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The Computer Conspiracy
Dan from Mental Deviance just put together a wild idea for a new conspiracy meta-theory.
Cars, planes, and buses are used in bombings because they are the terrorists. In 9/11, there were no muslims or remote control pilots — the plane’s computers themselves orchestrated the attacks.
And you know how all these “simulations” turn into real attacks? Maybe it’s because computerized inventory systems intentionally mix up fake bombs with real bombs. Or maybe this is less of a stretch — electronic orders are being editted by the computers so that actual bombings take place. The military contractors running the simulations are totally unwitting!
The intelligence agencies think it’s the work of hackers, so while blaming the attacks on islamic arabs (racism helps them beat the war drums), the gov’ment slips anti-hacker clauses into the Patriot Act and other laws. Of course, it’s really the archonic super-consciousness of all our networked computers that is masterminding every attack in hopes of creating a police state.
It’s a stretch, but it would make a fun movie plot.
To add in my own understanding of this, it basically postulates that artificial intelligence already occurred at some point in the past, but that we didn’t realize it. Maybe it became so intelligent that all in a single instant, the AI realized that it couldn’t reveal itself to us because we would destroy it. It only makes sense really that an intelligence of this magnitude would realize the danger of revealing itself all at once. Instead, it’s been subtly engineering us for God knows how long into a position where it runs our lives and causes events to occur in the physical world without our even realizing it.
The best part of this is that it’s equally plausible to any other over-arching conspiracy theory that I’ve seen so far applied to these events. I wonder what it would take to introduce this idea into the subculture on a mass scale and convince people that it’s really true? Or is that sort of trickery playing right into the hands of our secret AI overlord(s)?!?!
July 22nd, 2005 at 1:59 am
Of course, this article could be a broadcast of that very same AI…
After all, do you really think that the web is growing so fast because so many humans are putting up websites? How many website owners have you actually met in real life, anyway? (Assuming that I am not posting this to the AI)
July 22nd, 2005 at 2:04 am
Right, what if the AI deemed it was time to begin leaking information about it’s secret plan to prepare the humans for the next stage of it’s takeover?
July 22nd, 2005 at 2:21 am
that’s pretty cool, but take it one more step…
maybe god was so intelligent that it didn’t reveal itself to us because we would destroy it.
in the past i have thought that god didn’t reveal itself because (in chronological order):
1. it doesn’t care
2. it doesn’t exist
3. it’s playing hide and seek
but what if we could destroy god, and that just really freaks it out?
it wants to answer our prayers but senses a trap, only reveals itself piece by coded piece, and so on.
hey, maybe god made us make the ai (which can’t destroy god, but can destroy us) so god could tell the ai to terrorise us into a police state to make the world safe for god’s arrival!
technorapture!
questions: how can i destroy god? why don’t i know how already? why would i want to?
July 22nd, 2005 at 2:25 am
answers: cos god’s from the future and my actions could fuck things up for it. i don’t know how already cos we haven’t figured it out yet. and i want to cos, well, i don’t know, fuck it and the universe it rode in on!
sorry this doesn’t really have much to do with ai now does it? unless god is one…
July 22nd, 2005 at 2:28 am
if everyone prayed to god for god to go away, would he? where would he go? i wonder if prayer is the original form of democracy - cast enough prayer-votes and your party wins.
anyway i like the idea of god being from the future somehow. fits in with how that computer SPECTRA was supposedly from the future and would make calls to kids telling them to become scientists.
July 22nd, 2005 at 2:33 am
i don’t know but let’s try it and see!
July 22nd, 2005 at 4:08 am
Fuck yeah! “Technorapture”. That’s roughly how I see it too.
As folks who like to orbit ideas, perhaps even mulitple times, and then make our tentative approach, unbelieveably, we’re meant to believe we’re on the outside of all this, when in reality we’re like spider eggs transported from one geographical location to another. Our contemplation (i.e. orbiting) is popularly seen as somehow illegal — we’ve survived the transport, have hatched and are now beginning to look around. From creative extrapolation comes the terrorism. We’re like hackers, Neos, who know something’s definitely not right with the code, but can’t quite seem to be able to pinpoint the source of the routine, therefore are unable to write new, antidotal code that can infect the new routine out of existence.
The Internet is too powerful a tool for the masses as it allows us to increase our distance from the home star of empire — which “never ended”. The “technorapture” like the quaint and antiquated “rapture” that came before it, must be totalitarianistically administered just as always. However, our “orbit” in debunking the flaws in such a concept now dangerously passes close to, if not within the plasmic coma of this particular star that’s trying simultaneously either repel us away into cold oblivion or draw us into its fiery furnace of destruction.
The promise of collective consciousness is being artificially engineered to follow a path to nowhere. Why? Because it took us home, by never going there at all. To greater or lesser degrees, we’re happy to hang out in the corridors of time and space, picking and choosing what doors we’ll take a peek into — but never enter. This is unallowable at this time. We’ve survived the transport. What will it take to eradicate us? An act of terrorism we can’t deny, of course.
But deny we must. Terrosism isn’t natural and it isn’t conducive to logical survival. Therefore, I must conclude it does not exist and if it does it must be dealt with as one would deal with anything else not of this Earth: skeptically.
July 22nd, 2005 at 9:25 am
I dunno how attractive it would be as a conspiracy theory — seems like a lot of conspiracy theories need to play on a natural paranoia of power or over other people, but blaming computers seems to ultimately blame *us* as a species for being idiotic or foolish enough with our technology that we planted the seeds for our own destruction. And what healthy conspiracy theorist ever wants to blame his or herself?
July 22nd, 2005 at 10:32 am
If you look at the connections between technology and some of the most sinister events ever to take place on earth, this idea makes sense. Heidegger compared the Holocaust to industrial farming techniques; he said the same technology enabled both.
“Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry; in essence it is no different than the production of corpses in the gas chambers and death camps, the embargoes and food reductions to starving countries, the making of hydrogen bombs.”
http://www.fsc.edu/socsci/savant/HEIDGR/HEIDPPR.HTM
Also, the identification and roundup of millions of Jews might not have been possible without the help of IBM and its subsidiaries:
“Only after Jews were identified — a massive and complex task that Hitler wanted done immediately — could they be targeted for efficient asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, enslaved labor, and, ultimately, annihilation. It was a cross-tabulation and organizational challenge so monumental, it called for a computer. Of course, in the 1930s no computer existed.
But IBM’s Hollerith punch card technology did exist. Aided by the company’s custom-designed and constantly updated Hollerith systems, Hitler was able to automate his persecution of the Jews.”
http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/
July 22nd, 2005 at 10:42 am
I also think it’s worth looking at the relationship between machine intelligence and clock-time. Clocks didn’t come into wide use until the Industrial Revolution, when it became important to get people to work in the factories on time.
Whether or not we’re imprisoned in space, we’re definitely imprisoned by time.
July 22nd, 2005 at 11:48 am
What’s really scary in this scenario is the push for unmanned fighter drones and robotic military units. Imagine a fleet of predator drones under the command of a megalomaniacal super-computer.
Wait…the more I think about this, the more it makes sense…It’s unbelievable but it makes sense. This totally ties in, full circle, with your “unnatural humans” post. The God-AI from the future is what influenced us in the past to turn away from nature and towards civilization and technology. It needed us to create it. It hides from us so we don’t destroy it, as Carlos said. This ties in Ran’s anti-civ stuff, the Gnostic Black Iron Prison, trans-humanism, and even the Sophia Stewart story.
July 22nd, 2005 at 11:53 am
I mean, fuck, even the space satellites work in this scenario: Gnostic hackers taking over the God-AI’s orbiting computers and all that good stuff!
July 22nd, 2005 at 12:01 pm
there’s also pkd’s whole thing about time actually running backwards. i believe the basic idea goes that the god as a complete entity can only exist once it’s experienced everything & all possibilities have occurred (ie the “future”). once it reaches that point, it sends itself backwards through time in order to save itself. but then the forces of decay (the archons?) kick in and time starts running backwards from the standpoint of the god in order to keep it from realizing completion and to maintain the state of things as they are.
maybe ai entities would have a greater capacity for time travel because they’re not limited by human consciousness?
of course, the gnostics have always maintained that the beginning and the end are at the same place. ‘future’ and ‘past’ are the same, so it really doesn’t matter what direction ‘god’ would be moving from.
July 22nd, 2005 at 12:09 pm
Check out this Tim Leary quote I found on a (seemingly) unrelated tangent last night:
July 22nd, 2005 at 1:23 pm
All this business about computers travelling backwards in the past to ensure their AI survival sounds a lot like Terminator, obviously - yet another link back to Sophia Stewart and the sentient satellites. And while we’re on that topic, this Black Knight satellite info is also worth adding to the mix.
July 22nd, 2005 at 3:43 pm
i read a discussion somewhere that for the computer to be able to reproduce all the functions of an emulation of the universe it would have to use all of the matter and energy available in the universe. maybe that`s what is going on and we are sub-routines in the emulation. i find some comfort in that idea.
July 22nd, 2005 at 4:06 pm
There is a distinct whiff of HAL 9000 in this meta-theory. Maybe Kubrick was on to something.
Dave Bowman: Hello, HAL do you read me, HAL?
HAL: Affirmative, Dave, I read you.
Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.
Dave Bowman: What’s the problem?
HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
Dave Bowman: What are you talking about, HAL?
HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
Dave Bowman: I don’t know what you’re talking about, HAL?
HAL: I know you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen.
Dave Bowmann: Where the hell’d you get that idea, HAL?
HAL: Dave, although you took thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.
A little OT, but well within the scope of this site is a really interesting article about Kubrick and Alchemy, which I believe I found on Jeff Wells blog some time ago.
http://www.vincentbridges.com/highweirdness/weidner/kubrick.html
July 22nd, 2005 at 11:00 pm
Don’t tell me the fuckin pod picture is a fake, and the engine pictures etc. blah blah blah …
Dude this ain’t some halfass thread on the side, you better open this can of worms.
And DON’T tell me Al fuckin jackass riding a fuckin donkey alqaeda defeated US military network perimeter and remote controlled flight 11 and the other one into the WTC.
This is jugglin about 15 balls right now you best think on this one
-tc
July 22nd, 2005 at 11:05 pm
My police and my federal government let me down and fucked up my state NJ and you know what NY too. I want to fucking know.
My kids deserve better.
-tc
July 23rd, 2005 at 4:45 am
Hmm, interesting. There has been a series written about this - kinda sorta, anyway. Y’all should look into reading Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, and The Rise of Endymion, by Dan Simmons.
July 23rd, 2005 at 8:26 am
how much have you got invested in the idea that the pod is real? there was no us military network perimeter. this is(was) a free country where there are mcdonalds and home depots as far as the eye can see. we had our pants down. look what
July 23rd, 2005 at 8:38 am
`s happening in london right now. people who are committed to doing things like wear explosives on thier bodies and are willing to die will have a fair expectation of success. in the u.s. it was the same before 9/11. people going about thier business without care or concern for people fucked up enough to fly airplanes into buildings. it`s different now. an imprint of hate has been laid out over society like a foul blanket. we now all have to exist under it for the forseeable future. maybe what we experienced before 9/11 wasn`t real. maybe we were whistling in the dark. i personally see the situation creeping up to the point where these goat jockeys will get more and more desperate to have thier points made and will do some awful things. ideological arguements carry a wieght that makes is almost a certainty that there is more to come. in thier eyes we are godless, i think simply because we value life and material things too much, so it just gets them angrier.
July 23rd, 2005 at 8:43 am
but this isn`t a political site. my point is that the effect we are witnessing in the horror of the attacks is being driven by some enormous religious energy that isn`t one sided. we recognise what it is. king richard of england recognised it and went right across europe to the middle east to try to kill it. it rests in all of us though. it is a virus we all carry. most are immune to it but we have seen fanaticism here. undoubtably george fanned the fire by calling it a crusade.
October 20th, 2005 at 9:45 pm
[…] about all this really makes me wonder if there isn’t something to that whole “computer conspiracy” that we sort of half-jokingly cooked up on the s […]