[HN Gopher] Apophenia: How the Internet Transforms the Individua... ___________________________________________________________________ Apophenia: How the Internet Transforms the Individual into a Conspiracy of One Author : mcone Score : 18 points Date : 2021-08-05 20:32 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (edwardsnowden.substack.com) (TXT) w3m dump (edwardsnowden.substack.com) | trhway wrote: | >The conspiracy theorist will believe that institutions can be | understood completely as the result of conscious design; and as | collectives, he usually ascribes to them a kind of group- | personality, treating them as conspiring agents, just as if they | were individual men. As opposed to this view, the social theorist | should recognize that the persistence of institutions and | collectives creates a problem to be solved in terms of an | analysis of individual social actions and their unintended (and | often unwanted) social consequences, as well as their intended | ones. | | and in between is the systems theorist who observes the emergent | behavior (which is nor "conspiring", nor generally directly | reducible to the "individual actions") of the systems. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-08-05 23:00 UTC)