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The Occult-Conspiracy Operating System



Do you ever get the creeping suspicion while browsing around occult or conspiracy websites that you’re a lot less crazy than the people that create them? I feel that way all the time (although I’m sure some would argue I’m just as whacked).

Part of it is the technical execution. Most of the conspiracy sites that you’ll run up against will have this ridiculous problem where they have ALL their content on one page. And that page will be this crazy mishmash of fonts and font sizes and colors and weird animated graphics that are totally pointless. It’s like they’re stuck in the early 90’s, as far as their computer aesthetic is concerned.

The other thing that gets me is that most of these sites seem to have swallowed their own theories hook, line and sinker. They may have gotten started by turning a critical inquiring mind against the mainstream, but once they established an identity by doing that, they wouldn’t dare turning that same critical faculty against themselves.

I sort of see your average conspiracy theorist and occultist as a computer programmer. They figure out a way to hack an existing piece of cultural software, rewrite it, or build their own from scratch. It really is a huge achievement, and I don’t want to diminish that. But then once they run their new software, it’s like they just get stuck in it for good. It’s really a pain in the ass.

I tend to see my own work and that of some of my sister-sites (such as those on my sidebar, under “Counter-Culture”), as being rather different. It almost seems like we’re taking all these little software programs everybody else is busy writing and running, and doing something altogether different with them. Using computer analogies, it’s almost like we’re writing a new operating system. Everybody else seems to be stuck trying to write rinky-dink shareware programs (a la the early 90’s) which will at least make them a few bucks by guilting people into registering the product. But with us, what we’re doing is more like the Open-Source Movement. We’re out here re-wiring from the ground up, writing plugins and extensions and trying to craft a viable alternative. Shareware, in some sense, just wants to get bought out by a big company. Open-Source tells the companies to go fuck themselves: we’re giving this shit away for free because it’s just a better system.

Anyway, maybe this is a totally geeky way to phrase the on-going debate. And the analogy certainly breaks down after a while. But to me it seems like it offers some useful new ideas to throw into the mix. Any thoughts on this?







9 Reader Responses

  1. crasspastor Says:
    June 13th, 2005 at 4:07 am

    Yes! A million thoughts!

    First of all: well fuckin’ said brother Tim. Well said.

    I’ve gotta say that I bristle at anti Carl Sagan commentary. I do. The man remains to this day my hero, who through his careerlong creative output, helped coaxe me out of nihilistic despair and into the stars all my life. My obsession with Sagan as the voice of the skeptical, has always begun and ended with the excitement skepticism afforded me in the olden days. Therefore, I am simultaneously in awe of finding Sagan’s humanistic direction wanting of explanatory power and also, in a much more mild sense, distraught that his “baloney kit” doesn’t scale to the world we find ourselves nine years after his death. But yet it does still apply, only not in the “down to the wire” sense in which we all find ourselves spiritually and culturally today.

    But in the same spirit of supreme, condescending CSISCOP propaganda, I find myself drunk in the considerations of other realms and modes of human thought. Perhaps none of the other qualifying methods are for me — I still maintain my atheism, so to speak. I will never drink the Kool-Aid unless this Kool-Aid is some fucking Kool-Aid. But I’ve been sippin’ some mean explanatory whiskey by reading you fellas that I can’t help but expand in the same. The imagination is a supremely beautiful thing. And this I’m beginning to realize is what transcendence means. I’ve taken nothing seriously along the way and yet invest every store I have for emotion in each. It’s fucking phenomenal.

    I’ve begun to look at my other paranoia attacks when I was younger through two seperate lenses now. First the image passes through the hyper-skeptical, “no way, no how” lens and then into my newly claimed lens of fantasy and creativity. I can’t tell you what a wonderful thing it is to see things from many different perspectives at all times. To look back on what I wanted to run from, I see wasted cycles of creativity now. I see ten years spent in denial of what I have always sensed.

    And that is, the world of mind control is alive and fucking well. There is no telling what will come next.

  2. crasspastor Says:
    June 13th, 2005 at 4:28 am

    Oh yeah, more thoughts on the Open Source politics thing. I wrote this to a friend some time ago:

    A new idealism can be spread and I think at this early stage, the best way to
    emulate this is through the example of the GNU model and Linux in its “all
    too important” business sense. As in the George Lakoff school of political
    framing, perhaps we must perform the duty of introducing the masses to the
    idea that they are programmed and therefore would want to be programmed with
    something more featureful and much more secure from outside attacks than what
    they currently are programmed by.

    If we follow the “linux model” to the T, it will necessitate that all
    developers be equal. Think of this:

    As separated as we are class, race, gender and culturewise, there is one
    system that remains constant. That is the system in which we operate our
    computers. As linux makes inroads, so then, so do we.

    Again, I am a long way off yet. But if we can decentralize the meaning of
    what is to be human in some way, perhaps in the way computer instructions are
    coded, and follow the TRIED AND TRUE brand spankin’ new business model of the
    “Linux revolution”, the support for progressivism will multiply as equally as
    progressivism itself will finally come of age to defeat this goddamn scourge
    of incurious unenlightenment.

    For every anything the mass, corporate trough overseers produce, we will emit
    a smell that will waft past the nose of every bored stiff snout that knows no
    cuisine better than the gruel it endlessly feeds upon. They can never
    compete with decentralization. This is why they are trying to shut
    decentralized communication down. This is why they may succeed or they may
    fail.

    I believe the system is too wieldy and slow to ever notice a threat without
    destroying everything else in order for it to get to it.

    The system is springing a trillion leaks. The rationality of the corporate
    Linux model is our only raft to safety. And paradoxically, our safety
    depends on the more people that get on.

    Strange but fucking true. . .

  3. slomo Says:
    June 13th, 2005 at 8:50 am

    Another slightly different model is the concept of peer-review. In my own professional life, peer-review is a major pain-in-the-ass and it sometimes succumbs to personal vendetta and other human faililngs. But it is also very necessary.

    I like to think of conspiracy theory as a discipline that attempts to build cultural predictive models. Many of your standard (unembellished) conspiracy theories tend to predict the behaviors of politicians much better than the narrative fed to us by corporate media. Many theories, however, are too weighed down by the unnecessary bestiary of shape-shifting reptile aliens and the like. Some of these flourishes are useful for their shock value: they draw people in, and such magnetism has value. But, as Tim suggests, many of these alternative narratives are so crazy that they’re distracting.

    The construction of cultural predictive models is a scientific endeavor. As such, it should be liable to the same collective vetting processes. Peer review — “scholars” commenting on the work of their peers — can help wield Occam’s Razor to shave down alternative narratives to models that are predictive, reasonably supported by the evidence, and no more complex than absolutely necessary. There are always those who would never submit themselves to criticism by competing “theorists”, but those individuals expose themselves for what they are: charlatans who are less interested in exposing the truth than in calling attention to themselves and developing a cult following.

    I respect the work that Tim here, Jeff at Rigorous Intution, and others do in this regard. Keep doing what you’re doing.

  4. alistair Says:
    June 13th, 2005 at 10:00 am

    popes such as carl sagan destroyed emmanuel velikovski`s career.i`m not saying that e.v. was correct in all that he put forward,but,there is some pretty compelling and obvious evidence on the planet,if you can stand life without blinkers,that suggest that our planet and the solar system and the universe as a whole is not what the religion of science says it is.
    try www.jimmccanneyscience.com
    for a discussion of the electromechanical model of the universe that science denies.it explains comets and planetary motion in ways that nasa denies.
    i am not attacking sagan the man.i never met him.if he provided inspiration to you,crasspastor,then he has done god`s work,but as a member of the science brethren he has different agendas.
    about the computer code thing.something`s emerging.we are busy beta testing for some entity of computational enormity and we are deep inside.
    certainly the conspiracy pages,whether occult or political or otherwise are mostly in it for the money,that`s why it`s like a visit to wal-mart.

  5. J. Puma Says:
    June 13th, 2005 at 12:32 pm

    what a geek, geek-boy.

  6. Fell Says:
    June 13th, 2005 at 2:47 pm

    Well put, Tim. I often use the open-source model myself when explaining occultism to noobs. They are much more open to the idea that way than using more antiquated jargon. The idea that conspiracy theory and the occult are simply a way of analysing all worldly paradigms and spiritual systems, and ultimately building an individualistic, inter-subjective architecture for use. Kudos.

  7. Thomas Conlon Says:
    June 13th, 2005 at 5:30 pm

    uhhh…. it’s called the Bohemian Grove in the US, it’s in California…

    what about P2?

    “…the question is whether you are paranoid enough.”
    -Strange Days

    “the meek ain’t gonna inherit shit!”
    -Urban Dance Squad

  8. Thomas Conlon Says:
    June 13th, 2005 at 5:39 pm

    BTW Open source politics… fuckin’ brilliant man… what I would envision vis a vis “transparency in the political process”

  9. rev max Says:
    June 13th, 2005 at 5:52 pm

    In a lot of ways that’s what the original gnostic movement seemed to be to me - people who took the Biblical myth as a template and then applied a sort of postmodern hermaneutic to it, allowing them to create whatever meaning was most useful in a given context.

    WHat’s interesting to ponder is that this was done deliberately, consciously and openly - “no one among them was considered spiritual until he had devised something new.” Gnosticism was itself an open source religion, thus the syncretism and the bewildering array of scriptures, gods, rituals, etc.



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