Empire Of The Sun

How does a modestly-funded scientific climate study turn into a conspiracy narrative, joining the 'theory' that governments across the world have been seeding the skies with various chemicals toward nefarious ends, via so-called 'chemtrails'? How is it that those of a certain mindset are promulgating the absurdity that the UK government, at the Prime minister's direct behest, is '...trying to block out the sun...' via the use of these fictitious agents [clue: aircraft have been leaving contrails in their wake since the start of the jet age, in the form of water vapour] in some apparently evil scientist attempt to forestall the effects of climate change that these self-same 'theorists' deny exists, and that itself is a government conspiracy? [source: "The 'Secret Plan' to Dim the Sun", by James Ball in this week's The New European]

The answer, of course, is that complex macro-organism: the online 'community'. Social media have successfully alienated [in the Marxist sense] a large swathe of [principally first world] society from reality by usurping practically all other forms of news and education gathering, and replacing them for most people as their principle source of information, news, and ultimately, knowledge. The added sauce to this, though, is that most people are simply unaware of how deviously mediated their information-gathering is by the algorithms that are employed by the social media companies to funnel their 'customers' into click-bait rabbit holes for maximum revenue return effect. Societally, this simply creates an opinionated feedback loop that, as any undamped feedback loop [cf. blog posts passim] will, feed off its regurgitated input without recourse to any other influence, until the system itself ceases to actually function correctly.

The resultant mess is bad enough in the world of audio [and for that matter any other form of] engineering, but when applied to real-world stuff that affects the ways by which people conduct themselves in society and influences and steers the views they hold to be true and factual, the results are catastrophic; weirdly more so in a democracy, where people actually have the power to influence political change and societal outcomes [to a point] via their vote. In a dictatorship, the ruling powers can say whatever suits their narrative in much the same manner as the voluntary 'communities' that infest the internet and social media in 2025 [and hence affect the prevailing political narrative 'democratically' in non-dictatorships]. The tipping point will be when those trapped in these feedback loops of fantasy become the majority and reality itself gradually slips away, leaving the power of government and change in the hands of the billionaires who hold the reins of it all. Sound like a conspiracy theory? Nope, that's the reality of it right now...