Noted he used the word "atomized," which seems like a Hannah Arendt reference. Personally, I don't worry about conspiracies, as I'm indexed on something much more plausible and serious. To scale and really be dangerous, you need for an idea to be simple and seductive. Arendts view was the idea of truth being the enemy, and once people were unmoored from it, they could not resist the directed chaos used against them. The sufficient condition was that good men did nothing. With no truth, there was no basis or identity on which to organize.<p>So there is no conspiracy. Just a set of incentives to align to and sustain the narrative, and the more absurd the gymnastics, the greater the rewards, because only the powerful can afford to seem so stupid and inconsistent. In that model, absurdity becomes a status signal, because to be that stupid requires hidden power.<p>Imo, Poppers paraphrase had been used to justify this precise set of incentives, and I don't think he's a useful reference for insight into what's going on now. Arendt, however, nailed it.
>The conspiracy theorist will believe that institutions can be understood completely as the result of conscious design; and as collectives, he usually ascribes to them a kind of group-personality, treating them as conspiring agents, just as if they were individual men. As opposed to this view, the social theorist should recognize that the persistence of institutions and collectives creates a problem to be solved in terms of an analysis of individual social actions and their unintended (and often unwanted) social consequences, as well as their intended ones.<p>and in between is the systems theorist who observes the emergent behavior (which is nor "conspiring" (despite sometimes displaying intelligence-like elements), nor generally directly reducible to the "individual actions") of the systems.
Truth and lies are functions of life, mental machinations of survival.
Especially in politics, since it is the game of power over human ressources, wich are at last the most important ressources of survival for a highly intelligent social organism.<p>Find a copy of Hannah Arendts article 'Truth and Politics'<p><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1967/02/25/truth-and-politics" rel="nofollow">https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1967/02/25/truth-and-poli...</a>
I don't which is worse, to be delusional about intended consequences, or to be conspiratorial about unintended consequences.<p>I learned the word 'apophenia' from danah boyd's blog, <a href="https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/" rel="nofollow">https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/</a>. She is a founder of Data & Society, at <a href="https://datasociety.net/" rel="nofollow">https://datasociety.net/</a>
Well more than public thinkers and conspiracy theorists which there is no dearth off, what is missing are people who are consistent nuisance to the powers that be. Not in TV studios or the twttersphere. But on the ground.<p>The powers thats be dont care what Snowden says. They dont see him as a problem anymore. Cause he is not on the board anymore.<p>Gandhi too would write a whole lot, to process what he was going through, and grasp at whatever he could find to convince himself he wasnt nuts for taking a stand, just like Snowden.<p>But the difference is, he didnt just retire into "public thinker" mode. He would pick a sensitive case, head straight to the center of action, court arrest and cause the entire state to shutdown. The Rowlett Act was no big diff to what Snowden is protesting. But Gandhi got the brits to bend.<p>Can you imagine what happens if Snowden sneaks back into the US and courts arrest by the Dems while they chant about defending privacy, and ideally does it exactly when some inevitable privacy/data exploitation related fiasco happens?<p>But that wont happens cause he has decided to become a social media influencer, oh sorry public thinker, just like the rest of America.
The term "conspiracy theory" is itself an apophenic simplification serving to render intelligible the maelstrom of conflicting data about the spectrum of intangibles lying between proven corporate and governmental crime at one end and inexplicable societal ills at the other.
It’s probably an example of the Baader-Meinhof effect¹ but I’d never heard the term “apopenia” until I read “A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon”² a couple of weeks ago. Despite not being a gamer and not being familiar with all the different types of game mentioned in the article, I thought it was an excellent analysis of how conspiracy theories take hold.<p>1. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion</a><p>2. <a href="https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analysis-of-qanon-580972548be5" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analy...</a>