Erratas; or, how to make yourself unemployable via meme magic (part 1)

i just wanted to make meme music

i never asked for any of this shit

Erratas, sometimes spelled Eratas, is an internet... myth? conspiracy? legend? It's rather hard to describe succinctly. Supposedly it's a program, or perhaps an algorithm, meant to perform some questionable human resources function, or perhaps to detect copyrighted content on Youtube. All that's known is that mentioning it or indicating you know of it gets you fired, unpersoned, and your mom's Jurassic Park AMVs taken off the internet. Oh, and if you say it too many times in your thread the 4chan mod team will come in the night and spirit you aw(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)

But that's not the whole of it. The full expanse of its legend includes a homeless grunge-sample band, forklifts, a Hawaiian serial rapist, an occult secret behind the original Jurassic Park film trilogy and the postal service as Illuminati. To this day no one is sure if Erratas was an attempt at an ARG, promotion for an album, a massive pile of coincidences or a real conspiracy.

Lore part one- the 4chan archives

http://archive.4plebs.org/x/thread/16986738/#17010929
First mention of "erratas"- or rather, "eratas"- is made on November 25 of 2015, in a thread about spooky work stories. One anon recounts a friend's experience working at a "really weird chemical plant or something". The program itself isn't described, just a bit of code for flagging employees who searched for it. Anon also recounts everyone "just doing what the computer system would tell them to do", weird and pointless, wasteful tasks he describes as "kafka-esque".
One anon claims to have heard of "erratas" (using that spelling) before, but another thinks it's just "errata" as in corrections.
Note the female friend in question was said to be homeless and "in a band". Also mentions forklifts. These details will surface again later.

http://archive.4plebs.org/x/thread/17105303/#17105303
The second 4chan post- Dec 19 2015- Another anon posts asking if anyone there could tell them about "some sort of sketchy HR-related program". Uses the "erratas" spelling and gives a time period of 2000-2010, which could line up with the original story. Another anon claims to know what they're talking about and mentions "UPS, Unilever and Ecolab"- no companies were named in the first thread.
(also posted is some generic "spooky" bullshit video of some people walking around a mall but with shakycam and morse code or some shit, but I don't think that has anything to do with anything)

https://archive.rebeccablacktech.com/mu/thread/61968898/#61969871
A third, more obscure mention was made on the /mu/ board on January 23rd (24th?) 2016, in reference to a certain video by Tod Ellsworth of an album by KFC Murder Chicks. The video dates back to Nov 21 2015, just days before the first "erratas" post, though the description and channel name could have been edited at any time. Another user seems exasperated to see this posted "again"- apparently this album came up a lot in sharethreads.
One anon comments "What does that mean? I think I remember Erratas being some software company in the 2000s like Enron who fired all their employees or some shit."

Lore part two- the Youtube channel

ChronosForLife JurassicPark's account was opened months earlier on October 17 of 2015 with the first video being uploaded a day later, consistent with his claim in one video that he's reuploading from his mom's lost account. The next "reupload" however isn't posted until November 21- over a month later, odd if he's just reposting content his mother previously made. This is also the same date as Tod's video.

The mom videos themselves aren't anything special or interesting, mostly just basic slideshows of random Jurassic Park images with the most basic WMM effects... but there's some weird shit in them.
Most notable is morse code at the end of the second video translating to "hollywood astral projection clinic". Unlike any of the strange visual assets, it would have to have been deliberately edited in, but neither Chronos nor his mom would have had motive to do so. The phrase seems like it should mean something, but has absolutely nothing to do with anything else related to Erratas. It's just... there.

On January 23rd, the third video was uploaded to the channel, titled "Youtube is MONITORING and controlling my life". In this video, Chronos goes on a bizarre rant (in the form of white text on a very low-quality video, making it difficult to read) about how Youtube was harassing his mom due to a secret she discovered in the original Jurassic Park trilogy. Yeah, it's about as insane as it sounds. He seems to realize how wild his story is, as he assures us he has not been diagnosed with schizophrenia or any other mental disorder.
Note at this point, Chronos had not yet mentioned "erratas" in any form.

The discovery

On January 25th, a thread was posted to 4chan's /mu/ board proposing the creation of a new music genre: "deep internet", made using old, barely-seen Youtube videos via Petitube. A small list of videos is posted as an example, and MONITORING is among them.
https://rbt.asia/mu/thread/S62020388
The thread is mostly concerned with music-making and tells those bothered by the video to fuck off back to /x/ (4chan's boards seem to hold a healthy and jovial hatred for each other). One anon persists, including posting an attempt at a transcript.
Someone did actually make a remix using his low-quality audio though lol

That same day, in response to the sudden influx of views, "Here goes nothing" was uploaded on Chronos' channel.
Aside from having the first mention of erratas, this video contains (or contained) one of the most baffling aspects of the case: the autocaptions, attempting to comprehend the video's distorted rap music, contained a street address belonging to the KFC Murder Chicks, the band behind the album uploaded by Tod Ellsworth.
Take note that this was the autocaptions. These could have not been modified by the uploader without no longer calling them autocaptions. Between the insanely low quality of the videos and Chronos' self-professed lack of technical acuity, it seems incredibly unlikely that the audio could have been made to influence the subtitles without an audible effect... so how did that address get there?
At this point the captions have changed significantly, likely due to upgrades to Youtube's speech-to-text algorithms, which used to be hilariously useless and are now rather more functional. The fact that they were automatically updated also seems to support the idea that the captions were automatically generated and then never touched.

It seems like the autocaptions at that point only contained four lines:

0:12 are far from over 200 Corbin KY 40219
0:52 111111
1:46 10.3% 10.4%
2:17 overthrow the government

Looking further into the KFCMC, they turn out to be an allegedly homeless girl band produced by one DJ Rozwell. Go back to our first story. Remember the homeless band member girl and her kafka-esque job? Hmmmmm.
KFCMC seem to have been mildly popular on /mu/ and even /x/ for their bizarre, unique sounds, as well as the rumor that one of Rozwell's previous albums was "cursed".

Incidentally, this connection wasn't even discovered by searching for the address itself, but via the Tod Ellsworth video posted to /mu/ way back. Looking into the band from there, someone noticed the address was also on their Tumblr. The whole story just went full circle.

More 4chan threads are opened in /mu/ and /x/:

https://archive.rebeccablacktech.com/mu/thread/S62044439
http://archive.4plebs.org/x/thread/17276998/#17276998
Chronos' last video is posted while this thread is going, a few posts in. (For some reason KYM claims this video was taken down...) A transcript is made.

Chronos mentions Unilever (namedropped in one of the earliest threads) and 3M (not mentioned) as adopters of Erratas. He claims it's been used "within the last 5 or 6 years", which would be the very end of the time period from the earlier stories. Also, apropos of nothing, he declares the second Jurassic Park movie (The Lost World) his favorite. Soon after this someone notices that "Tod Ellsworth" is an anagram of "The Lost World". Minds are blown.

Another tunnel of the rabbit hole is opened as the twitter account @ErratasOrBust is discovered. The account is assumed to be a troll job by some anon, until it's noticed its two posts date back to November and early December, long before any of this came into the limelight.
Named Tod Ellsworth, the account was opened on Nov 14th, with posts on Nov 20 and Dec 9th. The first post is an eerie black-and-white image of a man's oddly elongated face; reverse image searching reveals its a police sketch of the suspect in a string of rapes in Hawaii in 2005. The only connection anyone could figure out was that the Jurassic Park films were produced in Hawaii.
The second post is a bizarre line about the US postal service being "the deepest part of the deep web". When it was found, the KFC Murder Chicks tumblr had a post stating they "don't really trust the post office". The post seems to actually be gone now, but there's still a reply to an ask where they explain their "reasoning".
It's also been suggested "deep web" is a sly reference to the "deep internet" music genre.

At about this point most of the "primary sources" of information dry up, but the ride is far from over. The intrepid autists of 4chan keep digging, and just keep uncovering... well, really fucking weird shit associated with all this.