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During Covid I lived alone after I had moved away from anyone I knew. I didn’t mind it too much but one of the effects was that I fell down a conspiracy rabbit

During Covid I lived alone after I had moved away from anyone I knew. I didn’t mind it too much but one of the effects was that I fell down a conspiracy rabbit hole. Looking back on it I find it hard to understand what my thought process was. On one hand it makes sense but on the other it doesn’t anymore (because I don’t believe in it). Without anyone else around you can talk yourself into believing some pretty wild things. Luckily I met my now fiance and she gradually talked me out of it, but I was very resistant and I got pretty upset sometimes when she challenged me on it. I have a lot more sympathy for people that fall for these things now, otherwise I would be a hypocrite.

macintux 2y ago
Kudos for finding your way out. It's very, very easy to rationalize your beliefs once they take hold.
- therobots927 2y ago
  Thanks but I really just feel bad for people still in the cult. I never posted anything myself so my conscience is clear that I didn’t egg any of them on, but just reading it was enough for me to feel like I was a part of something. Really weird stuff and it’s unfortunate to see people still locked in that mindset, of thinking that any day now huge amounts of wealth will be yours and you won’t have to worry about money again. It’s kind of cruel and I’m lucky that I had a high enough income that my losses in the stock didn’t impact me.
modeless 2y ago
Which one?
- therobots927 2y ago
  That GameStop stock would go to infinity basically. It’s an online, anonymous modern day cargo cult.
  - Animats 2y ago
    There's a minor industry doing that now. See r/metaverse_blockchain, where there's a new "memecoin" being hyped every day. Many are very similar. Some are clearly using the same template for their scams. Most of them forward their links through Linktree.
- gagagaga7 2y ago
  I fell into the lableak/fauci covering it up conspiracy theory
  - mikeyouse 2y ago
    So did a lot of people - pretty wild.
    - decremental 2y ago
      [dead]
decremental 2y ago
[dead]
b33j0r 2y ago
This doesn't resonate with me, but it strangely does because that timeframe just had these weird artifacts. I rejected the conspiracy theories and machismo-empowerment waves of 2016 and 2019, and found myself completely isolated. My conservative friends said "join us" and my liberal friends said I wasn't woke. Kinda thought that was a fever that would pass, but besides my closest friends and family, that restaging was surprisingly permanent. I came into my own back in freshman year of college when I was convinced about 9/11 being fishy by "Loose Change." If true, that's outrageous! So I then kept looking into it and came to understand conspiracy theories and skepticism. It's so sad. All of my friends left and right are conspiracy theorists now, 20 years later. Anti-progress pendulum or something.
- therobots927 2y ago
  Welcome to the 21st century. It’s only gonna get worse.
- ChainOfFools 2y ago
  A big contributor to the problem is that the word conspiracy has become too broad to be useful as a test or label anymore. Everything novel in the world arises as a result of a recursively self-propagating memetic function, one that could be characterized in its earliest phases as a conspiracy: namely that one, two, and then a handful of people settle on a common notion about something universal that needs to change, whether it's for the good or the bad of everyone else, and when successful that idea fans out memetically to others so that it accumulates the necessary physical mass and force required to cause real change. By the time the impact of this force hits people who have no connection or even awareness of the original initiating group, it feels entirely exogenous and a search for the conspirators, those who triggered the initiation of this wave, is an understandable response especially if the change is unwanted. As a recent example, one of the cleverest bits of social engineering in the Bitcoin project was the possibly intentional disappearance of its pseudonymous founder, conveniently removing the ability of those so exogenously impacted to identify the origin of the change with any particular individual, greatly complicating accusations of conspiracy. A much earlier example, curiously similar in form, is the origin story of the traditional founder of alchemy, Hermes Trismegistus, to whom was even ascribed authorship of that movements own founding "white paper," called the Emerald Tablet.

macintux 2y ago

Kudos for finding your way out. It's very, very easy to rationalize your beliefs once they take hold.

therobots927 2y ago
Thanks but I really just feel bad for people still in the cult. I never posted anything myself so my conscience is clear that I didn’t egg any of them on, but just reading it was enough for me to feel like I was a part of something. Really weird stuff and it’s unfortunate to see people still locked in that mindset, of thinking that any day now huge amounts of wealth will be yours and you won’t have to worry about money again. It’s kind of cruel and I’m lucky that I had a high enough income that my losses in the stock didn’t impact me.

modeless 2y ago

Which one?

therobots927 2y ago
That GameStop stock would go to infinity basically. It’s an online, anonymous modern day cargo cult.
- Animats 2y ago
  There's a minor industry doing that now. See r/metaverse_blockchain, where there's a new "memecoin" being hyped every day. Many are very similar. Some are clearly using the same template for their scams. Most of them forward their links through Linktree.
gagagaga7 2y ago
I fell into the lableak/fauci covering it up conspiracy theory
- mikeyouse 2y ago
  So did a lot of people - pretty wild.
  - decremental 2y ago
    [dead]

decremental 2y ago

[dead]

b33j0r 2y ago

This doesn't resonate with me, but it strangely does because that timeframe just had these weird artifacts. I rejected the conspiracy theories and machismo-empowerment waves of 2016 and 2019, and found myself completely isolated. My conservative friends said "join us" and my liberal friends said I wasn't woke. Kinda thought that was a fever that would pass, but besides my closest friends and family, that restaging was surprisingly permanent. I came into my own back in freshman year of college when I was convinced about 9/11 being fishy by "Loose Change." If true, that's outrageous! So I then kept looking into it and came to understand conspiracy theories and skepticism. It's so sad. All of my friends left and right are conspiracy theorists now, 20 years later. Anti-progress pendulum or something.

therobots927 2y ago
Welcome to the 21st century. It’s only gonna get worse.
ChainOfFools 2y ago
A big contributor to the problem is that the word conspiracy has become too broad to be useful as a test or label anymore. Everything novel in the world arises as a result of a recursively self-propagating memetic function, one that could be characterized in its earliest phases as a conspiracy: namely that one, two, and then a handful of people settle on a common notion about something universal that needs to change, whether it's for the good or the bad of everyone else, and when successful that idea fans out memetically to others so that it accumulates the necessary physical mass and force required to cause real change. By the time the impact of this force hits people who have no connection or even awareness of the original initiating group, it feels entirely exogenous and a search for the conspirators, those who triggered the initiation of this wave, is an understandable response especially if the change is unwanted. As a recent example, one of the cleverest bits of social engineering in the Bitcoin project was the possibly intentional disappearance of its pseudonymous founder, conveniently removing the ability of those so exogenously impacted to identify the origin of the change with any particular individual, greatly complicating accusations of conspiracy. A much earlier example, curiously similar in form, is the origin story of the traditional founder of alchemy, Hermes Trismegistus, to whom was even ascribed authorship of that movements own founding "white paper," called the Emerald Tablet.