Saturday, April 14, 2007
Imagine eight people brought together by trouble: trapped together (with thousands of others) in the Denver airport by a blizzard. We had a lot of time on our hands. We talked. We bonded. Awww. How nice.
One thing we talked about a lot: how the Internet scoops the official media. It's real obvious in a crisis. In Denver, as in the Katrina disaster, people found the true story on the Internet. News stories and gumment bulletins can never hope to match the agility of citizen bloggers and mobloggers, nor their honesty of people talking one to another. Internet people are the real first responders today, the boots on the ground.
Now, here's the thing. We eight have come to believe that a crisis is coming – on April 30, to be precise. (An oil shock, or something to do with oil.) We have no proof – it's just something a guy said in an unguarded moment. He may have been putting us on. But we don't think so. We have decided to prepare.
This is the barebones message found on the website, Worldwithoutoil.org. Sounds sort of like the proverbial message found in a bottle, only this time found on the electronic shores of the Net. If one didn't know better, it could be passed off as more doom-saying, or perhaps a coded message from one right-wing, pessimistic fringe group to another.
What it actually is is a teaser for a website devoted to playing on online alternate reality game, allegedly starting on April 30th on that very website.
Labels: future uncertainty
