LET ME SPRINKLE YOU WITH FAIRY DUST
The title of this story is "
All Discordians join the Illuminatti"
I called it the
Adam Weishaupt Society.
We made this big alternate reality game around creating and propagating fake news stories. We had a secret website and a secret forum.
We taught ourselves to talk in the authority-voice, the man-on-the-scene voice.
We learned what kinds of stories would make people tweak out and rage, or beat their friends over the head, going "See?? I told yoU!!"
We even had a scoring system -- when you found a forum or blog that mentioned your story, you earned points. When non-players commented, it earned points. The bigger the reaction, the bigger the score.
We were organized into cells - all the players were spread out over 4 teams. Each team had an photoshop-wizard, a text-wrangler, and a web monkey. We used code names, and had cool avatars. It felt like this secret operation
The game was divided into 2-week rounds, and every team was trying to get the biggest score during that time. Of course, the misinformation game didn't stop at the public, it was also not-unheard-of to fake screenshots and stage outrage as a launching platform for an even louder screech.
Honestly, it was super fun, while it lasted.
Before the wave, it felt like we were actually doing this public service. Like, maybe this would teach some people to read more critically. Kinda like the Discordian vibe - that we are a religion that's so absurd it couldn't be a religion, it begs to be rejected -- but to reject us, you need rigor. You need a system for sorting out "true" from "false", and that lens is very difficult to hold up against Religion and Spirituality. You cannot toss out Discordians without tossing out some of the authentic, so it feels like our absurdity is also a service to the greater lunatic fringe... and back in the late 2000s, our little fake news games felt the same way--like we are trying to break the machine in a way that would (in some small way) ultimately contribute to our health.
Then Facebook happened. 2014, 2015, 2016 happened. Fake news changed. We all became more tightly plugged into the infosphere, and it started to make us all a little stupid. It became impossible for me to see it as this fun game, this playful joke that the knowing are playing on the ignorant. Now it's about hacking the human biocomputer, positioning fnords for dopamine hits, affecting political outcomes through misinformation and disenfranchisement. It's a part of warfare. And it's making us fucking stupid.
I quit the fake news game. I quit trolling, too. Now I play Sincerity (or fake it
).
It's hard for me to process disinformation as humor these days. What's the point, when there are flat earthers? Creating more flat earthers is not a victory condition, the whole thing is a disease and if you cultivate it, you're doing harm.
Goddess save us all from Adam Weishaupt.
