What Lies Below, Day Eleven
Welcome back to What Lies Below. We’re deep in the second of twenty tiers in the vast conspiracy iceberg. Today has a couple items that are just very normal terms that I don’t even see a lot in the world of conspiracies or supernatural stuff. 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, we’ll just be bumping into that stuff here and there. We’re still getting some good genuine weirdness!
PANOPTICON — So I mean, this is just a word for a building designed in a way that lets one person(or a small group) monitor everyone at once, usually secretly. These days it is sort of expanded to a national or international level, 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, and also worked into other conspiracies because it sounds cool and you sound smart if you use it. Try it next time you’re at the bar, everyone will be impressed!
NEODINOSAURS — They’re exactly what it sounds like and they rule! I guess they’re technically a subfamily of cryptids, but they can be a broad range of things that seem to be dinosaurs or things that are recognized dinosaurs. This is sometimes active sightings and sometimes more of a ‘dinosaurs lived up until much more recently than we think’ thing. Popular ones are woolly mammoths, Mokele-mbembe(a Brontosaurus-style creature), and of course the idea that the Loch Ness Monster may be one or multiple surviving dinosaurs.
ACCELERATIONISM — This is a real popular term right now in the political world. Usually when you hear it these days, it’s regarding the various types of Far Right groups who are purposefully 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. It CAN mean other things, too. Some idealists (incorrectly)think accelerating capitalism will somehow make it start to work properly. Others use it in terms of technology and the ‘Singularity’ mentioned higher up on the iceberg. Some people genuinely are pure accelerationists who don’t have a higher ideology than just wanting to see how far or bad things will go, too.
GNOSTICISM — I guess every mystical philosophy has to be on here, but honestly they all kind of blur together after a while. Their junior adherents will get VERY mad if you say this, but the old hands at occult stuff will shrug and generally agree. Gnosticism is at least a little more interesting than the rest because it works like a JRPG storyline. See, there is a Abrahamic God figure out there somewhere — but some other also-divine entity is responsible for our universe/dimension/whatever. And it’s a bad guy. And we have to focus on knowledge to blablabla. Anyway, it’s soooooort of a Christian philosophy but 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 experience regular rebirths.
IRAN-CONTRA — lol at this being on here. This isn’t really a conspiracy or even that weird?? Reagan sold missiles to Iran in order to give the money to the Contras(right wing fascist death squads) in Nicaragua. Both of these things were technically not allowed, and a lot of boring politicians got very huffy about this breach of protocol(most supported the fascist death squads, they just wanted it handled more politely). I guess maybe the conspiracy is that some people think Reagan wasn’t an evil piece of shit but those people are wrong and stupid so who cares. NEXT!
THE MIDNIGHT GAME — I sure hope that as this iceberg gets deeper, it doesn’t just become 75% creepypasta. This 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, spooky spooky! 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 crappy movie.
OUMUAMUA — This was a weird ass space-something that wandered through our solar system a few years ago. 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 pfft. 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 one of those things that exists in that fuzzy middleground where woke hippy metaphysics meets genuine science. It’s cool though, right? They’re very alien to us in terms of life forms, it’s a fun idea that they operate on a whole different type of ruleset than we do. I don’t know if Joe Rogan has ever listened to this theory and gone ‘whoah’ and got 1 million dollars for it, but it’s definitely going to happen if it hasn’t. There is real science that suggests maybe plants have some level of intelligence, but it’s all still pretty vague and misunderstood.
EXPANDING EARTH — It’s what it sounds like lol, 150 years ago people’s minds were so blown by mountains and stuff that they decided it’s because earth is expanding(maybe or maybe not because its absorbing space energy or something. Even the flat earth and hollow earth people don’t care about this one. No longer a real factor in the conspiracy world.
GANGSTALKING — In an objective sense, this means a single person is being targeted by an organized group effort to stalk and harass them with varying levels of intensity. This 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. It’s usually some government agency orchestrating the gangstalking, even if they’re simply 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 and personalities who they’ve singled out for constant surveillance and harassment. 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.
IMF NIRP — International Monetary Fund Negative Interest Rate Policy. Seems confusing! I’m not as smart as the character I play on twitter! I had to look it up and I’m more confused now! Something about setting interest rates at a negative amount, which I guess is bad but money is fake so none of it makes sense anyway. Most of the sites I see yelling about it are right wing places calling it communism but I don’t think it’s communism! Next!
BICAMERALISM — Something about the way our psychology developed from two halves of our brains yelling at one another, or the way a divided political body is set up! Who knows! BORING!
TRANSVESTIGATION — This is when people get hyper-obsessed with ‘proving’ various public figures are trans, usually accompanied by all sorts of photos with lots of circles and lines drawn on them. It’s usually so dumb as to be laughable but still real gross, and sometimes it slinks into mainstream — i.e. your Republican uncle on Facebook sharing gross stuff about Michelle Obama. One of many avenues by which the online conspiracy community recruits and radicalizes right-wingers.
That’s it! Weird mix today; with bog-standard terminology like ‘Bicameralism’ rubbing shoulders with high level occult theory like Gnosticism and very real, 100% verified things like Iran-Contra. See you tomorrow!
DAY TEN ← → DAY TWELVE
