Recently my feed on LinkedIn (such as it is) has been peppered with posts about various of the most ‘popular’ conspiracy theories. This is all thanks to a single colleague who I connected with because, well they seem nice enough in person, and we’d really only ever talked about work at work. I mean it’s LinkedIn, we’re connected because we’re colleagues and I’m not going to disconnect with someone because I don’t agree with them, I’d have to disconnect with solidly 80% of my connections in data science if I was to go down that path. But also it’s LinkedIn, I thought I got to avoid this type of nonsense by not being on Facebook. I’m expecting my LinkedIn feed to be full of cutesy marketing videos, baseless claims about AI tools that are going to solve all the world’s problems by 2025, meaningless motivational nonsense and the occasional interesting post from friends whose job is actually doing something to make the world a better place.
Anyway here I am, confronted with the ‘truth’ in my LinkedIn feed of all places and I have to say I’ve learned a lot from it. For example I wasn’t previously aware that the ‘fascist’ government of Jacinda Ardern (famous for that classic fascist move of relinquishing power of her own volition before her democratic mandate had expired) was responsible for killing tens of thousands of New Zealanders and covering up the fatal impacts of the coronavirus vaccine (along with the current administration, the mainstream media and every other government around the world). Some people would think that this is simply a conspiracy theory, but I’ve seen a link to a website that explains it. I’ve seen a video of someone sat in a car near where a whistleblower is being arrested (apparently unable to walk round the corner and video the actual arrest) talking about it. It turns out that whilst the truth is relatively easy to find, it’s very hard to document in the manner that everything else is documented these days.
Last week, Davos week, I was learning about the German farmers and how their ‘fascist socialist’ government is oppressing them by raising the price of diesel and banning fertiliser at the behest of Klaus Schwab and the WEF. In protest, they’re driving their tractors to Berlin and apparently are willing to drive all the way to Davos if they don’t get what they want, because compared to a hike in fuel duty, the diesel cost of driving a tractor the 850km from Berlin to Davos is nothing. Apparently this too is being ignored by the global mainstream media, because when a nation’s farmers protest it is usually headline news around the world. It turns out this is part of a conspiracy to stop us all eating meat and make food the preserve of global elites. Why else is Bill Gates buying up so much farmland?
I know very few of the verifiable facts in this case. I suspect the German government has increased tax on diesel and hasn’t exempted farmers. Maybe they’re also banning certain types of fertiliser that are causing considerable environmental damage. What I find amazing is that this fits conveniently into a grand conspiracy theory: the Great Reset, which I have to say I don’t really understand. What are these global elites trying to achieve by making us live in 15 minute cities and eat less meat? What’s their end game? Surely it’s easier to lord it over the proles by just giving them shit jobs, selling them junk food, junk tech, junk culture and raking in the profits? Surely there are more subtle ways to get power, say by letting government ministers holiday for free on your island/yacht/space ship. Surely there are easier ways to make money, such as taking advantage of conflict to increase the price of fuel or get governments to pay you ’free money’ to deliver poor quality ‘public’ services. But no, apparently the global elites are more concerned with controlling us, so we are a bit more healthy and a bit less destructive of the environment.
The are two problems here, the first being there is clearly some basis in fact for the claims made in these conspiracy theories. Some policy makers do indeed think that we should eat less meat and use less diesel (although not nearly enough in my opinion), but that is not a conspiracy, merely a response to the recommendations of countless scientists, who have actually looked into this stuff. Obviously the conspiracy theorists will conclude that the scientists are in on it, which leads to the second problem: there are conspiracies, just not the ones popularised in these theories. They can be arrived at by a simple process of looking at facts. As a scientist, what is going to make me more money, doing independent academic research that shows the products of the biggest, most profitable companies on the planet are making that same planet uninhabitable, or doing ‘research’ funded by those very wealthy companies that casts doubt on the scientific consensus? As a scientist, what is my motivation for showing the cause and impacts of climate change? Why would I do what Klaus Schwab told me and why would I do it in collaboration with tens of thousands of scientists around the world? On the other hand if I’m an oil baron, hanging out with Klaus Schwab and my billionaire mates at Davos this week, what is my motivation to make people believe that the actions that would stop me accumulating obscene wealth at the expense of humanity’s survival are actually just part of a sinister global conspiracy? What indeed? It seems almost too obvious that those in power would help undermine the message that their wealth accumulation is killing people. Almost, but not. I suspect the reason people ignore the real ‘conspiracies’ is because they are so obvious as to be depressingly mundane.
The German farmers have every right to be angry, they should be protesting, against a system that forces them into debt to have to spend a quarter of a million euros on a tractor that relies on fossil fuels that will only rise in price, that has a support contract that means they have to pay the manufacturer for any repairs and can be sued if they attempt to repair their own tractor themselves. They should be protesting against a system that forces them to buy seeds that are genetically modified to need artificial fertilisers that are literally killing the land they are trying to grow things on. The people who make spectacular amounts of money out of these systems of exploitation must laugh all the way to the bank every time they hear people protesting based on conspiracy theories that add to their profits and obfuscate their impact. They must revel in the reputation washing that comes along with it. Bill Gates is the centre of many of the most preposterous conspiracies and he must love it, because the more he’s accused of putting 5G chips in our bloodstream via the covid vaccine or whatever, the more people look away from the very real harms caused by his extreme techno-solutionist neoliberalism, or even just his private jet use. There is a sinister conspiracy and if you like, you can see it centred around the WEF, after all that organisation believes “the world is best managed by a self-selected coalition of multinational corporations, governments and civil society organizations” (ie those who already have wealth and power), which is a fundamentally anti democratic position. The Great Reset was hilariously a policy put forward by the WEF as a way of mitigating the impacts of what they do. They saw it as throwing humanity a bone, a way to make the plebs feel considered as something other than resources, tiny cogs in the wheels of the apocalyptic money machine. So we should be angry at these people, they don’t really consider us as anything other than subjects, they don’t really have our best interests at heart and they do benefit from a system that oppresses, controls, manipulates and kills us. It’s called capitalism. I dream of a day when that conspiracy appears in my LinkedIn timeline.
