![]() In March, he created a Randonauts subreddit, which now has 125,000 members. In February 2019, while caring for his father, who had just suffered a stroke, he created a Telegram bot that used the Fatum Project’s code to generate random coordinates. Lengfelder, a former circus performer, thought the code and its underlying ideas could be used to explore the relationship between consciousness and technology. He absorbed the project’s theories about how random exploration could break people out of their predetermined realities, and how people could influence random outcomes with their minds. Joshua Lengfelder, 29, discovered the Fatum Project on the messenger app Telegram in January 2019, in a fringe-science chat room. The bot’s code came from a group of programmers called the Fatum Project who were interested in, among other things, using the technology to ensure the randomness of online gambling outcomes. They wanted to open their minds to the world around them and make meaning of life’s coincidences. But what were those intentions? A Brief History of Randonautingīefore Randonautica, there were the Randonauts: Strangers who swapped stories about their bot-assisted adventures into the unknown. The creators of Randonautica say the app has evolved beyond their intentions. While several of them appear to be fake, others have raised some cause for concern. However, interest has been driven by the spooky and often synchronistic “randonauting” stories many have shared on social media. Many of the places users have been sent to since Randonautica became available in February are unremarkable: parking lots, grasslands, many bodies of water. This process relies on location settings and a random number generator, which, despite what the company says, cannot be directly affected by human thoughts. Randonautica makes a few asks of users - “What would you like to get?” “Choose your entropy source” - before prompting them to “focus on your intent” while it fetches coordinates. Think: The law of attraction meets geocaching. That is the gamble one takes with Randonautica, which claims to channel users’ “intentions” to produce nearby coordinates for exploration. One young woman, after making her college decision, followed the app to a field where her school’s initials had been mowed into the grass.Īnd then there were the friends who followed the app to a suitcase full of human remains. The app led one person to a friendly dog in the desert and another to a field of wildflowers. ![]()
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