Come on, you gave an example of "really genuinely nutty stuff" yourself: '"the government reads your email on their secret moon base staffed by hitler clones"'.
I'm not saying I agree with GP exactly, but you're strawmanning it into a tautology when you seem to know exactly what was really meant.
it is not enough to be right all along. if you want to be credible, you need to avoid being wrong all along, too.
real example. the theory that the NSA secretly poisoned the DES s-boxes to introduce a backdoor. People insisted that's what happened without any evidence. They were wrong all along. Later, when dual-EC came along, I think people were a little skeptical it was really a backdoor precisely because of the DES story.
Cell phones didn't always have GPS. "Closest cell tower" is less scary than "Within two metres"
That's exactly what I'm saying.
If you ignore all the crazy, the stuff that's left was stuff that almost nobody else was saying: that there was some kind of "conspiracy" to implement a total surveillance state (PRISM and friends, and location-aware phones), that in the future the middle class was going to be destroyed and the world enslaved to the service of a tiny elite (the "sharing economy" of non-employees with no benefits), fascism is coming back (too many examples to list), corporations with shadowy "deep state" links will rule the Earth (TPP), etc.
Remember that this was in the post-cold-war 1990s when everything was getting better, a rising tide would lift all boats, and freedom was going to ring. This was before 9/11, the great housing hyperinflation, the 2008 crash and the great stagnation, or our experiment at bringing democracy to Iraq ended with ISIS.
Polite establishment intellectuals weren't saying those things. Only crazies were, and the crazies were largely right. Maybe they were bat shit crazy about the underlying mechanisms, but they were right about where things were going.
IMHO a lot of conspiracy nuts are actually very perceptive and intelligent. They've got good pattern recognition circuits going. The problem is that they've got poor epistemology. They're not very careful thinkers, and they're often a bit uneducated and inexperienced about how the world really works. As a result they tend to force-fit their observations and extrapolations onto silly cartoonish models of how the world works. The observations are correct, but the models are not.
This is coupled with the fact that being loony outsiders, they have no reputation or political street cred to protect. They don't have to care about offending their superiors because they have none, and they aren't afraid of damaging their reputation because there's nowhere to go but up from 'fringe lunatic.' As a result, they can tell the truth insofar as they can point out trends nobody else wants to look at. According to Pravda grain production is only going up!
Just replace the word "conspiracy" with "emergent behavior in a complex system" and re-read all that stuff.
There is no Illuminati, but there is an "old boy network" where favors are traded for favors and corruption breeds. There is no New World Order per se, but there is a complex global economic system full of paradoxes and feedback loops and perverse incentives that behaves very much like one, and we do have corporations so big and complex and entrenched they're almost like a model of what a hostile AI would be like. Put these things together and you get everything the nutters write about minus the funny hats and secret societies.
Then again...
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/02/i-crashed-a-wal...
wait. is this an example of a good theory or a crazy one?
> The structure of the control network of transnational corporations affects global market competition and financial stability. So far, only small national samples were studied and there was no appropriate methodology to assess control globally. We present the first investigation of the architecture of the international ownership network, along with the computation of the control held by each global player. We find that transnational corporations form a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic “super-entity” that raises new important issues both for researchers and policy makers.[1]
[0] http://equitablegrowth.org/research/exploding-wealth-inequal...
[1] http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf
When everything is automated and nobody knows how to build anything anymore, what's the incentive to keep the idle masses fed?
Why would it necessarily be "anyone"? If wealth and capitol are concentrated, and wealthy own automated factories, then what will provide income for the rest? Maybe, as Gibson projects, population will crash (the "Jackpot"). If everyone has enough automation, on the other hand, then we get a Vinge-like future.
I wonder how many high-end restaurants and gathering spots are bugged (not necessarily by the gov).
well, yeah. if you ignore all the crazy, what's left isn't crazy. why is that surprising?
> The conspiranoids would have called you crazy if you'd suggested that everyone would be carrying devices that constantly report their location at all times
would they? that seems like a pretty obvious consequence of carrying a cell phone.
maybe my recollection is different, but i don't think people were saying "the government reads your email" was a crazy idea. they were saying "the government reads your email on their secret moon base staffed by hitler clones" was a crazy idea.
if you want to make the argument that the hatters were right all along but were wrongly dismissed, find a specific claim that was made, and a specific counterclaim. these "right all along" discussions always slide into unfalsifiable generalities and strawmen.