The Wikipedia article gives more details than I would ever care to cover myself, but here's the gist of it: in numerous cities (seemingly centered in Philadelphia), weird little plaques or tiles would be found embedded in roads or sidewalks. All said the same general thing: "Toynbee Idea / In Kubrick's 2001 / Resurrect Dead / On Planet Jupiter." Dozens of these tiles appear, and nobody has any idea who has done them. It actually even took a lot of work to figure out how they were done, being that the tiles had to be stuck to asphalt and concrete. There were also little side messages attached, which seemed to detail a larger conspiracy involving secret societies that are trying to silence the tile creator.
A lot of people have gotten obsessed with the mystery, trying to figure out what the message means and who is responsible. They seem to be convinced that there is some larger secret that is just waiting to be decoded.
Well, I've figured it out. Here it is: some delusional paranoiac has been vandalizing your city.
Seriously, there's nothing more to it. The guy was nuts, plain and simple. What's the breakdown of the "secret message?" Toynbee was a historian, and he really only talked about resurrections in the sense that he found the Christian idea of coming back from the dead (in your physical body) more believable than the idea of ghosts. Not that he was an expert on the subject or anything; he was a historian, not a scientist. So what does this have to do with Kubrick's move, 2001: A Space Odyssey? Well, Arthur C. Clarke once wrote a short story where there's a ship named after Toynbee and a ship named Jupiter V, and Clarke worked with Kubrick for 2001, where people are flying to Jupiter.
That doesn't make any sense, you say? What does any of that have to do with anything else of that? Give yourself a gold star, because you just hit the nail on the head. There is no sense to it, and it doesn't connect. At least not to a rational person.
But the creator of the Toynbee Tiles is not rational. There are several subtle hints that this is the case. Firstly, attached to the tiles are manifestos and rants about how a conspiracy between the media (Knight-Ridder specifically), the Russians, and the Jews (of course) are trying to kill him and silence his message. Secondly--and most importantly--he sticks goddam tiles into the asphalt with messages about his persecution fantasies. I'm no psychologist, but I don't think that qualifies as normal behavior.
Discussions on the internet go on about the tiles like there's something paranormal about them. You'd think the tiles were dropped out of the sky by a UFO, the way they carry on about how "mysterious" it is. They make a big deal about how there must be some connection with David Mamet, because he wrote a play where some nutjob calls a radio host to talk about exactly these kind of nutjob ideas, and the fact that there is some newspaper article which references an editorial written by a guy espousing the idea that we'll colonize Jupiter by resurrecting our dead onto the planet's surface (even though it's a gas giant and has no discernible surface). Sure, there is some debate as to which came first (because they can both be credited to 1983), but I posit this: who cares? Either Mamet read the article by the crazy guy and got inspired, or the crazy guy read the play and thought this sounded like a good idea. Do the details make any real difference?
Finally, while the tiles are still being discovered decades later, it is clear to anybody with eyeballs that now that the whole "phenomena" has gotten popular, there are copycats. Do you really think this guy went to South America to plant tiles? I doubt it. Also, when the tiles are written in entirely different styles, fonts, and with different methods, for some reason everybody hesitates to mention that maybe it's not the same guy. Instead they act like it was some kind of new "phase." Then again, maybe one of his other personalities did it. If you're going to be crazy, you might as well go whole-hog.
An entire documentary was made about this non-phenomena, titled Resurrect Dead: They Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles. I tried to watch it, but got fed up after about 30 minutes. It's ridiculous. Credibility goes immediately down the toilet when your main "researcher" is a guy who has spent years living on the street and describes himself as "a self taught artist, musician, and writer in the Philadelphia underground art and music scene." If that's not a euphemism for "unemployed," I don't know what is. At one point, this guy admitted to having run down the street (after he "just missed" the planting of another tile) yelling about how he believed in the Toynbee Idea. Really, guy? You believe in the idea of bringing the dead back to life on Jupiter? I mean, you've obviously done more than a few drugs in your day, but is your brain that full of holes? This joke of a documentary is an homage to everything that is humiliating and discrediting to the entire field of parapsychology. Here's a hint for next time: having a guy read the tiles in a creepy voice does not make them more significant.
I am honestly baffled as to why anybody cares about the Toynbee Tiles, with the exception of the public works department that should be tasked to clean the tiles up. All we've got is an anti-Semitic delusional conspiracy theorist with a penchant for what could only very generously be described as "street art." Why does this inspire us to hunt for further meaning? What about this makes us think there is anything worth learning more about? Are those of us who are into the unexplained of our world so desperate for new mysteries that we'll cling to the misguided art projects of mentally unstable racists?
If so, I think we'd better just quit right now, while we're somewhat ahead.
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