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Conspiracy Theories and the Internet according to Steve Clarke
37 Plays4 years ago
Josh and M review Steve Clarke’s “Conspiracy Theories and the Internet: Controlled Demolition and Arrested Development” from the 2007 special issue on conspiracy theories in the journal Episteme.
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
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Transcript
Narrator's Dilemma: Awakening in Captivity
00:00:16
Speaker
Having been conked on the old cranium before, I knew it was wise to wake slowly and cautiously, in case whoever had done the conking was still present. As such, I opened one eye, my right one, very slightly to get a lay of the land. It was obvious that we were no longer in the crypt of the Church of Orphans, but rather back in our hotel rooms. Or at least, someone's hotel room, an older throw. Standing at the foot of the bed I happened to be lying on, somewhat bound, were two figures pacing back and forth in a slightly awkward way.
00:00:41
Speaker
See, I told you if we led Morrissey and his chattering simpleton to the church, they would find a way into the crypt.
00:00:49
Speaker
Yeah, plan undoubtedly won't. But why, though, did we not dispense with these... two, rather than carry them back in the dead of night? I thought I'd have respect to
Morrissey's Escape Plan
00:00:58
Speaker
your... Stickle is dead. This is now certain, whatever you might have thought of Morrissey is irrelevant. Yes, quite. Sorry. The figure who was advocating our demise has leant over the other bed, where, I assumed, or hoped, his lordship lay. You know, when I look at him like this, I can't help but wonder what all the fuss was about. The simpering lord was duped for years, accusing men of crimes Stickle himself had committed and covered up.
00:01:17
Speaker
Wise continued to have a practice post the events in Glasgow I will never know. I assume the constabulary is even more dimwitted than previously suspected. I nearly jumped out of bed at the impudence, stopped only because of the danger it might post was lordship, and the fact I was securely tied.
00:01:31
Speaker
Be that as it may, what is our plan? Aside from confirming Stickle's death, there's nothing in the crypt that indicates his contingency plan, if indeed he had one. Oh, I have one. You'd not lead a conspiracy of criminal masterminds for over 200 years to have your long-term plans halted by someone being pushed down a well.
What to Do with the Kidnappers?
00:01:49
Speaker
Now, I think our plan now is to entice one of them to come out of hiding, and I think the corpses of Morrissey and his monkey lying on the altar of that damn little church should be sufficient motivation, don't you think? Hmm, I think you're quite correct, my dear.
00:02:01
Speaker
Morrissey sounded very much awake. I turned my head to watch the spectacle of them leaping off the bed and, in what looked like a pirouette, grab a walking stick and subdue our kidnappers with a series of rapid knocks and conks upon their persons.
00:02:11
Speaker
I think they should about do. Marcy! Pluddles, my good man, let me loosen those bonds. Morrie said about untying me with alacrity. You probably want to know how I accomplished my feat. Like you, I made sure to pretend to be asleep as I recovered from unconsciousness. Unlike you, I have been keeping up with my rope-tying skills, and was able to loosen my bonds without them noticing.
00:02:34
Speaker
Once it was clear our kidnappers knew nothing more than was useful, I decided it was time to cut short the conversation before they cut short our lives. Finally three of my bonds I stood. For a moment I thought about embracing my friend, but then decorum asserted itself. I'm sorry you had to hear some of what they said, Morrissey. Pish-posh-puddles. The opinion of criminals is not something we need to take account of. Indeed. So what are we to do with these two? The local constabulary I'm sure will be interested in them.
00:03:04
Speaker
Kidnapping is a serious charge, and kidnappers really start their criminal career with such an audacious crime. We, on the other hand, should return to Manchester. I have a few inquiries only a decent library can provide answers to. Right-o. I could feel the end of another exciting case approaching.
Introducing the 'Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy'
00:03:35
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. Imdentit.
00:03:45
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcast as Guide to the Conspiracy. I am Josh Addison. They are Dr. M. Denteth in both Auckland and Wellington respectively. We don't have an election to talk about much. I mean, I guess there'll be a bit in the bonus episode, but it feels a bit odd. I mean, you say there'll be a bit in the bonus episode. There'll be a lot of it in the bonus episode. The election in the US is really the only conspiratorial news worth talking about.
Steve Clark's Paper: Conspiracy Theories on the Internet
00:04:09
Speaker
And a bonus episode anyway. And the main content of this episode is, of course, time for another episode of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre. We've, in our journey through time, we're all the way up to 2007 now. I mean, we should have said journey through space. Some of us have been moving locations during this time as well. Well, that's true. That's true, yes. So we're looking at another paper by our friend Steve Clark.
00:04:35
Speaker
published in 2007, and as you'll see, 9-11 is in full swing now. A large part of this paper is devoted to 9-11 truth conspiracy theories, so they're up with the game, and it talks about the internet.
00:04:52
Speaker
Yes, and it talks about the internet at an age in which we thought maybe the internet would work for the common god. Yes, think back before we start talking about this paper, think back to what the internet was like in 2007.
00:05:08
Speaker
I joined Twitter in 2008, I remember that much, but it was around then, wasn't it? Yeah, so I think I joined about that time. Yeah, so Twitter was about a year old, Facebook was two to three years old. Social media was pretty young. So you had, I think Tumblr was around by that point in time, but the real social media, which kind of isn't the social media now, was Blogger and Blogspark. Yes, Web 2.0. Do you remember Web 2.0?
00:05:38
Speaker
Remember when people had blogs? Remember when people kept blogs up to date? Well, yes. I was about to say, I have a blog, and then you said that, and like, you know, that's actually fair. Yeah. Blogs now are where ideas go to die. That's pretty much true. So that's the context this paper was written in. Shall we just get straight into it then? Have you anything else to say before we start the episode proper?
00:06:06
Speaker
Only one thing. Play the chime.
00:06:17
Speaker
Right, so let's give it its full name. The paper we're looking at today is Conspiracy Theories and the Internet, Controlled Demolition and Arrested Development by Steve Clark in Epistean slash Epistome 2007. And this is the special issue on conspiracy theories edited by David Cote, which we'll be talking about a lot, although we have just skipped a paper. So there's a paper by Michael Borman, which is on
00:06:45
Speaker
fundamentalism. And at the time I read it back in 2007, I thought this has very little to do with conspiracy theories. And looking over it again in 2020, I went
00:07:00
Speaker
Yeah, this is basically a complete dead-end or non-entity in the literature. It actually would be a waste of our time to talk about it, so we've basically skipped over a paper and gone from Brian all the way to Steve bypassing Michael.
00:07:16
Speaker
Good. So the abstract of this paper reads. Following Clark 2002, a Lakatosian approach is used to account for the epistemic development of conspiracy theories. It's then argued that the hypercritical atmosphere of the internet has slowed down the development of conspiracy theories, discouraging conspiracy theorists from articulating explicit versions of their favoured theories, which could form the hardcore of Lakatosian research programmes.
00:07:40
Speaker
The argument is illustrated with a study of the controlled demolition theory of the collapse of three towers at the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001. So yeah, straight away, I thought this was quite, this was an interesting angle to be taking, because these days, people talk about conspiracy theories in the internet a lot. David Farry is on about it all the time. And the main thing people seem to be talking about is how,
00:08:07
Speaker
the internet affects the dissemination of conspiracy theories. They're all over the place. They're spreading. They get into the mainstream more easily and so on. But this paper, in fact, is talking about the internet's effect on the quality of conspiracy theories, not their prevalence or spread. And indeed, this is a paper that I've cited a lot when talking with other academics about the notion of what the internet has done for conspiracy theorizing as a phenomenon.
00:08:35
Speaker
and it's quite interesting going back and revisiting it because the last time I read it was back in 2007 when this paper was first published. It has now been 13 years and let us say that history has not been kind to people who had hope about the internet back in 2007. It is unfortunately true.
00:08:58
Speaker
So this paper is in four parts, or is it five? Is the conclusion part five? Yes.
How Does the Internet Affect Conspiracy Theories?
00:09:06
Speaker
So part one is an introduction and talk about research, which is basically a recap of Steve Clark's papers that we've looked at previously, the one from 2002 that mentioned in the abstract that is of conspiracy theories. No, that would be Brian's paper.
00:09:23
Speaker
that's of conspiracy theories. So Steve's the one that comes after that. I remember the name. Yeah, conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorizing. That's the one. That's the one. What you'll recall is we talked about the whole research programs and the problem with conspiracy theories being that conspiracy theorists stick to these degenerating research programs and Steve suggests it's due to them suffering from the
00:09:49
Speaker
fundamental attribution error cognitive bias. Now it is important to note he talks about his 2002 paper, both with respect to putting forward that conspiracy theories are examples of research programs, thus we can judge whether they're good or bad as to whether they're progressive or degenerative.
00:10:12
Speaker
He also does mention in this paper that he talked about psychological issues that certain conspiracy theorists should have. What he doesn't note in this paper is that he's exiled his 2002 views
00:10:27
Speaker
later on in the book by David Coady. But at any rate, matters psychological do not feature in this paper at all. No. No, it's interesting. He cites his 2002, doesn't cite his 2006. Yes.
00:10:46
Speaker
He gives a summary of what he's talked about before in terms of research programs and productive versus unproductive research programs. He says many conspiracy theories should be judged to be at the core of degenerating research programs because they seem to imply predictions that are not successful.
00:11:09
Speaker
And here starts talking explicitly about 9-11. We've seen previously people had started talking about it in the literature by this point. But as we will see, once we start going through things, by 2007, the 9-11 Truth Movement was actually starting to get off the ground. So there's plenty to talk about here. So Steve starts by pointing out that the Al-Qaeda, the official theory, quote unquote,
00:11:37
Speaker
of 9-11 is an example of a productive research program. He notes, if you'll recall, David Cody in his paper gave the idea that he wanted to define conspiracy theories as being opposed to the official version, by definition.
00:11:57
Speaker
Steve does note that if you follow that definition, then things like the Al-Qaeda theory and Watergate can't be conspiracy theories because they're the official one now. But he does point out, well, at the very least, things like Watergate weren't always the official version. So they were conspiracy theories for some point in their existences. But I think that was just sort of covering all the bases there. That doesn't really seem to come up further on.
00:12:21
Speaker
And it is important to note that Steve is willing to bite the bullet here, unlike some philosophers at the time, and go, look, actually any explanation which cites a conspiracy turns out to be a conspiracy theory of some way, shape, or form. So it doesn't really matter what you believe about 9-11. You believe a conspiracy theory. One of them has been ordained the official theory. The others have not.
00:12:51
Speaker
So indeed, he explicitly says it can seem odd to refer to these widely accepted theories as conspiracy theories, especially when, as in the case of the Al-Qaeda theory, they are opposed by prominent conspiracy theories. Nevertheless, these are theories which involve secret plans, and by the likes of widely accepted definitions of conspiracy theories, such as the definitions due to Pigdon and Keeley, they therefore count as conspiracy theories. So yeah, it makes the point perfectly well. But then we move on to part two. And part two is the internet.
00:13:21
Speaker
all in capital letters. Do you write internet with a capital I or not? I don't, no.
Analyzing the 9/11 Truth Movement
00:13:27
Speaker
No, I still kind of do, but there's been a bit of debate in sort of technical writing or writing in general theory. Is it, given that the internet these days is just sort of kind of a utility, you wouldn't capitalise electricity or water?
00:13:43
Speaker
So you shouldn't capitalise internet, but I don't know. Maybe I'm just an old-fashioned guy. You're very old-fashioned with your dual monocles over your eyes. Well, yes, yes. You should get me some laser surgery. Well, if you're what you should do, you should make both monocles pop spontaneously. Or one after the other. That. That would be worth seeing.
00:14:07
Speaker
Anyway, so talking about conspiracy theories and the internet, Steve says some conspiracy theories will require a bit more evidence of degeneration than is normally required before they will give up belief in a favoured conspiracy theory. Some require a lot more evidence and some will never give up on their favourite conspiracy theory regardless of the degree of degeneration of the associated research program.
00:14:33
Speaker
I appealed to findings in psychology to explain this phenomenon, and I think that's all he says about that. Yeah, so basically, as I noted on rereading, I'm not really mentioning that he resigned from his analysis a few years later. And then there was this lovely bit.
00:14:53
Speaker
Sorry, no, we're not quite at the lovely bit yet. There's a little bit before that. I'm jumping the gun in my eagerness. He talks about the social effects of the internet.
00:15:07
Speaker
He says, significant changes in social and material circumstances can have an effect on the quantity and quality of the conspiracy theories that are advocated. Now, we've got, this is something we've talked about plenty before, right? The sort of society you live in, you experience that in Romania, obviously a lot. A more conspiratorial society leads to more conspiracy theories. Yes, your judgment of prior probability of how conspired your society is tend to then dictate how conspired you think your society is going to be in the here and now.
00:15:37
Speaker
I will argue that the development and widespread use of the internet, which has had significant social effects, has also had a profound effect on the development of conspiracy theories. It is commonly held that conspiracy theories have flourished on the internet, citing Morello 2004,
00:15:52
Speaker
However, I will argue that although the internet has enabled the dissemination of many more conspiracy theories than there once were, the internet has not been an unqualified boon to conspiracy theorists. I will argue that the internet has actually retarded the development of many conspiracy theories. In terms of the quantity thing, though, this is something you've mentioned before that Joe's talked about. Are there actually more conspiracy theories than there used to be, do you think?
00:16:15
Speaker
Not that we can tell with respect to polling and surveys. So I know anecdotally everyone goes, oh, the internet is awash with conspiracy theories. And of course, we're now talking about 2020 as opposed to 2007. But it's not particularly obvious when you start doing the polling.
00:16:35
Speaker
that conspiracy theories are any more popular now. And indeed the polling indicates that really the height of conspiracy theory rhetoric was back in the 1960s and so. So I can't really think that 2007 is quite as awash with conspiracy theories as Steve makes it out to be. I think the difference is it suddenly became a lot easier to
00:16:59
Speaker
find conspiracy theories because of the internet, not because there was suddenly more of them. And so he harking back to things he's talked about previously about sort of the attitudes of intellectuals towards conspiracy theories and whether intellectuals are justified in sort of disregarding them. He talks about the fact that because conspiracy theories are often disregarded by intellectuals or
00:17:25
Speaker
this sort of, I think elitists was the term that came up again as well, conspiracy theorists will be drawn to the less official channels since this is a bit early I think in the development of the internet for people to be talking about the MSCM and what have you, but the official channels are maybe less well regarded, but the internet, anyone can go on the internet, there's nothing official about it.
00:17:51
Speaker
And so therefore conspiracy theories, well therefore the internet rather, is attractive to people who are wanting to promote or find out about conspiracy theories.
00:18:01
Speaker
Now this, now, this is the bit I was waiting for. This is the bit that you were also tweeting just yesterday, I think. Here's the section and this excerpt and a section on the internet where he says, there is a vast amount of information that is available on the internet at the click of a mouse. However, people have much difficulty assessing the reliability of much of this information.
00:18:24
Speaker
There are calls to establish conventions regarding the reliability of information on the internet. See Konstan others 2002, Weder and Wachbroit 2003. And there seems to be no, in principle, reason why such conventions could not be established and why these could not achieve general acceptance. So the difficulty of assessing the reliability of information on the internet may only be a short-term phenomenon. Ah, you delightful optimist. You hopeful summer child. I don't think that's a paragraph that's aged particularly well, unfortunately.
00:18:54
Speaker
No, and I mean it's not really Steve's fault. Back in 2007, we really did think we would get to grips with this online phenomenon of passing information around. And it turns out that not only did we not get to grips with it,
00:19:12
Speaker
But the businesses that run the social media organisations we rely upon have spent vast amounts of time and money lobbying world governments to stop there being any kind of regulation to make it easy for us to discern what's going on online. So in 2007, the future really did look so bright, you had to wear shades.
00:19:38
Speaker
Now, now we live in the end of Trump's presidency, where it seems that people are now being persuaded that Trump won the election fair and square because we aren't very good at discerning what happened online at all.
00:19:54
Speaker
No, yes, the most we've got is the vague sort of stabs at Twitter putting up little, this content is still under dispute or something and similar things on Facebook, which seem to be very much a band-aid. Also, the other thing that stuck out to me, a second ago, we were quoting a Morello. Now we're quoting a Vedder. Did every 90s rock legend end up becoming a philosopher of conspiracy theories?
00:20:20
Speaker
Or is that just coincidence? You don't even know who Tom Morello is, do you? No, I don't. Guitarists pledge against the machine. Anyway, that is not relevant. What is relevant is that this point still sits out.
00:20:34
Speaker
I know Rage Against the Machine, I just don't know the individual artiste in Rage Against the Machine. Fair enough. I have to say, you know, if I didn't have to work for a living, I would spend a large amount of my free time watching YouTube videos of people reacting to hearing killing in the name of for the first time. Because there is not much better than that. It must be serious. Do yourself a favour and look it up. Anyway.
00:20:58
Speaker
So yeah, Steve gets into the guts of his theory, or at least the beginnings of the guts of his theory here, saying, it might seem that the internet has aided conspiracy theorising by accelerating the rate at which conspiracy theories degenerate or progress. However, there are two reasons to think that this is not the case, and that the internet may actually serve to slow down the development of conspiracy theories.
00:21:18
Speaker
So his two reasons are the first is the reason that we've just talked about the fact that it's it's difficult. It was at the time and remains difficult to establish how reliable information is on the Internet. As Steve puts it, if we cannot agree on the facts that would be accounted for, then it is difficult to agree about whether a research program is progressing or degenerating. Can you hear the siren outside my window? I certainly can. It's siren. So can our listeners. Excellent.
00:21:44
Speaker
So that's the first one, which you've kind of gone over already. And then the second reason is, as he puts it, there is reason to suppose that the high level of critical discussion on the internet may create an atmosphere that is not conducive to the construction of theories that are stated explicitly enough to function as the core of either a progressive or a degenerative research program. Now, when he talks about there being a high level of critical discussion on the internet,
00:22:07
Speaker
At first blush that could be a compliment. High level can mean good. Critical discussion, that's the sort of thing we do all the time. But I think what he means is people are incredibly like to criticise a lot and essentially the internet is full of dicks.
00:22:20
Speaker
Yeah, so the kind of model he's thinking of is you decide that you've got a particular conspiracy theory you want to introduce to the world. And you write a blog post, because in 2007, that's what you do. And the problem with writing a blog post is that you might spend several hours composing your post, trying to put forward the best argument possible for your particular conspiracy theory. But within minutes of
00:22:48
Speaker
putting that post online, people are going to find it and start critiquing you or calling you a dick and engaging in the ad hominem fallacy. So the idea being that, yes, the internet is great for disseminating information,
00:23:05
Speaker
Then this is also great for instant replies to information, and this kind of comes out later on in the paper where Steve talks about the model of how conspiracy theories were spread before the internet was a thing, whereby you would write a magazine article
00:23:22
Speaker
or you would write a book, at which point people would read your article or book, and then they would write a letter to the editor, or they'd write a letter to your publisher, and that information would get back to you very slowly. And so Steve takes it that the instantaneous way in which people are able to react to conspiracy theories online
00:23:45
Speaker
actually seeks to impede their growth, as opposed to what happened in the old days, where because things were so slow, you could kind of develop your conspiracy theories in a more gradual and more grandiose way.
00:24:02
Speaker
And I guess there's the matter of effort as well. It takes no effort to dash off a comment on the bottom of a blog, but you kind of need to, you only need to want to, you know, to send letters to the editor or engage in actual some sort of correspondence. There's a bit more of an effort threshold required.
00:24:19
Speaker
Yes, I mean, as someone who has replied to tweets and also written letters to the editor at the New Zealand Herald, it's much easier to tell someone they're being stupid on the internet than is to try and compose something that you think the letters editor is going to publish.
00:24:36
Speaker
So at this point, Steve goes on to talk about how conspiracy theorists operate, or at least operated in 2007. But I think it's pretty much the same. So as he says, conspiracy theorists are typically engaged in two sorts of activities. First, they try to develop theories explaining observed phenomena that involve one or more conspiracies. Second, they look for anomalies that are not explained by received view, which their theory competes with. And certainly that search for anomalies is something we see in just about everything. They're searching for anomalies all over the place in
00:25:05
Speaker
in the states at the moment, trying to find any sort of evidence of voter fraud that they can come up with. He says oftentimes the conspiracy theory involves the postulation of a cover story, which is designed to prevent people generally finding out about the true nature of the conspiracy in question. And yes, cover-up conspiracies, that's
00:25:23
Speaker
That's that stock in trade. And he says conspiracy theories can develop in a variety of ways, but typically they start in one way. A conspiracy theorist typically begins by identifying anomalies in a received view. This motivates further investigation, which can lead to the discovery of further anomalies and may prompt the suspicion that the received view is a cover story that has been promoted by a group of conspirators in order to prevent the general public from finding out the truth.
Internet's Evolution in Conspiracy Theories
00:25:46
Speaker
The last step in this development sequence is that an alternate alternative explanation is postulated.
00:25:52
Speaker
And I think, yeah, that's true sometimes. When I think of the things we look at, especially like your sort of false flag conspiracy theories and stuff like that, they don't notice something, an anomaly in an official version and then start developing a theory on the back of that. They decide that there's a conspiracy straight away and then start looking for anomalies to back up their view. As soon as there's any sort of a major shooting,
00:26:18
Speaker
like within moments someone will be saying it's a false flag theory now they haven't spotted any anomalies that have caused them to come up with this theory it's just taken as read now and also if you come from a culture in which conspiracies are particularly common in your political discourse
00:26:34
Speaker
say, as I keep on talking about with respect to Romania, where a corrupt government does corrupt things all the time. You're just going to suspect that something is up no matter what is going on, because all the other times something has occurred. It turns out something really was up in the background anyway. You don't have to be looking for anomalies. Sometimes you go look,
00:27:00
Speaker
the normal course of affairs in our society indicates that conspiracy is just very, very likely. Well, the other other example I was thinking of is returning again to the US election at the moment. I mean,
00:27:14
Speaker
When you see interviews with Trump supporters and so on, they seem to be just starting from the position that no Trump can't have lost. He just can't. I just won't believe it. And from there, go on for a look, go on a search for anomalies. But at any rate, Steve did start this by saying conspiracy theories can develop in a variety of ways.
00:27:37
Speaker
The one that he gave as typical isn't the kind that sticks out to me in this day and age. And again, of course, this was writing in 2007. Now, his quote continues, it is only when an alternative explanatory theory has been postulated that we're in a position to begin assessing whether that alternative explanatory theory is at the core of a progressive or a degenerating research program, which is what he's interested in.
00:28:01
Speaker
It is easy for conspiracy theorists operating on the internet to become caught up in rapidly developing debates about anomalies in a well-known received view that is being challenged by other conspiracy theorists. When this happens, conspiracy theorists can become bogged down in the business of challenging a received view and may end up taking longer to articulate a clear alternative.
00:28:19
Speaker
And that really is where things really start to strike a chord with me, because this is something we've talked about. This is something I've said a lot before. My problem generally with things like 9-11 truth conspiracy theories is that they spend all their time bagging the official version and are very, very vague when it comes to any sort of positive claims they're making on their own.
00:28:45
Speaker
We've talked about this plenty of times. I looked all the way back, all the way back in episode 66, by which time we'd already been going for over a year. But anyway, we did an episode on World Trade Center Building 7 and referred to, there's a 2013 article, so host dates on we're talking about by six years, but by Michael J. Wood and Karen M. Douglas, it was a psychology article about the psychology of building seven conspiracies
00:29:14
Speaker
And sort of the conclusion of it was that conspiracy theorists spend much more time trying to debunk the official theory than they do putting forward their own explanations. That seems to be typical, question mark. I mean, I don't know whether it's typical. I know it happens often enough that we remark upon it. And it is true. There are a whole bunch of conspiracy theories that are more inclined to debunk the official theory than they are to put forward rival hypotheses, which are as fulsome.
00:29:44
Speaker
But I'm just not entirely convinced that that's the normal way of doing things. I worry that maybe we're dealing here with... Look, these are the obviously weird conspiracy theories. They spend more time debunking other views, and this has got us vexed about what they're doing, as opposed to asking the question, is this normal? Or are we simply picking on these ones because they're the ones that really fascinate us?
00:30:14
Speaker
Yes, you could be right, actually, because maybe it's not typical of conspiracy theories in general. It does seem to be fairly typical of 9-11 truth conspiracy theories, though, which I guess is why he then goes on to use them as his case study. So we move on to part three of this paper, controlled demolition.
00:30:32
Speaker
And this paper actually is quite a good, interesting rundown of the history of 9-11, or specifically controlled demolition conspiracy theories, up to 2007. So the first publication he points to is a book called Painful Questions, published in 2002 by Eric Huffschmidt. Which is not a story about children asking about sex. No, although it sounds, I'm not familiar with that one.
00:30:58
Speaker
is I assume it hasn't taken on the definition. Yeah, it's one of those things, probably 2002 to 2007, it seemed like a particularly big thing. In retrospect, it's really kind of a footnote in the history of 9-11 trutherism.
00:31:15
Speaker
So the two big names he talks about at this point are David Ray Griffin and Stephen E. Jones. Doesn't mention Richard Gage. I had a quick look on Wikipedia and apparently Richard Gage founded the Architects and Engineers for 9-11 Truth in November of 2007. So that would have been after this paper was written. And we have to recall, I mean this paper's published in 2007. It may well have been written towards the end of 2006, which is actually I think
00:31:44
Speaker
calls into question how we talk about the analysis of the internet in general. Because we go, look, by 2007, Facebook was two years old, Twitter's just on the scene. It's actually quite likely this paper was written pre-Twitter when Facebook was actually something that very few people used.
00:32:03
Speaker
Yeah, so Richard Gage doesn't get a mention, but that's because we're in the past now and that's how time works. He does mention loose change in passing and also lists a bunch of organisations supporting the official theory and opposing these 9-11 Truth
00:32:22
Speaker
organisations stating online debate between proponents and opponents of the controlled demolition theory is intense and extremely polemical, which I think is the politest way of describing that phenomenon I've ever heard. Yeah, it seems quite quaint in retrospect.
00:32:41
Speaker
So he says, much of the discussion in Griffin and Jones is concerned with the criticisms of the received view. And by contrast, little is said about the details of the positive theory. I don't pay a lot of attention to 9-11 true theories outside of the scope of this podcast. I've heard different positive actual theories put forward, but is there
00:33:08
Speaker
Is there anything like a grand unified view of 9-11 truth in terms of what actually did happen? I mean, I literally don't know. I've been thinking about this a lot since rereading the paper because I had a question mark there, which is how true is Steve's portrayal of 9-11 now? So let's just leave the 2007 thing to one side. How true is it that
00:33:35
Speaker
9-11 Truth is by and large is still questioning the received view rather than putting forward a grand theory of their own. And I think they're probably putting forward a grander theory than they did back in 2007.
00:33:51
Speaker
But an awful lot of what I've read, and I don't spend much time reading 9-11 truth stuff because I'm actually not that interested in 9-11 as an event. Largely because I do accept the official theory that was the actions of Al-Qaeda. Most of the stuff I've read is still very much focused.
00:34:11
Speaker
on showing discrepancies in the official theory, and then doing the Richard Gage thing of saying, I'm not going to say who actually did it, but you know.
00:34:24
Speaker
You can work it out. Yes. No, so he talks about the Griffin and Jones, the sorts of things they say. He says, Griffin makes two substantial claims regarding the positive theory. First, that the conspiracy was perpetrated by domestic terrorists. And I have to say, until I read this paper, I hadn't actually seen this specific angle on it because he takes it that
00:34:48
Speaker
If we're acting under the assumption that it was a controlled demolition, if it was simply foreign powers, if it were evil terrorists wanting to cause as much destruction as possible, they wouldn't go with the controlled demolition. They wouldn't care how controlled it was. So the fact, quote unquote, that it was a controlled demolition means it must have been people, internal people who wanted to localize the destruction just to these buildings and not damage any more than they had to.
00:35:19
Speaker
Then he says that Griffin's second substantial claim is that the controlled demolition, together with the cover-up needed to ensure that it did not become publicly known, could only have taken place with the assistance of forces within the US government.
00:35:32
Speaker
we start to get a look at who the culprit might be, or at least the area to look for them. And I mean, I guess maybe that is one thing about the 9-11 Truth stuff. Most of them seem fairly happy to say, oh, it was the Bush administration. It was elements within the Bush administration, because they'll talk about the Patriot Act, and they'll talk about essentially that the Bush administration then got to do everything they'd been wanting to do off the back of 9-11.
00:36:03
Speaker
Which we're going to see analogues of with COVID-19 lockdowns long term, I feel. Yeah, I saw a clip from the Daily Show today where old good old Jordan Klepper's been off to his Trump rallies again talking to one guy who was explicitly saying that yes, COVID-19 was caused by the Democrats so that there would be a whole lot more male voting in the election, which would then be fraudulent and steal the election for Joe Biden.
00:36:32
Speaker
So apparently Jones doesn't suggest any particular culprits or motive for the controlled demolition of the Twin Towers, and his conclusion is that he wants to set up an unbiased panel to investigate it properly, which sounds like basically a fancy way of saying he's just asking questions.
00:36:54
Speaker
Yes, Jones was the Jerry Brownly of his day. And so then Clark basically goes on to point out a whole bunch of problems with the controlled demolition theory. And I think the angle he's getting at is because this isn't a properly specified theory, because it's so vague, there are all these holes which maybe could be corrected if they were to say, you know, be a bit more specific and detailed and a bit more concrete in what they're saying. He says,
00:37:21
Speaker
The broader theory that they are implicitly committed to appears to be quite baroque. The controlled demolition theory involves an unnamed, nefarious organisation which was able to organise for three very large buildings to be pre-wired for demolition, apparently without any of the thousands of office workers who worked in those buildings thinking it worth mentioning to others that unusual events were occurring in their places of work. Such preparations would take a long time and would typically involve obvious evidence of suspicious activity, such as the partial removal of interior walls on all blast doors.
00:37:52
Speaker
He also, this version of the controlled demolition theory that Clark is talking about, that presumably that Jones and Griffin were advocating, does allow that planes were actually flown into the tower, so it doesn't go for the whole, you know, there wasn't planes, it was missiles, it was holograms and directed energy weapons or what have you. And nanothermite. No, yeah, well, you know, it hasn't come on the scene yet either.
00:38:18
Speaker
It will do, though, very, very soon. Yes, but then that causes problems as well because, as he says, the theory also appears to involve the difficult-to-believe plane that the preset blast charges in WTC 1 and 2 could have survived the impact of the planes and the subsequent fires which burned on the floors near the points of impact for 102 minutes and 56 minutes respectively prior to collapse, which again is another point
00:38:44
Speaker
that I hadn't really considered. We saw the towers burn for a good wee while before they collapsed, which is presumably when this controlled demolition was set off. So you have to allow that the explosives that they'd carefully set up were such that they couldn't be set off at the wrong time or disabled completely by the plane impact.
00:39:07
Speaker
I mean, this is actually one of the issues I had with the Richard Gage talk that I saw both in Wellington and in Auckland back in the day, is that the way that Richard Gage describes the 9-11 event
00:39:19
Speaker
has it that the event actually, when he describes it, looks very much like the collapse of a building due to structural issues after two planes flew into them. And he says, oh, no, no, no. It is a controlled demolition. The controlled demolition is set up to look like the collapse of a building by having an explosion in the midsection.
00:39:43
Speaker
then a series of explosions in the upper section above where the plane flew into it, then causing collapse in the lower section, end up going, your theory is a lot more complicated and more Baroque than just the hypothesis that two very large planes flew into two very large buildings, core structural issues which cause the first half to collapse and then the second half to collapse.
00:40:10
Speaker
I mean, why bring in the controlled demolition thing when there's a simple explanation of massive structural damage caused by planes flying into buildings?
00:40:21
Speaker
Yes, it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. And then his final point is that, lastly, it appears that the conspirators are either only interested in conducting a single major terrorist act, or are very patient and are prepared to wait for long periods of time before striking again. An organization of such power and competence could surely have conducted further terrorist attacks on a similar scale, but it appears that it has had no desire to conduct any such operations in the last six years, or indeed now in the last 19 years.
00:40:48
Speaker
Let me note the one thing I put in the article at that point. Zing. It is quite the zing. So having done his case study, we now get to part four of the paper, getting conspiracy theories off the ground. And so basically what he wants to say... That should be getting conspiracy theories off ground zero. Could have been more punny, but there you go.
00:41:13
Speaker
He wants to say that basically if Griffin and Jones supplied more detail in their theory and made more actual positive claims about what they think did happen, not what they think didn't happen, what was wrong with the official version, then we could actually begin to make predictions based on these theories and they could become productive
00:41:32
Speaker
productive models. But, as he says, we cannot yet say that the controlled demolition theory is at the core of a degenerative or a progressive research program because we do not have a well-specified set of core theoretical commitments that constitute the controlled demolition theory. What we have is a proto-theory. Now, at the time I read this, back in 2007, my notes indicate that I agreed with Steve on this matter.
00:41:59
Speaker
As someone looking back on my work in 2020, I don't think I do. And that the way that I define conspiracy and conspiracy theory in my work, it is sufficient to go, there's something fishy about the story we're being told, given evidential concerns.
00:42:23
Speaker
I cannot really specify exactly what's going on here, but it's enough to say there's a cover-up or collusion of some particular kind, and that then warrants the claim a conspiracy is going on. So yes, it would be nice to have a well-specified conspiracy theory in situations of this type.
00:42:44
Speaker
At the same time, sometimes all you need is a well-grounded suspicion that we're not being told the full truth to go, look, there's a conspiracy theory going on here. I'm not entirely sure of the details, but let's investigate it and find out what's really happening.
Does the Internet Hinder Conspiracy Theories?
00:43:02
Speaker
Hmm, yes.
00:43:05
Speaker
What he does, though, is contrast this sort of proto-theory with one of his actual predictive progressive research programs. So he says, by contrast with the controlled demolition theory, the al-Qaeda theory is quite clearly specified. The names of key members of the organization are specified along with the immediate objective in theory, which is to resist Western political and military influence in the Islamic world.
00:43:32
Speaker
The World Trade Center was a symbol of US power, and it is plausible to think that the members of Al-Qaeda see US foreign policy as the chief source of Western political influence in the Islamic world, so the attack on the World Trade Center is explicable on the Al-Qaeda theory. I've characterized this theory as being at the core of a progressive research program. Some might disagree with me about this, but it would be hard to disagree with the claim that it is at the core of a well-articulated research program, because yes, it gives culprits, it gives motive.
00:44:02
Speaker
It gives, you know, the official theory gives means essentially. What other things you're supposed to have for a crime means motive opportunity? It's all there. So believe it or not, it at least is a theory that can be analysed and tested, basically.
00:44:21
Speaker
But conversely, and not to come across as a 9-11 truther here, if you believe the hypothesis that this was an inside job, you can also talk about means motive and opportunity with respect to wanting to secure oil futures in the Middle East.
00:44:39
Speaker
or wanting to engage in warfare overseas, because that's what hawkish members of the Republican Party desire. I think part of the problem here is that Steve is going, look, predictive success is an important part of any successful theory.
00:44:58
Speaker
And that is true in the sciences. But we're not dealing with scientific theories when we're dealing with conspiracy theories. At best, we're dealing with social scientific theories or things akin to historical explanations, where predictions are things which are nice to have, but they're actually not an essential feature of those theoretical complexes.
00:45:22
Speaker
Yes, I mean, certainly the 9-11 truth theories are less specified, I guess is the way he put it. They suggest, well, it's the Bush administration, although they aren't able to give key players and they give
00:45:44
Speaker
are possible motives, which, yep, fair enough, but they don't, sort of the talk of the means. As we already said, it was, would be a difficult thing to pull off and they don't, you know, but basically it's my nanothermite winge again. The people who say, oh, we obviously have proof of nanothermite, but how did I get there? Oh, that's who, that's your job to look up, you know?
00:46:11
Speaker
But yes, no, I think there is something to what you say. But we move along to part five, conclusion. And the conclusion goes, the internet has aided in the dissemination of the controlled demolition theory, but it also appears to have retarded its development. It seems plausible to think that advocates of the theory have failed to develop specific versions of the theory because they're keen to avoid the criticisms that they know they would attract were they to commit to a specific version of the theory.
00:46:39
Speaker
As we've seen, there are many defenders of the received view active on the internet who are ready to attack advocates of the controlled demolition theory. And these advocates would be much more vulnerable to attack where they should commit to a specific variant of the theory. Advocates of the controlled demolition theory also attract criticism from proponents of rival conspiracy theories as well as from other advocates of the controlled demolition theory. They could reasonably expect more of this criticism if they were to commit themselves to a specific version of the theory. Which I felt
00:47:06
Speaker
That bit seemed a little bit underdeveloped, I don't know. At the very beginning, he talks about basically people are dicks, and by giving a specific view, you open yourself up to more criticism, and then had quite a good analysis of the controlled demolition thing, and then at the end just stuck the two together. I kind of agree with it, but I don't know if that section of the argument is as fleshed out as it could have been,
00:47:34
Speaker
No, I mean, it's one of those things where it seems intuitive, but I think you need to do more work to show that that intuitive thing actually follows from what you see in the body of people putting forward conspiracy theories.
00:47:52
Speaker
And as I think you noted, it's questionable as to whether or not this is a new thing brought on by the internet, because while there are the conspiracy theories that people wrote books on and developed quite thoroughly, other conspiracy theories historically have been fairly sort of vague and meandering as well. Well, yes, precisely. I mean, most anti-Semitic conspiracy theories simply go, you know who to blame? The Jews.
00:48:21
Speaker
Why? Because they're unsanitary, or they own all the buildings, or they control all the money. We don't need to get into specifics, we just need to blame them. They're the people responsible. Yes, not always particularly well-articulated either.
00:48:43
Speaker
He has a little bit on the way things worked before the internet. He says, conspiracy theories are typically theories that are pitched against a dominant received view. It may be that these are best developed initially in the absence of direct competition with the received view. Indeed, this was the typical pattern of development of a conspiracy theory before the advent of widespread use of the internet. A theory would be developed by an individual or a small group who are cut off from the mainstream media. Oh, look, the term is there now.
00:49:08
Speaker
It was typically only when these conspiracy theorists had a relatively well-fleshed-out conspiracy theory which was developed enough to deflect obvious criticisms that they would seek to publicise this widely, principally through the publication of books that outlined the relevant theory in detail. And again, true for that sort of conspiracy theory, but for your anti-Semitic, general, vague ones.
00:49:30
Speaker
possibly not as true.
00:49:48
Speaker
are the ones which are very well specified. That doesn't tell us how many vague conspiracy theories were being put forward in letters to the editor or magazine articles at that time. It just tells us that because that stuff was ephemeral, we don't know about it. But anyway, we're at the end of the paper now. His final words are,
00:50:14
Speaker
In the era of the internet, conspiracy theories such as the controlled demolition theory are developed in the glare of worldwide publicity. Advocates of conspiracy theories on the internet have been reluctant to advertise positive theories. It seems that this is because they fear being criticized by any of the billions of people who have access to the internet, a significant minority of whom are happy to devote their energies to attacking conspiracy theories discussed on the internet.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:50:37
Speaker
So instead, they concentrate their views on criticising the received view. As long as there are ways in which the received view is less than perfect, this activity can proceed and internet conspiracy theorists can remain active. However, in and of itself this activity cannot be sufficient to overthrow a received view in favour of a conspiracy theory. The most it can do is cause people to suspend judgement. Before we can reasonably expect a conspiracy theory to replace a received view, that conspiracy theory must be judged to provide a superior explanation of the relevant phenomena than the received view.
00:51:06
Speaker
But this cannot happen unless the conspiracy theory in question is fleshed out to the extent that it is in a position to figure in specific explanations of the events in question. And there you have it. I think I agree with what he's saying in this paper. I just think maybe it's not as general a claim as he's putting it across. Maybe it only applies to sort of a subset rather than conspiracy theories and conspiracy theories on the internet in general.
00:51:33
Speaker
Yes, I think the problem here is there's a good idea here, which is it turns out in the era of the internet people might decide to be vaguer in their claims because it's easier to defend a vague claim that is to suffer the onslaught of a lot of people going, look,
00:51:53
Speaker
You said it was Richard III, but actually Richard II was the king of England at that particular point in time. I've just shown your entire theory to be false. Good day, sir!" And you're going, you know, so that was a typo, what I meant to say was. But at the same time,
00:52:09
Speaker
That's, and I mean, it's worth having that kind of critique about the way in which people might decide to not be so specific because of the fear they're going to be so easily criticized. But we shouldn't be generalising about that, about all conspiracy theories in the modern era. Ooh. Yes, so definitely some good ideas there, nevertheless.
00:52:33
Speaker
So we're going to be going through this episode of this issue of episteme and subsequent conspiracy theory masterpiece theatres are we? We are indeed. There's going to be some Basham. There's going to be some Pictor. There's going to be a bit more Cody.
00:52:54
Speaker
is going to be a bit of Neil Levy, who we haven't encountered as of yet. And indeed, we're going to have Pete Manduck with his salaciously titled paper, Shit Happens. Cool.
00:53:07
Speaker
How vulgar. I know. Right. But until then, we're done with this episode. So it just remains to say that if you are a regular listener of this podcast, we will bid you farewell. But if you're one of our patrons, you'll get a bonus episode. And yeah, I was probably understating things a little bit when I said that there's plenty of elections. Actually, I don't know.
00:53:35
Speaker
Looking at the content now, what have we got? We've got some Trumpy stuff, but we do have a decent amount of other stuff, don't we? We do, but I mean, there's Trumpy stuff, there's Hunter Biden stuff. I mean, there's some local election stuff. And then we've got an update on good old Russia and the way they like killing people in really, really Baroque ways.
00:53:59
Speaker
So if you're a patron, you have that to look forward to. If you're not a patron and you'd like to hear about that, then you can become one just by going to Betrayon.com and searching for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. But patron or not, this main part of the episode is over. So unless you have anything else to say, I think we should draw things to a close. Indeed, I think we should declare this case closed. Case closed. Goodbye, everyone. Toodaloo.
00:54:36
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron, via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:55:37
Speaker
And remember, silent green is meeples.