Tulpas, Tulpas Everywhere
That time the internet created an event like a tulpic shaman.
So this one is about an incident that happened which could suggest with enough directed thought/attention could people create an event unintentionally; akin to the global consciousness project.
In the build up to the release of the Dark Knight Rises in 2012, the third in the Nolan trilogy, the first sequence in the movie was released online. This sequence encompassed the main villain Bane being captured, being put on a plane, then subsequently escaping and crashing the plane whilst dangling from a second plane. The internet being the internet began immediately to create memes from this, cutting down segments into GIF format and using them for reaction comments. This was most prevalent on 4chan, 8chan, 9gag and reddit, the most unusual and visited parts of the internet at the time. One of the most popular memes created from this was the ‘for you’ GIF and involved Bane having an exchange with another character which ended in Bane uttering the words ‘For you’. These GIF memes were all over the internet at the time and made their way into more surface level internet such as social media, twitter, facebook etc….
How did this impact reality or break through into reality? On the 24th March 2015 a Germanwings flight from Barcelona to Dusseldorf crashed into the French Alps north of Nice. All 144 passengers and 6 crew died in the crash. In the subsequent investigation it was discovered that the co-pilot Andrea Lubitz had deliberately caused the crash. He had waited until the captain had left the cockpit and then proceeded to lock him out of the cockpit, disabling the captain's ability to return. At which point Lubitz refused to respond to those outside trying to gain access to the cockpit or to those on the aircraft radio trying to hail the plane. Lubitz then descended the plane and turned the speed up gradually at the sametime. Lubitz was suffering from mental health issues and had prescription drugs to combat it, he had also been searching ways to commit suicide. Sadly due to German law his employers Germanwings could not look into his medical records and therefore could not ground him, as this would have required Lubitz to volunteer the information, thereby self-excluding himself from further flights.
Why is this relevant to a collection of memes from a movie posted online by people for the lols or reactions. Well the most obvious coincidence is the planes number 4U9525, the most popular meme from the Bane-posting was the ‘For you’, however nothing more than a coincidence. But where did the plane crash exactly, right next to a town called Dignes-Les-Baines, Baines/Bane. However there is more for which we need to do some quirky math, the amount of time up to the scene with Bane in the plane saying ‘before I put on the mask’ (the piece of dialog that leads to the ‘for you’ scene is 3 mins 24 secs into the movies, 24th March the day of the crash. Another one would be something I had trouble verifying, but there was a restaurant 150 kilometers away from the crash site, 150 people were killed in the crash. Perhaps the strangest one however was that of the government prosecution official for the crash investigation, whose name was Brice Robin, Bruce Wayne and Robin. One of the final scenes in the movie is one of the characters being revealed as Robin.
What does all this mean, why choose such a morbid subject. I in no way wanted to trivialize an horrific act causing the death of a 150 people including the perpetrator, I do however think this is an interesting look into whether the attention we give to things, with the hype for this movie unparalleled at the time, couple with the persistent recycling of specific scenes in the movie in the form of memes and GIFs; can in fact affect the reality we exist in or somehow blur the lines between the two. Whilst I accept this was in the overwhelmingly negative sense, if it can be done negatively then why not positively. Why can we not create a self-fulfilling prophecy along the same lines for a fairer, better world.