"The Babylon Project, a multi-author, participative art project, is a biting satire of New Age spirituality, conspiracy theories, and the anti-capitalist movement, or something completely different. I admit to being quite confused by the whole thing."
Mick Dunny, Thanet Messenger, July 2001
The Babylon Project has a long and complicated history, though the Discordians involved in creating this website, some might say quite mistakenly, see it as just one manifestation of the Discordian plot: Operation Mindfuck, originally instigated by Ho Chih Zen, of the Erisian Liberation Front. Operation Mindfuck’s guiding philosophy is that originally proposed in The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (von Neumann and Morgenstern): that the only strategy, that an opponent cannot predict, is a random strategy. This induced the late Malaclypse the Younger to proclaim, "We Discordians must stick apart".
The radical decentralization of all Discordian enterprises created a built-in random factor even before Operation Mindfuck. To this day no apostle of Eris knows for sure who is or is not involved in any phase of Operation Mindfuck, or in what activities they are or are not engaged in as part of that project. Thus the outsider is immediately trapped in a double-bind (first defined, by anthropologist Gregory Bateson, as a situation in which you must choose between two alternatives, both of which are unpleasant): the only safe assumption is that anything a Discordian does is somehow related to OM, but since this leads directly to paranoia, this is not a"safe" assumption after all, and the "risky" hypothesis that whatever the Discordians are doing is harmless may be “safer” in the long run. Every aspect of OM follows, or accentuates, this double-bind.
"This collection of drug-addled, dribbling nutcases spouting quasi-mystical tripe from the appalling depths of their strangely subverted, anti-social, ruined neuronal networks is the closest this newspaper has come to the spawn of Satan on Earth, and would push any right-thinking citizen into pressuring the government to re-introduce burning at the stake."
The Daily Mail, May 2003
Everything herein is true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense, and/or all or none of the above. The Babylon Project can also be ignored, improved, modified beyond recognition, used as toilet paper, or as a tool for self-expression and liberation as well as, of course, for the overthrow of BABYLON, but only if you’re gullible.