Stand on Zanazibar is a great book, but I don’t think that excerpt demonstrates quite what this article is talking about. In-universe, those appear to be generally truthful, and are a good match for such real things as the Anarchist Cookbook.
The same author’s Shockwave Rider is probably a better place to look for craziness spreading via Internet, though the governmental and elite malfeasance spread on the network was true.
Not an expert, but I do know more far right neo Nazis types from growing up than I’d care to admit. I’d say there’s definite crossover between gamergate, Q-ANON, and old guys with guns. Neo Nazis, on the other hand, sometimes go even further right than the others, and don’t trust Trump because of Kushner. Q-ANON has a very weird spread of people, from my experience. Seems to have more women involved in it than gamergate, and it also skews older.
Thank you for the overview.
I guess I should go do some reading on this one of these days. Ignoring them sure isn’t making them go away.
bits don’t care whether they’re true or not, they all take up the same space in the tubes
I cannot express how much I detest the phrase “Do your own research”. I hear it everywhere from the woo crowd these days. It’s gotten to the point that I yearn for a good old-fashioned “Wake up, sheeple!”
True. But researching won’t make them go away, either. It’ll just make you sadder about the state of America.
QAnon really reminds me of something like malicious flat earthers, where people have gotten there by “research” without realizing they haven’t left the echo chamber. They all tend to be religious and distrustful of institutional authority structure. I bet you’d see a big overlap there, particularly in the way people have monetized the publicization of both conspiracies.
Good points.
In Stand on Zanzibar, the New York City Public Library has been virtualized, the physical contents have been moved to some secure unknown location, the library is where you search and read the data. But there is no indication that people do this from home.
Shockwave Rider is prophetic about the data net in many ways, but limits it to North America, missing the globality of our web. Also, there is no sense whatever of everyone in the world having a mobile phone; we see that a secret agent has a pocket communicator, and the protagonist gets an advanced pocket veephone near the end of the novel, but that’s about it.
Two of my favorite books, which I re-read every year or so.
Some of its most visible proponents, such as Jack Posobiec, a conspiracy theorist who is now a correspondent for the pro-Trump cable-news channel One America News Network, backed away.
Not very damned far, and only for as long as it took the fuss over the Comet Pizza shooter to die down. Stuff like QAnon is all he does.
That’s true. It really does get to me when I see how vicious people can be.
Ok. Like flat earthers. That’s probably all I need to know. Laugh/cry
Fuuuuuuuck me. Stop… just stop, I can’t take any more!
If you have a chance, watch Behind the Curve on Netflix. It’s about flat earthers, and it definitely humanizes them, while also pointing out how deluded they are. It never feels like the filmmakers are exploiting them either or really punching down.
Regarding Qanon, and other alternative reality trips currently trending - more and more I’m developing the impression (as others have mentioned above), that some central assumptions about the nature of belief, (and presumed rationality) are not only flawed in the present days context, but have always been more off the mark than we’re comfortable to admit at times. The U.S. has a rich and colorful history of in-their-time very unusual belief systems gaining considerable power and followers. The idea that people don’t have specific beliefs so much as mental moods/(pre-?) dispositions, Vonnegut-ean “Granfaloons” etc. Specific genetic or environmentally influenced neuro-chemical factors, various health, nutrition and recreational or prescribed chemical consumption influences are all aspects of what influence our tendencies to “believe”. Not to mention the social and power connections that reward (with material & psychic components) or punish (likewise) diverse positions depending on ones particular context.
The psycho-active chemistry side of this seems critical. In the 60’s chemicals were widely available, but possibly less widely used, and the counter-culture that was experimenting more heavily had certain philosophical guide-stones, (possibly better education on average and idealism) as well as figures like Tim Leary, John Lilly, Alan Watts and Robert Anton Wilson (to name a few of those pop-psych sages available in mass-market paperback formats), all offering some degree of navigational counsel to the mental landscapes involved. Still, even with the kinds of admonitions about buying ones own b.s. (thanks R.A.W.) - plenty of folks went to some extremely strange places and stayed there (and perhaps even more disturbingly some mutated into today’s reactionary weirdness).
To what extent do the current (likely) far more numerous consumers/victims of the opioid epidemic, over-prescribed pharmaceuticals and customers of commercialized high-grade laboratory cannabis forms have similar “reasoned” voices to provide reasoned perspective about various reality tunnels? Is the natural McLuhan-esque mode of the YouTube format necessarily radioactive insanity?
The Internet IS the drug. Our brains aren’t adapted to it and still react to the same old triggers. It’s very easy to blur the line between the virtual and the “real world”. Using algorithm to harness eyeballs rewarding content that causes strong emotions is a very effective way to radicalize beliefs. It’s like spam, it’s massive enough that most people ignore it but those 1% that buy it are a gold mine ripe to exploit.
What drives me crazy about the stupidity of this is that they elected THE president that has consistent accusations about actually abusing girls at Epstein’s house as the paladin against pedophiles. Like, REALLY? For people that made a slogan of “doing the research” they have a blind spot the size of Jupiter there.
Shades of this classic bit -
I thought we’d have to throw Terence McKenna in there somewhere but now I realize he was from a younger generation and didn’t become a big drug-woo figure until the '80s and '90s
EDIT: There was also Aldous Huxley, from an earlier generation
It’s no different than other conspiracy belief. I mean, all the antivaxxers have “done their research” as well, and there a TONS of factual inaccuracies in their whackadoodle theories. Even when pointed out, they figure out some weird and equally inaccurate loop de doo of thought to explain the inaccuracy.
It truly is a religion because fact is being fitted to prove the end goal thought, not the other way around.
Remember the movie Inception? In the movie, they try to implant some core emotion, even less than a specific idea, it is a seed that then changes the target’s entire perception of the world.
The core idea here is “The world, as it appears, is a facade. The truth is secret, and communicated in code by those in the know.”
Just enough truth to show that there is a facade-- that photo of the Clintons hanging with Epstein wasn’t faked. But that’s the wedge used to bring in the real batshit crazy stuff. Slowly, a little at a time.
(yeah, I know - this is a guy who helped execute a war based on lies … so, maybe he’s got qualifying experience here?)
