The frequent bragging could be explained by an "antifragility" logic - if an effort was made to actually hide the "stage," then there would be a risk of everyone simultaneously seeing it for the first time at once. Instead, everyone sees it all the time and sees everyone else seeing it and not doing anything about it, and learns to just stop looking. Eyes on the road. Tune out the peripheral. You really do just start to believe that the glimpses of the stage were functionally your imagination.
It's hard for me to buy into a "the brag as taking credit for whatever is happening anyway" model, even if it's obviously simpler, as 1) there seemingly has to be at least some blending, (9-11, though it was covered with obvious tells, still required actual conspiracy) 2) so much of "everyone" is directly adjacent to the stage that the cliched "conspiracies are impossible, someone would talk" trope has no real foundation.
These days it's easy to look at the stage without the old dissonance. All sorts of obvious brags show up. Funny about the Bomb Trutherism, I didn't know that was a thing until recently; I thought I had just come up with that on my own in February but probably had the idea seeded in my head from online.
All good points, and to be clear, I’m always of the opinion that most things are a complicated blend of various factors. There are absolutely times when people put their own dirty laundry out there to get ahead of the story and that has an obvious benefit as well as trying to normalize the abnormal. The problem I see though is when every single piece of media or event is asserted to be a part of a highly coordinated narrative. All information then becomes a puzzle piece when there may not even be a puzzle to solve, because people like to structure reality as a story. There’s also a tendency to think that everyone in the past was stupid and naive… and I see both factors in play when analyzing the existence of an episode like this. To me, it seems far simpler that this writer and director were pulling on discussions that they were having amongst their social group, which were skeptical of space exploration, nuclear weaponry, and media control and formed it into a one act play.
I just feel the need to point these tendencies out because it creates a situation where any creative person/dissident journal/radical becomes seen as simply a limited hangout. Certainly some of these people must be genuine, it stretches credibility to think that all are owned and controlled. And this has a dual effect of creating paranoia within the fringes while also keeping the “normies” far away from the subjects. So then I ask, who IS actually benefiting from speculative accusations of “shillery”? It’s like if a coordinated, omnipotent “they” doesn’t exist, we will create “them” with our bare hands just so we can cognitively process the complexity of the world. I’d personally rather just maintain my stance of being skeptical about just about everything.
As for satellites, there definitely something “up there” but I’m not even sure what “up there” means anymore. There are too many strange artifacts and special effect edits in random ISS clips for me to be sure that they are actually filming from there, though it’s again fairly obvious that there’s something that looks like it floating above our heads. I suspect that whatever “space” is, if anyone knows, it’s fully controlled by the various militaries of the world and that could explain a lot of the dog and pony show we see given to us plebes. There’s an inescapable occult element to all of it too, which only confounds this further. If I had to bet though, if space tourism ever really takes off, no one will be going much higher than the Bezos/Branson flights and your average person will never be able to get even as high as the alleged ISS. I guess we’ll see… if civilization doesn’t completely tank within the next few decades, which is a bet that looks about like even money these days.
Right, and that's where my antifragility logic would come in - most bragging is still just for the sake of bragging, the events attached to the bragging don't contribute in anyway way directly to "controlling" what happens, or often backfire. "Media control" Omicron is a potential example of that; and that makes sense, because it's not biologically plausible that the real-world impact of a lab-grown virus could be predicted in a lab.
The frequent bragging could be explained by an "antifragility" logic - if an effort was made to actually hide the "stage," then there would be a risk of everyone simultaneously seeing it for the first time at once. Instead, everyone sees it all the time and sees everyone else seeing it and not doing anything about it, and learns to just stop looking. Eyes on the road. Tune out the peripheral. You really do just start to believe that the glimpses of the stage were functionally your imagination.
It's hard for me to buy into a "the brag as taking credit for whatever is happening anyway" model, even if it's obviously simpler, as 1) there seemingly has to be at least some blending, (9-11, though it was covered with obvious tells, still required actual conspiracy) 2) so much of "everyone" is directly adjacent to the stage that the cliched "conspiracies are impossible, someone would talk" trope has no real foundation.
These days it's easy to look at the stage without the old dissonance. All sorts of obvious brags show up. Funny about the Bomb Trutherism, I didn't know that was a thing until recently; I thought I had just come up with that on my own in February but probably had the idea seeded in my head from online.
Pretty sure most satellites and non-moon missions were/are real. Maybe not Skylab https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Skylab#/media/File:SL4-150-5074.jpg
All good points, and to be clear, I’m always of the opinion that most things are a complicated blend of various factors. There are absolutely times when people put their own dirty laundry out there to get ahead of the story and that has an obvious benefit as well as trying to normalize the abnormal. The problem I see though is when every single piece of media or event is asserted to be a part of a highly coordinated narrative. All information then becomes a puzzle piece when there may not even be a puzzle to solve, because people like to structure reality as a story. There’s also a tendency to think that everyone in the past was stupid and naive… and I see both factors in play when analyzing the existence of an episode like this. To me, it seems far simpler that this writer and director were pulling on discussions that they were having amongst their social group, which were skeptical of space exploration, nuclear weaponry, and media control and formed it into a one act play.
I just feel the need to point these tendencies out because it creates a situation where any creative person/dissident journal/radical becomes seen as simply a limited hangout. Certainly some of these people must be genuine, it stretches credibility to think that all are owned and controlled. And this has a dual effect of creating paranoia within the fringes while also keeping the “normies” far away from the subjects. So then I ask, who IS actually benefiting from speculative accusations of “shillery”? It’s like if a coordinated, omnipotent “they” doesn’t exist, we will create “them” with our bare hands just so we can cognitively process the complexity of the world. I’d personally rather just maintain my stance of being skeptical about just about everything.
As for satellites, there definitely something “up there” but I’m not even sure what “up there” means anymore. There are too many strange artifacts and special effect edits in random ISS clips for me to be sure that they are actually filming from there, though it’s again fairly obvious that there’s something that looks like it floating above our heads. I suspect that whatever “space” is, if anyone knows, it’s fully controlled by the various militaries of the world and that could explain a lot of the dog and pony show we see given to us plebes. There’s an inescapable occult element to all of it too, which only confounds this further. If I had to bet though, if space tourism ever really takes off, no one will be going much higher than the Bezos/Branson flights and your average person will never be able to get even as high as the alleged ISS. I guess we’ll see… if civilization doesn’t completely tank within the next few decades, which is a bet that looks about like even money these days.
Right, and that's where my antifragility logic would come in - most bragging is still just for the sake of bragging, the events attached to the bragging don't contribute in anyway way directly to "controlling" what happens, or often backfire. "Media control" Omicron is a potential example of that; and that makes sense, because it's not biologically plausible that the real-world impact of a lab-grown virus could be predicted in a lab.