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Thoughts on Cicada 3301

I was familiar with Cicada 3301 when it was new. I had neither the skills nor resources to really invest but I never forgot about it and followed the progress at times.

I was overall disappointed. I was less invested in the puzzle itself and more in the source - who was issuing clues to this tantalizing, fictional-sounding real world puzzle that has required hundreds if not thousands of people internationally to collaborate (for no one person could have found and followed all the clues on their own, due to the physical locations of some clues in the real world). The deduce that, I tried looking at the clues, after all with such a heavily layered, detailed puzzle it stands to reason that the references themselves were carefully chosen. Many were references to philosphers and artists. It struck me as being very-unlike the US government, not only because it contained so many left-leaning ideas.

The most referenced artist was William Blake, a print maker and author with a highly romantic worldview who was renowned for his love of symbolism and heavy-handed usage in his works. This made me look at the symbol of the puzzle itself - cicada. The most obvious use of the bug being for its status as a "cryptic" (one that hides from other bugs) in a cryptography puzzle, but this is a bug famous for its inordinately long hibernation period, emerging from the ground after 13 or 17 years. The first clue of the puzzle was released January 1, 2012. 17 years prior, the year 1995, was the year of the commercialization of the internet. This event was seen by many of the community at the time to be the death of the internet as they knew it.

Once I took this into consideration, coupled with the way the messages are written (english with no british or australian language quirks) I figured I'm looking at a group of mostly/all male programmers/ex hackers who were active and had a public presence on the internet until 1995 at which point they gave the appearance of disbanding or going on permanent hiatus. Who they are exactly, I'm not sure. I was too young at the time to be into the scene, and some cursory reading on wikipedia about prominent hackers of that day was interesting but I gleaned nothing. Cicada3301 made an official statement after an attack on planned parenthood denying their alleged involvement due to a similar pseudonym and in their statement said "We do not engage in illegal activities" which to me further impresses the picture of some ex-hackers turned white collar systems workers like every ex-hacker I've read about

That leaves me with whatever their apparent motive is. Clearly internet privacy and universal encryption are their primary MO. That reminds me, I gotta check out the I2P internet encryption network to see if maybe there's any leads there.

There's the Liber Primus - a helluva disappointment and head scratcher. Supposedly their holy book, but is just more clues without substance? Because the supposed philosphy contained within is tepid inch-deep piss. It's essentially "look within, do not conform, preserve nothing". It refers a lot to primality, it claims overconsumption happens because "we are scared we don't have enough or that we can't get more, or that we have what we have by luck". Like, what?? No one overconsumes food because they're scared another meal isn't coming, or booze. I guess it could be referring to immaterial things like... affection? Sex? It doesn't seem to hold up no matter what I apply it to. The philosophy they're espousing is not awful and wrong in and of itself (though there's a lot I'd fundamentally disagree with some of it, like "much isn't worth preserving", that goes against my core world philosophy), but it seems like entry-level high school kind of stuff. "The truth is within you"

My big thing about a lot of that "philosophy" is, is this really the message they were trying to get to people? Considering the kind of work and dedication required to participate in cicada3301's puzzle in any meaningful way, it seems very unlikely to impossible the participants would find any of it revelatory. So it must be yet another clue in some way. After all, it does warn in the beginning "believe nothing in this book except what you know to be true". It includes something to the effect of the words are the map, their meaning is the road, the numbers point the way. So it's not about disregarding the parts with bullshit philosophy but getting some bigger picture as a whole? Perhaps it's a philosophical test and that's why it's gone unsolved

I'm rereading the "book". Some of the instructions include: do four unreasonable things each day, command your own self, program your mind/program your reality, question all things/discover truth inside yourself/follow your truth/impose nothing on others,
some wisdom includes: you are a being&law unto yourself/each intelligence&all that lives is holy, amass greath wealth/never become attached to what you own/be prepared to destroy all that you own.