General Disinformation Conspiracy as a Hobbyists lobbying

Generally, most people who do think subjects in depth and like to do so, are also somewhat more creative than an average person. There are some individuals in this group who happen to be more creative, although inherently of the same intelligence, group and mass culture.

Then there are people who are able to create their own theories, however absurd, but manage to keep those to themselves, never to tell anybody about it. Some write books as science fiction, but some do take advantage of people wanting to believe anything seemingly logical about matters generally ignored by generic scientists, politicans and mass.

This group of people, who do take advantage, often start by writing posts to forums and then watching the thread evolve, usually contributing to it as to feed the fire that got a spark.

I wanted to start a thread about these kind of things, because I personally know a few people who have a hobby of creating weird theories and then feeding those to forums and web sites. They do it for fun, usually even achieving some results. They regard it as a psychological experiment.

There's no goverment, no entity, no social organization, no nothing behind it except the will of these people to do this for fun. It is in some places called trolling, some call it manipulation and some understand it to have something to do with the individual's personal interests.

I do not believe this to be ethical, but I have done such things myself in the past, it once was a hobby commonly shared by many of my friends, and it worked well. We often got hundreds, sometimes even thousands of replies by working together as a group, always feeding whatever associations that we ourselves didn't invent came into conversation. It was merely a matter of cathegorizing promising associations using logic.

I'm never, ever going to tell which specific theories have been doings of my friends and have afterwards evolved into some kind of subculture, but those theories do exist. None have enough momentum behind them to actually produce books, but some would have if fed with more propaganda.

I'm quite certain those kind of people exist here as well, although I can't name any of them. It is not difficult to do such things, most imporatant thing being the fact that staying behind a good story and feeding every somehow related association made by others succeeds nearly every time.

Just wanted to say this, I have no intent of doing such things. I do know how easy it is, and usually can regocnize such things going on. Perhaps it would be of everybody's interest to actually check if a story evolves by ideas of other's instead of authors, especially when author feeds fire.

Oh, forgot to say this one particular thing. We weren't masters in manipulation, i am not a master of it, yet we were never ever reveladed to be some general trolls. There are ways, easy ways, to prevent it.

[edit on 3-10-2007 by rawsom]

Interesting logic. I like you already.

reply to post by rawsom


Great post! And welcome to ATS.

So, was it fun watching silly, gullible fools take your stories like it was the absolute truth and add even better logic to it?

Great post, and welcome to ATS. I think we need some more people like you on this forums sometimes.

-fm

So, was it fun watching silly, gullible fools take your stories like it was the absolute truth and add even better logic to it?

It was not that much about making people looking silly, fool or of poor intelligence. It was more like a challenge to create and that creation was the source of whatever joy we did get from it.

Usually people don't accept anything as truth until there's somebody behind it, the tricky part is finding the first few who do believe, because those few feed associations that one can use to create.

Personally, I stopped at the moment it begun to seem like some people perhaps took it a little too seriously. I'm quite happy with that fact, at least it leaves me just a bit room to move and say that although what we did was very wrong, I did have a tiny amount of moral with me.