Mysterious Website Actually Social Experiment

MaelstromX writes "For six months a website called eon8 (probably down) has carried a countdown to July 1, along with vague and mysterious codes. In addition, strange code-bearing posts associated with the site were made in various webforums, and the site carried a map of the world marked by spots of "deployment". All of this, along with some apparent recorded visits by US military and intelligence computers, led many people to believe this was an imminent terrorist operation or a massive virus to be unleashed on the web-surfing public. Turns out, it was just an experiment by a 23-year-old guy named Chris from Florida who wanted to see how people would react to an absence of information, and he was disappointed that people expected the worst -- even going to so far as to attempt to hack his webserver and make phone calls to anyone with any perceived tangential connection to the site or its host. A mirror of the site in its current state is available with an explanation added by the site owner after the countdown expired."

Comments

Troll response

[A nonymous Coward]

The problem with the classic libertarian view, as you have expressed it, of taking personal risk, is that the vast majority of the financial risk I take is not personal at all; it is out of my control. I have no control over the investment market, and what little knowledge I can obtain is unreliable at best. In other words, I can't take any personal responsibility for my investments. The so-called free market is controlled by huge conglomerates whose owners are not well known and whose goals, both short term and long term, are invisible to just about everybody else.

When the US becomes a truly capitalist society with no robber barons and monopolists biasing the risk in their favor and limiting my options to rigged investments, then I will be more than happy to have Social Security disappear. But as long as the fat cats rig the system in their favor, I am just as happy to have them finance the social safety net.