I was sitting at a cafe with some friends, and we got onto the subject of weird anime we have watched. None of us are heavy anime consumers, so it's not really a topic that comes up often. I recalled a time I was at my brother's house a couple months ago and we got WAY too high and started digging through his Crunchyroll to find something dumb to watch, and found this movie from 2014 called "Satellite Girl and Milk Cow". So I described the premise, a guy who was turned into a literal bipedal cow by some wizard happens upon a sentient satellite that falls to earth and becomes a humanoid girl... I don't remember anything else I was REALLY high lol.
Over the next couple of minutes, I ended up saying "Sattelite Girl and Milk Cow" a couple more times. When eventually one of the friends doubted my recollection, they took out their phone to look it up. They started typing, and then stopped dead, stared at the screen for a few seconds and blurted out "What the fuck?"
They turned their phone around and they had typed "Satellite" into google and THE FIRTS RECOMMENDED RESULT was "Satellite Girl and Milk Cow". A goofy relatively obscure animated movie from 2014.
Ok, what? How? That's such a specific and obscure thing to pull as a first result. There are hundreds, if not THOUSANDS of other things that would be immediately more relevant to any random person's life than that. I don't have a smartphone so couldn't try on the spot, but when I got home, neither my laptop or desktop gave any similar behavior on multiple different search engines. It gave me a few seconds of dread that even though I have consciously made the choice to exclude myself from the constant data gathering of smartphones, other people's phones are still listening to me, which is something I hadn't really thought about before.
I'm sure plenty more people have stories like this, but the specificity and obscurity of this example is just so baffling to me, like there's NO way that it wasn't picked up as an audio cue.
I can almost feel the tinfoil hat beginning to grow out of my skull.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F0_z2zn7&hl=en-GB
~~Are you in Arizona?~~ (looked again and it gave Alaska, not sure what's going on there)
Spike in the past week or so of interest for some reason. Perhaps it has come up somewhere else recently to prime you to discuss it with your friends.
Security researchers have been looking hard for any proof of this for decades now. Humans are just super predictable even when it feels like what we do is completely random.
We watched it like last October, so way before that spike...
Maybe that spike was us talking about it yesterday and the one search my friend did, and this thread...
Looking at the 5 year trend in the USA, and how there are only 2 blips in interest and a flatline 0 background interest otherwise shows me that the movie is indeed as obscure as I thought. My one mental offramp was that it was actually popular in some other community somewhere and I just hadn't heard of it. Even the Worldwide 5 year graph has a LOT of 0 flatline... Which makes it all the stranger.
And all the people saying it was some correlation between our phones being together or something... I don't have a smartphone. I never searched for the movie on any device I own, the only device it was played on or even typed the words into was my brother's crunchyroll app on his TV (which is indeed one point of collection). We live in different states, and I have never logged into any of my accounts on his TV. I hadn't spoken the words aloud in over 6 months. I have one point of social media, an Instagram, where I interact with 0 other accounts and simply post my photography. This friend does not have an instagram. I can't find any reasonable thread that could connect anything to my friends' phone. He had definitely never heard of the movie before, hence why he went to go look it up. And again, none of us are heavy anime consumers, so it's not like he's searching anime on his phone all day.
I dont care what anyone says. Ive seen this happen like 10-20 times personally so they are definitely paying attention somehow. Most recently someone nearby mentioned a movie monsoon wedding. Go back home and its my #1 youtube recommendation despite never being there before.