Tag: weird shit

If you were into science fiction or the paranormal, “you’d eventually butt up against Ong’s Hat,” said David Metcalfe, who runs social media for the University of Georgia Business School, and edits Threshold: Journal of Interdisciplinary Consciousness Studies. When he discovered Ong’s Hat as a teen in the late ‘90s, said Metcalfe, “It was popping up on chat boards and message boards, it would bleed into your life.”

Ong’s Hat: The Early Internet Conspiracy Game That Got Too Real

Oh man, no shit…

Fuck, do I remember this. Completely formative early Internet experience. There I am, working in the dot.com world, late 20s geek who’s lucked into a corner office in a skyscraper at Universal Studios working for a guy who’s convinced the South Koreans to fund an early web community site. And I’m spending the day clicking around the early web (blink tags!) using Netscape. I run across this website. And it leads me down the rabbit hole. Montauk. Hakim Bey (who I think I had already run across via various other esoteric web sites, maybe Sterling talking about TAZ). The Pine Barrens themselves.

Then, just a few years ago, I ran across this book. It brought back all the memories. That never to be recovered rush of those first discoveries when the Internet was young. I don’t think that I believed all the Ong’s Hat stuff was true, but I have to admit that I was sad after I read this book and found out it had all been a couple of guys fucking with me and everyone else.

A little bit of the magic went out of the world.