Conspiracy theorists aren't necessarily wrong about the fact that there are conspiracies, but a trend I've noticed of late is that a lot of folks don't understand maintenance and system interdependence. I am certain that, if these folks really thought about things, this would be a "no duh" realization, but many of the knee-jerk reactions do not reflect a genuine understanding of how little scheming it takes to cause significant problems.
For example, cars are more complicated than they've ever been. There is a lot of effort placed in reducing or eliminating maintenance on cars with superior technology, and there are things we don't have to do today that car owners did 50 years ago, but this comes with a reliance on technological developments and those things are complicated.
Instead of a carburetor, we have fuel injection with electronic pumps that can vary the amount of fuel delivered to the cylinders to get the best air-to-duel ratio given the temperature of incoming air, the position reported by the throttle sensor, the current RPM, and so on. All of this work didn't get invented, it got automated, as prior to the computer controlled systems, these jobs all were still required to run the engine, but they were often mechanical, and mechanical control systems simply wear out faster than electrical ones.
Maintenance of the mechanical control systems required user understanding of the systems, womb to tomb, because failures could happen at any time, and help wasn't easily available in the many decades before cell phones. Electrical systems, because they automate, hide these activities away from the user. They are still happening, but "out of sight, out of mind." Small corrections are made on the fly, diagnostics can be run, and until the "check engine" light, or some other error reporting prompts the user to seek service, drivers are largely ignorant as to what the state of their car is.
Gone are the days of being able to "feel" when a system is not operating as well as it should, because between the user and the device are layers of electronics that can only simulate feedback, they do not transmit it the way that a mechanical system does.
So, how does this apply to conspiracy theories?
It takes a lot less effort to sabotage than people think, and because people don't understand how things are made or operate, fault is assigned to the devices as a whole, instead of properly understanding what the role of the device was in the nefarious scheme.
To continue with cars as an example, let's say there is a conspiracy to murder, and in order to do this, you sabotage someone else's car. They then operate their vehicle as if all is fine, presuming there is nothing wrong with the vehicle, and then expect it to do something it no longer can because of the sabotage, and find out only too late that their car is not functioning correctly, and get in an accident or something like that.
If our hypothetical murderer cut the break lines, then it'd likely be an accident due to the vehicle not slowing down fast enough, and the driver losing control.
In that scenario, what's really at "fault" for the accident? Is it the design of the car? Is it the purpose of a car? Or was it how the car was used?
If you aren't sure how this is confusing, look at the evidence of the connection between vaccines and autism. How frequently is "well they weren't autistic before, and now they are, and the only thing that changed was they got a vaccine" the jist of the data provided? So what actually caused the autism? Is it the design of the vaccine? Is it the purpose of the vaccine? Was it how the vaccine was used, how it was made?
Most folks aren't trying to figure out, because if such a tangible connection existed, it would not be so ethereally difficult to find. We know that 100% of vaccinations don't result in autism, but we can also know that it's not 0% either, because for some reason, after having a vaccine, there are children who develop autism. Ignore how many there are, because it's likely statistically insignificant if you compared to all vaccinations, but what's important is that there are side effects of vaccines, and how they interact with people does vary.
If we sorted out what that connection really was, then before we gave anyone a vaccine, we could ensure that the vaccine would do only what it was designed to do. Or, to return to the car example, if we know that leaking fluid under a car is a sign of trouble, then we'd know to dig further and determine the true state of the car before we drove it. A smaller example of this might be checking the air pressure in the tires, seeing if any "check engine" lights come on, etc.
GMOs are another example of a technological creation that has ominous connotations, and the "evil" is often prescribed holistically, ignoring the details of what is really happening, and throwing out the entire technology because of how it was used by someone to do something "evil". What folks are doing, perhaps unintentionally, is assigning inherent "good" or "bad" vales, ignoring that "good" or " bad" requires context to remain coherent.
If someone was murdered via their car being sabotaged, does that mean we should ban cars? That nobody should ride or drive in a car?
Are cars inherently "evil" because someone can use them to manifest "bad" consequences?
It's the same thing with guns and gun control. Is it the gun, or how guns are used, that people really have a problem with?
It's easy to be blinded by cognitive bias on topics which are emotionally charged, but if we can't remain intellectually consistent, then we can be manipulated and controlled by folks who simply figure out our buttons faster than we can figure out theirs.
Modern technologies rely on, as I have said in other posts, layers of automation, and users are not aware of all these layers, let alone how they interact. These complications increase the opportunities for problems to arise, because each layer is dependent on each one below it, and so the whole system must be working well.
Now, not only are there opportunities to interfere at each level, but if components that serve each level are manufactured to the same "depends on everything else working" mentality, then product quality could be terrible and you wouldn't know until you started to run into systemic failures, and that presumes people even report them.
How reliable are modern electronic devices? To what degree do we expect them to work all the time?
If we live in a society where things break or malfunction regularly, where quality is a memory, and folks rarely grasp the way these systems all really interact, then to manifest a plot, you'd only need to know a single weak link in the whole system, and then apply a very small amount of pressure to it, and then rely on the automated systems getting people beyond what they can deal with to do the rest.
Where once you may have had to hide your trails, fate can be blamed when low quality goods produced lazily by the lowest bidder result in disaster. Don't need fancy secretive technology to make that happen, though it wouldn't hurt. Even better, nobody would immediately suspect malevolence because everything can be explained simply and rationally from the data at hand.
It's fun to think that there is fancy cutting-edge stuff, to imagine the James Bond style workings behind the scenes, but the reality is probably a lot simpler, a lot more boring, and a lot more simplistic in nature, and we'll miss it if we're expecting something more. We'll not actually root out the real problems because we're convinced it has to be something more complex, more convoluted, more arranged. Don't be tempted to go down that path.
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