I have to be honest with you about something: for someone who makes his living producing content on the internet, I’m not sure I really have any idea why some things become popular online and others don’t. Sometimes I think I know, and then something will happen that will remind me that my ignorance is as vast and lush as the Tennessee Valley. Sometimes that something is lousy, like a post I was hoping would be popular, not taking off. And sometimes that something is wonderful and unexpected, like a silly reel I made about storing data on a salami going viral.
It’s true! As of this writing, a short video I made about encoding some computer data onto a slice of salami has had over 1.5 million views, 116,000 likes, and has been shared 104,000 times. How does someone predict something like that?
It’s literally a silly joke I had in my head, and it wouldn’t leave, so I had to just sit down and shoot it. This was one take, with my kid holding the camera. Have you seen it? Here, you can watch it, just so you get the context:
It’s pretty goofy, of course. It was the sort of thing that I feared maybe only I found funny, but I felt like I had to do it anyway, so I made that web-based interface for the laptop and wrote a BASIC program for the Apple II side, and rigged up a couple of salami-reading hardware units and now people are accusing me of being AI or actually believing I have encoded data into a slice of salami, or, even better, believing I have encoded data into salami, but also that I have done it in a stupid way, because they’re smarter.
You know, the internet.
Anyway, it’s so absurd and improbable that this silly thing has taken off, so to celebrate, we made a limited-edition shirt! (Note: This is a pre-order, meaning you have until the 19th of December to order it, and then we’ll print it and ship it in the new year). 
It’s a sort of lo-fi, one-color shirt, and yes, that typeface is the actual Apple II character set, so no worries there.
The text, of course, comes from the first string of text ever transmitted by salami, AUTOPIAN IS THE BEST, but with one error, making it AUTOPIAN IS THE BENT.
What a weird world, right? Don’t get me wrong, I’m positively delighted, and the fact that this bit of nonsense blew up so much gives me so much hope for the internet and the world in general! Plus, I’ve just about convinced myself that this is actually possible. Because of dilipids, you see.
Anyway, why not get a shirt and show the world you were in on the ground floor of the salami data-storage revolution!
The post To Celebrate The Strange Success Of The Data-Salami Thing, We Have A Shirt For You appeared first on The Autopian.
