7 ms·

Conspiracy theorists mistake guitar pedal diagram for “5G Chip”

61 points by pinewurst 6y ago

mmastrac 6y ago
Critical thinking skills are definitely missing from early childhood education (along with financial literacy to understand things like marginal tax rates). Sheesh.
exabrial 6y ago
Metal Zone? Come on, have some decency. Make it a tube screamer next time.
griffoa 6y ago
My Mother is being sucked into this whole QAnon, Covid, 5G conspiracy universe. I dont know what to do about it. She is sounding more and more unhinged every time I talk to her. I am thinking about somehow getting her IP blocked by YouTube, but I am not entirely sure about how the best way would be. Maybe I could run LOIC against YouTube from my laptop next time I visit her, but I am not sure it is enough to get one blocked.
- dreamcompiler 6y ago
  Does her router have parental controls and the ability to block websites? I was under the impression that most do nowadays.
  - griffoa 6y ago
    Not sure. She has one of those fiber boxes with branded router provided by the operator. I should try to access it next time I visit her - it might have some sort of parental control.
    - Triv888 6y ago
      Probably does, but if she is renting those, you should do her a favor and replace them with something she will own and that has parental control. Or maybe change the DNS servers to one in your control (not sure if that will work with the encrypted DNS though that get pushed onto you by Firefox).
- pcdoodle 6y ago
  Don't do that. Be nice.
  - griffoa 6y ago
    I probably wouldn't. I am getting more concerned recently only because I got the vibe somehow from her during new year that I was somehow involved in some of that shady stuff, which those conspiracy groups claim is going on under our noses. I work in IT for a bank currently and am doing pretty well as a consultant. Somehow she cannot really "compute" that.
- sorokod 6y ago
  If possible, maybe be take a holiday together, away from the internet?
  - griffoa 6y ago
    I tried to get her out and visit her family (in a different country), but she is isolating more and more. I will try to be more persistent.
- kennywinker 6y ago
  This podcast recently had an episode about parents getting radicalized, and it had some suggestions - might be worth a listen https://castro.fm/episode/2JwRY7 https://castro.fm/episode/2JwRY7
  - griffoa 6y ago
    Thanks, I will check that.
- SkyMarshal 6y ago
  Saw a good article on that recently, which a bunch of links to potentially useful ideas: https://theweek.com/articles/951759/parents-warned-internet-break-brains-broke-theirs-instead https://theweek.com/articles/951759/parents-warned-internet-... It's not just your parents, it's lots of people who didn't grow up with the internet and don't fundamentally understand some of its nuances. Excerpts: "None of this is to suggest my generation's brains are immune to internet breaking. But there are some important distinctions here — three in my observation — that give this a generational dimension. ... "The first (and this is based in data) is that younger generations are less likely to dose themselves daily with the poison of cable news, so that's one less source of content blasting. For those who consume cable news on a regular basis, the immersion becomes nigh impossible to break." ... "And that brings me to the second generational distinction: the degree of innate understanding of the medium. I do not think my older family members understand the extent to which the content they encounter is tailored by algorithms to set their lizard brains on fire. Like the majority of their peers, as a 2019 survey showed, they probably don't understand an algorithm is involved at all. They insist they do understand, but their behavior tells me they do not." ... "I thought my own parents would be safe from all this because — thank God — they are not on any of the big three social media sites; they don't have cable; and their tech skills are limited. As it turns out, that's irrelevant. The internet is so user-friendly now it can break anyone's brain! YouTube and a few political email lists are all it takes. And now that this content history is established, my mom's search results are tailored accordingly. The brokenness is self-reinforcing." ... "[Third:] Our parents have generally not managed that pandemic-time connectivity to their [real life] friends — if indeed they had close friends in the first place. A common thread in my discussions of broken boomer brains is a lack of intimate friendships and hobbyist communities. In the absence of that emotional connection and healthy recreational time use, this media engagement can become a bad substitute. The memes become the hobby. The Facebook bickering supplants the relationships. And it's all moving so fast — tweet, video, meme, Tucker, tweet, video, meme, Maddow — the change goes unnoticed. The brain breaks."
pcdoodle 6y ago
This happened on /r/conspiracy too, a person posted a pic of an old TV receiver board with COV-19 laser etched onto the RF receiver shield. No BGA chips and 100% surface mount made it a pretty obvious.
dreamcompiler 6y ago
At what point do we label massive shared delusions mental illness and treat them as such? If we do treat them as mental illness and approach these people with kindness and compassion, is there a threshold of sheer numbers and self-destructive potential beyond which kindness and compassion fail to be effective tools to bring people back to reality? If so, what do we do then? Obviously there are weaknesses in the human brain and in our educational systems, and these weaknesses are being actively exploited by people bent on chaos, power, money, or whatever. So how to we find and punish the culprits and dissuade them from doing this kind of brain-hacking in the future? How do we establish global-level policies to make average citizens less vulnerable to it? Stuff I spend a lot of time thinking about lately.
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
  > At what point do we label massive shared delusions mental illness and treat them as such? I'm having trouble imagining how that's compatible with a democratic form of government. A policy like that would, I think, provide a very clear roadmap for would-be dictators.
  - dreamcompiler 6y ago
    Agreed. "Reeducation camps", etc. Which is why I asked the question and think about it a lot. There don't seem to be any straightforward answers.
  - cmelbye 6y ago
    There is a long history of using mental illness and "anti-social behavior" as a convenient excuse to silence large groups of people, political opponents, and dissidents. Nazi eugenicists, FBI's COINTELPRO, and more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry It's often not until after the fact when a society recognizes the atrocities committed under a false pretense of public well-being. There is no easy way out of this crisis. "Eradication of a widespread mental illness that causes dangerous political ideas" is a pseudo-scientific way of describing a dictatorship or civil war.
- 6y ago
cameldrv 6y ago
It's instructive to think about how these things come to be. Yes, a bunch of people are duped and spreading this around, but somewhere out there, there's someone who took a schematic of a guitar pedal and relabeled it. Maybe they're just in it for the lols, or maybe they have some other motivation.
- lilyball 6y ago
  They almost certainly did it as a joke. If they had some other motivation they wouldn't have picked something easily identifiable as analog audio equipment.
  - sorokod 6y ago
    Looks like "they" know their customers.
  - Theory5 6y ago
    I work in Infosec, and I keep getting the question "why do all these scammers send poorly worded, frequently misspelled, obviously fake emails by the millions?" And I lay it out for them. The short answer: is because it works. If they send 5k emails out, asking for $2k, all they need is for a small percentage to fall for it. They know how much effort to put in to get a specific return. Why can't that be the same idea here? Pick out the ones who don't ask questions, or take 2 seconds to Google something, etc. Whip them into a frenzy. Then steer them to a specific site. Or to donate. Or even just start following whomever wrote this out, to be convinced to donate somewhere later.
    - lilyball 6y ago
      My understanding is the poorly-worded emails are deliberate, to act as a filter to get rid of the folks who are unlikely to fall for the scam. This means the scammer isn't wasting time talking to these folks when they'll never pay up. This doesn't apply to the diagram. In this case, it wasn't just laziness. The author actually added not just the "5G Freq" label, but added "Bass", "Treble", etc in the exact same style. And I know they added this because I dug up an original diagram where the labels look different. The author erased the original labels and re-did them (and added "5G" to the pre-existing "Freq"). This was clearly a joke. Someone doing this for real would have simply left off the other labels and only kept "5G Freq" (or would have added other suspicious labels).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
goldforever 6y ago
Stop posting silly articles on HN...take this down.
cafard 6y ago
It sounds as if somebody has been reading Our Man in Havana.
golemiprague 6y ago
This is the type of reddit crap I wish didn't appear in HN, it has nothing to do with technology or give any interesting insight to the phenomenon of 5g conspiracies. It is just an anecdote, a meme, a clickbait to generate somme useless discussions
sdoering 6y ago
During the first (very) soft lockdown in Germany I stumbled into a anti COVID demonstration on a supermarket parking lot. There were two segments. The ones in the center already deeply indoctrinated. And some few at the fringes. These were the ones one could reach. One could talk with them, listen to their fears and try to nudge them back from the fringes. It was interesting. And would never scale. And would, I believe, not work for people already deeper into the abyss.
- Sharlin 6y ago
  I guess that's how some people justify endless Internet arguments with creationists, conspiracy theorists, and what have you. You're never ever going to convince your opponent, but with luck you might be able to convince some of the bystanders. However, I agree that as you said, to be effective you'd likely have to reach out to the bystanders directly, and with an approach rather different from the decidedly unkind manner that those discussions are typically conducted.
hcarvalhoalves 6y ago
The web arrived too early - we developed the ability to massively spread and monetize (mis)information before people developed the ability to filter it and think critically.
hammock 6y ago
What is the value of this article to HN? It's ad hominem against a group of people that are irrelevant to this audience. It needlessly smears an entire generality of people, while doing little to advance facts or truth. @dang
- bondarchuk 6y ago
  It seems part of an ongoing effort to introduce censorship and restrict the flow of information on the internet. Apparently terrorists, pedos and drug dealers got a little old after a while.
- kennywinker 6y ago
  1. It’s amusing 2. The proliferation of these conspiracy theories is a byproduct of the communications platforms created and worked on by many people here. 3. The boss mt-2 is a great sounding pedal
dudeithinkBLM 6y ago
Hmm, did "flat earth" suddenly go out of style for linking ridiculous not-believable conspiracy theories to people who doubt consensus establishment views? Got it, I'll start shrieking about guitar pedals now whenever anyone starts questioning taking the Covid vaccine.
swiley 6y ago
This is flat earth levels of obviously wrong and part of me feels like the idea that significant numbers of people believed it is itself fake news.

61 points by pinewurst 6y ago

Critical thinking skills are definitely missing from early childhood education (along with financial literacy to understand things like marginal tax rates). Sheesh.

exabrial 6y ago

Metal Zone? Come on, have some decency. Make it a tube screamer next time.

griffoa 6y ago

My Mother is being sucked into this whole QAnon, Covid, 5G conspiracy universe. I dont know what to do about it. She is sounding more and more unhinged every time I talk to her. I am thinking about somehow getting her IP blocked by YouTube, but I am not entirely sure about how the best way would be. Maybe I could run LOIC against YouTube from my laptop next time I visit her, but I am not sure it is enough to get one blocked.

dreamcompiler 6y ago
Does her router have parental controls and the ability to block websites? I was under the impression that most do nowadays.
- griffoa 6y ago
  Not sure. She has one of those fiber boxes with branded router provided by the operator. I should try to access it next time I visit her - it might have some sort of parental control.
  - Triv888 6y ago
    Probably does, but if she is renting those, you should do her a favor and replace them with something she will own and that has parental control. Or maybe change the DNS servers to one in your control (not sure if that will work with the encrypted DNS though that get pushed onto you by Firefox).
pcdoodle 6y ago
Don't do that. Be nice.
- griffoa 6y ago
  I probably wouldn't. I am getting more concerned recently only because I got the vibe somehow from her during new year that I was somehow involved in some of that shady stuff, which those conspiracy groups claim is going on under our noses. I work in IT for a bank currently and am doing pretty well as a consultant. Somehow she cannot really "compute" that.
sorokod 6y ago
If possible, maybe be take a holiday together, away from the internet?
- griffoa 6y ago
  I tried to get her out and visit her family (in a different country), but she is isolating more and more. I will try to be more persistent.
kennywinker 6y ago
This podcast recently had an episode about parents getting radicalized, and it had some suggestions - might be worth a listen https://castro.fm/episode/2JwRY7 https://castro.fm/episode/2JwRY7
- griffoa 6y ago
  Thanks, I will check that.
SkyMarshal 6y ago
Saw a good article on that recently, which a bunch of links to potentially useful ideas: https://theweek.com/articles/951759/parents-warned-internet-break-brains-broke-theirs-instead https://theweek.com/articles/951759/parents-warned-internet-... It's not just your parents, it's lots of people who didn't grow up with the internet and don't fundamentally understand some of its nuances. Excerpts: "None of this is to suggest my generation's brains are immune to internet breaking. But there are some important distinctions here — three in my observation — that give this a generational dimension. ... "The first (and this is based in data) is that younger generations are less likely to dose themselves daily with the poison of cable news, so that's one less source of content blasting. For those who consume cable news on a regular basis, the immersion becomes nigh impossible to break." ... "And that brings me to the second generational distinction: the degree of innate understanding of the medium. I do not think my older family members understand the extent to which the content they encounter is tailored by algorithms to set their lizard brains on fire. Like the majority of their peers, as a 2019 survey showed, they probably don't understand an algorithm is involved at all. They insist they do understand, but their behavior tells me they do not." ... "I thought my own parents would be safe from all this because — thank God — they are not on any of the big three social media sites; they don't have cable; and their tech skills are limited. As it turns out, that's irrelevant. The internet is so user-friendly now it can break anyone's brain! YouTube and a few political email lists are all it takes. And now that this content history is established, my mom's search results are tailored accordingly. The brokenness is self-reinforcing." ... "[Third:] Our parents have generally not managed that pandemic-time connectivity to their [real life] friends — if indeed they had close friends in the first place. A common thread in my discussions of broken boomer brains is a lack of intimate friendships and hobbyist communities. In the absence of that emotional connection and healthy recreational time use, this media engagement can become a bad substitute. The memes become the hobby. The Facebook bickering supplants the relationships. And it's all moving so fast — tweet, video, meme, Tucker, tweet, video, meme, Maddow — the change goes unnoticed. The brain breaks."

pcdoodle 6y ago

This happened on /r/conspiracy too, a person posted a pic of an old TV receiver board with COV-19 laser etched onto the RF receiver shield. No BGA chips and 100% surface mount made it a pretty obvious.

dreamcompiler 6y ago

At what point do we label massive shared delusions mental illness and treat them as such? If we do treat them as mental illness and approach these people with kindness and compassion, is there a threshold of sheer numbers and self-destructive potential beyond which kindness and compassion fail to be effective tools to bring people back to reality? If so, what do we do then? Obviously there are weaknesses in the human brain and in our educational systems, and these weaknesses are being actively exploited by people bent on chaos, power, money, or whatever. So how to we find and punish the culprits and dissuade them from doing this kind of brain-hacking in the future? How do we establish global-level policies to make average citizens less vulnerable to it? Stuff I spend a lot of time thinking about lately.

DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
> At what point do we label massive shared delusions mental illness and treat them as such? I'm having trouble imagining how that's compatible with a democratic form of government. A policy like that would, I think, provide a very clear roadmap for would-be dictators.
- dreamcompiler 6y ago
  Agreed. "Reeducation camps", etc. Which is why I asked the question and think about it a lot. There don't seem to be any straightforward answers.
- cmelbye 6y ago
  There is a long history of using mental illness and "anti-social behavior" as a convenient excuse to silence large groups of people, political opponents, and dissidents. Nazi eugenicists, FBI's COINTELPRO, and more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry It's often not until after the fact when a society recognizes the atrocities committed under a false pretense of public well-being. There is no easy way out of this crisis. "Eradication of a widespread mental illness that causes dangerous political ideas" is a pseudo-scientific way of describing a dictatorship or civil war.
6y ago

cameldrv 6y ago

It's instructive to think about how these things come to be. Yes, a bunch of people are duped and spreading this around, but somewhere out there, there's someone who took a schematic of a guitar pedal and relabeled it. Maybe they're just in it for the lols, or maybe they have some other motivation.

lilyball 6y ago
They almost certainly did it as a joke. If they had some other motivation they wouldn't have picked something easily identifiable as analog audio equipment.
- sorokod 6y ago
  Looks like "they" know their customers.
- Theory5 6y ago
  I work in Infosec, and I keep getting the question "why do all these scammers send poorly worded, frequently misspelled, obviously fake emails by the millions?" And I lay it out for them. The short answer: is because it works. If they send 5k emails out, asking for $2k, all they need is for a small percentage to fall for it. They know how much effort to put in to get a specific return. Why can't that be the same idea here? Pick out the ones who don't ask questions, or take 2 seconds to Google something, etc. Whip them into a frenzy. Then steer them to a specific site. Or to donate. Or even just start following whomever wrote this out, to be convinced to donate somewhere later.
  - lilyball 6y ago
    My understanding is the poorly-worded emails are deliberate, to act as a filter to get rid of the folks who are unlikely to fall for the scam. This means the scammer isn't wasting time talking to these folks when they'll never pay up. This doesn't apply to the diagram. In this case, it wasn't just laziness. The author actually added not just the "5G Freq" label, but added "Bass", "Treble", etc in the exact same style. And I know they added this because I dug up an original diagram where the labels look different. The author erased the original labels and re-did them (and added "5G" to the pre-existing "Freq"). This was clearly a joke. Someone doing this for real would have simply left off the other labels and only kept "5G Freq" (or would have added other suspicious labels).

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

goldforever 6y ago

Stop posting silly articles on HN...take this down.

cafard 6y ago

It sounds as if somebody has been reading Our Man in Havana.

golemiprague 6y ago

This is the type of reddit crap I wish didn't appear in HN, it has nothing to do with technology or give any interesting insight to the phenomenon of 5g conspiracies. It is just an anecdote, a meme, a clickbait to generate somme useless discussions

sdoering 6y ago

During the first (very) soft lockdown in Germany I stumbled into a anti COVID demonstration on a supermarket parking lot. There were two segments. The ones in the center already deeply indoctrinated. And some few at the fringes. These were the ones one could reach. One could talk with them, listen to their fears and try to nudge them back from the fringes. It was interesting. And would never scale. And would, I believe, not work for people already deeper into the abyss.

Sharlin 6y ago
I guess that's how some people justify endless Internet arguments with creationists, conspiracy theorists, and what have you. You're never ever going to convince your opponent, but with luck you might be able to convince some of the bystanders. However, I agree that as you said, to be effective you'd likely have to reach out to the bystanders directly, and with an approach rather different from the decidedly unkind manner that those discussions are typically conducted.

hcarvalhoalves 6y ago

The web arrived too early - we developed the ability to massively spread and monetize (mis)information before people developed the ability to filter it and think critically.

hammock 6y ago

What is the value of this article to HN? It's ad hominem against a group of people that are irrelevant to this audience. It needlessly smears an entire generality of people, while doing little to advance facts or truth. @dang

bondarchuk 6y ago
It seems part of an ongoing effort to introduce censorship and restrict the flow of information on the internet. Apparently terrorists, pedos and drug dealers got a little old after a while.
kennywinker 6y ago
1. It’s amusing 2. The proliferation of these conspiracy theories is a byproduct of the communications platforms created and worked on by many people here. 3. The boss mt-2 is a great sounding pedal

dudeithinkBLM 6y ago

Hmm, did "flat earth" suddenly go out of style for linking ridiculous not-believable conspiracy theories to people who doubt consensus establishment views? Got it, I'll start shrieking about guitar pedals now whenever anyone starts questioning taking the Covid vaccine.

swiley 6y ago

This is flat earth levels of obviously wrong and part of me feels like the idea that significant numbers of people believed it is itself fake news.