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Category: Review

Conspiracy Theory Is Actually Just Postmodernism In Disguise

I should preface this by saying I don’t know anything “officially” about postmodernism outside of what I read on Wikipedia and Googling around (and a really stupid Jordan Peterson article I won’t link to). And the fun part is, that’s kind of postmodern itself. You can become an expert in five minutes. And then of course being an expert then makes you automatically untrusthworthy as a source. It’s ninja turtles all the way down, I tells ya…

Anyway, I gathered some of what I found already here, so I won’t rehash that all at length, but wanted to pull on a couple strands I didn’t cover there.

Namely, that Lyotard himself defined the postmodern as, “incredulity toward metanarratives.”

Anyone who has looked at conspiracy theory stuff online will know that people are always saying in a tongue and cheek way: “Don’t question the narrative.” That is, they feel oppressed by or don’t agree with whatever they perceive to be the “official” metanarrative.

What’s a metanarrative in the context of postmodernism? Also from Wikipedia: “a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience.”

So when they jokingly say, don’t question the metanarrative, they are literally demonstrating Lyotard’s own definition of the postmodern. They are incredulous of the metanarrative. They want to question it, to challenge it, to tear it down and replace it with their own version of the truth. Their own metanarrative.

This is a decent WaPo article by Aaron Hanlon from August 2018 about Postmodernism. I’ll pull out a few choice quotes. Regarding his book, The Postmodern Condition, it:

“…described the state of our era by building out Lyotard’s observations that society was becoming a “consumer society,” a “media society” and a “postindustrial society…”

Hanlon continues:

“This was a diagnosis, not a political outcome that he and other postmodernist theorists agitated to bring about.”

“[…] Right-leaning critics in the decades since Bloom have crassly contorted this argument into a charge that postmodernism was made not by consumerism and other large-scale social and technological developments, but by dangerous lefty academics, or what Kimball called “Tenured Radicals,” in his 1990 polemic against the academic left. At the heart of this accusation is the tendency to treat postmodernism as a form of left-wing politics — with its own set of tenets — rather than as a broader cultural moment that left-wing academics diagnosed.

“[…] This “gospel” characterization is misleading in two ways. First, it treats Lyotard and his fellows as proponents of a world where objective truth loses all value, rather than analysts who wanted to explain why this had already happened.”

So if we accept Lyotard’s original assertion, that postmodernism is characterized by mistrust of “grand narratives,” it unequivocally has that in common with garden variety conspiracy theory. But not only that, right-leaning conspiracy theory has reconstructed its own grand narrative where Postmodernism is the grand narrative which it mistrusts… Which is entirely postmodern in itself if you think about it. A subset of postmodernism attacking its own superstructure…

It would be funny if it weren’t so foolish and tragic. Because this kind of blatant self-denial creates a somewhat predictable (and boring) loop. Conspiracy theory denies it has anything in common with Postmodernism. It then projects its shadow contents onto the “other” & villifies the perceived differences. When, in actuality, they’re rooted in the exact same thing. The same social-cultural phenomenon that’s been happening for decades now, generations. Brought on by consumerism, industrialization, media-saturated soeiety, etc. Which is what the original theorists were observing happening all along, and which is still happening today. Nay, which is in utter free fall today. Hyperreality is on over-drive, and virtual & augmented reality haven’t even yet kicked in. HFS. Are w ever in for it!

I mean, no wonder people are clinging to any & every life raft they can find. I don’t blame them. I do blame the short-sightedness of getting bogged down in dumb political-territorial games & losing track of the larger phenomena at play though. When instead, we could be working on finding a way through it all. There is so much greater possible insight we could have into our shared condition than just fighting or getting sucked down into the quagmire of loser scripts that constitutes conspiracy theory outright.

The world is literally never going to learn, though. I’m old enough to accept that now. At least I got to write a nifty blog post about it.

Forum Seeding & The Hyperreal, Part 6

While we’re on the topic of the Ancient Hieruthians, via the post in this series about dictionary definitions & the hyperreal, I thought we should make a small detour.

First, a seed artifact posted on Medium, under one of the Quatria publications, explaining in perhaps overly complex terms what the Hieruthian Hypothesis (similar to the Silurian Hypothesis) is. (archived)

And a supporting invented dictionary definition of Hieruthian posted through another account (archived).

Hieruthians (“Old Ones”) in Quatrian myth & prehistory were basically very early mammals, like the kind we see depicted creeping about the forest floor in paintings of dinosaurs, before dinosaurs were wiped out by successive cataclysms, and mammals rose up to take their place in certain ecological niches…

Tangent that I will come back to another time, before we take too much of a detour of a detour of a detour:

https://twitter.com/tphlat/status/1326183346326691841

Wait, one more side-tangent before the actual topic at hand, forum-seeding.

Another one from Quora, in an effort to triangulate out the data points for SEO:

Is the Hieruthian Hypothesis a plausible explanation for Kumari Kandam? (archived)

The thing most interesting to me here is the invention of an alternative spelling, “Kynari Kendal.” It’s so convincing as a place name, I had to look it up to see if it was “real.” Or rather, whether it’s a spelling shared by others (wherever it falls on the scale of the hyperreal). Apparently it’s unique to this user. Go figure.

Ok, forum seeding…

Obviously, I didn’t invent this technique. I haven’t even used it that much, but it’s easy to do and ripe for dissemination & manipulation of networked hyperreality narratives…

First things first: If you’re going to make fake posts on conspiracy or other forums like Quora, I recommend using an AI-generated headshot, courtesy of thispersondoesntexist.com. That site is a miracle for work like this, as each one is uniquely generated, meaning you can’t take it into Google image search and find any original image source (like if you just copied a photo from somewhere else).

I only did two of these, but there’s no reason to believe doing hundreds or thousands would not have a severe impact on hyperreality. Use with caution, lest you send the multiverse careening to the edge of destruction!

Meet Cal

I like to let the photo generated by the AI help determine the direction of the character backstory…

Cal is your typical average straight-laced ISO compliance professional by day, and “the good kind of conspiracy theorist” by night. And he is just, like, totally curious as heck about the Hieruthian Hypothesis & ancient Quatria in general (like so many of us these days). Who can blame him? Good work, Cal! Keep asking questions!

Meet Jesse

Jesse “Martini” is just your average fun-loving post-grad student in ancient history & literature. And he’s “not a big conspiracy guy” by his own self-admission, but he’s wondering about the Hieruthian Hypothesis, and another very controversial topic: the alleged splitting apart of the continents of Arctica & Antarctica.

Yes, Arctica was totally a continent…

Because of prior experiments on Quora, I knew that this was potentially a hot-button topic! (See below)

When did the continents of Arctica and Antarctica split apart? (archived)

This science enthusiast was none too “enthused” about the idea of there being a continent called Arctica. Except, in fact, that according to Wikipedia in my timeline, there totally was! (archived)

Now, Wikipedia could be wrong, bear in mind. It could be subject to the global international conspiracy to filter out Quatrian history from our collective holographic display, but there are certainly a lot of footnote references included, and who am I to go and bother checking footnoted references for validity? [A whole other blog post, remind me!]

If it was really wrong though, there would likely be a huge flame war on the Wikipedia Arctica Talk page, and there is not… So either the Guardians of Reality were asleep, or this is totally “real,” at least insofar as anything in the distant distant past can be proven to be…

Now, whether or not Arctica & Antarctica were ever one continent… well, that’s a whole different story I will leave you to try to resolve on your own. Suffice it to say, the Earth we know today is not the Earth which once was, or one day will be…

Just ask anyone on a conspiracy forum.

Quora & The Hyperreal, Part 3

In prior installations of this series on the Weapons of the Hyperreal (Read Parts 0, 1, & 2 for context), I looked at the power of naming & the dissemination of “facts” via press release into the various lower strata of news sites. I am by no means an expert on this, but merely trying to collect & reflect on all the hyperrealist cryptoart experiments I have done for the past several years, without having a name or genre to slot them into–until now.

I’ve quoted it once, I’ll quote it a thousand times:

Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.

Wikipedia

With press releases, the purpose really is to get others to pick up your facts, and re-transmit them as their own. It’s largely what “news” as an industry appears to be based on.

But there is another path.

The path of counter-engagement. Where you pose “facts” with the intent that they will be argued against, and shot down by self-proclaimed “experts.” In so doing, you help to drive the narrative forward, increase the SEO footprint, and expose new people to the ideas, while fully acknowledging their disparate existential footing, thereby circumventing cultural immune systems by activating them.

One branch of the many paths through the forest of counter-engagement lies through Quora.

If you’re still wondering what I mean, browse through this search results page for “Quatria” on Quora (archived), a site positively FILLED with experts!

Here are some choice samples, with questions asked anonymously on Quora marked below in bold.

Note: I am obscuring some of the personally-identifying information of responders here, as my purpose is not to name or shame them, but to use these examples to illustrate the vagaries of the hyperreal world we now live in…

Debunk me

While I respect this person likely has some authority in the domain of history, the argument seems to be, “I haven’t heard of this, therefore false…”

Of course, this argument further falls apart once we understand what a crypto-civilization is, and that by their very nature, they’ve been hidden from conventional history… Around and around we go.

From the same source above:

This responder above even took the time to Google & re-transmit my article about the Quatria Theory to myself & others. Very helpful, very hyperreal!

Another Quora thread:

I would rate this answer as only partially true. There is no “work of fiction” entitled Quatria. There do exist certain very real volumes of collected Lore from that supposedly “fictional” culture (debatable) called the Lost Books of Quatria, put out by Lost Books, an indie blockchain publisher. The first volume is even available as an NFT.

However, none of that precludes the very real possibility that ancient or even pre-historic cultures could have made it to Antarctica. Especially since we know it was once more close to the Equator!

Hit me one more time:

This is exactly the creeping feeling of the hyperreal… You don’t know if it’s a “real” fake, or if its a fake fake that some might take as real… The circle never ends.

I often think that it must be reassuring to be this certain that one’s own ontological conception of “the real” is the sole and correct one.

It’s also interesting to me that there are people who feel so strongly compelled to act as Guardians of the Real that they fight it out daily in online forums. Bless their hearts for that… but I hate to break it to you…

Quatria is def real, y’all:

Guardians of the Real, assemble!

It’s interesting that at Quora, it’s normal to make existential determinations on behalf of all humanity and its past, hidden beyond the veils of time. What would they do if they found out Quatria is real…?

Meme: (Morpheus) “What if I told you… Quatria Is Real”
Quatria is very very real, I am afraid

But once in a while, you strike on a compatible hyperrealist fantasy of someone else, such as this person who has combined quite nicely the story-myth of Kumari Kandam with that of Ancient Quatria. It almost makes me wonder too if there isn’t some match here, cosmic forces of a sort driving together the two complexes of ideas & borrowed bits of history…

Where is it mentioned indeed! Perhaps a better question, and one more telling, would be, where isn’t it mentioned?

That said, one must also be careful: one person on Twitter, after posting one of my conspiracy articles from Medium, told me that their father had “worked on Quatria…”–whatever that means. I didn’t inquire further, but perhaps should have.

Or perhaps I did in an alternate timeline, and a huge holographic refractor in space is blocking memory of it from my present self…

Wait, what *is* the Quatria Conspiracy:

I would actually subscribe to this monthly club, perhaps, if the price & contents were right! Hyperreal Trend Report Monthly. Sounds like a Substack waiting to happen.

Others go in directions I don’t quite understand. This one starts strangely, and then…

…well, I guess I’m not the only one stranded deeply in the hyperreal. It’s just that each of us calls it something different, and dresses it up in the decorations that are the most familiar to us.

Is this person suggesting there IS a true life conspiracy to suppress knowledge of Quatria? Did I, through this simple ritual of asking troll-y alt reality history questions on Quora, accidentally invoke one into existence? Only time can tell!

Bringing it all back home…

Time, or another few examples from Quora threads, saved for posterity:

To each their own, I guess. I don’t have an all-seeing eye that tells me none of those things are even remotely possible. Perhaps they are not. But perhaps… Teletubbies to the moooooooon!!!

How do we determine anymore what is “of substance” in the Age of the Hyperreal? This person seems to be also, perhaps inadvertently, admitting there is indeed *some* evidence of this ancient lost civilization after all!

But seriously, how do we know all trace wasn’t simply removed from the web about Quatria, save for a few ramblings by confused authors who have dreamed a dream from outside of time? We really can’t be sure either way!

If you don’t believe me, you could always believe this news article on publish0x, the famous reputable news site (archived).

Or this helpful video, published by bollyholly143:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wy8mBL–O1g

Javascript rapid word input tool

I went off on pretty much a tear earlier investigating the possibility of coming up with some kind of rapid communication board which would allow you to input words, not letters.

I went once or twice around the bend, and found the closest match in an app called DocsPlus which gives you the ability to create customizable word-bars. There’s a 28 day free trial. It’s interesting, but my use case is to be able to rapidly paste in the results of these sentence creation actions into Firefox in a spreadsheet. It was too combersome with switching back and forth between tabs to access other word bars.

So I cooked up some Javascript I’m still tinkering with which looks at the moment like this:

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