Owl Union
People like blue. Not because it makes us better, but because it draws us in.
If you are particularly fond of blue, you may easily discover a blue dot, one pixel wide and one pixel high, somewhere on a website while wandering the internet. Finding blue is not difficult for someone who likes blue. It is, in fact, all too easy. When you click the dot, as though following a predetermined sequence, a message appears: “Congratulations. You are now a member of the Owl Union.” You have passed a kind of qualifying test.
The website’s address is unknown. It cannot be found through a search engine and can be reached only through that hyperlink. The link changes each time someone visits. The blue dot may already have disappeared as well.
Three people founded the union. They first met in a Usenet newsgroup in the early 1990s during a small but strangely persistent debate: “Why are there no blue Skittles?” Everyone proposed plausible theories, and the discussion drifted in increasingly unexpected directions. The person who started it disappeared midway through, and a decisive event soon buried the thread. In the end, only three people remained. Realizing they all liked blue, they agreed to form a union.
They immediately made a website and secretly planted hyperlinks to the union around the internet. Members were recruited only through hyperlinks; links already used to visit the site were tracked through HTTP referrers and deleted.
None of the founders liked owls. They had never even seen one in person. To them, the Owl was merely a villain in Daredevil. The name “Owl Union” came from the belief that owls were the only birds able to distinguish blue. This later proved untrue, but they did not bother changing the name. Such looseness suited the union’s atmosphere. Besides, its thirty-seventh member had already joined by then.
There was just one principle: the union’s website server had to be in Egypt. This honored the ancient Egyptians who, around 2200 BCE, made Egyptian Blue, humanity’s first artificial pigment.
The unusual recruitment method prompted rumors that the union was plotting to overthrow the system or worshipping the devil. In fact, it was simply a group of people who liked blue. There were no dues or regular meetings. Members only needed to like blue in their own ways. The only thing that changed was a sense of belonging. It was an unnecessary undertaking.
In Zur Farbenlehre in 1810, Goethe explained why people like blue: “Not because it makes us better, but because it draws us in.”
Members talk about blue in blue-painted rooms and attend Blue Man Group performances. They drink Johnnie Walker Blue Label and watch Andy Warhol’s film Blue. After midnight, they prepare blue clothes for the next day and go to bed. They were also the ones who nicknamed the Beatles’ compilation 1967–1970 “The Blue Album.” They bought work by Yves Klein, famous for International Klein Blue (IKB). Their interest spread beyond appreciation into history and chemistry. In 2009, a research team led by American chemist Mas Subramania invented a new blue pigment, YInMn Blue. It was about two hundred years after France’s Louis Jacques Thenard invented Cobalt Blue in 1775. Crayola later released YInMn Blue under the name Bluetiful.
That Tim Berners-Lee and Bill Gates are members is an open secret. Perhaps it is no coincidence that NASDAQ’s logo is blue. In 2001, French historian Michel Pastoureau published Blue: The History of a Color. A section on the union appeared in the draft but was removed at the suggestion of an editor at Stanford University Press.
The union’s existence first became known to the world through a member’s confession. The reason was simple: they could no longer like blue. As of 2019, the union is still recruiting. Anyone can become a member. Finding blue is not difficult for someone who likes blue, even if it is a dot only one pixel wide and one pixel high.