Looking for feedback on a text I wrote

[adversity1]

Hi folks

Just wanted to thank all the skeptics here and elsewhere for providing an excellent resource for countering truther lies and distortions.

I've just finished a 8 page article for a British magazine called Datacide that attempts to theorize the truth movement. The point of the piece is not to debunk claims of the movement since I believe that's already been done quite competently, but instead to try to understand the persistent appeal of the theories. I'm coming from a situationist/socialist perspective (:eek:), so that figures into how I analyze the movement. If you're not open to that you might not be interested. But hostile feedback is also good. ;D

PM me if you've got some time. Thanks!!

[Alferd_Packer]

What the heck is a situationist/socialist perspective?

[Nick Terry]

What the heck is a situationist/socialist perspective?

Google 'situationism' and you'll be enlightened. Exactly what kind of socialism will be the clincher, as there are way more than 57 varieties.

But, you know, viewing 9/11 through Debordian lenses could be kinda fun.

Does anyone know if Baudrillard ever commented on 9/11? Woulda thought it was just the kind of media event that was up his street.

In answer to the question, 'who's Baudrillard', again, Google is your friend. It gives me headaches even just thinking about trying to explain his ideas, which is why I'm glad I don't teach cultural theory or any of that [rule10].

[jaydeehess]

Hi folks

Just wanted to thank all the skeptics here and elsewhere for providing an excellent resource for countering truther lies and distortions.

I've just finished a 8 page article for a British magazine called Datacide that attempts to theorize the truth movement. The point of the piece is not to debunk claims of the movement since I believe that's already been done quite competently, but instead to try to understand the persistent appeal of the theories. I'm coming from a situationist/socialist perspective (:eek:), so that figures into how I analyze the movement. If you're not open to that you might not be interested. But hostile feedback is also good. ;D

PM me if you've got some time. Thanks!!

Philosophical musings make my head hurt:D but I'll give it a shot. Socialism doesn't scare me and I think I'd be better off not googling anything before reading it.

pm me adversity1

if'n ya yews'd 2 meny big wurds I might not foller it butt I'll giv it a shot.

[Confuseling]

Marxist, quite busy with uni work, but quite interested in reading what you've got if it'll help.

[Edmund Standing]

As a non-leftist who nonetheless has swum in those waters (during my Critical & Cultural Theory MA), I'd be interested to see this article.

I'm also interested in 'Datacide'. I see issue 9 had a reprint of a Coil interview (I love 80s Industrial music) and 8 had an article on the SPK, a group who fascinate me in their nuttiness.

For those interested: datacide.c8.com

[Finnegan]

Does anyone know if Baudrillard ever commented on 9/11? Woulda thought it was just the kind of media event that was up his street.
[rule10].

He certainly did:

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillard-the-spirit-of-terrorism.html

Essentially he argues that it was an 'absolute event', in contrast with the Gulf War which was a 'non-event'. This was because it reached beyond direct factors to 'triumphant globalisation battling against itself.'

This is my favourite section:

"All through the stagnant 90s, there has been "la greve des evenements". Well, the strike is off. We are even facing, with the World Trade Center & New York hits, the absolute event, the "mother" of events, the pure event which is the essence of all the events that never happened."

As someone who takes a minor interest in both the writings of Situationism and the psyches of what I'll for conveniences sake call conspiracy theorists I'd be very interested to see this article. (There's a sentence that's unlikely to be written again)..(except by jokers)..

[adversity1]

Sending PMs...wow, we only get 10 PMs at JREF. Um, what?

As I stated, the main goal of my article is to understand the persistence of these theories, how they are reproduced, what causes them to go into crisis and then to re-emerge. In that sense, the core of the piece is a comparison of 'truth production' to 'commodity production' in the classical Marxist idea of the phrase.

A reconsideration of the situationists in the wake of 9/11 I think would be an interesting read. After all, if it is possible to hallucinate away the attacks as illusions funneled through the mass media (no-planes), then the real power of this particular spectacle and its social importance is worth thinking over. Still, a discussion like that would have to go beyond the situationists as far as I can see, because even though Debord created a compelling understanding of the spectacle as the integration of separation and representation (political phenomena) into daily life, the influence of the Situationists on the modern left (even idiots like Adbusters) has taken the form of a crass critique of the media. That conspiracist notions emerge from this, "we're all being lied to" is no surprise. True, the influence of the Situationists hardly coheres with the theory they wrote and the actions they were involved in throughout the 60s. They are misinterpreted. But it's the weakest link in any chain that often becomes ideologized.

I would have to re-read the Society of the Spectacle to really iron out my criticisms of the theory of the spectacle, but I think mainly we are living in a different age from Debord. Participatory internet: email, blogs, video, podcasts etc. There is no point in talking about "a" spectacle in the unitary sense (and perhaps there never was). People seem to be happy innovating their own, and are working at diverse points that do not necessarily have any relation to others.

[gtc]

I'm also interested in 'Datacide'. I see issue 9 had a reprint of a Coil interview (I love 80s Industrial music) and 8 had an article on the SPK, a group who fascinate me in their nuttiness.

Cool, I'm a big fan of the Severed Heads, its interesting to see a magazine that links music and politics so organically.

[Nick Terry]

Sending PMs...wow, we only get 10 PMs at JREF. Um, what?

As I stated, the main goal of my article is to understand the persistence of these theories, how they are reproduced, what causes them to go into crisis and then to re-emerge. In that sense, the core of the piece is a comparison of 'truth production' to 'commodity production' in the classical Marxist idea of the phrase.

A reconsideration of the situationists in the wake of 9/11 I think would be an interesting read. After all, if it is possible to hallucinate away the attacks as illusions funneled through the mass media (no-planes), then the real power of this particular spectacle and its social importance is worth thinking over. Still, a discussion like that would have to go beyond the situationists as far as I can see, because even though Debord created a compelling understanding of the spectacle as the integration of separation and representation (political phenomena) into daily life, the influence of the Situationists on the modern left (even idiots like Adbusters) has taken the form of a crass critique of the media. That conspiracist notions emerge from this, "we're all being lied to" is no surprise. True, the influence of the Situationists hardly coheres with the theory they wrote and the actions they were involved in throughout the 60s. They are misinterpreted. But it's the weakest link in any chain that often becomes ideologized.

I would have to re-read the Society of the Spectacle to really iron out my criticisms of the theory of the spectacle, but I think mainly we are living in a different age from Debord. Participatory internet: email, blogs, video, podcasts etc. There is no point in talking about "a" spectacle in the unitary sense (and perhaps there never was). People seem to be happy innovating their own, and are working at diverse points that do not necessarily have any relation to others.

some random musings in this vein:

Debord was writing in the era of "mass culture", which lasted really through the age of radio and onto the early years of TV. By the time he wrote SotS, there was already ample evidence that consumers were detourning their consumption and funnelling it into production of their own; the classic case is the Beatles and every band since. This does remain within commodity culture, thus proving one part of the situationist thesis, and provoking endless debates about 'selling out' ever since.

Virtually every era before the internet age had means of communicating that were comparable, as well as means of avoiding spending money - tape-trading, taping chart songs off the radio. But now it's infinitely easier, as long as you spend money on the broadband connection, or have it spent for you (twoofers in their mom's basement). This begs questions about the shifts within capital. Traditional culture industries have been partially supplanted by hardware, software and ISP industries. But the practice of detournement remains, and is generally what keeps us amused and interested.

Now detournement has extended into the news media, not simply the cultural media. To some extent twas ever this: there have been crank letter-writers most likely ever since the invention of newspapers. The underlying cognitive failure displayed by a 1950s newspaper cutting hoarder and a 2000s twoofer is the same: inability to process information properly.

Classical CTs have been disseminated through fanzine-like means, the crank pamphlet being the prime example, as well as small-press books. They have generated subcultures. There's little doubt that CTs are more the product of 'scenius' than genius. It requires a loosely connected community of morons to discover that there's another loon out there who thinks just like them, or who transmits an influence which is copied literally verbatim into the 'new product'. Plenty of commentators have spoken of how the memes mutate, i.e. the copy errors creep in and the CT evolves, sometimes uncontrollably.

But there are surely more of them now, because of the increased volume of media. The increased transmission rate causes more and more copy errors to the original wrongness.

It does seem likely that twoofers are the inevitable casualties of the "infowars", only they don't realise it. They think they're the protagonists, the heroes, the soldiers winning medals (eg CIT). They remind me of the Tim Robbins character in Jacob's Ladder - they're braindead, only they don't know it just yet, and live out intense flash-forward and flash-back fantasies with great rapidity.

Actually, the best example of how da twoof bears out situationist/Marxist/cultural theory analysis is the infamous twooferbucks stupidity. This was a wish-fantasy of how to quantify fictitious subcultural capital.

[ktesibios]

Classical CTs have been disseminated through fanzine-like means, the crank pamphlet being the prime example, as well as small-press books. They have generated subcultures. There's little doubt that CTs are more the product of 'scenius' than genius. It requires a loosely connected community of morons to discover that there's another loon out there who thinks just like them, or who transmits an influence which is copied literally verbatim into the 'new product'. Plenty of commentators have spoken of how the memes mutate, i.e. the copy errors creep in and the CT evolves, sometimes uncontrollably.

But there are surely more of them now, because of the increased volume of media. The increased transmission rate causes more and more copy errors to the original wrongness.


With the advent of copy/paste operations on every home computer, the concept of "copy errors" a' la DNA replication in the development of conspiracist memes is kind of obsolete. Something I've observed more than once is that a Google on a phrase from such a meme turns up hundreds of hits, the text of which is absolutely identical, right down to duplicating the same internal error- a sure indication that the text has spread from one woowoo site to others via select-copy-paste.

The first time I ran across this was a few years ago when I set out to try to discover the source of the infamous purported Ariel Sharon quote "we, the Jewish people, control America". Googling "control America" + Sharon produced over 400 hits, all of which were perfectly identical, including a rather obvious and serious grammatical error. The obvious inference was that multiple PCTers had run across it somewhere and simply copied and pasted the text to their own web sites.

It's a process that can easily be observed in a variety of habitats. As an example, try Googling the phrase "man does not have the right to develop his own mind". Read the blurbs on the results pages and note how many are identical.

My own pet name for this process is "cybermetastasis". When technology makes it so easy for a poor typist or even a near-illiterate to duplicate text with no copying errors, when we observe a common woowoo citation developing over time, we should probably think "deliberate modification" rather than "random mutation".

[Nick Terry]

With the advent of copy/paste operations on every home computer, the concept of "copy errors" a' la DNA replication in the development of conspiracist memes is kind of obsolete. Something I've observed more than once is that a Google on a phrase from such a meme turns up hundreds of hits, the text of which is absolutely identical, right down to duplicating the same internal error- a sure indication that the text has spread from one woowoo site to others via select-copy-paste.

The first time I ran across this was a few years ago when I set out to try to discover the source of the infamous purported Ariel Sharon quote "we, the Jewish people, control America". Googling "control America" + Sharon produced over 400 hits, all of which were perfectly identical, including a rather obvious and serious grammatical error. The obvious inference was that multiple PCTers had run across it somewhere and simply copied and pasted the text to their own web sites.

It's a process that can easily be observed in a variety of habitats. As an example, try Googling the phrase "man does not have the right to develop his own mind". Read the blurbs on the results pages and note how many are identical.

My own pet name for this process is "cybermetastasis". When technology makes it so easy for a poor typist or even a near-illiterate to duplicate text with no copying errors, when we observe a common woowoo citation developing over time, we should probably think "deliberate modification" rather than "random mutation".

I know what you're talking about - and great observation. The pet name is cool, too.

But actually those aren't the 'copy errors' I was thinking of. Old-school CTists, in the pre-Microsoft Word days, also managed to copy verbatim chunks of text from one crank screed to the next, right down to telltale errors.

An example from my research into Holocaust denial: several German authors in the late 1960s and early 1970s spoke of the Rudolf Hoess memoirs and called them Der Kommandant von Auschwitz spricht - The Commandant of Auschwitz speaks.

In fact the German edition was called Kommandant von Auschwitz. The *French* edition was called Le commandant de Auschwitz parle. In fact, these authors simply plagiarised citations from the French denier Paul Rassinier, in German translation, and never even read the Hoess memoirs in the original. This explains why they missed some really obvious answers to their 'awful questions'.

No, 'copy errors' come when CTists paraphrase the meme and thereby recast it subtly as it is slowly garbled through being repeated in slightly altered form - perhaps the 2nd generation version is incomplete, and the new iteration is then picked up by a 3rd generation, and so on, slowly mutating - in the old days - or rapidly becoming incoherent - in the internet age.

We see the end results of this process of mutation and derangement here, having lost all original context, sourcing, or the slightest glimmer of cohesion, in LastChild's posts.

[Par]

Google 'situationism' and you'll be enlightened. Exactly what kind of socialism will be the clincher, as there are way more than 57 varieties.

But, you know, viewing 9/11 through Debordian lenses could be kinda fun.

Does anyone know if Baudrillard ever commented on 9/11? Woulda thought it was just the kind of media event that was up his street.

In answer to the question, 'who's Baudrillard', again, Google is your friend. It gives me headaches even just thinking about trying to explain his ideas, which is why I'm glad I don't teach cultural theory or any of that [rule10].


You’ve reminded me of an opening to a thread I wrote up some time ago but forgot all about. It’s now here, if you’re interested.

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=3632247

[jaydeehess]

I have just started in onm the paper Ad1

I am on lunch break and won't have time to gp over much of it but will pm you with a few thoughts.

[adversity1]

Cool, I'm a big fan of the Severed Heads, its interesting to see a magazine that links music and politics so organically.

Please give Datacide a look! The next issue should be out by June. Given your interest in music and politics, you might check out back issues too.



Classical CTs have been disseminated through fanzine-like means, the crank pamphlet being the prime example, as well as small-press books. They have generated subcultures. There's little doubt that CTs are more the product of 'scenius' than genius. It requires a loosely connected community of morons to discover that there's another loon out there who thinks just like them, or who transmits an influence which is copied literally verbatim into the 'new product'. Plenty of commentators have spoken of how the memes mutate, i.e. the copy errors creep in and the CT evolves, sometimes uncontrollably.

But there are surely more of them now, because of the increased volume of media. The increased transmission rate causes more and more copy errors to the original wrongness.

[/U].

Nick, thanks for your thoughtful reply. I agree with your historical comparison of truthers to earlier newspaper hoarders/obsessives. I think at least one place at which we are seeing a major difference with the 9/11 truth movement is not only its capacity to reproduce a collectively produced reality (as ktesibios puts it, cybermetastasis, or the mass reproduction of errors), but in the particular appeal that this reality has found amongst the public at large. In the paper I go into why I think this is so, the trauma of 7 years of war, the incomprehension of martyr ideology and let me add, the generalized atmosphere of discouragement: failure of the anti-war movement, failure of the New York transit strike, UAW strike, in other words the failure for a better option to emerge are some of the reasons for the appeal of 9/11 conspiracy theory in America. Abroad, there is a different story. The crude critique of capital, which sees the WTO, IMF and even the UN, as a sort of parasitical presence over 'good' national economies, what came together in the late 90s and early 2000s as the anti-globalization movement, is now a very real re-alignment of state power in the third world. Much like the anti-imperialists of the 60s might've wished success on the national liberation struggles of that time, these politics tend to produce monsters. Venezuela and Iran are two economic poles already emerging to challenge American hegemony in the context of the dollar's fall and the civil war in Iraq. Similarly, other nations, while not necessarily trying to oppose America outright, are driven by capitalists who recognize the dillemma of too many dollars in the central banks and want to shift to a more profitable currency (often Euros). This is the case with the country I live in, Japan, which is more and more shifting away from direct alliance with the US towards economic partnerships with Korea and China (something nearly unthinkable 5 years ago!). Given this global shift, it is unfortunately no surprise that such poorly hashed out ideas as "9/11 truth" gain the traction that they do, and that the truly noble debunkers who bother to disprove this nonsense are initially numerically overwhelmed. Fortunately, however, it is possible for the 'truth movement' to go into crisis, precisely because of its cybermetastasis, i.e. that it is founded on errors that can be eventually exposed. It has no central holy book like the Bible or the Koran which can claim holy immunity to reason, the 9/11 truth movement stakes its existence in reason, and will eventually be overcome by it.

I have just started in onm the paper Ad1

I am on lunch break and won't have time to gp over much of it but will pm you with a few thoughts.

Jaydeehess, thanks for your comments (thanks everyone!! If I haven't gotten back to yet, I will). I'll fix the facts that I've got wrong. I really appreciate the "peer review" here. Maybe after Datacide, I can get my piece published in the Bentham journal, lol.

[ktesibios]

An example from my research into Holocaust denial: several German authors in the late 1960s and early 1970s spoke of the Rudolf Hoess memoirs and called them Der Kommandant von Auschwitz spricht - The Commandant of Auschwitz speaks.

In fact the German edition was called Kommandant von Auschwitz. The *French* edition was called Le commandant de Auschwitz parle. In fact, these authors simply plagiarised citations from the French denier Paul Rassinier, in German translation, and never even read the Hoess memoirs in the original. This explains why they missed some really obvious answers to their 'awful questions'.

No, 'copy errors' come when CTists paraphrase the meme and thereby recast it subtly as it is slowly garbled through being repeated in slightly altered form - perhaps the 2nd generation version is incomplete, and the new iteration is then picked up by a 3rd generation, and so on, slowly mutating - in the old days - or rapidly becoming incoherent - in the internet age.

We see the end results of this process of mutation and derangement here, having lost all original context, sourcing, or the slightest glimmer of cohesion, in LastChild's posts.

Thanks for the example, Nick. One significant difference I see between crankery in print and on the 'net is that books or even pamphlets are imperishable compared to Web sites. If I may use a metaphor, you had the fossils to help sort out the lineage of those latter-day specimens.

With stuff on the net, the fossil record hardly exists. There are tantalizing hints at how a meme evolved- for example, I can readily imagine how a passage in a book speculating that if we could learn enough about how inhibition works in the brain we could make it impossible for a border incident to escalate to a casus belli could ultimately morph into "Someday armies and generals will be controlled by electronic stimulation of the brain." through enough generations of "Chinese whispers" from site to site, but the evidence that would permit testing that hypothesis just ain't there anymore.

It's frustratin'. Perhaps there's a fertile field there for some enterprising student of folklore.

Fortunately, however, it is possible for the 'truth movement' to go into crisis, precisely because of its cybermetastasis, i.e. that it is founded on errors that can be eventually exposed. It has no central holy book like the Bible or the Koran which can claim holy immunity to reason, the 9/11 truth movement stakes its existence in reason, and will eventually be overcome by it.


Umm... I've encountered quite a few people for whom the truth value of a statement is determined by whether or not it reinforces their existing belief system. As long as that's a common trait among our species, mere falsification by facts will never be the ultimate demise of any CT.

When newly introduced into a naive population an infectious disease can become a raging epidemic, as happened when pathogens endemic in the European population were introduced among the indigenes of the Americas. However, given a population large enough to produce a steady supply of susceptible individuals and dense enough for reliable transmission, such a disease can become endemic, as with the infections we used to call "childhood diseases", existing continuously within that population while not spreading quickly or widely enough to be epidemic.

Our society does produce a steady supply of susceptible individuals; we see this in action every time a brand-new troofer turns up on the forum repeating the same old claims we've seen over and over and over. Conspiracism as an endemic infection depends on this supply of previously-unexposed noobs who have no immunity or natural resistance- as Honest John Barlow put it, "they won't know enough to do any smart checking".

Of course, even the best-established endemic infection can be driven to extinction by a sufficiently universal program of routine immunization (vide smallpox), but that poses two problems:

First you've got to develop a vaccine.

And then you've got to persuade people to take it.