So, all people who were saying that NSA is spying on the whole internet (before Snowden, that was the conspiracy) were secretly authoritarian?!
There are conspiracies. They exist. But I'm mostly speaking to the mindset of a person who completely immerses themselves in conspiracy theory as a way of life.
What if conspiracy theory sites and groups are just part of a conspiracy that exists to monitor, marginalize, and distract conspiracy theorists? What if the only thing that gives the conspiracy any power at all is the weight of the conspiracy theories behind it?
And that's when I spackled over the cracks in my pot, stopped looking for evidence of malicious intent in everything, and washed my hands of all of it.
I still think that there is a massive international conspiracy of rich and powerful individuals, but I also believe that they don't have nearly as much control as anyone thinks they have, including themselves. They have the illusion of control.
For instance, they can propel lobbying efforts to pass trade deals which would "normalize" copyright in 20+ different countries, and then everyone just ignores it and torrents the latest episode of Game of Thrones anyway. They can buy up all the newspapers, and then everyone suddenly stops reading them, so they all have to merge or go bankrupt. They lobby for strict environmental controls, to preserve their huge tracts of land. People subtly cheat or blatantly and overtly break the law whenever the cops aren't watching. Or the vendors cheat on behalf of their customers, just to stay in business. They can manipulate currencies and equities and get even richer, but a hired cook will still piss in their morning coffee or feed them a slice of doodoo pie.
The conspiracy theorists may actually be supporting them, by ascribing to them powers and abilities that they do not actually possess. When the elites gather in Davos, they aren't plotting the future course of the world economy, like everyone thinks. They're patting themselves on the back, getting drunk, doing drugs, and cheating on their spouses in posh hotel rooms, all the while toasting the fact that the proles hadn't erected the guillotines since the last meeting. They remind themselves how important they are, and then return to the world that will briefly roll its eyes at them before getting back to the work it was already doing.
All the upvotes for this right here LOL. But seriously, your comment reads like it came out of my own head. The elites _try_ to control everything but their efforts are like sticking a rocket onto an asteroid: you can influence its direction but you can't make it do a u-turn. If people want to burn this shit down, they will and there's precious little all that money and power could do to stop it.
The world is scary and unpredictable so people have been comforting themselves with predictions and models since time immemorial; even if those predictions are of their own doom, at least _they_ saw it coming and that makes them feel better/safer.
* It's their job
* The software security industry is full of people who used to hack professionally for them
* There'd been a major news story roughly every other year since the 1990s Echelon thing about NSA dragnet surveillance
There are still things people say about NSA that have the tenor of conspiracy theories --- some of them being things Snowden actually said! --- and you might be able to make observations about the character of the people who believe those things (I don't know, that was the other commenter's point).
But the basic outline of what NSA is doing with the Internet is not a conspiracy theory.
Your average conspiracy theorist doesn't just believe the NSA is spying on Americans [they better be spying on non-Americans; we taxpayers are paying them a lot of money to do so] or that Putin has had a few guys killed. Your average conspiracy theorist believes that the Moon landing was faked, JFK was assassinated by a coordinated effort of at least three different groups, there are cures to cancer and all other diseases being kept secret by corporations and/or the gov'ment, Hitler is still alive, aliens have visited the Earth, are living here, and have secret treaties with various states, the UN has real power, various diseases [eg, HIV] are man-made, and various biblical artifacts have been found and kept secret.
You rarely find a conspiracy theorist who believes one crazy thing, it's almost all or nothing. It's this weird credulity veiled as skepticism for the establishment
Not sure how true this is. There are certainly a lot of vocal conspiracy theorists online who match your description. Unfortunately these are lumped together to discredit genuine conspiracy theories ( market manipulation, Hillsborough etc ) when they exist. It is a powerful tool to diminish investigation.
You make it seem as if this association between "rational" and "irrational" conspiracy theorists is itself a conspiracy to discredit the former with the latter, which probably happens, but it's also the case that the conspiracy theorist community (or communities) and conspiracy sites often choose not to discriminate between rational and irrational theory themselves. Conspiracists tend to interpret skepticism or attempts to debunk (read, actually prove) their theories as attempts to "silence the truth," making it difficult to clean house.
Although it also doesn't help that the more outlandish conspiracy theories are the ones that enter public consciousness through the media. But those outlandish conspiracy theories are also the most fun - would anyone watch an X Files about normal, boring conspiracies - tax evasion, surveillance and occasional human experimentation, rather than aliens and the Illuminati?
>Such examples, along with others in my years on the conspiracy beat, are emblematic of a trend I have detected that people who believe in one such theory tend to believe in many other equally improbable and often contradictory cabals. This observation has recently been confirmed empirically by University of Kent psychologists Michael J. Wood, Karen M. Douglas and Robbie M. Sutton in a paper entitled “Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories,” published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science this past January. The authors begin by defining a conspiracy theory as “a proposed plot by powerful people or organizations working together in secret to accomplish some (usually sinister) goal” that is “notoriously resistant to falsification … with new layers of conspiracy being added to rationalize each new piece of disconfirming evidence.” Once you believe that “one massive, sinister conspiracy could be successfully executed in near-perfect secrecy, [it] suggests that many such plots are possible.” With this cabalistic paradigm in place, conspiracies can become “the default explanation for any given event—a unitary, closed-off worldview in which beliefs come together in a mutually supportive network known as a monological belief system.”
>This monological belief system explains the significant correlations between different conspiracy theories in the study. For example, “a belief that a rogue cell of MI6 was responsible for [Princess] Diana's death was correlated with belief in theories that HIV was created in a laboratory … that the moon landing was a hoax … and that governments are covering up the existence of aliens.” The effect continues even when the conspiracies contradict one another: the more participants believed that Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered.
In any case, maybe we're a bit off point here, but what ZH posts is definitely closer to "NSA is spying on everybody" than to "lizards run the world" or "moon landing never happened".
Before Snowden, there was about 10 years of news regarding the NSA desiring to spy on everyone (coming from such organizations as the EFF, which -- while clearly biased, are usually not pie in the sky fanciful.)
I'm not too familiar with Zero Hedge, personally. My "first impression" (just looking at Zero Hedge) is that it's not your ultra-conspiracy-theory Alex Jones type site. Definitely no Jade Helm 15s or Illuminati here.
However, I do think that the tone of the site is excessively negative and excessively Chicken Little. It also hawks gold in a bad way. Very much a red flag. In the real world, gold tends to be a more emotion driven trade than a logical one -- http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21692942... .
The best time to buy gold is actually during times of good prosperity, when the fearmongers stop pushing up the value. :)
I think many of the subjects Zero Hedge reports on look like real issues, to be honest. ZH doesn't seem to have any solutions other than "OMG world going to end buy gold!". Which is... not helpful (see above). There's too much of the "Evil Elite Wall Street / Politician" angle as well; while we should be concerned about inequality, concentration of capital in markets, etc., casting them in emotional terms isn't helpful either.
Having said that, there was an anti-vax article. Zero Hedge better be careful, that definitely is Alex Jones territory. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-28/why-our-children-sh...
That's my first impression. Maybe I'm wrong, I'd love to hear a counterpoint. From a perspective of where I get my "truths" from, personally I get most of my business news from The Economist and Kiplinger. Even then, this is not really for investment purposes. The best investment advice is relatively simple: invest periodically in a variety of baskets, and hold long.
Fun to hang out with, though.
I think one of the compelling aspects of conspiracy theory as an expression of faith, is that it's comforting to realize that even if the world is run by a dark and malevolent agenda, at least it has an agenda, and someone or something is in control.
One can see this expression of conspiracy as religion here on Hacker News. Whenever a skeptical statement is made about some conspiracy theory, someone will inevitably state that because Edward Snowden was proven right, conspiracy X should be considered true. Or, because people considered the things Edward Snowden described were once considered "conspiracy theory", one should accept that conspiracy theorists are enlightened about the true nature of the world.
Rationally, this argument makes little sense as one conspiracy theory being true doesn't validate the truth of another, but such statements are made in the context of religion all the time, as expressions of faith.