Derek unpacks what’s really going on in conspiritualist messages about the "climate change narrative" and how they use an assault of varying degrees of credible information to conflate issues, some of which they then monetize.
Then, he looks at how messages go horribly astray when the full context is missing—something quite common in social media, and which upcoming main episode guest, Tobias Rose-Stockwell, calls “context creep.”
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Last week I posted two short videos on social media about conspiritualists who conflate numerous topics around climate change, then pick off certain elements that they monetize in their product line.
One video also explores the cruelty that often coincides with what they think is them taking the moral high ground.
So for today's bonus episode, I want to unpack what's really going on in these messages, how these influencers use an assault of varying degrees of credible information to conflate issues, and then some of them, which they monetize.
And finally, I'll look at how messages go horribly astray when the full context is missing, something quite common in social media, and which upcoming main episode guest, Tobias Rose Stockwell, calls context creep.
I'm Derek Barris, and welcome to another Conspiratuality Bonus Episode.
EMF and 5G and chemtrails, oh my.
As always, I can't claim intentionality when it comes to why people do what they do.
So I'll start by saying that I think some people see no conflict in selling a solution to a problem they're decrying because they really think it's going to help.
And some people might not make that connection at all.
And some people are noticing a hole in the market and they rush in to fill it.
Belief or ethics be damned.
I'm not going to guess which is which today.
I'm only going to point out their techniques.
Now, just before recording this episode, I read an article in the Washington Post entitled, Historically Bad Heat Wave Isn't Close to Over.
And I know here in Portland it's been hot, but that's nothing compared to what I'm reading about in other cities.
So here's a few fun facts from that piece, which was published last Wednesday.
Phoenix, Arizona broke a record of 19 straight days above 110 degrees and it was predicted to continue for a week or more.
Now that city also set a record low temperature of 97 and I can't imagine what it's like waking up to 97 degree heat.
El Paso, Texas reached 100 plus degrees for 33 consecutive days.
Miami has a heat index of over 100 for 38 consecutive days.
Nationwide, 80 million people have been experiencing a heat index of at least 105 degrees.
Okay, so, as you can probably tell by the stats in that article, let's stop saying that climate change is coming.
That hasn't been true for a while.
And I think the movies really messed with our heads by implying that only major catastrophes, like a fuckin' tidal wave in Los Angeles washing over New York City, is the real mark of global warming.
We're in it.
It's going to get worse with this upcoming El Nino, and a lot of people are fucked right now.
And sadly, it's hard to even discuss this because historic heat or thousand-year floods don't really mean anything when they happen every year now.
I was writing about climate change topics back in the 90s as a newspaper reporter, and I covered it more extensively a decade ago for Big Think.
For that site, after publishing a series of articles, my editor said I had to stop writing them because, quote, they don't get a lot of attention.
And that's how perverse the incentives of our online discourse is right now.
And you know we're screwed when people like Jordan Peterson get hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of likes with his climate hoax trolling tweets.
But let's unpack a different angle now.
Last week, Luke Story, a self-reported metaphysics teacher and former fashion industry something-something based in Austin, of course, he put out a climate change post with a photo of contrails or condensation trails in the sky.
The wink-wink to his audience and to anyone willing to engage in the conspiracy theory is that it is chemtrails, and this idea was spun up in the mid-90s about governments changing the weather by releasing chemicals into the atmosphere.
Now, of course, that's not a conspiracy.
The Chinese government has done things like this.
They have the Beijing Weather Modification Office, which has performed cloud seeding to change weather since at least 1995.
So as with all conspiracy theories, chemtrails have a bit of truth behind them.
That office currently employs 37,000 people in China, and the government regularly seeds clouds with silver iodide loaded into rockets, sometimes for noble purposes like putting out wildfires.
But then of course there are questionable purposes like ensuring that there's no rain during the Olympics.
So that's all real.
But American airplanes toxifying the environment with airplane trails is not.
