Where do these ideas come from? Here’s where it gets serious.

I mentioned earlier that I get mail about it, the majority being really sincere, but misguided. Others are just flat out crazy. The former category comes from people with upstanding lives that really think that something unknown has conspired on them. They have been business owners, teachers, office workers

and even one concerned mother writing about her daughter, a student, who said she was being gangstalked. The sad thing is the stories are always similar, vague things happening to them, for vague reasons (the sites never explain why just how) When I used to engage via email I would always ask why? And their never were any concrete answers even to themselves. “I signed a petition once..,”, “ I filed a complaint against my workplace…” , “I was an animal rights activist on my college campus 25 years ago…” but mostly the answers are “I have no idea”. None of these are reasons to be stalked much less by governments or other nebulous ‘gangs’, but they still believed it was happening. Even if they couldn’t prove it in any way. That’s a huge stumbling block to get around.

I often introduce the concept of Ockham’s Razor which states “that among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected” or basically the simplest hypothesis is usually the correct one. Is it more probable that a concerted effort of hundreds of unknown people are conspiring against a person in a coordinated way or that you are drawing connections from unconnected events; connecting dots that don’t exist? The latter pattern, which is called apophenia, is the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. In this case random events, experiences that seem to become coordinated attacks where there are none. Apophenia is how conspiracies (and other groundless ideas take root). But it is difficult to tell people this who are already down far into that rabbit hole. Have you tried talking to any conspiracy theorist people about reality lately? To provide a counter narrative literally challenges all of their assumptions, beliefs and for lack of a better term critical thinking about their worlds and surroundings. Sometimes its heartbreaking. People are losing their whole functional lives around it. These kinds of social phenomena are

ot just about wingnuts, fringe or confused people, but at some level affects all of us especially in the digital age. Its just becomes more exaggerated for some.

I think confirmation bias is also reinforced through the web where any idea, belief or practice can be reinforced as true through supporting websites. This is reinforced by internet searches. Google and all of them in their roles as good capitalist want you only to find the most ‘relevant’ searches and tend to reinforce similar pages to which you have already been before. And if pages like Wikipedia or a real dictionary don’t have entries, then you get the same reinforcing fringe sites. In the case of gangstalking there were no websites about it until about 2005 and now there are dozens that all have basically the same information and stories. If you look up the word it could look like a large body of work on it, but really every crappy blog rises to the surface with the same weight as a respected site. This also means the ideas developed and were reinforced under a post 9/11 world. A world of increased surveillance in some sectors of civil society, fear of ‘terrorism’ and the nonstop media coverage that reinforces it all out of proportion without filters to sell toothpaste and cars. These sites all reiterate the same vague information in a meme that has gone awry. Like Baudrillard’s ideas of the simulacra it has become real only because it has been copied and repeated enough times. There is no original.

The last piece I want to mention that I think adds to the whole of these stories are one lack of critical understanding of how the government administrations and law enforcement divisions work. The government is seen as a one homogenous and all powerful single entity, which it is far from. Instead of seeing it as it is a huge bureaucratic nightmare of entangled and often competing agencies fighting to get money into their programs and pockets, individual fiefdoms fighting for control and mountains of inefficiency. That doesn’t mean that sometimes multi-government agencies don’t engage in coordinated efforts to get people a la the Boston Marathon Bombers or under the Green Scare. They do, BUT only when they think they are going to get a conviction. Even with their gobs of money they don’t have the endless resources to harass people without end. At the end of the day they need to get criminal convictions to make their system work. They cannot afford to chase people for no reason or for vague reasons.

Lets Close This

I don’t mean to make light of this because it seems painful when people write me. People are really harassed sometimes by ex-lovers, ex-gang members or even other bullying students at school etc., but those are isolated events compared to this vast supposed conspiracy involving thousands of people. Of all of the websites on the subject NONE of them are credible. Not one. They are filled with varying amounts of misinformation, distortion and complete fabrication all reinforced by belief and not critical thinking. Which makes it harder to grasp for those genuinely trying to find answers to the alienation and complexities of our lives. This conspiracy example can be used in any of the other conspiracies floating around the world too. You don’t have to believe me. And just because you believe it doesn’t make it any more true than it was before the internet. Some can even say that I am now part of it all; and I would laugh at that. There is no MK Ultra here. I just wanted to clear the air and say stop using me as an example of some fucking fringe conspiracy that doesn’t even make sense. There is no gangstalking and saying more or louder doesn’t make it more real. I support real movements and real communities, but not this one.

Nuff’ said.