Dwi Hartanto: One Year After
PREVIOUS: Part II: The Faulty Checkpoints
Previously, we have established that a lot of parties who could have — and should have — called out and stopped Dwi Hartanto on his tracks colossally failed to do so. The media, government officials, and even some academic communities somehow missed or consciously neglected the countless occurrences of warning signs throughout Hartanto’s march to national recognition. It can be said that, through his lies, Hartanto successfully took the lid off the media’s and the authorities’ filth casket to have their fetid contents paraded to the public. And yet, despite their supposedly authoritative status, most of them refused or neglected to be held accountable. In the end, at the expense of Hartanto himself, they got off lightly (or, in the media’s case, with a net gain), with the status quo largely undisturbed.
While the fact that responsible parties getting away with hair-thin scratches is a mesmerising enigma, the fact that someone had the capability to execute a deception capable of besmirching their reputation in an unbelievable scale is another wonder of its own. After all that has been said about the impact, it is simply unbelievable and easy to forget that all of these were the fruits of a mere postgraduate student — sometimes flippantly referred to as ‘the slave labour of academia’. How did an academic and political nobody, thousands of kilometres away from his homeland, managed to systemically fool an entire nation of more than 200 million people? What did Hartanto do differently compared to his less successful predecessors, such as ‘The Balinese Iron Man’ and the ‘Jodhipati electricity generator’ ‘inventor’, so that he managed to grab himself a paid homecoming trip from Kemenristekdikti, an official award from the embassy, and a Mata Najwa interview?
In other words, what makes Hartanto’s lies so convincing — and why did Indonesia believe it for so long?
Synthesising Strains
People need a narrative, and if there isn’t one on offer, they make one up.
- Jean Hanff Korelitz
People like stories. Whether it’s telling or hearing them, stories are an effective way to make people engage with each other. They are so important, in fact, that they are a fundamental part of the human cognition and social interaction¹. Inspirational ‘hero’ tales are no exception, which is perhaps why television programmes like Kick Andy have become a mainstay in Indonesian television, or why stories about children from families with low socioeconomic status continuing their studies overseas are commonly featured in news sites (Exhibit A|B) and shared through social media. Neuroeconomist Paul J. Zak even went as far as making a controversial² claim that inspiring narratives, in particular, trigger the release of oxytocin in the brain, which is correlated with trust, empathy, and emotional attachment³. Regardless of the veracity of Zak’s claim, it cannot be denied that people, including Indonesians, adore stories of nobodies or underdogs making their names in the world stage — and the media adore covering them for these tales sell like pancakes.
With the machinery set in place, all deceivers like Hartanto had to do were to provide the stories to feed it. Just fabricate a story about how you achieved something impressive, spice it up with some evidence and non-evidence, and behold, an anak bangsa (‘child of the nation’) public figure. Sounds simple? Well, many people, including ones with worse academic qualifications than Hartanto, had done it so far — Tuyung Supriyadi (Super Toy HL-2), Joko Suprapto (Blue Energy), and I Wayan Sumardana a.k.a. Tawan (‘Balinese Iron Man’), to name a few — so it couldn’t be rocket science. With this perspective, what Hartanto did cannot really be considered something special. Or can it?
While at the first glance Hartanto’s fictitious story is similar to the ones before it, one should remember that Hartanto’s halo of lies lasted far longer, deceived more parties, and required a more coordinated effort to expose than the aforementioned fraudsters. Supriyadi was outed six months after Super Toy’s president-christened first harvest, Suprapto got arrested within four months since the first publication after Muhammadiyah University of Yogyakarta (UMY) dismantled his ‘generator’, while the ‘Balinese Iron Man’ only lasted weeks. In comparison, Hartanto maintained his deception for more than two years after Eddi Santosa’s seminal 2015 Detik article while being rewarded and acclaimed by many government bodies and even academic communities in the process before PPI Delft put the effort to compile two dossiers against him. This begs the question: what distinguished Hartanto from the rest?
The first and the most prominent reason is that his products of invention couldn’t be readily physically shown or demonstrated live. This means that the only thing that could be presented are documentations, specifically photographs. Preparing a launch demonstration requires extensive preparations; as an illustration, Delft Aerospace Rocket Engineering (DARE), the students rocket society Hartanto was a part in, needed more than one and a half years of preparation to launch their flagship sub-orbital Stratos III rocket — and it disintegrated twenty seconds after lift-off. Had the journalists asked for a demonstration, Hartanto could have just said that his team doesn’t have enough time and resources to successfully do so. Considering the nature of rocketry, the journalists would've just accepted his alibi at face value, sidestepping Hartanto from the burden of proof. Contrast this to Tawan’s ‘robotic prosthetic arm’, where he could just wear it whenever he wanted to demonstrate it, or Suprapto’s ‘Blue Energy’, where he could just use some random combustible fluid to run a diesel generator.
The ‘too much hassle’ alibi doesn’t cover everything, however. The journalists could have just asked Hartanto to do other, less demanding demonstrations, such as wind tunnel experiments or propulsion tests. Alternatively, even if those are too much work, Hartanto could have just shown some prototype or final parts of a work-in-progress project. How did Hartanto avoid subjecting to these demands? This is where the second pillar of his deception came into play: the ‘sensitive, confidential project’ alibi. Recall that Hartanto claimed in the Mata Najwa interview that he was ‘the only non-European personnel in ESA’s Ring 1 (inner circle) of technological development’. This means that any projects which Hartanto was most likely to be involved in are considered as special interest of the European region and should be treated as sensitive, confidential information.
Because of that reason, Hartanto could easily attribute the classified nature of his projects to avoid having to show any form of definitive proof, something that Tawan and Suprapto could only dream of. In fact, Hartanto has used this exact reasoning for his benefit twice. First, in the Jawa Pos coverage to avoid showing his ‘three patents’ to the journalists; second, to withhold the release of the Kumparan article about his activities at the end of August 2017, presumably to avoid provoking the active investigation group against him further. This talking point was so effective, in fact, that some of his supporters used it to dismiss Hartanto’s exposé as a mere conspiracy to ‘cover up his involvement in the defence industry’.
The two alibis on their own were formidable enough to deter most Indonesian journalists from actually seeing Hartanto’s ‘inventions’ in person. These weren’t everything, however, as there was another layer of complication for anyone who were interested to do so: geographical distance. While most Indonesian fraudsters were based in Indonesia, which are easily reachable by land transport or short-haul flights, Hartanto was based in Delft, a Dutch city situated 11,455 kilometres (7,118 miles) northwest from Jakarta, which is equivalent to an approximately 13-hour direct flight. Considering that long-haul flights from and to Jakarta aren’t cheap, the news agencies that are willing to fund a journalist’s visit to the Netherlands must have been devoid of any more important political-, economy-, and law-related news to run, which was infinitesimally unlikely to be the case, especially in Indonesia.
The combination of hassle of demonstration, confidentiality, and distance allowed Hartanto to freely churn out stories after stories to the Indonesian media without rising too many demands of proof. From this point, it was just a matter of modulating the frequency of release and the content of each release to create the impression that progress are actually being made without rising concerns about the truthfulness of the narrative.
This is exactly what Hartanto did with his narrative. After the Mata Najwa interview in November 14, 2016 that was basically an enhanced version of the 2015 news articles about the TARAV7s rocket launch, the combined frequency of both media exposure and Facebook posts about Hartanto’s achievements averages around once every one to two months. Frequent enough to make people vaguely remember about the figure in question and his achievements by the time the next publication comes, but also sparse and erratic enough so that the average person wouldn’t be suspicious of the eventual contradictory details and the dubiously precise timing of release.
In addition, another characteristic of Hartanto’s narrative, especially post-Mata Najwa interview, is that each release is a continuation of the previous, which means that the combination of releases builds a grand tale. As an example, consider his ‘fighter jet’ sub-narrative. It started off as a mere passing mention in Jawa Pos’ Visiting World Class Professor article in December 2016, in which he claimed that he was involved in the ‘development of the new generation of the European multi-purpose fighter Eurofighter Typhoon (also called ‘Eurofighter Typhoon NG’)’.
Five to six months later, Hartanto stated in a Facebook post and a Liputan6.com article that he and his team from ESA was developing a ‘sixth-generation fighter jet’ after the successful development of the aforementioned Eurofighter Typhoon NG. One of the aspects of the new fighter jet in particular, the ‘hybrid air-breathing rocket engine’, won an inter-space agency competition in Cologne, which attracted the attention of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Lockheed Martin. Both entities, impressed by Hartanto’s work, offered Hartanto an opportunity for collaboration. Two months later, the continuation of the story was revealed to Kumparan by Hartanto that the offer materialised into an actual project, which required him to go back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean. Unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on the perspective — the final part of the ‘fighter jet’ story did not make it to publication before he got caught.
Hartanto’s patient tale-weaving over the course of two years has earned him a reputation that lasted for a longer time than his predecessors. As he strategically synthesised and released lies after lies, the Dwi Hartanto legend grew larger and larger, drawing the attention of the public, the mainstream media, and government entities. However, simply crafting narratives about himself isn’t enough to make people truly believe his stories.
In order to make people believe the narrative, you have to turn it into a ‘reality’.
Virtual Reality
And the parson made it his text that week, and he said likewise,
That a lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies,
That a lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright,
But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight.- Alfred, Lord Tennyson in The Grandmother (1864)
One of the worst mistakes that can be done by scientific and engineering fraudsters is creating stories that are too far detached from scientific and engineering principles. After all, if you claim to create something so preposterous that violates the fundamentals of physics — such as Siti Nurmala et al.’s ‘free energy spin-magnet generator’ or Dicky Zainal Arifin’s ‘fuel-less electricity generator’ — the public will not call you an inspirational figure; instead, qualified experts will see through your facade and dismiss you as a lunatic. While you should still have the support of some exceptionally gullible people with infinitesimal critical thinking abilities, most people, especially the experts, will turn against you, torpedoing any chances of you ever progressing further and benefitting through your deception.
The key to maintaining the believability of one’s deception is to make sure that the narratives are still grounded to reality. In concept, this is not exactly difficult for the person to do; in a 2013 study, when a group of people were told to deliberately lie, the majority of them resorted to telling a lie that are based on their actual experience rather than fabricating a story from the ground up⁴. In reality, however, the liar might become too greedy and try to create a false narrative that is self-aggrandising, yet contains not even a modicum of reality. This type of deception is generally easy to take down, especially by people who actually know and understand the fundamentals.
In fact, this is exactly what thwarted Joko Suprapto’s attempt to convince a group of professors at Gajah Mada University (UGM) to formally recognise his ‘magic electricity generator box’ back in 2005. In the presentation, Suprapto’s team stated that the box is able to generate electricity ‘eternally’, which quickly became the laughing stock of the professors during the presentation. One of them even suspected in jest that the box was ‘Djinn-powered’. Needless to say, Suprapto’s attempt to convince the professors ended in vain, becoming a mere data point in the set of baseless, laughable attempts at science-based deceptions.
In order for Hartanto to avoid becoming another statistic, he had to hold back on the claims and inject enough reality in his narrative; not only to make it seem real, but also to make people who read it live in the ‘reality’ he crafted. A ‘virtual reality’, as one might say⁵.
Compared to outright fabrications, reality-infused lies — commonly called half-truths — are harder to take down. The reason is, besides making people doubt the story less due to the realistic components , when people doubt and try to challenge the claims, the fabricator could just present some sort of factual evidence that is in line with the narrative, regardless of the actual relevance of the evidence to the doubters’ rebuttal. Even if it doesn’t manage to convince the sceptics, other people who observe the debate might be convinced due to the evidence presentation. Since a part of the story is factual, it might be interpreted that the rest of the story is also true, making it a great way to deceive people.
Injections of reality in a false narrative come in two forms. The first form is the one stated in the aforementioned 2013 study: as the basis of the story. These stories are akin to Disney’s 1995 animated film Pocahontas in the way that they are based on real events, but have many of their details — or even progression — distorted, omitted, or added by varying degrees, sometimes entirely. In Hartanto’s case, he used this bottom-up tactic to create one half of his narratives. In one of his earliest lies, Hartanto claimed to engineer and launch an orbital rocket to a low-Earth orbit with his team as an ESA personnel. While the part that he engineered and launched a rocket with his team was factual, he and his team were affiliated with DARE, which operations are nowhere near the scale of ESA. Besides, the rocket they launched was a sub-orbital sounding rocket, CanSat Launcher V7S; not even close to what Hartanto described. Furthermore, Hartanto put a special emphasis on the control systems of the rocket, which is understandable, since during his time in DARE he was a member of the Advanced Control Team, who were in charge of developing active rocket stabilisation technology.
In addition, he used a similar tactic when lying about his meeting with B.J. Habibie, Indonesia’s third president, as described in the previous part. He also used it when he falsely claimed that he won an inter-space agency competition with his ‘hybrid air-breathing rocket engine’, as described earlier. To made things seems more legitimate, Hartanto also had a photo ‘evidence’ of him holding a €15,000 prize check from DLR for winning the competition. In fact, the only truth about this story was that he joined a competition at all; the rest of the details were completely fabricated. As described in the previous part, rather than a technological competition, it was just a student coding competition, and he and his team did not win. Furthermore, the photo evidence that he provided was digitally altered from his actual photo of him holding the check template from the event.
While basing the writing from real events helps with keeping the narrative plausible, one can still add too much hyperbolic embellishments that diminish the ‘realness’ of the lies. How did Hartanto restrained himself from doing this? The restraint came from his usage of the second form of reality injection: adding enough real, realistic, or realistic-sounding details to the narratives (top-down). As an illustration for this point, consider the 2014 science fiction film Interstellar. While ultimately a work of fiction with signs of artistic freedom, the amount of attention Nolan et al. put into its scientific detail⁶ made it become considered as one of the most realistic science fiction films of all time, which makes the premise and theme of the film sound plausible.
Another fitting example would be Multatuli’s 1860 fictional novel Max Havelaar, in which the titular protagonist — a Dutch colonial official stationed in Java during the cultuurstelsel period—fights against the corrupt agricultural system imposed by the colonial government. In writing Max Havelaar, Multatuli depicted the setting of the story based on his experience as a colonial official in Java himself. When the novel was published in the Netherlands, it created a political storm, which contributed to the growth of the Dutch liberal movement. The movement ultimately led to the birth of the Dutch Ethical Policy, which was an attempt to ‘pay back’ their colonial subjects. Simply put, using realistic details allows the narrative to not only sound plausible, but also persuade the audience that the narrative might actually be ‘real’.
This is where Hartanto’s experience in rocketry and satellite engineering shone the brightest. He used the aerospace engineering knowledge that he accumulated during his time engineering rocket subsystems in DARE and designing Delfi-n3Xt’s telemetry system in his master’s thesis research to season the narrative with realistic-sounding details. Revisiting the TARAV7s example, the comparison of the known specifications of TARAV7s (according to Hartanto) to the smallest orbital rocket, SS-520-5 (JAXA) and two actual DARE rockets reveals the extent of realistic detail Hartanto put in his narrative (Table 1).
There are several things to note about Hartanto’s details about TARAV7s. First, the peak thrust of TARAV7s is way closer to the orbital SS-520-5's than the peak thrust of the two sub-orbital DARE rockets active around the time period the TARAV7s was ‘launched’. Second, the orbit altitude Hartanto mentioned in his first media publications, 347 km, is within the historical range of the orbit altitude of the International Space Station (ISS) (330 km at the lowest), where he claimed his system carried a ‘scientific payload’ to in the Mata Najwa interview. Both of these details are realistic and wouldn’t be out of place in actual rockets.
Hartanto did not stop there, however. Recall that, in order to increase the legitimacy of the narrative, the added details don’t have to be actually scientifically accurate. Instead, they only have to sound realistic or scientifically accurate to most people to convince them. One way to do this is to simply properly use scientific or engineering terms and principles in the narrative. This tactic was most famously used by the perpetrators of the Dihydrogen Monoxide hoax⁷ (and similarly, the oxidane hoax⁸).
In Hartanto’s case, he used it countless times during the two-year period of his actions. To name a few, in the TARAV7s Detik article alone, he detailed the control systems of the rocket (including the specifications of the flight module computer, down to its operating system and processor) as well as its record-breaking capabilities (capable of ‘reaching a higher apogee’ and ‘supersonic lift-off’). Similarly, in the ‘sixth-generation fighter jet’ Liputan6.com article, he mentioned that his ‘hybrid air-breathing rocket engine’ is able to do ‘near-space hypersonic flights’ and superior to SABRE (which, ironically, is actually funded and validated by ESA) and conventional scramjets, which he claimed to be ‘plagued with thrust-to-weight ratio and energy control issues’.
The combination of the bottom-up and the top-down approach is one of the cruxes of Hartanto’s success. This way, Hartanto took the audience’s reality, weaved his own narrative into it, then added enough detail work so that it fits the audience’s experience and worldview. Every time Hartanto did a release to either the mainstream or the social media, he repeated the same process over and over again, with each story built on the previous. After several iterations, without them knowing, the audience have been manipulated to live in Hartanto’s ‘virtual reality’ instead of the real world. Persuasive, yet subtle.
A ‘virtual reality’ gives a lot of power to the creator over the people who lives in it. This is especially useful when the creator has to deal with an adversary threatening to compromise the integrity of the creator’s story. In Hartanto’s case, it is his less-than-flattering incident shortly after he got his Bachelor’s degree (class of 2005) from AKPRIND Institute of Science and Technology (IST AKPRIND), Yogyakarta.
There are several contradicting accounts about the incident, but the general story goes like this. Around 2006 or 2007, after his studies in IST AKPRIND, Hartanto either forged a lecturer’s signature or stole and falsified an official document from the university (Fig. 3) in order to fulfill the requirements for his application to a scholarship-funded master’s degree programme in UGM. Unfortunately for Hartanto, it did not go very far; the Yogyakartan chapter of the Private Higher Education Institution Coordination (Kopertis)⁹ caught the suspicious document after coordinating with IST AKPRIND. Whether Hartanto got formally punished by the university is unclear; while IST AKPRIND stated that Hartanto wasn’t meted out over his misconduct, the lecturer Hartanto purloined his documents from stated the opposite.
Regardless of whether Hartanto got punished for his transgression or not, the lecturer — who used to consider Hartanto as his favourite student prior to the misconduct — said sternly to Hartanto that ‘his career in Yogyakarta is over’ and, if Hartanto insisted, he wouldn’t hesitate to ‘annihilate his career by blackmailing Hartanto’s workplace with his account of the incident’. To top it off, he said to Hartanto to scram from Yogyakarta to rebuild his career and report back to him once he is a successful man.
Understandably, this shameful incident marred Hartanto’s decorated academic past — he graduated cum laude with 3.88 GPA and represented IST AKPRIND in a regional competition — which had all the potential to ruin Hartanto’s future career at any point. Any mention of the fact that Hartanto was an IST AKPRIND alumnus could lead to the revelation of his transgression, especially with someone on his tail who is more than pleased to completely obliterate his reputation. To prevent this from happening, Hartanto had to sweep any knowledge of his time in IST AKPRIND under the rug from anyone who matters. How did he do it?
What Hartanto did to avoid professional death is actually one of his oldest chicaneries. Way before Hartanto started lying about TARAV7s in 2015, Hartanto already faked aspects of his identity during his master’s studies in TU Delft (2007–2009). In May 2009, just months from his graduation from the programme, Hartanto was introduced in a PPI Delft’s routine talk and discussion event, KoPI Delft, as an UGM alumnus — instead of IST AKPRIND — who also spent some time in Tokyo Institute of Technology (TITech) as an intern. This pretense did not last long, however. Strangely enough, in the earlier version of his master’s thesis (which can still be found in CiteSeerX) (Fig. 4), which was published two months later, the institutions were practically reversed: Hartanto graduated from TITech in 2005, then worked as a lecturer in UGM until 2007. Later articles about Hartanto dropped any mentions of UGM altogether, leaving only the ‘TITech graduate’ as a part of his ‘virtual reality’. Just like this, Hartanto wrote his shameful time in IST AKPRIND out of his personal history, just like Japan wrote the Nanjing Massacre out of its history books.
An enigma remains, however: why did Hartanto revise his true educational history out of the narrative differently multiple times? While the true reason is still unknown, it can be suspected that this was due to UGM’s larger and more extensive alumni network (KAGAMA) in Indonesia compared to TITech’s, as well as its more accessible location for Indonesian journalists to visit. Both of this means that the task of verifying Hartanto’s true alumni or former staff status would be much more trivial if he claimed to be a former student or lecturer in UGM compared to if he claimed to be either in TITech (which might require a physical visit to Tōkyō to verify Hartanto’s alumni status; not to mention the language barrier problem). By switching alma mater from UGM to TITech, Hartanto’s ‘reality’ is much harder to be toppled down by a suspecting ‘fellow’ UGM alumnus’ call-out.
By carefully timing the releases, tying his narrative to real events, and exerting manipulative power over his audience, Hartanto has fabricated and imposed a self-aggrandising ‘virtual reality’ that is a gargantuan task to disillusion — compared to his predecessors’ — upon millions of unsuspecting Indonesians. However, while these factors explained why his narrative seemed real to a lot of people, it did not explain why his lies were so alluring to many Indonesians from all layers of society. It did not explain how his narrative worked so well that it served as the basis for his invitation to one of the most respected talk show in Indonesia, as well as the bestowal of his VWCP travel fund and embassy award. After all, any random person could have followed any of the strategies laid out so far to deceive a lot of people about his or her own identity, but that doesn’t mean that the deceiver would receive the same scale of recognition that Hartanto got.
If you want to reap the benefits and recognition with your ‘reality’, the narrative has to pull the heartstrings — the deepest collective desires — of the society.
A Rambling Man, A Foolish Mind
Compelling reason will never convince blinding emotion.
- Richard Bach
Indonesian people are generally nationalists. A 2017 survey by the Saiful Mujani Research & Consulting (SMRC) suggests that an overwhelming 99.0 percent of Indonesians are at least quite proud of their nationality, while 84.5 percent of Indonesians are willing to fight to defend their country. Among them, Generation Z Indonesians are the most nationalistic compared to others, as a separate survey done by UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta suggests.
The sense of nationalism extends to the fields of science and technology. Due to Indonesia’s scientific recognition crisis in the world stage, as the low and declining academic publication citation number suggests, Indonesians are ardent towards stories about Indonesian scientists making their names in the global scene. This is evident by the countless number of online news articles about ‘accomplished world-class anak bangsa¹⁰’ academics (Exhibit C|D|E) and triumphant Indonesian students in international science olympiads (Exhibit F|G), as these stories are popular and prone to be shared through the social media; perhaps to fulfill or invoke the sense of being able to stand their own ground against scientifically superior nations, such as North American, European, and East Asian countries.
Alas, while the enthusiasm of Indonesians towards the progression of science, technology, and research is commendable, it does not translate into better understanding or competence in those fields. As a survey done by the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) in 2015 suggests, more than half of Indonesians have mediocre understanding of issues related to science and technology. Furthermore, despite being constant medal-winners in science olympiads, Indonesian students constantly rank low in PISA (65 out of 65 in 2012, 69 out of 76 in 2015, and 63 out of 72 in 2018) and TIMSS tests, which measure mathematical and scientific abilities of students — among other metrics — around the world. To make the situation worse, the quality of Indonesian educators left a lot to be desired; the average score of teacher’s competence assessment in 2015 is a disappointing 53.02 percent. Taken together, this means that, on average, Indonesians have abysmal scientific literacy, and the situation is unlikely to improve anytime soon.
The lack of scientific competence, combined with the ironic nationalism-driven high interest in the national progression of science, technology, and research, as well as the appalling digital literacy, are the contributing factors that make Indonesia the perfect breeding ground for nationalism-flavoured scientific misinformation and charlatans. There are many different types of these adversaries in existence, but the most common type is ‘ground-breaking inventions or discoveries’. Appropriately enough, this is in line with LIPI’s finding in 2015, where it was found that the most common misconception of science and technology among Indonesians is that science and technology are simply ‘great discoveries’. Demonstrating this point, there are many notable examples of these throughout the years, ranging from actual scientific works that were overblown by misinformation, such as the ‘4G LTE inventor’ and the ‘Helmholtz equation solver’, to straight-up lies, such as Joko Suprapto’s ‘Blue Energy’ and ‘Jodhipati electricity generator’.
Dwi Hartanto is not an exception. Knowing that nationalistic sentiments would tug the audience’s heartstrings, Hartanto added copious amounts of them multiple times in the narrative. He was especially fervid about it during the early stage of his lies. For example, he stated in his Mata Najwa interview that he wrapped an Indonesian flag around his TARAV7s rocket as his prerogative due to him being the technical director of the project (Fig. 5) (in reality, it was wrapped around one of the Stratos rockets, for some reason). In another — and more prominent — case, in the same interview, and many other news articles about him, he confessed that he received countless offers to change his citizenship to Dutch, but he refused because he wanted to ‘show the world that Indonesia also has excellent engineers’, playing into Indonesia’s nationalistic desire of scientific and engineering glory.
Apropos of citizenship offers, he also rode on the character of one of Indonesia’s most revered technocrat who had a similar experience on this matter, B.J. Habibie. Hartanto framed himself as an accomplished Indonesian aerospace engineer who is working in a distinguished European institution and encouraged to give up his Indonesian nationality in favour of an European one; descriptors that also perfectly portray the former Indonesian president. Considering this, and the fact that Indonesians were scuttering in panic to find a successor for the 82-year old science and technology icon with a gradually deteriorating health condition to survive Indonesia’s aeronautical dreams, it was inevitable that Hartanto was designated as ‘The Next Habibie’, and Hartanto knew it.
In order to capitalise on Habibie’s reputation to win Indonesian people’s favours, Hartanto associated himself with Habibie in a personal level and made sure that the audience is aware of it. First, he begged to the Indonesian embassy to meet Habibie, which materialised into a ten-minute meeting near the end of a special iteration of Indonesian Student Association in the Netherlands’ (ISAN’s) Lingkar Inspirasi event. This real event was then, in a manner described previously, published into a narrative that he ‘was requested by Habibie to have a personal, private meeting in The Hague’, in which he was told to ‘never give up his love for the country’.
Keeping his distance close with Habibie was one of Hartanto’s way to nudge the public to draw parallels between the two of them. One can argue that his efforts didn’t stop there, however; in order to portray himself as Habibie’s successor even further, starting from the December 2016 Jawa Pos article, he tweaked the direction of his narrative slightly from solely being a rocket and satellite engineer to also being an aeroplane engineer after his meeting with Habibie, aligning himself even better with Habibie’s reputation and background as one. This way, the public would see Hartanto as ‘the person who was passed the baton by Habibie’, which would be seen as a sign of ‘blessing’ and ‘approval’. To make things even better for Hartanto, Habibie affectionately called him his ‘intellectual grandson’ in an interview with Don Bosco Selamun in September 2017, which strengthened the notion that he is the rightful heir to Indonesia’s aeronautical industry, and he is the hopeful one who should be supported if you want a hopeful future for Indonesia’s science and technology. And Indonesia bought it.
We have seen that Dwi Hartanto abused Indonesia’s nationalistic sentiment to deceive everyone by making them sympathetic to his character and cause. However, it can be taken one step further by saying that Hartanto pandered to many other aspects of Indonesia beyond its nationalism. In particular, Hartanto also abused the Indonesian government’s initiative to improve the nation’s state of academic research.
The Indonesian government is well aware of the nation’s abysmal research performance and — admittedly commendably — is actually taking steps to improve the situation, albeit misguided at times. One of the initiatives they took — briefly touched upon in the previous article — is ‘Visiting World Class Professor’ (VWCP), a programme with the premise of bringing back temporarily a number of Indonesian faculty members in overseas institutions to hold general lectures in Indonesian universities. However, despite collaborating with Indonesian International Scholars Association (I-4), which membership consists of foreign institution-based Indonesia faculty members themselves, the programme’s speakers selection process was held solely by the Ministry of Research, Technology, and Higher Education (Kemenristekdikti).
The combination of the Ministry’s desperate demand for speakers — especially in the field of defence and advanced materials — and the lack of I-4’s insight to properly inform the Ministry about the nature of academia in overseas institutions created an opportunity for people like Hartanto to abuse the system. This is why Hartanto managed to get accepted into the VWCP programme despite his statement in Mata Najwa that he was simultaneously a post-doctoral fellow and an assistant professor. The ‘post-doctoral fellow’ position has no equivalent in the Indonesian lecturer functional hierarchy¹¹, which might have caused a part of the Ministry’s confusion when reviewing Hartanto’s application; one that could’ve been easily resolved had I-4 was involved in the vetting process. Furthermore, the Ministry’s desire to have ‘The Next Habibie’ in the programme was due to the feeling of ‘fear-of-missing-out’, stating that ‘Indonesia might not have people like Habibie within the next 50 years’. In other words, the acceptance of Dwi Hartanto into the VWCP programme was one based more on emotion and desperation rather than rationalism.
By creating a narrative that positioned himself as an accomplished aerospace engineer in major European and American institutions and industries who is worthy and blessed of being Habibie’s successor, Hartanto successfully played the Indonesian people and government by catering to their desires and ambitions while bypassing scepticism and reason, which lured and trapped them in his ‘virtual reality’. A reality where Indonesia’s aerospace and scientific future is bright, with Hartanto as the figurehead that carries the baton Habibie used to hold so dearly. Any attempts to shatter his ‘virtual reality’ are done by adversaries so dangerous that they are equivalent to the arrival of the invading Netherlands Indies Civil Administration (NICA) after Indonesia’s Proclamation of Independence in 1945, and should be fought and shut down immediately with Indonesian’s own blood.
From this point, all Hartanto had to do was to let the typical Indonesian’s over-zealousness do the work of defending him and his ‘reality’. As an illustration, when Danang Birowosuto Parangtopo, an Indonesian CNRS physicist who is also a TU Delft alumnus in the field of applied physics, called Hartanto out in one of Liputan6.com’s article’s comment section,…
Liputan 6, please clarify this news again truthfully. The aforementioned Dwi Hartanto is an interactive intelligence researcher (NOT AERONAUTICS). The papers [he published] are in the field of interactive intelligence. Please reconfirm [the report]. http://ii.tudelft.nl/?q=node/5
- Danang Birowosuto Parangtopo
…he was immediately met with resistance so hostile, it — in any other case — would’ve made Sutomo proud¹².
Heh, look how amusing the behaviour of butthurt scientists like Danang is! I spent a long time in the USA’s academic circle; these kind of things are commonplace; many professors from my place were recruited from the industry with unrelated backgrounds compared to their papers. Their skills, experience, and patents are what were needed. How can this nation progress if it’s filled by salty naysayers like you?
People like Danang is [pathetically] hilarious. Instead of making their own achievements, they make a fuss of other people’s. How typical. I hope people like Danang won’t ever have a place in our government. I’m sick of how many people like this exist.
With all aspects covered, Hartanto was done. He has done all of the dirty, messy work of weaving the fabric of virtual reality and pulling many hopeful, yet naïve, foolish minds into it, who would do all the legwork of defending it from any threats that will tore and destabilise its integrity. With the reality he created, all that remained for Hartanto to do was simply to march on it to announce to his followers and stage himself the grand return of the Indonesia’s scientific messiah. The one that will radically change the path of Indonesia’s history. No longer will Indonesia live under the shadow of its Asian contemporaries; she will now stand tall on her ground, outshining even the lustrous lands of America and Europe. And Dwi Hartanto is her shepherd.
But then, before his epic managed to reach its grand conclusion, his acquaintances pulled the plug on his VR headset.
Epilogue: A Mess We’re In
As Hartanto was colossally deceiving Indonesia for two years, the Indonesian student community in Delft, PPI Delft, grew restless. After feeling uneasy of the expansion of Hartanto’s fictitious narrative, to the point of deceiving Indonesia’s scientific communities, his fellow PPI Delft members personally warned him of the repercussions of his actions. Hartanto, naturally enjoying the shower of attention he got from glorifying himself in the media, didn’t take them seriously.
Furious, they decided that they need to prepare for the ammunition needed to wreak havoc upon Hartanto’s ‘reality’. Traces of Hartanto’s public deception, as well as the data of his true identity were scraped from the corners of the Internet. They also clarified and verified the true nature of Hartanto’s activities from the event organisers — something that the media and the government failed to do. The result of their extensive sleuthing work was then synthesised into two dossiers.
At first, they were hesitant to fire the shots. But then, an alumnus posted a screen capture of Hartanto’s brief appearance in Habibie’s special interview in September 4, 2017 to PPI Delft’s Facebook group, and all hell broke loose. Adding fuel to the fire, Hartanto’s doctoral thesis defence date was announced to be held in September 13. As the date was closing in, the group was split between the parties who were eager to put an end to the chaos immediately and the parties who wanted to hold off the trigger until after Hartanto’s defence. Regardless of their stances, however, everyone agreed on one thing: Hartanto, and his false reality, must be terminated.
Many parties were alerted of Hartanto’s deception. The Indonesian embassy, which bestowed Hartanto an award during the Declaration of Independence Day Ceremony, was asked to cooperate with their investigation. As a reaction to the revelation, the embassy revoked said award on September 15, citing ‘unforeseen developments beyond good intentions’ as the reason. At around the same time, LAPAN, which was part of the reason why the situation with Hartanto escalated within PPI Delft, was notified about the findings and subsequently revoked Hartanto’s invitation to their event. In a separate occasion, on September 10, someone revealed the dossiers to I-4 by posting them to I-4’s WhatsApp group. Most notably, TU Delft somehow managed to notice the turmoil surrounding Hartanto — either by someone actively reporting Hartanto’s misconduct to the university or by the university’s own observation — and subsequently postponed Hartanto’s thesis defence.
With the immediate threat to the future of his academic career, complicated by the mounting pressure from his peers, Hartanto finally realised that he could no longer maintain the ‘reality’ he created. For him, it was the beginning of the end. The start of the big crunch.
He attempted to cushion the impact he was going to suffer from the destruction of his ‘virtual reality’ by wiping off traces of his narratives from the Internet. On September 10, he took down his Facebook account; a channel he used to publicise a lot of his lies before they even managed to reach mainstream media. With it gone, so did the countless materials he used to weave his narrative, as well as one of the main ways he could use to maintain the integrity of his ‘reality’. That wasn’t the end of it, however; on the day after he received the dreaded news of the postponement of his thesis defence, he quickly revised the master’s thesis he uploaded to TU Delft’s Computer Engineering publication repository by removing the falsified curriculum vitae he attached at the end of his thesis (Fig. 8) — either by his own volition to avoid further academic repercussions had it been found out¹³, or by TU Delft’s pressure to correct his records.
With Hartanto neutralised, so did his ability to keep his ‘reality’ whole. Slowly but surely, the unmaintained fabric of ‘virtual reality’ he created started to unweave, leaving a jumbled mess of yarn on its trail. So far, however, most of the drama was contained in Delft, with most people in Indonesia, lying on the far side of the fabric, ignorant of Hartanto’s demise. For more than two weeks after the beginning of his fall from grace, he was able to hold on to the remains of his ‘reality’ — despite being battered hard by a university-held ethical hearing on September 25 — for the fiasco was just a Typhoon in a teacup¹⁴.
The time bomb was ticking, however, and there was no stopping it.
The dossiers sent to I-4’s members on September 10 were received by then-Savannah State University professor, Deden Rukmana. After maintaining radio silence for three weeks, Rukmana ultimately decided that he couldn’t let the ‘virtual reality’ stand any longer. On October 2, 2017, he blew the whistle on Hartanto by publicly posting his now infamous open letter to his Facebook account. With Rukmana — a prominent professor in the Indonesian academic circle — slashing open a huge tear in Hartanto’s reality, its disintegration finally reached the Indonesian social media sphere.
After the hole was struck, the unweaving was unstoppable. Three days later, Gatra published an article about the embassy’s rescission of Hartanto’s award. This was significant as, after the embassy hid the decision for weeks, it was finally exposed to the Indonesian public for the first time. Considering the shocking nature of the decision, Gatra then inquired Hartanto about what was the fuss all about. Hartanto, suffocating under the pressure from both Delft and the Indonesian scientific and social media circle, finally decided to cut his losses and admitted to Gatra that he has been deceiving Indonesia for years.
However, while Hartanto’s admission of guilt to Gatra should’ve marked the end of his narrative, some patches of his ‘reality’ still remained within the minds of his bewildered believers. After all, the Gatra admission was indefinitive, vague — Hartanto did not specify which parts of his stories were mere fabrications — and not far-reaching enough to conclusively obliterate any notion that Hartanto was an accomplished aerospace engineer, as he claimed. Needless to say, his colleagues in PPI Delft were having none of it. As a result, in the Hive room, at the TU Delft Library, on October 7, 2017, Hartanto was coerced into formally admitting all of his fabrications and falsifications in painstaking details by making a statement and signing a physical document of his clarification and apology, while being watched by his fellow PPI Delft members and alumni.
As the Kumparan reporter in attendance, Eddi Santosa — in one of the most baffling strokes of irony, the same person who broke the first fake story about Hartanto in Detik two years prior — brought the news out of the room to relay it to his fellow journalists in Jakarta, Hartanto had to deal with the dread of the reality — the actual reality, not his — that everything, every single thing that he created starting from eight years ago, from his TITech graduate claims to the jet fighter lies, and the reputation he got, and the glimmering hope he witnessed from his fellow Indonesians, dispersed into thin air. As Kumparan broke the news of this unfortunate, yet cathartic event, the last of the binding threads of the fabric of his ‘virtual reality’ unweaved itself. The artificial existence turned into emptiness. Into sunyata.
The sunyata, however, is not a state favoured by the human nature. As the people who were hypnotised into believing Hartanto’s reality got their virtual reality simulation abruptly shut down, they came into their senses once again. Realising that all of the tales of hope and glory they basked upon were just a mere lie by an unassuming doctoral student, the feeling of emptiness was quickly replaced with an amorphous mess of emotions.
Anger. Sadness. Disappointment. Denial. Shame. Every single one of them fueled the chaos that ensued. As the media ran Hartanto into the ground for the sweet, sweet advertisement revenue, every single revelation that was spat out by them became a piece of laughing stock of the nation. The most iconic of them all? As it turns out, the true field of Hartanto’s expertise for his doctoral studies was nowhere near aerospace engineering. Instead, it was the more comically apt… virtual reality.
No longer willing to be associated with Hartanto — and the mess they’re in that is forever attached with his name — every single party who contributed to the creation of his ‘reality’ detached themselves to wash their own hands, from Kemenristekdikti, Kemenkominfo, the Indonesian embassy, I-4, to even Habibie himself. All of them quickly turned their backs on him and pointed their fingers to implicate only Hartanto and the media for their transgressions.
Sadly, this means that the victims of Hartanto’s ‘reality’ completely failed to recognise how and why they were trapped in it in the first place. As Hartanto was left for the ravens, they gave themselves a pat on their backs, and moved on to look elsewhere for another hopeful, promising Indonesian scientist to fawn upon —
Tahukah anda Dgn istilah: mythomania? Yaitu suatu kelainan dimana senang BERBOHONG & meyakini bahwa kebohongan tetsebut sbg suatu yg benar!¹⁵
— Taruna Ikrar (@TarunaIkrar) October 9, 2017
— only to be lured into yet another virtual insanity.
Footnotes
¹ Schank, R. C., & Abelson, R. P. (1995). Knowledge and Memory: The Real Story. In R. S. Wyer (Ed.), Knowledge and Memory: The Real Story (pp. 1–85). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Retrieved from http://cogprints.org/636/
² Ed Yong discussed the oxytocin debate in his 2015 piece in The Atlantic.
³ Zak, P. J. (2015). Why Inspiring Stories Make Us React: The Neuroscience of Narrative. Cerebrum: The Dana Forum on Brain Science, 2015. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4445577/
⁴ Leins, D. A., Fisher, R. P., & Ross, S. J. (2013). Exploring liars’ strategies for creating deceptive reports. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 18(1), 141–151. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8333.2011.02041.x
⁵ Related to the concept of hyperreality in postmodernism.
⁶ The scientific basis behind Interstellar is discussed further in Kip Thorne’s book The Science of Interstellar (2014).
⁷ ‘Dihydrogen monoxide’ is simply another name for water.
⁸ ‘Oxidane’ is another IUPAC-recommended name for water.
⁹ Oversees the activities of private higher education institutions in Indonesia. Separated into regional chapters.
¹⁰ Translated into ‘child of the nation’.
¹¹ Refer to Law №14 of 2005 and Regulation of the Minister of Administrative and Bureaucratic Reform №17 of 2013.
¹² The blood-boiling nature of these comments is, unfortunately, lost in translation.
¹³ Most likely the rescission of his master’s degree.
¹⁴ Pun intended.
¹⁵ Translation: ‘Did you know about the term ‘mythomania’? It refers to a [mental] disorder in which [the sufferer] loves to LIE and believes that the lie is the truth!’ Source: https://locita.co/esai/menanti-bukti-ikrar-sang-taruna-ikrar
