Futility Closet - 244-The Women's Protest

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 10,000 quirky curiosities from a palindrome virtuoso to a confession in a horse. This is episode 244. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In February 1943, hundreds of German women joined in a spontaneous protest in central Berlin. They were objecting to the roundup of some of the city's last Jews, their husbands. In today's show,

Starting point is 00:00:44 we'll describe the Rosenstrasse protest, a remarkable example of civil disobedience. We'll also ponder whether a computer can make art and puzzle over some unusual phone calls. In the decades that led up to the Third Reich, Jews in Germany assimilated quite widely by intermarrying. In 1904, 9.3% of Jewish men and 7.7% of Jewish women who married chose someone outside the Jewish faith. By 1933, that had risen to 44%, so that by 1935, 35,000 Jews were living in intermarriages. In 1939, 1 in 10 Jews was married to a non-Jew. That presented a problem for the Nazis, who couldn't persecute these Jews without raising objections from their Aryan spouses. Hitler exempted intermarried Jews from the genocide, but he did inflict severe disadvantages on them. By 1938, there were 200 state laws regulating Jews and Jewish households,

Starting point is 00:01:40 sexual relations were prohibited between Aryans and Jews, and the Gestapo openly pressured German women to divorce their Jewish husbands. It didn't work. More than 90% of them refused to do so, and in late 1942 there were still nearly 30,000 of these German-Jewish mixed marriages. That may be admirable, but it carried real consequences. By this time, Jews were required to wear the Star of David in public, and having even friendly relations with them was punishable by imprisonment. It was a crime even to supply newspapers to Jews. Many of the Germans who had married Jews found that their parents abandoned them, and neighbors and co-workers refused to consort with them. They were not allowed to take civil service jobs, their professional careers were blocked, and they were given radically reduced

Starting point is 00:02:20 rations. One Aryan woman who was married to a Jew tried to use an Aryan air raid shelter and was told, the air that you breathe out, we can't stand to breathe in. Yet, in the face of these enormous legal and social pressures, 93% of the Aryans married to Jews stayed married. By 1943, with the Holocaust in full swing, these intermarried Jews were virtually the only officially registered Jews left in Germany. But Hitler was said to be impatient with this, and Josef Goebbels wanted to declare Berlin free of Jews in time for Hitler's 54th birthday in April. The decision was made to solve the Jewish problem once and for all. So on Saturday, February 27th, the Nazis began rounding up the remaining Jews in the Greater German Reich. Every covered truck in Berlin was requisitioned for the raid, which started at daybreak. The SS burst unannounced into factories while the local

Starting point is 00:03:09 Gestapo and the municipal police removed Jews from their homes. Anyone on the streets wearing a Star of David was taken as well. Of the 10,000 Jews who were rounded up, 8,000 were taken to internment centers around the city and then to train stations, which sent them to the death camps in the east. The remaining 2,000, mostly men, were related by marriage to Aryan Germans. They were locked up in Rosenstrasse 2-4, an administrative center of the Jewish community. By noon, their wives had heard about the roundup. They asked at the police station, which directed them to Rosenstrasse. Knowing that their husbands had been taken from work without food or clothing, most of them went home, packed bundles, and headed for eastern Berlin.

Starting point is 00:03:48 They arrived to a tense situation. A witness named Werner Goldberg said, Outside the building, the sidewalk was blocked off. Policemen stood across the street from the crowd that had gathered and prevented anyone from getting through. About 20 policemen, positioned about 10 meters from each other, formed a chain across the front of the building. And the people in the crowd waited, hindered from any kind of contact with persons inside. We had virtually no notion at all what was happening inside. The women had come here to seek information, not to protest. Many of them demanded their husbands' house keys. The guards

Starting point is 00:04:18 obtained these, hoping to quiet and disperse the crowd, but that only increased the women's resolve since it proved that their husbands were inside. Charlotte Israel told the guard, get me my husband's potato card. How do you expect me to eat? The guard gave her the card some minutes later, and she saw on it a scrawled message, Ich bin gesund, I am healthy. The women had come for their own reasons, but a feeling of solidarity began to grow among them. Normally, citizens were reluctant to dissent, but these women were all facing the same fear, and they refused to disperse. By sundown, at least 1,500 people were standing in the square, mostly women and children, swarming the guards outside the building and clamoring for their husband's release. One witness said the square, quote, was crammed with people, and the

Starting point is 00:04:59 accusing, demanding cries of the women rose above the noise of the traffic like passionate avowals of a love strengthened by the bitterness of life. Inside the building, Jews who were forced to act as clerks carried news of the protest to the prisoners, along with a flurry of rumors. Thirteen-year-old Hans Kuhn had been arrested with his father and sister while they'd been applying for ration cards. They'd been carried by truck to Rosenstrasse, where he says, we were taken care of by a young SS man who told us that outside our women were demonstrating for us. To this day, I marvel that there was almost this note of pride in the voice of this SS man, that it is possible in Germany that women stand up like that for their

Starting point is 00:05:34 husbands and children. On the second day, while the Gestapo continued to arrest Jews at their houses and on the street, the crowd grew in the square because most people didn't work on Sunday. Women in the crowd began to shout, we want our husbands back. Inside the building, 40 men were squeezed into one room of 20 square meters. They could only stand or sit, perhaps on a bale of straw or an old mattress. Some of the younger prisoners stood to allow the older ones to sit. One older man, hungry and distraught, died of a heart attack. Ernst Buchhofer said, if I stole a glance through the window, I could occasionally catch a glimpse of my wife and daughters among those passing back and forth

Starting point is 00:06:08 on the street. A Gestapo man told the prisoners, they are calling for you out there. They want you to come back. This is German loyalty. As it became clear that the women were determined, the city tried to stop their protest by blocking transportation to the area, and it closed the nearest elevated train station to keep people from seeing the crowd. But the protesters came back for a third day. The growing number of men inside the building only swelled the ranks of women outside pressing for their release. What had started as a vigil was becoming a demonstration, and the Nazis were strangely helpless to stop it. The Berlin Gestapo had an office just around the corner within earshot of the protest. Public gatherings were illegal, and the Gestapo registered any gathering that appeared hostile. But they couldn't find any

Starting point is 00:06:48 organizers in this protest. Root Gross, who was 10 years old at the time, said, The police kept driving us away, but we kept coming back. We went there several times a day, and we always met other women who stood there. There was an advertising column on the corner, and I used to stand there because from it I could see the window where I would occasionally see my father. When we were chased away, I could hold out longer at the advertising column because the police didn't come from all sides. That evening, the British Air Force began its first bombing of Berlin. The Rosenstrasse building was undamaged, but the attack was another blow to the city's morale, and it left the regime even more unwilling to confront its

Starting point is 00:07:20 own citizens. Day after day, the women kept returning, not as an organized movement, but individually or in pairs, on their way to or from their jobs. The ones who had to go on their way were always replaced by others. There was no precedent for this. There had never been a demonstration on behalf of Jews in wartime Nazi Germany, much less a demonstration of unarmed women standing face to face with armed municipal police officers. Charlotte to Israel recalled, we didn't really talk much to one another. We chanted and shouted, Give us back our husbands, you murderers, you criminals. As the tension mounted, on the fourth day, the SS unpacked machine guns and took aim

Starting point is 00:07:54 from behind a barricade of sandbags. The resistors, who had no weapons, stood their ground. The SS trained the guns on the women, but they kept calling, Give us our husbands back. The guards shouted, Clear the streets or we'll shoot. At that, the women scrambled into alleys and courtyards, but within minutes, they were back. Again and again, these threats of gunfire scattered them, and again and again, they returned, massed together, and called out for their husband. Word began to spread through the

Starting point is 00:08:18 city. Swedish and Swiss journalists, some of the only journalists left, began to visit the demonstration, and the Swiss embassy cabled Washington. Elza Holzer had originally come to Rosenstrasse for information about her husband, but as she witnessed the women's resolve, she started to feel she was helping to affect his fate. She said, we expected that our husbands would return home and that they wouldn't be sent to the camps. We acted from the heart, and look what happened. If you had to calculate whether you would do any good by protesting, you wouldn't have gone. But we acted from the heart. We wanted to show that we weren't willing to let them go. What one is capable of doing when there is danger can never be repeated. I'm not a fighter by nature, only when I have to be. I did what was given me to do. When my husband needed my protection,

Starting point is 00:08:56 I protected him. I went to Rosenstrasse every day before work, and there was always a flood of people there. It wasn't organized or instigated. Everyone was simply there, exactly like me. That's what is so wonderful about it. On March 6th, Charlotte Israel said, the street was dark with a sea of heads, a thousand people. I went there every day and each day there were more and more. Since word had spread, the protest now included people who didn't have imprisoned relatives and Israel remembered that it took on a more political and anti-Nazi character. Protesters shouted, you murderers, and not just give us our husbands. So on that day, the Nazi leadership took the only practical option that was open to it. It gave in and released all the intermarried Jews. Ruth Gross's father came home thin and unshaven, but holding a release order.

Starting point is 00:09:39 Josef Goebbels wrote in his diary, there were some rather unpleasant scenes in front of a Jewish old people's home, where the people gathered in large throngs, and some even sided with the Jews. I have given orders not to continue the evacuation of the Jews at such a critical time. Amazingly, 25 men who'd been sent to Auschwitz were brought back on an overnight train and offered an apology for what was called a technical oversight. The Rosenstrasse demonstration was the only group protest by Germans of the Third Reich on behalf of fellow citizens who were Jewish. And it worked. It worked in part because of fortunate timing. It had come just nine days after the German army's disastrous loss at Stalingrad, which had devastated German morale. And it had coincided with the first heavy bombing of Berlin by the Allies. So as the capital

Starting point is 00:10:18 of the Reich lay in rubble, the city's residents saw SS manpower being deployed against unarmed women. The Nazi leadership couldn't afford to use violence to resolve the standoff at Rosenstrasse for fear of turning public opinion against them, so the surest way to break up the protest and prevent it from spreading was to release the men. Nathan Stoltzfus, a historian at Florida State University, writes, Goebbels realized he could not murder all the people he wanted to murder, the Jewish relatives, spouses, sympathizers. At some point, the Germans would have begun to identify with one another rather than with a government that kept demanding ever more human victims. People would begin to question and complain, and the

Starting point is 00:10:53 resulting unrest would hinder the social unity that was needed to fight the war. And a public discussion about the fate of the Jews threatened to reveal the extent of the Holocaust, which would create more publicity and potential unrest. As it was, Goebbels worried that Germans were learning to protest. After a couple of similar demonstrations later that year, he wrote, the people know just exactly where the soft spot of the leadership is and will always exploit this. The state may never, against this better insight, give in to the pressure of the street. In his diary, he vowed that he would carry out the deportations more thoroughly later on, but this never came to pass. Most of the intermarried Jews lived in Berlin, where support for Nazism wasn't strong and where the international press was watching. So the Jews released from Rosenstrasse survived the war. Indeed, within

Starting point is 00:11:34 Germany, they were virtually the only ones who did. In September 1944, 98% of the Jews who remained in the country were intermarried, and the overwhelming majority of German Jews who survived the war were married to non-Jews. Tens of thousands of Germans had risked their own lives to stand by their Jewish spouses. It would be simplistic to say that this kind of demonstration could have been replicated easily. Certainly we have to consider the events at Rosenstrasse in light of the particular circumstances there. But it's worth asking what might have happened if non-violent protests such as this had taken place more widely within Germany during the war. One of the incarcerated Jews was a journalist named Georg Zivier.

Starting point is 00:12:14 After the war, he called the protest the flare of a small torch that might have ignited a general resistance to arbitrary tyranny. Years later, one of Goebbels' chief aides said that the simplest solution to the embarrassment at Rosenstrasse was to eradicate completely the reason for the protest. In other words, the Nazi leadership would consider yielding to resistance. There are other examples of this. In the late 1930s, when the Nazis ordered that crucifixes in schools be replaced with pictures of Hitler, Catholics had refused. And when they proposed euthanizing the disabled and the mentally ill, the public objected.

Starting point is 00:12:39 The regime backed away from both of these policies. Goebbels and Hitler were sensitive to popular opinion. They relied on a semblance of unity and social harmony. The Nazi party stressed that its political power arose from the conscious decision of the people to support it. Hitler insisted on getting popular support before implementing his hate laws, and he tried to change social traditions only gradually to avoid arousing popular discontent. That contradicts our received idea of a totalitarian state. The main figures in the pantheon of German resistance had all died in their struggle. It was understood that you couldn't win,

Starting point is 00:13:10 the only choice lay between acceptance and martyrdom. What set the Rosenstrasse protest apart was that the women had stood together, non-violently, in an overt display of opposition. The state might control the press and the radio, but it couldn't control dissent that was expressed publicly. This wasn't even a political demonstration. These women weren't opposing anti-Semitic policies per se. Each wife just wanted her own husband back and often departed quickly when she'd got him. That underscores the bravery of the protesters. Other institutions had cooperated with the Nazis here. The Swedish press had agreed not to report on the roundup, and the Catholic establishment had given lists of intermarried Jews to the authorities.

Starting point is 00:13:48 So the protesters were resisting when others were not, when active steps were being taken to hide and silence their opposition. Stoltzfus, the historian, wrote, the implications of this protest are that mass, public, and nonviolent acts of non-cooperation by non-Jewish Germans on behalf of German Jews could have slowed or even stopped the Nazi genocide of German Jews. True, some six million Jews were murdered. Not many Jews were saved. Yet when the non-Jewish German populace protested non-violently and en masse, the Nazis made concessions. When Germans protested for Jews, Jews were saved. The building is gone now. It was destroyed in an Allied bombing at the end of the war. But a memorial stands in a park nearby. The inscription reads,

Starting point is 00:14:29 The strength of civil disobedience, the vigor of love, overcomes the violence of dictatorship. Give us our men back. Women were standing here, defeating death. Jewish men were free. Thank you. slash IT security conference held in Las Vegas. I watched one talk given by two German journalists and an academic trying to expose fake science slash academic publication groups who will publish any paper for money and hold fake conferences. Long story short, the journalists get an algorithm to generate a fake scientific paper.

Starting point is 00:15:19 They read it word for word at a fake conference. Not only does it get published in a scientific journal, but they are given an award for best paper at the conference. The video that Aaron watched is from DEFCON 26 from this past August and was entitled Inside the Fake Science Factory. Two German investigative reporters used a program called SciGen to generate a fake computer science paper to present at a fake science conference. SciGen was created by three students at MIT who said of it, SciGen is a program that generates random computer science research papers, including graphs,

Starting point is 00:15:56 figures, and citations. Our aim here is to maximize amusement rather than coherence. The title of the paper presented at this sham conference was Highly Available Collaborative Trainable Communication, and the abstract was Unified Scalable Theory Have Led to Many Natural Advances, Including Object-Oriented Languages and Hash Tables. In fact, few steganographers would disagreeberish involving theories of red-black trees, a 1990s Nintendo Game Boy system, and that memorable quote from the Greek philosopher Plato, a single particle is a reflection of quantum potentiality. This great presentation had one of the journalists showing a simple figure of basically three circles

Starting point is 00:16:57 with some arrows connecting them and saying very insightfully, here is the relationship between our solution and the analysis of the memory bus. This is the memory bus, and here on the bottom and the top and all of this. And for this amazing presentation, they won a Certificate of Best Presentation award, which tells you quite a bit about the standards of the conference. Yeah, I guess there aren't many skeptics at a fake conference. Oh, I guess that's a good point. An article in MIT News explains SciGen as an academic mad libs of sorts arbitrarily slotting in computer science buzzwords like distributed

Starting point is 00:17:34 hash tables and Byzantine fault tolerance. The students who wrote SciGen had said that one useful purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissions to conferences that you suspect might have very low submission standards. Soon after creating the program in 2005, the students had used it to create a paper that they had submitted for presentation at the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics, a conference that one of the students had said was known for being spammy and having loose standards. After the paper was accepted to the conference,

Starting point is 00:18:05 the students revealed the paper's origins and started getting a lot of attention from the media, at which point the conference disinvited the team. Undeterred, the students raised some money to travel to Florida, rented a room right outside the conference rooms, and held their own session of presentations based on SciGen papers, which were really pretty funny based on the video they made of it. The students hadn't seen the slides generated for the presentations prior to the session, so it's pretty amusing to watch them have to improvise on the spot for, say, why the title

Starting point is 00:18:37 page for Synthesizing Checksums and Lambda Calculus Using JOG has a picture of Che Guevara on it. calculus using jog has a picture of Che Guevara on it. It's a revolutionary system, and that's why we have this icon on the screen, said the quick-thinking presenter. Then he had to read, with a straight face, the first slide in the talk, titled Motivation, which listed items such as trends in operating systems prove that right-back caches and embedded models are more typical than ever, and researchers do not currently understand the essential problems involved in crypto analysis. Later in the talk, he had to explain one of the main assumptions of the research, which is that there are only childlike adversaries. Another presenter got to deal with a paper titled On the Study of the Ethernet,

Starting point is 00:19:25 which had an image of a package wrapped in brown paper on its title page, of which the presenter said that it's a cliched analogy. The Ethernet is a box wrapped in the brown paper of various protocol details. When you unwrap the box and open the box, what do you find inside? Part of this study's motivation was that epistemologies must be made symbiotic, flexible, and large-scale, and that the usual method is to throw more access points at the obstacle. The paper's listed conclusions include, prevents the World Wide Web, and we verify that redundancy and e-business can interfere to achieve this aim. As funny as some of the side-gen text is,

Starting point is 00:20:07 the random graphics that it created were just downright ridiculous. For example, there was a graph supposedly depicting extremely mobile information underwater that was just covered with random data points that were said to represent distance in percentile plotted against throughput in Celsius, and that purportedly demonstrated that simplicity decreased by 9,005 seconds. And another titled average clock speed that said we dog-fooded tip on our own desktop machines paying particular attention to hard disk speed and showed interrupt rates, number of nodes, plotted against time since 1970. But no one questioned any of this.

Starting point is 00:20:52 Well, I mean, I don't know. You know, when they were doing the presentation, they weren't really trying hard to pretend that these were really serious papers. But still, I can't help but think these programs, it's comical now because it's sort of inept, but as time goes on, they're just going to get better at being plausibly fake papers. But still, I can't help but think these programs, it's comical now because it's sort of inept, but as time goes on, they're just going to get better at being plausibly fake papers. Yes, yes. Well, and actually, as it is, it turns out that some of the papers generated by SciGen

Starting point is 00:21:16 have been taken at least seriously. I mean, remember, the student's paper was originally accepted to this conference before it turned out what it was. And MIT News has reported that SciGen has had a serious impact as many researchers did start using it to expose conferences with low submission standards. So they were actually using it for that purpose. And the reporting on the students' experience with the multi-conference led the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE, the world's largest organization of technical professionals, to withdraw its sponsorship of the conference. And in 2013, IEEE and Springer Publishing removed more than 120 papers from their sites

Starting point is 00:21:56 after a French researcher's analysis concluded that the papers were generated by SciGen. So after realizing that they had published some algorithmically created articles, in 2015 Springer released SciDetect, an open source program that can be used to detect papers written by SciGen and other fake paper generators such as MathGen and PhysGen. So just a heads up for anyone who thought they might try a shortcut for getting a paper published. So now it's an arms race. Yes, exactly. but for getting a paper published.

Starting point is 00:22:22 So now it's an arms race. Yes, exactly. After episode 238, Alex Balmonds wrote, following on your discussion of AI-generated Harry Potter texts, I recently came across this. As explained in the video, it is an episode of the Idea Channel, entirely written by an AI, that was trained on the corpus of all the previous episodes so far. I am not familiar with this podcast, but I must say the delivery of the presenter is amazing. I can imagine that a lateral thinking puzzle being solved by an AI would be pretty amusing to listen to.

Starting point is 00:23:13 But what Alex is referring to was an episode of the PBS Idea Channel posted on June 29, 2016, entitled, This Episode Was Written by an AI. In it, the host did do a remarkable job of making several minutes of nonsense sound like it should mean something. And he then followed with an explanation of neural nets and how one had been used to create the text for the episode. But what really caught my attention was the companion episode, which was posted the following day and titled, Can an Artificial Intelligence Create Art? I found several of the ideas raised in that episode really interesting, especially given our discussions on this show about AIs and the art that they've produced. The host of the show, Mike Rugnetta, said at the beginning of the episode that the question is not whether computers and artificial intelligence can make art. The

Starting point is 00:23:54 question is whether we will allow them to make art. Rugnetta says that creators make works and that what makes some works art is an audience appreciating them in a certain way. And he questions whether humans will appreciate machine-made works as art. He gives several examples of visual art and music that's been produced by neural networks that were fed lots of examples of a type of art and then produced more examples, but these are usually not seen as art. Rugnetta says that art is viewed as something that is produced with effort, that demonstrates an organization, Rugnetta says that art is viewed as something that is produced with effort, that demonstrates an organization, technique, or skill of the creator, that has meaning and intention, and

Starting point is 00:24:29 that embodies the subjectivity and perspective of the artist. Machine-generated works are the result of a different kind of labor than has traditionally been recognized, and lack intention, meaning, subjectivity, and perspective. Rugnetta says that the nature of machine-generated creativity is hard for humans to internalize. He tells the story of how David Cope, the creator of the music writing program EMI, ended up destroying its database of 25 years of input because people wouldn't see its creations as music, but only as computer output, something that was too easily reproducible and thus devalued. That's an interesting question. It's sort of a form of chauvinism. I mean, maybe not today, but eventually it'll be hard to tell.

Starting point is 00:25:09 There's going to be a line where machines have to cross when they start developing what could be legitimately called intentionality. Maybe we've already reached it. I don't know. But it seems like humans might be resistant to acknowledge that when it happens. That's true. Yes. And Ragnutta suggests that computer-generated works

Starting point is 00:25:25 that have been successful so far are successful because they're relying heavily on interpretations by the audience. So right now, the audience have to add a certain amount to the works for them to be seen as successful. And he gives us an example of that, the movie Sunspring, that we discussed so much in episode 228. But he says that with Sun Spring, it's difficult to say what Benjamin, the AI that wrote Sun Spring, could possibly be getting at because Benjamin is getting at nothing and says that to see machine-generated works as art, we'll either need to give up our search for meaning in art, or as you say, that machines won't have to get better at creating works that have more human-type meaning in them. Yeah, that's interesting. It's

Starting point is 00:26:04 like sometimes people give a paintbrush to a chimp or an elephant. Sure, right. And there's sort of a philosophical debate about whether what's produced is art or not. Sometimes it's visually appealing. Right. And I was actually reading up a little bit about that for this piece because I had the same thought too. Would we consider what animals produce to be art?

Starting point is 00:26:24 And it seems to come down to some people kind of question, is the chimp or the elephant, or in some case, bunnies, are they doing it because they enjoy it and they want to be producing this? Or are they doing it just because they've been trained to and they get little treats for doing it? So to them, it's not really an activity with any meaning. So I guess it's the question of the meaning behind it. Yeah, but that's not always clear. Rugnetta also addressed the question of how we think about whether machines are really making the works that they create. He notes that machines have been used to create art for a long

Starting point is 00:26:55 time. For example, think of typewriters, computers, and cameras, but they're seen as being guided by humans. They aren't independent, and they require direct and constant human involvement. But AI programs complicate this as the goal is for the programs to eventually create something significant and original without the direct and constant involvement of a human. Currently, the programs are more imitative and are just assembling source material in new ways, so they'll eventually need to learn to add creative intent. Rugnetta questions whether anything is truly original, or whether everything we think of as original is really just a remix of old ideas and elements. He argues that being truly generative shouldn't mean producing something that is truly original,

Starting point is 00:27:36 but for that an AI truly generative will mean truly independent. And he sums it all up by saying again that the question isn't can machines make art, as he thinks that the answer is that they already do. The question is really whether we will ever see works made by AI as being art and treat them as such. Which is a different question. Which is a different question. Thanks so much to everyone who writes in to us. We really appreciate your follow-ups and comments. So if you have any that you'd like to send, please send them to podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's Greg's turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. I'm

Starting point is 00:28:18 going to give him a strange sounding situation and he has to work out what's going on, asking yes or no questions. This puzzle comes from Jennifer Sinnott, who says that she started listening to the podcast after her friend recommended our episode about the Boston molasses disaster because she is the great-great-granddaughter of one of the people who died in that event. Yeah. And she says her puzzle concerns something that happened to her friend Julie, who is also a listener to the podcast.

Starting point is 00:28:42 So hi, Julie. Jennifer's puzzle is, recently, Julie's phone number was listed as the contact number on a Craigslist ad seeking a roommate. Julie is now getting phone calls at exact two-minute intervals for random four-hour blocks and expects this will continue for one month. What happened? Does she intend this? No. So her name was just, her number was just used on Craigslist by someone. Uh-huh.

Starting point is 00:29:10 As the contact number for, I'm sorry, what was it again? An ad seeking a roommate. Is it important what the ad was seeking? Not terribly. I mean, it might have been, it might have turned up in the same connection

Starting point is 00:29:20 on a different Craigslist ad. Possibly. Okay. Two minute intervals for random four hour blocks yeah and expects expects this will continue for one month is she upset at this yes yes getting that many phone calls yeah so is her identity in particular important it's just it's just a live phone number right that someone wanted a live phone number to use for some purpose yes i'm not quite sure what you mean. Well, someone's doing this to her,

Starting point is 00:29:47 and they could have just made up a phone number. Did they just make this up and it happened to be her phone number? No, no, no. So they chose her number? No. They found her number? No. Okay, but it wasn't made up.

Starting point is 00:30:03 Right. Is this a robot? Is this automated in some way? I mean, the calls, obviously. The calls are coming from a bot, yes. So someone does this deliberately. So someone has programmed a bot to call the same phone number every two minutes for four hours. Yes.

Starting point is 00:30:20 Were you going to say something? Yeah, I just wanted to be careful you weren't making an assumption here, but check your assumptions about some different things. Okay, well, someone got her phone number. I wouldn't... Someone programmed her phone number into a bot. Okay, yes. And for a while there, I was pursuing how they got her. Is it important how they got her number?

Starting point is 00:30:40 Would that tell me something? They got her number from the Craigslist ad. number? Would that tell me something? They got her number from the Craigslist ad. The person who put it into the bot got her number from a Craigslist ad. Okay. Sorry. So she put her number into a Craigslist ad? No. That's what's confusing me. Her number appears in a Craigslist ad? Yes. She didn't put it there? Correct. Someone placed a Craigslist ad with her phone number.

Starting point is 00:31:05 Yes. Without her knowledge. Yes. And it was an ad for a roommate? A roommate, yes. Someone placed an ad on Craigslist for a roommate. Yes. Representing her as the interested party?

Starting point is 00:31:18 No. Someone placed an ad on Craigslist for a roommate. Yes. Somebody who was actually looking for a roommate. But put her phone number. Yes yes instead of their own yes so this person was looking for a roommate yeah but put the wrong number in yes that is correct and hence won't ever get a roommate right not that way right does this person whoever placed the ad expected to get a roommate they were hoping to all All right. So they placed a number on Craigslist unwittingly with her number?

Starting point is 00:31:48 Yes. Yes. Okay. So they thought they were putting their own number. Yes. And they accidentally put Julie's number. So then there's one other part here. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:31:57 That doesn't explain. Right. Right. But there's two different someones. The someone who placed the ad and the someone who programmed the bot, who put the number into the bot. Okay. So these are presumably two unrelated things.

Starting point is 00:32:07 Two. Well, they're related, but the people aren't related. Right. So someone just is going through Craigslist and harvesting phone numbers. Oh, is it just telemarketing, just spam calls? No. No. Because Craigslist would be a source of live phone numbers.

Starting point is 00:32:20 Right. Yes. That's not it. Yes. No. They're harassing her. I mean, she's getting a phone call every two minutes. It's not intended for telemarketing. Is it someone who opposes Craigslist or the idea of-

Starting point is 00:32:32 No, but that's more like on the right track. It's sort of an activist or someone with a bone to pick. Yes. Yes. And that's very close. They were offended by something in the ad. So they're doing this as retribution. The ad was posted by a man seeking a roommate, and after getting a trickle of text asking to see the apartment, Julie suddenly received a very, very angry text from someone

Starting point is 00:32:53 who objected to the ad's wording, as the ad had ended with the phrase, No gay people, thanks for understanding. Julie responded and explained it wasn't her ad, but the angry person had already paid for a service that harasses a phone number of your choice by having bots call that number every two minutes for blocks of time for a month. Do you know what happened? They just stopped eventually, I guess?

Starting point is 00:33:13 Julie eventually found a way to block the number. It's because they were coming from a restricted number, and she eventually found a way to block it. But yeah, I mean, this actually happened. That's terrible. Wow, yeah. So thanks so much to Jennifer for that puzzle. And it was interesting to virtually meet someone actually connected to the Boston molasses disaster. Yeah, that's at first.

Starting point is 00:33:30 If anyone else has a puzzle they'd like to send in to us, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. This podcast is supported entirely by our amazing listeners. is supported entirely by our amazing listeners. If you would like to help support our celebration of the quirky and the curious, please check out our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset or see the support us section of the website at futilitycloset.com.

Starting point is 00:33:56 If you become one of our phenomenal patrons, you'll get access to extra discussions for some of the stories, more lateral thinking puzzles, peeks behind the scenes, and updates on Sasha, our dedicated feline mascot. At our website, you can also graze through Greg's collection of over 10,000 exceptional esoterica. Browse the Futility Closet store, learn about the Futility Closet books, or see the show notes for the podcast, with links and references for the topics we've covered.

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Futility Closet - 244-The Women's Protest

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