The Tsuki Project AKA SYSTEMSPACE: The Online Cult Inspired by an Anime

Foreword: 

This was originally written on October 5, 2021. I know that I said that my previous post about China 🇨🇳 and North Korea 🇰🇵’s relationship was going to be my last post for November, and I was planning on it being the last post for this November, but after I finished eating breakfast, eating Thanksgiving 🦃 leftovers, and downloading more photos from DeviantART to use as wallpapers for my phone 📱 or my laptop 💻, I figured, “I can crank out one more before the month is over.” That’s why we’re here today, Friday November 29, 2024.

Now, as you read from the title, this is about the Tsuki Project AKA SYSTEMSPACE, and the best way that I can really describe it is that it’s an online Internet suicide cult 🛜 that used the imagery of the cult anime series, Serial Experiments Lain. At first, I thought that the Tsuki Project was directly inspired by Serial Experiments Lain, like it was started by a fan of the series that perhaps took it a bit too seriously, and thought that it was real and that it was really possible to transfer one’s consciousness into a computer 🖥️ and into the Internet 🛜 just like Lain does in the anime. And that’s what I thought when I wrote this, as you’ll read down below. I thought maybe it was like Jediism, that weird made-up religion or philosophy inspired by the Jedi Order from Star Wars, but after watching Kylie Boggly’s video on the topic, I learned that wasn’t the case. Jediism for one isn’t an actual cult the same way SYSTEMSPACE was. It’s much looser, disorganized, and lacks any real leadership. It’s largely just people cosplaying as Jedi, or using Jedi teachings and applying it to their daily lives.

I also learned that the core tenets of SYSTEMSPACE were not really directly inspired by Serial Experiments Lain at all. There were completely unrelated at first. They were much closer to something like Heaven’s Gate, except instead of using aliens 👽, UFOs 🛸, and godly imagery and terminology, it uses computer and Internet language 🖥️. It all started because this 4chan user called Tsuki had daydreams 💭 and visions, or claimed to anyway. He talked about his purported beliefs, how the universe is apparently like a computer system called Systemspace (hence the name of the eventual cult) and it consists of multiple dimensions called systems, and that humans live in the “Life” system. The Life system is bad because according to him it was using too much energy or aurora. It’s all very confusing and stupid, and doesn’t really make sense, and the logic falls apart the more you think about it. 

So, then Tsuki created a website called SYSTEMSPACE.link, to try to create a way for people to leave the Life system in order to start a new one. A process that the website referred to as “unlinking,” which was pretty much suicide. The website claimed not to condone suicide, but come on, how else is one supposed to “unlink” from the Life system that Tsuki says is so bad? At first, a lot of people thought that the website was some kind of Serial Experiments Lain ARG (augmented reality game) because it used the imagery of that show, like Lain herself was featured on the website’s homepage. But, once people dug deeper, and saw that it was talking about Life systems and unlinking, they quickly realized that this had nothing to do with Serial Experiments Lain at all and that this was no ARG. This was something far more sinister. Tsuki had simply used the imagery from that show to trick people and entice them into joining his cult, and adopting his weirdo ideology. Even though his ideology had pretty much nothing to do with the show itself, other than it was vaguely conputery sounding 🖥️.

Tsuki had used something else to entice people too into joining his cult, something far grosser 🤮 and disturbing. He wrote on the website that the age of consent inside of the next system to replace the Life system was around 12, or even as low as 9 😨. Like, what the hell man? Are trying to attract pedophiles to your cult or what? The website also referred to babies as “newborn people,” a bit weird and creepy as Kylie said in her video. 

Most of the information that I’m writing down here came from Kylie’s video. If you haven’t already heard of this cult before, and you want to learn more about it, go watch her video on it, it’s fantastic. I’ll have it linked down below in the original text. The only negative about that video I’d say is that she had an ad for Scentbird in it, a fragrance company. A lot of the comments below that video were talking about how it was a bit hypocritical of her to do a sponsorship ad for a company lead by a cult leader when this video is about criticizing a cult leader. This is why I don’t like most YouTube sponsorships, they’re always for really shady companies led by shady people, or they’re just pure scams like Established Titles. That was a pure scam, and people actually got conned out of money 💵 for signing up for that. That’s why I’m glad that most YouTubers (most of the ones that I watch and that I trust anyway) have stopped doing sponsorships for that company. 

But, they are still sponsorships for BetterHelp, despite how dodgy and shady that company is and how awful their metal health services are. They got into controversy a few years back because of how bad their therapy services were, and how they were exploiting people with mental health issues to make a profit 🤑, and that was enough to get people to stop sponsoring them for a while. But, it seems everyone forgot about that, or they don’t care and they’re willing to overlook it, because everyone started to doing BetterHelp sponsorships again all of a sudden. They’re still a terrible company. They haven’t improved or changed at all, they’re still the same as they were before, and yet, people are still sponsoring them in their videos. I guess so long as they’ve been given money 💵, these YouTubers are more than willing to look the other way. 

I actually edited that Scentbird ad out of Kylie’s video. I downloaded it off of YouTube, put it in iMovie, and took that ad out. I did because I was worried about her being harassed by Tsuki, and her being forced to remove her video from YouTube or edit something out just to appease him, and keep him from harassing her. I wanted to preserve the original video as much as I can. But, I also slightly altered it and took the ad out because like a lot of other people who watched Kylie’s video, I too felt it was hypocritical for her accept a sponsorship from Scentbird. I would post that version of the video on here, but the file is just too big and it will just take up too much on my Google Drive or Blogger media archive or whatever it’s called, and I don’t want to have to deal with that. So, I’ll have to use the YouTube version of that video with the Scentbird ad, I apologize.

Something else that I learned about the Tsuki Project from watching Kylie’s video is that someone has actually died from this cult. Yes, the cult has claimed its first confirmed victim. That victim was a 17 year old Canadian boy 🇨🇦♂︎ named Jake Fehr. He was a troubled youth, likely experiencing anxiety or depression and was pushed over the edge by reading the teachings of Tsuki on the SYSTEMSPACE website. He committed suicide and was found dead in the woods 🌲. This makes the cult much more disturbing and much more dangerous in my eyes than it already was. It’s a shame that this Tsuki guy ♂︎ hasn’t faced any legal repercussions or any consequences for doing this, for causing this boy’s death. The Internet 🛜 just allows horrible people to get away with horrible things like this without facing any real consequences. 

There is no accountability for people such as this. It’s all that anonymity, it gives people permission and incentive to be their worst selves. It makes them feel invincible and unstoppable. It’s things like this that make people think that the Internet 🛜 should be more regulated, and should be restricted for certain age groups. Australia 🇦🇺 recently passed a law to restrict access to the Internet 🛜 for everyone under the age of 16. So, from here on out, children will not be allowed to use the Internet 🛜 in Australia 🇦🇺 until they’re 16 years old when they’re a bit less susceptible to the pressure and vitriol that’s rampant throughout social media. When their developing brains 🧠 are not as vulnerable to the horrible things can found on the Internet 🛜. Though this law wouldn’t have been much help to Jake if a similar law had been implemented in Canada 🇨🇦 before his death, or if this law had been been implemented before his death and he had been an Australian citizen 🇦🇺 instead of a Canadian one 🇨🇦 since he was 17 when he was exposed to SYSTEMSPACE and was driven to suicide by Tsuki’s lies.

At least, the SYSTEMSPACE website was taken down and is no longer around to harm anymore unsuspecting people who might’ve stumbled upon it otherwise. But, Tsuki is still at large, and is in hiding 😶‍🌫️ as of now because of what happened to Jake Fehr and the media scrutiny his website faced. But, he pops up every once in a while to cause trouble, mostly silence critics of his. He did this sort of thing to a YouTube channel called Scare Theater who did a video on him that was critical of him (as are most videos about him and the website are). He flagged his video on the basis of Scare Theater exposing him and revealing his identity. So, Scare Theater was forced to remove his video on Tsuki and SYSTEMSPACE, and then release an edited down version of it with those sections talking about Tsuki’s identity removed just to get Tsuki to stop harassing him. That’s just his pattern now. If there’s video about him and his website that’s critical of him and his website, and if the channel is big enough and has a large enough following, then he will target that video and that channel and harass them until they take it down. 

That’s why I was worried about Kylie’s video, and why I downloaded it as quickly as I could because I was worried she might face the same thing. I’m still worried that she might. I’ll be okay though because I have no audience, I run a small blog that pretty much except my immediate family knows about and not even they read it. And while I do have a YouTube channel, I don’t post videos on there, and I really use my YouTube account to like videos, comment, and create playlists. So, I doubt Tsuki will ever discover this, or target me. If he does, I’ll stand my ground, and I will refuse to change anything about this post. It will stay as it is. This Tsuki guy ♂︎ is a scumbag, just a really spiteful and loathsome person, and I hope he gets what’s coming to him one day. 

There was this video I stumbled upon that initially inspired me to write this that apparently features music that used on the SYSTEMSPACE website that I’ll link here. The uploader of the video claims that he is not associated with the website at all or supports its ideology, but I don’t know. It’s hard to know what to believe and what not to believe on the Internet 🛜. The uploader also refers to the website as an ARG, when as we’ve established, it wasn’t.

I do still plan on watching and reviewing Serial Experiments Lain in the future. It’s a shame that this is first thing that I’ve written and posted about it here on the blog, but it does give me a little of comfort knowing that this cult of Tsuki’s wasn’t actually directly inspired by the show, and that he had just used the imagery of it to cynically exploit people’s love for that show and to lure them into his website to try to indoctrinate them into his ideology and end their own lives. If you want to see an actual Serial Experiments Lain website that was actually created by a real fan of that series, go check out Wired Sounds for Wired People. It’s pretty much everything people initially thought SYSTEMSPACE was until they learned that it was all a ploy to get people to commit suicide based on a fake ideology literally dreamt up by an Internet conman 🛜. I don’t know if Wired Sounds for Wired People is still up or not, but if it is, I might link it here. 

Then after that, I’ll review Texhnolyze if I can get a copy of it, a show that isn’t at all connected to Serial Experiments Lain (like it’s not part of the same universe or anything as far as I know), but shares the same character designer, Yoshitoshi Abe. It also has similar themes and concepts, like they’re both science fiction anime series that deal with computers, the Internet 🛜, robotics, and cybernetics. Though, from what I understand, Texhnolyze deals more with robotics and cybernetics than Lain does, and it features androids (maybe?). It’s also set in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, much further into the future than Lain, whereas Lain is more or less like our world the way it is now, though a tad bit stranger and more uncanny. Like the intro said, it’s in present day, present time. 

Also, since I don’t know if I’ll have another opportunity to talk about this, I guess I should tell you about the games that I’ve been playing recently on the Switch. A couple of weeks ago, I bought a Star Wars combo pack for the Switch called Star Wars Racer & Commando Combo, which contained two Star Wars games from older generations on the same card: Star Wars Episode I: Racer and Star Wars: Republic Commando. Star Wars Episode I: Racer is from originally from the 32-bit era or fifth generation of gaming, and was originally available for the Nintendo 64 and the PS1 in 1999, and Star Wars: Republic Commando was originally from the sixth generation of gaming available for the XBox and PC in 2005. This double feature combo release is the first time that Republic Commando has been available on an Nintendo console. 

The reason why I got these was that I was interested in playing them for quite some time, especially Star Wars Episode I: Racer, and the combo pack was being sold at a pretty affordable price for a console game on the Switch. Plus, they’re both based in the prequel era, which is by far my favorite era of Star Wars. So, what did I think of both games after playing them for a couple of weeks? I like them, they’re pretty enjoyable so far. I can see why each of these two games has a cult following, and why so many Star Wars fans love them so much 🥰. 

Now, the Switch version of Star Wars Episode I: Racer is just called Star Wars: Racer, but when it was originally released back in 1999, it was called Star Wars Episode I: Racer because it was a tie-in game for Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. It was directly based off of the Podracing sequence in that movie. But, for the sake of brevity, I will be referring to the game as Star Wars Episode I: Racer since that’s the title most people know it as.  

Star Wars Episode I: Racer is by the far the older and much more primitive game, especially from a graphical perspective. The graphics for that game look really dated, and no amount of upscaling or remastering will cover up how dated it looks. But, it is still a fun game for what it is. It’s a racing game that gives you good feeling of what it would feel like to pilot a Podracer, and if you liked the Podracing sequence in The Phantom Menace, you’ll get a kick out of this game. 

But even if you take the Star Wars-y stuff out of it, it’s still a quality racing game mechanically speaking. It’s a lot like Wipeout in a lot of ways, even though I’ve never played a Wipeout game in my entire life. There is no story, which is something that it shares with Wipeout, and the game lacks many of the memorable sound effects Ben Burtt came up with for the Podracers in the film, but that’s fine because the gameplay more than makes up for those shortcomings. And the game does feature music from the film like “Duel of the Fates” for instance, so there is that. 

It of course means that on YouTube, if anyone does a longplay of this game, they’ll have to mute pretty much all of the music, including the opening crawl (because the game does have an opening crawl just like a lot of other Star Wars games do), to avoid copyright. The races do go on for a long time, which is something that I’m not used because of how the short the races are in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe or in all three Nickelodeon Kart Racers games, so I’m only able to play this game for so long before I get tired of it 🥱. But, that could may be because I usually play these games at night. 

That’s when I started playing Star Wars: Republic Commando, and arguably much meatier game. For one, it actually has a story that you can follow, and has characters that you can get attached to rather than simply play as. It is a first-person shooter (FPS), and while I don’t usually go for those type of games (I usually prefer playing third-person shooters, TPS), I have enjoyed this one so far. The gameplay is pretty fun, the shooting is good, the story and the characters are engaging, and I always appreciate a game with autosave. On top of that, this game is canon because Star Wars: The Clone Wars featured Republic Commandos in one episode, pretty much making them canon to the universe, not just relegated to Legends like a lot of other things Star Wars fans enjoyed about the Expanded Universe. Even if there are a few contradictions here and there between this and the films and The Clone Wars series, such as the B1 Battle Droids looking different, but that could be hand-waved away by them being a different model or being a variant or whatever. 

Also, unlike Episode I: Racer and many other Star Wars games, Republic Commando does not feature an opening crawl. It’s one of the few Star Wars games that I know of that doesn’t have an opening crawl. I don’t know why it doesn’t. Maybe they felt that it just didn’t fit the tone of the game. Maybe they wanted this game to have a strictly darker military feel to it, almost akin to Call of Duty, Battlefield, Medal of Honor, or even Doom 3 (which was released in 2004, one year before Republic Commando), and they felt that an opening crawl would ruin that. I mean, I don’t mind or anything, it’s just something that I noticed right away when I started playing the game. 

It does give the game a different feel, like you genuinely feel like you’re seeing a different side of the Star Wars universe, and seeing through a completely different genre, even though the events of the game do take place during the events of the films, particularly Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones and Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith. It definitely feels like you’re playing a very different game from Episode I: Racer, not just in terms of the gameplay and genre in the fact that Episode I: Racer is a racing game and Republic Commando is a tactical first-person shooter, but in the tone. 

Episode I: Racer is a much more light-hearted and family friendly game which fits given that it’s based on The Phantom Menace and The Phantom Menace is much more of a family movie or a kid’s movie than the other two prequels. While Republic Commando is a much darker game, it takes itself pretty seriously, though that’s not to say it’s completely devoid of humor (it isn’t), it’s set during a war, and people actually die. This is a war game through and through, and there are actual stakes. It that way, it is much closer in tone to Revenge of the Sith, which is the darkest film of the entire Prequel trilogy. The fact that Episode I: Racer is rated E for Everyone while Republic Commando is rated T for Teen should tell you everything you need to know how different these two games are. It was genius pairing them up like that. 

My only real problem with the game so far is the difficulty. The game has no difficulty settings, you’re kind of stuck with whatever difficulty the game has picked for you. And the difficulty definitely spikes pretty early on. I’m stuck on a pretty difficult part of the game, it’s in the level fittingly called “Canyons of Death,” where me and my squad mates are facing against Geonosians as well as B2 Super Battle Droids. I really hate the Geonosians in this game, they’re probably the most frustrating enemies in the game so far. They dodge your blaster fire, they fly around and poke at you with their spears, and it’s hard to get a clear shot at them, and they take quite a few more shots to kill so you’ll be using up quite a bit of your ammo. 

On top of that, there are these Elite Geonosians which carry around these laser beams which drain your health pretty quickly. Those guys take even more shots to kill than even the standard Geonosian warrior. I’ve lost count at how many times I’ve died in this one spot trying to kill these things, and even if I do manage to kill all the Geonosians and progress past that spot, I don’t get very far because then I face several B2 Super Battle Droids which take even more shots to kill than even the Elite Geonosians. I find it helpful to use the grenades to take down the B2 Super Battle Droids.

I always end up dying right away from them because they’re not just shooting at me and my squad mates, but there are these turrets shooting at us too. It’s so frustrating, and I still haven’t figured out a way to get past this part without dying. If anyone’s played this game before, please tell if there’s an easy way to get past that part that I’m describing. I don’t want to stuck on that part forever, and never progress and finish the game.

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(This is a screenshot of the home page of the SYSTEMSPACE website.)

 

The show [Serial Experiments Lain] has even inspired an actual cult called the Tsuki Project, which created a defunct website called Systemspace.Link. They took the show as literally as you can possibly take it, and believed that you could transfer your consciousness into a computer and gain eternal life as result. That, or perhaps the whole thing was just a prank or some type of fictional storyline or something, I don't know. It's hard to tell if anything is authentic or not on the Internet, and is especially hard to tell if someone or a group of people genuinely believe in something or not. The Internet has completely destroyed any sort of trust or authenticity in things, and has created an environment where people are suspicious everything they see or hear, and are suspicious of one another.

But, regardless, of whether they actually believed in this stuff or not, it is crazy that this one show, this Japanese sci-fi anime show 🇯🇵 from the late 90s actually inspired weird websites and cults like this, and Wired Sound for Wired People; which is not a cult website, but is a pure fan site dedicated to the show, and is sort of like a continuation of the story from the show; Wired Sound for Wired People arguably is a form of fan fiction on the part of the website's creator. This show not only gained a figurative cult following, but it actually inspired weird cults, and made people indulge in the ideas presented in the show such as the idea of becoming immortal by transferring one's consciousness into a computer, or the idea of a literal Internet God. It took on a whole other life of its own, in ways very few anime series do. 

 

(This is a wallpaper image for Serial Experiments Lain.)

 

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kylie boggly's video on SYSTEMSPACE AKA The Tsuki Project: