why do i hate that artist thing that people keep posting on my facebook so much? why am i such a jerk?

youtube particularly was huge for conspiracies, they like to communicate through videos, those prosumer production values convey legitimacy, loose change brought a lot of people into the fold

the odds of someone moderately intelligent believing in fringe stuff goes down at the same time

the internet has done some things to change my idea of what "intelligent" can mean

there are many types of intelligence!

Woah did all those people really get suddenly deactivated?! I don't think that's a good idea to just shut down dissent like that even if it is annoying and insensitive. And some of those people, like Amber Lyon, are actual journalists covering stuff like police crack-downs on Occupy groups and stuff and not just talk radio kooks. Makes FB look pretty bad IMO shutting down the pages of people who cover actual abuses of power from the government and not just theoretical moonbat ones.

i think you guys are underestimating how easily and widely distributed fringe stuff was in the pre-'net days. behold a pale horse was a bestseller

max otm

Or is actual documented FBI and local-PD infiltration of the Occupy movement in order to destabilize it just a wacko conspiracy you'd have to be an idiot to believe?

kicking all those people off looks FB look just fine imo

xp to max: yeah, erich von daniken and all that end too. people love weird shit! how seriously they take it, eh, idk if that can really be quantified. if anything the net makes the question of exact quantification more pressing.

god, mailed newsletters about stuff like this seem like the most unimaginably old-fashioned things ever now

I think the odds of like, 'someone on ilx' beliving something a little fringey about this or that because they were poorly informed and never really looked into it woulda been way higher in 1985 but who knows

makes those journalists look pretty bad to be associating with crackpots to begin with, imo

ilx was pretty weird in 1985, it's true

1 thing the web does thats new is create a self-reinforcing loop via search engines, people search for 'illuminati', illuminati content is created to fulfill that demand, which leads to more people seeing it, which leads to more people searching for it.

this is not unrelated to what goole is saying about quantifying it, like its hard to tell exactly how big the audience for this content is. if 8.5 million people have 'viewed' the sandy hook truth video, how many of them believe it, how many are gawking, how many are getting mad

i mean, i saw that post about FACEBOOK SILENCES PROMINENT POLITICAL CRITICS, and then the list turns out to be all the lizard people bilderburger chemtrails whackadoos

at first i was like... and then i lol'd

i think you guys are underestimating how easily and widely distributed fringe stuff was in the pre-'net days. behold a pale horse was a bestseller

― max, Wednesday, January 16, 2013 2:55 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

As someone actually alive back then, I have to disagree.

i think you guys are underestimating how easily and widely distributed fringe stuff was in the pre-'net days. behold a pale horse was a bestseller

― max, Wednesday, January 16, 2013 2:55 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

max otm

― mh, Wednesday, January 16, 2013 2:55 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDx1GLqvBO8

hey look this copy of loose change has 3m views

we have a delightful thread on the satanic ritual abuse conspiracies of the 1980s that people were sure reached into the government. pretty much every evangelical person, or middle-american person who was in contact with such, heard all about these illicit child abuse satanists

FACEBOOK SILENCES PROMINENT POLITICAL CRITICS

except this one

just my own observations obvs not quantified, and speaking as someone who did keep an eye on conspiracy stuff before the net blew up, theres no comparison as far as the popularity of this stuff before and after

underestimating the past doesn't necessarily mean overestimating the present

the prob is just how anecdotal everyones pre-net experience is

can you imagine how annoying facebook would be if 'jfk' came out now? ppl forget how many folks were taking that movie at face value. mainstream film critics were all 'he's onto something here'

we have a delightful thread on the satanic ritual abuse conspiracies of the 1980s that people were sure reached into the government. pretty much every evangelical person, or middle-american person who was in contact with such, heard all about these illicit child abuse satanists

― mh, Wednesday, January 16, 2013 3:03 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is pretty different as it was msm driven and actually prosecuted by legitimate government agencies

'lyndon johnson...quite the murky figure indeed'

fwiw I can't find any numbers on Behold a Pale Horse sales except claims that it was the "#1 undergroud bestseller of all time" whatever that means. In any case, you can't compare a book that you have to go out and buy to an instantly and infinitely shareable free video.

I think there was a lot more weird shit then that was accepted as matter-of-course and not necessarily seen as conspiratorial. Or just seen as weird and "makes you think" material rather than in-depth analysis

does anyone else remember chain faxes? so much weird shit.

this is pretty different as it was msm driven and actually prosecuted by legitimate government agencies

partly due to an environment were bad information spreads unchecked!

where

this is pretty different as it was msm driven and actually prosecuted by legitimate government agencies

― lag∞n, Wednesday, January 16, 2013 2:06 PM (40 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

true, not sure if that makes it worse or not!

underestimating the past doesn't necessarily mean overestimating the present

― mh, Wednesday, January 16, 2013 3:06 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

*scratches chin, thinks abt it*

I think alot of it has to do with the Race To Be The Smartest that the internet in general sort of encourages. We have wikipedia and all these things and if something happens in the field of astrophysics, EVERYONE has to post their opinion. Then it's all about demeaning others as dumber than you because the arguments are weak, they invoke Hitler, they use bad language, etc, etc. There is a race to be the biggest know it all and it shows up in all sorts of ways, from the obvious to the subtle.

This kind of conspiracy stuff not only fulfills a political motive but it also fulfills an emotional need to be more clever than the simpletons who believe everything the government tells them.

The other night a guy called into Pacifica radio about the "reptilians" and I got so excited I pumped my fist

adam otm in a lot of cases, imo. plus i think lots of bored people want to latch onto some kind of IRL thrilling experience, feel like they're part of something bigger.

i'd imagine radio was the conspiracy go-to before the internet. space ghost coast to coast's been around for a while. i remember when i was a kid i got caught up in a doomsday cult i heard on the radio because i was like, 7, and was woefully unsupervised. internet's probably just magnified this shit like everything else.

PUBLIC ACCESS TELEVISION

Yeah I mean, its not like alternative bookstores didn't exist before the internet and they weren't filled with R.A. Wilson and William Cooper and Stanton Friedman books and the like.

But the whole underground network of newsletters and trading of Xth-generation video taped documentaries is def. gone and been somewhat mainstreamed by blogs and youtube.

"Everything in this book is a Lie but Totally True" or whatever it was actually titled was pretty big everywhere too. I know Behold a Pale Horse was in most all bookstores but I wasn't interested in it because I was a 90s pre-teen and it wasn't about aliens.

this is not unrelated to what goole is saying about quantifying it, like its hard to tell exactly how big the audience for this content is. if 8.5 million people have 'viewed' the sandy hook truth video, how many of them believe it, how many are gawking, how many are getting mad

― max, Wednesday, January 16, 2013 3:00 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

good brand reinforcement here max

there's a pretty awesome conspiracy guy on WFMU who I used to listen to a lot -- he's more of the secret reich/bilderburgs/bush-saud/military-financial-governmental-industrial complex type and his theories were actually so complex I could never even tell if they made any sense. He has recorded like hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of shows were he just lectures on all of these different connections, and if you listen long enough they create this funny exciting tingly feeling like you're finally going to understand everything.

I have to disagree.

I am with Hurting 2 on that one. Back in the day there were a great many fringe ideas and theories that floated about. Books did help to spread these ideas, but the books were few and could only be written and published at a relatively slow pace. Therefore the greatest single vehicle for disemination of these ideas were conversations between believers and their prospective converts.

Usually these conversations were disjointed affairs and even if the proselytizer was especially coherent and the pigeon was especially malleable, the chances for reinforcing the conversion and bringing a new believer into the fold were few. The feedback model was weak. After a long bull session with a believer, you might hold their ideas somewhere at the back of your mind for a time, but newer, stronger impressions eventually washed them away.

The internet allows a cult-like exclusivity of focus to form and be sustained more easily than in the past. Proselytizing can now be self-initiated more easily. A book could be hard to track down, but the web is flattened by search engines and instantly available.

hurting, that's dave emory. i think his schtick was that there was a hidden 4th reich that's been slowly building up to take over the world.

Also the Roswell Alien Autopsy was a FOX prime-time special! I think this stuff has always been popular, and only a small minority of people are actually intellectually invested in "weird stuff" or whatever you want to call that whole nexus between the paranormal, occult, and conspiracy topics.

fwiw I can't find any numbers on Behold a Pale Horse sales except claims that it was the "#1 undergroud bestseller of all time" whatever that means. In any case, you can't compare a book that you have to go out and buy to an instantly and infinitely shareable free video.

― space phwoar (Hurting 2), Wednesday, January 16, 2013 3:07 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well, right, exactly. web numbers are soft, difficult to figure out. i think the web changes the dynamic on this stuff but i wouldnt take it for granted that conspiracism is more mainstream than it used to be. father coughlin had millions of listeners. the anti-masonic party got 8% of the national vote.

hurting, that's dave emory. i think his schtick was that there was a hidden 4th reich that's been slowly building up to take over the world.

― Spectrum, Wednesday, January 16, 2013 3:15 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes, dave emory. I loved his show in a weird way -- it was so plodding yet forceful, so monotonous, so airtight.

and I meant "was" -- don't think he's on fmu anymore

& the other thing about comparing pre-net to post-net is that there are so many more opportunities to learn that you have friends who believe in 9/11 truth or whatever. in 95 there was no facebook where you could see that someone you went to high school with was recommending behold a pale horse.

Yeah Dave Emory's awesome.

I think part of the change now is that people are publicly posting these things in social media as statements of purpose or being given legitimate soapboxes, whereas it was just kooky stuff that you may or may not buy into but enjoy listening to in the past.

full disclosure, I spent probably an hour listening to some crazy rapture-obsessed Christian AM station at the end of last year.

This tradition goes all the way back to radio announcers reading Francis E. Dec manifestos over the air for a good laugh. People love to hear about crazy shit, fringe shit has always had its 15 minutes but I don't think there's really an epidemic of people becoming "true believers" or whatever.

I think part of the change now is that people are publicly posting these things in social media as statements of purpose or being given legitimate soapboxes, whereas it was just kooky stuff that you may or may not buy into but enjoy listening to in the past.

I disagree! I don't think any of these people's soapboxes are seen to be legitimate. That's why Alex Jones's ad revenue is from mineral supplements sold only on the internet and not real products. Once I hear a Dannon yogurt ad or JC Penny's ad on one of these people's shows I might think differently.

full disclosure, I spent probably an hour listening to some crazy rapture-obsessed Christian AM station at the end of last year.

I do this constantly tbh. Christian AM stations are hypnotic to me.