While this particular report is false or "fake news" or whatever, I'm increasingly sympathetic to the "conspiracist" mindset that it feeds. https://twitter.com/MattGertz/status/1259184336995258372

People who believe these reports have an intuitive and fundamentally correct understanding. The tiny elite of the ultra-rich actually is connected by a complex network of aligned and conflicting financial interests that manifest in complex kinds of private ownership ...

... private equity, controlling stakes in corporations, pending inheritances, intellectual property, sponsorships, college endowments, "charitable" development foundations, and so on.

It would be great to have a transparent repository that held collectively vetted, relatively reliable, current knowledge about these connections, that was safe for people to use, emphasised important over unimportant information, and was somehow resilient to malicious use.

I feel like almost all of us are almost equally ignorant of these relations, so it maybe behooves us not to outright slander "conspiracism"—even though so much of it is pernicious and vile, QAnon, antisemitism, etc—for its instinct to uncover them and fantasise about a response.

These people are idiots, but also, the existence of people like Bill Gates—and there are many multi-billionaires who don't have a similar high profile—and our lack of reliable knowledge about them and their interests is a huge problem https://twitter.com/rachael_dexter/status/1259306149930651648?s=20

Thinking also about the laughable performative smashing of television screens that was going around the other day—yes it's pitiable, but it's also founded in an intuitive and correct sense that things are deeply amiss with the information we're given to interpret the world

I've done a lot of dot-joining in my time, for example some years ago when my mind was exploding with all the value exchanged in refugee and migration related NGOs and foundations, I produced this diagram … and this could certainly be called "conspiracism"

One thing that characterises the *kinds* of connections this type of research tends to centre is that they're not strictly pecuniary—they are often speculative, affective, familial or even murkier kinds of bonds—but nevertheless I do believe they're real and need accounting for.

We should understand these relationships better to hope to strategically disrupt them. Consider the garbled flow of information we get about the capture of Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet by speculative conflicts of interest … Robb, Taylor or Dastyari, most of them are in on it.

Once you go down the "Burned Spy" route for a while—devote yourself to some marginally superior version of QAnon "research"—what you realise is that the qualification, classification and maintenance of this kind of info (which changes very rapidly) is beyond any one person.

It's similar to methods used by corporations though—competitor research, risk management and insurance, value chain optimisation all involve this kind of ambiguous detective work, and arguably point toward a political approach that could be useful, and isn't much done.

One thing the pandemic has reminded us is that parts of this web of interests are very fragile, many of the actors are only a fortnight away from crisis. We can reason that, used tactically, the threat of disruption *should be* a wellspring of political power akin to the strike.

That's why a project like Market Forces is cool. It gathers data about super funds that's little known to us, but reveals deep conflicts of interest in institutions like the trade union movement. It's also not enough. Good news is that the deficiency is a technical problem.

The "Centre for Responsive Politics" is another example, devoted to "dark money" in US campaign finance » https://www.opensecrets.org/ 

Again the picture that appears is too incomplete, and probably too hard to search, analyse and maintain.

It's beyond my ability, but a protocol design that satisfied requirements of anonymity, trust, banning, and representing this kind of information across many different domains would be a very cool thing to have. There's probably a dubious crypto startup out there doing it

To end a pretty hand-wavy thread, I've felt for ages that "activists" barely scratch the surface when studying the concrete workings of capital, where corporations and private interests are all vastly more advanced at it, for the purpose of competing with one another.

"This, but good"

It's worth noting there are three or four things on this sign that are, or were both real and alarming https://twitter.com/patrickwlh/status/1259365125523296256?s=19

Not so sure that "neutralizing the solemnity of the warnings" captures the whole effect of lots of people joke-tweeting "5G corona".

For one thing, they make it impossible to search any actual conspiracism under that banner on this site. https://twitter.com/daily_barbarian/status/1269355497133498374?s=20

The Maxwell and Epstein stories are a chilling reminder that under the regime of private accumulation, power is located in individuals, stabilises itself through elite networks, and often expresses itself through the perverted treatment of human beings as consumable objects