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Lyle Zapato

He Who Controls The Encoder...

Lyle Zapato | 2004-06-10.1788 LMT | General Paranoia | Technology

As every paranoid knows, all "music" released by the Recording Industry has been riddled with cerebrosonic mind control ever since the Industry's inception. (The earliest forms of cerebrosonics were, unsurprisingly, laughably crude by today's standards -- such as Edison's simple backmasking of adverts for his electric pen into his debut release of "Mary Had A Little Lamb" -- and the modern era of consumer cerebrosonics really didn't come to full fruition until the development of Beatlemania-inducing quasinodal harmonics by the BBC in 1962.) It's no wonder then that paranoids have been musically disadvantaged in recent decades, since finding underground, trusted sources of mind-control-free recorded music was often difficult.

Then the 1990s brought with it the promise of being able to find those sources with ease, for both paranoids and orthonoids alike. The global and decentralized nature of the burgeoning Internet allowed the free exchange of music, with digital signatures based on advanced cryptographic technology used to ensure a network of trust from paranoid artists to their paranoid fans. Today, this is all taken for granted, however there is a dangerous flaw in this trust network: The music encoder.

Say you have a raw digital recording of mind-control-free music that you are going to distribute on the Internet. To save on bandwidth, you wish to compress it as much as possible while maintaining quality, so you unthinkingly use a common compression solution such as MP3, AAC, or WMA to encode the music for distribution. But, how can you trust the encoder not to add cerebrosonic mind control to the resulting file? You can't. And since the "lossy" compression significantly reinterprets the recording, there's no easy way to verify that the resulting file matches the original in memetic content.

Consider: The technology in all these high compression formats is based on a scientific field called "psychoacoustics," which studies how the brain perceives and interprets sound, and specifically what sounds people can't consciously detect. I mean... come on, do you really trust your brain to people calling themselves psychoacousticians? (Notice how that one doth protest too much about the whole "sonic mind control" issue.)

Furthermore, the technologies are all heavily patented by groups ranging from a shadowy German corporation founded by a Knight of the King of Bavaria, to a cult-like company known for its leader's ability to locally distort perceived reality, to Microsoft. If you are using encoders for these compression formats, you might as well just buy the newest Britney Spears CD and surrender your brain to the New World Order's sex slave recruitment division.

Of course, orthonoids and ill-informed paranoids will use them, just as the forces of mind control have arranged. (Organizations like the RIAA are merely fronts designed by the forces of mind control to encourage use of these compromised technologies through reverse psychology.) And while open audio technologies like Ogg Vorbis offer an alternative for those who know to look for them, they will never be allowed to gain general acceptance.

(NB: All MP3s offered on this site were hand encoded using vi for your protection.)

UPDATE: More On iPods & Cerebrosonics