This is an actual rocket that Elon Musk is shooing into space. I can't believe it took us 60 years to finally get 1950's sci-fi aesthetics. I kinda want to watch Flash Gordon now.
Friday, January 11, 2019
Retro-futurism
This is an actual rocket that Elon Musk is shooing into space. I can't believe it took us 60 years to finally get 1950's sci-fi aesthetics. I kinda want to watch Flash Gordon now.
Saturday, December 29, 2018
On the Demise of Conspiracy Theories
I love conspiracy theories. It was the first thing I used the internet for when it was new. Back then the web was a glorious place to research conspiracy theories, with amazing primary source information untainted by disinformation. Back then, nobody knew what the internet was going to be; what it was capable of. I believe in those first few years of the world wide web, lots of juicy secrets slipped through the cracks.
But that all changed once society at large figured out the internet was going to be the next big thing. Conspiracy theory sites popped up across the web, each telling similar but slightly different stories about aliens, government mind control, the JFK assassination, remote viewing, bigfoot, and a different secret society for each day of the week. Art Bell's radio show rose to fame. Much was disinformation, but most were people trying to sell the tin foil hats and colloidal silver charms. Once the internet became primarily a marketplace, conspiracy theories were no longer glimpses behind the veil ... they were commodities. Researching conspiracy theories on the internet was for he most part a fruitless endeavor. I went back to re-reading some of the primary source texts I still had in paperback, some of which were hard to find on Amazon, yearning for the glory days of the late 90s.
Today, in this post-fact fake-news world, conspiracy theories find themselves in an even worse place. Before, conspiracy theorists were considered odd, quirky, a little weird, sometime a lot weird. But today, it is definitely a pejorative. Conspiracy theories such as the "Deep State" or "Pizzagate" are seen as the cause of the political and social divisions we face now. How did we get from something so fun to this?
It probably started when conspiracy theories went mainstream. Now you may be thinking that conspiracy theories aren't even close to mainstream, in the same way the Kardashians or The Marvel Cinematic Universe is mainstream, but think about this. Before it was removed, the "Q-Anon" app in the Apple store was ranked the #1 paid entertainment app. That means that the "Q-Anon" conspiracy was bigger than Minecraft, and if you have kids, you have a good idea how crazy popular this conspiracy theory is. So why is going mainstream bad? I think it's like when I was in high school, and the first Lollapalooza happened and all the jocks started wearing Nine Inch Nails and The Cure t-shirts. I should have been happy that more people were experiencing the music I loved, but I knew they were just going to ruin the experience. And they did.
Most conspiracy theorists have as a goal to enlighten the masses, to show them what's been hidden from them behind the veil, to awaken humanity. I think this is a bad idea. The vast majority of people aren't ready for this kind of stuff. Most people still haven't recovered their sense of reality after seeing Ned Stark beheaded in the first season. They're totally not ready to argue whether the Greys or the Reptilians are our allies.
The other issue I have with contemporary conspiracy theories is that they are tainted with ideology. When one is researching conspiracy theories, it is imperative to not let ideology blind you. Ideology, whether it is political, religious, social, or economic, is its own control system. Now while I am aware that everyone has ideologies, and they are impossible to escape, if one is really interested in truth, then considerable effort must be made to look past your ideologies.
I never liked Alex Jones. Even when he was a small time Austin personality who was doing cool things like breaking into Bohemian Grove. The reason is that from the beginning, it was obvious that the conspiracy theories he reported were being used to justify his own political and religious ideologies, and that was just wrong.
If you want to see an example of how ideology blinds you from the truth, look no further than Pizzagate. For those not in the know, Pizzagate is a conspiracy theory based on John Podesta's hacked e-mails. When they were released on Wikileaks, the kids over in 4chan scoured through every e-mail and found ... that John Podesta ate pizza fairly often. That was it. That was all they could find. And so, they came to the conclusion that "pizza" was a code word for "child prostitution," and one of them went to a pizza place Podesta frequented and started shooting the place up because he thought there were child sex slaves in the basement. Now, if you actually read Podesta's e-mails, you will see multiple conversations regarding official government disclosure of extra-terrestrial intelligence. Are you kidding me? Obama's chief counselor is talking about the government's interaction with aliens and the conspiracy is that he likes pizza a little too much?
I could go on and on about how YouTube's business model and algorithms forces content creators to come up with a new conspiracy theory every day, the more toxic the better. Or how Twitter rewards the lowest common denominator in discourse. Or how people will believe anything in Facebook as long as it came from a "friend", even if the "friend" is someone you went to grade with for a year and haven't spoken to in 47 years, not even saying anything when you added them as a "friend."
I think part of the reason I wrote this novel was to relive some of the joy I experienced researching conspiracy theories. Will those days ever return? I don't know. I doubt it. The internet ushered in the information age, leaving behind the industrial age. We initially thought that power would come from controlling information. We now know that power comes from controlling truth.
I wonder if Moulder still believes the truth is out there?
But that all changed once society at large figured out the internet was going to be the next big thing. Conspiracy theory sites popped up across the web, each telling similar but slightly different stories about aliens, government mind control, the JFK assassination, remote viewing, bigfoot, and a different secret society for each day of the week. Art Bell's radio show rose to fame. Much was disinformation, but most were people trying to sell the tin foil hats and colloidal silver charms. Once the internet became primarily a marketplace, conspiracy theories were no longer glimpses behind the veil ... they were commodities. Researching conspiracy theories on the internet was for he most part a fruitless endeavor. I went back to re-reading some of the primary source texts I still had in paperback, some of which were hard to find on Amazon, yearning for the glory days of the late 90s.
Today, in this post-fact fake-news world, conspiracy theories find themselves in an even worse place. Before, conspiracy theorists were considered odd, quirky, a little weird, sometime a lot weird. But today, it is definitely a pejorative. Conspiracy theories such as the "Deep State" or "Pizzagate" are seen as the cause of the political and social divisions we face now. How did we get from something so fun to this?
It probably started when conspiracy theories went mainstream. Now you may be thinking that conspiracy theories aren't even close to mainstream, in the same way the Kardashians or The Marvel Cinematic Universe is mainstream, but think about this. Before it was removed, the "Q-Anon" app in the Apple store was ranked the #1 paid entertainment app. That means that the "Q-Anon" conspiracy was bigger than Minecraft, and if you have kids, you have a good idea how crazy popular this conspiracy theory is. So why is going mainstream bad? I think it's like when I was in high school, and the first Lollapalooza happened and all the jocks started wearing Nine Inch Nails and The Cure t-shirts. I should have been happy that more people were experiencing the music I loved, but I knew they were just going to ruin the experience. And they did.
Most conspiracy theorists have as a goal to enlighten the masses, to show them what's been hidden from them behind the veil, to awaken humanity. I think this is a bad idea. The vast majority of people aren't ready for this kind of stuff. Most people still haven't recovered their sense of reality after seeing Ned Stark beheaded in the first season. They're totally not ready to argue whether the Greys or the Reptilians are our allies.
The other issue I have with contemporary conspiracy theories is that they are tainted with ideology. When one is researching conspiracy theories, it is imperative to not let ideology blind you. Ideology, whether it is political, religious, social, or economic, is its own control system. Now while I am aware that everyone has ideologies, and they are impossible to escape, if one is really interested in truth, then considerable effort must be made to look past your ideologies.
I never liked Alex Jones. Even when he was a small time Austin personality who was doing cool things like breaking into Bohemian Grove. The reason is that from the beginning, it was obvious that the conspiracy theories he reported were being used to justify his own political and religious ideologies, and that was just wrong.
If you want to see an example of how ideology blinds you from the truth, look no further than Pizzagate. For those not in the know, Pizzagate is a conspiracy theory based on John Podesta's hacked e-mails. When they were released on Wikileaks, the kids over in 4chan scoured through every e-mail and found ... that John Podesta ate pizza fairly often. That was it. That was all they could find. And so, they came to the conclusion that "pizza" was a code word for "child prostitution," and one of them went to a pizza place Podesta frequented and started shooting the place up because he thought there were child sex slaves in the basement. Now, if you actually read Podesta's e-mails, you will see multiple conversations regarding official government disclosure of extra-terrestrial intelligence. Are you kidding me? Obama's chief counselor is talking about the government's interaction with aliens and the conspiracy is that he likes pizza a little too much?
I could go on and on about how YouTube's business model and algorithms forces content creators to come up with a new conspiracy theory every day, the more toxic the better. Or how Twitter rewards the lowest common denominator in discourse. Or how people will believe anything in Facebook as long as it came from a "friend", even if the "friend" is someone you went to grade with for a year and haven't spoken to in 47 years, not even saying anything when you added them as a "friend."
I think part of the reason I wrote this novel was to relive some of the joy I experienced researching conspiracy theories. Will those days ever return? I don't know. I doubt it. The internet ushered in the information age, leaving behind the industrial age. We initially thought that power would come from controlling information. We now know that power comes from controlling truth.
I wonder if Moulder still believes the truth is out there?
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