Lan Ummok

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Over a three-year period in the late 2020s, more than half a billion people from seventy-eight countries willingly contributed personal content to an unknown entity.

.

The gist of it was fairly simple. A static website with a purple interface, allowing anyone to upload up to thirty-second audio clips, any number of times. No guidelines were given regarding the content itself. Just a button to record, and the words:

come forth, you have a voice

In 12 different languages.

https://lan-ummok.cc was the elected domain name.

Journalists reported that the platform was first whispered about on Mastodon channels. No one knew who was behind it. A new Satoshi Nakamoto case. Maybe shadier. Could be a start-up funded by another effective-altruism think tank, some speculated. Others claimed it was a state-propaganda tool. Rumors went on. It’s a hacker prank! A performance art piece by ill-intentioned activists! A backdoor surveillance program orchestrated by North Korea! Russia! And so on.

Yet, curiosity overcame fear.

..

Like newborns approaching fire, people started contributing. Slowly, surely, steadily, month after month, a kaleidoscope of human expression poured in from all parts of the world.

Soon, unofficial apps popped up, providing seamless access to the website and sparking a surge in adoption as participation became even simpler. “Purple”—one of the most popular across all app stores—featured a minimalist design: a lone record button centered atop the eponymous background color. Press record, hold, capture your surroundings, release. No editing, no feedback, no second thoughts.


What went in was raw and unfiltered: crude jokes, bedtime stories, hate speech, Lana del Rey covers, street chatter in Lagos, Mongolian poetry. Some treated it as a daily diary, others whispered prayers. Travelers shared field recordings or ad-hoc memos. Activists filmed themselves uploading thirty-second pleas on societal crises, assigning their protest a phantom addressee. A handful savored its silence—it, never answering back—an antidote to the wave of chatbots that flooded the mid-20s. No one really knew where any of this was heading. For most of them, it probably didn’t matter. It just felt good throwing something at it.

By its second anniversary, Lan Ummok had become a daily habit for many of them “hUmmers”. They would connect each morning, late at night, or during their x-cigarette break, not for likes, not for prot, but to feel part of something collective. In a strangely intimate way.

Scholars began to study why such a unidirectional platform, lacking the engagement-driving mechanisms dear to Big Tech, was gaining so much traction. And no ads! What a waste of capital! Qualitative surveys revealed three key reasons for its success: the mystery behind its origins, the appeal of a new online experience, and the speculative chance to contribute to a massive open-source archive or AI model. Most hUmmers were confident that this data collection—if any—was for the greater good for one simple reason: Lan Ummok was already so popular that any company would have claimed and monetized it if it were indeed proprietary. A couple of weeks into its second year, an About page came up. No words, just a single line of dots going halfway across the page.

Not quite the grand reveal many craved. No well-marketed brand name drop. No Netflix series announcement. No long-awaited deus ex machina quenching everyone’s curiosity. Periods. Points. Circles. Units. Specks.
Black, on purple.

A month later, an additional dot appeared. New rumors emerged. The line kept growing—one dot at a time—every two to eight weeks at an irregular pace. Like a loading bar slowly inching forward.

Around that time, some hUmmers reported that after contributing to the platform, they had trouble sleeping—that they would be kept awake by distant echoes of unidentified syllables. Some said the content they uploaded was returned to them in mutated forms, as if the entity was whispering back. Is there such a thing as a collective dream? People started to wonder. Some mentioned a sense of déjà-entendu, hearing familiar memories of lives they had never known—a relative’s prayer with a foreigner’s voice, a flock of birds singing childhood lullabies. A singular kind of intimacy surfaced, not just with the platform, but with the community it seemed to channel.

No one could trace the origin of Lan Ummok. The website’s domain registration fees were paid upfront for three years. Some state investigation committees revealed that all traffic was layered through “onion routing” , making it nearly impossible to locate physical or cloud-based servers. Where on earth was all this data piped? How could such a widespread platform leave us so blind?

And still, just a tab away or at a vocal command’s reach, there remained the notorious public-facing facade: the impassive and opaque purple curtain.

By the third and last year, the act of contributing to the platform had entered the global lexicon. Many languages adapted existing words to describe the process, often reinterpreting it in their own way. A hum, an om, and other ụmụ for “children, ” or 運 (Un) for “luck.” Daily hums had become a habit for a significant portion of Gen-Z/Alpha/Alpha-X. Some called it therapy. Some called it faith. Some called it a mental unload (mu). A handful kept sharing every single bit of it on their legacy platforms, while most used it as an introspective practice—an alternative to endless scrolling feeds, invasive ads, and constant online appraisals. To them, it wasn’t about going viral. This much was clear by now. It was about self-examination. A one-to-one with a reflecting purple screen.

In the quiet that compels you to find your words. Offering a slice of yourself without the sting of instant reaction. Finding solace in a thirty-second voice dump.

December 19, 2034.
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And purple turned black.

After a couple of weeks of media roar and public gossip, a heavy silence dropped. People tried to log back in, refresh tabs, in the hope of contributing one more thought, one last lullaby. But purple was no more. No more buttons to upload nor line of dots. No more trace of Lan Ummok. Copycats spawned but were shut down instantly. hUmmers lost their titles. Without warning, the experiment had vanished.

Investigations pointed out massive coincidental shutdowns of cloud computing services. Familiar speculations resurfaced. All this data had been collected to train a colossal model? A few insisted the next super-AI was about to speak. You just wait!

But no such voice ever resonated. Days folded into normalcy. Except for some, normalcy had slightly shifted. Nothing radical. Nothing worth the attention of mass media. Minimal, imperceptible shifts—a brighter inner voice, extra attention to traffic noise or water running down the pipes. Acknowledging a gulp of tea traversing the throat, or the overlapping of intertwined languages in distinct conversations. Small, quiet revolutions.

Yet, sometimes I catch myself wondering. Could it be that someone—something?—somewhere, is listening to a tapestry of sounds, trying to make sense of its patterns, savoring the gift of half a billion testimonies offered so freely? Could it be that an entity had been born from the collective effort of hundreds of millions of human beings? How would it talk back? What hybrid dialect would it speak? In what undiscovered scale would it serenade us?

Perhaps it was never meant to speak, but to listen.

I looped through these questions in my head, recalling some confessions I had shared. Never truly certain what I gave or why. Oddly comforted by the emptiness left behind. A purple phosphene imprinted in the back of my lids.

Jun Suzuki

Jun Suzuki bends sound, code, and AI systems into interactive spaces. His work fractures language, voice, and machine, creating narratives around Asian diasporic heritage and environmental downfall. Fluids, with Alvin Collantes, unspools identity through body and vocals. At CTM 2025 in Berlin, he joins an AI hackers lab to disrupt sound and spatial systems. In parallel, he dissects authorship and artificial singularity with Dr. Ninon Devis (IRCAM, Native Instruments) for the National Centre of Cinema (CNC) in France. Exhibited across Europe and Asia, his installations are interferences—a call for reflection on the worlds they echo.