the revolution will be televised

poetix

we murder to dissect
Conspiracy theory is now not only a perspective on world events, but an active force within them - I don't just mean that there are conspiracies, but that conspiratorial and counter-conspiratorial theorising and strategising are part of how mass politics is done. Duginists and Bannonites and people like that are shaping not so much the way influential people think, as the way they think other people think. It's not that those with power are themselves Moldbuggians necessarily; rather, they know there are forces they can rally by dogwhistling to Moldbuggians. It doesn't take much to make a QAnon cultist prick up their ears, they're constantly on the lookout for signs that someone's in on the game. It's a bit like the Bene Gesserit in Dune seeding religions and prophecies so that they can exploit them later.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Those who buy into conspiracy theories are mugs, but the real conspiracy is the shaping and promulgation of such theories as tools of out-of-band political influence - rather than (or in addition to) shaping opinion through official media propaganda, you shape emotion and expectation through cultic, counter-cultural narratives that exert a strong pull on those who want to access secret understanding.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
I get the impression that a lot of people strongly invested in the outcome of Brexit can barely say out loud what they think is really going on, because if they did it would sound absurdly silly.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Dugin and Bannon as agents of a real-life Missionaria Protectiva. I love it.

I was thinking just last night that the whole QAnon thing seems to have fallen out of the spotlight a bit over the last half-year or so. Is if still a thing?
 

luka

Well-known member
Yeah, I mean, that is the standard dissensus line isn't it. conspiracy theories are defined as false images of reality and correspondingly everyone who believes in them is a mug but I dont find it very satisfactory
 

version

Well-known member
Now one of the many reasons Soros is fascinating is that he reminds us (and this is one of the lessons of gravity's rainbow as version will explain when he wAkes up this afternoon) that nation states are not the only players at the table. There are transnational factions, ideological groupings, corporations, cartels, NGOs, secret societies and there are individuals with the financial resources of a nation state.

These also trying to shape reality to their own ends.

It more or less removes borders once you acquire that level of wealth. I imagine it'd be entirely possible for someone like Soros or Charles Koch or whoever to just live in international waters in perpetuity if they really wanted to. They've transcended.

The scene in Gravity's Rainbow where Mexico bursts into the boardroom and they're all there feels quite telling, there's something operating in parallel to the war where the lines are drawn completely differently. IBM sold equipment to the Nazis irl, the Koch brothers' father built oil refineries for Hitler and Stalin.

One of the most glaring examples of this sort of thing, economics superseding national security/the nation state, I've seen recently is the stuff on Chinese hacking of US businesses and the lack of response due to the victims being too worried about losing money to do anything about it.

As China Hacked, U.S. Businesses Turned A Blind Eye

Technology theft and other unfair business practices originating from China are costing the American economy more than $57 billion a year, White House officials believe, and they expect that figure to grow. Yet an investigation by NPR and the PBS television show Frontline into why three successive administrations failed to stop cyberhacking from China found an unlikely obstacle for the government — the victims themselves.

In dozens of interviews with U.S. government and business representatives, officials involved in commerce with China said hacking and theft were an open secret for almost two decades, allowed to quietly continue because U.S. companies had too much money at stake to make waves. Wendy Cutler, who was a veteran negotiator at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, says it wasn't just that U.S. businesses were hesitant to come forward in specific cases. She says businesses didn't want the trade office to take "any strong action."

"We are not as effective if we don't have the U.S. business community supporting us," she says. "Looking back on it, in retrospect, I think we probably should have been more active and more responsive. We kind of lost the big picture of what was really happening."

 

version

Well-known member
One of the things hypernormalisation got right was to go look we don't know what's real, we don't know how the spectacle is created and we don't trust it and there are people out there both exploiting this and, to some extent, engineering it. And this, he says, in its most advanced form, was pioneered in Russia.

I sometimes struggle to tell whether or not I'm taking personal experience as universal with this stuff as I feel that 'unrealness' quite a lot and not just when it comes to the news, global events or whatever. I sometimes get this thing at parties where I can feel like a CCTV camera or floating eyeball rather than a participant and none of it feels real, like being in The Truman Show or VR or something. I had the same feeling walking around a Christmas market the other night, I could see all the people and knew they were people, but they just didn't seem like real people, it was like they were all behind glass or something, a shark tunnel.

shark-tunnel-473012_640.jpg
 

luka

Well-known member
I don't get that nearly as much as I used to. Derealisation. I used to absolutely love it though. It's magical.
 

version

Well-known member
It is engaging, but it can feel horrible too. I find it goes hand in hand with sleep deprivation, wake up groggy and dazed and float through the day.
 

luka

Well-known member
If as Burroughs says reality is a constant scanning pattern then those are moments when it's radically reassembled
 

version

Well-known member
That line in Gravity's Rainbow about the war really being dictated by the needs of technology - plastics, electronics etc - has always stuck with me. When I look at something like automation, it almost feels out of our hands. As though even if the people ensuring it happens didn't want it to, it would happen regardless. The technology itself wants to move forward, and it will.
 

version

Well-known member
If as Burroughs says reality is a constant scanning pattern then those are moments when it's radically reassembled

One of my favourite ideas in The Matrix is that deja vu is what happens when They change something.
 

luka

Well-known member
What I was trying to talk about this morning wasn't conspiracy theory per se but about how the status of revolution and revolt and protest today and how they are weaponised and how that has compromised the status of those events and complicated the meaning of those events.
 

luka

Well-known member
The impetus came from an argument with my cousin. She feels the Hong Kong protests are illegitimate and part of America's war on China. I'm not happy with that position.
 

version

Well-known member
I wouldn't be surprised if America played a part or stoked the fire a little, but I don't believe they're entirely manufactured. Likewise the Russia stuff. I think they're exploiting divisions and issues which are already present rather than conjuring the thing out of thin air.
 

version

Well-known member
There was a piece a while back supposedly from someone who worked for the US military which claimed the reason China's going so hard on the Uyghurs is because the US were or are planning to use them the way they used the Taliban in the 80s and because Xinjiang is key to China expanding westwards.

It's certainly believable, but it also sounds like anti-US propaganda and an attempt at justifying human rights violations. The site it was published on is apparently pro-Russia too.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
The impetus came from an argument with my cousin. She feels the Hong Kong protests are illegitimate and part of America's war on China. I'm not happy with that position.

Glad you're not happy with it. You get people who say this every time there's any kind of attempted or actual revolution, protest movement or whatever in oppressive countries with governments that are not on good terms with the USA. I think it's an extension of "my enemy's enemy is my fried" to "my enemy's enemy's enemy must also be my enemy".

It's deeply racist, too, since it rests on an assumption that white Westerners are the only people in the world with political agency.
 
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