Henosis Sage
2021-07-10 07:18:05 UTC
The party in power wants to redraw district lines. The prime interest rate has changed. A free service has been created to host our personal files. These conspiracies order, and disorder, our lives; and yet they can’t compete for attention with digital graffiti about pedophile satanists in the basement of a DC pizzeria.
This, in sum, is our problem: the truest conspiracies meet with the least opposition.
Or to put it another way, conspiracy practices – the methods by which true conspiracies such as gerrymandering, or the debt industry, or mass surveillance are realized – are almost always overshadowed by conspiracy theories: those malevolent falsehoods that in aggregate can erode civic confidence in the existence of anything certain or verifiable.
In my life, I’ve had enough of both the practice and the theory. In my work for the United States National Security Agency, I was involved with establishing a top secret system intended to access and track the communications of every human being on the planet. And yet after I grew aware of the damage this system was causing – and after I helped to expose that true conspiracy to the press – I couldn’t help but notice that the conspiracies that garnered almost as much attention were those that were demonstrably false: I was, it was claimed, a hand-picked CIA operative sent to infiltrate and embarrass the NSA; my actions were part of an elaborate inter-agency feud. No, said others: my true masters were the Russians, the Chinese, or worse – Facebook.
As I found myself made vulnerable to all manner of internet fantasy, and interrogated by journalists about my past, about my family background and about an array of other issues both entirely personal and entirely irrelevant to the matter at hand, there were moments when I wanted to scream: “What is wrong with you people? All you want is intrigue, but an honest-to-God, globe-spanning apparatus of omnipresent surveillance riding in your pocket is not enough? You have to sauce that up?”
It took years – eight years and counting in exile – for me to realize that I was missing the point: we talk about conspiracy theories in order to avoid talking about conspiracy practices, which are often too daunting, too threatening, too total.
*
It’s my hope in this post and in posts to come to engage a broader scope of conspiracy-thinking, by examining the relationship between true and false conspiracies, and by asking difficult questions about the relationships between truth and falsehood in our public and private lives.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/01/edward-snowdon-conspiracy-theories-belief-powerlessness
Powerlessness ... that's a good point to make. In relation to govts and also to religions like eckankar and it's high priests. anointed and self-appointed both.
I note one of the key witnesses against julian assange in the UK trials has admitted he was lying and recants. https://twitter.com/democracynow/status/1409487111808602116
Meanwhile ... "The only thing tragic about the death of Donald Rumsfeld is that it didn’t occur in an Iraqi prison."
or in a gutter.
"Donald Rumsfeld was a merciless war criminal who presided over systemic torture, massacres of civilians, illegal wars. That’s his legacy and how he should forever be remembered."
someone said those things .... I'll call him Rebazar Tarzs, he said it ...
Multiple governments and the Congress of The United States of America should be remembered similarly.
This, in sum, is our problem: the truest conspiracies meet with the least opposition.
Or to put it another way, conspiracy practices – the methods by which true conspiracies such as gerrymandering, or the debt industry, or mass surveillance are realized – are almost always overshadowed by conspiracy theories: those malevolent falsehoods that in aggregate can erode civic confidence in the existence of anything certain or verifiable.
In my life, I’ve had enough of both the practice and the theory. In my work for the United States National Security Agency, I was involved with establishing a top secret system intended to access and track the communications of every human being on the planet. And yet after I grew aware of the damage this system was causing – and after I helped to expose that true conspiracy to the press – I couldn’t help but notice that the conspiracies that garnered almost as much attention were those that were demonstrably false: I was, it was claimed, a hand-picked CIA operative sent to infiltrate and embarrass the NSA; my actions were part of an elaborate inter-agency feud. No, said others: my true masters were the Russians, the Chinese, or worse – Facebook.
As I found myself made vulnerable to all manner of internet fantasy, and interrogated by journalists about my past, about my family background and about an array of other issues both entirely personal and entirely irrelevant to the matter at hand, there were moments when I wanted to scream: “What is wrong with you people? All you want is intrigue, but an honest-to-God, globe-spanning apparatus of omnipresent surveillance riding in your pocket is not enough? You have to sauce that up?”
It took years – eight years and counting in exile – for me to realize that I was missing the point: we talk about conspiracy theories in order to avoid talking about conspiracy practices, which are often too daunting, too threatening, too total.
*
It’s my hope in this post and in posts to come to engage a broader scope of conspiracy-thinking, by examining the relationship between true and false conspiracies, and by asking difficult questions about the relationships between truth and falsehood in our public and private lives.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/01/edward-snowdon-conspiracy-theories-belief-powerlessness
Powerlessness ... that's a good point to make. In relation to govts and also to religions like eckankar and it's high priests. anointed and self-appointed both.
I note one of the key witnesses against julian assange in the UK trials has admitted he was lying and recants. https://twitter.com/democracynow/status/1409487111808602116
Meanwhile ... "The only thing tragic about the death of Donald Rumsfeld is that it didn’t occur in an Iraqi prison."
or in a gutter.
"Donald Rumsfeld was a merciless war criminal who presided over systemic torture, massacres of civilians, illegal wars. That’s his legacy and how he should forever be remembered."
someone said those things .... I'll call him Rebazar Tarzs, he said it ...
Multiple governments and the Congress of The United States of America should be remembered similarly.