In the wake of Facebook’s downtime, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, NSA-whistleblower Edward Snowden, and several other prominent figures all chimed in to condemn the spread of “misinformation” on social media platforms.
This points to a simple conspiracy, namely that either the downtime or the response to it were coordinated. It also suggests state powers, especially those in the U.S., have an apparent need to begin controlling the flow of information. And that’s called censorship.
Edward Snowden took it to the extreme yesterday and published an article titled “Apophenia”. This condition, first coined by Nazi psychologist Klaus Conrad, involves people looking for confirmation of their own biases, and then finding said confirmation in random coincidences.
In his blog post, Snowden seems to argue that ordinary people who think they see patterns in information are likely conspiracy theorists, and that proper thinking is best left to professionally trained social theorists. This is Marxism in a nutshell, for it denies people can trust their own senses, and claims that those who try are “victims of institutions”. Where have we heard that before?
Snowden further writes, “The easier it becomes to produce information, the harder that information becomes to consume.” Snowden means to say that when ordinary people—rather than trained experts—start writing blog posts on the internet, the information overload makes it harder for everyone to figure out what is true.
If that sounds like an argument for censoring the internet … well that’s exactly what Snowden is suggesting.
Except, it isn’t so. Snowden falsely assumes that by now limiting the production of information (say, through “fact-checking”), we somehow regain access to higher quality, more truthful information. But once we start censoring information, we don’t somehow get more condensed truths, rather, we get more refined bullshit.
What he really means to say is that common people shouldn’t be allowed to freely use social media anymore, for they may end up believing things that aren’t true. This is a threat to states and state media, for the public’s own opinions drown out the voices of state-sanctioned outlets. The greater diversity of thoughts among the public that social media has enabled diminishes the effectiveness of state propaganda.
I find it odd that Snowden would not see that value in that. Whose side is he on, really?
Snowden next calls human beings “meaning-making machines” and I thought that was a peculiar phrase, for two reasons. One, people are not machines. Does Snowden think of himself as a machine? Does he believe people ought to be programmed like computers? And two, people don’t just make meaning. They more often absorb it or cultivate it slowly.
We are not meaning-making machines, we are sense-absorbing beings.
Basically, Snowden’s grand argument is that the general public cannot be trusted to filter out truths from untruths on their own, and therefore, we ought to somehow start restricting people’s use of social media. Can you smell the internet passport already? Because I smell the internet passport and I wonder if the unvaccinated will still be allowed to have opinions online. We’ll see.
(Apparently, Snowden himself is still allowed to “produce information” on his blog, and he perfectly timed his post for Facebook’s outage, as though he hadn’t already prepared the article long in advance.)
No, people do not seek “order in the chaos”, either, as Snowden claims. This is a typical leftist trope based on the Left’s own inability to understand the populist Right. They mistakenly think right-wingers need order and closure, but we, on the Right, actually excell at dealing with unpredictable circumstances, whereas it is the Left that has the incessant need to make everything predictable.
It is the Left that wants to capture the workings of the whole universe in unchanging scientific formulae and fixed constants. The Left must deny anything they cannot predict. Hence, the Left’s fear and hatred of the unpredictably superior Right, for the man who has the intuitive senses and his wits about him to deal with an unsure future can succeed without calculation.
Snowden: “But we now live in a dystopian digital landscape purpose-built to undermine these capabilities, training us to mistake planned patterns for convenient and even meaningful coincidences.”
What he calls a dystopian digital landscape is his way of saying social media. In other words, he believes social media, which has enabled ordinary people to communicate among themselves for the first time in human history, is the state planner’s worst nightmare, and it has to be stopped, in some form or way, for it apparently trains people to think wrongly. Wrongthink!
We might, for example, mistakenly assume Snowden has been working for the World Economic Forum all this time, now pushing precisely Klaus Schwab’s and George Soros’s policy of dismantling social media.
I don’t deny that a lot of what is said online is nonsense. I say that social media actually provides some people with a way to puncture through the gigantic historical and present State lies and find a glimpse of the truth, some of the time. By removing this tool from the public’s hands, no one will only be able to access true information, for the fact-checkers are employed by the State. Their alleged independence is a sham.
The technocrats have given us, the people, a tool for searching the truth, but it has proven so dangerous to state interests that we may no longer have it. Social media were supposed to help the blue checkmark crowd spread their version of the truth, but now we cannot have a rebellious population finding out alternative truths, for example, that it was the CIA who killed Kennedy, or that Zionists embedded within the U.S. government such as Paul Wolfowitz actually did 9/11?
It’s very, very strange to find Snowden in this camp of what is, in essence, a call for internet censorship, reeling social media outlets back in, and letting the blue-checkmark fact-checking crowd tell us what is true from now on. But there he is, masterminding the new Ministry of Truth.
Snowden believes that people’s access to and participation in information production “has ‘turned back’ and ‘reorganized [the universe]’ to revolve around the individual, performing and corroborating his suspicions.” What he means to say is he believes social media have made people fall for their own preconceptions by finding lucky coincidences here and there. In other words, he is arguing against common people doing their own research, for he believes you have to be a trained expert to do so.
So, I repeat what I stated earlier. Even if this is so, and most people using the internet somehow end up believing nonsense, there are still immeasurable benefits won here, namely that people’s personal conspiracies help drown out the official state-sanctioned versions, thereby diminishing the power of the state (which I think is a good thing), and that some people do actually manage to find out the truth by critically scrutinizing their thinking.
Without stating any facts to back it up, Snowden feels the need to say “Hitler was one of greatest conspiracy theorists of all time.” Really? Which conspiracies did Hitler believe in? The one where he said that the Russian communist leadership under Lenin was majority Jewish? Oh wait, that’s the one Winston Churchill disclosed in his article Zionism versus Bolshevism.
Without the internet, I would never have found that article, and I would never have been able to confirm that, indeed, most of the Soviet Russian leadership under Lenin was majority Jewish, nor would I have found out that Soviet Russia invaded Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic States, and Czechoslovakia before Hitler invaded the Sudetenland of which mainstream historians still say “that’s what started World War 2”.
Meaning, the Soviets invaded Europe first, but no one in the so-called international community batted an eye until the Germans began to defend themselves.
Without the internet, I could not have known that Lenin and Stalin always meant to invade and occupy all of Europe and that neither the French, the British, nor the Poles could have stopped them. But one country might have been able to stop the Russian advance, and despite all lies told about WW2, the Germans really did stop the Russians at Berlin, thereby granting Western Europe almost 75 years of freedom and peace.
The real conspiracy theorists, I believe, are the censors of history who have deliberately warped our understanding of that period. Of course they fear the free internet that lets critical minds painstakingly piece together what really happened.
Snowden: “In fact [Klaus Conrad, who coined the condition of apophenia] ended up being one of the only Nazi scientists to be producing science without rockets, torture, or pentagrams.” I suppose they also invented the transistor radio, cryptography, the Autobahn, consumer cars, Olympic torch relays, particle board, Jägermeister, and the jerrycan.
I jokingly mention these, because Snowden here actually does what he warns others not to do. He relies on his own apophenic nonsense to justify his literal conspiracy theory that says German scientists were only involved in drawing pentagrams and torturing people. That’s not true.
“In an apophenic state,” he continues, “everything’s a pattern.” Yes, but only to machine-minded men like Snowden. Most people worldwide never ever find themselves in an apophenic state, meaning, to them, the use of and access to mass quantities of information still provides them with a healthy glimpse into the inner workings of reality. It generally does not fool people into believing nonsense.
Snowden goes on to complain about “the narcissism of living online.” But most people online aren’t narcisssists. Sure, we all know Joey B. Toonz’s showcase of the TikTok narcissists, but although social media offers narcissists tools to promote themselves, using the internet doesn’t make anyone a narcissist. Now this might be a conspiracy theory, but I do believe Edward Snowden is a narcissist.
According to Snowden, on social media, “you can basically find evidence for any theory you want”. That still doesn’t say most people who go looking for evidence for their theories end up believing them. Most people don’t. The threat of misinformation is highly exaggerated and must stem from another fear, namely the fear people are waking up to the truths that censors of the past so carefully tried to hide.
It also isn’t true that everybody is always looking for evidence for their made-up theories online, since very few people bother to think up their own theories. In fact, it would be beneficial to society if more people started thinking up their own theories rather than not to think at all. Most people, today, still swallow whatever the mainstream media tell them to believe despite having acess to an internet full of insights that might help falsify the mainstream narrative.
The belief that mainstream media and mainstream historians are telling us the truth is a lie.
At this point, Snowden feels like showing his true colors by citing a Jewish conspiracy theorist named Karl Popper, who, for example, believed that the entire canon of Western philosophy since Plato inevitably led to the Holocaust and the Gulags. That’s not true. That’s a conspiracy theory.
Snowden: “Popper believed conspiracy theories are exactly what feeds a totalitarian state like Hitler’s Germany, playing on and playing up the public’s paranoia of The Other. And authoritarians get away with it precisely because their pseudoscientific claims, masquerading as sound research, are designed to be difficult to prove ‘false’ in the heat of the moment, when data sets—not to mention a sense of the historical consequences—are necessarily incomplete.”
Wow, just wow. He’s so whiny he sounds like Greta Thunberg going blah-blah-blah.
For starters, actual science, as we know it, rests on the unproven and unprovable assumption of materialism, which is the belief that everything in existence in the universe is matter in motion, denying the existence of souls, a free will, a spiritual dimension, the existence of minds, and God. That means all science is pseudoscience, since all science is materialist science, which, as of today, has no sound and proven basis in reality.
Materialism has never yet been proven true. So it is certainly not just “the authoritarans” who make up arguments that are difficult to prove ‘false’. It is the entire leftish ideology, too, that itself rests on yet unproven assumptions. However, the assumptions of the Left do seem to be a lot easier to falsify. Make of that what you will.
Snowden then ends his blog post with a typical left-wing anti-fascist trope:
“The conspiracy theorist will believe that institutions can be understood completely as the result of conscious design; and as collectives, he usually ascribes to them a kind of group-personality, treating them as conspiring agents, just as if they were individual men.”
Sure, we already know Snowden sees people as machines. Himself clearly lacking a personality, he cannot grasp the concept of groups of people behaving as an organism. But groups do behave as one, some of the time. Herds of deer, for example, can collectively respond to a threat. They do not respond as isolated individuals.
Snowden believes that people who recognize that biologically related people with shared values and beliefs can act as “groups” are, in his view, “conspiracy theorists”. In other words, he thinks people who see families as families and not as random collections of thrown-together individuals are all right-wing conspiracists.
Snowden also believes that only the social scientist who forces himself to see the world in terms of atomized individuals, just as he sees the physical world as collections of atoms devoid of any soul or mind, is a “public thinker, oriented toward improving society”, whereas the family-oriented men who see the ties between individuals and how they bond individuals together into groups “is a victim of institutions that lie beyond their control.”
Do I need to say more? Notice that I don’t accuse Snowden of having a personality, and that is because communists, as a group, are too single-minded to be suspected of having a personality. They have been regurgitating the exact same unchanging philosophy at least since the revolution of 1917, and they have not progressed their understanding of the world one iota since Karl Marx.
Snowden is a classical communist whose mind is broken, and who wants to put social scientists—pseudoscientists—in charge of our world. Haven’t we learned enough from history to make sure that may never happen again?
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