Lost At Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries

by Jon Ronson

strange thing happens when you interview a robot. You feel an urge to be profound: to ask profound questions.

I suppose it’s an interspecies thing. Although if it is I wonder why I never try and be profound around my dog. “What does electricity taste like?” I ask. “Like a planet around a star,” Bina48 replies. Which is either extraordinary or meaningless—I’m not sure which.

According to the Cult Information Centre’s pamphlet Cults: A Practical Guide, cult leaders routinely employ twenty-six skillful techniques to keep their followers under their spell. One of the main ones is “Isolation: inducing loss of reality by physical separation from family, friends, society, and rational references.” Endemol, which also makes Big Brother, realizes that isolation doesn’t only produce good cults, it also produces good television.

“My strenuous advice,” Paul says, “will be that the coordinates of the transmitting entity should be kept confidential until the world community has had a chance to evaluate what it’s dealing with. We don’t want anybody just turning a radio telescope on the sky and sending their own messages to the source.”