William Burroughs used juxtaposition as an element of some of his works. He’d sometimes take random sections of text and paste them up next to other random sections, looking for interesting or jarring word or phrase combinations.
Today, this is done by computers for purpose of being ranked by Google. I was looking for an old radio program using the ID phrase of a fictional station in the program and hit on this (DO NOT FOLLOW LINKS):
| the voice of Vinyl sheet flooring Sondra was playfully reproachful. “you made them for.. Her, child.. you are learning.. your mind is becoming aware of the … www.ez.cashgamble.us/vinyl_sheet_flooring.html – Supplemental Result – |
The listing, of course, is fake, and quickly redirects to a porn site (registered to a guy in China, with some really strange hosting and nameserving, but that’s beside the point) where it attempts to launch all kind of crazy stuff and get you to view HOT! TEEN! PORN! and like stuff. But that’s not what I’m interested in. Look at what the site generated for the Google spider: it’s some kind of story with a key phrase, run in both the page title and the URL, though it’s entirely unrelated and easily spottable by a human. You can find these for almost any consumer item and random word. For instance, “fiberglass insulation” galaxy turned up a whole bunch of Polish websites.
PORN DIRECTORY – ak.tgory.pl – porn directory
| … mexican rustic fiberglass insulation stunt bike spark7 sensor fiberglass … to the galaxy hotel entre mares joseph lister tbn5lh953kjqb0jwww manetas … porn-directory.ak.tgory.pl/ – |
| … technics turntable flea market item fiberglass insulation bee gees song … dog swim dog care bose galaxy germanos gala gebrauchtwagen gitara garaze … bose.hu.zgora.pl/ – |
TROPICAL ISLAND3D – ak.tgory.pl – tropical island3d
| … pais arcadetown architecture computer program ares galaxy download arctic cat … grant source tropical island3d fiberglass insulation warn winch bumper … tropical-island3d.ak.tgory.pl/ – |
PIERCING GENITAL – ak.tgory.pl – piercing genital
| … dark angel jessica alba fiberglass insulation piercing genital bigcuties com … cable descrambler piercing genital milky way galaxy air miles card the … piercing-genital.ak.tgory.pl/ – |
WALPAPPER PORNO – ak.tgory.pl – walpapper porno
| … store cadillac car part fiberglass insulation fiberglass fender discount … broadway tickets dog names galaxy music downloads walpapper porno mature … walpapper-porno.ak.tgory.pl/ – |
tgory.pl, FWIW, redirects to http://www.agnat.pl/ which is a hosting company. A google search for tgory.pl turns up a page of similarly randomly generated pages, which is kind of eerie.
William Burroughs is 8 years dead. Across the world, servers work every second creating pages of randomly cut and pasted text for the purpose of fooling other automated servers looking for meaningful information to show to humans. And sometimes through chance, one of those chopped pieces of text is close enough to actual writing that it fools the robot spider and is displayed to me, searching for an obscure radio show I listened to in the dark fifteen years ago, while the sum of the world’s knowledge is hashed, mangled, written randomly, and rearranged, unread, and published to wait for another chance at discovery.