Fri, 14th Aug, 2026
Last month I was part of a small event where we organised a ‘conspiracy night’, during which participants would prepare a presentation on a chosen conspiracy/weird theory/supernatural event, and present it in front of the group. For mine I have chosen to talk about a briefly viral app called Randonautica, the mechanism and mythos behind it, tying it to the more esoteric views. For the sake of preservation, I went over the slides and notes and prepared it as a blog post as well, though I must say, the visual presentation may have been more fun. Regardless, here is the full thing:
In Feb 2020 an app called Randonautica was launched that promised users they can use ‘quantum entropy’ and change reality with their mind, and even open up a real world portal. The claim of the app is this: it uses a quantum random number generator to generate a coordinate that, based on your intention when generating it, gives you a location of something that is relevant to what you were looking to find.
Naturally, this caught the attention of TikTok, where it became a massive trend the same year, with people doing increasingly more unhinged explorations, searching for spooky stuff and paranormal events, with various weird coincidences coming about.
Most notably, the case where a group of teenagers following Randonautica coordinates was led to the exact location on Seattle beach containing two suitcases. When they opened the suitcases they found human remains inside. Police investigation followed and eventually the two bodies were identified, and the perpetrator charged with double homicide. After these things hit the news, the trend slowly faded off, but its community survived as more of a niche, with hundreds of people online to this day reporting similar stories of the app leading them to places oddly specific to the ones they looked for.
But this is not something the people behind this app thought of themselves, and rather an application of existing concepts in parapsychology, most notably Mind Machine Interaction.
Randonautica came directly out of a niche internet project started in Russia in the late 2000s called The Fatum Project. Originally just a spambot built for ICQ that would send people random coordinates, later iterations had it as a telegram bot with its own community of people who believed this random coordinate generation is meaningful.
The Randonautica developers Auburn Salcedo and Joshua Lengfelder encountered Fatum Project in a Telegram group in 2019, joined their online groups, found links in existing research papers on the topic of QRNG or quantum random number generation, so they adapted the idea and built a community that eventually became Randonautica the following year. And these concepts have a surprising amount of genuine research behind them.
In the 1930s, after hearing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle give a lecture attesting to the scientific proof that one could communicate with the dead, Duke University psychologist J.B. Rhine became interested in examining ESP, and he set up a laboratory to test subjects for psychic abilities. The test involved a deck of custom cards, back of which had the same blue background, and the front contained one of five different shapes. 5 shapes each for 25 total. Rhine tested different abilities, and one of them was precognition - where participants would write down their guesses on the order of the deck first, deck was then shuffled, and card shown in order. This was repeated thousands of times, and statistically the chance result would be for someone to guess 5 correct cards in 25, or 20% of the guesses. What Rhine found were certain participants who have consistently achieved 7, 8, even 9 correct guesses, across a large number of runs.
Another test he did was with dice, where he investigated psychokinesis - or an ability of people to influence objects with their minds. Instead of guessing, participants were instructed to make dice land on a certain side. Here as well some of participants over many throws showed an increase over the statistical average of a few percentage points. Minor, but not insignificant.
Critics of Rhine disputed dubious controls and statistical procedures, along with obvious biases that can happen with tests where people manipulate objects themselves or are done face to face, which brings us to Helmut Schmidt. A physicist who built electronic devices that produced genuinely random binary events.
His earliest machines used radioactive decay as the random source. according to quantum mechanics the timing of a singular radioactive decay event is fundamentally unpredictable. In a simplified experiment, a machine would interpret a decay event and have the light turn from red to green. Statistically, this would be a pure 50/50. Participants were asked to try make the green light occur more often simply by focusing the intention and doing nothing else. Here as well, he saw 1-2 percentage points increase. Again, small, but not insignificant.
PEAR or Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research was a research program at Princeton University that studied parapsychology. Established in 1979 by then Dean of Engineering Robert G. Jahn, they conducted studies on two areas - psychokinesis and remote viewing. Their similar RNG experiments were even bigger in scale, and did this by highly automated electronic systems. They would sit a participant in front of a display. The RNG would generate 1s and 0s, showing as a left and right arrow on the screen. The participant then received one of three instructions:
Thousands of bits generated every second, and the expected result for a random output like this would be the following:
| Instruction | Expected | Actual |
|---|---|---|
| High intention | 50% | 50.05–50.15% |
| Low intention | 50% | 49.85–49.95% |
| Observation | 50% | 50% |
Again - small but not completely insignificant. But let’s expand the scale even more.
The Global Consciousness Project was essentially a worldwide extension of the PEAR laboratory’s mind–machine interaction research. It was started in 1998 by Roger D. Nelson, who had previously worked at PEAR.
The project distributed dozens of hardware random number generators
(RNGs)—nicknamed “eggs”—around the world. Each generator continuously
produces random bits: 01100010101001011001101011… Under
normal circumstances, every generator should just generate pure random
output with any deviations fluctuating randomly within expected
values.
The hypothesis behind this experiment was not just that one person can intentionally change random output, but that moments of emotional synchronicity between millions of people can collectively affect this network of global RNGs.
The experiment went on during notable world events such as New Years celebrations, World Cup finals, or specific moments like Princess Diana’s funeral. Data was then analysed as a stream of numbers over decades of recording. When looked at the output during these kinds of moments, there was also a minor deviation observed within these RNG eggs’ outputs. Most notable one happening on the day of 9/11 attacks where in a single 6 hour window, the data skewed about 6.5 standard deviations, which would be something like 29 billion to 1 odds against pure chance.
For the purposes of this story, let’s assume two possible interpretations:
And the second path brings us to another interesting concept.
In the mid-1990s, philosopher Nick Land and cyberfeminist Sadie Plant were central figures in the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) at the University of Warwick. CCRU was an infamous academic group blending odd topics together such as philosophy, cybernetics, computer science, horror fiction, occult traditions, economics, rave culture, early internet culture, etc. Their work is notoriously weird, due to the fact that they often intentionally avoided writing conventional philosophical works, and opted for what they called theory-fiction, which blurred philosophy, cultural analysis, and mythmaking, due to their belief that narratives shape reality. The CCRU coined the term hyperstition (hyper + superstition), which would be fiction that helps bring about its own existence in reality. Kinda like a self-fulfilling prophecy but broader.
Self fulfilling prophecy: “People imagine X so they act in ways that make X happen”
Example: A rumor spreads that a bank is failing. People rush to the bank to withdraw the money. Mass withdrawals cause the bank to fail.
Hyperstition includes the same basis but also adds the cybernetic aspect of recursive feedback loops involving media, culture, markets, technology, institutions, etc.
It would go something like:
Someone imagines a future → idea spreads culturally → people organise around it → investments, engineering, infrastructure follows → imagined future becomes real.
Instead of it being a prophecy or a prediction, a hyperstition actively participates in bringing itself to life.
1. Cyberspace
William Gibson coined the term cyberspace in his 1982 short story Burning Chrome before anything like today’s internet as a shared digital space existed. (the world wide web was created in 1989 and the first website in 1991.)
Engineers who grew up in a world where Gibson’s ideas were influential then built technologies in actual reality that resembled his initially fictional world.
2. Artificial Intelligence
For decades a thing discussed by science fiction writers, in fact Asimov’s laws of Robotics written in 1940s are relevant today in the AI alignment field - decades before even the first personal computer was invented.
And more notably Samuel Butler in the book Erewhon where he speculates about machines with capability to become more intelligent than humans, a book written in 1872, when there were no electronic machines, computers or transistors at all.
Then the rise of electronics, computing, internet, algorithms, all driven by people who grew up in a culture saturated with these stories, in intention, when building all of it, eventually made all of it into an everyday thing.
So to tie it all together, there is that idea of two options for these paths of ideas:
We can Imagine world A, where thought directly changes quantum randomness and as a result your intention can bend reality. Or world B, where thought changes people, people build technology, technology changes culture, culture changes reality. And in truth, both options at the end of the day lead us to the same endpoint, one of them just has more steps.
And finally going back to where we started with Randonautica: The app tells people to set an intention when getting the coordinates to go somewhere random. You go out, you start noticing things, exploring, interpreting it in your head, going places you haven’t gone before, looking at details you haven’t noticed before, and your behaviour ends up changed because of the initial idea. The app does not need to manipulate quantum numbers, it only needs to be able to manipulate or influence you, and you in turn change the reality of what you are experiencing.
Thoughts maybe cannot literally move electrons but thoughts certainly can move people who move other people who move tools and create industries and build the internet and this computer and probably whatever circumstances led up to you navigating to this page, so maybe the real psychic phenomenon is that simple in practice.