“Yeah, I mean, he’s probably a white dude,” Jason replied.

“But you’re right that he’s able to say things he wouldn’t otherwise be able to say by removing his identity. It’s fascinating and also a little terrifying.”

“And also already being copied,” Jason said.

“Really?”

“Yeah, there’s a channel called Common Dissent that has the exact same MO. All animated, anonymous host, no ads. He doesn’t respond to anything The Thread says directly, but he’s gathering steam the same way, and in a different direction. It’s grown a lot in the last few weeks.”

“I guess we’re at the point in history where being a person has become a liability. Better to just be a disembodied jumble of ideas.”

“And then you just walk away and let other people argue on your behalf.”

“ ‘Other’ people or computer programs pretending to be other people.”

It was true, The Thread had paid for an analysis that had proved that a lot of arguments happening in the comments of his videos and other video essays were being had by combination human/AI content farms … and then he made a video about it. The battle for hearts and minds was being waged, in part, by beings without hearts or minds.

Daniel Judson

@DetachedNihilist1

Is death just god moderating the comments section? I know it’s not PC to say, but I for one am enjoying April May’s shadowban. Too Soon? Lol

2.4K replies 894 retweets 6.3K likes

Carson Communications Outages Continue

If your internet service has been spotty the last couple weeks, you’re not alone. Internet outages have been rippling across South Jersey for weeks now, with Vineland and surrounding areas being the most affected, but complaints being registered as far north as Cherry Hill.

“Part of the value we provide customers is high-speed internet,” said Derek Housen, owner of Wolton’s Dream Bean Café. “We haven’t had stable internet in six weeks. I’m paying my bill, but I’m not getting service. I’ve taken to setting up a hotspot with my phone, but the data charges are out of hand.”

Carson Communications, the company most affected, has been in communication with customers, but service remains inconsistent and slow. “We have had technicians in the field every day for over a month now,” said a spokesperson for Carson. “We are aware that we are not providing the level of service we aspire to.”

Though representatives did not confirm this, several Carson customers told us that they have been receiving partial refunds for periods of significant outage.

MAYA

My hands are huge and made of metal, and they’re scraping away at the scraps of a collapsed building. I am giant and joyous in my strength. My invincible fingers dig into the brick and steel, and it feels like digging through balls in a McDonald’s ball pit. I am unstoppable. And then I look down and see that the dust and wood and crumbling bits of brick are wet with blood. I lean down to look and see April’s eyes and snap awake.

I used to puke when I had that dream. It had been coming less often now, and I’d been more able to handle the fallout. But I still shook, sweat coating my skin. I pulled the sheets off of my body and then wrapped myself around them, to feel like I was holding something. Or maybe just to feel like there was something else in the world besides the emptiness of failure. There was no way I was going back to sleep.

Here was my working theory that I had gleaned from conversations on the Som.

Cable internet slows down when more users are on the system, but this shouldn’t be system-wide. Basically, cable internet is like a giant underground tree with branches that are sometimes physical, sometimes coded into the frequencies being used in the signal. Multiple customers use the same frequencies and the same branches, but if one branch is over capacity, all the other branches are completely unaffected.

But in South Jersey, all of the branches were being affected, turning on and off at random like a string of Christmas lights. My theory was that, if this had something to do with Carl, which every other conspiracy theorist on the Som also believed, there would be some pattern that might lead us to where or how all that extra bandwidth was being used.

I figured if I could follow some vans around for a couple weeks and map out where the problem spots were, maybe I could find some kind of pattern.

My first day of this was a learning experience. I had thought that I would go to their dispatch office and maybe follow vans from there, but I actually spotted one before I even got there. I did a quick U-turn and followed it a couple cars back, doing my best to not focus on how ridiculously I was behaving.

About fifteen minutes in, the van pulled up at the biggest barn I’ve ever seen. Painted on its front it read “Cowtown: Often Imitated Never Equaled.” Next to the giant red barn was a giant red cow. It was distracting enough that I almost lost sight of the van. I pulled into the mostly empty lot and parked a few cars down from my target.

I tried to get a look at the guy. He was wearing a blue denim shirt and a white cowboy hat. His belt was buckled at the base of a tight, round belly. I only got a quick glimpse at his face as he pulled a few big cases out of the back and put them on a hand truck to wheel them inside the massive barn. I waited a couple minutes and then followed him in.

Or I tried to. A young man stopped me. “We’re not open for another half hour.”

“What is this?” I asked, truly perplexed.

“Cowtown,” he said. “It’s a flea market. Open Tuesdays and Saturdays.”

“So all the people currently inside are …” I asked.

“Vendors … just people setting up.”

“Oh, so this is like a farmers’ market.”

He laughed. “Yeah, it’s like a hundred farmers’ markets in one building. Come on back in a half hour, you’ll have your mind blown.”

So that’s how I learned that Carson Communications didn’t own its trucks. In fact, a lot of the technicians that worked for Carson didn’t actually work for them. They were independent contractors and had other gigs. Gigs like, apparently, selling stuff at a giant flea market. I did not come back in a half hour because April May was alive somewhere and searching a giant flea market would not help me find her. I’d already wasted my first morning in South Jersey.

The trouble was, even after I refined my system (only following trucks that went to the dispatch center for supplies first being the main change), there were no patterns.

Trucks went all over the place. Mostly Vineland, because that was the biggest city in the affected range. But also Bridgeton and Glassboro and Salem and Swedesboro and even occasionally back to Wolton. I was getting familiar with the area, which turned out to be equal parts too cute and too weird. I don’t think I’m cut out for small-town life.

At least I had my potato plant, which, yes, at this point still just looked like a big pot of dirt. But I kept it watered and warm. And I had the Dream Bean, which, over the weeks of me following cable repair vehicles, had quickly become a part of my morning routine.

The morning the nightmare came back was also the one-year anniversary of April’s first video. The one-year anniversary of me waking her up in the afternoon with coffee that I knew she was going to hate. The anniversary of my world—and the world—completely losing any anchor it once had. I didn’t want to be bored in a truck alone with my thoughts and radio broadcasts playing “Mr. Roboto” and “Starman,” with DJs loudly joking about the anniversary of the arrival of aliens. I understood why they had to make it a joke—what other choice did we have? I just didn’t want to be there while they did it.