Intermission: ARG Research Report No.1
"It is a process which, first and foremost, creates itself and propagates until nothing is left except the Enmangled remains of once was."
This essay is part of an ongoing series by The Nostomodern Review on Modernism and its future in the 21st Century and beyond. Each essay forms parts of the Nostomodernist project: a quasi-scholarly attempt at reevaluating what it means to be Modern in contemporary times, to possibly reconcile the gap between Modernism and its successors, and to speculate on new trajectories within the current era of history.
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Linda Haras?
I first joined the Adnil Research Group (ARG) on 29th April, 2021, or almost 6 months after the initial email was sent to Ulysse in late November 2020. The rabbit hole has only deepened since then. I would like to thank Edain and Emma for giving me the opportunity to research this report and to produce it with them. It was been great, if not sometimes frightening, fun. I am looking forward to the new works we recover in 2022!
As a primer for the reader, I would recommended reading A Treatise On Enmanglement (2002) before reading ARG Research Report No.1. You can find the ARG’s WordPress site here and the original Treatise PDF here.
You may also choose to play this track by Goemon during your reading—for dramatic effect. I hope your reading experience is bettered by it. Have fun!
"I have seen it myself, the visions of a red-tinted world of agony and orgasmic pleasure; outside of existential matters yet entirely wreathed in them — the MONAD is truly awesome in all ways imaginable, and in ways that cannot be imagined. All that is and all that will be will become one with the MONAD at the end of time through the holy and demonic process of Enmanglement."
from A Treatise On Enmanglement (2002) by Sarah Adnil
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
SECTION 1: INTRODUCTION
SECTION 2: EARLY ADNIL MATERIAL
SECTION 3: LATE ADNIL MATERIAL
SECTION 4: CONCLUSIONS AND FURTHER SPECULATIONS
SECTION 5: ADNIL-DERIVED MATERIAL AND INTERNET MEMES
FOREWORD
It began from a series of excerpts. The language was strange. They spoke of flesh mothers, red worlds, and enmangled bodies; the author gesticulating to some imminent doomsday at the end of the world — the flesh monad at the end of time.
Needless to say we were terrified at first; we were bewildered at what to make of it. These excerpts were followed by a name — Sarah Adnil — and what followed the name was a near 6-month rabbit-hole of dark web blogs, Russian data farms and cyber-artefacts from almost two decades ago.
By January 2021, the Adnil Research Group (ARG) had successfully reproduced A Treatise on Enmanglement (2002) for the first time — the first Adnil work to be published on the clearnet in almost 20 years, salvaged in more or less complete form.
We bring the published findings of this process to you with ARG Research Report No.1, the first in our series of Adnil-related reports on the ongoing recovery process.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank our fellow friends from the ARG and the Theorygram community for taking the time to research and compile this information with us. We would especially like to thank those who risked their own safety in trawling the oldest edges of the dark web to recover Adnil material and media, and to those who offered their technical advice as for how to safely proceed once we found it.
Special thanks to Ulysse Malcoeur, the former Theorygrammer who ran @metaspinoza and @thousandgrugeaux, to whom an anonymous user emailed the original PDF of A Treatise On Enmanglement to in late November 2020. Wherever you are, Grug, we wish you big cabbages to grow and cool waves to surf on.
It has been a wonderful project to embark on, and in spite of the risks and setbacks, we are glad to contribute to the lost media community and its initiative to protect ageing data for future generations. We consider this our small, niche contribution to a growing, global effort.
SECTION 1: INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background
Over the years there have been successful attempts to retrieve lost data and media formats from the early Internet. There have also been plethoras of Internet mysteries and phenomena, such as peculiar videos without origin, titles or authors or anonymous texts, surviving as Internet copypastas.
Generally, over the years, a wide litany of strange and sometimes wonderful media has been thrown into the world and survived. Here is one such case too.
This first report is by the Adnil Research Group (ARG): the straightforward name we gave ourselves. Although an informal group was formed on 30th November 2020 — the same day Adnil excerpts were shared to Theorygram — it took several months before we could produce any cohesive effort.
It should be noted that this is not an esoteric project; although the subject matter is fairly elusive by its nature. This project is essentially a search for lost media, and more specifically a search for the works of one interesting person, Sarah Adnil, who wrote strange works of philosophy from 1997 to 2010.
This group is made up of volunteers who have dedicated hours to trawling the boondocks of the Internet in search of clues. It was risky at times, but I doubt any of us have significant regrets about it. At the end of the day, we do this in the hopes of recovering something of value from the past, or at least to gain insight into an interesting mathematician with peculiar ideas, who wrote and disappeared in the short years before and after the turn of the millenium.
With Report No.1, the ARG would like to assure everyone that Adnil is not a psychological operation meant to scare people with a philosophical bogeyman. In the months since A Treatise on Enmanglement was released, we have received both praise and skepticism over the recovery project, which is understandable given its nature and the memes of the early days. Adnil is really out there, and hopefully we will be able to show that.
When the PDF was first announced, there was a lot of speculation. Truth be told, at times, we likewise doubted if it were true. Perhaps this was nothing more than an elaborate joke. Perhaps this was merely a philosophical bogeyman for Theorygram circles. Perhaps the vague backstory would suspend our disbelief and stop us there.
Sometimes we wished this were the case: that Adnil was simply a creative fiction or theory joke by Theorygrammers. We especially felt this during in late 2020, when clues were scarce and the post-Treatise trail had gone cold.
But the project had taken a life of its own by then. One clue eventually led to another; one excerpt referenced another chapter; and to our surprise, one author referenced another. And by early 2021, we had made headway into the problem.
Report No.1 is intended to summarise Sarah Adnil for the clearnet public, based on our findings from this year, and to outline the ARG’s efforts in researching and cataloguing her work over this period. We hope you will enjoy the journey, as we did in uncovering this obscure philosopher.
1.2 Estimated Timeline Of Sarah Adnil
1997 — Creates their first website using the domain, http://www.adnil.net, while living somewhere in Indiana. The website — now retroactively a blog — is based in her university.
Adnil publishes intermittently, featuring various cooking recipes, personal stories, and mathematical ramblings. The presently incomplete but humorous Against Ranch: A War on Good Taste is published during this period.
2001 — Suffers a mental breakdown, Adnil is admitted to a psychiatric institution for a few weeks. Returning home, she soon destroys her office, and in particular, her server and the accompanying hard drive.
She moves to the East Coast, not long after. Her precise whereabouts are unknown during this time. Presumably, this is where she begins to write A Treatise On Enmanglement.
2002 — Publishes A Treatise On Enmanglement for the first time on http://www.adnil.net as a .PDF file.
Adnil transitions to their darkweb blog soon afterwards, abandoning http://www.adnil.net for a period of time, before deleting the earlier university blog.
2004 — Allows the domain license for http://www.adnil.net to lapse; the registration is not renewed.
A Treatise On Enmanglement is re-uploaded to a private onion site on the dark web, which she hosts herself and begins to publish new writing from.
2008 — Writes with growing volatility during this period, and focuses especially on posts about feminine, identity, and sexuality.
Posts to her dark web site become increasingly infrequent overall, and her hidden service link keep changing during this time.
2010 — Publishes their final blogpost on their dark web site; Adnil writes about the effects of the Deepwater Horizon as a moment of “planetary enlightenment”.
The dark web blog is taken down shortly afterwards. Adnil no longer publishes on the Internet.
1.3 Recovered Works Of Sarah Adnil
- Longer Essays
A Treatise On Enmanglement (2002)
ATOM (est. 2003)
The Wound (est. 2004)
- Shorter Essays
Against Ranch: A War on Good Taste (est. 1998)
- Yet to be recovered essays
#1 Anecdote on mental breakdown and homecoming (est. 2001)
#2 Anecdote on mathematical reading list (est. 1999)
1.4 Miscellaneous Notes on Sarah Adnil
We have RSS references to a website which no longer exists, of texts which have yet to be found and which may likely be lost forever. This is because the blog was deleted in 2002.
We know they wrote in American English, distributed their writing using RSS and other weblog standards, transitioned from one blog to another after 2002, and lost much of the earlier material lost around the same.
After 2002 and Web 2.0, they retreated to the early darknet and became involved with a community there. It could only be accessed using the early Tor browser; and her darknet days are where most of these findings come from.
In 2010, the darknet blog disappeared too, but more traces survive there than the early university blog. At times, these traces have emerged in the clearnet too; albeit in ways which we did not hope for nor expect to retrieve from.
1.5 A Short Summary On Internet Blogging
In the final years of the second millennium, the fledgling Internet was filled with an increasing number of personal blogs, websites and forums. Each one contributed to a new cultural mode: that of the Internet Age. Connected across the world was now a new generation of individuals on the very edge of the cultural future, seeking early access to the forthcoming spectre of the Digital Age.
One manifestation of this early excitement was the blog surge of the early 2000s, which spawned the likes of Gizmodo, Gawker and other large-scale blogs. Blogs were early means of personal expression on the web in the Antediluvian days before social media platforms like MySpace and Facebook.
In the late 1990s, there were only small collectives of bloggers and personal sites spread across cyberspace. The idea of blogging had yet to even form. It was a unique community at the outset of its own legend; a small group of visionaries throwing their data out to the void for whoever could access it. But these isolated pockets were among the first Internet communities. At the time it was expensive to host servers, and so many blogs were concentrated around universities and other places which had both the funding and the physical space.
Created by enthusiasts, eccentrics and those able to programme a website at the time, they also represented the earliest examples of the Internet’s power to not only connect others across cultures, but to forge new cultures entirely online. The potential of the Internet had already been written about in the early 1990s, but it was near the end of the 20th Century whereby technology had caught up with the premonitions.
And while most of these groups have faded from existence over the past twenty years, as with many forums and messaging clients of their generation, a similar spirit of connection remains alive in the Internet communities of today. The Internet, in other words, is still a young and great well of human connection, despite its technical appearances.
But after 2002 and the coming of Web 2.0, the growth of the former-blogosphere and college-based servers catapulted to ludicrous speeds. The small handful of blogs of the late 1990s—then run by a limited group of experts and mavericks in the more socioeconomically-developed parts of their countries—has expanded to cover the entire globe.
Billions of words, images and miscellaneous data now float across international borders through multifarious blogs, newsletters and social media sites—there is almost too much information.
Sieve through the digital ocean and you will now find more content than you could ever digest in a lifetime. As each generation of Internet users strives to make their own mark on the world, the strata of dead data increases, and the content layers compound, till it becomes more and more difficult to find websites, especially blog sites, from the earliest days of the Internet.
Archival services such as the Wayback Machine exist, but the exercise in visiting any blogs from the late 1990s is increasingly more like archeology than casual web browsing. These early progenitors have become artefacts from an earlier time. Many of their weblinks no longer work, font issues persist, and good luck securing an HTTPs connection to the site. And these are only the websites which have survived; most have been lost to time, or sit idly in dusty warehouses and decaying server memories.
There is simply too much dead data.
SECTION 2: EARLY ADNIL MATERIAL
2.1 Just Another Internet Blogger?
The difficulty with researching Adnil's early works is that we do not know where to start. Hence, this Section of the report is going to be short.
We define Adnil's early works as those written from 1997 to 1999, published on her first blog during her life in Indiana. However, the site has been long been lost, and we doubt that the server which housed a back-up still exists in some Indiana warehouse. In any case, Adnil disowned this period of her life after her mental breakdown in 2001.
From what little we found, the material from this time is quite innocuous and even mundane. From what we can surmise, it mostly deals with campus and faculty life, such as complaints about the weather, the food and other people. It is not too different from many of the blogs written around this time.
The most complete piece we recovered so far is Against Ranch: A War on Good Taste, and we only have found its top half. Other than an unpublished mathematical reading list from 1999, and some comments which may not even belong to Adnil, this unfortunately constitutes what we have of her early work.
The autobiographical information, which we used to form the estimated timeline of Adnil's life from 1997 to 2010, comes from her later darknet blog, which had several references to her early work. The darknet blog disappeared in 2010.
Hence, what we have today comes from an cobbling of outdated RSS references, tenuous quotations in other blogs, some lucky breaks from Russian data farms, as well as an anonymous user who sent us the original PDF for A Treatise On Enmanglement in late November 2020.
SECTION 3: LATE ADNIL MATERIAL
3.1 Recovering The Treatise
In late November 2020, an anonymous email was sent to Ulysse Malcoeur, a well-known Theorygrammer who ran @metaspinoza and @thousandgrugeaux on Instagram, publishing theory-based memes, essays and a podcast between mid-2020 and early 2021.
Malcoeur quickly posted several excerpts from the PDF attached to the email on @thousandgrugeaux, expressing some mixture of horror and curiosity, although the original post has been lost since he left the platform in March 2021.
To our frustration, no one has a clear memory of what was written in that email, nor what the caption of the post was. What most remember is a series of screenshots detailing, from the anonymous, a short explanation of what the PDF was and a desire to see it published on the clearnet. That was the first and last correspondence as far as we know — some speculate that it was Adnil herself, but the ARG is not so sure.
Given that, as of February 2022, it is nigh impossible to contact Malcoeur directly, it might remain a mystery until contact is regained with him. But email was the first point of contact with Adnil's work, and from there, the rest is history.
The ARG was established on 30th November 2020, first as a private Instagram group chat, with members discussing and speculating on what Treatise could mean, and later as a semi-formal group with the goal of publishing it on the clearnet. Soon afterwards, a WordPress site was created to house the PDF, and a concerted effort to research on Adnil was developed over the next year.
If you have not already, look up and read A Treatise On Enmanglement for yourself. It is where all of us started.
3.2 Do Not Go Looking For Russian Data Farms
There are some bizarre content/data farms out there. If the Internet can loosely be broken down into 3 parts — the clearnet, the darknet and the deepnet — there exist sites between all 3 which few users will ever see, nor should they want to stumble across. Fortunately or not, we found a few of them earlier this year. We were very underprepared.
However, it should be noted that we will not be naming these sites nor how to find these forums for reasons of safety and caution. We do not encourage anyone to go looking for these them yourselves.
If this is suspicious to you, given that this is meant to be a supposed Research Report, then unfortunately it will have to remain so. This was a consensus decision by the ARG to safeguard others. Once again, we do not want anyone looking for these sites yourselves. Some of our members really regret doing so.
But what are these sites about? We are not sure either. Imagine a vast mirrored web of dead forums with non-functional UIs and ghost users, mentioning publications and journals which do not exist, with quotations of passages from books with no origins and authors with no identities.
Things quickly did not add up, and we were stuck here for several days in 2021. Below are some internal memos from that time; there was a lot of fear and confusion that weekend:
"The visual style is reminiscent of mid-to-late 2000s forums. The posts reference a Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Volume 7, 2005. The user comment ends with a link which, upon clicking it, redirects you through a network of sites, all with legitimate encryption and certificates, but almost all of which are hosted on .ru domains."
"What is stranger is that the dates are all wrong. Some of the posts were made in 2004, but this supposed journal they mention, the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, its Volume 14 was published in 2012 or something. They not only mention a journal which does not exist but at a time which had yet to happen."
"Imagine 3 different websites all hosting the same fake forum, which redirect and bounce across several 'in construction' sites with nebulous, stitched-together content. It appears that there are at least half a dozen other sites, and probably more, which bounce off each other pointing to a file of a journal that does not exist."
"You have to ask yourself why did an algorithm create something so niche, bizarre and academic that the average person would be unlikely to ever come across, much less care about?"
There are two real Journals of Speculative Philosophy, one of which currently publishes under Pennsylvania State University — the other being an unrelated publication which ceased in 1893. But the journal mentioned in these forums has no match to the real one by Pennsylvania State, and instead, has references to a group which no longer speaks, thrown together with other anonymous works and long text walls of aggregated content. Eigënhophfzt, Beldingër, Cromby and Thomason?
We suspect that this is likely a private content aggregator, pulling in data and material from across the web, from both the darknet and the clearnet, and that we got lucky when one of our Google searches hit a listing. We really have no other explanation for why these sites exist, but they have been a valuable, if not terrifying resource, to use and explore.
As of 2022, we are still scouring these sites for more material, although some have been disappearing when the domains become rerouted, for whatever reason. It was from these sites which we came to find fragments of two later Adnil works, after hours of sieving through dead data and unreadable technodecay, ATOM (est. 2003) and The Wound (est. 2004), which were confirmed as Adnil texts by cross-referencing with our darknet sources.
So far, less than 20 combined pages of both of these texts have been recovered, but we are still combing for more sources, and perhaps, running against the clock as some of these darknet sources become more tenuous each day.
SECTION 4: CONCLUSIONS AND FURTHER SPECULATIONS
4.1 Adnil Lives
Sarah Adnil lives on through 4 main digital sources: the anonymous email we received in late 2020, the creepy Russian data farms, the older parts of the darknet, and rarely, old RSS references from pre-2000s blogs.
In bits and pieces, Adnil has survived deletion, headless algorithms, and massacres in digital spacetime. The investigation is still ongoing.
We are hopeful that we might complete ATOM and The Wound sometime in 2022, although this is contingent on the trail keeping warm. It has been difficult, dangerous and rewarding work, but the ARG is in good spirits.
But what is the conclusion to all this? We hope that you can trust us now that Sarah Adnil is real, and that a lot of work goes behind-the-scenes to prove that this is true. Memes and jokes aside, Adnil is an interesting character who produced some strange and exciting work from the late 1990s to the 2000s.
We are quite sobre in our appraisal of her, but we understand that this first Report is not entirely comprehensive, and much remains to be written. The problem with writing about Adnil, at least throughout 2021, was that it is difficult to write anything with certainty about her life, and the bits and pieces we have are just that: bits and pieces.
We are essentially speculating about this person's life, trying not to invent too much nor to complete the picture without the actual pieces in place. Even the 2010 Deepwater Horizon event, or the "planetary enlightenment" episode, is still a mystery to us. Perhaps it was simply meant to be forgotten, like many other things and even lives, or to become its own myth. Hopefully, we will have a clearer picture when Research Report No. 2 is published. Until then, we keep digging.
And in many respects, it feels like archaeology and we are certain that digital archaeology, if such a term suffices for the subject matter, is a present and important concern as the Internet continues to establish itself in our lives. More and more of these older works will become lost, and these digital pioneers will be the first to go.
There is simply too much dead data.
5. SECTION 5: ADNIL-DERIVED MATERIAL AND INTERNET MEMES
Copyright © Thomas J. Pellarin, 2022. All rights reserved.