True Internet Horrors: Chip-Chan, Local 58, and The Plague Doctor
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What is the story behind the Plague Doctor video?
Gather round. This happened in 2008. A user on 4chan discovered something on an unsecured webcam. A feed from Seoul, South Korea. A woman's apartment. She was lying motionless on a thin mat surrounded by towers of boxes and trash. The 4chan user thought she was dead. Then she moved. The woman sat up, wrote something on a whiteboard and held it to the camera. Broken English. My name is Chip Chan. Police officer put chip in my ankle. He control my brain. She collapsed back onto the mat, unconscious. Twenty hours later, she was still there. Same position, she hadn't moved a muscle. The internet had found its new obsession.
Before the stream, she was normal. Jane. A Korean woman in her 30s who wrote a blog. She talked about restaurants. She gave movie reviews. She talked about her weekend plans, her friends, her job. Ordinary life documented in ordinary ways. Then around 2006, the post changed. She wrote about footsteps in the hallway that stopped outside her door. Cars that waited outside her window. She constantly felt like she was being watched. She wrote about a police officer who kept showing up places she went. Coffee shops, the grocery store, where she worked.
Who is Chip Chan and what is her story?
Always the same man, always watching. She wrote about waking up exhausted with no memory of falling asleep. Her apartment was rearranged. Objects moved from their normal places. Windows opened that she remembered closing. She would suddenly be missing time. She lost hours at a time and had no idea why. The blog post became frantic and paranoid. Then they stopped. but two years later, she was back. She live-streamed herself 24 hours a day from an apartment that looked like a hoarder's tomb. Boxes stacked to the ceiling. Trash bags lined every wall. The floor was buried under food containers, empty bottles, and crumpled paper. Her windows were completely covered with newspaper and cardboard. No natural light made it inside.
She called him P, a corrupt police officer who had implanted a Verichip in her ankle sometime in the late 1990s. The same technology nightclubs were using to identify VIP customers. The same RFID technology medical facilities use to store patient data. An implant about the size of a grain of rice that could be read by external scanners. These chips are real, and they can be read by scanning equipment passively, meaning you don't have to activate them. They just work. According to Chip Chan, her chip was different. P could trigger it remotely from anywhere in the city. He could force her to go unconscious with the push of a button. He controlled exactly when she slept and when she woke up. She lived entirely within his schedule.
She was a puppet and P held the strings. The apartment had three webcams positioned in the corners. These were professional setups with good angles and clear resolution.
What unusual behavior did Chip Chan exhibit during her livestream?
She installed them herself to document what happened during the hours of missing time. She said she was looking for evidence. Proof that P was controlling her. She wanted to document the crime. What she created was a window into hell, and the world started watching. The stream never stopped. The cameras captured everything. She ate ramen noodles with plastic spoons. She wrote desperate messages on whiteboards in broken English. She slept in contorted positions for 18 to 20 hours straight without moving a muscle. During these sleep periods, she looked dead. She didn't shift or turn over. She didn't twitch. You had to concentrate just to make sure she was breathing. This death-like stillness went on for almost every day.
Early viewers timed her blackouts with stopwatches. They created detailed spreadsheets. The pattern was consistent and unnatural. She suddenly collapsed into a deep sleep at the same exact time every day. Then she woke up at the same time. Day in, day out. Like she was programmed. Like she was being controlled. Humans don't sleep like this. Even heavily sedated patients shift position occasionally. Not Chip-Chan. She slept like she was paralyzed. And every day, people watched. They wanted to help her expose the corrupt police officer who was controlling her.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the story behind the Plague Doctor video?
0:07–1:33
2
Who is Chip Chan and what is her story?
1:33–3:10
3
What unusual behavior did Chip Chan exhibit during her livestream?
3:10–4:39
4
How did the internet react to Chip Chan's livestream?
4:39–5:51
5
What is the significance of Local 58 in the context of analog horror?
5:51–7:37
6
What messages were broadcasted by Local 58 and what did they imply?
7:37–9:17
7
Who is Chris Straub and what role did he play in the creation of Local 58?
9:17–11:39
8
What are the overarching themes of technology and surveillance in these stories?
11:39–39:33
Speakers
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