Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
If you're hearing this, well done. You found a way to connect to the internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast premium episode 278, The Tsuki Project. As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Liv Hagar, and Travis View.
Today, we're gonna dive into an old-fashioned internet rabbit hole. That is the Suki Project, which is also known as System Space. This is a once-active community of like-minded anonymous 4chan users who longed to transport into a better world. And they believe that by participating in this community formed around the promises and lore of someone named Suki, they could enter into this better world after they died. Hmm.
So this community has long since dissipated into the online ether, and it's hard to say what the Suki Project was exactly. It has been described as an anime suicide cult, a digital version of Heaven's Gate, a hoax,
a piece of interactive fiction, an alternate reality game, or just a group of lonely, depressed people who are sucked into one person's maladaptive daydreams. It was probably a swirl of all of those things. Now, what exactly happened has to be pieced together from archived image board posts, websites that only survive as zip files on the dark web, anime wikis, and leaked screenshots from Discord servers.
You know, they say that the internet is forever, but in truth, some things on the internet are actually, you know, are harder to piece together than some things that happened many, many years ago.
Yeah, like chat GBT drivel is forever. But like whatever went on on some Discord in 2017, that is lost. And many people are probably very happy to hear that as well, I'm sure. Yeah, our ancestors had to like chip away at stone and like use fine brushes to sort of pull apart the sand to see images, you know, etched in tablets. And we have to piece together broken Discord links, blurry JPEGs, tiny pieces of art
online chat boxes. I mean, we've come a long way. You have to go through a 4chan archive search that sends you to like 10 chatterbait websites, even though you have adblock on it the second you click on it. Also, yeah, just a miserable search function, like four plebes just as just miserable to navigate and search through. I imagine, I think it's Matt Dillon at the
beginning of um the fifth element where like the aliens are walking by and he's like sketching them horrified but like our situation he like sketching just like horribly like racist posts anti-semitic shit
So I think the story of the Suki project is interesting for anyone who is really compelled to learn more about online cults or Chan culture, but it's also a story that made me personally reflect on why I was initially attracted to like early forms of social media as a young boy and a teen in the nineties. You know, I liked the idea that you could like drop into like a local BBS server or a Usenet group about like, you know, any topic you're interested in. Like for example,
I really liked The Simpsons. I didn't know anyone who wanted to talk about The Simpsons, but there was a Usenet group full of people who were more obsessed with The Simpsons than I was. And they were obviously, they were clearly adults and they understood references that I didn't get. You know, I felt like it was enriching my experience. And, you know, discovering that and discovering like there's just this large community of people who had the kind of like same kind of like mind like me was very validating. Yeah.
Yeah. I feel like we've, we've hit a critical mass of that now where it's like, if you want to like fuck toasters or whatever, you'll be able to find a community. Like there's, there must've been some point where it was good enough that there's all the reasonable hobbies and communities. You can find someone and it'll.
enrich your life. And then it gets to a point where it's like, no, maybe there shouldn't be communities of people encouraging each other to fuck toasters. Yeah. See, I didn't know that that... I didn't know that you could do that on the internet when I was a teenager and had internet in the house for the first time. I basically understood like America Online chat rooms and...
instant messages. And before that it was prodigy chat rooms essentially. And then like in the later years, like, yeah, downloading like maybe like one picks like a pixelated, uh, image of pornography. Like I didn't know that there were forums where you could go and like discuss like, you know,
specific topics like that. And as far as I was concerned, like that part of the internet didn't exist to me. It was just like going into like chat rooms and being like, Hey, and pretending to be like an older person. Like sometimes, you know, like somebody like a police officer or something, just something that I thought was cool, you know?
Too much information? No, no, no, no. No, no, that's a good, you know, like, perspective. I just didn't realize that there was, like, forums where it was like, oh, I could go to, like, I didn't know that there probably would have been, like, a Ghostbusters forum where I could go talk about Ghostbusters with like-minded people when I was a teenager with access to the internet.
Yeah. It's very easy. Like everyone knows, everyone who would be into that probably already knows they can like Google. Yeah. Some community. Yeah. People know what the internet does now. Whereas like in a, when like Travis and I like first, when I first got it in my house, like we didn't know the extent of like what it was able to do. I remember asking my, I remember showing it to my grandfather and,
We were like, this is the internet. You can connect to it. You can ask it questions and stuff. We had maybe like an Ask Jeeves browser. And he was like, really? And I was like, yeah, what do you want to know? And he was like, Google Jewish basketball players from 1923. Like that's what he was like, wanted to know like what Jews had played basketball professionally. I feel like we hit a critical mass in relation to that. Yeah. Which has resulted in 70-year-olds knowing what QAnon is. Yeah.
The Suki project began on the 4chan board R9K. So this is probably, I would say it's the third most notorious board on 4chan. So yeah, the original board is also probably the most famous and notorious is the B board, Random, which is like, you know, known for being this chaotic, vulgar, and sometimes creative laboratory of internet meat.
And the second most famous probably is the Poll Board, birthplace of Q, some other insider anons, also a famous sort of like gathering place of like, you know, the internet far right. But the culture of R9K is based around shared alienation of its users. The board was originally developed to test a piece of moderation software called Robot 9000.
but it evolves into a home for sharing painful anecdotes from socially awkward 4chaners who self-deprecatingly call themselves robots. My understanding is the difference between R9K and B is that on R9K, you can't make the same post that someone else has already made. So, you know, on B, they'll have like, this is a thread and you remake the thread continually, but you can't have that. Okay, so it has to be some new weird shit that no one has said before. And that's how they eventually got to this religion.
Yeah, eventually, you know, it's monkeys typing on a typewriter. Posts on R9K are frequently made from young men and occasionally young women who express frustration about, you know, the hurdles of getting romantic attention, making friends generally, or finding fulfilling work.
They romanticize the life of the NEET, the N-E-E-T. That's an acronym for Not in Education, Employment, or Training. They talk about like getting NEET bucks to live a life of isolation, pursuing solo hobbies, playing video games, watching anime, and consuming pornography.
They often feel like society has rejected them and their pain is expressed in existential terms. They convince themselves that their future only holds rejection and tedious low-paying labor, so they wonder if there's any point in trying to better their lot. In other words, it's full of people who believe that they have nothing to lose in life, and consequently, it's full of people who are very receptive to the idea that there's a simple way to exit this world and enter another.
You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QAA podcast. For access to the full episode, as well as all past premium episodes and all of our podcast mini-series, go to patreon.com slash QAA. Try
Travis, why is that such a good deal? Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA podcast for just $5 per month. For that very low price, you get access to over 200 premium episodes, plus all of our miniseries. That includes 10 episodes of Man Clan with Julian and Annie, 10 episodes of Perverts with Julian and Liv, 10 episodes of The Spectral Voyager with Jake and Brad, plus 20 episodes of Trickle Down with me, Travis View.
It's a bounty of content and the best deal in podcasting. Travis, for once, I agree with you. And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.com slash QAA. Well, that's not an opinion. It's a fact. You're so right, Jake. We love and appreciate all of our listeners. Yes, we do. And Travis is actually crying right now, I think, out of gratitude, maybe? That's not true. The part about me crying, not me being grateful. Oh.