The new power of cryptid belief |
Last month, during the Arctic Blast that still has a few states trapped under ice (greetings from Illinois), someone posted an altered Google Earth screenshot to Facebook. The image displayed a snake-like shape in the Atlantic Ocean, east of Virginia. “The Leviathan is waking up,” the caption read. “This is why they are creating a FAKE snow storm and manipulating the weather so they can freeze it because of the military bases in the area.”
The post gained enough traction to land on Know Your Meme, the internet’s best-kept meme encyclopedia. But it wasn’t just a meme, at least in the sense we usually mean. A lot of people earnestly believed that the biblical Leviathan was waking up from beneath the Commonwealth of Virginia. Within days, people were cross-referencing the Bible, pulling up maps of naval installations and treating weather radar imagery like scripture requiring interpretation.
AI brings a new epistemological category, not ‘real’ and not ‘fake,’ but something like ‘plausible render’
AI brings a new epistemological category, not ‘real’ and not ‘fake,’ but something like ‘plausible render’
I’ve been passively consuming cryptid material – information about mythical creatures – for most of my life. It was always a little silly, even when it scared you, and everyone knew, and that was part of why it worked. The thrill was in the “maybe.” The sound of the house settling after you finally turned off Unsolved Mysteries. Art Bell’s voice fading out as you drifted off, half-listening to a caller describing triangular lights over the desert, or maybe some kind of........