Wonderful point of everything?

I work in a field governed by strict NDAs. That being stated, the easiest way to describe my daily work without detail is that it concerns AI training. The bulk of my workload is auditing the performance of a given AI system. The work is often times more tiresome than it is cyberpunk spooky.

The creepy outliers themselves are usually typical. Things like outrageous clickbait sites with all caps headlines, self-maiming forums, lame cults. Things that somehow gate-crashed into the New Clean Internet. The image above is a cutting from a screen shot I recently took. There were tons of these in a result page that should have yielded a pile of shopping links and consumerist articles for a vacuum cleaner.

For some reason they captivated me. They’re all the same, nothing but texts walls. Text that is palpably not human, but is patched together by a motley collection of human parts. Frankenpages. The work of electric ghouls.

The phone number shown in the machine stuttering above is from the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. This is an unincorporated territory belonging to the United States that consists of 14 islands in the Mariana Archipelago. It has the population of a dying town, logging less than 50,000 in the 2020 Census. Most of the population stays on the islands of Saipan, Tinian and Rota. The northernmost islands are sparsely populated. One in particular used to have residents numbering in the thousands, but apparently no longer does for “various reasons”. This is the island called Pagan. Mild Spooky.

I always wonder if there’s some dirty doings happening in these U.S. Territories with their states, not states politics. In a state of stoned intrigue, I decided to dig for the fool’s gold of conspiracy gossip from these islands. I found only a ghost. An old website titled, SaipanSucks.com. Rad stuff, but all gone. I could only find a Wikipedia bit about its pseudonymous creator:

Saipan Sucks was written by a person or persons going by the pseudonym “Forgetabilia”. Reported investigations carried out by the CNMI government in July 2001 led to an alleged belief about a real identity behind this persona. Later, on November 16, 2006, a CNMI daily alleged that Saipan Sucks was written by a former CNMI Assistant Attorney General, who the daily reported as having “disliked his position” in the CNMI. The same day, a regional publication denied the claim, reiterating that the author or authors remain anonymous. Saipan Sucks closes by stating, “As for the authors of this essay, our days in Micronesia have ended … In all likelihood we shall remain happily for the rest of our days ensconced in anonymous Longnesia, suffering, with a little luck, from a selective am-nesia. Hence our name – Forgetabilia.”

As of September 10, 2014, the website was no longer available. However, it has been reposted at saipansucks.weebly.com.

Wikipedia entry for SaipanSucks.com

The website, while it lasted, was said to present allegations of corruption, racism, nepotism, jury-rigging, worker exploitation, employment discrimination, and mismanagement of the CNMI tourism industry by local CNMI officials, and sought to warn U.S. mainlanders about moving to the islands to accept employment offers.

“Nepotism rules on the islands. Fueled by money paid by American taxpayers and diverted to the far-off territory, politicians run for office primarily for the sake of being in a position to appoint their relatives to high-paying sinecures.”

Forgetabilia, writing on SaipanSucks.

So close I could almost smell it. At the same time, this is the sort of thing I expected. Island corruption seems to the only way these U.S. Territories ever go. What I could find very little on was the U.S. military activity on the islands. There’s some history logged in connection to the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, and general statements of there being military bases on the islands somewherabouts. But mostly everything points you over to Guam and the subject moves on.

Is it spooky? Have I caught a single straw in my grasping?

So these screenshots. I didn’t read all of them. I screenshot them, somehow thinking they would make sense later or something. I wanted to write a series about these, and about a certain theory I’ve been hearing the last year or two. I had heard of dead internet theory before, but only recently did I read something that really fleshed it out. Did the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana and the censored SaipanSucks bring me any closer to deciphering these or evidencing the dead internet theory that I so far only naively understand?

I don’t know yet. I doubt it, but I’m having a good time.