The swivel-eyed community may have got better at radicalizing one another, but the good news is, that continues to not be most people. These conspiracy shibboleths aren’t persuasive; you still need to go to google and more or less consciously think, “what is the keyword that will give me the conspiracy-theory version of reality?”
Speaking in code helps you build terror cells (or harmless underground support communities), but it’s the opposite of a technique for changing the popular consciousness. In fact it’s stigmatizing; there is no more reliable way to make me switch from open-minded listening mode to “ok bye” mode than using a term like “deep state” or “Seth Rich”, and the more these people immerse themselves in their secret language, the less they will know how to talk to healthy people without triggering that reaction.
Myself, I can only speculate. But for instance a good example of what could happen would be the recent fake news rumor that the rules had been changed to make the whistleblowers heresy complaint legitimate. This was started by the right-wing blog the Federalist, written by some republican tool who used to be a staffer for Rick Perry of all the republican losers, he was bred under that goofballs wing. The story was quickly debunked by real journalists doing real journalists work. They show that the Federalist got the basic facts wrong, by incompetence or intention, and actual sources that the Federalist never spoke to also completely undermined their allegations.
Fact-checking sites cover things like this too, but I think we need a similar service that culls the feed only to the false narratives that are being pushed by trump and his right wing supporters - tagged with the same keywords so opposition research shows up in the same searches.
I feel like Google could really be helpful here. The goal would be to provide search results or YouTube suggestions that are truly ‘fair and balanced’ in a 1960s kind of way. You know, facts.
So Googlers: I know you are believers in facts. It’s ok if you still love Ayn Rand, all I’m suggesting is that a well-informed populace is better than our burgeoning Idiocracy. Please fix your algorithm to provide a semblance of fact checking. Yes, the faithful will undoubtedly go use duckduckgo, but they are lost souls, we are trying to keep the bulk of the citizenry in the reality-zone.
Both “crisis actor” and “virtue signalling” are used in the academic literature to talk about something entirely different from conservative fantasies.
For instance
“The crisis actor in this inquiry is the respondent to, not the initiator of a situational change that triggers perceptions of a high threat, a finite time for response, and probability of war.”
I suppose that if you are trying to explain cultural change through the lens of a culture war, you might accidentally co-opt some technical terminology from an analytical framework that treats a nation-state as an individual.
Similarly, virtue signaling is a concept from ethology, wherein the primary motivation of the population is avoiding “cheap talk”. Classically, the peacock tail is a signal of fitness, that cannot be faked. It’s a sign that the peacock has the genetic makeup to survive as a peacock and to maintain a luxuriant tail that hinders their ability to survive…
So virtue signaling is a means of communicating authenticity by sacrificing more time and effort than a non-authentic individual would consider rational.
No, that’s something different than what’s talked about here.
Dog whistling is taking normal, in use terms and giving them an alternate meaning which is only understood by your followers.
This is talking about making up new terms to dominate the search results for them.
How come the right wing crazies are so media-savvy? I was browsing shoutcast the other day to find some nice exotic music to listen to and alex jones’ infowars is everywhere in all the categories.
R’s have cornered the talking heads media of three minutes hate. D’s have cornered Hollywood and comedy. I would not characterize either as completely dominant. They dominate different segments of the media.
It’s disconcerting to encounter the idea of a flavor of epistemological malpractice as removed from mere bullshit as bullshit is from mere lies; but I think you’ve identified one.
I wonder if it’s significant, or merely happenstance, that the co-opted use of both terms is more or less precisely contrary to the term as (not all that. outside of specific subjects, which is why I wonder) commonly used; rather than different but not in any decisive way.
The academic literature crisis actor is what it is only by virtue of the crisis context in which they act; while the conspiracy one is what it is purely by virtue of not acting in an actual crisis context, with any resemblance to those who are entirely for the purpose of simulating a real crisis.
Similarly, the usual message board implication of ‘virtue signalling’ is a combination of dismissing someone’s talk as cheap and implying that it’s also performative in a dishonest sort of way; while the academic sense is about expensive signals of agreed-upon virtues.
Especially given that the standard usage is a trifle obscure(not wildly technical; but not necessarily everyday general stuff) I’m not sure if there’s an advantage to be derived from a coinage so thoroughly counter to the usual meaning; or if it’s just happenstance.
Yeah, that’s exactly what’s so disturbing about it to me. That’s a great way of summing it up. There’s nobody really benefiting, nobody to reason with or defeat, just a numerical target being maximized by an algorithm, and the people who think they will benefit not only don’t care what the other consequences of hitting that target might be, but are actively motivated by their own advantage not to care. There’s no belief, no principle, no ethics involved on anybody’s part, just the “invisible hand."
