Joseph Matheny: Ong's Hat and the Blurring of Fiction and Reality
Pioneering storyteller and artist Joseph Matheny joins us to talk about his seminal 'Alternate Reality Game' (ARG) Ong's Hat, and how in recent years the techniques he employed have been weaponised by
Original article link: https://www.dailygrail.com/2023/12/ongs-hat-creator-joseph-matheny-on-the-blurred-lines-between-fiction-and-reality/
Ong’s Hat. For those who were on the early internet and into Grail-like topics, those two words likely spark a heady sense of conspiracy, alternative science and history nostalgia. Across websites, email lists and forums devoted to those topics, there was discussion about how much of the mythos behind the many-threaded, multi-media story of Ong’s Hat was fiction, and how much might be based in truth. Could the rumours of portals to alternative dimensions have any truth? Were conspiracy theories about it being hushed up?
In retrospect, thirty years later, it all seems a little quaint. We now know Ong’s Hat was co-created as a piece of ‘guerilla storytelling’ by a number of individuals which morphed into what is now known as an alternate reality game (ARG). It’s influence, nevertheless is huge – both on the ARG business and in various modern stories which echo some of its themes, like Stranger Things. But a more shady part of its influence is on the conspiracy scene, in particular the way in which it revealed how blurring fiction and reality can give birth to myths that can no longer be controlled by their creators – and create a horde of ‘true believers’ who cross the line from having fun in a game to being particularly toxic, and possibly dangerous.
Those who have followed the trajectory of Pizzagate and QAnon in recent years might recognize a similar pattern, with myths that started on messageboards as LARPs (live action role-playing games) propagating out into the real world and being co-opted by bad actors.
As such, when I got the chance recently to sit down and chat to the creator of Ong’s Hat, Joseph Matheny (embedded below), these topics dominated our discussion. I think it’s one of the most important areas worthy of talking more about, in a world now dominated by social media and influencers, in which myths of all kind are now spreading through society and being taken as reality by far too many. Especially in the conspiracy, and alternative history and science scenes, such as we’re currently seeing play out with ‘UFO Twitter’.
Enjoy!
JM's story thru a hypnotic fog and then an electric fence to continue to tell his story is a preservable story because it has personal traits of nature at its core. Joe's seed was planted long ago in the mind that he lives in now. If we continue to flip the pages in our living book that we are adding to each day in our understanding of our deep self
Can you explain the larp angle of pizzagate/q anon? I haven’t seen those topics be satisfactorily dissected. I imagine that given your background, you have some unique insights to share on the subject.
To me, pizzagate was a lot of theorizing about a few pieces of data, which has resulted in the birth of spiralphobia. What I saw, there were messages interpreted as code in the podesta emails, that fbi document with the triangle and butterfly symbols, and the pizza shop in dc related to both. I think it was Breitbart’s infamous tweet about Podesta that got people to really speculate.
The whole adrenochrome obsession seemed odd, like flat earth odd, like deliberate disinfo. I haven’t ruled out that the word adrenochrome isn’t used as a code for some other thing, or that there’s some alien race or people with a peculiar biology to whom it’s of actual interest, but i know that the actual molecule is not some secret billionaire’s superdrug.
Q anon, well... I read the q posts, and there was a lot of good info in them. There was a lot of vagary, which drove wild speculation. There were mistakes. There was an effort to convince the reader that the author was a top level insider, quite a bit of that. There were multiple phases, in different styles, yet always presented as coming from the same confirmed source. There were echoes of operation trust; it had a similar effect. It certainly captured a lot of attention and grew into a phenomenon, for better or worse.