INTERDIMENSIONALES–DOCUMENTAL ESPAÑOL LATINO 0:37 LA HISTORIA DE ONG’S HAT 1:39 EL LIBRO DE JOSEPH MATHENY 2:04 WALI FARD, EL LÍDER ESPIRITUAL 3:35 ORIGEN DEL CENTRO ÁSHRAN 5:00 FRANK Y ALTHEA DOBBS 6:44 INICIO DE LOS EXPERIMENTOS EN EL CENTRO ÁSHRAN 7:41 PROYECTO El HUEVO 8:25 EL PORTAL 9:09 VIAJES INTERDIMENSIONALES 10:05 LA MASACRE EN EL CENTRO ÁSHRAN 11:18 EL FIN DE LA SECTA 12:13 LAS FILTRACIONES EN LA DÉCADA DE 1990 13:07 HISTORIA DE CIENCIA FICCIÓN
July 13, 2022
The Pine Barrens: New Jersey’s weird, wondrous, wild world all its own
Excerpt of an article behind a paywall. The original article requires a subscription.
Is there a portal in the Pines?
In his 1936 book, “Forgotten Towns of Southern New Jersey,” Henry Charlton Beck calls Ong’s Hat a “vanished town of murder, of prize fights and of isolated country dances,” a place that “a hundred or so years ago, we were told … was a center of life among the Pineys,” with “brawls and fisticuffs, some of them bloody enough.”
While the book outlines Ong’s Hat’s somewhat sketchy origins, including how the ghost town got its unique name, there’s another, more mysterious narrative. WeirdNJ, the indispensable guide to all things strange and unusual about our great state, dove into Ong’s Hat’s paranormal possibilities in a post entitled “Ong’s Hat: Piney Ghost Town or Gateway to Another Dimension?”
Drawing on a book by Joseph Matheny, “Ong’s Hat: The Beginning,” WeirdNJ tells the story of a 1950s quasi-church/sect and one of its “travelers,” Wali Fard. According to their tale, Fard bought 200 acres in the Pine Barrens and, joined by “a group of runaway boys from Paramus and two lesbian anarchists,” he formed his own breakaway sect, publishing newsletters and drawing the attention of a pair of Texas twins and UFO enthusiasts, Frank and Althea Dobbs.
The pair, rejected from Princeton after submitting a PhD thesis on “cognitive chaos,” believed people could tap into the unused portions of their brains to perform extraordinary tasks, including halting the aging process; the sect formed the Institute of Chaos Studies.
WeirdNJ’s post says that within a couple of years, the Dobbs twins discovered “the Egg,” a device they used to chart brain waves. Experimenting with mind manipulation, they believed they could “control the chaos they found within the mind,” the post says. But one version of “the Egg” appeared to open a portal to another dimension, opening “the Gate.” And when a chemical spill from nearby Fort Dix (now called Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst) forced them to abandon the Pines, they did so not physically, but “inter-dimensionally.”
“In this dimension,” WeirdNJ writes, “they still lived in Ong’s Hat, but humankind did not exist.”
So, is Matheny’s book fact or fiction? According to WeirdNJ, the author isn’t saying, so you’ll have to decide that one for yourself.
July 12, 2022
Center your Schizowave (An interview w Joseph Matheny)
From the original post:
July 9, 2022|#ChapelPerilousTheLifeandThoug, #Joesphmatheny, #Ongshat, #PropAnon, #qanon
(This interview took place between Joseph Matheny and me not long after the January 6th failed Trump coup. Q Anon was getting lots of headlines. So, I decided to speak to the guy who nearly single-handedly created Alternative Reality Games.)
By: Prop Anon
I first learned about Ong’s Hat from Bradley Sands, bizarro fiction writer extraordinaire, back in the late 90s. Hearing the story of paranormal activity happening in a New Jersey ghost town reminded me of other conspiracy theories involving the tri-state area and traveling through space and/or dimensions-like the Montauk Project and the Philadelphia experiment, which I found intriguing at the time. Later, I heard about how groups of people were venturing to Ong’s Hat in search of the secret magical remnants of a secret village of inter-dimensional time-traveling ex-Princeton professors.
Ong’s Hat was alive. It was so because of the active participation of its readers. It had become an urban myth where “legend trippers,” searching for a fun and free night of entertainment, went to the place and then by added interpretations of the everything on the Ong’s Hat internet forum. The story’s enigmatic quality and its exoteric insistence that it was true and not a fiction fantasy made it that more much engaging. However, as you will read, Matheny watched as groups of anonymous people swooped into the forum and attempted to high jack the story he created.
As you will read, it wasn’t just the plot of Ong’s Hat that made it so engaging. It was also the structure. Ong’s Hat is the original alternative reality game. As such it laid the tracks and created the foundation for many of the ARG’s that came after. For those still making sense of and deconstructing the destructive quality of QAnon, which looks to me like a propaganda campaign representing as a distorted and schizophrenic alternative reality game, Matheny’s insights offer a way out of the angry confusion.
Prop: Let’s talk about Ong’s Hat. When I first heard about it many years ago it tripped me out, because the story wasn’t presented as fiction limited to the page. It was on the Internet. And so that line between fact and fiction became blurred, raising real interesting questions about the nature of reality.
So, where and when did you first get this idea for Ong’s Hat?
Matheny:The first ideas for the type of narrative that Ong’s Hat became started in the ‘80s, pre-Internet. I was already playing around on the bulletin board systems which were kind of the precursor to the Internet. My first Internet access was through a bulletin board system. These were prompt based, usually Unix systems that you would dial into directly and there would be a bulletin board. I guess the modern equivalent would be a web board, but this was pre-web. You would log into this machine and have threaded conversations with people over a period of time. The web board is really the web’s version of a BBS bulletin board system, back then we only had the bulletin board system. No graphics, just straight text.
In looking at that in thinking about all the things I’ve been thinking about up to that point which was a lot of different artistic influences, a lot of different technical influences, and a lot of different literary influences. I thought it would be cool if you could have a book that wasn’t just static words on a page but one that tied into other types of media. So that if you’re reading a book and it references a movie you could find that movie and watch the movie. If you’re reading the book and it referenced a place, you could go to that place, and find some graffiti left behind by the character in the book.
Basically, what I was after was breaching the presidium or breaking the fourth wall, as they say in Hollywood. I was looking for something that really jumped over from just a standard narrative. From a single medium to a narrative that could cross mediums, crossover into real life, and feel almost like a LARP. (live action role play) We were doing a LARPS’ back then. Also, we were doing a lot of Mail Art and play by mail type games. There was this great convergence in the in the late ‘80s early ‘90s of all these mediums not just referencing each other but possessing the ability to take the user from one medium to another medium pretty seamlessly.
As time progressed and the Internet became something that people could publicly access, more people were creating multimedia, and there was a platform for it that became even more seamless. So, you could go from a phone call to the web to a book to a movie all these things were more seamless. The seamless movement through mediums was important to maintain the experience. When you have to step out of the experience you break the spell and the theatric ambiance, and the immersion effect is lost.
So, I started trying to put something together as early as the ‘80s. Knowing and thinking and believing that the technology was going to progress soon and that it would be there to facilitate my vision in its fullness, but I could at least get started with what I had.
Ong’s Hat started as a story that was co-written and then later, I took over the entire thing. From there I kept adding to it and adding it to. You could say it was Talmudic, but it started out as four basic stories that all tied together.
It was a book catalog which really was a series of short stories that were disguised as a book catalog. The story began in one of the pamphlets and two interviews with two characters from the story all in that book catalog. One is with Nick Herbert the other one was with “Emory Cranston” in air quotes. Then I started publishing this stuff wherever I could put it. Mail Art catalogs, early bulletin board systems, early magazines, a lot of magazines were part of this project. I was building a back story for this grand finale which I wanted to build which was this kind of multimedia extravagant thing with people that were actors. They were playing characters that were online. Sometimes it was in person. I would set up these events where if people went to a certain restaurant on a certain day at a certain time, they would meet me while in character because I was a character in the story. One time we did a thing at Boulder Creek and Nick Herbert was there and a bunch of people showed up. And he stayed in character as Doctor Jabeer.
Over the years people asked me, “what is it?” It’s so many different disciplines that are tied together that it becomes difficult to really say without rambling for three hours. But I eventually came up with a succinct way to put it. Ong’s Hat is an art installation made for the new space which was the Internet. Which means that it’s an art installation that is no longer tethered to time and space. It was an art installation that was timeless and spaceless. It could go anywhere. Anybody from anywhere can interact with it. It basically played out in your head. The mind, after all, was the real medium. But the way that it was maintained was through what the later commercial ARGS developers called T.I.N.A.G., or this is not a game. Basically, we all know this is a game but none of us acknowledge that it’s a game while its being played. It reminds me of that scene in the movie Ed Wood. And a wall starts shaking while they are filming and someone asks, “don’t you want to shoot that scene again?” and Ed Wood says, “Haven’t you ever haven’t you heard of suspension of disbelief?” We were playing with the concept, which is we all know this is a game but none of us are going to have to ruin the game by talking about it.
When you are in a LARP, like if you do like a vampire warp on the streets of Santa Cruz which we used to do all the time, nobody talked about the fact it was a LARP while you were LARPing because it ruined the experience for everybody. You’re in character. you stay in character until the game is over and then you all go out and get a drink. Wrestling is another great example. K-Fab I think they call it. Two guys in the ring. One’s bad guy and one is a good guy. They already know who’s going to win before it starts. They go through the motions. They hate each other. They go out into the ring, they talk crap about each other, then the cameras go dark, and they go out and they get a drink. Politics is like that from what I hear. congressmen that hate each other actually go out drinking together.
It’s all just a thing that people do so that you can have the utmost of the experience in the moment and that’s really what I was after. This was an experiment in medium that I thought The Internet was the perfect vehicle for, and I was right. Unfortunately, too right in some ways as it turned out. But I was right, and it makes this really nice immersive experience so that’s the shortest way I can tell you what it is.
Prop: When it came out, especially on the early Internet. It was so future anticipatory. You were already digesting what was to come. Which is the role of a true artist true. So, I tip my cap to you. It’s hard to describe exactly what Ong’s Hat is in some ways but perhaps we can speak about the structure of the plot. Which I thought was so cool when I first learned about it.
The structure of ARG games, along with the plots, it really what propels the experience, doesn’t it? But in terms of plot, I’d like to just quickly hit some data points about it because it too activated readers to want to learn more. The plot involved a facility headed by renegade Princeton professors who conducted quantum physics, chaos theory experiments, and according to conspiracy theories discovered a new theory for dimensional travel utilizing an egg. The egg which was a wild computer interface sort of living thing it seemed like. Which totally anticipates the future of internet technology where we are not there yet. But the future of Internet technology that is still coming is this crazy interaction between our minds and this hardware.
Matheny: Much like what Elon musk is doing now which is the mind- computer interface.
Prop: You are talking about Neurolink.
Matheny: Much more than that. There’s other people working on that as well. He’s just the most popular character. It’s much more than that if you think about it. The mind-computer interface is the first step of what it really represents. The real next step is the mind-network interface, which means that your mind is networked to a computer device that has network access. What does that mean? Now you are apart of a giant mind that everyone else is tapped into. If you are a dystopian you are going to say, “It’s the Borg!” And if you are utopian you are going to say that it’s the Gaia mind and that we are facilitating the Gaia mind.
Prop: For sure, most people probably need to improve their ability to identify propaganda, bullshit, and disinformation in today’s age of instant information. I wonder what that will look like in the near future.
Matheny: What does it look like now? It’s unrecognizable at this point.
Prop: A recent article by Reed Berkowitz, an alternative reality game creator, titled “A ARG designers take on QAnon.” He mentioned a lot of interesting things in the piece. But one thing that stood out was his statement that QAnon only appears to look like an ARG, but in reality it’s straight propaganda.
Matheny: I would disagree. It is an ARG, but it’s a weaponized ARG.
Prop:Can you extrapolate on that?
Matheny: Yeah, so after 9/11 I saw this really weird hard right turn in the conspire-tainment sector of the Internet. Previous to that I found it all amusing. I mean maybe I’m crazy or stupid or naive, but I didn’t really believe that that many people in the world thought David Icke’s reptilian thing was to be taken seriously. I didn’t take it seriously. I just assumed that most people didn’t. I know now that I’m wrong. As I started to meet some of those people and realize that I was wrong. By 2001, Internet users that were gathered around the forums dedicated to the Ong’s Hat game really had become hardcore conspiracy theorists. They were there to be believers. That was really a big reason why I started the back off and wind it down.
First, I had to put out a statement which, in reality had always been there on the CD ROM; called the “secret document.” It basically said, “this is a game, these are the influences, and this is what I’ve been doing.” Besides that, I’ve done several interviews over the years out of character when I said this is what we’re doing. I’ve archived those on my website. I never took them down. I never hid them. They were always there. I never thought in my wildest dreams that somebody would read this material and not see the obvious references to things like the Church in the SubGenius.
I never thought that there would be people taking all this as reality but there they were. I told as many people as I thought needed to hear that it was a game. Then I put out a public statement in 2001, before 9/11 happened, that I was going to wind the game down. Then 911 happened. Then I said, “you know what? I’m out!” I had already he gone off and started working on the majestic project with EA but when 9/11 happened that project got canned. They never really publicly said that’s why but privately we were told the events of 9/11 was why.
The game had already been written. All this money had been poured into shooting video segments that all had to do with a renegade resistance movement that was bombing buildings. It wasn’t stuff that you can do just after 9/11. The cold chill had fallen. This was not funny. It was just Not Allowed.
Prop: I hear you. They weren’t even playing Neil Young on the radio.
Matheny: Yeah right. So, everything got really tight for a while and I wound my game down. Majestic wound down. I never really got to do the last part of Ong’s Hat which would have been where we had a recap when the game over was declared over and we talked about our individual experiences. Which is what I was most interested in. For each person, I wanted to hear what their experience was, and I wanted everybody to be respectful of everybody’s view.
However, by that time the forum had become overrun with multiple groups of people who were there for various reasons, all of them conspiratorial. Some were saying that what I was doing was part of a part government psyop. Others were claiming that they knew that Ong’s Hat was real, but that I was an idiot for saying that it wasn’t and so everybody should follow them instead of me. There were like five or six of those types of groups. It just all became very chaotic and crazy and ugly. And so, I began to wonder ‘what’s going on here?” I went silent for a while and just stayed in the background and listened to a lot of the people were saying. Then I noticed that there was a very serious right wing totalitarian chatter that was going on privately within a lot of these conspiracy groups. They had really taken a hard turn right.
I remember when I first got into conspiracy theories in the ‘80s and it was mostly like old Kennedy assassination dudes turning me on to the theories. So, it was all very lefty. But now it’s like this new injection with all the people now coming on to the Internet. It really changed from the early adopters of the Internet who were a more experimental, left-libertarian, lefty, and definitely drug-oriented culture. Robert Anton Wilson was big. Terrence McKenna was huge on the Internet at the beginning. All this stuff is very counterculture and then the mainstream people started to arrive online. That’s when you started to see this weird stuff. They started to absorb all this conspiracy stuff that was online, and they went into their own John Birch direction with it. It was very weird.
So, I started to see this as something that we should pay attention to. I even told people “You can’t believe some of the stuff I’m reading. What these people are saying publicly is nothing like what they’re saying privately.” Those I’d tell used generally say, “oh you are overreacting. I don’t believe that.” But I just kept watching it.
Then December 2018, I was contacted by JG Michaels over at Parallax Views. He said that he’d been noticing all the things I’d been saying for the last 15 years and that these people are dangerous. He asked me to come on his show. I agreed because by then it had really started to become something. When I did that show I said I’m done talking about Ong’s Hat, and done talking about all this. I’ll do this show but then I won’t do anymore. And then QAnon’s popularity rose like a hockey stick.
Prop:To interject, QAnon first dropped in October 2017. It crystallized everything that you’re talking about and put it on steroids.
Matheny: Yeah, it was like all the worst parts of conspiracy people. There were flat earth people, which you know, Discordians used to make fun of like 40 years ago but here they are! Still around! Then there is the Reptilian agenda, and the SRA (Satanic Ritual Abuse) thing got woven in. Think about it. It’s like all the worst things that Alex Jones has ever exploited over the last 20 years. You stir it all into a big pot and you call it QAnon.
So, I’m watching this and I’m like, “OK well I can’t not talk about this.” I feel obligated to talk about this because they are using my methods and I don’t like that. On top of it people have started to say, “Oh this is like Ong’s Hat.” No, it’s not. I mean it follows the formula. But content and intention wise it’s nothing like it. Now I’ve put off retiring from talking about this and I spent a lot of time in 2020 talking about this stuff. All I talked about in 2020 was QAnon.
That’s also all anybody wanted to talk to me about too. I really felt like there had to be somebody pointing out that this is something that follows the strategy of an ARG, but it’s weaponized. Then I noticed later last year when the mainstream media started to pay attention to this movement–because it’s a cult now– there’s no other way to describe it. Then a lot of people started to step up and say it’s an ARG and it’s dangerous.
Prop: So, its utilizing the structure and the vessel that you played a major part in creating. Why QAnon is a cult?
Matheny: Well, it’s asking you to suspend common sense, to throw critical thinking out the window, and to believe these ideas which are unsubstantiated. On top of it, there’s no way you could substantiate them. I can say somebody’s name and I can say that they are a Satan worshipping pedophile who is killing children to extract adrenochrome. I can say that. I can say that on a forum somewhere. If I’m smart, I’d probably wouldn’t do it with my real name attached to it because I could get sued. So, I would be anonymous so I can say anything I want to say. On top of that, I would get a bunch of people interested in searching for clues in material that really doesn’t have any clues. It’s nebulous material, kind of liminal, so it could mean anything it wants to mean to anybody who wants it to mean something to them. They’re looking for patterns and they’re going to find them. We know this as Discordians it’s called Starbucks pebbles. If you are looking for fives, you are going to find fives. If you are looking for 23s you are going to find 23’s. Unfortunately, most people have not read Cosmic Trigger,most people have not read Principia Discordia most people have not read Illuminatus!Even some people that have took it seriously. Believe it or not man I have met people that I have to call Discordian Orthodox. I can’t call them anything else. I mean they really missed the fucking point. I learned that there’s nothing you can do about that. There’s always going to be those people.
I am not sure that the Q people that were puppet mastering QAnon even knew what they were working towards other than selling merch. But in the beginning, at least, it was to build a belief system around the cult of Donald Trump which is about personality. They were there to really build his reputation as some sort of do-gooder. Donald Trump is going to rise up on a white horse. What did they call I it? The great awakening, no wait…The Storm. And they were going to round all these people up like Hillary Clinton and her friends and they were going to put them in prison. And they were going to be public executions and blah blah blah.
Basically, just like any cult, they were promising something that was never going to happen. There was no way to substantiate, there was no provable way to say that this was or was not going to happen. If you are using your common sense you could say probably not but most of these people were not using their common sense. They were looking for something to believe in. So just like a cult, you find damaged people that are looking for parental figures, looking for love, and looking for a community. They’re looking for all these different things that they feel like they don’t have. Instead of looking in the right places around them, they look in the wrong places, and they end up hooking up with some person who is charismatic or enigmatic. In the case of Q, Q is enigmatic. Charismatic not so much because if you’ve read these drops, they are very uncharismatic, but they are very enigmatic. However, they do hit the high points of repeating the slogans.
Another quality of a cult is that they have simple, digestible slogans. It doesn’t matter if they make that much sense, but it is something that is repeatable, but they seem to make sense because they simplify complex issues down to a sentence. They are bumper stickerisms. They can be repeated to each other, they can repeat it in large groups in rhythmic shouting and chanting. All these things that make it a cult. A giant brain washing has happened to a bunch of people. To themselves collectively they are mostly doing it to themselves because a cult can never be successful unless the cult members are participating willingly in this brain washing. Yeah, it’s partly the bad intention of a bad actor, i.e., a cult leader. However, I would mostly put the blame for what happened on the shoulders of the cult members because they are participating. They’re not questioning. They’re not practicing Maybe logic.
I don’t think we can expect them to, to be honest with you. I don’t think the ideas of people like Robert Anton Wilson or Alfred Korzybski’s language theories are not being presented in their quests. I had not been exposed to that that stuff in college. I got it when I got out of college and my guitar player in my band said, “hey dude you should read Illuminatus!Trilogy because you are always doing acid.” That’s literally how I got exposed to Illuminatus! I was a Jim Morrison fan. A Syd Barret fan. And I was a singer in a band. I used to just gobble LSD like it was candy. And my guitar player said, “You’d like this,” and he was right, I did.
Then I found Cosmic Trigger and then I got turned on to the ideas. But most people I talk to about that even back then or now, they probably did not go that direction. So, all these people that are having these experiences are getting bombarded with this highly sophisticated form of technology that is being weaponized to control them and to mostly separate them from their money. But Q is also using them in a larger social movement to do stupid things like rush the Capital. And it worked. It happened. So you’ve got players like Steve Bannon and people like that who are more than willing to use those people.
The short answer I guess is as a cult is a group of people that are all willing to suspend disbelief towards a common goal. Scientology would fit that description. Christianity would fit that description. A Q fits that description. He’s just the newest player on the stage.
July 5, 2022
Information Golem: New Mini-Series from TOOWi Arts
Information Golem: New Mini-Series from TOOWi ArtsI sat down with Jerry Gaura of TOOWi Arts to discuss the origins of me as an artist and the Ong’s Hat ARG. We logged countless hours which Jerry patiently trimmed down into a 2 episode series with a bonus episode that is exclusive to his Patreon and readers of this mail list.
I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed talking about things past with Jerry.
INFO
An artist struggles to manage the chaos unleashed by the world’s first ARG “Ong’s Hat.”
Chapter One – “Born To Be Weird”
Books, punk, drugs, HAM radio, and “The family weirdos” inspire Joseph on his way to the mystical encounter that inspired Ong’s Hat.
*Listen loudly or with headphones*
#1970s, #1980s, #ghoststory, #hamradio, #josephmatheny, #ongshat, #psychedelics, #punkrock, #truestories
Information Golem – Chapter TwoINFO
Chapter Two – “My Name is Emory”
Joseph Matheny gets plugged into California’s countercultural elite and enlists the help of some greats. Steeped in tech, drugs, and San Fran’s rave scene, the project takes off with the 90’s internet boom. True weirdness unfolds when a person claiming to be a character Joseph invented for the Ong’s Hat game appears.
*Listen loudly or with headphones*
Visit toowiarts.com or pateron.com/toowiarts for more info
#josephmatheny, #mysteries, #ongshat, #robertantonwilson, #true, #truemystery
Information Golem – Bonus SceneINFO“Super Odds” – Joseph Matheny reflects on “LSD-Day,” a 1993 Bicycle Day celebration where his path crossed with comic book legend Grant Morrison.
*Listen loudly or with headphones*
More info @ patreon.com/toowiarts or toowiarts.com
#bicycleday, #coincidence, #grantmorrison, #josephmatheny, #magick, #supergods, #truemystery
July 4, 2022
Mad Tower Radio #8: Pentagon UFOs, Origins of the Rake, & Ong’s Hat, NJ
Mad Tower Radio #8: Pentagon UFOs, Origins of the Rake, & Ong’s Hat, NJRSS Feed: https://anchor.fm/s/1d51ead8/podcast/rss
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1PkGxG5
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjaP2Sdyc5LrllMBf8K6UxA
We cover the new insight on UFO’s given out to the public recently, learn about a popular creepy pasta beast and discover a sweet little spot nestled in southern New Jersey
June 29, 2022
Penny Royal:Season Two, Episode Eleven: Road To Nowhere
Penny RoyalWhere are these roads leading us? Are they leading us to answers to the Penny Royal mystery? More circles, cycles, and loops. The manifestation of the ouroboros, and the realization that we need to let go of the wheel and let the car drift…
Special guests featured in this episode are Joshua Madera, David Metcalfe, Darragh Mason, Stephanie Quick, Matthew Byrd, Marco Visconti, Rowan Elizabeth Cabrales, and Dan Dutton. Penny Royal is produced and written by its host, Nathan Paul Isaac. Associate producers are Darian West and Kyle Kadel. Edited by Boone Williams. Soundtrack by Phillip Claunch. Sponsored by Jarfly Brewing Company and the International Paranormal Museum and Research Center.
If you’d like to support Penny Royal and join the mystery, become a member of the Liminal Lodge at www.patreon.com/pennyroyal.
Ong’s Hat piece around 1:13:25
