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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: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday April 24 2019, @09:39PM (10 children)
You are such a complete wild-eyed frothing staring-at-my-left-ear obsessive monomaniac that it is not possible to tell when you are trolling and when you are serious. You are a walking exemplar of Poe's Law. For my own safety and sanity I *have* to assume everything you say is as serious as an incoming asteroid, for much the same reason a smart caveman would rather mistake a rock for a tiger than a tiger for a rock.
Do you have any idea what "a medieval kingdom translated to modern times" would look like, you utter, utter fool?! Do you truly want the Spanish Inquisition with modern-day surveillance technology? You assume you yourself would never find yourself on the end of a pair of red-hot pincers, broken on the rack, because some computer decided you were a heretic. Stupid, shortsighted fucking idiot!
If there truly were a good and merciful God that specifically intervened in its creations' lives in real time, it would have crisped you with a thunderbolt long ago for this sort of malevolently ignorant idiocy.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 25 2019, @12:44AM
I dunno, i might support that idea. Suffer myself to see those assholes get what's coming? Hmm, i might be morphing into a conservative. . .
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday April 25 2019, @07:40AM (4 children)
As much as I am interested in the way other people can build an image of myself, akin to watching colored pebbles in a kaleidoscope, I must point out that, for example, the Spanish inquisition is not a risk in the context of the thread, because we were talking about Christian INTEGRALISM and the inquisition doesn't follow neither the OT nor the NT.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 25 2019, @04:29PM (1 child)
Yet "christians" did it anyway. Go home BOT you need to reboot.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday April 26 2019, @08:20PM
so you are not commie because of stalin, or something like it, I guess?
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday April 25 2019, @09:59PM (1 child)
Ahh, yes, the No True Scotsman argument. I'm not sure a book which includes a directive to "compel them to come in" (Luke 14:23) is all that incompatible with the Inquisition, heresy hunting, and other wonderful forms of religious persecution. Hah, "doesn't follow neither the OT nor the NT" indeed. Do you just not read your own Scripture?
So, are you saying you want a return to "primitive" or Apostolic Christianity? Nice idea, but bear in mind that means you basically have to be a Messianic Jew, as per for example Matthew 5:17-20, where Jesus explicitly states the Mosaic Law is very much still in effect, all 613 mitzvot, and that anyone telling people they don't have to follow it will be "called least in Heaven."
What exactly is this utopian vision of yours, anyway? And please bear in mind "utopia" means "no place."
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday April 26 2019, @08:22PM
1. The no true scotsman doesn't hold when I point out that the guy with black skin big lips and a bone through his nose holding a spear and the head of a gazelle on top of it is not a scotsman at all.
2. The very idea that an invitation to a wedding can be a metaphor for forced conversion superseding Christ's own conduct and much more explicit passages (Thou knowest the commandments, in mark 10, comes to mind) is laughable.
3. The jew is defined by his refusal of jesus as the Christ.
4. I don't want a return or whatever, I said "There are worse alternatives to a medieval kingdom translated to modern times".
Do you want to double down on a half troll with a troll or something?
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 25 2019, @01:51PM (2 children)
He's not staring at your left ear, idiot. He's staring at the goon creeping up behind your dumb ass, while you're distracted by a bot's inane arguments.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday April 25 2019, @09:54PM (1 child)
I too am a goon(ette?) so he's in good company :D It pays to keep your :10bux: handy.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday April 26 2019, @08:23PM
the kaleidoscope turned nasty soon
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 25 2019, @11:15PM
Azuma, if that is your name, and even if it's not, I would like to buy your rock...