8 ms·

Apophenia: How the Internet Transforms the Individual into a Conspiracy of One

164 points by mcone 5y ago

trhway 5y ago
>The conspiracy theorist will believe that institutions can be understood completely as the result of conscious design; and as collectives, he usually ascribes to them a kind of group-personality, treating them as conspiring agents, just as if they were individual men. As opposed to this view, the social theorist should recognize that the persistence of institutions and collectives creates a problem to be solved in terms of an analysis of individual social actions and their unintended (and often unwanted) social consequences, as well as their intended ones. and in between is the systems theorist who observes the emergent behavior (which is nor "conspiring" (despite sometimes displaying intelligence-like elements), nor generally directly reducible to the "individual actions") of the systems.
- beckman466 5y ago
  > and in between is the systems theorist who observes the emergent behavior I disagree, the systems theorist fits under the social theorist category imo. I’d say your new category just adds unnecessary complexity.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  It's hard for most to think that way.
ndrake 5y ago
Relevant TMBG: https://youtu.be/r9qLD3NtR94 https://youtu.be/r9qLD3NtR94
motohagiography 5y ago
Noted he used the word "atomized," which seems like a Hannah Arendt reference. Personally, I don't worry about conspiracies, as I'm indexed on something much more plausible and serious. To scale and really be dangerous, you need for an idea to be simple and seductive. Arendts view was the idea of truth being the enemy, and once people were unmoored from it, they could not resist the directed chaos used against them. The sufficient condition was that good men did nothing. With no truth, there was no basis or identity on which to organize. So there is no conspiracy. Just a set of incentives to align to and sustain the narrative, and the more absurd the gymnastics, the greater the rewards, because only the powerful can afford to seem so stupid and inconsistent. In that model, absurdity becomes a status signal, because to be that stupid requires hidden power. Imo, Poppers paraphrase had been used to justify this precise set of incentives, and I don't think he's a useful reference for insight into what's going on now. Arendt, however, nailed it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  Since reading some of the Subgenius tracts I've found my tendency to see conspiracies to be a useful internal barometer. It doesn't really matter whether I'm blaming interdimensional psychic vampires or misaligned incentives in the federal bureaucracy for not living my best life, what matters is the degree to which I've associated my problems with an external locus of control. Keeping an eye on that, and trying to get 'the conspiracy' to look less intimidating over time is a useful exercise.
  - horrified 5y ago
    But there actually ARE conspiracies. Practically every political group is scheming how to gain power and get their demands implemented.
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      I would argue, moreover, that conspiracy is the very definition of capitalism: everyone competing against each other and making alliances to crush competition. It's not disconnected from reality to consider some groups of people to have too much power and to conspire against the best interests of society at large for their own benefits. What is delusional is to link that to reptiles or illuminatis, when the people pulling the strings are the same ones we see smiling on TV: multinationals and their lobbyists, bosses unions (eg. MEDEF in France), political parties. Some of these interest groups tend to be more secretive (eg. Bildeberg, Dîners du siècle) but they are comprised of well-known figures whose interests align, and there's certainly not a single group of people controlling the entire planet's fate. It just so happens the rich and powerful have strong incentives to unite in order to screw the rest of us.
      - horrified 5y ago
        I think you would find a LOT of conspiracies in the history of communism.
troelsSteegin 5y ago
I don't which is worse, to be delusional about intended consequences, or to be conspiratorial about unintended consequences. I learned the word 'apophenia' from danah boyd's blog, https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/. She is a founder of Data & Society, at https://datasociety.net/ https://datasociety.net/
cleancarpets 5y ago
The irony being that Snowden's post itself is conspiratorial.
- jcrites 5y ago
  What do you mean by Snowden's post? He didn't make a post. He handed over classified material to journalists, who made decisions about what was in the public interest to publish in their newspapers. Maybe in the years since he's written a blog or an article in the news (he's given a number of speeches or attended events), but that wasn't how he blew the whistle to the public on the fact that the NSA was wiretapping the entire Internet, including the communication of ordinary Americans.
  - implying 5y ago
    Did you not even read the url, let alone the article? This is Edward Snowden's blog.
    - jcrites 5y ago
      I read the blog post, but not the URL (Do browsers show the full URL any more?). I scrolled directly down to the content. I didn't realize he was the author. He's a surprisingly insightful author, then. The first post in the series (this is the second) makes it clear that this is part of his personal story: https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/conspiracy-pt1 https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/conspiracy-pt1
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Anything conspiratorial you got from that, you put there yourself. Apophenically, maybe even.
yann2 5y ago
Well more than public thinkers and conspiracy theorists which there is no dearth off, what is missing are people who are consistent nuisance to the powers that be. Not in TV studios or the twttersphere. But on the ground. The powers thats be dont care what Snowden says. They dont see him as a problem anymore. Cause he is not on the board anymore. Gandhi too would write a whole lot, to process what he was going through, and grasp at whatever he could find to convince himself he wasnt nuts for taking a stand, just like Snowden. But the difference is, he didnt just retire into "public thinker" mode. He would pick a sensitive case, head straight to the center of action, court arrest and cause the entire state to shutdown. The Rowlett Act was no big diff to what Snowden is protesting. But Gandhi got the brits to bend. Can you imagine what happens if Snowden sneaks back into the US and courts arrest by the Dems while they chant about defending privacy, and ideally does it exactly when some inevitable privacy/data exploitation related fiasco happens? But that wont happens cause he has decided to become a social media influencer, oh sorry public thinker, just like the rest of America.
- polytely 5y ago
  >what is missing are people who are consistent nuisance to the powers that be Assange was one of them, and look what happened to him. >Can you imagine what happens if Snowden sneaks back into the US and courts arrest by the Dems while they chant about defending privacy, and ideally does it exactly when some inevitable privacy/data exploitation related fiasco happens? The news would cover the arrest, he would go to jail, and after a couple of months there would be a short news item about how Snowden was convicted under the Espionage act and sentenced to life in prison. There is no way to do a public interest defence when you are charged under the espionage act, so the outcome would be a forgone conclusion, and I don't see the mainstream media being interested in that fact. If you look how little coverage there is of the actual details of the Assange case (or the Donzinger case for that matter) in the mainstream media, it is clear to me that there is no way Snowden would get anything done by facing 'justice'. There would be some reporting on the fact that it happened, but there would be no reckoning or analysis of root causes (outside of places like Democracy Now).
  - southerntofu 5y ago
Borrible 5y ago
Truth and lies are functions of life, mental machinations of survival. Especially in politics, since it is the game of power over human ressources, wich are at last the most important ressources of survival for a highly intelligent social organism. Find a copy of Hannah Arendts article 'Truth and Politics' https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1967/02/25/truth-and-politics https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1967/02/25/truth-and-poli...
ttctciyf 5y ago
The term "conspiracy theory" is itself an apophenic simplification serving to render intelligible the maelstrom of conflicting data about the spectrum of intangibles lying between proven corporate and governmental crime at one end and inexplicable societal ills at the other.
bronzeage 5y ago
You'd expect a little more sympathy towards conspiracy theorists from a whistleblower who literally unveiled a huge conspiracy. Conspiracies are only limited by incentives and the ability of the planners of the conspiracy to recruit willing co-conspirators. Minewhile the term conspiracy theory had morphed from a term describing an unfeasible collaboration, into whatever the mainstream media decides is a conspiracy. Even the suggestion the covid virus escaped by a mistake from a lab, a theory that doesn't suggest even a single person acting maliciously, (or requires collaboration for anything other than a cover up by a regime which is known for its cover ups), is called a conspiracy theory. If you want to discuss a conspiracy theory, you need to discuss how likely it is that the required collaboration formed. If it requires collaboration of innocent people with no interests in the conspiracy, like most conspiracy theories, you can dismiss it. If it required collaboration of small amounts of people with aligning interests, and their actions could be carried in secret, you can't dismiss it just because it's a conspiracy.
Anthony-G 5y ago
It’s probably an example of the Baader-Meinhof effect¹ but I’d never heard the term “apopenia” until I read “A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon”² a couple of weeks ago. Despite not being a gamer and not being familiar with all the different types of game mentioned in the article, I thought it was an excellent analysis of how conspiracy theories take hold. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion 2. https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analysis-of-qanon-580972548be5 https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analy...

164 points by mcone 5y ago

>The conspiracy theorist will believe that institutions can be understood completely as the result of conscious design; and as collectives, he usually ascribes to them a kind of group-personality, treating them as conspiring agents, just as if they were individual men. As opposed to this view, the social theorist should recognize that the persistence of institutions and collectives creates a problem to be solved in terms of an analysis of individual social actions and their unintended (and often unwanted) social consequences, as well as their intended ones. and in between is the systems theorist who observes the emergent behavior (which is nor "conspiring" (despite sometimes displaying intelligence-like elements), nor generally directly reducible to the "individual actions") of the systems.

beckman466 5y ago
> and in between is the systems theorist who observes the emergent behavior I disagree, the systems theorist fits under the social theorist category imo. I’d say your new category just adds unnecessary complexity.
agumonkey 5y ago
It's hard for most to think that way.

ndrake 5y ago

Relevant TMBG: https://youtu.be/r9qLD3NtR94 https://youtu.be/r9qLD3NtR94

motohagiography 5y ago

Noted he used the word "atomized," which seems like a Hannah Arendt reference. Personally, I don't worry about conspiracies, as I'm indexed on something much more plausible and serious. To scale and really be dangerous, you need for an idea to be simple and seductive. Arendts view was the idea of truth being the enemy, and once people were unmoored from it, they could not resist the directed chaos used against them. The sufficient condition was that good men did nothing. With no truth, there was no basis or identity on which to organize. So there is no conspiracy. Just a set of incentives to align to and sustain the narrative, and the more absurd the gymnastics, the greater the rewards, because only the powerful can afford to seem so stupid and inconsistent. In that model, absurdity becomes a status signal, because to be that stupid requires hidden power. Imo, Poppers paraphrase had been used to justify this precise set of incentives, and I don't think he's a useful reference for insight into what's going on now. Arendt, however, nailed it.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
SuoDuanDao 5y ago
Since reading some of the Subgenius tracts I've found my tendency to see conspiracies to be a useful internal barometer. It doesn't really matter whether I'm blaming interdimensional psychic vampires or misaligned incentives in the federal bureaucracy for not living my best life, what matters is the degree to which I've associated my problems with an external locus of control. Keeping an eye on that, and trying to get 'the conspiracy' to look less intimidating over time is a useful exercise.
- horrified 5y ago
  But there actually ARE conspiracies. Practically every political group is scheming how to gain power and get their demands implemented.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    I would argue, moreover, that conspiracy is the very definition of capitalism: everyone competing against each other and making alliances to crush competition. It's not disconnected from reality to consider some groups of people to have too much power and to conspire against the best interests of society at large for their own benefits. What is delusional is to link that to reptiles or illuminatis, when the people pulling the strings are the same ones we see smiling on TV: multinationals and their lobbyists, bosses unions (eg. MEDEF in France), political parties. Some of these interest groups tend to be more secretive (eg. Bildeberg, Dîners du siècle) but they are comprised of well-known figures whose interests align, and there's certainly not a single group of people controlling the entire planet's fate. It just so happens the rich and powerful have strong incentives to unite in order to screw the rest of us.
    - horrified 5y ago
      I think you would find a LOT of conspiracies in the history of communism.

troelsSteegin 5y ago

I don't which is worse, to be delusional about intended consequences, or to be conspiratorial about unintended consequences. I learned the word 'apophenia' from danah boyd's blog, https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/. She is a founder of Data & Society, at https://datasociety.net/ https://datasociety.net/

cleancarpets 5y ago

The irony being that Snowden's post itself is conspiratorial.

jcrites 5y ago
What do you mean by Snowden's post? He didn't make a post. He handed over classified material to journalists, who made decisions about what was in the public interest to publish in their newspapers. Maybe in the years since he's written a blog or an article in the news (he's given a number of speeches or attended events), but that wasn't how he blew the whistle to the public on the fact that the NSA was wiretapping the entire Internet, including the communication of ordinary Americans.
- implying 5y ago
  Did you not even read the url, let alone the article? This is Edward Snowden's blog.
  - jcrites 5y ago
    I read the blog post, but not the URL (Do browsers show the full URL any more?). I scrolled directly down to the content. I didn't realize he was the author. He's a surprisingly insightful author, then. The first post in the series (this is the second) makes it clear that this is part of his personal story: https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/conspiracy-pt1 https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/conspiracy-pt1
ncmncm 5y ago
Anything conspiratorial you got from that, you put there yourself. Apophenically, maybe even.

yann2 5y ago

Well more than public thinkers and conspiracy theorists which there is no dearth off, what is missing are people who are consistent nuisance to the powers that be. Not in TV studios or the twttersphere. But on the ground. The powers thats be dont care what Snowden says. They dont see him as a problem anymore. Cause he is not on the board anymore. Gandhi too would write a whole lot, to process what he was going through, and grasp at whatever he could find to convince himself he wasnt nuts for taking a stand, just like Snowden. But the difference is, he didnt just retire into "public thinker" mode. He would pick a sensitive case, head straight to the center of action, court arrest and cause the entire state to shutdown. The Rowlett Act was no big diff to what Snowden is protesting. But Gandhi got the brits to bend. Can you imagine what happens if Snowden sneaks back into the US and courts arrest by the Dems while they chant about defending privacy, and ideally does it exactly when some inevitable privacy/data exploitation related fiasco happens? But that wont happens cause he has decided to become a social media influencer, oh sorry public thinker, just like the rest of America.

polytely 5y ago
>what is missing are people who are consistent nuisance to the powers that be Assange was one of them, and look what happened to him. >Can you imagine what happens if Snowden sneaks back into the US and courts arrest by the Dems while they chant about defending privacy, and ideally does it exactly when some inevitable privacy/data exploitation related fiasco happens? The news would cover the arrest, he would go to jail, and after a couple of months there would be a short news item about how Snowden was convicted under the Espionage act and sentenced to life in prison. There is no way to do a public interest defence when you are charged under the espionage act, so the outcome would be a forgone conclusion, and I don't see the mainstream media being interested in that fact. If you look how little coverage there is of the actual details of the Assange case (or the Donzinger case for that matter) in the mainstream media, it is clear to me that there is no way Snowden would get anything done by facing 'justice'. There would be some reporting on the fact that it happened, but there would be no reckoning or analysis of root causes (outside of places like Democracy Now).
- southerntofu 5y ago

Borrible 5y ago

Truth and lies are functions of life, mental machinations of survival. Especially in politics, since it is the game of power over human ressources, wich are at last the most important ressources of survival for a highly intelligent social organism. Find a copy of Hannah Arendts article 'Truth and Politics' https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1967/02/25/truth-and-politics https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1967/02/25/truth-and-poli...

ttctciyf 5y ago

The term "conspiracy theory" is itself an apophenic simplification serving to render intelligible the maelstrom of conflicting data about the spectrum of intangibles lying between proven corporate and governmental crime at one end and inexplicable societal ills at the other.

bronzeage 5y ago

You'd expect a little more sympathy towards conspiracy theorists from a whistleblower who literally unveiled a huge conspiracy. Conspiracies are only limited by incentives and the ability of the planners of the conspiracy to recruit willing co-conspirators. Minewhile the term conspiracy theory had morphed from a term describing an unfeasible collaboration, into whatever the mainstream media decides is a conspiracy. Even the suggestion the covid virus escaped by a mistake from a lab, a theory that doesn't suggest even a single person acting maliciously, (or requires collaboration for anything other than a cover up by a regime which is known for its cover ups), is called a conspiracy theory. If you want to discuss a conspiracy theory, you need to discuss how likely it is that the required collaboration formed. If it requires collaboration of innocent people with no interests in the conspiracy, like most conspiracy theories, you can dismiss it. If it required collaboration of small amounts of people with aligning interests, and their actions could be carried in secret, you can't dismiss it just because it's a conspiracy.

Anthony-G 5y ago

It’s probably an example of the Baader-Meinhof effect¹ but I’d never heard the term “apopenia” until I read “A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon”² a couple of weeks ago. Despite not being a gamer and not being familiar with all the different types of game mentioned in the article, I thought it was an excellent analysis of how conspiracy theories take hold. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion 2. https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analysis-of-qanon-580972548be5 https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analy...