Interactive Skepticism

seriously messed up

I think I finally did it. I think I went and broke myself. A kind Net Insanity reader named Bill submitted today's featured website expecting me to apply my usual brand of insensitive, mocking deconstruction to it, but golly gee, folks, I am just plain confused about The Secret of Invisibility. I mean, on the one hand it seems like just another crackpot scam to trick idiots into buying a childish fantasy with actual adult money. But something just doesn't smell right about this site. Underneath the telltale tropes of crazy I detect a hint of failed hoax.

Maybe I just don't want to believe that I live in a world where anyone, even a mentally deficient child, believes that a business can be built on the promise of teaching people how to turn invisible and magically command animals to do their bidding. But I've seen more outlandish ideas embraced with stone-faced severity on and off the Internet, so I don't think that's what's bothering me here.

For one, The Secret of Invisibility is a bit too literate for its own good. There are no misspellings or grammatical errors. The emphasis, be it in all caps, underlined or with red text, is always in an intuitive place. There's a disconcerting amount of elegance in phrases like "A powerful secret is within your grasp". That's not to say there aren't moments of clumsiness on this site, just that they don't have that flavor of attention degeneration that usually accompanies sites like these.

Readers, I think somebody is having a half-assed laugh at our expense. "No mumbo-jumbo or hocus pocus"? Hell, those are terms I would use on my own site if I were making fun of a product like this. What's more, the pictures on The Secret of Invisibility are too regimented. They're evenly spaced and get progressively more nonsensical until they're just crappy "artistic" photoshop jobs and random symbols. The whole thing is like a joke that builds up to a punchline that never comes.

I decided to pop over to Invisibility's sister site, The X-Secret, to see if it was similarly unbelievable. The X-Secret seems like a run-of-the-mill seduction methodology scam, but there are other parts of it that just don't seem right. The most distracting item is a freaky-ass picture of a giant fricking tarantula crawling out of the top-front of a woman's panties. For a very small segment of our society I'm sure that this image is the sexiest thing ever conceived. For the rest of us, it's surreal and nightmarish. That single picture is keeping me on the fence about this one. It could be a nod to the wild, absurd joke that is this site, but it could also be an indication that the guy who built it is certifiably insane.

I can't do this one alone. Since this site suggestion came from one of my readers, I'm going to bounce this one back from whence it came. Take part in the first ever Net Insanity Psychiatric Review Panel, featured alongside this article. If you readers believe The Secret of Invisibility is real, we'll give it the official crazy stamp and move on. If you think it's fake, I'll grant it the AK Smile Seal of Approval. Happy polling, you beautiful cretins.