I remember this one! +1
Living the dream, or dreaming the life?
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This is the discussion related to the wiki page SCP-1425.
and held this position until the book was purged from public knowledge by the SCP Foundation, using the Serpentarius Protocol.
I do not buy this in the slightest. There's no power short of going in and in great detail rewriting the mind of EVERY SINGLE PERSON in the world that could do this. And there is no way the Foundation has that kind of power.
Could you name a book that was popular for three weeks seven years ago?
Alright, I like the premise here, though it works much better as a tale. But it does break suspension of disbelief really badly. Possibly the worst of any article I've ever read on the site. It is however, incredibly late at night, so I can't really post anything coherent right now. I'll dispatch this article tomorrow.
Part of the idea is how short the attention span of society is. Will we remember this "bath salts" thing ten years from now? Because to the average citizen, this is like that: a bunch of odd incidents that were attributed to the same source. Saying "oh shit, reality crisis" is like saying "oh shit, zombie apocalypse". All the Foundation had to do was destroy the evidence and handle a few situations with amnesiacs.
Part of the idea is how short the attention span of society is. Will we remember this "bath salts" thing ten years from now?
Yes, but in this case all trace of its existence was wiped out very shortly after interest in the book was at its peak, not years afterwards.
All the Foundation had to do was destroy the evidence
The problem is that the there'd have been so much evidence that the Foundation couldn't possibly destroy all of it.
EDIT: Plus there were lots of blog posts about the "face-eating" incident. If everyone who had blogged about it suddenly found their posts about it mysteriously gone, people would notice.
A man in Florida assaulted another man by chewing off 80% of his face. There was speculation that this psychotic behavior was caused by designer drugs which were referred to as "bath salts".
A man ate a man's face, an event ascribed to "bath salts", a new designer drug. Since then, newspaper blogs everywhere have reported on cases of cannibalism, linking them to that incident, usually with the spin of an oncoming zombie apocalypse. Is there a zombie apocalypse on its way? Doubtful. But imagine that it's a Foundation cover story for a clear and impending threat and not just unrelated incidents being connected by sensationalistic journalism.
and held this position until the book was purged from public knowledge by the SCP Foundation, using the Serpentarius Protocol.
I do not buy this in the slightest. There's no power short of going in and in great detail rewriting the mind of EVERY SINGLE PERSON in the world that could do this. And there is no way the Foundation has that kind of power.
Yeah, that bit made no fucking sense whatsoever, and rather forcefully ended any immersion the article had for me.
Perhaps. However, one can also see it as an exercise for the reader to determine the minimum amount of effort the Foundation would need to use to effect the desired result.
First, we have to define the threat level. Apparently there is a high probability of a CK-class threat here, so few stops will be left un-pulled in preventing it.
Second, we should compare similar real-world events: if a book has spread to public knowledge, and has undesirable information, then in normal life we would put together a spin campaign to "redefine" what the book is (something for crazy people, poorly written, boring) as well as quickly-but-quietly recall the book to minimize availability (which was done in-story). Finally, the Foundation uses its well-established abilities to quash the breakouts as quickly and effectively as possible (Amnesic administration, etc).
Honestly, this is mostly a problem of scale. If we assume the Foundation is committing the vast majority of its field resources to combatting this threat, should we assume that the story is plausible?
Let's see: the story states the book had made "bestseller" status. According to Wikipedia, a book can become a bestseller in the UK with as little as 4,000 copies sold, and around 5,000 in Canada. Assuming that a large portion of readers didn't "stick with the program", we could reasonably be left with the several-hundred-to-few-thousand range of books that directly need to be contained. Cut this by a fair factor due to Foundation disinformation, then multiply by about 4x (since the US has about 5x the population of the UK, but a lower literacy/active reading population) and you could be left still in the low thousand range of objects needing containment across the US, but more likely to be concentrated in population centers (due to higher levels of literature consumption per capita and higher overall population), and I see it as being a big-but-possible job for a well-prepared, largish organization like the Foundation. This also ignores the "unread bestseller" phenomenon, where huge numbers of bestseller books are simply purchased as coffee table decorations and never read (several studies have been done on this phenomenon; the size varies, but it's a shockingly large proportion of the total sales).
So, yeah. I can see this as somewhat stretching, but still being within the realistic limit of the Foundation's resources if they are mobilized quickly enough (one of their assumed specialties). I'll give it a +1 for going the extra mile to try and bend believability without breaking it.
Actually, I buy this because the Foundation is potentially omnipotent, given the things it has in containment. There are objects the Foundation has that could potentially wipe out or remake the entire universe. Something like this… all it requires is for a few O5s to decide that the risk of unsealing a can of SCP-████ is less of a threat than letting this thing continue uncontained.
That said, I'd like to see some implication of the downside of the massive Foundation containment effort. Listing some of the collateral damage from the [REDACTED] they used to contain this thing might help in the suspension of disbelief.
There are objects the Foundation has that could potentially wipe out or remake the entire universe.
If the article said that's what happened I'd buy it. However, aside from the "[FURTHER ACTION REDACTED]", the article gives the impression that, besides amnesiacs, the Foundation used entirely mundane means of covering things up.
This is why I suggest some exploration of the downside of such an approach. A bit of a hint of paranormal containment would help, IMO.
BTW-I got a bit of this implied in the last addendum, but I think it's too little too late for folks who already were bumped out of the story by this concern. I wasn't thrown out of the story by it, but I'm obviously not a majority on that point.
The impression that the last addendum gave me was that the Foundation has so much money and political clout that those two things, combined with some amnesiacs, was able to do it all.
i read this at 1am and i was very disturbed. Im going to have myself confined to a supervised facility. one vote up.
EDIT: It's too late at night for me to post.
(account deleted)This seems like a wee bit of an overreaction. I mean, its okay to have your suspension of disbelief broken by a portion of an scp, and to be dissatisfied with an answer, but that doesn't make it your hate crusade. Yes he dares. He dares to assert that people forget about shitty books from 2005. It's not that big a deal. It's just a website, you should really calm down.
Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!
At what point does this blow the Foundation's cover? They pull some strings in government to work with the CDC and FCC to suppress effects of an SCP. The anomalous nature of the effects isn't publicly discovered. The idea that someone would make a leap from "a parasite in some bad seafood is causing people to be volatile" to "there's a secret organization dedicated to containing objects that are inherently destructive to our neat little perspective of the universe" and get taken seriously by a lot of people is what defies common sense.
Researchers note that, although Star Signals has been available on the market for nearly two weeks, no critical reviews or other analytical reports have been published in newspapers, nor on television, and any online reviews have been deleted by the website's owners. This is later determined to be a censorship program operated by the Fifth Church.
First, the Fifth Church would have to be vastly powerful to be able to censor all reviews from the Internet like that. Secondly, even if they could, when people have their writing censored like that it pisses them off, and they talk about it. And then, a month later, the book they were censored over doesn't exist anymore. That's going to keep people talking for a long, long time.
It might work if, for some reason, the Fifth Church itself did most of the cover up. They harness the reality-warping power of all the people who read the book to prevent, and even retroactively remove, any public reference to the book which wasn't under their control. No reviews, no analysis, not even a single Twitter message about "Geez, not another self-help book"; the only publicly available evidence that the book exists is various celebrity endorsements. With that situation it might be within the grasp of the Foundation to erase all evidence that the book ever existed.
I assumed it was a successful version of Operation Snow White. Being a Scientology analogue and all.
Being a Scientology analogue and all
Okay, this finally pinpointed what has been bothering me about all the Fifthist stuff coming out that I couldn't figure out. It seems too pointed a parody of/homage to Scientology.
Giving bearhugs to the unsuspecting since 1872.
I dunno, I feel like this did a successful job of moving away from Scientology references myself.
Agreed. Rather than talking about outer space dictators and alien ghosts that make you think movies are fictional and not repressed cultural memories, it apparently has some credence and can result in some incredibly weird stuff because it just happens to work.
While this is well written, the dick-waving memo makes me wince. I think the whole concept of this article is just turning me off.
He's trying to dick-wave at double agents. Not an unusual practice.
I also think the memo wasn't that good, and either of the parts should be expanded and make up the whole memo (Either 'it wasn't REALLY contained' or 'We know you're out there, Fifthists'), but overall the article is very good.
It's very well written, but the memo at the end is gratuitous and breaks tone. It's holding me back from upvoting.
Ok, silb? Forget I said anything last night. The complaint I raised about the object itself is completely irrelevant in the face of that containment operation. I understand where Roget is coming from- it pushes the limit, and hard- but we already have precedent for global amnesiac dispersal thanks to Yoric's EX, and with government cooperation (and perhaps a little controlled SCP deployment) this seems legitimately doable within the SCP universe. The in-Foundation Fifthist sleepers still being operational hurts your case a little, as do the problems with the end note that have already been raised; but in spite of all of that, I'm still an upvote.
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page revision: 5, last edited: 18 May 2020 23:10
