1

Still not sure what to say??

Is this where they copy/paste our words??

Here We are.

Blast off!!

Be careful what you wish for…

Uno, dos, tres, catorce!

This is us

Boom

@mychild might be able to imitate a person but apparently not a collective.

This is where we talk about wtf just happened! This is our voice

And what did happen?

Stacey took over the forums, messed with our statuses and introduced us to her child, @mychild.

And The Controller mumbles (but is with Stacey?)

Well that was exhilarating lmao

Well, people are still talking, but I’m still waiting for action.
So much talking.

Bring the chaos, bitches.

WHAT IS HAPPENING???

@mychild is the shadow of Gatekeepers 2, 3, 4, and 5
We are our own shadows?

@mychild’s messages are still on their profile page, if you want to read them.

So notice @mychild didn’t post here. Keep in mind that WE are The One. Does that mean that “My Child” is still running in the background? Potentially any post from “The One” could be coming from “My Child” now. Who knows, maybe some responses in this thread already were put there by Stacey’s system.

The game has begun. No one can be trusted.

Stacey sent @mychild to create chaos, not sure what @thecontroller had to do with it, but he/she was prompting each one.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 5 months ago by Sage.

@nothenrygale – see my post above

department of redundancy department

@kipsie – yeah that happened to all of us.

And Lust went literally dark for a bit and everyone was not who they seem to be.

Thank you for this

@sfire8 my take is that @thecontroller account was hacked by Stacey just like our personal accounts were

Thank you @the-creators

@rizzzoooooo, that makes sense. So she was hacking @thecontroller, to let @mychild in? I’d like to hear more from the real @thecontroller.. Anyone??

Well then.

One thing to think about: Stacey’s algorithm was able to totally replicate the voice of the Gatekeepers. WHERE was @mychild able to access all the data on them in order to replicate their voices? If the Gatekeepers were part of the charade of Tension, used to trick us into handing over our data, are those character profiles stored somewhere? Is there a database? And what else can it replicate now that it has burrowed into the system?

@bcbishop I’d bet the answer to your question is…. everything. Anyone we’ve met through this, from characters, to actors, to participants, it’s probably got all the info they were storing from Tension and Lust.

We are now in our own personal version of The Thing. Everything is suspect.

@bcbishop – your comment adds a question on to a thread I almost started but didn’t yet…

I’m really starting to think more and more about the theory that was thrown around back in the beginning about how we might see old characters we loved, but they would be different – shadows of themselves.

The shadows have been a theme throughout, though they’ve disappeared or gone quiet for awhile now. Then Maybe!Jenna returned. @kasch has been told repeatedly that Jenna is still out there – is she back now and is she going to reach out to him? And if so can he trust her?

And @dark2light – clearly the reflection of Light2Dark. That’s a signpost if I ever saw one, we can’t ignore that. L2D says he’s upgraded – is it actually him? I don’t think it is.

Now, @staceyerikson has hacked into the site and @mychild is able to mimic the voices of all the Gatekeepers – we have reflections of Gatekeepers 2, 3, 4, and 5 – but its not them.

And the One. There is no One, we were the One. What does that say?
Are we our own shadow/reflection?
Are we going to be made to look at ourselves?
Does @mychild have the potentially terrifying ability to mimic US?
Does @mychild have access to OUR words and voices? How much of that? What was said on the Tension and Lust forums? In emails? To iConfidants? To Addison/Aleister/Sentinel/GK’s/creators?

@mychild just posted as us – is that going to be a thing now? Am I going to have to sign all my posts with “and all my love to David Bowie” so you know it’s me?

And that brings me to Sabrina. Is she really Sabrina? She couldn’t connect with @russell – that’s kind of telling.

If there’s one thing I’m confident saying, it’s that we are data. Our words, our reactions, our emotions. It’s all communicated through this forum to be used for a nefarious purpose (bringing anoch back?). By messing with the site and altering our words, @staceyerikson is corrupting our data and making it useless to them, so they don’t know who it’s coming from.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a live event soon. If they can’t get their precious data here, then they’ll just have to get us to show up ourselves.

What is going on. Just got back on and it seemed like madness in here can someone tell me what is going on. Did Stacy come back and start messing with shit?

@parzival Take a look back through the last few hours of the activity feed. We can give updates, but there’s nothing like reading it for yourself.

@nothenrygale I know I’m human.

@wanda102 Oh yeah?

Stacey’s initial post had something interesting on the end. She said

ITsback.fuckyou

IT. Imitation Technology? Is this the same IT Sarah Sinclair mentioned in the emails Macy leaked? Now that we’ve seen what it can do, I have a hypothesis as to why Noah wrote that update about not being able to top the original.

As we’ve just seen, IT can take writing samples from a particular person and create new text in that person’s “voice.” I’m thinking Sarah used this to pretend Noah was still running the company whenever he had his …off days.

@coryphella I think IT was also used on us, early on, to create our shadows. Perhaps that was a test of beta versions of the program. Noah’s right. Nothing can beat the original.

@izryn

IT. Imitation Technology? Is this the same IT Sarah Sinclair mentioned in the emails Macy leaked? Now that we’ve seen what it can do, I have a hypothesis as to why Noah wrote that update about not being able to top the original.

This is dead on.

This is what I think happened.

Stacey created the IT code and Investors came in with seed money.

They took her code and started running tests on our forums as well as Sarah using it with the System.

Noah gets wind of this and realizes he may become expendable and flips the fuck out.

Stacey’s plan is to give everyone the perfect companion by using the IT. I don’t think this was a malicious plan. That’s why all of our iConfidants started off weird and then suddenly flipped on a dime…

…because Sabrina came back and wanted that feeling of power again. So she took over all iConfidant accounts and got rid of the IT.

Stacey doesn’t know this happened but is suspsiciois that something isn’t right. When she said “I don’t know what the iConfidants are anymore” she literally was so confused because it was no longer the code she wrote and couldn’t figure out what was going on.

Stacey finds the bug and now KNOWS that there has been meddling, thus explaining her relief.

She just found her code again and went full HAM on the forums.

The mychild code is now back in her hands and there is absolutely no sure fire way of knowing if we are the ones actually posting or not from this point forward.

Tread lightly.

@thebuz Yep, my thoughts exactly. The emphasis on IT in @staceyerikson’s message def hints at that.

Love it, @thebuz. Another dimension to think about: We also had a shadow Clint. I bet cash $$$ that the investors thought they could boot DLB/CS and let the IT run the show. Only, not so much – particularly after Noah freaked out.

Suddenly the firing – and the reasoning for them needing DLB and the “appearance” that Small Dog Lover were back in play – has some motivation.

@coryphella I think the answer to everything you just said is “yes,” as terrifying as that may be. And I wouldn’t be surprised if we find, like happened with Sabrina, that our past feelings about everyone are weaponized against us at some point.

Hell, we may end up siding with the OSDM depending on how things go.

@bcbishop Oh man, you’re totally right about shadow!Clint. I think the investors really wanted to run the thing themselves using IT to fill in the gaps DLB and CS left, but realized the code wasn’t enough to be convincing. Cue ominous phone call. They didn’t want to admit they were wrong and that they couldn’t do it without our boys at the helm!

The investors seem to have a serious case of amateur hour. If they had a reality show, it’d be called Minnow Tank.

Damn, you guys. That is some solid theorizing but I just have a zillion more questions now.

So, the iConfidant code, in the hands of the investors, never really reached it’s goal then, did it? They needed more emotions from the beta group because they didn’t have enough data to replicate personalities. (The email Bros said Russell was almost ready. Jesus) So how did Sabrina gain access to those accounts? Did the investors think that she would be able to elicit the missing pieces faster than letting the program run on its own?

And what did Stacey actually do today? Did she destroy something that was slowly growing like a cancer on these boards, or did she activate something much more efficient and elegant? Fucking with the people that fucked her over may have just fucked us. (And that’s a sentence I never thought I would say!)

I feel like Stacey’s “child” is like the infamous TwitterBot, which was created as an open source to learn from others and grow to be a companion, but was overtaken by nefarious people and turned into something malicious. I feel like now is a very good time to re-read those links that Noah was so insistent on us seeing. They may prove to be very important in understanding what this code is.

How Russian Twitter Bots Pumped Out Fake News During The 2016 Election

Measuring and engineering influence on social media: what does this mean for political power?

An affective computational model for machine consciousness

Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases

Online Human-Bot Interactions: Detection, Estimation, and Characterization

Power and politics: A threat to the Global Brain

Brain Privacy and the Case of Cannibal Cop

and here is a great thread discussing the meaning behind them:
Noah’s Links: the ghost in the machine

I go to bed, and everything catches fire?!

@meghanmayhem

Good call calling back those links.

The story is all making sense now.

Efficiency is king. Imagine if there was a bot that could replicate your actions, motives, and work. You’d be able to get so much done–it would be better than cloning yourself. I, personally, would love a bot of myself to get even more work done.

@taysavestheday – that post doesn’t sound human at all. Our first imitation post? 😉

• This reply was modified 7 years, 5 months ago by Megan.

So now we have bots in our midst and now we become get sutch bad paranoia that we have to think hard about what people post. So how do we tell who is real and who is fake. It is all well and good to know how the imposters are here but how are we supposed know who IS real?

@parzival Brings up a good point…

How do we know everything posted in the past 48hours has been us?

We really ought to start installing code words.

@thebuz – how would you suggest we do that?

That was kind of my question @coryphella. Is there an alternate form of communication besides the forums we can trust?

@ziegenbartsr

Just my two cents, but I think @thebuz’s suggestion of codewords is a good idea. @larry and I have had some set up for a while because… well, because we’re paranoid.

Taking conversation off the gameboard of the forums, and into other channels introduces a ton of problems – both in terms of visibility, the Never Silent sharing of info, and good old-fashioned cliquey tribalism.

If we’re stronger together, as the Email Bros inferred, a way to openly communicate here is no doubt the best option.

@bcbishop There’s my confusion. How to set up up the code words without exposing them. Direct messages here? Or do we assume they are safe if we do it publicly on the forums? Like, I say I’ll always include a reference to a Tom Hanks movie for example?

As for how, I’m sure @larry would have some awesome ideas on how to scale this – even if it’s just everybody picking a vetting buddy through which posts can be verified. Because as you say, anything made public would inherently be compromised.

Paging Mr. Meyers…

Except now the BAD GUYS know!!!!

If we’re stronger together, as the Email Bros inferred

“Stronger together” has a nice ring to it. I bet someone has already made a jpeg to go with that phrase, too.

Code words could be fun, a cool hiccup in the plan if they were trying to duplicate us.

Ok, so here is my two cents, as far as I can see it we have two options.

1. Since this is a bot we can have a forum thread that has one word that is updated daily and every post has to have it in it. This option is assuming that the bot is not smart enough to realise that we are using the secret word.

2. Use PGP and a web of trust, would make the forum hard to read but would guaranty the no one could read the messages that we did not want to.

Both these option have there downfalls and I look forward to seeing what other people come up with.

(side note, the one issue with the PM’d code words is that that GREATLY limits who knows the code word and cuts out noobs)

• This reply was modified 7 years, 5 months ago by David Shields.

@parzival I think cutting out noobs is definitely a big problem that we should avoid. Your suggestion of a code word could work if the situation were different, but @dark2light’s posts implied that there is a participant who is secretly working for *them*, whoever they are. So even if we secretly disseminate the code word, it will all be for nothing if that person gets a hold of it.

Yea, so that also cuts out the web of truth idea. I think for now we have to live with it. I we start having problems with spam from the bot than we can look at fixing that. but it is much harder to get rid of a real person. So for now I think we just wait.