Analysis of the hypertext

This hypertext is a parody or a series of parodies. It talks about genetic engineering, titles of books, romantic poetry, theology, financial scandals…

When you open it there is a rainbow shown, and immediately after it can be read : "Where you expecting something beautiful? Making rainbows is a dirty business" Then it shows the main page.

Its main page shows a factory, which has two rows of windows. In the upper ones they show you everything in its pretty, commercial version and in the lower one the "true" one for the author. 

In the first window there is a machine which creates rainbows. In the lower one the machine creates normal rainbows as well as faulty ones. The faulty ones are taken by another machine and thrown away. As the author suggested one of the targets was genetic engineering I think he meant this one. Although that hadn't occurred to me, it makes a lot of sense since by genetic engineering we choose the best qualities of a plant and introduce it in another plant or choose the most fertile type of a plant and reproduce it massively to get greater profit. I would have thought of it as a critic to our consumism society where we always have the same products fabricated in a row and which look exactly the same. That's why you can dress (and probably do dress) with the same clothes as some one who lives in any other continent.

The second window in the upper row it says “How the colors came” it tells you where they get the colors used for the rainbows. it says: "red from the blood of a dying god", "yellow of a canary feather", "orange plucked from the heart of Seville", "blue from the exuberance of electrical storms" , "green mined from the eyes of jealousy" , "violet scrapings from the corners of the dreams", "indigo from nobody living knows where...". It is quite sensational because it's hard to believe the actual colors were taken from that places, but it can also mean where did we get the tones we wanted from.
The lower row shows some sentences such as "rainbows are born of tears and therefore sinful" and "the rainbows are circles and therefore perfect" which are immediately crossed out by the word HERESY in big red capital letters "This is a parody of theological arguments, where people can sometimes argue over very small points of interpretation of the Bible or other religious works." Theological arguments are an important problem now where the tensions between the occidental world and the Arab world is an important issue, as we have so different culture, and they both crash in some points. Nowadays we tend to think most of our beliefs are based on science, and we don't believe anymore in God, as people used to do. Now we believe in science, which is itself something that can be wrong, as it is so big, and has so many things to study, that it is almost impossible to be sure about many things. Maybe this just tells us we have to be careful with our beliefs.

The third window both upper and lower show how light should form rainbows and what happens some times when they make mistakes and the raindrop explodes instead of generating a rainbow. I’m not sure i understand this window but i suppose it means that they do mistakes and what in theory is supposed to work sometimes it doesn't.

The fourth upper window explains how rainbows evolved to their actual form. Underneath the explanation there is a note which says "Thanks for reading our educational  literature. We hope you found it interesting and informative." educational literature then is crossed out and propaganda is put in its place. This criticizes how they manipulate truth to make you feel safe, and like their company.

On the lower window there is a parody of the B-movies of the 50s. It is a series of sensationalistic posters where artificial selection of rainbows is criticized. It talks about the dangers of the selection, because it can take wrong paths. It also says that this information is censured and that we have to fear "The Revenge of the Killer Mutant Rainbow" that is the worst thing we could see.

The fifth window is a library where you can find many scientifical information about the rainbows as there are different sections that contain important information about rainbows, that can be useful in the factory such as "Reproduction and Breeding" , "Health" , "Rainbow Herd Management" , "Nutrition" , "Working Plots of Gold" , "General Flock / Herd Management" , "Marketing", etc. The titles of the books are parodies of actual scientific textbooks.

In the lower window there is a group of activists protesting in front of the factory for rainbow rights. It is a parody also because a rainbow is an unanimated object, so technically it doesn't need any rights. The author is criticizing the protesters, which sometimes protests for non important things.

The sixth window shows the products of their research on rainbows. In the upper window there are the "cool" new rainbows which have characteristics as being monochrome, dynamic, pastel and also rectangular. they come along with some words such as sophisticated, elegant, high-tech... This is a parody of the fashion world, which reinvents itself each season with new stuff that is nonsense, because it sometimes make something loose its essence (how can a rainbow be monochrome or dynamic?).

The lower window shows us the ones that went wrong, and are therefore useless.

The next window shows a typical Microsoft error page, with words changed so it talks about some problems you might have, so you choose the actual problem you have, and they give you a solution. In the lower window the same error page has a different text. it tells the true, and how they can't fix your rainbow, because it is probably broken. This is a typical thing that happens in Microsoft windows, so he just reflects the truth.

The eighth window shows a poem were it says that you can't trust the rainbow stock market, because it's not stable. It reminded me of the actual financial crisis, caused by the high-risk mortgages given in the USA, where people wanted to get profits with construction that weren't sustainable. After the market does crashes, they all want to sell and became paranoid and blame each others (that is the lower window).

The ninth window is a thank you note that takes us to the writers page (gift shop) of back to the main page.