Markovian Parallax Denigrate: The Unsolved Digital Mystery of 1996

The year was 1996. Most of the public didn't yet know the concept of the Internet, but more experienced users had Usenet. It was then that hundreds of strange messages began to flood some newsgroups on the service. None of them made sense, and at first users thought it was spam, but they had three words in common: Markovian Parallax Denigrate. Almost a quarter of a century later, the Web debates whether there is a mystery to solve here, or whether it was the best act of trolling ever done.

Strange pranks, unresolved mysteries, large-scale challenges that cross continents and cultural barriers. The Web has given rise to all that and much more... but what was the starting point? Where did it begin? Who was first? We may never know the answer for certain, however, many arrows point in the direction of Usenet. The year? 1996. America Online had been offering access to Usenet as part of its service package for about three years, unleashing the famous Eternal September in the process. But what brings us together here today is not the type of access, but the messages published on that August 5. Erratic, absurd, nonsensical... and loaded with mystery.

jitterbugging McKinley Abe break Newtonian inferring caw update Cohen air collaborate rue sportswriting rococo invocate tousle shadflower Debby Stirling pathogenesis escritoire adventitious novo ITT most chairperson Dwight Hertzog different pinpoint dunk McKinley pendant firelight Uranus episodic medicine ditty craggy flogging variac brotherhood Webb impromptu file countenance inheritance cohesion refrigerate morphine napkin inland Janeiro nameable yearbook hark hem burette you'd dendrite versatec plot homologue Godwin barbarism psychobiology perfuse macaque Serpens orthodox phycomycetes coadjutor scriven supreme Coriolanus whish minim protrude cardamom hyacinth wet shame habitant Somali bewitch intimal egghead nitrate

Today we see such a string of text, and the first thing that comes to mind is an artificial intelligence processing dictionaries on the fly to create "poetry". But back then, users thought it was spam. "advertising campaigns" were not unusual on Usenet, and with time, the bombardment became easier.

However, those messages had something... special. Three words, three common elements: Markovian Parallax Denigrate. That raised the possibility that the messages were the work of an anonymous programmer experimenting with Markov chains, but an old 2012 article suggests the involvement of a supposed spy named Susan Lindauer.

Lindauer's name arose because of the header of one of the messages, which displayed the name "Susan L." with the address susan_lindauer@worf.uwsp.edu. But a bit of detective work managed to locate the owner of that original address, who basically denied any connection to the messages. Most likely, a "scraper" took hundreds of addresses to inject them as sender and hide the culprit, while the hypothetical spy intervention merely added a bit of conspiratorial spice to the story.

In the end, the answers are still stored in Usenet itself. In reality, Markovian, Parallax and Denigrate are not the most common words in the messages, but rather "cindy" and "thimbu", and the rest follows a relatively standard distribution. Furthermore, the publication of the messages was concentrated on seven newsgroups, all of them dedicated to Christianity except for one, focused on reporting system abuse.

In summary... the evidence suggests that Markovian Parallax Denigrate is the result of a troll focused on spamming Christian Usenet groups. Now, there are many who reject that conclusion and look for alternatives to the origin of the messages, but that's how conspiracies work: They always reach a point where they feed themselves.

Source: Barely Sociable on YouTube