The story is in the title. Two teenage girls from Seattle were using a phone app called "Randonautica", which has been described in articles as a "geocaching-type app" without much more detail. The app gave them coordinates that led them to a Seattle beach, where they discovered a suitcase. Inside the suitcase was something undetermined wrapped in a black garbage bag that "smelled really bad", and after making a TikTok video (which has gone viral), they called police. Police discovered that the suitcase, along with other bags they found nearby, contained human body parts. They are investigating.
That is really the whole of the story; but the app that took the kids there, "Randonautica", is a kind of weird thing all its own that I'll give you some explanation and context about.
Presumably many or even most of you have heard of a hobby called "Geocaching". The hobby began in 2000 when more precise GPS system accuracy was made available to the general public; essentially, websites maintain lists of GPS coordinates at which hobbyists have placed "caches", and other hobbyists set out to find them. The caches may contain a visitor log or perhaps small trinkets as "prizes", with those who find them being encouraged to leave something of their own for the next visitor; and these caches can be placed theoretically anywhere from remote wilderness locations to city parks (which has caused some problems of course, but that's a digression).
Randonautica is a fairly new app - I first heard about it only a week and a half ago. It is like geocaching, insofar as the app gives you GPS coordinates and the object of the "game" as it were is to go to those coordinates. It is unlike geocaching in that there hasn't been anything left at the coordinates, which are ostensibly completely randomly generated (hence the name), though within a user-defined maximum distance. You just go there for the sake of going there, for all practical purposes. The location is randomly generated, though, so there is no chance of those kids' happening to find a body at the location they were sent to being anything other than a horrific coincidence.
But, there's a little bit more to Randonautica and it's weird. You get hints of it just by watching their promotional material:
[yt]h148J7ym7Ww[/yt]
To wit: there is a veneer of what might be deemed pseudoscientific psychobabble about the thing. The app connects via web interface to a "quantum random number generator", which is what it uses to generate destination coordinates for users, and it suggests that it could theoretically be possible for peoples' thoughts to influence the generator. Therefore, it asks for each user to form "an intention" before using the app. Presumably a good one, as all the promotional material mentions the possibility of interesting effects and coincidences that could happen via using the app, and the general implication is that these are expected to be positive or at least neutral in nature. The allegation is that if you, say, think of "the color blue" as your "intention" before using the app, then you will encounter the color blue in some meaningful way either at the generated location, or on your way to or from it.
There's still a little more to this than a simple exercise in confirmation bias, though. When I first heard about this app I visited the website and gave it a read. Right now the website only repeats the same simplistic statements made in the video; but back when I previously visited there were other pages, which have since been removed, that contain...well, a lot of detailed theory-crafting. It is extensive and I cannot remember all of it in detail; you can read a cached page here. Essentially it's a musing on the nature of reality that seems to lean toward predetermination, or even simulation theory, though not explicitly. The app has a "secret" purpose, which (I...think?) is to see if reality can be "broken" by having a large enough population use the app to see if the randomly-generated locations tend to form an attractor of some sort over time, and eventually perhaps trying to intentionally leave the confines of the attractor? That's what I think I picked up, but I'm not completely sure I understood. Read the thing yourself, it's a hoot - and it also goes on and on. It's not really word-salad, but there is some nonstandard usage going on. I do not know if the pages featuring the thesis on reality and mental manipulation of outcomes were removed because of this incident with the finding of the human remains or not.
At any rate, the mumbo-jumbo has been seen by more than enough people to have spooked users of the app and as you might expect, a social media community has grown up centered on the app and all the strange, wonderful, or scary experiences people believe they've had while using it. The video titles feature the new lingo invented by the app developers, talking about "intentions", "despair memes", "voids", "attractors" and whatnot. It's almost a little cult-like in some ways although I hasten to add I haven't seen anything nefarious going on with it.
That is really the whole of the story; but the app that took the kids there, "Randonautica", is a kind of weird thing all its own that I'll give you some explanation and context about.
Presumably many or even most of you have heard of a hobby called "Geocaching". The hobby began in 2000 when more precise GPS system accuracy was made available to the general public; essentially, websites maintain lists of GPS coordinates at which hobbyists have placed "caches", and other hobbyists set out to find them. The caches may contain a visitor log or perhaps small trinkets as "prizes", with those who find them being encouraged to leave something of their own for the next visitor; and these caches can be placed theoretically anywhere from remote wilderness locations to city parks (which has caused some problems of course, but that's a digression).
Randonautica is a fairly new app - I first heard about it only a week and a half ago. It is like geocaching, insofar as the app gives you GPS coordinates and the object of the "game" as it were is to go to those coordinates. It is unlike geocaching in that there hasn't been anything left at the coordinates, which are ostensibly completely randomly generated (hence the name), though within a user-defined maximum distance. You just go there for the sake of going there, for all practical purposes. The location is randomly generated, though, so there is no chance of those kids' happening to find a body at the location they were sent to being anything other than a horrific coincidence.
But, there's a little bit more to Randonautica and it's weird. You get hints of it just by watching their promotional material:
[yt]h148J7ym7Ww[/yt]
To wit: there is a veneer of what might be deemed pseudoscientific psychobabble about the thing. The app connects via web interface to a "quantum random number generator", which is what it uses to generate destination coordinates for users, and it suggests that it could theoretically be possible for peoples' thoughts to influence the generator. Therefore, it asks for each user to form "an intention" before using the app. Presumably a good one, as all the promotional material mentions the possibility of interesting effects and coincidences that could happen via using the app, and the general implication is that these are expected to be positive or at least neutral in nature. The allegation is that if you, say, think of "the color blue" as your "intention" before using the app, then you will encounter the color blue in some meaningful way either at the generated location, or on your way to or from it.
There's still a little more to this than a simple exercise in confirmation bias, though. When I first heard about this app I visited the website and gave it a read. Right now the website only repeats the same simplistic statements made in the video; but back when I previously visited there were other pages, which have since been removed, that contain...well, a lot of detailed theory-crafting. It is extensive and I cannot remember all of it in detail; you can read a cached page here. Essentially it's a musing on the nature of reality that seems to lean toward predetermination, or even simulation theory, though not explicitly. The app has a "secret" purpose, which (I...think?) is to see if reality can be "broken" by having a large enough population use the app to see if the randomly-generated locations tend to form an attractor of some sort over time, and eventually perhaps trying to intentionally leave the confines of the attractor? That's what I think I picked up, but I'm not completely sure I understood. Read the thing yourself, it's a hoot - and it also goes on and on. It's not really word-salad, but there is some nonstandard usage going on. I do not know if the pages featuring the thesis on reality and mental manipulation of outcomes were removed because of this incident with the finding of the human remains or not.
At any rate, the mumbo-jumbo has been seen by more than enough people to have spooked users of the app and as you might expect, a social media community has grown up centered on the app and all the strange, wonderful, or scary experiences people believe they've had while using it. The video titles feature the new lingo invented by the app developers, talking about "intentions", "despair memes", "voids", "attractors" and whatnot. It's almost a little cult-like in some ways although I hasten to add I haven't seen anything nefarious going on with it.
via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/3hLoIkO
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