.............................................................. >From the New Paradigms Project [Not Necessarily Endorsed]: Conspiracy Shopping Cart: http://a-albionic.com/shopping.html From: Remy C. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: endsecrecy list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [endsecrecy] Paranoia in the Sunday Sections Date: Friday, May 12, 2000 11:35 AM From: http://www.accessmagazine.com/scripts/articles.cfm?ArticleID=668 (Go to that page directly to be able to click the hyperlinks.) E-LIFE Paranoia goes pop on the Web Do you belong on the World Weird Web? By Douglas McDaniel May 7-May 13, 2000 Do you ever feel drawn to the dark, to the weird, to the hidden? When channel surfing, do you stop at the sound of Leonard Nimoy�s voice announcing that he�ll be �In Search Of ... " those ancient alien visitors who taught astronomy to the Mayans? Do you watch �The X-Files"? Do you know for a fact that a cabal of Freemasons established the United States and that their mystic icon for the coming New World Order--the pyramid with the all-seeing eye--now resides on your dollar bill? If you answered �yes" to any of these questions, you already know where you belong: on the World Weird Web. Sure, normal people use the Web to shop for Pez dispensers and track their stock portfolios, but the online world really comes alive when visionaries, wackos, the slightly mad and the completely daft get to play show and tell. In the new century, paranoia has gone pop, and the mainstream media is advertising for qualified loonies to keep up with the demand. In a FoxNews.com report, we are told fringe thinkers have a �new role as content providers to the booming Internet economy." A newspaper in Maine recently advertised for an online security and privacy reporter with the come-on, �Are you paranoid?" Well, of course you are. After spending time surfing the World Weird Web, who wouldn�t be? A leader in the �Truth Is (Way) Out There" category of Web sites is Disinformation, which packages the high-weird subculture with link-heavy dossiers on radical politics, �magick" and the unexplained. The site�s operators recently held a conference in New York called Disinfo.Con 2000, which was more familiarly dubbed �Cyberpalooza." Funny thing was, although the reported attendance of 500 was as demographically significant as a bake sale, the conference was nonetheless covered by FoxNews.com and The New York Times. Says Disinformation CEO Gary Baddeley, �The province of the conspiracy theorist has been taken over by the mainstream media." A host of similar paranoia portals--many of them well-edited, slickly designed and adult-oriented--show how this subterranean culture is coming to the surface. ParaScope offers a witches� brew of conspiracy theories, UFO tales and paranormal topics, while Conspire.com, The Konformist and Steamshovel Press all serve up free-floating fear like popcorn. One of the best of these sites, The Smoking Gun, is run by two crime writers at the famous New York-based alternative weekly The Village Voice. The site repurposes quirky items from official sources and explains them with glitzy irreverence. Real nutsavvy folk, of course, are beyond these tidily packaged products and are digging ever deeper into the Web in search of the proverbial ghost in the machine. They tease out releases from the CIA, the FBI or the National Security Agency, or go to rich �open source intelligence" sites such as Cryptome, which keeps a running tab on Echelon, a global electronic surveillance system that reportedly monitors e-mail and is said to be operated by the NSA. My best advice is this: If you�ve read this far, make sure you bookmark the site run by the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, the group that publishes Skeptical Enquirer magazine. The site pours cold water on just about every prairie fire of paranoid conjecture raging out there. As any good cybernaut knows, when you�re exploring, it�s a good idea to keep yourself firmly tethered to your capsule. Douglas McDaniel is a senior editor at Access Magazine. He can be e-mailed at [EMAIL PROTECTED] [And here's the original version Doug was kind enough to send endsecrecy with some of the hyperlinks spelled out. Remy C.] �Truth is Out There� sites By Douglas McDaniel Here is today�s new hope in human search engineering: The Web should always be a safe haven for the dangerous idea that almost makes sense. Free society depends on it. Sure, there are good reasons to sanitize the Internet for the mainstream, but many of us need to feel a little danger, a little mystery in our lives. People went to the World Trade Organization anarchist sites, cropping up as they did like revolutionary cells, to get a sense for the inside story on the riots in streets of Seattle. They surf lunatic fringe sites where UFOs and conspiracy theories are seriously considered. Places where a self-proclaimed shaman can do a little astrology, where Chicken Little can vent stress about strange contrails in the sky. Go ahead, get it off your chest: Who do you think is the anti-Christ? Indeed, as the Web exploded in the 1990s, it coincided with the �X-Files� effect of proliferate paranoia portals. The Fox television series hit helped to turn �The Truth is Out There� into a phenomenon on the Web. Sites such as Disinfo (www.disinfo.com), Parascope (www.parascope.com) and Conspire (www.conspire.com) hyperlinked the paranoids and wove the lunatic fringe into slick pop-friendly fabric. Even a mainstream educational portal, Space.com, played off the trend with its Area 51 (www.space.com/spaceimagined/area51). It�s no coincidence that as the Y2K calendar event loomed, paranormal inquiry reached a fever pitch. On New Year�s Eve, we went to the Web like superstitious neo-primitives asking the medicine man for clues to a lunar eclipse, to that strange star appearing in the sky, to the End drawing near. And then the invisible threshold passed and the sky was still up there � being blue. So now, free of the pressure cooker of Jan. 1, 2000 on our calendars and fragile belief systems, we are due for a shift in perspective. The �X-Files� just isn�t as good anymore, it seems. So what happens to all of that curiosity, to that deep desire to reveal �The Man Behind the Curtain?� Well, if �X-Files� becomes �Y-Files,� then what is �Y�? The answer may be this: The truth isn�t �out there,� it�s �in there.� Meet the open source-erer. He�s the geek that decided, hey, maybe I can�t use alchemy to manipulate the cosmos, but maybe I can penetrate the secrets of cyberspace and therefore, the practical world. It works on a lot of different levels, from hackers to online spies. At Stratfor (www.stratfor.com) you can find information that the spooks call �open-source intelligence.� The site covers nations and corporations around the world like an online CIA. Find out why Chechnya is really strategic to the Russians, and had nothing to do with terrorism, everything to do with geography, and why Iran is responding with diplomatic moves to the West. At Strategic Internet Group (www.strategicsite.com), an outsourcing e-commerce consultant for Fortune 500 firms, you can find links to strange stories about French spies working at Microsoft, and how it connects to a worldwide U.S. surveillance program called Echelon. Sure, passionate hacromancers can spout as much wrong-headed thinking about cyberphysics as wannabe wizards always did about metaphysics and the Knights of Templar. But it sure makes more sense to go to Cryptome (www.cryptome.org) and imagine the NSA reading electromagnetic waves off your PC than to worry about 18th century Bavarian secret societies or who shot JFK. In the 21st century, paranoia and the very, very real seem to be converging. The term �Big Brother� is experiencing a rebirth, and one can only imagine what the final winner of convergence on the Web will be like. Already, Bill Gates can make deals Goethe�s Mephistopheles could barely dream of. So here�s my big prediction: the Netizenry isn�t going to be as interested in tales about the ghost in the attic. But they sure will want to know about the ghost in the machine. DOUGLAS McDANIEL is senior editor at Access magazine. He can be contacted at [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Get paid for the stuff you know! Get answers for the stuff you don�t. And get $10 to spend on the site! http://click.egroups.com/1/2200/9/_/1335/_/958145701/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Shop for Cars On-Line: http://a-albionic.com/ads/srch.html Forwarded for info and discussion from the New Paradigms Discussion List, not necessarily endorsed by: *********************************** Lloyd Miller, Research Director for A-albionic Research (POB 20273, Ferndale, MI 48220), a ruling class/conspiracy research resource for the entire political-ideological spectrum. 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