Brian Kwon is an author who, beginning on or around October 5, 2005, began using a series of Yahoo! mail accounts to send unsolicited e-mail messages to the postmasters of a number of US universities, including CalTech, Brown, Stanford, Northwestern, The University of Chicago, and many other schools on the east coast and in New England. The messages arrived at a rate of several per day, perhaps moderated by the actions of Yahoo! in terminating the author's accounts for abuse of their Terms of Service.

Kwon appears to be a student, possibly located around the Boston/Cambridge, MA area. One message listed a postal address in Andover, MA, and a telephone number in the 978 area code.

Various messages indicate that Kwon's favorite author is Hermann Hesse, and that he enjoys singing in church.

It is not known whether or not Kwon sends his messages to other audiences. As of October 19, 2005, searching sources such as Google, the SPAM-L mailing list, and news.admin.net-abuse.email provided little to no information about Kwon.

Message style and themes

The messages Kwon sends typically take the form of prose story-telling in the first person voice, although on occasion they are also written as free-verse poetry. The spelling and punctuation reflect an informal, descriptivist linguistic style, and capitalization is used sparingly.

The messages span a number of themes, from personal experiences with alcohol and racism to his beliefs about propaganda, charity, life after death. Various messages also proclaim his status as a Messiah.

Financial aid

In a number of messages, Kwon expresses a desire to gain funding which has been withheld from him. He also encourages his audience to seek deserved money: "schools owe u money for doing propaganda and destroying your brains (making u insane) and making u into robots."

Art

Great art, according to Kwon, is created by those who do not focus on the psychology of their work. "[G]reat artists just draw, paint, [and] sculpt. ... These [psychological] ideas do not fuck them up. [B]ad artists get fucked up[,] they purposely draw only women[,] they draw in curves[.] [T]hey do a whole mess of bull shit."

Kwon may himself be an artist, as in one message he explains that he had a bag of artwork stolen from him, and when it was eventually returned, the bad art he had not been planning to sell had been stolen.

War and propaganda

In Kwon's purported view, there will be a world war, aided in part by propaganda distributed by establishment organizations: institutions of higher education, especially the Ivy League schools, television broadcasters, and the media. During this war time, five cities will be safe and un-bombable: Boston, Philadelphia, New York City, San Francisco, and San Diego.

Kwon describes the war as "the craziest war in history," with "every single country fighting on [American] soil -- which will be surrounded by airforce carriers." He further defines it as good humans versus evil humans, humans versus robots (i.e., insane people), and everyone versus racists and homophobes. He explains that "many hollywood stars, the media, and everyone [on] tv is gonna die," presumably because of their roles in promoting propaganda.

Kwon repeatedly likens insane people, people who fall victim to propaganda of racism, homophobia, and fear of sex, to robots. He states that robots will not go to heaven.

Religious views and Messianism

Kwon claims that he is a Messiah, one touched by God. He further claims that he knows of two other Messiahs; they are each younger than he, and African-American. One is purportedly Trey Smith, Will Smith's eldest son. In a fight against Michael Jordan, Kwon states that Trey will win, provided the fight takes the form of spirit or energy fighting, or "hyukins." If, however, the fight takes the form of fisticuffs, Jordan will win due to his superior size and strength.

The messages promote Kwon's quasi-Christian view of religion. While there clearly is a Hell, as various actions such as lying and gossip are proclaimed to be "Hellworthy," a number of other actions fall into a grey area where wrongness is determined by the individual's intent: murder is wrong, but killing may be justifiable, and theft that does not harm anyone and is necessary for one's survival is justifiable whereas theft that destroys businesses or human lives may be wrong. Even racism does not automatically qualify one for Hell, as he purports that 'deep racism' may be genetic and God takes this into account, especially in combination with one's good actions.

A basic tenet of Kwon's religious views seems to be that one must "kill hate with love and acceptance." This is reflected in his statements that prayer cannot take the form of wishes for one's own benefit, but should instead be for the benefit of other people, as that develops community ties and spiritual love. He explains in one message that "we need a society with a natural hierarchy and more acceptance," and promotes street fighting as a way to encourage the creation of this natural hierarchy of strong leaders, and also vent pent-up anger which leads to war and exploitation.

Florida

Kwon journeyed to Florida for approximately six months, although he notes that it seemed like ten years. This journey apparently had spiritual consequences; had he not survived his journey (which he likens to Christ's crucifixion), a new Messiah would have been born in order to save the world. However, since he survived, that did not need to happen.

While in Florida, Kwon states that the gods tested him by forcing him to use neither glasses nor contacts, and by ripping a hole in his khakis so that he was bitten by a mosquito. Apparently also a bag of his property was stolen, as on October 19 he reported it had been returned by the Miami Beach Police Department, missing several pieces of original artwork.

Motivation

To date, Kwon has not explained his motivation for choosing his audience as he has done.

He has, however, written as follows:
<blockquote>
here is the story of how this began:<br />
<br />
in a nutshell<br />
ed loved jenny<br />
jenny loved me<br />
i didn't love anybody<br />
ed got pissed off<br />
ed accused me of being gay to protect jenny<br />
ed, jenny, and yang told the world i was gay<br />
then also that i was racist and everything else
</blockquote>

Reaction

While several of the schools which receive Kwon's e-mails have staff who regard the author as a "loon" or a "nutjob," or have instituted anti-spam blocking techniques to disallow or discard the messages, a number of other institutions have staff which are personally amused by the "crackpot literature" aspect of the messages.

See Also

Flying spaghetti monsterism

Internet trolls

Messiah

Michael Jordan

Monotheism

Polytheism

Will Smith

External Links

A homeless Korean man named Brian Kwon was arrested in early 2005 in Miami, FL