In my years of following activity in gematria related disinformation accounts I’ve never seen the likes of the current activity in the Shill Game. That’s where, since the product is at best “less wrong”, instead of producing a better product you attack the other producers to boost your signal. The pattern is often just a temporary misunderstanding that sees the hatchet buried after at most a few weeks. Sometimes people do rage quit entirely, but they end up simply moving to alternate bad ideas after a parting shot or two.
This makes the attacking and counterattacking appear disingenuous. So who knows if someone is really super pissed off and has reached a breaking point. The video and blog content include specifics of what is exactly wrong with the content being attacked. Things like the lying and hypocrisy are directly addressed. Things like how easy it is to attribute anything to being at least a “ritual” performed by the scapegoat of choice. Then after the few weeks of heated debate, which by accident or design creates more engagement and social media activity, the attackers go back to business, focusing on their little clique that they’ve become a part of.
So, in honor of those that are at least going through the motions of rage quitting for good I thought I’d post a synopsis of a famous falling out from the world of paleontology. A story where a friendship was formed, money and attention were at stake, and ultimately how the drive for that consumed the friends to the point they became bitter rivals.
Instead of a relatively fresh idea like gematria for scammers to capitalize on, our heroes were decently smart, legitimate scientists. Both came from old money, with Othniel Marsh getting the benefit of support from a wealthy uncle and Edward Cope belonging to a wealthy family.
Just like our political landscape in modern times is always in turmoil, the government was dealing with trying to get beyond the social upheaval and economic costs of the US Civil War. Since their attempts to create modems to ruin the future with that technology, they instead created the US Geological Survey. Paleontology itself is a fine science and deals well in its lot of studying the past to learn for the future. However, in this case, money and fame being involved turned this rivalry to amount to ignoring the science, simply focusing on the personal clout. Elon Musk and John Hammond would fit well into this mix.
Just like chemistry aficionados searching for new elements in the periodic table, discovering the fossil remains of new dinosaurs was all the rage. Cope and Marsh had met in Germany years before the fossils fueled their quest for fame. So naturally, their friendly relationship led them to check up on what decodes were going on in each other’s blogs.
When things were going well at first, they did the pre internet equivalent of giving a shout out, naming new dinosaur discoveries after each other. However, Marsh decided to engage in the pre internet equivalent of rushing to put out the first decode of the current bad news - paying off a quarry owner for first dibs on new bones.
It is possible for a gematria decode to go slightly astray. The “fix” is to simply point out that the number you misposted is actually still an evil number (they all are). So there’s nothing quite like the colossal misfire of Cope assembling a dinosaur skeleton with the head at the end of the tail. So, in typical internet scammer fashion, the shill game was on. Marsh pointing out the mistake. “Nanner, nanner boo boo, you’re making this work look bad.” An embarrassed Cope engaged in the pre internet equivalent of memoryholing - posting a correction in scientific literature wasn’t enough. Maybe if I find all the copies of the bad info, nobody will ever now.
You’re pretty deeply invested in a bitter rivalry if you hire a spy to track your enemy like Marsh did. Now with the internet it’s pretty easy to insert a sock puppet in a Patreon to keep tabs of what picks your opponent is decoding. Things for Cope were much easier at this time. Paleontologist Bob Bakker describes “taxonomic carpet bombing”. The pre internet equivalent of making multiple channels, posting multiple short videos daily, and even posting the same video on multiple channels.
Marsh decided to use political connections to ruin Cope. Playing around with the government funding that had kept both men afloat - the pre internet equivalent of constantly trying to game the YouTube algorithms by begging for likes, comments, shares, buying fake subscribers, and any engagement. Instead of relying on a quality product to get your support. Like a normal YouTuber.
Now we get to a point where Cope suffers the pre internet equivalent of getting his channel deleted. Marsh’s efforts to bankrupt him were starting to have an effect. Desperate for an alternate source, Cope lost everything with a bad bitcoin, er, silver mine investment. Not content with that fate, Marsh decided to push his luck and steal the only thing Cope had left. He lied about the funding of Cope’s fossils, the pre internet equivalent of lying on the internet.
Well, you can only badger somebody so long before they draw a line in the sand and fight back. So Cope resorted to the pre internet equivalent of the attack video. Having collected a ton of actual evidence of wrongdoing, the pre internet equivalent of showing clips of lying on YouTube, and turned it over to journalists, the pre internet equivalent of other YouTubers.
There’s not a happy ending to the story for these two guys. That’s what you get when your best talent is slandering someone else for a long period of time. The government finally got fed up with the feud, the pre-internet equivalent of the world STILL WAITING for social media to actually do something serious about internet grifters.
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