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Year Zero (our year 2022, the year the United States is 'reborn') was (and will be?)(is?) a dystopian vision of a future in which your government worked against you.
...or... a game and technology and music...
...or a technological Easter Egg hunt...
...or ... a concept album that i would call brilliant!
September 2006, Trent Reznor (THE guy of NIN unless touring) decided to shake things up a bit. He decided that music and marketing would work brilliantly together if worked in a fun, interesting and puzzling way (not marketing, but an "artistic concept"): what he got was a thriller and marketing he couldn't have expected.
He hired a company called 42 Entertainment to help promote his coming album by giving out clues to a larger puzzle.
The first piece of the puzzle were tour t-shirts (the With Teeth tour) with highlighted letters that spelled out "I am trying to believe".
"This phrase was registered as a website URL, and soon several related websites were also discovered in the IP range, all describing a dystopian vision of the fictional "Year 0"."
---https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_(album)
USB keys were left in bathroom stalls at tour venues. Clues left on web-sites, clues leading to web-sites, phone numbers, email addresses, videos and mp3's.
Phone a number found from one of the clues and you are left with a message telling you "By calling this number, you and your family are implicitly pleading guilty to the consumption of anti-American media and have been flagged as potential militants."
Another clue told fans to not drink the water because the government had drugged it, but other clues led to a phone number that when called, a message said simply "I am drinking the water, so should you".
Leaked songs gave clues: The Great Destroyer, when played in mono, gave clues saying "Red Horse Vector". Was there a website for it? You betcha!
Finally at the release of the Year Zero album, fans discovered that the black CD cover when warmed, exposed a string of binary numbers that when translated into ASCII read "exterminal.net"
###
0110 010 1011 110
00011 101 00011
00101 0111001 00110110
1011 010 010
1101110011000
010 11 011 0
0 0 01 0 1 1 1 00 110
1 1100 1100 1 01 01
11 0 1
0 0
###
The Year Zero story takes place in the United States in the year 2022; or "Year 0" according to the American government, being the year that America was reborn. The United States has suffered several major terrorist attacks, and in response the government has seized absolute control on the country and reverted to a Christian fundamentalist theocracy. The government maintains control of the populace through institutions such as the Bureau of Morality and the First Evangelical Church of Plano, as well as increased surveillance and the secret drugging of tap water with a mild sedative. In response to the increasing oppression of the government, several corporate, government, and subversive websites were transported back in time to the present by a group of scientists working clandestinely against the authoritarian government. The websites-from-the-future were sent to the year 2007 to warn the American people of the impending dystopian future and to prevent it from ever forming in the first place
It's an interesting 'total package' concept, and there's 2 more years to go: but has this dystopian vision already arrived?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 23 2019, @08:57PM
The ICE concentration camps are open for business. We're at the stage where there is a stock market crash (talking heads at MarketWatch were saying probably in 2020 last I checked) and BRICS (along with the EU in this timeline) moves away from the US dollar. The magnitude of that crisis left only one option for the masters of the universe.
Martial law was quickly declared, followed by World War 3. The preparations for this are already in an advanced state, especially as concerns internet censorship. Darknets as they currently exist, piggybacking on the clearnet, were unable to function.
In my original timeline, the US existed during its final few years as a neoliberal fascist state, however in this timeline a Christian fascist state seems likely. Perhaps fortunately, it does not last long. It all reached a conclusion in 2025, the year of hell. Summer never came. Over 3 billion people died, some on N-day and during the immediate aftermath, many more later on due to starvation and lack of potable water.
unless