Born To Be Wheeled - Home on the Range of Disinformation
S usceptibility to disinformation is the illiteracy of the internet age. We have a tendency to view conspiracy theories as theories, statements about the world that can be either true or false. Since they are typically false, we treat them as flawed explanations, premised on logical inconsistencies or faulty evidence. The expression “conspiracy theory” was coined by a philosopher of science, Karl Popper, to designate the incapacity to understand social events as the outcome of a many interdependent processes. He saw them instead as the expression of a single and omnipotent will. The “conspiracy theory of society,” Popper wrote , was something akin to “a primitive kind of superstition.” This has remained the prevalent view ever since: in an influential article published ten years ago, two Harvard scholars—Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule— called them “crippled epistemologies.” This is certainly how I've seen them. With increasing occurrences of people whom I would think would know