Three Meaningless Words

Speaker 1: Boy, do I have a story for you.

Speaker 2: Let's go.

Speaker 1: It's not the one I thought it was when I first started looking into it.

Speaker 2: Can I put my feet up? Or you gonna you gonna meet with the storytelling time with uncle Jordan?

Speaker 1: I'm a we I'm a I'm a weave a yarn yarn I'm a tell you a story. And that story is set in a place before the web called Usenet. Sounds familiar. Today, it is not the easiest thing to access. But through the eighties and nineties Usenet was like a thriving online community. It wasn't a website, it was before websites. It's where Tim Berners Lee went in 1991 to announce the creation of the World Wide Web. And in 1996, parts of this like thriving pre web online community are being spammed with these posts titled, Markovian Parallax Denigrate. And the bodies of the posts were always these sort of cryptic word noise suit puzzles, stuff like Brotherhood web impromptu file count There were a lot of these posts, starting on 08/05/1996, hundreds of them start appearing all over Usenet, all titled Markovian Parallax Denigrate. And so, this early internet mystery is born. A mystery that would later be labeled the weirdest oldest mystery on the internet.

Speaker 3: An event that, although it predates the internet itself, is often considered to be the first true Internet mystery.

Speaker 1: Slowly, over time, the Markovian Parallax Dynacrate became one of just countless campaigns that began flooding onto this decentralized, basically unregulated Usenet. Eventually, it just got lost in the noise. Usenet carried on and for reasons we won't get into yet, declined in use as the World Wide Web rose into prominence. Until, 2006. The dawn of the age of listicles, when stories of this eerily named Markovian Parallax Denigrate started making their way into internet folklore, and this sort of age old conspiracy theory came up again. But in the decades since, some things have changed. Since Usenet was no longer accessible to most people, all these sort of 2,006 web sleuths had to go on was Google's incomplete news group archives. And because spam had become so bad on Usenet, Google's archives make the choice not to index all of it, which Markovian Parallax Denigrate is flagged as. Meaning there's only one post left carrying that title. And it was sent by a visible email address. An email belonging to someone named Susan Lindauer. At the time of the original postings, that name didn't belong to anybody of note. But by 2006, Susan Lindauer was in the news, because Susan Lindauer was a former congressional staffer turned anti war protester who had been arrested and indicted by a grand jury for allegedly spying for Saddam Hussein. And there was this email on all of these posts. So people started asking again, what was Markovian Parallax Denigrate? So that's the story, and it's super compelling, right?

Speaker 2: And that that's it? That's it? That's that's all we get?

Speaker 1: Yeah. No. That's the whole thing. I watched a whole bunch of videos about it and I was really excited to do this episode about it, right? And it's because it has that kind of classic internet mystery energy. It's a great headline and it's a really fun story for articles and YouTube videos, so many YouTube videos, and now podcasts to tell. Nice. And it's still today widely cited as one of the oldest and weirdest mysteries on the web.

Speaker 3: The Markovian Parallax Denigrate.

Speaker 2: The topic is called the Markovian Parallax Denigrate.

Speaker 4: The Markovian Parallax Denigrate.

Speaker 1: But that story has a second half.

Speaker 2: I was gonna say, I feel like I feel like it's incomplete. I feel unsatisfied in its conclusion.

Speaker 1: It has a second half, and it's way down in the source text so people never cite it. So that first half of the story, the really provocative half keeps getting told over and over again of the oldest mystery on the internet, the Markovian Parallax Denigrate. But the second half that no one includes changes the story. You can't, in good conscious, get past this intro thinking this is about spies because it isn't, or internet conspiracies because there aren't, or even really a mystery. What this is about is the Markovian Parallax Denigrate. Markovian Parallax Denigrate.

Speaker 2: Markovian Parallax Denigrate.

Speaker 1: And whether it's actually the Internet's oldest weirdest mystery, or just three meaningless words. Here on Hacked. So you were on Usenet? Correct. What did you do on it?

Speaker 2: I am that I am I am I am that old. Truthfully, we stole a lot of software using Usenet. Really? Yeah. News groups were and bulletin boards were kind of places where all of the original nerds used to congregate.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: So it was, you know, our OG Internet was a lot of text based news groups. You know, there was news reader apps and stuff like that eventually. I came out on Linux and and Windows 3.1 and stuff. But the news groups, BBSs, IRC chats, you know, lots of the OG Internet, kinda mediums for discussion and connection, I was on all of those. Spent a lot of time on lots of lots of them. I don't think I ever post any of value on on Usenet and the bulletin boards, but but, I spent a lot of time in IRC chats. That's for sure.

Speaker 1: What do you think happened to it? Like, why did the web win?

Speaker 2: Oh, it was well, truthfully, like, if I'm not mistaken, and I don't know everything about news groups and Usenets, is that I believe it was a completely distributed system. Like, I remember connecting to the news groups through my ISP's local Usenet server, if I'm not mistaken. Mhmm. We're going deep in time here, so we're really stretching my memory. But it was essentially distributed. So you'd make a post onto the the news group, and that post would then be, you know, replicated across the Internet onto all of these different news group servers. So, you know, what was in that post or or file attachments and embeds and things like that, you know, would get replicated across the Internet, which was great because, you know, I I know that there was lots of things in Usenets like software, you know, pornography, things that you're pretty much find generically all over the Internet these days, used to be tucked into to news groups in the hidden little dark corners of the of the bulletin board worlds.

Speaker 1: I think the demise of Usenet is what this story is actually about, but we're get we're gonna get to it later.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 1: In all of the breathless kind of writing about this, people have called this, you know, the Internet's oldest and weirdest mystery, one of the first great puzzles of the Internet, and it's not. It's a triumph of, like, creepypasta misinformation and the power of a good headline. And it's a shame because what it's actually about is also really interesting, but just in a much less scandalous way. I got onto this because I fell for it while researching for this episode. I got this close to participating in this internet myth making. And here's what you'll find when you look this up. Atlas Obscura writes, what is Markovian Parallax Denigrate? It's an enduring question for the ages, or simply a case of nothing much at all. Depending on whom you asked, it's been called the Internet's oldest and weirdest mystery. And it all started with a series of enigmatic early Internet posts from the mid nineteen nineties, the full meaning of which remains unsolved over twenty years later. It is provocative and spooky and really, really frustrating.

Speaker 5: The Markovian Markovian Parallax Denigrate.

Speaker 1: Markovian Parallax Denigrate. There's so many videos about this, and they're all the story of, hey, look at this spooky, cool, old mystery that has stumped people for years. And every single one of them sites the same reference, a very important reference for the purposes of this story. A 2012 article by a guy named Kevin Morris for the daily dot titled, The Markovian Parallax Denigrate, unraveling the Internet's oldest and weirdest mystery. And it's a pretty fun read. And it is really provocative because of the presence of that, you know, character in the heart of it, Susan Lindauer. Because her name is on the last available Markovian Parallax Denigrate post in those Google archives. Do you know who Susan Lindauer is? No. I do not. Susan Lindauer, to drastically, drastically oversimplify, is this anti war activist reporter turned political actor. Coming in hot out of Anchorage, Alaska, master's from London School of Economics, Seattle Post reporter turned Washington political spokesperson. She's pretty accomplished. And it's difficult to parse what happens next in Susan's life. But in the early two thousands, she becomes embroiled in Middle Eastern politics. She starts taking trips to New York, meeting with leaders of Libya and Iraq, and kind of acting as this unofficial lobbyist. But all of this voluntary lobbying came to a head on 03/11/2004 when the FBI arrested Lindauer in her Takoma Park, Maryland home, charging that she'd acted as a, quote, unregistered agent of a foreign government in taking all of those meetings that no one asked her to take. The government cited a trip that Lindauer took to Baghdad in 2002 where she was allegedly given $10,000 breaking trade embargoes. Lindauer, who at this point was publicly claiming to be a CIA asset, asserted that her arrest was intended to silence her from revealing the truth about nine eleven. So this is all kind of turning into, like, a word stew of stuff that really conspiratorial people like.

Speaker 2: Oh, for sure.

Speaker 1: Lindauer is released in 2006 after a federal judge declared her unfit to stand trial, citing she suffered from paranoia and delusions of grandeur. So she's like a really complicated figure and a really ripe protagonist for a conspiracy theory.

Speaker 2: Right? Totally. She got all the right boxes checked. That's for sure.

Speaker 1: And in 2006, Susan Lindauer is checking those boxes right when tales of this Markovian parallax denigrate start to bubble back up online. And someone researching it on Usenet archives finds this one post with the email tied to it, susanlindauer@wharf.uwsp.edu. So the conspiracy machine starts to turn a little bit. This person who had tried to speak truth about nine eleven, who allegedly knew these government secrets, seems to have posted these cryptic mystery posts right before she's arrested by the very organization she was publicly criticizing. And right when that connection to Lindauer gets made, the Wikipedia for Markovian Parallax Denigrate goes down. It is an extraordinary amount of smoke for the conspiratorially minded to not think there's a fire somewhere. There's gotta be something to the Markovian parallax denigrate. Of course.

Speaker 2: It's it's the thing that connects all of the everything together. You know?

Speaker 1: It's the yarn between the thumbtacks, man.

Speaker 2: It it is the it is the glue in the middle of this. I can feel it. I can feel it coming. It has nothing to do with content creation and online editors needing to make, you know, things to capture interest. It has nothing to do with that.

Speaker 1: No. Nothing at all.

Speaker 2: Nothing at all.

Speaker 1: And all of that press coverage, and there's so much of it, really picks up when Kevin Morris synthesizes everything I've just said into his article in the daily dot in 2012. People read that headline about this, you know, weird old mystery that people So wait. Wait.

Speaker 2: So this guy's article is literally the yarn between the thumbtacks then. Is that what you're saying?

Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. And people read that that little piece of yarn he posts, and they start writing their own articles. They start making their own video videos, and they start recording their own podcasts. And this about this puzzle with this fascinating Susan Lindauer character lurking around the edges. And so if you're paying attention, the whole thing really turns on that email. Susan_lindauer@wharf.uwsp.edu. Because that's where this kind of weird thing turns into a conspiracy. Right? And do you notice anything about that email?

Speaker 2: Well, it's an American educational institution. Yeah. UWSP is what's Wisconsin?

Speaker 1: Surely, if Kevin Morris's article contains some important information in the second half that changed the story or provided context or really just deflated the sinister quality of all this, surely that would be included in all of the articles, all of the videos, all of the podcasts that cite that article as a source. Right? Like, surely all the people citing this article read it.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Of course.

Speaker 1: Less they make content that tricks me, podcast maker, all excited about a cool Internet mystery into thinking this is something it isn't.

Speaker 3: An event that, although it predates the Internet itself, is often considered to be the first true Internet mystery.

Speaker 1: That person must have read the whole thing. Right?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Of course.

Speaker 5: This is often called one of the very first Internet mysteries.

Speaker 1: What about them? Like, they must have read it. Right? Mhmm. Mhmm. All of them must have read it to the end, because this is how the end of the story goes. In 2012, when Kevin Morris was writing his daily dot article, he managed to find the person who that email belonged to. And to skip right to the point, it's an entirely different Susan Lindauer.

Speaker 2: Nice.

Speaker 1: Not the Washington political actor, but a university student in Wisconsin. And Morris gets a hold of both Susan Lindauer's. And while the freelance diplomat Susan Lindauer had at least heard of this, it was not her email. She had nothing to do with it, and neither did the other one. And it's important to understand that Usenet made it really, really easy to spoof an email. Mhmm. You just typed your email in. You can put any email in any post you want to. So lots are pretty decent that whoever made the original Markovian Parallax denigrate posts, just scraped a bunch of emails off a university website. And Susan Lindauer, the main character of the Markovian Parallax Denigrate, just happens to share a name with a person whose email just happened to get stolen. No connection whatsoever. So this is the part where I start going I keep reading over and over again that this is the Internet's oldest, weirdest, spookiest mystery. This puzzle unstuck from time. And I really wanted to know, what is the actual mystery here? By 2012, when Kevin Morris wrote his very entertaining article, The Markovian Parallax Denigrate Wikipedia was no longer up, which Morris cites in his article as having fueled further speculation, writing quote, shortly after Lindauer's connection to all this was dug up, the Wikipedia page disappeared. You needn't have been a conspiracy nut to connect the dots to think something fishy is going on. But if we hop in the Wayback Machine, we go look at a cached June 2005 version shortly before the page went down, we're gonna find an edit saying, quote, beyond the name connection, there is no compelling information introduced to suggest that these messages had any sort of meaning. The page was nominated for deletion in 2009 because there was no story. No connection to Lindauer beyond her name in an email. No one else writing about it yet, so no sources to cite. Until 2012, when the Daily Dot published a 3,000 word article that spends 90% of its time entertaining the many fabulous implications of this story, before finally debunking everything that came before in the final paragraphs. An article that begins being cited as a source across the Internet, most of which do not include the debunking details at the very end of the article. And I'm talking about legitimate sources here. Wired has talked about this. And so this story, this myth is born the day Kevin Morris posts his article about it, about a mystery that never really existed until he wrote a story about it. So I kept pulling on the thread, and I wanted to see if anyone else was on this, the oldest mystery on the Internet isn't actually a mystery tip. And I'm really happy to say that I am no longer alone. There are dozens of us.

Speaker 2: Dozens. Dozens of us. There there are there are hundreds of conspiracy theorists and dozens of you.

Speaker 1: Google's Usenet archive is really compromised, but it actually has more stuff about this story than Morris cites in his article. A YouTuber named Barely Sociable hunted it down in an essay last year. If you go to the alt.religion.christian.boston newsgroup, we can look at other posts made around the same time as the famous one. And it's here that we make a really important discovery about all this, which is that the phrase, Markovian Parallax Denigrate, is just one random title from this much larger spam event. It's just three meaningless words in an ocean of these meaningless word posts. All the other ones just had different random words as their subject lines. It was a spam bot. If we jump a couple days later, we can actually see the aftermath of Markovian Parallax Denigrate, where user Catherine Hampton outlines all of the different groups that were struck by the spam bot. Uk. Religion. Christian, rec.music.christian,alt.religion.christian. So, specifically, the Internet's oldest and weirdest mystery is a spam bot targeting religious groups.

Speaker 2: So so what you've found is the origin of spam and probably the origin of fake news, and they are explicitly linked.

Speaker 1: I bumped into this story not through the daily. Article, but through all the other coverage. I think it started with Wired. And I read about it, and I thought, what a cool story for our cyber tech story podcast. And I'm embarrassed to say that I then watched another video about it. And then a third one, before finally going, oh my god. I need to read the source article on this, which I did. And it took me a second to realize what had occurred here. That the oldest, weirdest mystery on the internet was neither a mystery, nor weird, nor old. It was born with Kevin Morris's article. It was kind of an invention that over cycles of coverage and coverage about that coverage turned a random snippet of text in a spam event into a grand conspiracy and a part of internet folklore. And it's not. It's what you just said. One of the earliest events of its kind. An event that would destroy the very place where it occurred: Usenet. And I want to chat about that with you, right after this break. Starting some new isn't just hard. It can be downright terrifying. You put a lot of work into a thing. You're not entirely sure it's going to work out. You're taking a huge leap of faith. I've started a few things. Now I know I was right for believing in, you know, the idea, the product, despite all of those fears and hesitations. But boy, does it sure help when you have a partner like Shopify on your side. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in The US. From household names like, well, hacked podcasts merch, to brands just getting started, you can get started with your own design studio with hundreds of ready to use templates. Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand style. Did I mention that that iconic purple shop pay button is used by millions of businesses around the world? I don't know why I wouldn't. I should. It's why Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet. It also helps boost conversions, meaning less carts, sort of getting abandoned in the parking lot, and more sales for you. It's time to turn those what ifs into sign up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.com/hacked. Go to shopify.com/hacked. One more time, that's shopify.com/act.

Speaker 6: Sierra has all the best active and outdoor brands you need. From athletic stuff, like a full court pickup game, swish, to athletic stuff, like a half mile stroll. Get those steps in. And for morning hikes up the mountain trail, good pace to nighttime ghost stories from the camping chair. What a twist. Whatever level of active, Sierra loves it all. Head to Sierra or sierra.com for the brands you want at the prices that let you do it all. From athletic to athletic ish, Sierra's got it.

Speaker 1: Was there a lot of spam on Usenet?

Speaker 2: I think, you know, with any kind of if you've spent any time on any kind of message boards, web forums, you know, there's there wasn't that much spam, I don't think, in the beginning, but I feel like everything just kind of eventually ends up there. Mhmm. If you don't have proper moderation, if it's completely uncontrolled, it's like email.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: Like, I don't know. If you're old enough to remember email before all of the complicated, Markovian no. They're not. They're Bayesian, actually. Bayesian filters and stuff that deal with our spam headaches. We email used to be great, and then it was really, really, really not great. Mhmm. And now it's great again. And I I feel like that that's just part of the thing. So Usenet, yeah, I think definitely, you know, had its own spam issues.

Speaker 1: So the modern era of spam is generally thought to have begun in 1994 when a law firm called Kantor and Siegel sent out a message to 5,500 Usenet news groups advertising a green card lottery service. And they claimed that the advertisements netted them about a $100,000 in business at a cost of a couple pennies. This claim came at the same time as they launched a spam for hire business. You gotta take it with a grain of salt. But, it was a pretty notable event in the history of the internet. And, spam on Usenet was apparently a pretty big deal because of how Usenet was built. It was a broadcast protocol where every message posted to a Usenet group got copied to every server that carried the news group it was posted

Speaker 2: to. So, Hey, I remembered it correctly.

Speaker 1: So, the cost of sending a Usenet message was really tiny for you and the one server you were connected to, but the cost of storage and processing multiplied by every server at the network plus the bandwidth of moving that message between all of the servers, basically meant that spam was really cheap for the spammer and really expensive for the system. Someone described this system as turning a spam attack almost into, like, a DDoS attack.

Speaker 2: In an odd twist, I actually did, a rather lengthy paper in my, grad degree about, the cost, the economic and social cost of spam. And, you know, the additional power consumption Mhmm. The additional, like, time lost for corporations, all of the, you know, things that you don't think about when it comes to spam. Like, you know, if you get 60 if back in the day, you used to easily get sixty, seventy messages a day. It would waste a lot of your day just pruning through spam, figuring out if it's a real email it needs you to respond to, deciphering it, deleting it, you know, unsubscribing, trying to get unsubscribed, etcetera, etcetera. Not to mention just the sheer cost of sending it, you know, big spam for profit operations that used to exist that would spam billions of messages a day. You know, the additional, you know, power capacity that the servers and the networks needed to just deal with this overwhelming amount of network traffic that was just generated because of spam. It's actually ridiculous.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: How much, like, how much of, like, a a social environmental impact and and economic impact spam has had. Mhmm. And it had it back in the day especially. You know, we've gotten pretty damn good at at catching and filtering and and flagging spam. And, you know, big, big props to, you know, a lot of the CS researchers and stuff that have done that because that's just made a tremendous difference to the efficacy of the platform, not to mention all of the other impacts that I just mentioned.

Speaker 1: When it was first kind of birthed on Usenet, it actually sparked, a pretty early discussion about free speech in these spaces. Some advocates were arguing that no one had the authority to actually remove this spam from Usenet, and admins would say, they weren't censoring the content of the messages, they were preventing this DDoS style attack and the fight just sort of went back and forth. And at a certain point, it became really hard to tell who was actually debating this and who was there just to kinda mess around. There were people saying that anti internet spam efforts were backed by lumber cartels trying to protect the profits from the threat of junk mail becoming electronic, which would reduce the demand for paper.

Speaker 2: Oh my god.

Speaker 1: But even by the mid nineteen nineties, it was getting pretty clear that Usenet's mass duplication and decentralized system that you've described wasn't really necessary, and it came with this devastating overhead to the service as a whole. Usenet was, like, uniquely unequipped to deal with spam, which didn't exist when it was designed and was kind of birthed on Usenet. And if you wanna understand what killed Usenet, which had more than a decade's head start on the web, it was kind of spam events like Markovian Parallax Denigrate. The number of posts to Usenet has actually gone up over time, even as the number of users has plummeted. By 2012, the traffic was at an all time high of about 18,000 posts a day. And at this point, from what I can parse, it's mostly just a spam graveyard. There's still people who do use it for file sharing, but it's by volume mostly just spam bots howling at each other in this void. One Reddit user raised the question of who the spam bots are even trying to communicate to at this point.

Speaker 2: Well, that makes total sense. Maybe they're just literally autumn automatons that people haven't turned off, that have completely forgotten that they exist.

Speaker 1: Why is that spooky to me?

Speaker 2: Just little little robots running on computers and servers somewhere. You know, somebody hacked into a server and installed a spam bot in that server and some, you know, American educational institution hasn't been taken down Mhmm. Or has been replicated over and over, and it still has this weird little automaton on it that just screams into Usenet groups that nobody listens to. Mhmm.

Speaker 1: Could

Speaker 2: you imagine? Yeah. It's like 25 year old, you know, or 20 year old bug just screaming into these things that no one's in anymore.

Speaker 1: Right. It's kinda like the golden record in space, but it doesn't make me hopeful. It makes me sad and afraid. Like, this message just going out. You kinda cracked what this was about before the commercial break. And, I got into the story because I thought it was gonna be a mystery because everything kept calling it the Internet's oldest and weirdest mystery. And then I stayed on it because I thought it could be a fun debunking, which I hope it kind of was. But I think it's actually a story about how Internet communities can die.

Speaker 2: It's probably constantly gonna be an issue because we don't really have an arbiter of truth. So without an arbiter of truth that is, you know, all knowing and all seeing, it's hard to disallow freedom of speech. And without with freedom of speech comes all these other problems like spam, which would be probably one of the least biggest problems for freedom of speech these days. But, yeah. So there's a a great philosophical challenge you have there.

Speaker 1: Because of how it was built Usenet wasn't able to adapt to how people were using it and it collapsed. And it's interesting that fifteen years after Markovian Parallax Denigrate helped usher in the collapse of Usenet, it then reared its head again, this time as misinformation. At a time when that was the biggest threat to the Internet. And it's kind of like this ghost that keeps coming back to haunt the Internet in whatever new form it's most vulnerable to. First, it was spam, and then it was conspiratorial misinformation, and maybe someday it'll be something else. But it will always be Markovian Parallax Denigrate, three meaningless words. I'm here to shout out our patrons on Patreon. Desh Gunatunga, you get me. I'm here for it. Liam Richards, I love it. Thank you so much. Willem Decker, you mean the world to me. It's the best way to support the show patreon.com/hackedpodcast. Maybe you could be the sponsor that brings back Deepfake Jordan and pays for the monthly subscription for the service that keeps Deepfake Jordan from the last episode existing. Also, I just wanna say shout out to Barely Sociable, a YouTuber who is a big source for this episode. I feel like Barely Sociable really kinda cracked this debunking angle in the story. AV Club wrote a great article to follow and now there are enough sources that I'm excited to say that the Wikipedia for Markovian Parallax Denigrate has been updated to reflect our current understanding of what it actually is, which is helpful. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Fact. Catch you on the next one.

Speaker 4: Still waiting in line? Again? That's time you will never get back. Save time and money with stamps.com. Over 4,000,000 businesses have skipped the line with stamps.com. Join them to save up to 90% off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now. Print postage for certified mail, registered mail, and packages in seconds, then schedule a pickup right from your home or office. For a limited time, go to stamps.com and use code podcast for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply.

Speaker 5: Feel your best and amplify your everyday look with Thrive Cosmetics. Go to thrivecosmetics.com/shine26 for an exclusive offer of 20% off your first order. That's thrive cosmetics, causemetics,.com/shine20six.