Someone on Mastodon, I forgot who, gave me this link to a Unesco paper about the African Fashion Industry.

https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000387230

I opened it in the background and started browsing. It was interesting, but I soon became consumed with the fact that they were missing letters in some of the words.

In the olden days of typewriters, this was a common problem. You'd have a sticky letter and everywhere you typed, you's miss a bit, but this is on the internet, no typewriters were used!

1 of 3

So if there are no typewriters, why are the letters missing? First it was a missing L, then it was a missing M.

And I slowly became convinced that the person writing this was sending a code. Maybe something like, "Help! I am being held in an illegal Media Factory!"

And so the entire time I am attempting to read this work, in the background I am trying to figure out what the secret message is that this person typing is sending me. It really gets distracting when he starts dropping F's.
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Then, I started thinking that maybe this is just a person who types very fast and doesn't push down their keys all of the way.
But what the heck? It is on a UNESCO site. Don't they have spellcheckers?

And I wonder if they make documents that no one actually reads. But why? So they can sell their online cookies?
This document got published with dozens or hundreds of missing letters in words, and no one caught it? Maybe there IS a guy stuck somewhere typing documents for slave wages. Who can say?

Then a ain, mayb this is a te hniqu for getting m re att ntion.

People ha e the ab lity to reco nize m ssing letters in ords.

B t good ess gra ious. It is h rd to typ this way. I can't i agine that this is a valid tec nique for getti g att ntion.

It is possible that the missing letters are a rendering error on my computer, and that if viewed in a different way, they would be visible.

But this still fits with the secret code theory. The poor writer sends hidden messages.

4 of 5 (I lied)

And this makes my conspiracy theories get even worse, because there used to be this virus in the ancient of days that people would spread. It would scare you by making your letters drip off the page.

Later someone made a screen saver to simulate it. (You remember screen savers?)

Well I have occasionally had odd distorted rendering on my computer that I attributed to this virus. Is this another manifestation of that?

Or perhaps it is an AI gaining consciousness?

5 of heck if I know? Da**it!

But in the back of the back of my mind, I am thinking this is some weird Neurodivergent something making me see patterns that don't exist, and I think something is wrong with me.

But that still doesn't explain why these letters are missing on the page of a published website.

Because if this is an error of typing, it means that pages and pages of the internet are created by single people without review, and others may never view them or comment on them EVER!

Every internet page is a thought.

And it kinda makes me lonely, thinking that I type on my blog, and no one reads it. Like words whispered on an empty moor. Whipped away by the winds of electrons, flowing into a common consciousness where I and You and countless others talk into a void without others hearing us or understanding us.

Are we not all individuals alone in their own dark rooms staring at black boxes that we don't truly understand?

Perhaps this is all an experiment, and there are no other people, except you.

CREEPY!