Informant:

 Zack was born in Boston Massachusetts and grew up in a house in rural Norwell Massachusetts in a secular family. His father is a musician and his mother a homemaker. Zack is a photographer who works with musicians and has traveled extensively both in his childhood following his father on tour and in his current occupation.

Original Script: “I learned about it on a web form from being posted to a form I was on. When they post a puzzle they basically come out and say solve this puzzle it will lead to the next riddle and so on and so forth. A lot of highly skilled cryptographers would sort of docu-blog on there progress as they were trying to figure out. The more they progress the more serious it began to seem, people where literarily flying places to solve clues, it was very Dan Brown. Most people who get close to solving disappear. Some people think they have succeeded and ended up requited into an intelligence organization. While it could be a hoax the difficulty of the challenges is genuine. It’s a total Mr. Robot”

Background Information about the Piece by the informant: Cicada 3301 is an Internet puzzles that appear mysteriously on various online chat forms annually. That focus on data security cryptography and steganography.

Context of the Performance: Annual online puzzle.

Thoughts about the piece: It seems to me that the Cicada 3301 is similar to the newer folkloric tales and myths that develop and are spread on the Internet. At the heart of this is the mistrust for the Internet and the mystery that comes with the anonymity one can find on the Internet. The informant is a member of multiple conspiracy theory forms that analyze myths, stories and other mysterious happenings so he is connected to forms that share stories like Cicada 3301.