Bluetooth Boos

My dearest safety coffin enthusiasts:

Summer is here! I have recently gotten back into running outside, because it’s nicer and I’m clumsy, which makes treadmills unreasonably dangerous. The ones at my gym have these VR type videos that you can watch that make it look like you’re running through a German town or a forest somewhere and I swear to God I get weirdly hypnotized by it and have almost fallen and cracked my head like, multiple times. And if I’m wearing wired headphones FORGET ABOUT IT. I hope the YMCA has a good ass waiver in place, because people are gonna be slipping in my blood on treadmill number 6 next time the VR takes a hard left around the Prezelplatz.

So I’m running outside with my Airpods, and I’ve been getting all this interference – they’re static-y and the sound is interrupted. Obviously I need a constant stream of Nelly or Big Pun to keep my BPM up, and the static is fucking annoying. I thought they were broken but because I’m married to an engineer, I now know that it’s CROWDED CHANNELS! This happens when a lot of devices are on the same frequency. Like, say, in an urban neighborhood full of yuppies on Twitter complaining about the DA. As far as I can tell there’s no solution, short of domestic terrorism that would bring the electrical grid down in Cole Valley every Thursday at 4 when I want to get a quick three miles in.

WHICH BRINGS ME TO the wild, wild world of anti-vaxxers and their completely insane, ghoulish scavenger hunts for Bluetooth signals in graveyards. In the world’s grossest, most bizarre game of Pokemon GO, these idiots are trolling through cemeteries with their phones out, looking for a Bluetooth signal from a corpse.

Where do I even begin? First of all – let’s credit the source: @vaxxersanti on Twitter, who does the Lord’s work of lurking in loser Facebook groups to get this wild content. They’ve posted a few screencaps about what anti-vax Bill Gates conspiracy enthusiasts are talking about online. I went in and looked at a bunch of these profiles – they’re mostly public – and these posts are real. I’m also probably on some kind of watchlist now.

In case you haven’t heard about this, there’s a conspiracy theory going around that the manufacturers of the COVID-19 vaccines have included a microchip that tracks your movements, and that this was funded or somehow implemented by Bill Gates. Yes, this is batshit insane, but the theory has interesting roots! It started with a Reddit AMA in which Bill Gates, in reference to his Gates Foundation work, suggested that someday we may be able to carry all of our vaccine information in a microchip embedded in our skin. A bio-hacking blog, which supports this kind of thing, made a meme about it. And once it hit the internet, it turned into GLOBALIST CUCK BILL GATES WILL END THE WHITE RACE THRU THE JAB!1!!! <insert ad for horse paste and testosterone pills>.

Misinformation peddlers jumped on this story and added a twist – the chips are enabled with Bluetooth technology, and they will try to pair with your phone or other Bluetooth enabled device. This is . . . fucking nuts and in case it needs to be said, both objectively false and technically impossible. But when you can make trash videos that appeal to Boomer tech illiteracy to sabotage a global health campaign, who cares!!!!

This conspiracy theory spawned “serial number chasing,” or wandering around with the Bluetooth app on your phone open, looking for – IDK – vaccine chips to connect to? In the misinformation world, this equates to proof of the conspiracy. As I mentioned at the start of this post, urban areas are absolutely lousy with Bluetooth signals – that’s why my headphones don’t work. All they’re finding is proof that we use this shit in all kinds of appliances.

At some point these people decided to take their serial-number-Pokemon to cemeteries because WHY NOT I GUESS! As you can see in the graphics, they’re wandering around recently dug graves with their stupid phones out, looking for a signal from a dead body. Because they think the imaginary chip is still active and somehow connected to a power source that allows it to broadcast through a metal coffin, concrete grave liner, and 6 feet of dirt. My brother in Christ, have you ever tried to connect your Airpods from more than 10 feet away???????

Honestly, I shouldn’t be surprised at this. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, new technology has had a kind of supernatural or mystical component to it. When people don’t understand something – like electricity (or Bluetooth) – they attribute it to magic and imbue it with mystical properties. This is the kind of thinking that powered the spirit photography industry. You see it today with devices like spirit boxes that scan radio signals and EMF meters. It’s not actually that surprising to me that people who believe these magical, impossible things about microchips and vaccine technology would think that they can, in a way, commune with the dead through them. It’s modern necromancy, and in this age of the mobile phone, anyone can participate.

As to why people want to delve into the black art of talking to the dead for likes, I think it’s trauma. COVID 19 killed a million people in this country alone, and whether these conspiracy theorists realize it or not, they’re just as traumatized as the rest of us. The ultimate irony of people who hate vaccines looking for proof of their culpability in a cemetery is that cemeteries are actually filled with people who died of infectious disease before vaccines came along. People died of pneumonia, measles, diphtheria, influenza, and tuberculosis on the regular for a loooong time. If you want to commune with the dead and learn their secrets, they’d probably tell you they wish someone had offered them the Fauchi Ouchie so that they could have had more time here on Earth. From my point of view, this is just another example of how badly this pandemic has broken people’s brains.

Anyway, enjoy the madness – at least these people are outside getting fresh air while they’re mining delusion.

Xoxo,
Court