To hypothesize this a bit: the older John Birch conspiracy theories were also media-ized. To join in, you felt like you were in a John Buchan novel and/or Hitchcock film.
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Uh I'm pretty sure anti-Semitic conspiracy theories gave a certain group of people a lot of heroic fantasies in the 30s and 40s. Can't blame Tony Stark for everything
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American life is cosplay
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This predates the MCU - would love to see an analysis of how many of these conspiracies are X-Files plots. This latest one certainly is!
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Also, advertisers targeting you based on past web searches to sell you crap is not "1984" or even close.
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" in our age" its always been that way and its not much different than the way people engage with any mass media narratives beyond local news
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what do you think these people were doinghttps://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/a-beating-in-berkeley …
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Definitely seems relevant to the point I've seen a few people make; that the reason QAnon took off when other conspiracy theories didn't is the ARG (alternate reality game) aspect of it.
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That participatory angle.
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This 1964 essay by Richard Hofstadter is still the best overview of the basis of this kind of conspiratorial thinking I've come across, if anyone hasn't seen it yethttps://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/ …
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Oh, for some reason I thought it wasn't paywalled because it was historically significant, but I guess not. Where there's a will, there's a way, however. Anyway, Hoftstadter applies this quotation from Norman Cohn on medieval millennial sects that is super recognizable today:pic.twitter.com/xdpJvpI1a5
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