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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: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday October 28 2019, @02:23PM (2 children)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday October 28 2019, @02:23PM (#912805) Journal

    I'm sure this whole thing is just a conspiracy, to find all those who are able to write convincingly about conspiracies, so they can be eliminated before they learn about the actual conspiracies!

    Sorry, I have to leave, there's a bunch of black helicopters arriving. Where is my tinfoil hat, dammit!

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28 2019, @03:35PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28 2019, @03:35PM (#912839)

    Tinfoil hats let signals in from below and bounce them around in the brain. What you want is a body or room-scale Faraday cage.

  • (Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Tuesday October 29 2019, @02:20AM

    by Pslytely Psycho (1218) on Tuesday October 29 2019, @02:20AM (#913089)

    Really? I thought it was a Briebart application process.

    Your tinfoil hat is in bedroom dresser in the upper right hand drawer, you accidentally put your Classic Queen concert T-shirt on top of it. We checked the video to be sure, you're welcome. Damn but your paranoid for no reason whatsoever.

    And those are People of Color Helicopters you insensitive clod!

    :D

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