It’s about that time again…Hammer Time? No, the ’80s retro trend has so (to reference an 80s-ish TV show) jumped the shark and Bling, well it Blung. Is it the end of time? Not quite, be patient, only four more years to go. That time is earthquake time for the West Coast, according to the affectionately known web bot, a.k.a. programmer Cliff High. I recently did an interview with the Pacific Northwest digital Nostradamus himself. He runs the predictive web site/service Half Past Human. He has essentially pioneered a methodology that uses language on the Internet as a sort of collective consciousness barometer to predict future events of significant magnitude.

He has allegedly predicted 911 (the “holy grail” of predictions, as he called it) as well as the Asian Tsunami of ‘04 and this summer’s China earthquake. To do this, he creates a lexicon of the English language–most commonly used terms by the average person and attributes each of them a meaning and intensity level. He then uses his software to scan the web. When terms outside of that lexicon come up with frequency that means something is brewing. High then interprets the results. For instance, he’ll hear a lot of chatter (a word that has come into our vernacular during the Bush, “War Against Terror” years) about interrupted weddings when a big earthquake hits.

This week’s big one has been pinpointed to occur between today and the 12th (coincidentally full moon time with some rough cosmological angles if you follow astrology at all). And now the question remains: should we believe? Let’s not forget the saying, ‘beware of false prophets,’ something that dances around my head when musing on the case of Half Past Human. If anyone’s ever seen the Darren Aronofsky movie “Pi,” one understands that the mind and its devices, machinations and imposed frameworks can actually lead us away from the realm of instinct (and thus prediction).

However, there is something to Half Past Human, for sure. You don’t have to have read Carl Jung to understand that the Internet is our tech-era incarnation of the collective unconscious (or consciousness). It’s a place of an infinite amount of connections, thoughts, feelings, opinions, etc. that we can now tap into as easily as turning on our computers or revving up our PDA’s. I do think humans are intuitive (not sure how fond I am of the term psychic which sometimes connotes a ’special’ individual like John Edward or some other charlatan vibing on people’s responses to create a response). I believe that every time the web bot picks up heightened activity, there IS an imminent event of magnitude around the corner.

What makes me a bit suspicious is High’s specificity. His bot did indeed predict tension mounting to a crescendo on October 7th or 8th somewhat assuming that it was portending a terrorist related event (interpretation). It ended up being the Wall Street Crash. Similarly, I recently read some of Half Past Human’s subscriber reports (which High gave me) and saw that something was brewing for the 26th or 27th of November but it looked like an attack on Iran. It was in fact the Mumbai terror attacks.

So while I’m wary of such specificity, I will take heed of the bot’s latest prediction for a large earthquake most likely in the Pacific Northwest/Vancouver between the 10th and 12th and stock up on my supplies and try not to be anywhere I’m not supposed to be

However, maybe that quake doesn’t take place in Vancouver. Maybe it takes place in…gasp, our consciousness.

Posted by Shana Ting Lipton