What Lies Below: Part 11
Exploring the Depths of the Conspiracy Iceberg
Welcome back to What Lies Below, a journey down the immense Conspiracy Iceberg. We’re deep into the second of twenty tiers today, and it looks like we’ve found a couple items that are pretty mundane terms that don’t appear much in the Conspiracy world. We also get another item that is born completely of creepypasta(a scary story cut n’ pasted repeatedly all over the internet). I think that with something of this scale, this sort of clump is inevitable from time to time. I think most of it will clear up soon, and we’re still getting some good genuine weirdness in the mean time!
PANOPTICON — As I mentioned in the intro, we have an item here that really isn’t anything on its own but a term sometimes attached to other conspiracies. A Panopticon is a building designed in a way that lets one person(or a small group) monitor everyone at once, usually secretly. The image usually used to describe this is of a prison with central monitoring/guard positions and cells lining circular perimeter walls.
These days, the term has expanded to imply a national or international level of monitoring, i.e. ‘surveillance panopticon’ standing for the way various shadowy alphabet agencies monitor most of our online activity. It’s a term that gets misused a lot, but does address very real concerns in the U.S. of a situation that was really ignited by the post-9/11 Patriot Act and expanded by Presidents of both parties in the time since. It’s also a word that makes you sound smart. Try it next time you’re at the bar, everyone will be impressed!
NEODINOSAURS — These are exactly what they sound like and the rule! I suppose they’re technically a subfamily of cryptids, but Neodinosaurs can be a broad range of things that either resemble dinosaurs or things that are believed to be actual dinosaurs. This can sometimes be attached to active sightings, but it’s more often attached to theories that suggest dinosaurs lived up until much more recently than we think.
Popular Neodinosaur items include Woolly Mammoths, which have an alleged modern sighting or two, and are believed by many to have survived into very recent days. There’s also perhaps the most famous singular Neodinosaur, Mokele-mbembe, which looks like a Brontosaurus and lives in the Congo River Basin. Some people think the Loch Ness Monster may have been a dinosaur. There are a few items down the Iceberg that deal with these sorts of things, and they usually come frustratingly close to genuine credibility but never quite have the hard evidence to lock them in.
ACCELERATIONISM — This is a very popular term right now in the political world. It isn’t really a conspiracy or even terribly unusual, unfortunately, but I suppose you could realistically suggest that it’s a philosophy behind certain cults or political factions and is therefore deserving of a spot. Usually when you hear it these days, it’s regarding Far Right organizations allegedly trying to accelerate social conflicts in order to bring about what they believe is an inevitable upheaval/race war/etc. In these circumstances, the Accelerationists in question will sometimes masquerade as being neutral or even pretend to side with the people they intend to someday subjugate or kill. There are also people who push it in the name of Anarchist principle, though most Anarchist philosophers would staunchly disagree.
It CAN mean other things, too. Some idealists think accelerating capitalism will somehow make it start to work properly. Others think an inevitable collapse is the only road, difficult as it may be, to a utopian future. Others use it in terms of technology and the ‘Singularity’ mentioned higher up on the iceberg and think that AI is going to come and change everything sooner or later, so it may as well happen here and now so we can figure out what’s next.
GNOSTICISM — I suppose every mystical philosophy has to be on here, but I’m afraid to say that they all start to blur together after a while. Some of their junior adherents can get VERY mad if you say this, but the old hands at occult stuff will usually just shrug and agree. To be fair, Gnosticism is at least a little more interesting than the rest and is very influential on vast swaths of the esoteric mysticism landscape. There’s too much to really define for our purposes, but I’d recommend a quick review on Wiki. In short, it kind of works like a JRPG storyline. See, there is an Abrahamic God figure out there somewhere — but some other also-divine entity is responsible for our universe/dimension/whatever. And it’s malevolent. To get past it and/or defeat it, we have to focus on knowledge to blablabla. Anyway, it’s a flabor of Christian philosophy but also kinda not, and calling yourself a Gnostic comes in and out of fashion every couple years. Gnosticism is pretty hot right now in the online spiritualist/occultist circuit and seems to be mutating as a philosophy right before our eyes as it is translated to the masses via memes and shitposters.
IRAN-CONTRA — It’s kind of funny that this is here, but I guess it is an example of the rare “One-time conspiracy theory that was proven and verified and accepted as fact”. In brief, President Ronald Reagan sold missiles to Iran in order to give the money to the Contras, a fascist death squad in Nicaragua. Both of these things were technically not allowed, and a lot of boring politicians got very huffy about this breach of protocol. It’s not that most of them didn’t support the fascist death squads, it was more that they just wanted it handled more quietly and politely. I guess maybe the conspiracy is that some people think Reagan wasn’t a monster capable of such things but those people are wrong. NEXT!
THE MIDNIGHT GAME — I don’t expect it to happen, but I am mildly concerned that the Iceberg is going to become very dense with creepypasta as time goes on. These stories often take on a “No, it’s actually real” aspect when they make the jump from one space to another, i.e. when they are plucked from an imageboard and put on Reddit and then wind up on Facebook. Each leap allows for some changes to make it more believable while also further obfuscating the origins. This is how even something as very publicly made on a forum as Slenderman can find itself genuinely believed by people.
I digress! The Midnight Game is a spooky story formatted as an instructional text on how to conduct a vague old “pagan ritual”. Candles, darkness, a little blood, knocking on a door at midnight, all the spooky ingredients are there. The key of the game is that after you do the little ritual, you have to wander around with a candle for a few hours and hope the, sigh, “Midnight Man” doesn’t get you. Yes, of course it was made into a bad movie.
OUMUAMUA — This was a strange object that wandered through our solar system in 2017; the first interstellar object that we know of to do so. It got relatively close to earth, insofar as stellar objects go, and was probably an alien probe. Obviously the government said it was a natural object, but I think we all agree on this. Oumuamua was long and narrow, may be hundreds of millions of years old, and allegedly is never coming back. This is a really interesting thing but there isn’t a whole lot for me to say about it, you know?
PLANT INTELLIGENCE — This is a subject that exists in that fuzzy sweet spot where woke hippy metaphysics meets genuine science. It’s cool though, right? Plants are very alien to us in terms of life forms, so it’s a fun idea that they operate in a whole different way than we imagine. There are scattered academic work on this, but most of the discussions about it are still more in the neighborhood of a Joe Rogan fan hearing it from his friend and going “whoah”. There is some real science out there suggesting that maybe plants have some level of intelligence, though. They can remember things and seem able to communicate at some level with other plants, for example. But it’s all still pretty vague and misunderstood.
EXPANDING EARTH — This is another one that’s exactly what it sounds like. Many years ago, people’s minds were so blown by mountains and other natural phenomena that they decided it’s because earth is expanding. Some thought it was because the planet was absorbing space energy, others thought it was a natural but unexplained matter. It was never a big one and even the Flat Earthers and Hollow Earthers don’t care about it. No longer a real factor in the conspiracy world.
GANGSTALKING — In an objective sense, this is the phenomenon of a single person being targeted by an organized group effort to stalk and harass them with varying levels of intensity. This idea has really picked up steam in conspiracy culture over the last few years, absorbing the ‘paranoid conspiracy theorist’ trope and giving it a more streamlined and defined backdrop. Social media is full of “Targeted Individuals” bemoaning their fates. It’s usually some government agency orchestrating the gangstalking, though they are sometimes pulling the strings and the actual ‘stalkers’ are just citizens being manipulated. It may also be any number of Illuminati/nwo/cabal groups seeing to it, or religious groups, or so on. As time goes on, the term is being thrown around more and more loosely.
There is also another aspect that is less conspiratorial. There are places online that function basically as gangstalking hubs, though their targets are generally not random people and are instead internet celebrities or other personalities they’ve singled out for constant surveillance and harassment. This practice is growing rapidly as online “influencers” proliferate and, in many cases, generate dedicated groups of detractors or trolls. These sorts of cases aren’t really part of some larger global conspiracy, but are usually just literally “for the lols”. In a way, that can be way more concerning. An early and particularly infamous case of this would be “Chris Chan”, and there are countless documentaries and articles online tracing that situation.
IMF NIRP — This stands for “International Monetary Fund Negative Interest Rate Policy”. Seems confusing! Believe it or not, I’m not as smart as the character I play on twitter, so I had to look this up. I’ll be blunt: it was dense and unpleasant to read. It seems to be related to setting interest rates at a negative amount, which I am led to believe is bad. When I looked around, most of the places I found this being discussed were politically Conservative. I saw some people suggest this is a part of communism, though I have my doubts. Next!
BICAMERALISM — This deals with our psychology having developed from two halves of our brains yelling at one another. Or maybe it refers to the way a divided political body is set up. In either case, it isn’t connected to anything juicy I’m aware of and some cursory searches didn’t turn up anything. I get the feeling it’s a term attached to esoteric theories about hidden abilities and personas in our minds, but that’s just guesswork. Sorry! Next!
TRANSVESTIGATION — This is not as new a phenomenon as some may think, but it was absolutely exploded in popularity over the last couple years as hysterical transphobia has become mildly lucrative in certain circles. Transvestigation is the process by which people become fixated with “proving” various public figures are transgender. This is usually accompanied by photos with lots of circles and lines drawn on them to draw attention to alleged “tells” of physiology, posture, and so on.
Transvestigations are virtually always so ridiculous that they’re hard to differentiate from satire, and this has given rise to plenty of people posting them as a meme. Unfortunately, the subtlety is lost on a small subset of the conspiracy theory community, who glom on to any such content and spread it vigorously. This occasionally causes the phenomenon to ooze into the mainstream — i.e. your Republican uncle on Facebook sharing gross stuff about Michelle Obama. This has become one of many avenues by which highly radicalized fringes will pipeline more “moderate” conspiracy theorists.
That’s it! We had a weird mix today: bog-standard terminology like ‘Bicameralism’ rubbing shoulders with high level occult theory like Gnosticism, and then real, 100% verified things like Iran-Contra. Hopefully it gets a little more obscure soon. See you next time!