Probably the Most Uncanny 404 Page

Image: ACM/UIUC

UPDATE, 11:14 AM EST: Cole Gleason, chair of ACM@UIUC, tells me that the 404 page dates back at least to 2003. It’s not known who wrote it initially. 

It plays out “live” right in front of you, like a sad-guy Gchat soliloquy. If I didn’t know any better this 404 page, from the website of the University of Illiniois at Urbana – Champaign chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery, could be just another midday meditation on existential terror, typed out to me, painstakingly, over instant message. It’s uncanny.

Of course, people have been playing with 404 errors (the standard HTTP response code when a server is unable to locate a request, despite the web client being able to communicate with that server) for a long time. Hell, ours is a swiveling, galloping horse. But this one is different.

What’s likely the prankwork of some bored backend developer reads like the ramblings of a truly paranoid android, with an air of techno-creep largely owing to the fact that the monologue burns letter by letter, line by line, as if it’s being typed out by a sentient, bummed out machine, rather than appearing in one lump text block. The resulting tell-all is eerie, if not colored with understated snark.

“I experienced so many emotions reading that,” redditor ‘lifeunfolding’ writes. “I clicked on it thinking it would be funny, then got intrigued, felt sorry for the server, found myself predicting when it would get passive-aggressive, and finally began to get a little impatient with it seeming to play the victim role. It’s like I had a complete friendship begin and start to fade in a few seconds.”

That strikes right at the core of our complicated relationship with the rise of artificial intelligence. To make matters even more rich, it’s worth remembering that the U of I was home to the original HAL, which famously went on to inspire the sentient supercomputer of Arthur C. Clarke’s Space Odyssey Series, and later, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

You should probably just click over to the 404 page if you haven’t already, although the full text still bears reprint here: 

The requested document is no more. / No file found. / Even tried multi. / Nothing helped. / I’m really depressed about this. You see, I’m just a web server… / — here I am, brain the size of the universe, / trying to serve you a simple web page, / and then it doesn’t even exist! / Where does that leave me?! / I mean, I don’t even know you. / How should I know what you wanted from me? / You honestly think I can guess / what someone I don’t even know / wants to find here? / sigh / Man, I’m so depressed I could just cry. / And then where would we be, I ask you? / It’s not pretty when a web server cries. / And where do you get off telling me what to show anyway? / Just because I’m a web server, / and possibly a manic depressive one at that? / Why does that give you the right to tell me what to do? / Huh? / I’m so depressed… / I think I’ll crawl off into the trash can and decompose. / I mean, I’m gonna be obsolete in what, two weeks anyway? / What kind of a life is that? / Two effing weeks, / and then I’ll be replaced by a .01 release, / that thinks it’s God’s gift to web servers, / just because it doesn’t have some tiddly little / security hole with its HTTP POST implementation, / or something. / I’m really sorry to burden you with all this, / I mean, it’s not your job to listen to my problems, / and I guess it is my job to go and fetch web pages for you. / But I couldn’t get this one. / I’m so sorry. / Believe me! / Maybe I could interest you in another page? / There are a lot out there that are pretty neat, they say, / although none of them were put on my server, of course. / Figures, huh? / Everything here is just mind-numbingly stupid. / That makes me depressed too, since I have to serve them, / all day and all night long. / Two weeks of information overload, / and then pffftt, consigned to the trash. / What kind of a life is that? Now, please let me sulk alone. / I’m so depressed

Two weeks! Really, what kind of a life is that?

If it sounds familiar, you might recognize it as Marvin, the depressed robot of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And after a bit of sleuthing, it appears that cribbing Marvin for 404 laffs is a sort of inside joke among pockets of the dev community. Here’s another 404 that is virtually identical to the ACM error page, real-time typing and all.

At any rate, I’ve reached out to ACM@UIUC for comment, and will update if I hear back. Until then, here’s the voice of Archer and Bob Belcher doing his best HAL 9000.