Perhaps it's happened to you. You're walking down the street, not a care in the world, when you see a letter carrier listening intently to what sounds for all the world like a voice coming out of a rain gutter. Did it really tell him to travel to Reykjavik and barbecue the skateboard?
The Fnorder was a feature of Steve Jackson Games' legendary Illuminati Bulletin Board System. (Yes, the one that was seized in the infamous Secret Service raid.) At random intervals the system would output fnords, messages named for a catchphrase in Shea & Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy that would seem like gibberish to the uninitiated, but to those in the know, they sounded like significant and portentious gibberish. The idea was to simulate the coded phrases used in fictional versions of spycraft, but take it one step further to make the messages look like coded instructions from the shadowy rulers of the world -- not the Americans or Russians or even Goldman Sachs or Microsoft, but those who control America and Russia and Goldman Sachs and Microsoft.
When Steve Jackson Games moved from the Illuminati BBS to a node on the Internet and eventually the World Wide Web, naturally the Fnorder came along. Programmers translated it into a number of computer languages on their own web sites, and eventually it became an iPhone app as well. Now the evolution continues with the Secret Knowledge Alexa skill. Just enable it and ask it for a message from the Illuminati. And if you hear something that sounds bizarre and disturbing, remember, it's all a game, it's all random and it's all just for fun.
Trust us. Would we lie to you? fnord
“Alexa, tell Secret Knowledge to give me a message from the Illuminati”
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