Wednesday, April 16, 2014

The New Age BS Generator

Have you ever wondered where manufacturers of New Age products come up with the gibberish that passes for deep and meaningful statements to members of their target audience? If so, look no further. This webpage cleverly automates the process of generating New Age copy, and the results don't appear to differ much from the real thing. It's not a Markov chain; as far as I can tell the underlying logic is more like a set of Mad Libs mixed with randomly selected sentence fragments. So it holds together just like real promo text does, and it can be adapted to any product or service with a few small modifications.

As an example, let's say that I was looking to convince New Agers that they needed to buy my books on Enochian magick. That would be pretty smart of me if I could pull it off, because as far as I can tell Enochian magicians number in perhaps the thousands but New Agers are legion. And hey, I do talk about working with angels. New Agers love angels! Here's the text that the generator came up with, modified a little to refer to my Enochian books. The bold text is what I inserted, the rest is automatically generated.

The goal of electromagnetic resonance is to plant the seeds of synchronicity rather than discontinuity.

This is the path of Enochian Magick revealed by Angels.

This life is nothing short of a condensing quantum leap of interstellar presence. We exist as ultra-sentient particles. Consciousness consists of molecular structures of quantum energy. “Quantum” means an evolving of the non-dual.

We are at a crossroads of growth and turbulence. We are in the midst of an endless unfolding of potentiality that will align us with the solar system itself. Our conversations with other entities have led to a deepening of pseudo-self-aware consciousness.

Traveller, look within and awaken yourself. If you have never experienced this ozmosis devoid of self, it can be difficult to self-actualize. It can be difficult to know where to begin.

The Mastering Enochian Magick series will show you the way.

Flow is a constant. Divinity is the healing of intuition, and of us. Nothing is impossible. As you heal, you will enter into infinite health that transcends understanding. Without growth, one cannot grow. You must take a stand against illusion. Pain is born in the gap where empathy has been excluded.

Delusion is the antithesis of truth. We can no longer afford to live with pain. You may be ruled by materialism without realizing it. Do not let it confront the growth of your path.

Buy the Mastering Enochian Magick series by Scott Michael Stenwick today!

Pretty good, right? Clearly, I'll be a New Age success in no time flat! I expect my sales will go stratospheric any moment now...

A suggestion for enhancing the generator might be to automate this process further by accepting the name of a product or company up front and then integrating it into the text, like I did with the subject and title of my book. It shouldn't be that hard to program, as it seems like most of the work should already be done and the name could just be inserted into certain of the "noun" positions. Better still, set it up so the information can be passed as parameters in the URL and return the text, so it can be seamlessly added into any web page.

Technorati Digg This Stumble Stumble

1 comment:

Scott Stenwick said...

To elaborate a little more for those who are technically inclined, I figure that a book-specific version of the generator could collect three pieces of information, [Subject], [Title], and [Author]. In the example, those values would be:

[Subject] = "Enochian Magick revealed by Angels"
[Title] = "The Mastering Enochian Magick series"
[Author] = "Scott Michael Stenwick"

The lines I inserted would then be structured as:

1. "This is the path of [Subject]."
2. "[Title] will show you the way."
3. "Buy [Title] by [Author] today!"

Bonus points - a way to associate [Subject], [Title], and [Author] with built-in URLs, so you could click on [Subject] for a basic search on the topic, [Title] for a link to buy the book, and [Author] for an author biography, or something like that.

Then dump the whole thing into an iframe or a feed so you can embed it in your custom website. Custom New Age promo copy for everyone!