stumbled across this when a co-worker got a phone call from a 216 number and was trying to find the originating city. some poor sod is going to have his/her phone spammed for something. the difference between a safe technology and a dangerous one is often merely a question of ease of use (this is why linux waits a couple of seconds before announcing that your password is incorrect). what’s troubling here is how far google is going to help your number be randomly broadcast far and wide. … and the above piece of excogitation is completely and utterly wrong. it turns that this number is one of: a component of an alternate reality game, a bunch of spammers using an MCI service called ‘IP relay’, or (as yours truly thought), a shocking example of Big Media’s uncaring violations of privacy. from shoutmouth.com: The number was found on a flash drive in a bathroom stall of a venue where Nine Inch Nails had played. The drive also contained another song off Year Zero, "Me, I'm Not", and the sound of crickets. Call the number. Once you've processed the call [sounds like something less than great went down], be sure to visit this site for further details. Expect more on this to come. The image to the side is a shot of the "spectrogram" where the number appeared. notice the complete ordinariness of the story. this could have happened. but that very ordinariness makes it suspect. this is too mundane, the story too shocking, the graphic design of the 'bureau of morality' website too well done, and, for latecomers like me, too easy to discover an explanation. i get it: nine inch nails is clever. they're cool. or someone is trying to make them look cool or clever. either way, this is an interesting way of grabbing attention. i get it again: nine inch nails is cool. here is the brilliance of the stunt: you can't tell how much of this experience was crafted. did someone really find the flash drive in that toilet? did someone really think: "just the sound of crickets? this must be some kind of code"? did someone else really figure it out for the rest of us uncomprehending fools? who, exactly, among all these people on the internet (including shoutmouth), was in the know all along? alternate reality games rely on this uncertainty. but even this uncertainty is bounded - when you choose to participate, you know, after all, that you are in the universe of the game - even if you wish to maintain a fantasy that you are in a Game. one does not, however, make fun of the game qua game. this is serious stuff for the participant, but for the occasional observer like me, it's merely confusing. that phone number ("it did belong to someone, did it not? after all, 'reverse lookup' is a related search") indexes a complex of meanings, and none of them holds primacy to me. this can only happen because of the shift of search technologies from just finding webpages to finding all sorts of other structured information. signals are being crossed – one expects to find something about a real person somewhere, but then discovers that it might have been all made up. there is something about this misinformation that subtly disturbs one’s confidence in the internet. perhaps that is part of the nine inch nails message. i get it yet again: nine inch nails is cool. clearly, this is a case of viral marketing (i'm in the design world, after all, so i should know about this stuff, shouldn't i). the idea behind viral marketing, of course, is to give a meme an air of being found, and then rely on people to pass it along as such. in this case, though, the meme has gone from being an idea that is communicated explicitly through the usual channels to being an information object in its own right (a google search query). it has gone from being communicable to being discoverable. the 'found' meme can now, really, be found, no social network needed. that bit - this emergence of the number as a popular google query - was, I hope, not crafted: because if it was, i must worship these guys, whoever they are. how interesting, then, that just as media technologies destroy increasingly more of your privacy, they themselves reveal new ways of creating misinformation, of adding noise to the signal. unlike the sufis, who have known all along, we need to understand taqiyya better.