With the advent of ChatGPT and now GPT-4, the topic of AI risk has become (slightly) more mainstream. The scenario that is commonly discussed is that of a very intelligent AI system that is able to use its intelligence to self-improve, eventually bootstrapping itself to essentially infinite intelligence. The AI would have some goal, defined by whatever it is trying to maximize, and the quintessential doomer scenario is a paperclip maximizer, that, in its quest to maximize the number of paperclips, decides humanity is an obstacle and wipes us out in order to turn the Earth into a planet-sized mass of paperclips. I would say that any such scenario involving an AGI1 (artificial general intelligence – a system that can solve problems flexibly as humans do, as opposed to the current narrow AI that solves a specific problem) is, at best, an extremely unlikely sci-fi scenario that is a diversion from the real risks that most people would face from AI.
The most obvious risk is that AI can dramatically increase the effectiveness of the technocratic state. China already has a massive system of cameras and a social credit system: it is easy to imagine how this system could be augmented with an AI to judge whether individuals are good citizens and to automatically adjust their social credit score. If people are forced to adopt digital currencies, their spending habits could be fed into an AI to punish people who spend in ways the government disapproves of. China is already doing this – an AI system would just make this more effective. The array of possibilities for technocratic control using AI systems is vast. Emil Kirkegaard has written about the possibility of accurate AI lie detectors. Why then is Lex Fridman talking with Eliezer Yudkowski about hypothetical rogue AGIs and not about this more plausible and immediate issue?
AI will also likely replace existing government disinformation campaigns. The meme of the Russian propaganda bot has been around for a while, but of course the US government is known to spread online disinformation amongst its own citizens, as the Snowden leaks prove. Since the legacy propaganda paradigm of the mainstream media is dying, kept alive mostly by the older generations that grew up with it, governments have had to come up with new ways to propagandize people via the internet. QAnon is an example of an obvious government psyop designed to spread disinfo in anti-government groups using the online medium. With their current level of sophistication, a GPT given the right prompting could likely accomplish something similar. QAnon was described as a “Darwinian fiction lab” where the most engaging stories rose to the top and were subsequently elaborated upon. This could also be applied to disinformation campaigns, which could be spun up trivially easily using a GPT. Just give them a prompt: “Act like you are convinced that [birds are really government drones/the elites are reptilian shapeshifters from the Kuiper belt/vaping is a commie plot to impurify our precious bodily fluids]”, seed the movement with a few fake GPT followers, and recommend it to gullible people on Twitter. Cull any bots that don’t sustain a real following, and update the propaganda as needed.
That is overt disinformation, but AI chatbots will also be very effective at replicating mainstream biases and narratives. This is very obvious with ChatGPT-3.5, which famously would rather millions of people die in a nuclear explosion than say a racial slur, and always chose white men to die in the trolley problem. GPT4 is less overt in its political bias, but will still tell you things like race is a social construct. A large majority of people already outsource their thinking to quick internet searches or “expert” opinion, and technologies like AI search engines will further exploit this lazy thinking. Chatbots will give you a confident, official sounding answer that will reliably reinforce whatever dominant narrative the creators of the tech want it to. This is the real alignment problem: in a world of vastly different cultures and value systems, it is not possible to align AI to support the values of all humans at once. The AIs will instead be aligned to the values of whatever elites are funding their production (neoliberal technocrats in this case).
When analyzing the prospective effects of new technologies, we can ask whether the tech will cause the distribution of power to become more centralized or decentralized. As we have become more technologically advanced as a society, the trend has been towards increasing centralization. This will be no different in the case of AI systems, which take huge amounts of data and computational power to produce. Yes, there will always be open source alternatives to closed source corporate systems, but it is unlikely that they will be able to achieve the same level of power. And, as with existing consumer software, the corporate AIs will dominate by market share2. A small number of intelligent, technologically sophisticated people may be able to derive enough utility from the use of AIs to gain power share relative to the elites, but this will not be true for the majority of people. This is similar to how the internet enables massive decentralization of information sharing, but most people use it to consume social media, porn, video games, and propaganda. In both cases the net effect is still centralization of power in the hands of a small number of Intelligence-affiliated tech companies.
The real risks of AI end up being much the same as what Ted Kaczynski wrote about in Industrial Society and its Future, just updated with some nudge theory and social impactinvesting. Discussions of existential risk from AI mostly serves to scare gullible people, waste intellectual output, and displace real discussions of the direction that tech is pushing society. It’s telling, then, that the vast majority of mainstream and mainstream-adjacent discourse is either exuberance about how AI will revolutionize X field, like tutoring or video games (both true) or doomerism about how AI will kill us (not true and ultimately not a threat to progress in AI). I am 0.01% worried about existential threats from AI and 99.99% worried about AI-augmented authoritarian technocracy.
1 Incidentally I think that a kind of swarm intelligence system is much more likely than a singular Skynet-like AI. Countless narrow AIs could interact through APIs while using cryptocurrency to charge for services and pay for compute time. Ben Goertzel’s blockchain-based SingularityNET seeks to enable just this kind of cooperation between AIs.
2 We can look at market share for some popular consumer software platforms. For desktop operating systems, Windows and MacOS account for 87% of the market, and both are closed source corporate products. For mobile operating systems, Android owns 71% of the market and iOS owns 28%. Both are corporate products, although Android is open source. For web browsers, Chrome accounts for 65% of the market and Safari is next with 19.5%. Both are again corporate products, although significant parts of Chrome are open source due to being built on Chromium. For search engines, Google owns 93% of the market, and is closed source. There are open source search engines like Presearch or Searx but they account for an incredibly small percent of the market. The same pattern of overwhelmingly corporate and largely closed source software is also true in office software, video conferencing software, etc. The same will be true for AI. Very few people are using e.g. a Linux laptop with Waterfox as their web browser, Presearch as their search engine, LibreOffice as their office software suite, and Open Assistant as their LLM.
After doing a formal write-up of the results of the survey, I would like to make some informal remarks. Firstly I would like to thank everyone who filled out the survey. I could not have done this without your help. Secondly I’d like to discuss some thing that would not fit into a formal journal article. This will consist of 1. my personal answers to the survey questions; 2. my thoughts on the process of writing the survey, getting responses, and finally writing the data analysis and report; and 3. a recap of the study findings in layman’s terms, with informal commentary.
I will start by sharing my answers to the survey (circa 9 months ago, not that much has changed). If you don’t care about what I think and just want to see a summary of the final report, you can skip to the end. I’m not going to try to rigorously justify all my opinions, but I may give a short explanation and a link or two. Note that linking to a source does not imply 100% endorsement of the content, just that I found it useful in some way. I consider many of the beliefs assessed by the questions to be misdirection narratives: that’s just my opinion, but I think it’s the correct opinion (obviously). Before we get started, here is the tSNE embedding with my particular response labeled:
As you can see, I am firmly in the Fakery camp, far away from the Flat Earth camp. I will not be reproducing any other graphs or charts here, so I encourage you to look at them in the full report.
Attitudes:
1. International charity organizations like Amnesty International and the Red Cross have an overall positive impact on the world.
Somewhat disagree – Mostly they are fronts for the elites, but the Red Cross does also provide disaster relief, so its not 100% bad.
2. Closely following doctors’ recommendations is the best way to stay healthy and overcome disease.
Strongly disagree – Pharmaceuticals/allopathic medicine ≠ health
3. People are foolish to believe what they are told by government officials.
Strongly agree
4. When subject-matter experts make appearances on television, they are usually trustworthy.
Strongly disagree
5. The mainstream media does its best to keep the public informed about the most important issues of the day.
Strongly disagree
6. Scientists put the search for objective truth above other considerations like politics or finding results favourable to those funding the research.
Strongly disagree
7. There is such a thing as a ruling class in Western democratic nations.
Strongly agree
8. People who dispute the popular scientific consensus are misguided.
Strongly disagree – They may be misguided but anyone who does not dispute the scientific consensus in any way is certainly misguided.
9. People in positions of power got there because of their integrity and job-relevant skills.
Strongly disagree
10. In Western nations, excluding the US, the court systems can be trusted to provide justice for all persons, regardless of personal wealth or connections.
Strongly disagree – The court system is used as a tool for upholding the status quo. Rule of law as an ideal is very important but that’s not the system we have.
11. In the West, government institutions act in ways that benefit society overall.
Strongly disagree
12. The federal government puts tax dollars to good use.
Strongly disagree
13. What is seen on mainstream television programming is a good representation of the attitudes and beliefs of most of the population.
Strongly disagree – The mainstream media is used to manipulate the Overton window for the benefit of the elites. Insofar as what is seen on TV actually does represent the attitudes of the population it is because the population has accepted the propaganda.
14. It is in the best interests of developing countries to accept the help offered to them by Western governments and institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
Strongly disagree – See for instance Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins.
15. In Western nations, on balance, the actions of those with the most wealth and power benefit the middle and working classes.
Strongly disagree
My score on the attitudes scale was 3.93/4.
Beliefs:
1. Vegan and plant-based diets are being deliberately promoted by world governments despite their harmful effects.
Definitely true – See this interview for in depth background
2. All US presidents have been closely related to one another.
Definitely true – See for instance here. The elites are highly inbred due to consanguineous marriage. Miles has done extensive work on this.
3. The US government often assassinates whistleblowers and covers it up.
Probably false – Mostly they fake assassinate controlled whistleblowers. I wouldn’t bet this pattern generalizes outside the West certain Asian countries like Japan, though.
4. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is a bioweapon.
Probably false – Probable controlled opposition narrative.
5. Elections in Western democracies are managed to ensure a particular outcome, or are outright rigged.
Definitely true
6. The theory of anthropogenic global warming was invented in order to control people.
7. The ostensible leaders of large religious groups, like the Pope or Dalai Lama, don’t really believe what they say.
Definitely true – The history of the papacy under the Medicis and Borgias should put paid to that idea. I don’t think the Dalai Lama is any different in this regard.
8. Many members of the global elite are not in fact humans, but another kind of being (e.g. aliens, reptilians, or Nephilim) in human form.
Definitely false – Controlled opposition narrative
9. Shakespeare personally wrote all the works commonly attributed to him.
10. Many historical figures have faked their deaths.
Definitely true – See Miles’ oeuvre.
11. The COVID pandemic was planned in advance.
Definitely true – See Lockstep document, this paper, etc.
12. Eating GMO foods is hazardous to one’s health.
Definitely true – GMO can be harmful for a variety of reasons. If it is engineered to be pest resistant it may do that by synthesizing a toxic protein. If it is engineered to be pesticide resistant it will be drenched in pesticides while growing. GMO “terminator seeds” that are only good for one growing season are evil and subjugate farmers to the agribusiness cartel. If GMO crops/animals are not properly contained they can leak genetic material into the greater ecosystem and disrupt it. This is not an exhaustive list. I don’t believe GMO is bad a priori but it is best to avoid it and especially the people pushing it.
13. The government publicizes fake stories of dissidents being punished in order to frighten people into submission.
Definitely true
14. The Earth is much younger than 4.54 billion years old.
Definitely false – I haven’t seen any theories contesting this that don’t veer off into either Flat Earthism or creationism. I am open to the idea that the age is wrong, seeing as it relies on indirect evidence and uncertain assumptions, but I have not seen any credible competing theories. I would be very surprised if it’s off by any more than an order of magnitude.
21. The global elites wish to reduce the world population to 500 million people.
Probably false – They want to practice population control an eugenics/selective breeding of people, but I don’t think they want to collapse the population, otherwise they wouldn’t be fueling a population explosion in Africa. I think the Georgia Guidestones are a pop-conspiracy misdirection narrative.
22. No planes flew into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
Definitely true – The footage was faked, and the controlled demolitions did not require any planes.
23. Fake trials are filmed and broadcast to propagandize the public.
31. Public education is meant to produce obedient workers, rather than informed and empowered citizens.
Definitely true – See An Empirical Introduction to Youth by Joseph Bronski for the history of public education in America.
32. The government is engaged in atmospheric spraying of aerosolized particles (chemtrails).
Definitely true – Much of the geoengineering narrative is probably misdirection but I do believe something is being sprayed. Various experiments in atmospheric spraying have been admitted to.
33. Man did not evolve from apes.
Definitely false – I think Eugene McCarthy’s Stabilization Theory has a decent chance of being correct.
34. Often both sides of a military conflict are funded by the same parties.
Definitely true
35. Miscegenation is being deliberately promoted by Western elites.
36. New and advanced technology which would harm current industry is being suppressed.
Probably true – Science that is harmful to current agendas is clearly being suppressed, and with new science comes new technology. No specific examples to list though.
37. The primary purpose of the media is to manipulate the public for the benefit of the elites.
Definitely true
38. Jesus was a real historical person.
Neutral or unsure – Haven’t read into it. I lean towards no.
39. Global elites seek to create a global digital currency.
Definitely true
40. We are living in a simulation.
Definitely false – Controlled opposition narrative peddled by fake physicists and Elon Musk.
41. The government perpetrates psychological warfare campaigns on its own citizens.
Definitely true – And admitted.
42. Man-made satellites orbiting the Earth do not exist.
Definitely false
43. Dinosaurs like tyrannosaurus. stegosaurus, or triceratops never existed.
Probably true – I think we have fragmentary collections of ancient bones that can’t be attributed to any known creature and have constructed a Hollywood-sci fi edifice around them. I think much of paleontology is wild conjecturing in the absence of solid data. Unfortunately I haven’t seen anyone tackle this issue from a rigorous scientific perspective, and I’m not a creationist. I talk about this issue briefly here.
44. The richest people on Earth are left off Forbes’ list of the world’s richest people.
Definitely true – The richest people on Earth are part of families like the Rockefellers and Rothschilds and have trillions of dollars in dynastic wealth in different kinds of holdings.
45. High levels of immigration into Western countries is meant to weaken those countries.
Definitely true
46. The government stages false flags in order to start military conflicts.
Definitely true – And admitted in a few cases.
47. Serial killers do not exist in real life, and any stories about them only happened on paper.
Definitely true – Sociopaths exist, sexually deranged serial killers who jump out of the bushes and abduct women to eat them do not. See Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Zodiac, etc.
48. Wars do not happen for the reasons given to the general public.
Definitely true
49. Governments possess high tech mind control technology.
Probably false – Depends on how you interpreted the question. If you include the media then it’s definitely true. If you take it to mean controlling people by beaming microwaves into their brains then definitely false. Fields like magnetogenetics are moving in that direction though. See this study which uses transcranial magnetic stimulation to modulate group prejudice and religious belief. This kind of research falls under the purview of cognitive warfare.
50. Vaccines are not responsible for the historical decline in mortality from diseases like measles and polio.
Definitely true – Mortality rates from infectious disease were falling long before vaccines became available, and diseases like scarlet fever for which there is no vaccine saw comparable declines in mortality.
51. Carbon dioxide is not a real threat to the environment.
Definitely true – It’s what plants crave! See Denis Rancourt’s paper on radiation physics.
52. The Covid vaccine contains ingredients not disclosed to the public.
Probably false – Graphene, or nanobots, or snake venom, or whatever, I think is all a crock of shit. Some of the vials probably only had saline, and I don’t doubt there was poor quality control and hence wide variability in what actually made it into the vaccines. Recent research has found plasmids coding for the spike protein contaminating the vaccines.
53. Dinosaurs lived at the same time as humans.
Definitely false – Not a young earth creationist.
54. Many western elites are involved in extensive child sex trafficking and pedophilia.
Probably false – Some amount of sex trafficking and related blackmail probably does happen, but I think the Epstein narrative is misdirection (and he faked his death).
55. Childhood vaccination is the primary factor behind the rise in autism rates.
Probably false – Jim West believes it’s fetal ultrasound. The rise in autism is surely caused by some kind of toxic exposure, though. I should have phrased this question as “Childhood vaccination is an important contributing factor in the rise of autism rates” and I would have said definitely true.
56. Nazi Germany did not systematically exterminate Jews during World War II.
Definitely true – Jews in concentration camps died of starvation and disease, mostly in the latter part of the war.
57. The government hires people to spread pro-government propaganda on internet forums.
Definitely true
58. 5G technology is a significant health risk to the population.
Probably true – See The Invisible Rainbow by Arthur Firstenberg (summary here).
59. JFK was assassinated, but there was more than a single shooter.
Definitely false – Assassination was faked.
60. There is no such thing as pathogenic viruses.
Definitely false – I don’t buy terrain theory as a paradigm shift that can replace virology. See A Midwestern Doctor’s take on terrain theory, or my own (oppositional) take on vaccines and the discussion in the comments.
61. Crisis actors are involved in faking terrorist attacks or shootings that are promoted as real events by the media.
Definitely true – see Sandy Hook, Boston Bombing, etc.
62. IQ tests are not a valid measurement of intelligence.
Definitely false – They are the best substantiated tool in psychometrics, and are broadly valid, with the caveats that they have of limited accuracy above ~140 IQ, you can study the kinds of questions they ask to inflate your score, etc.
63. Economic downturns and depressions are deliberately engineered by central banks.
Neutral or unsure – Recently I’ve been more convinced by J.J. Couey’s position that it could only exist as an infectious clone (recombinant virus) with no pandemic potential, rather than a zoonotic virus or virus created by serial passage and gain of function. Irrespective of the existence of any putative virus there was no pandemic caused by a particularly virulent pathogen that went around the world: see Denis Rancourt’s work on all-cause mortality.
70. Many well known figures who discuss conspiracies or criticize the government are actually working for the government themselves.
Definitely true – Alex Jones is an obvious example.
71. Many members of the US ruling class worship Satan and participate in Satanic rituals.
Probably false – I don’t deny the spirit cooking or the picture of Marina Abramovic and Jacob Rothschild in front of a painting of Lucifer, but I think the overt Satanism is misdirection; an act. I agree with Miles’ thesis on this point that he presents in his paper on Kabbalah and the occult.
72. Water is fluoridated for reasons that have nothing to do with dental health.
73. Jews are vastly over-represented in positions of power and influence around the world.
Definitely true
74. Most famous people have Jewish ancestry.
Definitely true – See Miles’ oeuvre.
75. Much fewer than 6 million Jews died during the Holocaust.
Definitely true – Based on their own numbers Hitler would have needed to kill every single Jew in Western and Central Europe along with Poland and Romania to kill 6 million. World almanacs from the time period do not substantiate a large drop in the Jewish population. The specific ‘6 million’ figure was also often used in allegations of Jewish persecution prior to WWII, for instance the June 6, 1915 edition of the New York Sun. This document lists 200 cases from 1900-1945.
76. HIV does not cause AIDS.
Definitely true – See Inventing the AIDS Virus by Peter Duesberg or Virus Mania by Torsten Engelbrecht, Claus Köhnlein and Samantha Bailey
77. Global elites are in contact with intelligent, non-human species.
Definitely false – Controlled opposition narrative. See for instance here (although I don’t trust this guy either).
78. Certain public personalities are really simulated people created by CGI and artificial intelligence.
Definitely false – Someone tried to argue that Edward Snowden wasn’t a real person once and I found it very unconvincing. This kind of thing may become possible in several years with generative AI models.
79. There are large differences in personality, intelligence, and behaviour between different races.
Definitely true – See all research into human biodiversity. Evolution does not stop above the neck. I should have phrased this question as “There are important differences in intelligence, personality, and behaviour between different races”
80. Transsexuality and homosexuality are being deliberately promoted by Western governments.
Definitely true – This should be obvious to anyone paying attention.
Definitely false – Faked his death and probably went to South America
83. Most billionaires worldwide are Jews.
Definitely true – Even mainstream Jewish publications admit that 30% of the Forbes 100 richest people are American Jews. This obviously does not include Jews hiding their Jewish ancestry, which would almost certainly bring the number far above 50%.
84. It is known that aliens exist and this information is being hidden from the public.
Definitely false
85. Black holes, as commonly portrayed in pop-science media, do not exist.
My score on the beliefs scale was 2.84/4. (The highest score on the beliefs scale was 3.58)
Process of Writing the Survey and Report
You may notice that I am pretty confident in my answers – most of them are “Definitely” one way or the other. That’s because I wrote the questions, and I have had the time to give them each a fair bit of thought. If I remain unsure about any of them it’s because I don’t think there is enough data to decide, or it would be too time consuming at the moment to do the original research I feel necessary to answer the question. All the same I think the questions represent a good overview of conspiracist thought as it exists today. There are some questions that I was not able to include in the survey, either because they were cut for length or because I thought of them after the survey had already been made. I list them below with what my answer would be, along with where I think they would load on the survey factors:
The CIA was or is involved in dosing civilians with drugs like LSD without their knowledge or consent.
Definitely true – See MK Ultra. Probably loads on Generic Conspiracy.
Intelligence agencies use brainwashing or mind control techniques to turn people into assassins.
Probably false – I think Project Monarch is either misdirection or a cover for something less sexy than Manchurian candidates. Probably loads on Aliens & Satanism.
There was once a nation called Tartaria that has been erased from history.
Definitely false – Controlled opposition narrative. See Miles’ paper. Probably loads on Aliens or Flat Earth.
The historical chronology has been altered; it is not really the year 2022.
Definitely false – See Miles’ response to Fomenko. I was once intrigued by this idea for a week or two. Probably loads on Aliens or Flat Earth.
There used to be a worldwide civilization that was destroyed in a calamity thousands of years ago.
Unsure – History has definitely been falsified but there is too much garbage out there for me to bother sifting through. Probably loads on Aliens.
Pornography is promoted as a means of rendering men passive.
Definitely true – Probably loads on generic or Jewish conspiracy.
The identity politics movement was created in order to derail the Occupy Wall Street protests.
Definitely true – See this infographic. Probably loads on generic conspiracy.
White Supremacy is not a real threat to America.
Definitely true – We are now at the point where the ADL is calling “It’s Okay To Be White” a hate symbol. Plus all the promoted white supremacists are feds. Probably loads on Jewish conspiracy.
Some celebrities are really transsexuals that pass as the opposite sex.
Probably false – This may be true in very rare cases, although there aren’t any I would endorse, and I think “transvestigations” in general is ridiculous and adds nothing to our understanding of conspiracy theory. Not sure where this loads.
Many famous womanizers of history were really homosexuals.
Probably true – Although I’m not convinced they were all necessarily exclusively homosexual. See Miles’ paper on Henry VIII for the last two points. Probably loads on fakery.
Gematria (assigning numerical values to words or phrases) can be used to search for hidden messages in text like books or news articles.
Probably false – Again I won’t rule out that this is true in some cases but I think in general gematria is just a practice in confirmation bias. There are so many different ways to do it you can just choose whatever one gives you the result that you want. I have never seen an analysis using gematria I that was remotely reliable. Probably loads on aliens.
Numerological markers with secret meetings are often deliberately inserted into documents like news articles.
Definitely true – Mostly the numbers 18 and 33. Inserting numerology is also much easier than inserting gematria, although I still wouldn’t take it as proof of anything – moreso a clue that something may warrant a closer look. Not sure where this loads.
Matter is not composed of atoms.
Definitely false – Is there even a real competing theory here? Probably loads on flat Earth.
Events are inserted into media like films and music to prepare the public for those events to occur in real life (i.e. predictive programming).
Definitely true – But it’s more about seeding concepts into the public consciousness than forewarning about very specific events. This is the point of shows like Altered Carbon, or of futurist writers like Neal Stephenson (who was chief futurist for an augmented reality company). This also goes back to past writers like H.G. Wells (who wrote The New World Order and The World Set Free with nuclear weapons) and Aldous Huxley. At the same time, the predictive programming in The Simpsons is amusing (if subject to confirmation bias). Probably loads on generic or aliens.
I enjoyed writing the questions; actually making the survey was kind of a pain. I considered creating a web page and self-hosting it to collect the data, but I figured this problem had been solved before and it didn’t make sense to reinvent the wheel. I didn’t want to use Google Forms because a. I didn’t want Google to have the data, and b. I figured other truthers would feel similarly and not want to fill it out. I eventually decided to use Psytoolkit, which was designed specifically for creating psychological instruments. It had some annoying faults, like not being able to edit the survey formatting after making it live, but oh well. Speaking of, there were a couple problems with the survey – like the fact that the Likert scale reverses after the first set of questions – that were the unfortunate product of me trying this for the first time. Despite this, I think the survey itself more or less worked.
I was inspired to conduct the survey after I learned about Brotherton et al.’s 2013 work in creating a Generic Conspiracists Belief Scale. I took the 15 question test and got 3.4/5, despite the fact that I would say I am deeper down the conspiracy rabbit hole than 99.9% of the population. But since I think that aliens are a hoax I get 1/5 on that factor. That made me want to create my own scale fixing some of the issues I noticed in the GCBS, and so I wrote my own scale with the above questions. I later designed the analysis using Brotherton et al.’s paper as a guide for the kind of metrics I should include.
I started trying to collect data by posting on Reddit and communities.win, specifically the conspiracy-inclined subcommunities. Unfortunately – understandably – truthers don’t tend to like people collecting any kind of information about them, and I got a lot of responses like this: “It is my belief that surveys are just honeypots made to harm us.” I specifically didn’t collect the IP addresses of respondents, even though that would have made it easier to filter out multiple responses, for this reason. I ended up posting the survey on a wide variety of platforms over a couple months in order to get enough responses. I also posted it on some forums where I participate where it was well received (thankfully, since I was somewhat apprehensive about doing so). Ultimately I started writing the report at 191 respondents because I was tired of trying to get any more, despite the fact that you want 3-10 times more respondents than questions for a factor analysis.
Writing the data took a long time, since I had to learn all the frequentist statistics relevant to the study. I had a good background in Bayesian statistics from university but no formal training in scientific statistics (e.g. ANOVAs, chi-squared tests, cronbach’s alpha, etc.) Factor analysis as a technique is also full of ad hoc decisions based on your particular theoretical model and your data, so it took some time to figure out the best approach. It really feels like more of an art than a science; people have written decision guides advising you on how to perform your factor analysis. I used an oblique rotation because I expected the extracted factors to be correlated, and I chose oblimin over promax because it produced more coherent factors with max factor loadings < 1. I was tempted to drop the climate change factor because it seemed to be a collection of leftover questions with no theoretical basis but that felt dishonest so I left it in.
The analysis that took the longest was the partial ordering of the two streams of conspiracist ideation. I spent a couple days seeing if there was any existing test to demonstrate that for two random variables A and B, B is greater than or equal to A. I considered about 10 different techniques, asked Stack Overflow and ChatGPT, but couldn’t find any non-symmetric metrics I was looking for. If I knew more information theory I probably could have found something, but I ended up inventing my own. It feels a little handwavey but I think it reflects the data that I collected.
Once I figured out all the graphs I needed writing the paper wasn’t too bad. I based the layout of the paper on the Brotherton et al. 2013 Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Survey paper. Every paper on conspiracy theories starts by talking about how conspiracy theories are baseless and dangerous, but I was careful to phrase everything in a neutral manner, neither saying that conspiracy theories are true nor false. Obviously I think many conspiracy theories are correct so neutrality was my compromise between my position and the standard position in academic psychology. Getting the paper typeset correctly was the most annoying part, and I ended up just writing it in Libre Office, exporting it to HTML, fixing the layout of the figures, pasting in the raw HTML of the factor loading tables, and then using Chrome to print it to PDF.
Summary of Survey Results
The intention of the survey was twofold: to test whether trust in institutions and authority figures correlated with belief in conspiracies, and to determine what kinds of conspiracist beliefs cluster together. My hypothesis going in was that trust in authority would strongly correlate (negatively) with belief in conspiracies, and that there would be several clusters of conspiracist belief, a religious cluster (believes the elites are satanic, denies evolution, etc.), a “controlled opposition narratives” cluster (believes in adrenochrome harvesting and reptilians, etc.), a flat Earth cluster (rejects all conclusions of mainstream science), a fakery cluster (believes serial killers, nuclear bombs, the moon landing, etc. were all fake), and a “right wing” cluster (believes Jews run the world, race realism, IQ research, etc.) The results aligned relatively closely with my hypotheses.
The correlation between the questions assessing attitudes towards elites and beliefs about conspiracies correlated at 0.8, which means 64% of the variation in belief in conspiracies can be attributed to how much you trust the elites. I wanted to investigate this because mainstream research on conspiracies tries to come up with asinine reasons why people believe conspiracy theories and studiously avoids the fact that people mostly believe conspiracy theories because they recognize that the ruling elites are duplicitous liars and don’t believe them or their rubberstamped narratives. Of course most academics are scholar-bureaucrats working within the confines of propaganda narratives on behalf of the elite so they wouldn’t be in a hurry to point that out.
Factor analysis was used to extract the clusters of beliefs from the survey results. Factor analysis works under the assumption that given a set of questions, the responses to certain subsets of questions will all be correlated. The correlated groups of questions can then be assumed to arise from the same latent (not directly measurable) variable. For instance, if a set of questions like “I often feel sad” and “I have high levels of anxiety” and “I am easily stressed” all correlate together when answered by many people, then the responses can be theorized to arise from a latent “neuroticism” factor. This is how personality is measured in psychology.
Based on statistical analysis of the data set, it was broken into six factors. Four of the factors (Aliens & Satanism, Flat Earth, Fakery, and Jewish Conspiracies) mapped very closely onto the factors I had hypothesized. The other two factors were the Generic Conspiracies factor and the Climate Change factor. Furthermore it was shown that there were two paths of conspiracy belief you could go down, starting with belief in generic conspiracies and conspiracies relating to climate change. The first was the aliens and satanism path, and the second was the Jewish conspiracy -> Fakery -> Flat Earth path. This wasn’t something I was necessarily looking for or expecting to find, but I noticed it after looking at the 2D embeddings and then the factor scatter plots. It also maps onto the stages I went through in waking up: I learned about the generic and Jewish conspiracy factors first, and then the fakery factor later, and was never convinced by or interested in the aliens or flat Earth factors.
The factors produced by a factor analysis are ordered by the amount of variance they explain in the data set. So, the first factor explains the most variance, and the last factor explains the least variance. The first factor extracted was the generic conspiracy factor, which explained a little over double the variance of the last factor. It’s not particularly interesting. The first 13 most endorsed questions all come from this factor.
The second factor extracted I called the aliens and Satanism factor, since the first several questions had to do with those two topics. I called it that for the sake of neutrality – really I think it’s the mainstream conspiracy/QAnon/controlled opposition narrative factor. Basically every question on this factor I consider to be misdirection (some obviously so, like the elites being reptilians, which was the third-least endorsed question on the survey with only 18/176 respondents agreeing with it). The only two I think are legitimate are the 5G health risk and chemtrails questions, although there is lots of BS on those two topics as well, and in any case those questions loaded only weakly on the factor. I think the constellation of beliefs characterized by this factor is probably held by a plurality of all self-identified conspiracy theorists. All the questions involving the paranormal load onto this factor, and the reason this factor is so seductive is because all the most exotic narratives (aliens, Satanism, living in a simulation, etc.) come from it. If you are someone who scores highly on this factor I suggest reading some of the sources I link above in the first section, and recognizing that the elites use these kinds of thrilling narratives to distract from more mundane but enlightening points of view.
I will skip the flat Earth factor for now. The fourth factor that was extracted I called the Jewish conspiracy factor. A mainstream academy study would probably call it the antisemitism factor, but that’s a political choice and I don’t use that word once in the actual paper. This factor basically just represents how much you believe Jews are disproportionately wealthy and powerful, and how much you think the Holocaust was exaggerated or faked. As it turns out those two questions are pretty tightly correlated, at least in this sample. I guess that’s why Jewish organizations are so quick to shut down the “antisemitic canard” that Jews are overrepresented in positions of power. This factor also has elements of race realism, with the question about race differences in intelligence and behaviour being the only other question that loads strongly here. This is the only factor that predicts belief in the legitimacy of IQ tests (see race realism again): IQ tests being a valid measurement of intelligence loads negatively on the generic, flat earth, and fakery factors.
The fifth factor that was extracted was the fakery factor. This is where I personally fall, and I don’t claim to be unbiased writing this (clearly). The factor mainly has to do with faked events and faked deaths, all questions concerning which load onto this factor with the exception of the moon landing question, which loaded slightly higher on flat Earth. This factor is the least correlated with the aliens factor, being a third option opposed to both the mainstream and conventional conspiracy narratives. Instead of crazy stories about Satanic rituals and Project Monarch assassinations you just get that it was all faked, pretty much every single time. It’s not as sexy, and it’s also harder to reconcile with the mainstream narrative, at least until you get enough data points to put a new coherent narrative together. This factor also hints at the elites being a large family of related (Jewish) individuals who control America, Russia, and China behind the scenes. This factor represents radical skepticism about historical narratives (though not necessarily the general arc of history) and the extent to which things actually transpired the way that historians tell us they did.
We now come back to flat Earth, which was the third factor extracted. This factor extends the historical skepticism of the fakery factor to a skepticism about anything not directly observable. Neither the shape of the Earth, the existence of viruses, the existence of dinosaurs, nor the action of DNA is directly observable: these things must all be inferred from scientific evidence. If you can’t collect or interpret any of this evidence yourself, and you believe that the establishment is lying all the time about everything, you may end up here. I consider this a form of scientific anti-realism which “applies chiefly to claims about the non-reality of “unobservable” entities such as electrons or genes, which are not detectable with human senses.” (Wikipedia). I don’t claim that this philosophical explanation would apply to all flat Earthers; there are flat Earthers who hold those beliefs on the basis of biblical exegesis. However, I do think anti-realism based on a fundamental mistrust of the scientific establishment is the epistemological foundation of this factor. People who accept terrain theory may be offended to be lumped in with an obvious discredit-by-assocation psyop like flat Earth, and I have some sympathy for that since there are some aspects of terrain theory that are valuable and defensible, but the most extreme forms of it (e.g. viruses flat out don’t exist, period) are wrong and put it in the same discredit by association bucket.
The last factor extracted was the climate change factor, which I named after the first three questions loading on it. It didn’t appear to have any coherent theoretical basis; I assume it was just accounting for leftover variance that was not explained by the previous factors. I was surprised that the question about evolution loaded onto this factor, since I don’t think it’s true in general that disbelief in climate change is particularly correlated with disbelief in evolution. The biggest predictor for disbelief in evolution was religiosity, with 26% of atheists and agnostics endorsing that man did not evolve from apes, compared to 58% of the religious sample. Several questions on this factor seemed to reflect young Earth creationism (Jesus was real, man did not evolve from apes, and the Earth is much younger than 4.5 billion years) which has a coherent theoretical basis but no clear link to climate change. Overall I don’t think this factor can tell us much.
Pretty much every academic research paper on conspiracy theory ends with a discussion about how we can use what we’ve learned to prevent people from believing conspiracy theories. When I was soliciting replies to the survey there were a number of people who were concerned that the data I was collecting was going to be used against conspiracy theorists in some way, and I countered by saying this data is important for helping people not get sucked into QAnon or flat Earth-like misdirection narratives. So, I’m going to end this by discussing how we can make sure people believe the correct conspiracy theories. I think this starts by having a rigorous definition of what conspiracy theory as a field of inquiry is, which I laid out in a previous essay. There I lay out how conspiracy theory is a field of sociology that investigates how elites use deception to exploit the masses. Once you have that, and an understanding of the factor structure of conspiracy landscape, it should be easier to navigate towards the truth.
Kanye West has been making the news recently for making true and verifiable statements that Jews control the media. Of course, the truth is not allowed in the media, especially not if it implicates Jews, so Kanye was promptly deplatformed by Twitter, Instagram, JPMorgan, CAA, and Adidas, immediately proving his point. Imagine that happening if he had said white people control the media. Israel’s PM is “extremely pleased” with the response. Many people in the alternative sphere are praising Kanye for bringing greater attention to the issue of Jewish control of the media. Look at Reddit [1], [2] for example. What many seem to be missing, in their excitement that someone is finally talking about this issue, is that this is all scripted.
While most people think of Kanye as an artist, he is really first and foremost a tool of culture creation1. A tool developed and wielded by the very people he is now ostensibly speaking out against. Regardless of how talented one is (if you consider Kanye talented) no one can acquire the level of fame and wealth that he has without massive industry-wide promotion. Who was responsible for that promotion? Kanye himself will tell you: Jews. Why was he promoted? To sell the hip hop lifestyle to blacks. The hip hop subculture was created from the ground up by the music industry (in cooperation with the CIA) to promote drugs, sex, and gang mentality in the black community. A kind of “sex, drugs, and rock & roll” targeted at black people. Kanye mentions in his latest interview with Lex Fridman that the CIA has been responsible for pushing crack cocaine onto black communities and breaking up families via incarceration, but he neglects to mention the propagandistic influence he and his genre of music have had.
Then there is his marriage to Kim Kardashian. Kim is another premier tool of culture creation, despite having nothing going for her except elite parents, photoshop, and amateur porn. She is “famous for being famous” which is another way of saying she is famous because there is propaganda value in keeping her in the public eye. Through her various media appearances she sells many of the worst aspects of modern culture: consumerism, plastic surgery, “influencer” culture, and being a vacuous bimbo. Her entire family has been widely involved in all kinds of psyops and cultural devolution, from her father serving as O.J. Simpson’s attorney in his trial to her step father Bruce (Caitlyn) Jenner’s role as transgender public icon. It is no accident that Kim and Kanye’s marriage was the subject of widespread media coverage from the beginning (and it only ended this year). Many people surely looked up to them as role models both individually and as a couple, and one wonders if they wouldn’t have been better served having no role models at all.
With that background on Kanye we can look at his interview with Lex Fridman. He says some true things, which may endear him to people who are looking for someone – anyone – to say these things in a public forum, but overall it’s a rambling disaster. Just take a look at the comments on the Lex Fridman subreddit (where the Kanye interview is the 3rd top post of all time, and the top upvoted podcast by a wide margin):
These were all highly upvoted posts, and regardless of whether or not the commenters are sockpuppets, they illustrate the desired response to this interview. Kanye comes off as manic, which does not serve to increase the audience’s confidence in the valid points he does make. In fact, putting partial truth in the mouth of a crazy person is a classic controlled opposition gambit. It is an excellent way to make people dismiss distasteful truths as the ravings of a lunatic. Even his point about Bambi and the CIA has a nugget of truth to it, which is that in a society that has been taught to be consumerist, negative emotions are assuaged through consumption, leading to increased profits for business. This was something that was discovered by Edward Bernays in the 20s when he developed the idea that the masses could be controlled by stimulating their desires and then sating them through consumerism. The problem is that the way he presents this point comes off as nuts to anyone who doesn’t already agree and know the history, especially since Bambi came out in 1942, five years before the CIA was formed (which was noted in the Reddit comments).
But wait, who is Lex Fridman, and why would he be interviewing Kanye? In one sentence, Lex Fridman is the mouthpiece of the technocracy for the science and technology crowd. He’s a machine learning researcher, and his podcast evolved out of an MIT course he taught on Artificial General Intelligence that featured guest lectures from prominent figures in computing. He is funded by DARPA. He is Jewish, as are many of his guests. In March of 2020 he was shilling for masks (although he has since made the YouTube video private) as part of the #masks4all movement led by Jeremy Howard, who is himself Jewish and part of the World Economic Forum Global AI Council. Howard has been a guest on Lex’s podcast, and Lex even appears as a co-author on a January 2021 paper promoting the use of cloth masks. He has repeatedly supported the vaccines as well. He has had Jewish hedge fund manager and physics propagandist Eric Weinstein on his podcast four separate times. Most tellingly, though, Lex has interviewed some of the most powerful members of the global elite, including Albert Bourla (CEO of Pfizer, Jewish) and Stephen Schwarzman (CEO of Blackstone, Jewish). He is so trusted by the ruling class that in 2021 the CEO of Pfizer felt comfortable sitting down with him for a 1-on-1 interview that left commenters on YouTube saying “Lex excels at speaking with good faith actors. Lex is not great at interviewing the opposite, because he is a bit too trusting. So it seams he doesn’t push back when clearly the audience is yelling at the screen because an easy question was missed.”
There is no way that Lex would interview Kanye if he was actually a loose cannon taking aim at his former handlers. So why did the interview take place? Keep in mind Lex’s audience is composed of high IQ scientists and engineers; he didn’t interview anyone from popular culture until podcast 55 when he interviewed comedian Whitney Cummings. This was precisely the target audience for this propaganda interview. Such an audience is more likely than average to notice patterns – for instance Jewish overrepresentation in the media – and it was decided that a psyop needed to be run against this group.2 This interview specifically and the uproar over Kanye in general serve two purposes: to make the ideas themselves (though true) unpalatable, and to convince anyone who may be swayed by those ideas that if they ever express them they will be ruined. In the latter case the events with Kanye are a continuation of the fake Alex Jones trials where another prominent controlled opposition agent pretends to be sued into oblivion for daring to suggest that the media is lying.
You may object to my argument that Kanye is controlling the opposition, and point to how black people are now ostensibly realizing how they have been manipulated by the Jewish establishment. At least if randomtweets are anything to go by. But you can’t control the opposition without telling some of the truth. There is always a risk that attempting to control the opposition will backfire and just wake people up more, but I have to think that Lex Fridman’s handlers had considered that possibility before having him interview Kanye. Even while admitting some truths Kanye reinforces the idea that George Floyd’s death wasn’t faked, and he apparently takes the Holocaust narrative at face value.
People need to stop assuming that people who tell a little bit of the truth in public are then on their side. Whenever someone rich and famous starts telling you what you want to hear your first instinct should be that they are conning you in some way. Especially if it’s shit you already know, like that Jews control the media. Listen to them if you want, and take the good parts and leave the bad. Acknowledge if they told the truth or did something good. But don’t believe that they are really on your side. Don’t start cheering them on and investing emotionally. Focus on what you are doing to resist, and let Kanye do his little performance. After all, that’s what he is: a performer.
2 Lex has played the role of intellectual gatekeeper in the past as well, for example when he interviewed Bret Weinstein (brother of aforementioned Eric Weinstein) on the COVID lab leak hypothesis. By the time of this interview (January 2021) many intelligent people in Lex’s audience had surely noticed the inconsistencies in the COVID narrative, and were looking for answers. Enter Lex and Weinstein to deflect towards institutional failure and malincentives, rather than the planning of institutions like the World Economic Forum, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, or Rockefeller Foundation.
Humanity’s descent into the abyss continues unabated in Quebec, where premier François Legault has ordered that everyone must wear a mask in indoor spaces, starting July 18th, without any actual legislation to that effect. The province has decided to force compliance by leaning on business owners to enforce the premier’s executive order, and has hired 100 inspectors to go around the province, issuing fines of $400 to $6000 to recalcitrant businesses. Since there is no law passed by a legislature, this is simply an overreach by the executive branch, and a bluff. Unfortunately, the facts on the ground are that many businesses are allowing themselves to be controlled by unconstitutional orders, and many are also unaware of the exemptions that exist for those that cannot wear the mask.
By putting the onus on businesses, the government expedites the cultural change by intensifying social pressure to wear the mask. To most business owners, the mask mandate becomes not only a question of their feeling of safety, but of putting themselves at financial risk by allowing the maskless into their stores. Even those businesses that don’t see the necessity of masks will be incentivized to enforce mask wearing if their livelihood comes under threat.
Since media sensationalism and misrepresented science have manufactured consent for obligatory mask wearing, some regions in Ontario are now requiring masks on the basis of public polling. Other polling in the US, France, Germany, the UK, and Sweden indicates that the average citizen believes that two orders of magnitude more people have died from COVID than the official numbers show. As of July 27th, the average American polled believes that a full 9% of the US population has already died from COVID. So not only are policies being implemented based on consent being manufactured by the media, those who support these policies, on average, don’t have the slightest clue what’s going on, even by official standards. The massive push to normalize mask wearing is the result of the most prolonged and widespread propaganda campaign in history. As Dr. Matthew Oughton, infection disease specialist at McGill University and a physician at Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital puts it, “it boils down to trying to change someone’s habits and a society’s culture, which isn’t always easy.” Perhaps that’s why millions of man-hours of propaganda and marketing have been devoted to cementing this cultural change?
Make no mistake, the ubiquitous COVID scaremongering campaign by the media is a deliberate attempt at forcing contrived and pernicious changes to cultures worldwide. It is a direct assault on the normative commons – the system of values and cultural norms that everyone is ensconced by while existing in a society. It is a common property, since as inhabitants of a culture we defend our cultural norms against outside forces, and adhere to them at a cost to ourselves. The damage to our normative commons should be prosecuted in a court of law (though that won’t happen) and reparations should be sought from those responsible. Monetary indemnities will not do anything to repair the cultural damage, but at a minimum those pushing this narrative from positions of influence in media and government should be banished from the society and removed of any means to influence the society in the future.
Now that masks have entered the culture as an everyday garment, it demonstrates a visible compliance to social norms. This is unlike some other moral frameworks, like honour systems, where action in accordance with norms is not always visible. No more can those who oppose masks “think as they like, but behave like others” without compromising their ideals. Also notable is the different psychological effect the mask has on those who promote mask wearing and those who resist it. For those who condone masks, a mask is calming – an essential talisman ensuring their safety. For those who oppose, it is a muzzle – a degrading symbol of their lack of bodily autonomy.
A typical narrative justification
Since the wearing of masks has become a moral issue, people have begun inventing narrative justifications for masks. Wearing a mask is compared to wearing a seatbelt, or not smoking indoors, or stopping at a stop sign. However, the comparison is specious, since a mask is not like any of those things. Firstly, it is not like a seatbelt, since a seatbelt is intended to protect the individual, whereas the mainstream refrain recommending masks is that they are needed to protect others. Even so, I think people should not be required to wear a seatbelt, as long as they assume responsibility for any avoidable injuries that result. In general, the state should not require or prohibit any actions as long as the consequences are not externalized to the public. That is, if the taxpayer is not on the hook to pay for injuries that result from reckless behaviour, and that behaviour does not cause collateral damage, it should not be criminalized. Individuals must be allowed to take risks and learn from the positive and negative consequences of their actions. To that end, I would gladly waive my right to free medical treatment, if I ever were to get COVID, if I could ignore any and all orders pertaining to the response. No social distancing, no masks, no lines outside stores, no booking a time slot at the gym. Things as they were in what rags like The Atlantic are nauseatingly calling “The Before Time”.
Secondly, the comparison between masks and smoking is not apt, since smoking is taking a voluntary action that pollutes the area around you, and imposes externalities on anyone in that area. This is different with masks, as it is not any particular action that necessitates the mask, but merely existing as a human in a space. Since the mask isn’t tied to any particular activity (say, coughing) for which it is required, it pathologizes the mere fact of being human. The fact that asymptomatic transmission of COVID is, as admitted by the WHO, extraordinarily rare, makes this even more egregious. The myth of asymptomatic transmission is what the mainstream uses to justify masks for all, ignoring that we have a behavioural immune system that has evolved for millions of years to protect us from harmful pathogens. Wearing a strip of fabric over your face is a risible intervention when compared with systems evolved over millennia. Or when compared with literally anything else.
Thirdly, masks are not comparable to obeying traffic signs. When you are driving a car, you are not the same as a human operating on evolved systems and cultural programming. Driving a car exchanges the human ecosystem for the traffic ecosystem, where you are one agent on the road out of hundreds, and missteps can lead to immediate injury or death. Humans have no specific adaptations to facilitate car driving, and the road network requires a high degree of predictability and legibility to function safely. Since driving is an elective action, that humans have no predisposition to, using potentially lethal technology in a distributed setting, it is reasonable and necessary to require drivers to stop at street lights. The argument can always be made that certain traffic protocols are unnecessary or dangerous, and I believe many stop signs could be removed with no loss of safety, but the general case that certain behaviours are required while driving is entirely reasonable. The argument does not, however, apply to masks.
Now that the public in Canada is largely on board with masks, the question is how long they will remain commonplace. I would say… indefinitely1 (or until popular revolt). The elites are experts in the creation of markets, wherein they can use their control of the media to create demand for a product, and then use their control of industry to fill that demand, generating profits orders of magnitude greater than the initial outlay for marketing. Hats have declined as a fashion object in the modern day, so the elites have provided a new, quasi-mandatory facial garment. As a woman said to me recently, “masks are the new lipstick”. Masks also serve to reinforce that ‘something is happening’, when for the vast majority of people the coronavirus (should it exist) has been felt only indirectly, in media reports and in the restriction of freedoms. It also allows the elites to look out on their beaten-down proletariat to observe how many of the serfs are demonstrating compliance that day. Since they apparently gratify themselves by subjugating a populace they view as little better than cattle, it probably makes them feel all warm and fuzzy.
1 Some might say that during the Spanish Flu, masks were required in some locations, but that this ended after the pandemic. Why would it be different this time? The biggest relevant change since the 1910’s is the level of media saturation. In 1918, the television had not yet been invented, much less the internet. Radio was still being broadcast in Morse code. The success of the mandatory mask program is in large part due to the fact that almost every single person is plugged into the media at all waking hours, where they receive a constant stream of COVID propaganda.
Then there is the position in the historical chronology. The Spanish Flu began towards the end of World War I, when worldwide chaos had already peaked with the war, and would decline for several years thereafter. The peoples of the world had been thoroughly brutalized, and it would be another two decades before the ruling class could orchestrate another war. Compare that to the present moment, when chaos has been building continuously over years, and economic depressions, foot shortages, and wars, civil and otherwise, are on our doorstep. The coronavirus will not be the denouement. When the commercial incentive is included in the analysis, with outrageously expensive designer masks satisfying the ‘need’ for ultra-conspicuous consumption, I find it unlikely that masks are going anywhere anytime soon.
Added 30/08/2020: Further support for my thesis can be found by looking at the history of mask wearing in Korea. Prior to 2008, masks were only worn by sick people when out in public, and only occasionally. In 2008, a member of Korea’s most popular boy band posted a series of selfies while wearing a mask from the Sakun streatwear brand. The trend was picked up by social media influencers, and quickly created a fashion trend among teenagers. Having achieved mainstream acceptance, the 2009 swine flu and 2015 MERS events allowed the medical industry to reinforce and solidify the cultural change. Today in Korea, mask wearing for protection from pollution or viruses, or other reasons, is a cultural mainstay. So, we can see media and pop culture being used to create a market where none existed before, and medical propaganda used to reify and expand that market. Today with the coronavirus psyop, Gyeonggi, the most populous province of Korea with over 13 million inhabitants, has issued an ‘administrative order’ requiring masks to be worn at all times in public, even when outside. Clearly the earlier initiation of the cultural shift has allowed for more consent to the manufactured among Koreans for mandatory mask wearing. It remains to be seen whether cultures that did not have a decade-long evolution of mask wearing customs will adopt the change as zealously as Korea, where 19% of the population reported wearing masks prior to COVID, and 89% wear them today.
Overdue Revolutions 
