raingod.com

Last updated: 08.05.2001

Historians have long debated the meaning of the name 'raingod.com'. Was it, as some have suggested, a sign of an unhealthy fascination with the Aztec/Mexica pantheon, in which the role of rain god was filled by the sinister Tlaloc, a deity with a disturbing taste for human sacrifices?

Or was the name perhaps a reference to a character in a work of twentieth-century fiction, the novel "Mostly Harmless" by British writer Douglas Adams? Some scholars have argued convincingly that the character of the luckless Rain God in this work, living under a perpetual overcast and unable to understand why it rains continuously wherever he goes, fits well with the unfounded sense of persecution displayed by some of the individuals believed to be associated with 'raingod.com'.

Some theories can be dismissed out of hand. The claim that the intended name was actually 'raindog.com', apparently a reference to the album "Rain Dogs" by Tom Waits, seems to be unfounded.

Perhaps the most radical theory is one which suggests that the name was the product of a nearly random process, a desperate search to find some more or less manageable and memorable domain name that hadn't already been registered. It must be remembered that 'raingod.com' was registered at the height of the Internet frenzy, shortly before most intelligent people finally realized that there were more rewarding activities than clicking ceaselessly from Web site to Web site, searching for some crumb of valuable information that might justify the eyestrain, the spinal curvature and arthritic pains, the sheer mind-shattering tedium of using the Internet. At that point, practically every name that one could think of had already been registered in the '.com' top-level domain. It is easy to imagine the relief of the future owner of the 'raingod.com' domain when, after days spent slumped over the console feverishly typing 'whois' queries, a name that had not yet been registered finally emerged. Small wonder that they did not stop to think too deeply about any possible implications of the name.

But what was 'raingod.com'? A malevolent left-wing conspiracy? A dubious cult? A thinly-disguised form of sexual solicitation? An unsuccessful experiment in group psychotherapy? A Web consultancy company and minor software house? A random collection of information that somehow achieved a high enough level of self-organization to acquire its own Web site and propagate its embryonic consciousness through the Internet? A vain attempt to reverse the growing tide of digital convergence by extolling the opposing values of divergence? Or simply another of the endless vanity sites that speckled the Internet like acne during the last years of the twentieth century? Opinion remains divided, but a tour of the users pages may possibly cast some light on the phenomenon. But beware. Little here is what it seems, and those things that are, probably shouldn't be.