(Credit: Jonathan Rach / Behind The Gallery)
On the time of writing, the 12 months is 2025. At this level, among the most influential and legendary items of sci-fi and cyberpunk writing ought to have already come to move. We must always have had a House Odyssey in 2001. We didn’t. Blade Runner ought to have occurred six years in the past. It didn’t. Hell, we’re practically 30 years out from the occasions of Escape from New York. To be clear, the world envisioned in these tales was by no means actually meant to be an correct imagining of what life on Earth would seem like in the course of the narrative timelines. Nonetheless, that was not the case with the 2022 Nine Inch Nails idea album, 12 months Zero.
In spite of everything, speaking a couple of United States of America within the clutches of a theocratic, fascist regime that polices each motion and resolution of its folks; that’s locked in fixed warfare with its neighbours in an imperialist conquest gambit; the place dissenters are frequently seized from their houses and disappeared in military-grade operations performed by shady authorities businesses—Trent was solely three years off.
Now, as painfully on the cash as 12 months Zero was with its predictions of what the USA authorities can be responsible of within the 2020s, that isn’t the story that we’re right here to speak about. It includes underground insurgent teams, psychoactive medication and large, ghostly fingers reaching down from the sky. It’s all fairly cool, however nowhere close to as cool as how this story was informed.
You see, the 12 months Zero challenge started in February 2007. YouTube was nonetheless in its infancy, so NIN weren’t going to go down the Ghosts route of creating a campy miniseries to include their lore-drops. As a substitute, the band turned to the achingly mid-2000s idea of the alternate reality game (ARG). In doing so, they made among the finest, most compelling and most ingenious examples of the entire medium.
How did 9 Inch Nails start the ‘12 months Zero’ ARG?
It started, as plenty of extraordinarily cool issues do, with a t-shirt. Two months earlier than the album’s launch, a t-shirt was uploaded to the band’s on-line store. Those that purchased it discovered that on the tour dates listed on the again, sure letters had been highlighted. When mixed, these letters shaped the sentence “I’m making an attempt to consider”. This led to the invention of “iamtryingtobelieve.com”, the primary in a community of internet sites set within the universe of 12 months Zero.
Now, on-line rabbit holes are cool. Anybody who was there for the digital frenzy that Cloverfield impressed when that iconic teaser dropped can attest to that. Y’know what’s cooler? A USB flash drive discovered within the rest room of the first-ever NIN concert in Portugal on Valentine’s Day 2007. One which contained the primary track launched from 12 months Zero, ‘My Violent Coronary heart’, which was leaked onto the web shortly afterwards.
This is able to occur once more in Barcelona a number of days later, however this time, the drive contained one other new track, ‘Me, I’m Not’ and a burst of static. When savvy followers analysed the frequency with a spectrogram, it revealed a telephone quantity, which, when referred to as, led followers additional down the rabbit gap. The sport went on for an extra two months, with clues hidden in all the things from flyers handed out at concert events to the stay album Beside You in Time.
Every of those clues would lead followers to new elements of the 12 months Zero story and to the early promotional materials for the album. The document’s lead single, ‘Survivalism’, premiered by way of a number of USB drives handed out on the March eleventh NIN live performance at London’s Brixton Academy, and it additionally contained its music video.
All this got here to a head on April thirteenth in Los Angeles, California. Within the album’s story, a motion referred to as ‘Artwork is Resistance’ was the pressure main an rebellion in opposition to the fascist authorities. On one of many boards discovered within the recreation, the decision went out for like-minded folks to affix the group in a gathering, someplace in LA. At this assembly, those that attended got ‘kits’ containing bandanas, pin badges, flags and, for 25 fortunate attendees, a pre-paid cellphone that might obtain, not make, telephone calls.
Just a few days after, they obtained a name on their new telephones asking them to unfold the phrase a couple of follow-up assembly, one that may see a speech from a resistance member. What they didn’t inform the attendees was that it might even be a secret live performance from NIN. Shortly after the live performance started, nevertheless, it was “raided” by a Swat group and the gang dispersed again into the LA night time.
Whether or not you’re into the band’s music or not, this complete saga is price anybody’s respect. Certain, the story itself is fairly pony, tried and examined 1984/The Handmaid’s Story tropes with a touch of The Matrix added for good measure. The sheer scale of the challenge, although, mixed with the invention of its distribution on the scale that it was carried out at, has not been seen since. Whereas that’s comprehensible (Christ solely is aware of what this all price), that’s nonetheless one thing of a tragedy.
One hopes that somebody takes up the baton that Reznor laid down over a decade and a half in the past. We’d like it now greater than ever.
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