Time seems to have had a way of vindicating at least some tin foil hatters, yet people today are just as ready to dismiss as 'crazy conspiracy theory' any similar extrapolations or speculations.
If you strip off the really genuinely nutty stuff, quite a bit of what I remember reading nutters talk about on places like Usenet alt.conspiracy in the 1990s is now reality. Some of what's now reality would have made them blush. The conspiranoids would have called you crazy if you'd suggested that everyone would be carrying devices that constantly report their location at all times to central servers owned by closely state-connected corporations -- and that people would accept this willingly and even pay out of pocket for these devices themselves.
> If you strip off the really genuinely nutty stuff, quite a bit of what I remember reading nutters talk about on places like Usenet alt.conspiracy in the 1990s is now reality.
well, yeah. if you ignore all the crazy, what's left isn't crazy. why is that surprising?
> The conspiranoids would have called you crazy if you'd suggested that everyone would be carrying devices that constantly report their location at all times
would they? that seems like a pretty obvious consequence of carrying a cell phone.
maybe my recollection is different, but i don't think people were saying "the government reads your email" was a crazy idea. they were saying "the government reads your email on their secret moon base staffed by hitler clones" was a crazy idea.
if you want to make the argument that the hatters were right all along but were wrongly dismissed, find a specific claim that was made, and a specific counterclaim. these "right all along" discussions always slide into unfalsifiable generalities and strawmen.
> well, yeah. if you ignore all the crazy, what's left isn't crazy. why is that surprising?
Come on, you gave an example of "really genuinely nutty stuff" yourself: '"the government reads your email on their secret moon base staffed by hitler clones"'.
I'm not saying I agree with GP exactly, but you're strawmanning it into a tautology when you seem to know exactly what was really meant.
I am saying that theories without predictive power are generally worthless. (this is true in many fields.)
it is not enough to be right all along. if you want to be credible, you need to avoid being wrong all along, too.
real example. the theory that the NSA secretly poisoned the DES s-boxes to introduce a backdoor. People insisted that's what happened without any evidence. They were wrong all along. Later, when dual-EC came along, I think people were a little skeptical it was really a backdoor precisely because of the DES story.
My issue is that if you dug through all the claims you found the ones OP was talking about and thought "this isn't actually implausible" and if you go a step further and check some sources, it's not for certain but there's enough evidence to be compelling. Yet you would only hear about these things mixed in with the nutty ideas, I guess because it was disreputable to even talk about the government having certain kinds of secrets. Post-Snowden this attitude seems to have been reduced.
"if you ignore all the crazy, what's left isn't crazy."
That's exactly what I'm saying.
If you ignore all the crazy, the stuff that's left was stuff that almost nobody else was saying: that there was some kind of "conspiracy" to implement a total surveillance state (PRISM and friends, and location-aware phones), that in the future the middle class was going to be destroyed and the world enslaved to the service of a tiny elite (the "sharing economy" of non-employees with no benefits), fascism is coming back (too many examples to list), corporations with shadowy "deep state" links will rule the Earth (TPP), etc.
Remember that this was in the post-cold-war 1990s when everything was getting better, a rising tide would lift all boats, and freedom was going to ring. This was before 9/11, the great housing hyperinflation, the 2008 crash and the great stagnation, or our experiment at bringing democracy to Iraq ended with ISIS.
Polite establishment intellectuals weren't saying those things. Only crazies were, and the crazies were largely right. Maybe they were bat shit crazy about the underlying mechanisms, but they were right about where things were going.
IMHO a lot of conspiracy nuts are actually very perceptive and intelligent. They've got good pattern recognition circuits going. The problem is that they've got poor epistemology. They're not very careful thinkers, and they're often a bit uneducated and inexperienced about how the world really works. As a result they tend to force-fit their observations and extrapolations onto silly cartoonish models of how the world works. The observations are correct, but the models are not.
This is coupled with the fact that being loony outsiders, they have no reputation or political street cred to protect. They don't have to care about offending their superiors because they have none, and they aren't afraid of damaging their reputation because there's nowhere to go but up from 'fringe lunatic.' As a result, they can tell the truth insofar as they can point out trends nobody else wants to look at. According to Pravda grain production is only going up!
Just replace the word "conspiracy" with "emergent behavior in a complex system" and re-read all that stuff.
There is no Illuminati, but there is an "old boy network" where favors are traded for favors and corruption breeds. There is no New World Order per se, but there is a complex global economic system full of paradoxes and feedback loops and perverse incentives that behaves very much like one, and we do have corporations so big and complex and entrenched they're almost like a model of what a hostile AI would be like. Put these things together and you get everything the nutters write about minus the funny hats and secret societies.
> The flip side of these trends at the top of the wealth ladder is the erosion of wealth among the middle class and the poor. There is a widespread public view across American society that a key structural change in the U.S. economy since the 1920s is the rise of middle-class wealth, in particular because of the development of pensions and the rise in home ownership rates. But our results show that while the share of wealth of the bottom 90 percent of families did gradually increase from 15 percent in the 1920s to a peak of 36 percent in the mid-1980, it then dramatically declined. By 2012, the bottom 90 percent collectively owns only 23 percent of total U.S. wealth, about as much as in 1940 (see Figure 2.)[0]
> The structure of the control network of transnational corporations affects global market competition and financial stability. So far, only small national samples were studied and there was no appropriate methodology to assess control globally. We present the first investigation of the architecture of the international ownership network, along with the computation of the control held by each global player. We find that transnational corporations form a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic “super-entity” that raises new important issues both for researchers and policy makers.[1]
Probably a case where choosing ones words carefully helps. If you told me in the 90s "wealth inequality will increase" I probably would believe you. If you had told me "the world will be enslaved" I would have been skeptical. Saying that you were right all along because, while you said the latter, you really meant the former, sounds like retconning.
If we get real, robust automation, we're not going to see wealth inequality head that way. Or, at least, it's not going to matter as much. When anyone can get automation to do all the things they care about, what's the incentive to work like a dog for your whole life?
> When anyone can get automation to do all the things they care about ...
Why would it necessarily be "anyone"? If wealth and capitol are concentrated, and wealthy own automated factories, then what will provide income for the rest? Maybe, as Gibson projects, population will crash (the "Jackpot"). If everyone has enough automation, on the other hand, then we get a Vinge-like future.
What makes you think that everyone will have access to automation? Once a substantial part of society does have it the incentive to provide it to more people will wither away because no one who already has power will gain any by doing so.
There's conspiracy theory, and there's conspiracy theory. Nazi spacemen from the Moon are obviously bullshit, but there's a heuristic I found to be good at predicting the real stuff that most people still don't recognize and treat as conspiracy - namely, that with technology, if something is possible (i.e. not breaking the laws of physics) and would benefit a group with deep enough pockets, it will be done.
So for example, is reading through most of the e-mail traffic possible? Yes, it is, there are ways to get this data in principle, and algorithms will help you in filtering. Is it useful for a government agency? Obviously. So it is most likely being done. Believing that before Snowden was not tinfoilhattery, it was accepting an obvious conclusion. Lo and behold, now we know for sure it happens.
People still don't get it. I die a little inside every time I see someone genuinly surprised about side-channel attacks like timing, reading the screen from light reflected off a wall, reading keys by power analysis, reading keypresses from accelerometer, etc. It's obvious this can be done and will be done. Computers are not magic boxes, they're made of matter and obey the laws of physics. They interact with the world.
I wouldn't go that far. You need both physical possibility and a good reason for doing something. Government dumping fake snow on Georgia is certainly possible, but much too expensive for no real reason whatsoever. Tapping all communications worldwide? Doable and there are parties with enough resources that would benefit greatly, so it's being done.
This is simply a current example of the political strategy known as the paranoid style. Just like the fear about "reds" in McCarthyism and various right-wing groups that used racial fears for political gain, there has been a very succcessful application of the paranoid style against the very idea of investigating the intelligence community.
If you (or anybody else) haven't read it, I suggest reading the original essay[1] on the subject. It may be over 50 year old, but it is probably one of the more important essays for understanding the modern (~post-WW2) American politics and how "conspiracy theory" has been used as a way of rallying people against "the enemy".
I know quite a bit of conspiracy nuts and I'm sure that some of the stuff they talk about may one day be revealed as true, but that doesn't mean that I will listen to 99% of their bullshit for 1% of potential truth.
>people today are just as ready to dismiss as 'crazy conspiracy theory' any similar extrapolations or speculations.
Extraordinary claims, extraordinary proof. No exceptions.
Because 99% of the time, those extrapolations or speculations are exactly that - uninformed, paranoid fantasies without any grounding in reality. The ones who turn out to be right are inevitably drowned out by the ones who will believe any conspiracy so long as it seems paranoid enough, and given that signal to noise ratio, skepticism even in the face of vindication seems only right.
I predicted mass surveillance in 2008 and I am not known for jumping on board conspiracy theories. My reasons were that server infrastructure costs are getting lower while elites seek power to control others, and monitoring electronic things seemed like a natural conclusion to me. I was labeled a conspiracy theorist by my own family.
Today, when I bring the Snowden revelations up with my family they say, "well duh, everybody knew that for many years"
facepalm you just can't win. Everything at high levels is shit and corrupt and it will always be that way. Go make yourself a sandwich and be glad we aren't living in anarchy.
Maybe of a very weak sort, if you define anarchy as "lawlessness." Maybe they're two sides of the same coin.
But to me, you can't have a police state without a state, or laws to enforce, or a way for the state to coerce involuntary obedience to those laws (which is what police are theoretically for.) All of these things seem fundamentally non-anarchist in principle.
I think of police states as authoritarian. Maybe there could be a democratic police state. But that would be odd.
Anyway, with anarchism there are voluntary associations. In free-market anarchism, there are private services for defense and contract enforcement. But if wealth is concentrated, such services that serve the wealthy will be far more powerful than those who serve the poor.
In effect, they will be "the police". And so we would have an authoritarian police state.
I've started to dislike this phrase. Extraordinary is subjective.
Obviously you can trot out edge cases. The claim that extraterrestrials run the US government is quite extraordinary. But edge cases aren't that interesting. Most claims fall somewhere in the middle, and in that case can be called extraordinary or not based on the personal biases of the claimant. Thus "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" becomes a goal-post-moving fallacy in practice.
Personally I don't consider claims about governments wanting to surveil people, economic systems tending to concentrate wealth, or the dystopian potential of supra-national corporate governance to be particularly extraordinary. YMMV.
The majority of chemtrail reports are doofuses seeing contrails, but the rumor mill may have started around a kernel of truth. I've thought about a couple possibilities:
(1) Cloud seeding, either experimental or operational.
(2) Experiments with the injection of aluminum nanoparticles into the upper atmosphere to increase the Earth's albedo as a potential geoengineering solution to climate change. There's some documentation for this if you Google it, and it might look pretty funky to a ground observer.
(3) Other experiments with spraying nanoparticles, such as for radar reflection or to attempt to simulate difficult radar conditions to test stealth-busting radars.
Folklore and wild rumor often starts around a seed crystal of truth. Note that many of the early chemtrails rumors came from the American Southwest, which is where the black project kids play with their toys.
> The majority of chemtrail reports are doofuses seeing contrails, but the rumor mill may have started around a kernel of truth.
Yeah, I'm perfectly aware that most "chemtrails" are just contrails, but I have a feeling now that it might have started around a quite solid kernel of truth.
You know, I used to post this picture as a joke: http://i.imgur.com/MM9YsTM.jpg. Now I realize it's exactly what the US military did in San Francisco.
After WWII, through at least the early 60s, the US military discounted risk quite heavily. Human experimentation with virtually uninformed consent was not uncommon. Knowledge of the effects of radiation exposure, and diagnostic methods, was limited. And so they tested on poor people and prisoners.
I'm not even saying that they did a wrong thing here (I do believe that there are important experiments that can only work when subjects are unaware that they're participating; I don't have a definite opinion on this particular one) - it's just that it's hard to dismiss something as TFH if even the craziest stories turn out to be rooted in truth.
> I do believe that there are important experiments that can only work when subjects are unaware that they're participating ...
Medical experiments? Sure, those were "harmless" bacteria, but maybe a few people died as a result of the test.
But would you believe that indigent cancer patients were given lethal whole-body x-ray exposures, and then observed (without treatment) while they died?
I was thinking more about social experiments than medical ones. A lot of problems with current social science research comes from telling people they're part of a study. Humans change their behavior when they know they're being watched (not to mention selection bias; people who agree to be a part of the study are often a very specific population subset, on the intersection of people with too much free time and the kind of people who like taking part in experiments). I think we need more studies like that infamous Facebook one (the one which media took and turned into an overblown ethical issue) - tweaking something and observing the dynamic response of the system, without the system being aware that it's being explicitly influenced.
I'm very reluctant to dismiss anything as tinfoilhattery nowadays. I always thought that people afraid of "chemtrails" are paranoid and believe obviously silly stories. Because why would anyone do that? And then very recently, on HN of all places, I learned that US Government did in fact spray bacteria on their own civilians for biowarfare research purposes, without the public knowing for decades.
It's getting harder to distinguish the crazy from the truth. I still don't believe in faked Moon landing though.
I think it's more interesting to wonder how it's possible for the US to be surprised by movements like ISIS or by random shooters when surveillance is supposed to be total.
Obviously there are many ways in which information can be lost between source and policy. But it's still strange that some events appear to be a complete surprise.
If Snowden and Campbell are correct, they really shouldn't be.
There's the possibility that total electronic surveillance is real and that it's no good at countering the kind of threats it supposedly is used against.
If you want conspiracy, consider this: what impact did the #occupy movement have on the world order? That certainly was more dangerous to the establishment than someone scaring the population with terror attacks.
Or if you believe the official story: who are all the people assassinated with extra-legal (from an international law perspective, anyway) drone strikes in Yemen? Are they enemies of the US?
> what impact did the #occupy movement have on the world order?
Exactly none? People just shouted for a while, maybe burned a few cars, and then they got bored with it. Terror attack on the other hand tend to scare the living shit and every remaining ounce of rational thought out of people. People worldwide supported two wars over 9/11.
It may be total, but there aren't enough resources to process absolutely everything. I'll grant you ISIS, but random shooters? That's hardly a national security threat. When you're running a secret surveillance program you probably don't want to go and tell police about every planned murder you discovered, because at some point people will start asking questions about how you know the things you do (or some Joe Random Officer will decide to disclose your program for a 5 minutes of fame in a late night show interview).
I guess it does work, but they prioritize the threats (possibly still missing some important ones).
Mass surveillance may simply be less useful. There are people that use the fact that 'it works' as an argument pro-surveillance. I don't agree with that argument but it gets used quite frequently. Now imagine how bad it would be if all this mass surveillance went on and it wasn't even effective. That's no way to get a bigger budget next year.
So Snowden and Campbell are likely correct and those that argue that 'it works' could very well be wrong at the same time.
1. The internet is not (in my guess) as ubiquitous in the Middle East as it is in more developed societies. If you want to monitor everyone in that environment, you're limited to Stasi style personal informants.
2. As information flows up to policy makers, it's transformed, shaded or obscured to fit the world views and agendas of the agencies and individuals "analyzing ans summarizing" it and passing it up.
Total Information Awareness is not for policy makers, it's for spies and law enforcement.
That may well reflect the false positive paradox. Let's say that the US has total surveillance. When they're interested in rare events, they'll be overwhelmed by false positives, unless the rate of false positives is very low. And so they need to check out all of the hits, and that takes time.
There's lots of 1998-2001 stuff on cryptome.org :)
Total TFH then. Now, not so much :(