Category
Internet Phenomena
Mandela Effect, QAnon, Cicada 3301 — the conspiracies that grew online.
2 articles
#FreeBritney
On February 1, 2008, a Los Angeles judge approved a temporary conservatorship over the 26-year-old pop singer Britney Spears, naming her father Jamie Spears co-conservator of her person and estate. The arrangement was supposed to last days. It lasted 13 years and 9 months. During that period, Spears released four studio albums, performed a four-year Las Vegas residency that grossed approximately $138 million, was the subject of two New York Times documentaries, and could not, by court order, leave the house without permission. The conservatorship was terminated on November 12, 2021, after a 24-minute testimony in which Spears told Judge Brenda Penny that she had been forced onto lithium, prevented from removing an IUD, and that everyone involved 'should be in jail.' The fan movement that had been arguing this for a decade — #FreeBritney — turned out to be right.
The Russian Sleep Experiment
On August 10, 2010, an anonymous user calling himself OrangeSoda posted a 1,200-word story on the Creepypasta Wiki. It described a Soviet experiment in which five political prisoners had been sealed in a sound-proofed chamber and exposed to a stimulant gas that kept them awake for thirty days. The story has no documentary basis. No declassified Russian archive contains anything resembling it. But over the next fifteen years it has become — to a significant fraction of the people who encounter it — historically true. This is the story of how a fiction acquires the texture of evidence.
2 files · end of the line