- Aug 2023
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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The more I learn about her recent activities, however, the less I am able to accept the premise of these questions. They imply that when she went over the edge, she crashed to the ground. A more accurate description is that Wolf marched over the edge and was promptly caught in the arms of millions of people who agree with every one of her extraordinary theories without question, and who appear to adore her. So, while she clearly has lost what I may define as “it”, she has found a great deal more – she has found a whole new world, one I have come to think of as the Mirror World.
Down the rabbithole there's Mirror World, with its own rewards and sense of community and being welcomed. Vgl conspiracy fantasy as giving you a better position above your environment (I know more, how it really is) and how that gives you standing amongst conspiracy peers.
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Conspiracies have always swirled in times of crisis – but never before have they been a booming industry in their own right.
conspiracy fantasies as genre, as business model and industry (the conpiracy industrial complex as moniker to describe the graph of media outlets, media personalities and network of grifters around them?)
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In practice, this squared virality meant that if you put out the right kind of pandemic-themed content – flagged with the right mix-and-match of keywords and hashtags (“Great Reset”, “WEF”, “Bill Gates”, “Fascism”, “Fauci”, “Pfizer”) and headlined with tabloid-style teasers (“The Leaders Colluding to Make Us Powerless”, “What They Don’t Want You to Know About”, “Shocking Details Revealed”, “Bill Gates Said WHAT?!?”) – you could catch a digital magic-carpet ride that would make all previous experiences of virality seem leaden in comparison.
The global attention to Covid meant an easy way to clout by attaching other stuff.
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And nothing had ever been nearly so hot, so potentially clout-rich, as Covid-19. We all know why. It was global. It was synchronous. We were digitally connected, talking about the same thing for weeks, months, years, and on the same global platforms. As Steven W Thrasher writes in The Viral Underclass, Covid-19 marked “the first viral pandemic also to be experienced via viral stories on social media”, creating “a kind of squared virality”.
Reminds of when tv shows were the talk of the town the next morning: everyone had seen it. You knew others had seen it, because there was just the two channels. It was a communally binding thing this talking about it. Media splintered, our interaction splintered, became diffuse. Covid centered everyones attention on a single thing. Globally, synchronous, on specific platforms, not just in the abstract but with individual's stories through our digital connections. Vgl [[Schaal van aandacht splitst 20210222161155]] wrt attention diffusion, Covid undid the diffusion.
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Because what Wolf turned into over the past decade is something very specific to our time: a clout chaser. Clout is the values-free currency of the always-online age – both a substitute for hard cash as well as a conduit to it. Clout is a calculus not of what you do, but of how much bulk you-ness there is in the world. You get clout by playing the victim. You get clout by victimizing others. This is something that is understood by the left and the right. If influence sways, clout squats, taking up space for its own sake.
'clout chaser' nice parallel to cloud chaser. Clout as volume of your online engagement, and is a thing in itself, clout is the aim of the work. Conspiracy fantasies a means towards clout.
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The big misinformation players may be chasing clout, but plenty of people believe their terrifying stories
clout as metric/currency. Klein's assumption seems to be that the arsonists don't believe their own stuff just see it as business. Those on the outside are always wondering though if that is the case? Maybe they know they are embellishing but perhaps also gradually falling for their own stuff as it seems to follow a predictable path further down the rabbithole. Do they catch up with their own BS over time? Or is it full on cynicism as on display w Bannon and the school shootings in the defamation case?
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Wolf is getting everything she once had and lost – attention, respect, money, power. Just through a warped mirror
Lost in the early 2010s, refound a decade later indeed. Vindication, like she was always right all along.
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At the extreme end, diagonal movements share a conviction that all power is conspiracy.
The sad thing is that isn't even extremely wrong. All power should be viewed with suspicion and have actively enforced limits. All organisations, initially merely a tool for structuring and collaboration, begin to work to perpetuate themselves (leading to vgl [[Corporations as Slow AI 20180201210258]]), all power seeks to sustain if not extend itself.
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If the claims are coming from the far right, the covert plan is for a green/socialist/no-borders/Soros/forced-vaccine dictatorship, while the new agers warn of a big pharma/GMO/biometric-implant/5G/robot-dog/forced-vaccine dictatorship. With the exception of the Covid-related refresh, the conspiracies that are part of this political convergence are not new – most have been around for decades, and some are ancient blood libels. What’s new is the force of the magnetic pull with which they are finding one another, self-assembling into what the Vice reporter Anna Merlan has termed a “conspiracy singularity”.
"Conspiracy singularity", ha! Note the two groupings of far right and 'new age' elements, and how they mix, with 'forced vaccine' the linking pin.
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couple of months earlier, Wolf had released a video claiming that those vaccine-verification apps so many of us downloaded represented a plot to institute “slavery for ever”. The apps would usher in a “CCP-style social credit score system” in “the West”, she said
Same here in NL All temporary instruments would be permanent they said. None of them ever talks about that that didn't happen. They moved on to the rear-guard fight of how all deaths were not Covid but the vaccines or Ukraine biolabs or climate hoax etc. None also notice the pattern of how very different topics end up at the same side of the rabbithole divide.
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Also fully downloaded to [[The Other Naomi 20230827093013]]
I at some point during the pandemic mistook Wolf for Klein too (same first name, fuzzy notion of last name other than it being short) and remember mentioning it to E as a sad shift (which in both cases is/would be true). Note that Wolf according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Wolf landed in the rabbithole a decade before the pandemic. Difference as Klein points out is that it in the mean time became an industry Wolf could be successful in where a decade ago it meant her dropping from previous high reputation.
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