Breaking the Stasis Field: An Interview With Auburn Salcedo, Co-Founder of Randonautica (pt i)
SEVEN STORY HOTEL ***LEAKED***
SEVEN STORY HOTEL ***LEAKED***
Auburn Salcedo is the co-founder of the mysterious synchronicity generating app Randonautica and co-author of the book, The Official Guide to Randonautica: Everything You Need to Know about Creating Your Random Adventure Story.
Randonautica utilizes quantum computing to generate random GPS coordinates, sending users off on serendipitous explorations into the unknown. Based around theories of parapsychology and mind-matter interaction, users are encouraged to meditate on their intentions before embarking, often reporting synchronistic or religiously profound experiences of archetypical significance. Having evolved from an obscure research project run by a group of fringe scientists know as The Fatum Project, and building off theories of memetics, Chaos Theory, and Guy Debords theory of the dérive, Randonautica uses quantum randomness to help break users out of conditioned behavioral loops (the probability tunnel) by pushing against the unseen forces which confine them (the stasis field), facilitating novel experiences impossible to reach through rational decision alone.
The app went viral when a video surfaced of a group of TikTokers, when attempting to manifest “travel”, found a suitcase under a pier that was full of human remains. Since then, the app has become an internet sensation, generating swarms of conspiracy theories and attracting an influx of new devotees, skeptics, and content creators looking for clickbait. I’m not concerned with the sensationalism, but rather the theories of consciousness, quantum science, and the esoterica at the apps foundation.
Auburn and I met over FaceTime. We discuss: the strange origins of Randonautica, cultural memetics, synchronicity, the technological paradigm shift, mind-matter interaction, quantum randomness, the power of magic, and the guiding intelligent hand. — Cori Hart
*This is an incomplete fragment of the complete interview published in Seven Story Hotel Issue One*
C.H. — Let’s start at the beginning. How did this project get started and what were some of the theories and concepts which guided it into existence?
Auburn — It started in a very mysterious and underground way. There were a bunch of brilliant mad-scientists that came together in a Telegram channel to discuss different ideas on consciousness and specifically memetics—the study of how ideas propagate—and how there seems to be this invisible breathing thing that connects human beings and creates these observable synchronicities between unrelated individuals. How can two people on opposite ends of the world consistently see the same thing in the same day and record it in the same place?
A couple of the researchers in that group involved with The Fatum Project had been testing those theories alongside randomness. Basicallly—what’s the influence on consciousness and memetics when you apply randomness? This was done in a very loose study where they solicited thousands of emails with random coordinates to random individuals, and over the course of a year, people visited these locations.
People were soon emailing the team back and reporting bizarre and meaningful experiences. Some times, they would report that they didn’t have any meaningful experience, but then many months later something would happen to them that coincided with their trip and meaning revealed itself. What the researchers realized is that there’s this oddity which comes from injecting randomness into people’s lives. So, through that process other researchers started getting involved seeking to debunk the mysteries of it. But strange things kept cropping up. When people traveled to random locations under the use of a quantum random number generator (QRNG)—which is what we use—statistically anomalous things would occur.
So, we opened a bot on Telegram called Shangrila_bot. It was super clunky. You would go into this program and give it a prompt which would then generate coordinates. Very simple, no bells and whistles, but it had a very creepy allure. You would go to the coordinates and have these bizarre experiences. Eventually more people started using the bot and sharing their stories on Reddit and from there it grew rapidly. People flocked to Reddit for explanations. “Someone explain how I thought about my grandma, and the coordinates took me to a tombstone in a cemetery with her name engraved.” These were essentially existential crises, and Reddit became that community to discuss them. It blossomed from there significantly. Eventually the bot wasn’t cutting it and we had to create a web application. Once that reached its capacity, we had to make the first version of the app, which we launched in December of 2019. That’s the birth story. From there it really went viral.
C.H. — There are so many paths we could take from here. I’d love to dig deeper into this idea of quantum randomness and its distinction from the everyday pseudo-randomness. There’s also that time component The Fatum Project discovered which plays into concepts of retro-causation. I’m sure some of these things will come back up.
One thing that’s really interesting to me is the skepticism towards synchronicity and mind-matter interaction. It’s funny because the notion that our thoughts have an influence on our material reality is nothing new. Across all cultures reaching back into antiquity, this relationship was something understood and engaged with through ritual. It wasn’t until very recently, starting with the Enlightenment, that we’ve become mired in a scientific rationalism that rejects the components of consciousness and reality that stand outside the reach of logic. The irony is—that same rationalist method of inquiry has birthed technologies which are now rediscovering these irrational phenomena. It’s come full circle.
A — Yeah, that’s a really good way to put it. For so long science needed to be black and white—and still does—but now technology is allowing us to bring the human experience into focus, those stories that are parapsychological, paranormal, metaphysical, whatever you want to call it. As we start to validate those experiences, even on an individual level, we can begin to match them up with what modern science is teaching us. Especially with regards to quantum physics. Sure, you are never going to be able to map one person’s meaningful story onto theories of quantum mechanics, but when you have enough of it...That’s the technological paradigm shift. The science and the human experience are starting to merge and a lot of what was called “pseudo-science" is being looked at more rigorously.
C.H. — To get back to Randonautica, could you talk about your early experiences with this technology and what led you to get involved with the project?
A — So, I’m really fascinated with time. When I tell this story it forces me to work out what came first, but for me time isn’t linear, it’s like threads stretching and overlapping one another with a central point—this "in between" moment which we tend to call the present. In the past decade I've taken a huge interest in the theories surrounding time, from popular concepts like alternate dimensions and parallel lives, to more practical methods of understanding time such as perception of time dilation and distortion.
I point this out because it has a lot to do with what brought me to Randonautica. I was at a point in my life where I had just gone through a long journey of playing with time and my ability to have an active influence on my reality. I had a Samadhi sensory deprivation tank in my home that I would use to test my own perception of time and its illusory properties. I’d notice strange things when being in the float tank for an extended period of time. Sometimes one hour would feel like eight, while an eight-hour float would feel like an hour. I started to notice that the more I skewed my perception of time, the more significantly my days had this sort of chaos element. All of a sudden there would be this rapid ripple effect of somewhat threaded events. Like, almost a butterfly effect. I now describe it as a shift. It would be surreal to be in it. So I started playing around with the idea that all information, past and future, is both accessible and malleable. I noticed that adding randomness to my routine seemed to put me in a heightened energy state that allowed me some level of access to this extensive trove of intel about my past and future.
That was the first thing that primed me for Randonautica. The second, and perhaps most important, was that I was doing Randonaut-type adventuring before I even knew there was a group brewing up this concept. Two years prior to the birth of the Randonauts, I’d take a coin with me when I went out and I would flip it to decide where to go. If it landed on heads, I’d take a right and if it landed on tails, I would take a left. I never set an intention, I just liked to go off the beaten path. I started tracking that the less routine my days were the more significant events would occur. I even began to notice, looking back, that I had somehow rerouted my trajectory entirely. Somewhere in the mix of me researching randomness and its effects on time, I stumbled across a newly started subreddit where a group calling themselves the Randonauts were forming opinions on this very thing. Excited as ever, I tried a random coordinate generator they had created in Telegram.
At that point, I was trying to explain to my (now ex) husband that there was something real with these Randonaut redditor’s stories, so I set my intention to find something that would serve as undeniable proof. I generated my coordinate which was about half a mile from my work. I’m walking around, and as my phone says “you’ve arrived at your destination”, I make a dead stop. I’m looking around and see nothing and feel super frustrated. I looked down and noticed right underneath my foot was a piece of trash — a receipt. I remembered reading that one of the tenets of the Randonauts is to leave your environment better than you found it, so I pick it up and walk back to my car huffy and puffy. When I looked at the Costco receipt (which I still have to this day) I noticed at the very bottom it said *my husbands name with his last initial* was your cashier.
Now this is a moment that brought on a feeling that words really can’t describe. The experience can be told second-hand but it’s hard for someone else to comprehend if they haven’t come across such serendipity in their own life. It was as if a veil was lifted and suddenly, I realized, “Oh, that’s how reality works?” I’ve had experiences of consciousness expansion prior, but the instantaneous element of putting in coordinates and 15 minutes later having something so significant delivered was incredible. So, I quickly got involved with the group and told them I would do anything I could to help. At the time it was just a bunch of decentralized researchers and I just fell in love with all of them. I was just that one chick who wasn’t an engineer or a quantum physicist but was ready to help. So my co-founder, Josh Lengfelder, and I took it from being this underground bot on Telegram and made it widespread. Over 500 million Randonaut trips have taken place across the world since then. Pretty insane to see how my journey got me here and how the time element, maybe even signals from my future self—or the effects from toying with entropy?—all weaved together as if they were happening all at once in my personal storyline.
C.H. — You’re right, if you were to tell the story of the receipt to somebody who doesn't put much stock into these more subtle experiences they’d probably just write it off as banal and inconsequential. Funny thing is if the Buddha told them his story of finding enlightenment under a Bodhi tree it would sound even more mundane. You can't express these profound shifts in consciousness in materialist language. That’s why I appreciate Randonautica, it creates a space for people to share these very intimate and ephemeral experiences. I feel kind of inclined to share my trip now.
A — Please, I would love to hear it.
C.H. — So like you, I was primed. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been haunted by the suspicion that freewill might not exist, and so I’ve always looked for ways of breaking determinism, which typically meant breaking from routine. For example, I had moved from Florida to Brooklyn on a whim, and for the first few months there I lived in a way resembling Debord's theory of dérive—aimlessly drifting, only hanging with strangers and bums, sleeping on rooftops, etc. But one morning while riding my bike on my usual route to class, I found myself taken by depression. It dawned on me that I had been in a waking sleep for weeks and had fallen into a routine, sucked in by what you guys would call the stasis field. Something then told me to make a random left in three lights , and on the next block over I found a city farm, right there off my daily route that I never knew existed. That farm became my oasis in the city. I would help care for the chickens, grow organic food to feed the neighborhood, take fresh eggs. On that first day I had even met a woman who I ended up dating for a time. I missed class that day, but a whole new hidden world was opened up for me—the most significant chapter from my time in New York—and all it took was this intuition to go left. Where did that voice come from? I still wonder if there was some outside intelligence behind that.
Anyways, when I first used the app I did it with a buddy of mine who’s an experienced occultist, so he's very receptive to this sort of thing. I told him, “I’m glad you’re coming along because I feel like you and I could literally find a brick wall and stare at it for ages trying to extract meaning.” We didn’t set an intention for our first coordinate—we didn’t want to insert confirmation bias. We thought, “If this force is real, it’s going to have to work hard to convince us.” We drive to the coordinate and its just an empty field behind a Walmart. So we walk out into the field and find—a brick wall! Not even a building, just an ambiguously placed free standing brick wall in the middle of this field. We didn’t try to set an intention, but it seems to have extracted one from our earlier conversation. It was just like you described—a psychic shift. I won’t go into detail about the other coordinates, but at every location there was some new dimension of weirdness. There was a very real feeling of an intelligent presence purposefully teasing us and fucking with our naive understandings of space and time. We were playing a game, and it was playing back. And there was an owl of course...
A — Wait what was the Owl!? I have to know.
C.H. — Okay so, it was our final point. We were already pretty convinced, but wanted a final sign that this was real. While meditating on our intent, I was thinking in theological terms—“God, if we’re in communication, show me something that will solidify my faith.” My friend thought in terms of receiving a “stamp” or “signature” to sign us off. So it took us to a neighborhood, and at the point in front of a house was a statue of the Mother Mary. I thought, “Oh, that’s my faith! Thats it!” My friend was impressed but not totally satisfied. So on our way back home (a route I've taken a hundred times) we passed a house, and nailed to the wall was a giant bronze owl sigil. It was huge! I had never noticed it before. He yelled, “That’s my sign off!” (The owl obviously being the official sigil of Randonautica.) So it took us on a route that had both of our intentions made manifest in sequence. By the end we felt like we were on drugs. We were high.
A — Yes! That is the best feeling. When you have hits like that it feels like it opens neural pathways the same ways that shrooms would. Everything starts to feel differently. I’ve had that exact experience and it is so bizarre. I’m so excited you had those experiences.
C.H. — Yeah. And the question that came up was—was that owl always there or did it generate after we set the intention? Simulation theory aside, even if it was there, the fact we never noticed it shows us how narrow our normal field of consciousness is, and that this tool can assist in expanding it to obtain a more holistic reality. That alone is magical.
Artwork by Zach Waltman (Hopper1000)
A — Absolutely, and that line of thinking makes you question what you’re missing when you’re not open. We can think about these things in terms of consciousness awareness, but other times I like to pull in the attributes of illusory time to describe the phenomena. One of my favorite books is The Road of Time: Theory of Double Causality by Philippe Guillemant. Guillemant suggests that all possibilities exist at once. As one of these infinite possibilities is observed, it simultaneously affects both the observable past and the future. So in every waking action we take in our “present”—which I now call the “in between”—there is a double causal outcome in both the past and future. I’ve even created my own diagrams to describe this under-appreciated theory. There is something that just really clicks with me about this concept for Randonautica. At the same moment you passed by the house with the large owl decoration, there are millions of other threads with no owl, a different color door, etc. Maybe by influencing “time” through the QRNG, you’re able to move to the nearest “this has something that will be meaningful” thread completely undetected by the universe.
But in terms of simply conscious awareness—it’s like we have these layers of blacked out glasses over our eyes and can only see through these tiny holes. You take off one layer after another until there is clarity. But what are we missing all around us on a daily basis? It can be saddening if you overthink it. To think there may be this whole field of meaningful visual experiences happening all around you, but your vision—which is your awareness—is blocked by these veils, only leaving you nominal visibility. Randonautica, somehow, rapidly rips-off those blockers and gives you the prescription for 20/20 vision.
C.H. — Definitely. But back to the chronology—once the official app launched and it became more open to the public, did anything start happening that evolved the team’s theories? Were there any displays of mass synchronization on a collective level?
A — Yeah, one of the earliest was the red-couch-meme—we use the term “meme” to denote memetic phenomenon. So, we had multiple separate avenues where communities were forming: Reddit, Telegram, and other mainstream social media platforms. As far as we could tell there wasn’t much communication between those communities, but somehow they were all going on trips and finding red couches in the most bizarre areas: in the middle of a field, in a dumpster, in the back of a truck, in a parking spot, on the side of the road with a free parking sign... They were all reporting on their individual stories totally oblivious to the fact that there’s this global synchronicity occurring. The team overseeing all of this caught on. These people weren’t even setting their intentions for red couches, but they were somehow ethereally manifesting everywhere all at once. As a team, we had to ask ourselves, “Are we emphasizing red couches too much in our conversations?” That’s a very deep conversation to have with your team. If you think in that mode too much it will make your brain explode, but it made us realize we had to experiment further.
C.H. — As I said, there’s is a sort of pseudo-scientific taboo with synchronicities because the term has been so mired in new-age fluff, but people seem to forget the concept actually comes from Jung. When you bring up the red couches I'm reminded that Jung’s esoteric magnum-opus was The Red Book (synchronicity?) There was also the mass synchronicity of the owl?
A — Oh yes of course. The origin story of the owl is pretty crazy. A lot of people think it comes from esoterica because the owl is used in so many different esoteric subsets. But actually, one of our early programmers had the Randonautica server at his home, and he happened to go shopping at a trinket store and picked up a little owl statue. He set it on his server and left for vacation for about a week. Meanwhile, we are tracking the trips and we started noticing that everyone was suddenly posting owls: real owls, toy owls, billboards for the owl diet, you name it. It wasn't until a day later, when we realized these owls were everywhere and in everyone’s content that he then goes, “Wait a second...I had an owl setting on the server. Guys, I feel like that has something to do with it.”
The owl has remained a seriously potent archetype for Randonauts. Josh actually had an owl fly into his car. There was also a woman who was randonauting so frequently that she had became plagued with owls! She was sending us videos of owls gathered outside of her house. She couldn't sleep because they kept her up all night. She even sent us a photo of her holding one in her hand. We literally had to help her de-manifest owls. It was extremely bizarre. Also important to keep in mind that the symbolization of the owl very much aligns with the ways of the Randonauts. This idea of owls being able to see in the dark is often how a curious Randonaut will approach an adventure to illuminate what their mind was pitch black to. Owls even have a transformative quality in their symbolism and having seen millions of users report on their Randonautica journeys—transformation is most certainly a common trait.
