Context: ‘Complete beat-up’: Downer laughs off Trump’s Russian probe conspiracy theory
Conspiracy theories are interesting. Not because they may or may not be true – but because as information artefacts, they provide a simple, caricatured, concise or abbreviated snapshot of a context or situation which, by virtue of its brevity, seems to generate momentum in the transmission medium of integrated information (and media) systems precisely because it is so simple and easily-replicated.
This resonates with the problem of “fake news” – the capacity for a bundle/packet of information to self-replicate in the media and communications systems becomes it’s raison d’etre abstracted above and beyond any notional Truth value – it is in this something of a self-propagating economic or logical principle before it is a matter of authenticity or fiction. This is not all there is to it, but it is certainly at least part of the way these false economies of information function.
Daedelus Kite 