The Doug behind the blog. American expat living in Belgium. Semi-retired librarian. Loves horror, cats, tea. Probably not in that order.
After a rainy afternoon yesterday, we had a pretty sunset in Grimbergen.
This is not a post about sunsets. I just did that to be nice for those who twitch at certain topics.
This is about spiders, spiders upon my person, and the things which happened next. Only continue if you can handle such things.
A spoiler if you are unsure: l 5Yg SIa SP 5xYa l YggptQ 5Yg Y PQ99q5 gYj gkI3QV 9Yga 7IJxa. la xpVa, Y73 TI73 qR gaI99 xpVag, Spa gxqp93 SQ qT.
I won’t really go into great or mighty detail about the ins-and-outs of Duolingo. But, there is a regular exercise where you repeat back a phrase it says to you — and has shown on the screen, as above — and then it…judges. I’m not precisely sure how, but it highlights a number of words that you said right versus not and then if you get a certain percentage of words or certain key words correct then it passes you. It’s something that can be very useful to practice while learning a language.
But, it’s often quite buggy. At least on my phone. Sometimes it fails me before I can speak. Sometimes I get a pass despite mumbling. I have occasionally had to figure out how to say the word incorrectly in the “expected” way to get it to register I was speaking.
THEN, Space Pilgrims, we have the phrase: Zij is zeventien.
It’s one of those Dutch phrases that I think is pretty immediately understandable by folks who can read English, but let’s save that for half a second down the road.
It failed me with that a week or so ago. I passed all the other glitches and mistakes I made, but not that phrase. There’s a place where you can visit your past mistakes and correct them — it’s a bit odd since you tend to do that in the lesson itself, but it’s a nice way to see things that maybe tripped you up — and it has sat there the whole time. No matter how I say it, it doesn’t register. I have recorded Duolingo itself saying it. I have used translation text-to-speech apps to say it.
I even one day, this past week, reached a near breaking point where I just shouted it in a variety of pronunciations.
Zij is sayvayteen.
ZAY ES SEVENTY!
ZI AS ZEBENTAN!
Etc.
It was only after I had had my several minute shouting match at my phone that I realized that my windows were open, and drapes pulled back, so it was quite probably audible to anyone walking by on the street (and our neighbors) that I am shouting variations of “Zij is zeventien!” on loop.
Which meant I was shouting, in Dutch, “She is seventeen!,” on repeat. For minutes. And anyone who glanced into the window would have seen me holding my phone while doing it.
I would like to apologize to my fellow Americans abroad that I am doing absolutely nothing good to improve our relationship with the lovely Belgian people. Whoops.
Bonus fun fact, though: If I tell Duolingo that “I can’t speak right now” it auto-passes the exercise for 100%. Which I 100% abuse on almost daily basis to get all the dang Daily Missions speed cleared.
tl;dr: Old technologies die and companies drive profits by pushing new ones, but at the same time, the warning of this is less about a specific company and more about a whole mindset. Kindles are fine, but you should have back-up plans.
Above screenshot is from the top of ArsTechnica’s article: For the first time ever, Amazon is cutting old Kindles off from the Kindle Store. Which seems…strange. Not that they are doing it, but I thought they had already done something like this for older Kindles. I’m getting Mandela Effect’d in real-time.
Anyhow, says AT references an article from Good-E-Reader: You can no longer buy e-books on Amazon Kindle made in 2012 or earlier.
Technically that’s [sic], as far as I know, since the purchasing seems to still be possible for the next month or so, but it’s a minor correction.
Another possible source if you just like to see various talk about the same tech news is not-shockingly the same way:
There are a variety of specific points brought up but it seems like consensus for the actual impact is:
My “first take” [for some definitions of first take, after spending an hour reading up on other takes and such] is that:
Amazon is 100% in their right to remove support for old technologies and hardware not up to date with current standards and future-plans, but at the same time PHHHHBBBTTTT.
Amazon is only going to lose (a relatively small amount of) face by this, no matter the reasons and this demonstrates the danger of the ownership-free future The Algorithm Class have been pushing.
[in 10 years you’ll still be hearing people talk about Amazon just stops supporting Kindles left and right much like how the 1984 incident back in…2010?…is still quoted as though it happens on a regular basis despite other bookshops being more prone to it]
Look, 2012 was a lot of time ago. Stuff that was brand-new in that era like Nintendo’s Wii U and Microsoft’s Windows 8 have already been sunset at this point (the former in a way no doubt similar to the what the early-Kindles are going through, still functional just not connectable to a shop or receiving device specific content). Computers and TVs from that era are different. Phones are completely different. Stuff changes and tech stuff changes significantly across 1.5 decades.
If anything, it’s a testimony to how well the old Kindles were built that the devices are functional enough that people are still attached to them…1
The fact that it is almost trivially easy to access your Kindle library through your phone or tablet or browser or through a computer app also factors into my somewhat lack of ire about this, though I still have ire.
Outside of the simple truism that old technology eventually gets forgotten [digital files last forever or five years, whichever comes first] my broad assumption that the DRM-wars are a big part of this decision. For whatever reason, we are in a world where ebooks are one of the most protected technologies and, in principle, harder to crack than music [often sold with zero DRM] and at least physical movies [which, if nothing else, can be played on a variety of players before you even get to ripping data from them].
Ebooks, especially Kindle-proprietary formats, and audiobooks [ditto, but Audible] undergo a constant push to innovate where a lot of the innovation is simply to stop people from breaking the DRM on the books they bought.
Piracy is real and has a real impact, but this confuses me to no end.
That is where absolutely any sympathy from me for any company, author, or anyone on the side of Amazon in this case ends. You should not have to rely on a third party to maintain your library and then be expected to buy upgrades to technology or sign away more rights just to re-read a book you bought [a lease to read] years ago. If you don’t want to maintain the library without snatching increasing amounts of personal data to build up into personas you sell to other entities, let us maintain our own. Books do not need DRM. If you are relying on anti-consumer tech to swim above piracy the sharks have already won.
All this being said, here are a few things that are semi-contradictory but I think are true enough to wrap up this kind of going-nowhere besides to take more pot-shots at the anti-ownership-driven future:
Promoting piracy in retaliation for this is a terrible argument. I’m old enough and been on the internet long enough to know that pirates are going to promote their auto-response to everything like it’s a…well, an auto-response. “Netflix increasing its prices? Pirate all the movies!” That kind of stuff. “Content creators barely get paid anyhow!” is the old workhorse that has been used in various forms for years and it remains as ignorant now as it was back then.
I 100% support anyone who uses technology to get around DRM to back-up their own library. Zero qualifiers. Don’t care about any contract or license or what have you. I don’t necessarily think they should have any rights to share it [but…] and especially not to make money off it but I should, and you should, have the right to make a copy of those files that does not require a specific device.
Promoting other ebook readers or even physical books is not precisely the answer. Books break. Folks who read 3-4 books a week will slam shelves full of books pretty quickly. Libraries and bookswap stuff is nice [I donate a lot of physical books] and I support that. Still, physical books are not necessarily going to have the advantages that some ebooks have even though they trump ebooks in other ways.
Other ebook readers are definitely an idea but if it involves simply buying into another ecosystem? Eh. I’d rather promote 100% open ebook readers or apps for common devices that can access all your libraries. See my second point.
I still like my Kindles. Though I am somewhat not in the target audience for this outrage since I tend to update my Kindles semi-often, every three-to-five years. I put them through a lot of wear and tear. Also, I’m the sort who would rather update my ebook reader than get a new gaming console or even a new phone.
Technologies will continue to die by design and a shift towards anti-ownership will continue to try and strip of your rights. Full-stop, the end.
It wasn’t technically Daniel Sell’s “How to Stop Jumping Ship” that made me start thinking about the topic of this post, but that is a linkable resource that has some of the information that has filtered into my brain space:
Important bit from slightly below that:
So I propose…we just toss it all in the bin and go back to the beginning. Blogs, newsletters, IRC, mailing groups, and, sure why not, Usenet, go nuts…These things are time tested, functional even in the face of overwhelming lack of interest from the general internet, and are, most importantly, utterly unbreakable. A specific blog, irc etc etc might disappear, but that won’t take anything besides that one facet of a larger whole with it.
What actually started it was an email which was sent out to the Melsonia email list. Same sort of information, a bit more pithy:
Pretty much everything in that image is in the above linked post, though one addition is very much in-line with the stuff I talk about here, which I’ll quote:
Social media is poisonous, drains all your finer impulses. Wastes energy you could spend being happy.
He includes a link to Bear Blog which I won’t include because I’m sure it is fine but this is not an endorsement of a particular product over the other and at a glance, the software seems to violate a couple of principles I’ll talk about in a minute.
If anything, this post is absolutely an anti-endorsement of anything that might be considered a product. Websites/Apps-as-products are killing us. Killing the earth. Killing creativity.
One caveat creeps up almost immediately: Sells and I are at least partially concerned about two different things. He seems to be largely talking about (a) moving towards a platform where ideas exist outside The Platform® and are not beholden to the constant drive towards enshittification and profits AND (b) coming up with something that trumps the Algorithm Class’s version of a good time. I like both of those things, both fit strongly in my Reclaim Ownership concept I have been discussing here or there on the blog, but I think for me there is something else brewing in my brain:
Stop treating the Algorithm Class like your friend: you are a commodity to them and the current internet is designed to take resources from you and feed your resources into their bank accounts [money they use to take more freedoms from you].
We are witnessing the death of ownership and are being manipulated into thinking we need them. In 2026, The Algorithm tells you you are bored, that you are unhappy, that you are worthless without The Algorithm, that your replacement worth is derived from the dopamine you get from participating in a rich-person’s profit margin. And we believe it…
Come and share! Like and subscribe! Upvote! Get your five-year streak!
We live in a world where we give third-party companies all the content that makes the platform worthwhile but then you give up increasing rights to your own creations as they rapidly change the rules. They don’t even ask nicely. They just have your college friends’ content being held hostage and you are lonely.
AI amoebae demanding access to our creations. Less control over what we can share versus keep. Free-fall user unfriendly design based around selling digital baubles. Digitally engineered loneliness and disease. All the other terrible aspects forced upon you while specialists in behavioral modeling outsource whitepapers to tell the owners of the servers how to maximize profits from your work.
It’s Big Tobacco all over again. Paying experts to make things more addicting while telling us they are just giving us a product we really want and rumors of your own addiction are greatly exaggerated.
With the bonus that it’s not only our creations, but often the core of our friends and family groups being held for ransom. “Keep smoking and you can keep talking to your mom back home!”
THEN, they take extra data from you and sell it.
It’s like the worst possible version of the peer-review process. That process has volunteer writers being edited/scored by volunteer editors and volunteer peer-review committees. Then the output is given freely to scientific publishers who generate substantial profit off making it available. With the consequence of not publishing can include missing out on tenure and promotion.
Only instead of contributing to the ever-expanding world of valuable science, we are simply trapped in a loop where in leaving a billion-dollar money maker we have no control over ends up with being branded as anti-social and distant. No party invites without social media. Missing out on collector’s items by our favorite brands because people on X got first dibs. How in the hell do we know what Florida Man is doing this week unless we spend hours each week doomscrolling through made up posts about Florida Man?
“I can’t leave Instagram, what about all my friends!?,” we say over and over as our data is stolen and the money generated from it is spent to lobby for war crimes. Taking your joy of expression and turning into AI slop generated in data centers so environmentally unfriendly they are altering ecosystems while unwriting decades of copyright and intellectual property law.
Don’t say, “If you are not paying for it, you are not the customer.” That’s tired. Sad. Ignorant. You can pay for it all day long and to The Algorithm Class you are just money and never enough.
Besides, you are very much paying for it and its the most expensive purchase you have ever made.
Like cats, there is no free social media. We are collectively paying billions of dollars to avoid going to bed on time. Our tax money spent to subsidize The Algorithm Class. In return, The Algorithm Class buying out a large portion of our governments for their needs. Every lost ecosystem and plot of land to build data centers. We are spending generational wealth indirectly to look at ads on Facebook.
And the saddest thing is that for all this money, you and your creations are worthless to them individually. Sold for pennies. A penny today so they can buy congressfolk to not pass privacy laws and make a dollar tomorrow.
That’s the thanks you get. Being sold for $0.03 on loop with no protections just so hackers can get your national ID numbers and ruin your credit while the data hoarders say, “oops,” and face no consequences.
There is no ceiling that will stop folks from generating profit off of your hard work and there are very few protections to keep you from suffering the laziness of their vibe-coding neglect.
I DIGRESS.
The point is that reading Sells’ post made me think about how hard it would be for me to actually get any of my friends and family on board with creating a web-ring or similar. I could probably get two or three signed up but the siren call of the wide-open for-sale web would hang there. We are two decades into the social-media-and-search-engine revolution that has stripped us of a properly free internet.
This means this is all in the heady realms of though experiment, so taking that as an act of freedom rather than problem, I was thinking of things I would like to see if I could back and shove Myspace off a cliff.
In other words, something where people create content streams through many different self- or creator-focused-hosted methods and something — webrings, RSS/Atom feeds, metadata chunkers, your own eyes and fingers — will handle this and there will be no fake digital commons generating billions of dollars in revenue as long as you keep playing ball and getting your grandma to sign up for an account.
No lectures from AI-generated moderators about how you need to tweak your content to maximize conversions.
Hell, there would be no conversions. Death to the trust-economy. No product of The Algorithm Class has earned the right to addict us and constrain us to the information/data/consumption-complex they have chosen.
You decide what you want to read and no one knows what you do with it but you.
I am a big fan of home repair. I’m not saying it’s easy. Hell, it’s often quite hard. There are plenty of times when you want to call a professional. Still, I like home repair a lot.
It’s one of the Tiers of Ownership that I believe in. A bit of control. A realization of what you have. Like cooking. Or posting your content to a resource that you have actual stakes in upkeeping.
This is a story about when home repair goes wrong.
On Easter Sunday, 5 April 2026, I was doing one of those gnarly-but-necessary tasks: cleaning out a deep fryer. I needed to refresh it because I was going to cook some vegan nuggets to go with our usual Sunday waffle meal.
I went into the water closet downstairs to wash my hands and a few seconds later noticed the sink was not draining. To clarify, it was draining but only if really full and only a small amount until it got about 1/3 full and then stopped.
We had some clogs upstairs in the shower and Kaz had worked on fixing those — later I realized the clogs are less like a traditional clog and possibly a mechanical aspect causing a bit of a vacuum/pressure problem but I have not solved that yet — and we were convinced that this new problem was somehow a child of the old problem. I tried plunging. We tried running water up to near the top of the sink to see if we could some pressure to release. Nothing was working.
Kaz unscrewed the screw holding in the drain guard. Let me illustrate with a picture.
The screw there in the middle. We wanted that out so that we could try and see what thing might be blocking the water flow. Past that part of the sink, you get this:
Something like a p-trap but not quite. I mean. We tried using a couple of tools to see if we could figure out where something was blocking the flow from the sink through this device.
Nothing was working.
We put a weak-but-potent-enough mixture in there to help break up clogs but had the problem that water simple wasn’t flowing enough. I would fill the sink up and let it slowly drain to the 1/3 mark. Did this on loop.
After maybe an hour or so, a time when I should have 100% been working on making Sunday dinner, there was no real progress.
Kaz had committed to running to a shop — few were open on Easter Sunday, as you can imagine — and while getting ready for that, I decided to reach under and feel around to try and figure out if there was supposed to be someway for us to access the piping system.
At that point, the whole under-pipe just fell completely out and dumped a sink full of water+chemicals all over me, the wall, the floor, and the tools we had been using.
Luckily, Kaz had not quite left yet and so I had helped wrangling cats and cleaning up a hell of a mess.
Turned out the pipe had a lot of soap-scum built up, along with the other bits such pipes accumulate, and they had somehow wedged into the section right as it goes into the wall.
I had no idea how I was able to effectively rip the pipe from the sink with barely a touch. Like finding out you have super-strength.
ONLY, you might have guessed it, but it was foreshadowed earlier on: turns out the screw that holds the drain-guard into place also holds the pipe in place. In fact, we had been massively lucky that it hadn’t dropped out earlier while we were waiting and possibly causing even more damage.
At any rate, we were able to take the pipe and get it completely cleaned out and get everything re-installed and cleaned up and working possibly better than has since we have moved in.
Never did make waffles, though. Sunday dinner ended up being cold cereal and sandwiches.
Did get the deep fryer cleaned. There’s that.
There are a few “Explain the Joke” subreddits on reddit and most, probably all, are trash-tier karma farming circle jerks. Just absolutely awful.
The same easy-as-shit jokes or rage-bait memes are posted over and over with people showing up in the thousands to comment. Sure, some of the replies are just bots joining in on the blatant karma manipulation. Which is fitting since it is likely mostly bots posting them. Bots and people trying to farm a few easy k karma to kickstart a reddit account so they can then sell it to bots.
In fact, you could probably automate a script to block every person who ever makes a post in one and trim a fair number of crap from your reddit experience.
Some of the replies are just going to be people who can’t help correcting others or sharing their thoughts, even when the same posts show up once a week or less. It’s weaponized tribalism versus default redditor behavior.
It is especially painful because posts from a couple/three of these subreddits frequently drift to the popular feed which dirty little no-accounts like me are forced to browse without extensive bookmarks: which might be the point. Let the shit float so people are forced to make an account just to have the tools to block them. Eh. Every day is a gift.
HOWEVER, you do occasionally get gold despite the massive attempt by gravity to pull sanity off a cliff. Like this one asking about the Tower of Babel made in [not-]LEGO [look at me violating my “never link to reddit or any social media” rule].
Pardon the proximity to a pun, but my brother in Christ, what could we possibly explain? I can get folks posting references to obscure-but-knowable things with a bit of a gate-keep to even knowing search terms. Sure.
Things like the Tower of Babel might not be universally known but when the immensely searchable words are right there….
At any rate, like all good circle jerking on reddit, the scant pretense of actual joy is people running with it and the replies are full of people posting answers [some on point] in various languages….and some people then trying to argue about the true meaning of Babel. Which is like the true meaning of Dollar Store kitten calendars. It’s aliens, my man. All aliens. All the way down.
Bonus, someone ended up inserting a Hail Mary joke which will make no sense until you’ve read maybe the first quarter of the book, but still.
I look forward to this above image becoming a post on this same subreddit in a couple of days.
This morning I made two sizeable purchases. One via a Belgian storefront for stuff like an automated cat feeder, some kitchen supplies, another air filter since allergies are whooping us, and some cat treats. The other purchase was from the US Amazon storefront and represents something like three+ months of stored-up shopping cart. Possibly the biggest Amazon order I’ve ever made but maybe not [not four digits big, just a lot of stuff at once, then with shipping and international handling fees and currency conversions and whatnot].
To explain the latter, when we moved I lost a decades-long history of streaming movies. Upwards of 200 movies. Most likely upwards of 300 movies. Stuff I’ve watched a lot. Genre classics. A fairly joyously curated list. And stuff from streaming services like Shudder which is not available here.
Something I started doing was picking up, through various methods — largely online — was high quality physical replacements of my favorite bits of that lost digital media. Some US versions but also UK, Belgian, French, German, Australian, Japanese, and so forth releases. I am finally at the effective end of that and today’s order was more or less wrapping it up.
Only, as soon as I clicked order I got kind of a icky feeling.
Not for what I ordered. Not for my at least momentary rampant consumerism. While this is something like twenty movies and that’s a fair lot, it does represent a fairly curated list and mostly definitive editions of everything on the list.
It’s just… I hit this moment where I’m kind of tired of buying things. Combined with stuff like pre-ordering the next year’s worth of Big Finish audios and some collector’s edition books — though of the “a lot cheaper” variety than my old indie book collecting days — it does represent a fair amount of money spent in the past two weeks.
Consuming media can be a black hole. Stuff where you spend more and more and then always look to a horizon. I am 100% opposed to the “clutter free” lifestyle that tends to prioritize streaming and the dissolution of ownership. I am also aware of my tendency to packrat and curate past the obvious choices. Stocking up on just-in-cases.
Anyhow, while I will no doubt enjoy and rewatch everything I ordered today multiple times, I think this vibe is a sign for me to call it quits right there. There are some pre-orders and outstanding crowd-funding. I have enough stuff to spend a good couple of months just enjoying.
Thus, from now until my birthday (30 May), I am going on a spending holiday. Taking a break from being a consumer whore, as it was.
While I promote ownership as a concept, especially curated ownership, you do really want to prioritize the stuff you will use and love.
This is my two months to do that.
And then maybe more but we’ll see.
A couple of weeks ago, maybe, I took a screenshot from the top of a Reddit thread because I figured I’d get around to answering it:
“What’s something you’re pretty sure only you do?”
Now, here are two answers and one answer has two parts because I’m me.
Just a shout out to all us Space Pilgrims: when we look at specifics a lot of what we do is actually fairly unique. Absolutely no one else is in that cafe at that table and eating that donut but you. In cafes? Sure. At tables? Sure. Eating donuts? Sure.
And I suspect, but have no idea what kind of chaos computing super mainframe would be required to know, that it only takes a few facets of our activities before a significant number of everything we do is unique.
A lot of people might grow roses. A much smaller amount by specialize in a particular type of roses. Arranging them into patterns based on, I don’t know, famous Shakespeare plays?
I am deeply suspicious of a growing trend that tries to paint uniqueness as being cringe while also judging folks for being basic.
That being said, this is about me…
To keep this lighter, let me say there are two things that come to mind.
Not truly unique since both Kaz and I say this on a regular basis, and I think I got this from somewhere, but the phrase “No digs for Satan” shows up a lot in our household.
What does it mean? We generally use it to mean, “This topic is so off-the-table we won’t even consider it.” 0-stars is a review. “Did not like,” is an opinion. This is something below consideration.
As always when I think this hard about it, I try looking it up to see if there is any other references to it and got this from the “helpful” AI summary:
heh.
At any rate, I updated that older post today to point out it might have been, “No ribbits for Satan” but at any rate, I’m sticking to my own thing.
Here’s one I’m more sure is definitely unique to me. Over on The Doug Alone, I play out multiple long-term solo RPGs set in alternate history Alabamas including a long running history of characters and locations cribbed from dozens of sources.
There are newspaper articles, fiction book series within the series, and multiple timelines that diverge depending on the campaign.
Some of those characters, like Amy Patel and Eustace Delmont, show up in different time lines as slightly different but interlinked characters. When stuff happens in a “future” timeline, it might get referenced and added to the lore to a “past” timeline, etc.
Eustace, by the way, is effectively a way for me to play a parody of myself and while in the cyberpunk-infused “The GLOW” version he is much more an angry, muscular guy, in the more “normal” Alabama Weird version, I simply just use my one photos modified in whatever style of art that fits that particular campaign arc:
He’s sort of like me if self-doubt was replaced with the simple bravado to fight all the strange things going on down in the swamps and small streets of lower Alabama.
from the NPR article, Your data is everywhere. The government is buying it without a warrant:
A whole industry of data brokers buys up vast quantities of electronic information from cell phone apps and web browsers and sells it to advertisers who use that data to target ads. The same industry also sells that data, including bulk cell phone location data, to police departments and federal government agencies in ways that can reveal intimate details about Americans without a warrant.
Now, privacy advocates say that the best chance for Congress to close the well-known loophole around the Fourth Amendment that allows for that sort of governmental snooping is coming up in just a few weeks.
That’s when Congress is expected to take up reauthorization of what is known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is set to expire on April 20.
After a 2015 change to the law, federal agencies are not supposed to collect data on U.S. citizens in bulk. But some found a workaround to requesting warrants by simply buying the data instead.
I’m actually neither shocked nor awed. Pikachu face can stay in the desk drawer. There are funnier uses for the meme. This is why I get so frustrated by conspiracy theorists. The real world changing conspiracies tend to happen in the open but are discredited by the same media and enterprises complicit in their existence [but not, you know, actually hidden].
Best bit is that AI-companies owned by the Algorithm Class is the real clear winner, here. They get paid to digest the human experience en masse to better train their LLMs by selling the data to entities that treat this data as different from protected data despite being the same data.
I have no precise takeaway here or anything to add besides to say that if our data is worth billions to someone, it should be worth [collectively] billions to us. The same way that if information wins war then information should be considered protected by the second amendment.
We’ve entered into a strange new horizon where companies revel in increasing the cost of doing business with them by, with very little choice, forcing a lot of us to give up vital aspects of our own liberty [namely the ownership of our own identity].
“If you are not paying for it, you are not the customer,” is dead, long live:
“You are now never the ONLY customer.“
The Algorithm Class demands a Commodity Class, and we be it.
Definitions and the weight of definitions are wild and easily manipulated. For instance, conspiracies by definition 100% exist and are 100% exposed — often to surprisingly little actual impact unless murder is involved somewhere and maybe not even then — on a regular basis. Let’s call these conspiracies — definite participants with definite consequences — “Tier One.”
Company A teams up with Place B to snatch Resource C from the inhabitants. Some rich someone has an area [or company] declared low value before buying it up. Smaller scale ones where groups of people plan out crimes. Large scale ones where countries devalue a target to take over trade routes.
This is before you get to stuff like MKUltra and other exposed government plots/programs to do stuff outside of standard channels of morality/expectation. These are probably getting close to what I consider “Tier Two,” which will come up in a bit.
However, these “Tier One” conspiracies are differentiated from a different sort. I am not going to do math because it is almost impossibly complicated, but for at least some folks, perhaps most folks, this is not what is meant when you encounter the word Conspiracy Theory.
Let’s call this extreme “Tier Three.” In principle, there is a indefinite amount of agents involved and the goal seems something almost ineffable (insomuch as “Total Control” is ineffable). Like the agents behind Tier Three conspiracies are attempting godhood. Thinking about that, I’m going to propose “The Fourth Element” and discuss it in brief, down below.
There are varying lists of elements involved on this other extreme (see the European Commission’s page about COVID conspiracies to see a specific flavor), to which I would point out three (from my experience) as being deeply related to the fourth:
The (often) lack of clearly defined morality, the (often) singular- or few-facet structure, and the fact that real Tier One conspiracies (usually) get spoiled violate these tenets. There’s a game to be played with conspiracy theories by my Tier Three definition where True Believers can see a bit further into the darkness and plainness.
Which brings us to the fourth element, the one I consider the key, the actual test of this tier three definition:
Believing that billionaires will manipulate the market to improve their own profit margins is not, by the Tier Three definition, a conspiracy. It is plain. It involves known actors doing a possible-to-actually-know thing. You could give evidence clearly that all adherents can appreciate.
You would need to believe they are doing it to bring about an ineffable end, some great ritual, some mystic passing. In this, people who are part of the shadowy world will be both fighting for and fighting against the common person. Some billionaires will be the good ones. Some government agents will be exposing the truth behind UFOs. There will be codes and secret signs left behind.
However, I am left with the sense that there are broad movements and there are general shifts by powerful players but not codified in quite the same way. What if snack companies push less-filling, brightly colored snacks not because they are working for Satan (to ape a chain letter of many years ago) but because they want you to get fat and feel like a loser for not choosing one product from one of their subsidiaries over another of their subsidiaries?
Which is making me wonder if there’s not space for a Tier Two definition:
Look, it’s a broad musing and a work in process. I know this is fallible. I’m chewing on it. This is the part of the canvas where I have to throw paint all over the room just to figure out which colors match. Much like the algorithms that push various problematic memes to see which one stick and be manipulated into generational trauma…
*wink*
What I’m wondering, though, is if you could have a group of people — maybe not precisely known at present but in principle definitely knowable with clearly defined lines — who interfere with things, perhaps in definite ways, usually with a definite goal, but with indefinite consequences.
Which is wrong. Throwing paint, like I said. It’s more like…
Generating indefinite instability in order to generate certain types of behavior in the short or long term with the assumption that some classes of people are more immune to large and small scale instabilities.
One odd aspect of this “Tier Two” is that…
A Tier One conspiracy would be like, say, a tobacco company or conglomerate of said companies making cigarettes more addictive. A Tier Three would be tobacco companies making cigarettes more addictive so that people absorb more chemicals and become conditioned towards government mind control backed up by a shady group of academic elites.
This type of Tier Two I am talking about would be various companies following trends of marketing and science to general make their product more addicting but then also paying for advertisement and education against addiction to harm competitors but also to increase distrust in science and regulation amongst their addicted regulars. Either they win by creating tribal-like brand dependency or by having people eventually thinking that “both sides” are problematic.
Oil companies making broad statements against renewable energies while also co-opting and sometimes controlling green initiatives for instance. Where wind power’s actual impact on local ecosystems can be treated as just-as-bad-as the extinction level event that fossil fuels can represent.
Complain about fossil fuels? Why do you hate small communities in Africa?
Promote veg*nism and a move from factory farms? That’s racist.
Algorithms pushing coverage for relatively minor infractions by environmentalists vs an over-emphasis on largely meaningless gestures. People being bullied for personal responsibility over the environment catastrophe vs people being portrayed as powerless against effective change (aka “the paper straw” strawman bullshit).
Co-opting “freedom of speech” as a way to attack personal freedoms. Or changing the meaning of “fake news.”
Algorithms that highlight catastrophizing and doom-scrolling. Creating a media landscape where brain-rot short-form media is both becoming a default and also complaining about it is becoming a default.
AI discussions where complaints or praises of it mean nothing because your average user cannot do a goddamned thing either way. Right up to complaining about the em-dash and oxford commas and all the other ways anti-AI sentiment is being used to dissolve standards of human communication. And yes, I filled this post with hand-coded — just to be pissy. I had to click extra for that shit.
Where Gen X was sold both anti-establishment and pro-establishment media. Anti-intellectual and pro-intellectual media. Told to trust the scientists we were told to mock as eggheads. Told to trust the government we were told to hate. Told to eat the food we were told to hate.
Where the only consistent thing was that we were told to consume.
To choose sides. To choose no sides. To engage. To be enraged. To qualify things that should be quantifiable. To quantify things of indefinite qualities. Where even the “generational system” of organization — Gen X, Millennials, etc — is nothing but bullshit pseudo-science to make us feel like we are striving for a horizon that has never existed. And if you complain about the labels? There’s a label for that, too.
“Here’s a box, get inside, please. Oh, don’t like the box? Me too! I hate boxes, subscribe to my newsletter!”
Because in the end that’s all that matters. Not the stance that we take. Not that we take a stance. There’s no stance we can take. As long as internalize it, though, as long as we think the stance or lack of stance is a thing, we consume. Just to show them.
That’s what I’m talking about. Where it’s not just about the doubt vs belief, identity vs the unknown, embracing conflict vs finding compromise: it’s about how we internalize these things and keep clicking more links. Thinking we have to fight but never quite knowing what it is we are fighting (plot twist: we are fighting our wallets to sign up for more online services, quite often). Thinking we are doomed but we might as well be playing on the Titanic and then getting fucking furious at people for playing on the Titanic while not thinking they are doomed in the exact same way.
We end up terribly judging who are just as intellectually complex and emotional extant as ourselves because the goddamned algorithm needed there to be an A and B or what the hell is A-B testing for?
I have to go chew on this and make more sense on approach two, assuming I get around to it.
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