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posted by Fnord666 on Monday October 28 2019, @03:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-if-it's-real? dept.

Submitted via IRC for soylent_brown

Inside National Conspiracy Writing Month, a challenge for creating 'fan fiction about reality'

Next week, a tiny group of researchers will feverishly devote themselves to unmasking the shadowy forces that control the world. Thirty days later, they will reveal a series of shocking conspiracies that only the most perceptive — some might even say paranoid — sleuths could possibly uncover. And if they succeed in their mission, nobody will believe a word of it.

The project is called National Conspiracy Writing Month, an unofficial spinoff of the long-running National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo) challenge. Where NaNoWriMo requires participants to write a 50,000-word novel, the inaugural NaCoWriMo asks them to produce a "deep, viable, and complete conspiracy theory." Its creator Tim Hwang hopes these fake plots can illuminate a pervasive cultural phenomenon — helping both participants and spectators understand how conspiracy theories emerge. He just hopes people don't take them too seriously.

[...] NaCoWriMo is designed to explore the point where logic goes haywire, so a lot of these links will be fanciful — Hwang, for example, plans to expose mysterious ties between American politics and Wrestlemania. (Given Trump's history in pro wrestling, it's not as far-fetched as it sounds.) But the project also raises a strange possibility: what if somebody uncovers a real conspiracy?

[...] Ultimately, Hwang thinks of conspiracies as an extension of our natural pattern-finding impulses — not just a political enterprise, but part of the same basic human urge that produces pareidolia and TV fan theories. "I think actually what's interesting is that the origin of it is investigation, it's trying to connect dots. And in a lot of cases, we really admire people who are able to find connections between things that other people have not seen before," he says. "'Conspiracy theory' has a certain kind of baggage about politics and sinister doings and smoke-filed rooms. But I think in some ways, the cognitive exercise of it has a lot of parallels with a lot of things."


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  • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28 2019, @06:22AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28 2019, @06:22AM (#912677)

    Aristarchus is gone, man, driven off much like Athuasanias Kichner was, by the ridiculous right. They destroy everything on the internets, with their dank memes. For example, I heard that TMB was dating CarliB! How skank is that! And did you know that Takyon is the kid in "ReadyPlayerOne"? True rumour! So now lets just settle down into our comforting conspiracy theories, that say that really fucking stupid white people are superior, and that America is Grate, and that Military Generals are just not equipped to handle Trump's Military (school) genius. Oh, the Hugo Grotius Manatee!

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