47 Comments
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Jun 29, 2021Liked by Edward Snowden

Good article, and agree with the overall theme. But it belittles many Truths and truthseekers while elevating self. Truth isn’t partisan and is fundamentally Simple. Just my opinion. ❤️✊

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Jul 1, 2021Liked by Edward Snowden

If one defines a "conspiracy" as a secret agreement to harm others, then the dichotomy between conspiratorial elites and popular consent doesn't hold. Popular consent itself is used as a weapon for legitimizing the infliction of harm on a vast scale, often directed against the vast majority of people in a democratic society.

It is precisely for this reason that the engineering of democratic consent is a major preoccupation of exploitative elites. Secrecy not only shields the conspirators from accountability for the harms that follow, it also sustains the illusion that the victims did it to themselves. The fuss elites make against "conspiracy theories" (even the false ones) is that they threaten this illusion.

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Jul 1, 2021Liked by Edward Snowden

Found your substack via your Guardian article. I will subscribe.

Re. this topic... Your analysis is very compelling and helpful, but I still think that the main problem most of us have is... Who are you gonna believe/trust? Which set of offered "facts" is reliable? How can we ever place our trust in an information source with any sense of assurance?

We cannot be expert in every field of knowledge. In the end trusting anyone is a kind of "leap of faith" (and I'm an agnostic!). I think we're doomed to uncertainty and relying on hope.

Thanks for taking your heroic stand for the truth as you see it. You have sacrificed much and it is appreciated.

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Jun 30, 2021Liked by Edward Snowden

Hi Edward, good article. I must say that in my adolescence I read a lot of conspiracy theories which culminated with the collapse of my belief system (as some one said: "If you shake someone's belief system you shake his world") . But I was able to recover from that and see those conspiracies with more discernment. Someone has to put light in there, and I thank you for trying that in this article. I don't immediately dismiss a conspiracy theory, but also I don't believe all the crap that is out there anymore. It is a balance. If you don't have a lot of facts, it requires patience, experience, intuition to discern the truth from falsehood and to assemble them in a picture. Usually people don't have that skill, maybe because they don't have all the pieces of the puzzle to fit them together. But if we have the facts, all we need is the courage to acknowledge it.

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You hit the nail on the head, on citizenship in a conspiracy society not requiring evaluation of a proposed fact for its truth-value. On a huge issue, our leaders' assertion that the Viet Nam War was mainly to oppose communism, citizens never evaluated it, in relation to hidden consular files (in National Archives) that place US corporations and consuls in Viet Nam from 1880s onward, in resource control enabled by violence. These and later records prove that the 1960s war was an attempt to resume those decades of colonial control for US profit, not to counter communist aggression. To this day, the US public has no mechanism to require the facts for an evaluation.

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Jul 1, 2021Liked by Edward Snowden

You remain one of the most erudite writers I have read on the practice and consequences of international surveillance. Your new work on conspiracy thinking is a logical extension of this. I want to help you to keep writing so I have subscribed. Stay safe.

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There's much to your discussion here in terms of human psychology but "Snowden's working with the Russians/Chinese/facebook" always seemed like the very intentional effort of the American state through their loyal media to discredit you in those early days after you came out and every agency was running around with their heads on fire. That is to say, another conspiracy.

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Jun 30, 2021Liked by Edward Snowden

I applaud your embrace of an expanded view of the notion of “conspiracy”.

While I don’t think you’ve uncovered the whole nature of the metastructure—I think you’ve engaged with a line of inquiry that is promising.

A few wrinkles I might add:

Could this set of circumstances emerge if nobody were a witting participant in any of it?

What if instead of Conspiracy in one of its forms enabling individuals to abdicate from the making of truth-value judgments, Conspiracy Practice and Conspiracy Theory emerge from an interwoven tapestry of narratives formed of the truth-value judgments of a multitude of individuals—and only when examined holistically in the context of the knowns and unknowns of history can we see who made good judgments based on true or false facts and who made bad ones.

Retroactively determining goodness and badness then depends on the conspiracy historian’s axiology—which in turn may be influenced by tribe or adopted to obtain tribal membership, or driven by a search for truth or a desire to have faith in a truth as revealed, and will invariably be variable in all the ways individuals are influenced to different degrees by cognitive biases and logical fallacies.

This is a really long-winded way of driving at an intuition that emerges from the fact that all individuals are the protagonists of their own stories—nobody sets out to be a villain (though some have no doubt cast themselves iconoclastic anti-heroes, which can come pretty close to “bad guy” from other individuals’ perspectives).

What if (absent technology-enabled efforts to manipulate the Human Information Umvelt at scale—a factor that has become more potent over the last century or so and has done so especially dramatically in the last decade) we’re actually observing the net effects of a world full of individuals forming truth-value judgments and trying to save the world in a bunch of different directions, and conspiracy is just how we make sense of all the outcomes in hindsight?

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Jul 1, 2021Liked by Edward Snowden

I admire you for your courage to speak in the things that so many others are in denial about. You are a true leader, one who has humanity and just cause in the reasoning for risks you have taken. I appreciate it , and honestly hope I see the day where you run for president. In my opinion you are exactly what this country needs.

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Jun 30, 2021Liked by Edward Snowden

Thank you Ed -- dark background and white lettering make is somewhat difficult to save as document but -- fairly ease to solve...

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Jun 29, 2021Liked by Edward Snowden

To the epistemic/existential/social triad I would add "nihilist" or even "eschatological" - the idea that the end of the world (or the current social system) is going to end, and that they deserve to be among the chosen few. Conspirationnal FOMO

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Jun 30, 2021Liked by Edward Snowden

The greatest conspiracy is the attack on nature — and that this can succeed without also destroying ourselves #eileencrist

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Jun 29, 2021Liked by Edward Snowden

...and right out of the headlines is a right in the open "In your face progressives!" to derail a Sanders like candidate true conspiracy, nothing hidden, right out in the open: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/us/politics/jim-clyburn-nina-turner.html

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founding

When Snowden quotes Rothbard 💛

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Jun 30, 2021Liked by Edward Snowden

What about conspiracies like "space lasers changing votes", which actually made it to a tribunal? And, what about it when something like that comes up as "supporting fact" to a group that is wrapped in a larger conspiracy as is in this particular example? Shouldn't such an obvious fabricated stance serve to fully end the conspiracy itself from within? It shows that there isn't an actual issue with voting as it is in this case, or tampering with the results, but a full will and desire to tie legal systems up with nonsense, as well as to divide society. I still see people supporting the election conspiracies even after that. My personal take when it is that evident, is that those who keep pushing have alternative agendas; support alternative agendas for perhaps strong, personal reasons. Back in time, Nazis and racists had something in common, for example.

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Welcome

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