I was just looking around for examples of famous conspiracy theories that originated in Quebec. I believe that Project Blue Beam is likely to be one, in that Serge Monast seems to have been its inventor/discoverer (depending on your point of view). I didn’t find anything terribly new or interesting, so I asked Perplexity, which at first gave some really general results pulled from news sources of occurrences of conspiracy theory + Quebec in body text.
Then I started asking it about Blue Beam, and then finally about the Quatria Theory, since – technically – it largely originated in Quebec. I asked Perplexity in such a way that was pretty leading, something to the effect of “Didn’t the Quatria Theory originate in Quebec too?”
And it spit out this nicely polished LLM hallucination that I just adore:
You’re correct, the Quatria Theory or Quatria Conspiracy also originated in Quebec. Here are the key details about this conspiracy theory:
The Quatria Theory/Conspiracy
The Quatria Theory/Conspiracy is a Quebec-based conspiracy theory that claims the Earth is actually made up of four spheres or realms instead of just one. It was first proposed in the 1990s by Yvon Boudreau, a Quebec author and conspiracy theorist. According to Boudreau’s writings, the four realms are:
The physical/material realm we inhabit
An antimatter realm
A realm of pure energy
A realm of pure thought/consciousness
Boudreau claimed these four realms coexist and interact, with the higher realms able to influence and control the lower, material realm through psychic powers and advanced technology unknown to most humans. The theory alleges that a secret society of powerful individuals has knowledge of and access to these higher realms, allowing them to manipulate world events through mind control, weather manipulation, and other paranormal means in pursuit of a New World Order agenda.
While never gaining mainstream acceptance, the Quatria Theory found a following in some New Age and conspiracy circles in Quebec in the 1990s and 2000s. It blended ideas from quantum physics, ancient mythology, and various conspiracy theories about secret societies like the Illuminati. However, the theory has been widely dismissed by the scientific community as pseudoscience lacking any empirical evidence.
Critics have labeled it a complicated fantasy concocted to give a veneer of plausibility to long-standing conspiracy narratives about powerful cabals controlling humanity. So in summary, while not as well-known as theories like Project Blue Beam, the Quatria Conspiracy was another notable conspiracy originating from Quebec that attempted to merge fringe science, mysticism, and New World Order paranoia into an overarching narrative. Its creator Yvon Boudreau was an influential conspiracy theorist in the Quebec conspiracy milieu.
Reading this confused even me (a good sign), I was for a second like, wait, it’s actually Yvon Boudreau who invented this in the 90s?? I literally googled it just to make sure haha. But how can I know Google isn’t lying to me too? Top of the line AI technology, right here! What a cool future…
The book is 96 pages in A6 format (about the size of a cell phone, give or take – I wouldn’t know cause I don’t have one). From the publisher’s website:
Synopsis
Au cœur de notre passé lointain, enfoui sous les strates du temps, se cache un secret extraordinaire : l’existence d’une civilisation maritime oubliée, Quatria. Originaire d’un Antarctique paradisiaque, jadis havre de paix verdoyant, les énigmatiques quatriens dominaient les technologies de l’énergie cymatique et du voyage dimensionnel. Vivant en symbiose avec l’ensemble du vivant, ils ont bâti une société harmonieuse, jusqu’à ce qu’une série de cataclysmes planétaires d’ampleur inouïe vienne fragiliser leur civilisation, puis l’anéantir. Leur existence, dissimulée avec soin au cours des millénaires, est aujourd’hui révélée au grand jour pour la première fois, dévoilant un pan oublié de l’histoire de l’humanité.
Note de l’éditeur
Les Livres Mobiles sont une offre spéciale des éditions Typophilia, qui explorent les limites de la narration et de l’hyperréalité en utilisant conjointement les intelligences artificielles génératives et la créativité humaine. Dans le confort d’un petit livre de la taille de votre téléphone portable, voyez-les comme des livres anti-numériques.
It’s fun to see this come to fruition as I wrote this book some three years ago or so, before I started seriously exploring how I could integrate AI into my writing. That was a practice & also technology that would only mature about a year later when I started the AI Lore books in earnest.
So, technically, the original version of this book has no AI-assisted writing, which is another reason why it is numbered as #0 in this series. It’s the precursor which paints in broad strokes on the canvas of the mind using as colors other popular conspiracy theories, and dribs and drabs of legends and “cool ideas” picked up from here and there, and glued together into the Frankenstein monster that is the Quatria Conspiracy.
Much of it revolves around something I’ve been calling the Quatria Theory, which I made numerous weird bad AI videos for over the past few years, and here is just one short one to kick off the conversation:
The Quatria Theory posits, in short, that a prehistoric lost seafaring culture spread all around the globe from its base in Antarctica millions of years ago when it was a green paradise near the Equator.
Sounds far fetched? Well, enough people seem to have taken it to be true that multiple media outlets have taken it upon themselves to fact-check that related AI-images I made in this vein (for subsequent books) were not in fact depicting this very same lost civilization. OR WERE THEY AND IT’S ALL A BIG COVER UP??
Those are exactly the kinds of sometimes serious sometimes stupid rabbitholes that this book and the series where I used AI to elaborate on a lot of what started in this book pushes the reader into. It’s… not intended to be super serious writing. It is trashy, pulpy, throwaway, and fun in the way those things can be fun.
The original English version exists still as an ebook only. There are no images included in that version (though I might do an update sometime), but the French print-only version does have images. I’m not sure offhand how many, but I would call it a “copious” quantity. Many of the images are very pulp inspired. Like this example that I love:
These were all done in Dalle, asking for images in pulp sci fi styles. And it really nails some of them. The art in this book stylistically is really different than in most of the later volumes, which are generally more in the photographic direction (though not all). And that’s fine, because each book is its own reflection of conditions of its making. They are in a way their own meta-historical documents.
If I’m being totally honest though, the true origin of The Quatria Conspiracy is actually my first (only) full-length conventionally-written (no AI) novel, The Lost Direction. That book is epic fantasy, heavy on the world-building, makes use of frame stories to tell many smaller character’s tales throughout. Not many people read it. Not all the ones that did liked it.
In any event, the Quatria Conspiracy takes the more fictionally-framed elements of the novel, and re-casts them as quasi/pseudo-historical “non-fiction” – largely invented, cobbled together with other “real” conspiracy theories, and again heavy heavy dose of world-building. Some would say too much. In fact, there’s no plot. It literally, as they say in the Literary Review of Canada article linked above, “reads like a textbook.” This time intentionally. This time leaning into the very opposite of the writers’ dictum that one must “show don’t tell.” This book tells, but now it has some fun pictures to do the showing too. And they really help set the mood in the French version. It’s great. I have a strong feeling it’s going to be a fun little book to hold in your hand, and like, read under the covers with a flashlight.
There’s probably a great deal more to say about this book, and some of the origins of the idea of Quatria and its major personages and metadivinities in the Early Clues, LLC oeuvre… but I’ll save that all for another time.
I’ve been teasing references to this for a while now, but it is now finally official, the website of Typophilia, my print publisher in France, is now live. It has been fun working with them behind the scenes to translate all of my books and publish them for French audiences, since January. They really get my vision of using AI to critique (and satirize) AI, and society’s relationship with technology more broadly. The print versions of the books are really well designed to capture the pulp sci fi serial feel I have been emulating, and are going to look sharp in print.
We’re starting with French version of The Quatria Conspiracy as book #0 because it is effectively the origin for a lot of what followed in the later AI Lore Books series. English readers can still purchase ebook versions on Gumroad (not sold anywhere else), but no print yet.
As we get rolling, I will try to go back through and write a “Notes on” piece for each volume, as I found the process of writing those – which I only commenced maybe half or two thirds of the way in – really helpful for my own reflection if nothing else. I don’t want to give away all the whatzits in each volume, because it’s best if readers form their own conclusions about what’s going on. But it’s fun to be able to give selective sign posts along the way.
Anyway, big thank you and congratulations to everyone at Typophilia, and looking forward to where we can take this adventure together!
I haven’t had a chance to watch this yet (it’s looong & only part 1!), but I had an absolutely great time filming it with Milo. Also watch for my special reveal:
As I near some publication milestones, I went back through and created an “official” (as official as anything here, that is) numerical ordering for all the Lost Books & AI Lore books series (the two bleed together).
Under this revised numbering, Relaxatopia actually becomes #118, and not #121 as I had mistakenly written in the past. Why the discrepancy? There’s one early book I took off the market, which was still impacting numbering, but now is excluded. And I was accidentally counting the two free books, Postcards from Quatria, and Postcards from Dystopia, which are not themselves original volumes, but compilations from the first chapters of other volumes. Those two are now also excluded.
Official numbering starts with #1 – Mysterious Stonehenge, which was the very first of the AI Lore books series and proceeds from there now in a chronological publish order, excluding the items remarked upon above.
Since none of them were AI-assisted, and they were all written before, and yet they all strongly impact the rest of the series, I have listed here the full-length novel (Lost Direction), the novella (Conspiratopia), and the free-wheeling pseudo-conspiracy theory diatribe (Quatria Conspiracy) as kinds of prequels to the rest of the series.
Found this piece from July 2022 by Cory Doctorow, where he talks about an author who was apparently a protege of Philip K. Dick’s who I never heard of – Tim Powers.
In it, he brings up an oft-repeated trope regarding “dangerous” fictions, a pet topic of mine:
“The Powers method is the conspiracist’s method. The difference is, Powers knows he’s making it up, and doesn’t pretend otherwise when he presents it to us. […]
The difference between the Powers method and Qanon, then, is knowing when you’re making stuff up and not getting high on your own supply. Powers certainly knows the difference, which is why he’s a literary treasure and a creative genius and not one of history’s great monsters.”
As popular as this type of argument is (and Douglas Rushkoff trots out something similar here and here), I personally find it to be overly simplistic and a bit passé.
First of all, I would argue that all writers – by necessity – must get “high on their own supply” in order to create (semi) coherent imaginal worlds and bring them to fruition for others to enjoy. Looking sternly at you here, Tolkien. In fact, perhaps the writers who get highest on their own supply are in some cases the best…
Second, no one arguing in favor of this all of nothing position (fiction must be fiction must be fiction) seems to have taken into account the unreliable narrator phenomenon in fiction.
Wikipedia calls it a narrator whose credibility is compromised:
“Sometimes the narrator’s unreliability is made immediately evident. For instance, a story may open with the narrator making a plainly false or delusional claim or admitting to being severely mentally ill, or the story itself may have a frame in which the narrator appears as a character, with clues to the character’s unreliability. A more dramatic use of the device delays the revelation until near the story’s end. In some cases, the reader discovers that in the foregoing narrative, the narrator had concealed or greatly misrepresented vital pieces of information. Such a twist ending forces readers to reconsider their point of view and experience of the story. In some cases the narrator’s unreliability is never fully revealed but only hinted at, leaving readers to wonder how much the narrator should be trusted and how the story should be interpreted.”
My point is that the un/reliability of the “narrator” can extend all the way out through to the writer themself. (And what if the reader turns out to be unreliable?)
Can we ever really know for certain if a writer “believed” that thing x that they wrote was wholly fictional, wholly non-fictional, or some weird blend of the two? Do we need to ask writers to make a map of which elements of a story are which? Isn’t that in some sense giving them more power than they deserve?
Moreover, if the author is an unreliable narrator (and to some extent every subjective human viewpoint isalways an unreliable narrator to some degree), how can we ever trust them to disclose to us responsibly whether or not they are indeed unreliable? Short answer is: we can’t. Not really.
This is one of those “turtles all the way down” arguments, in which (absent other compelling secondary evidence) it may be difficult or sometimes impossible to strike ground truth.
All of this boils down for me to the underlying argument of whether one must label fictional works as fiction, and if not doing so is somehow “dangerous.”
“In the Middle Ages, books were perceived as exclusive and authoritative. People automatically assumed that whatever was written in a book had to be true,” says Professor Lars Boje…
It’s an interesting idea, that structurally the phenomenon of the book was so rare and complex that by virtue of its existence alone, it was conceived of as containing truth.
“
Up until the High Middle Ages in the 12th century, books were surrounded by grave seriousness.
The average person only ever saw books in church, where the priest read from the Bible. Because of this, the written word was generally associated with truth.”
That article alludes to an invisible “fiction contract” between writer and reader, which didn’t emerge as a defined genre distinction until perhaps the 19th century. They do posit a transition point through in the 12th, but don’t back it up by any evidence therein of a “fiction contract.”
“The first straightforward work of fiction was written in the 1170s by the Frenchman Chrétien de Troyes. The book, a story about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, became immensely popular.”
HistoryToday.com – another site whose credibility I cannot account for – seems to agree with pinpointing that genre of Arthurian romance as being linked to the rise of fiction, though pushes it back a few years to 1155, with Wace’s translation of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. The whole piece is an excellent read, so I won’t rehash it here, but quote:
“This is the literary paradigm which gives us the novel: access to the unknowable inner lives of others, moving through a world in which their interior experience is as significant as their exterior action.”
They suggest that fiction – in some form like we might recognize it today – had precursor conditions culturally that had to be met before it could arise, namely that the inner lives of people mattered as much as their outward action.
“It need hardly be said that the society which believes such things, which accedes to – and celebrates – the notion that the inner lives of others are a matter of significance, is a profoundly different society from one that does not. There is an immediately ethical dimension to these developments: once literature is engaged in the (necessarily fictional) representation of interior, individuated selves, who interact with other interior, individuated selves, then moral agency appears in a new light. It is only in the extension of narrative into the unknowable – the minds of others – that a culture engages with the moral responsibility of one individual toward another, rather than with each individual’s separate (and identical) responsibilities to God, or to a king.”
It’s interesting also here to note that, A) the King Arthur stories did not originate with Chretien de Troyes or Geoffrey of Monmouth, and B) many people ever since still believe them to be true today to some extent.
Leaving that all aside, one might also ask regarding my own work, well isn’t this all just a convoluted apologia for the type of writing I’m doing? Absolutely, and why not articulate my purpose. You can choose to believe me or decide that I am an unreliable narrator. It’s up to you. I respect your agency, but I also want to play on both the reader’s and the author’s (myself) expectations about genres and categories. These are books which take place squarely in the hyperreal after all, the Uncanny Valley. They intentionally invite these questions, ask you to suspend your disbelief, and then cunningly deconstruct it, only to reconstruct it and smash it again later – and only if you’re listening.
Further, as artists I believe our role and purpose is to some extent to befuddle convention, and ask questions that have no easy answers. Yes, this will cause some uneasiness, especially among those accustomed to putting everything into little boxes, whose contents never bleed or across. Some people might even worry if it’s “dangerous” to believe in things that aren’t factual. Is it? I think the answer is sometimes, and it depends. But it largely depends on your agency as the reader, and what you do with it in real life.
He is the very definition of the unreliable narrator, whose labels of fact of fiction likely do not accord with consensus reality on many major points.
The video below is a good, if a bit annoying, take-down of many of Cramer’s claims, though unfortunately I think leans rather too heavily on deconstructing his body language, when his words alone are damning enough (btw, looks like the George Noory footage comes from an interview he did for his show Beyond Belief):
The question remains: is this an example of a “dangerous” fiction?
To understand that, I tend to think in terms of risk analysis, in which we might try to estimate:
Feinberg’s defines harm as “those states of set-back interest that are the consequence of wrongful acts or omissions by others” (Feinberg 1984)
Is saying you spent 17 years on Mars a “wrongful act or omission?” Perhaps. But as the Stanford article points out, actually defining what is or isn’t in someone’s interests is incredibly squishy.
In Cramer’s case, perhaps it is willfully and wrongfully deceptive to say the things he is saying. Do we have a moral or legal responsibility to always tell the truth? What about when that prevarication leads to financial loss in others?
In Cramer’s case, according to the second video linked above, he does seem to ask people for money – both in funding creation of a supposedly holographic bio-medical bed which can regrow limbs, and in the form of online psionics courses and one-on-one consultations.
But is it wrongful if the buyers/donators have agency, and the ability to reasonably evaluate his claims on their own?
Wikipedia’s common-language definition of fraud seems like it could apply here:
“…fraud is intentional deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right.”
Is Cramer a fraud? Is he a liar? I wondered here if Cramer might have a defamation case against the YouTube author referenced above, who calls him a pathological liar. But last time I checked, truth is an absolute defense against defamation claims. That is, the commonly accepted truth we agree on as a society – more or less – is that Mars is uninhabited, and there is no Secret Space program, etc. So if it went to court, it seems like the defamation claim would not have a leg to stand on.
Of course, it’s *possible* it’s all truth, and what we call consensus reality is based on a massive set of lies itself that is very different from ‘actual’ reality. But that’s not how courts work.
What if Cramer included disclaimers like you might see on tarot card boxes, or other similar novelty items, “For entertainment purposes only?” It depends what authority we’re trying to appeal to here: a court of law, the court of public opinion, or one reader’s experience of a particular work. Each of those might see the matter in a different light, depending on their viewpoint.
In my case, I include disclaimers regarding the inclusion of AI generated elements. I leave it up to the reader to try to determine A) which parts, and B) what the implications of AI content even are. Should they be trusted?
My position, and the one which I espouse throughout, is that – for now – AI is an unreliable narrator. Making it about on par with human authors in that regard. Are the fictions it produces “dangerous?” Must we label them “fictions” and point a damning finger at their non-human source?
In some ways, my books are both an indictment of and celebration of AI authorial tools, and even full-on AI authorship (which I think we’re some ways away from still). To know their dangers, we must probe them, and expose them thoughtfully. We must see them as they are – as both authors and readers – warts and all. And decide what we will do with the risks and harms they may pose, and how we can balance all that with an enduring belief and valorisation of human agency.
Because if we can’t trust people to make up their own minds about things they read, we run the real risk of one of the biggest and most dangerous fictions of all – that we would be better off relying on someone else to tell us what’s ‘safe’ and therefore good, and trust them implicitly to keep away anything deemed ‘dangerous’ by the authority in whom we have invested this awesome power.
Yesterday brought the first review of my latest book, Conspiratopia, via a blogger in Croatia who runs a book review WordPress site called Soph’s Book World.
Here’s a direct link to the review, an archived version, and a copy on Goodreads. Since it’s a short review (and a short book!), I thought it appropriate to copy the whole thing here for future reference. Soph’s Book World gave the book 4/5 stars:
I must admit satire is not my usual pick (as a matter of fact, I haven’t read something like this since high school), but, as shallow as it might sound, that gorgeous cover drew me in. And I was pleasantly surprised.
Our main character is just a normal dude, jobless, living with his mother and playing games all day, and he doesn’t mind it that much. However, when he stumbles upon a great job, which is taking surveys for a bunch of money, of course he doesn’t decline. So what if he has to give out a bunch of his personal info, at least he got free VR glasses and a pizza! But soon he finds out it would’ve been better if he signed a deal with the devil himself.
This was such an interesting book and definitely a breath of fresh air in comparison to my usual romances and fantasies. I would say if you’re also like me and don’t really know much about satire (or conspiracy theories), you might enjoy this.
This definitely made me think of myself, as I also do surveys for money in my free time and I also have all those apps where you spend hours upon hours playing games for a few cents. So I just might not be that different from our main character lol.
To summarize, this was a very interesting and quick read and even though it might seem as a harmless fictional story, it has a deeper meaning. The way you portray it comes to you. I quite enjoyed it and if you think this is the content you might like, definitely pick it up!
Very nice review, and it’s heartening to hear that the reviewer liked it, despite not being too steeped in satire as a genre, or conspiracy theories. I hope to have a few other bloggers who will publish reviews as well in the coming weeks.
If you’re a blogger, podcaster, or social media influencer who would like a digital copy of the book for review, please let me know. You can contact me at the Lost Books site.
Even though these politicians who are apparently living in their own parallel universe are vehemently against my new book, Conspiratopia, it appears that another segment of the population is coming to the book’s defense. It is, however, an unexpected group, consisting of a coalition of billionaires who claim that everything contained in the book is in fact quite true and stuff…
Here are their stories:
To be honest, I had no idea that George Soros was a drug user. Big, if true!
Jeff Bezos has a weird quality in this video. Seems almost like an AI himself, don’t you think? Maybe he spent too much time in outer space or something…
And this last video from Google’s CEO appears to explain why Google is suppressing evidence of the Conspiratopia Project from Google Ads and elsewhere. Why am I not surprised at all?
Please, if you’re reading this, and you can do anything to help, make sure you share these videos far and wide on social media and on the blockchain, so that people can know the truth about what’s really happening with the Conspiratopia Project!
Okay so here’s a quick run-down of what for me is the exact problem and “danger” in conspiracy theories and their use in modern analysis or whatever (I hesitate to call a lot of it “analysis”). Because I essentially agree with the basic idea of, you should test reality, ask questions, go and find out what is your truth, and how you can mesh that with the truth of others together fruitfully. (Whatever that means)
So in a nutshell, here it is. Contemporary conspiracy analysis online hinges on a single point:
1. Things are not what they seem.
And then there seems to be an in-built conclusion most people who get into that funnel find as the next logical step:
2. And it sucks.
Then, a lot of people just get stuck there. They know to ask questions. But they don’t necessarily always know which ones are the right questions that might lead them to fruitful personal & inter-personal experiences.
So they settle on simplistic lowest common denominator thinking, where they choose a convenient enemy & assign the cause of sucking to them. And we end up with the third corollary in the series:
3. Because group x.
If the average contemporary conspiracy person didn’t get stuck on step 2, they almost definitely get stuck on step 3. Because humans seem to have an in-built basic need to identify & maintain enemies. Or if not a “need,” per se (I would argue we can live without it), then at least a desire to blame badness on some “other.” And that’s what rises into varying shades of step 4:
4. So we should vote out/remove/jail/eliminate/prevent group x from y.
This desire to change the conditions which suck flows out of number 2. The recognition that things suck and we should try to change them is NATURAL and HEALTHY. And we can find healthy expressions of this recognition coupled with desire in things like voting people or parties out of office, pursuing them for legal violations, etc. Or we can find the ever-more-popular anti-social variants of wanting to randomly jail people or eliminate them because of “reasons.” Which are obviously hella shitty.
However, I think there is an alternate path one might take through the above steps, but one which branches off after 2) And it sucks, or even branches off earlier at number 1) Everything is not what it seems.
I would argue that the path of the psychonaut & allied practices might be like:
1. Yes, things are not what they seem.
But then go to:
2A. And it’s awesome
Or also recognize that:
2B. And it’s sometimes awesome and sometimes sucky
And then there is I guess we could call it the “Human Potential Movement” conclusion based on this that sets up an alternate to 3 (where we don’t land on “enemies” as a conclusion):
3B. And we have the power to change it.
With an alternative path of action to vanilla conspiracy step 4:
4B. We can change it by applying our imagination and will to effect changes within the field of consensus & personal reality
Which also seems to be the occult or “magick” perspective, though also that of, say, the entrepreneur, and the practitioners of the secular magics of growth-hacking and self-improvement.
There’s a saying in the Gospel of Thomas, I believe number 113, which I’ll paraphrase: The Kingdom of Heaven is laid out upon the earth, but men do not see it.
In terms of phildickian gnosticism (small “G”), people recognize and attempt to fight against but then become even more entangled by the Black Iron Prison. When really, simultaneously, we also live in the paradisaical Palm Tree Garden. But it’s hard to remember it, and to stay there, or to have the openness and imagination to see it again and again. But it’s always there waiting to be re-discovered, if you do forget or lose the tracks in the forest or the trail up the mountain, so to speak.
Granted, things do often and especially lately seem to massively suck. I want to recognize that at the root of today’s experience that drives people into conspiracy stuff in the first place. It’s good and healthy to recognize that, and to try to take steps to overcome it within the field of your own life & experience. I might even say it’s essential…
The bad part for me comes down to the failure of imagination to just say that everything sucks and to stop there, or to chase false “solutions” where you pin the blame on people you don’t like, and then attempt to leverage them out of the picture. That’s not freedom. That’s being chained to reaction and fear, and stopping short of finding real answers that might challenge those reactions and fears down to their very core, and find out they aren’t substantiated, or even that those reactions and fears are themselves not what they seem, but something much more malleable in the face of mind and will and the action of applied imagination.
Also, personally speaking, I recognize my position is somewhat of a fantasy. That clinging to hope is a fantasy. But long term, I find it a much more fulfilling and personally tenable position to hold that the contrary that says it sucks, and is caused only by bad people I don’t like. I can’t live like that day to day. Hatred and anger take too much damn energy to maintain. My position might be equally a fantasy (though at least not a dark one), but it’s an infinitely easier burden to bear day after day as we go through this thing called life.
