Bonus Sample: Digital Delusions: How conspiracy-fueled political religions like QAnon hijack our brains

Conspirituality

Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, Julian Walker

Spirituality, Social Sciences, Religion & Spirituality, Science, Philosophy, Society & Culture

4.2 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 26 July 2021

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

QAnon emerged out of a perfect storm of evolving technology, social psychology, and global crisis. But it exploited pre-existing neural architecture already easily hijacked by addictive drugs, junk food, porn, persuasive marketing, and cultish religions. It also relied on how mobile social media, running on cellular and wifi technology, amplifies and speeds up the algorithmic impact of hyper-contagious cultural memes on the material world. Maybe 5G was the real threat all along?Julian explores our conspiritualist tendencies toward patternicity and apophenia, which can be super-stimulated by well-adapted memes, complex puzzles, and grandiose in-group purpose—and suggests a possible antidote. -- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a Glassbox Media Podcast.
0:08.5	Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality Podcast team.
0:12.5	The following is a sample of the bonus episode we produce every week for our Patreon subscribers.
0:18.8	You can support our work and have full access to bonus episodes and other premium content
0:23.7	by subscribing for as little as $5 a month at patreon.com slash Conspirituality.
0:31.1	Thanks for listening and your support which keeps us ad-free and editorially independent.
0:42.5	We're all familiar with the feeling of epiphany. When the solution to a problem suddenly pops into
0:50.0	your head or a deeper perspective illuminates an intractable situation. The stories of Newton's
0:56.2	realization when the apple supposedly fell on his head about the solution to his puzzling
1:01.2	over gravity or Archimedes crying out, Eureka when hitting upon a key mathematical principle
1:07.6	come to mind. The concept of an epiphany did originally have a supernatural connotation much like
1:14.9	the way a lot of spiritual people today think about intuition or the repurposed concept of
1:21.1	downloads as if something so outside of our everyday rational thought process and Monday
1:26.6	knowledge base has dropped the relevant information into our minds. Part of this epiphany quality
1:35.1	is a resonant emotional sense that this new thought simply must be true. There is likely a good
1:42.3	neurochemical explanation for this probably via dopamine but without that effect all you
1:49.2	would have would be another thought or a solution that emerged by predictable and familiar means.
1:55.2	Epiphany's feel special they feel good meaningful they drive us forward as we anticipate the next
2:02.3	pleasurable discovery or application of this new insight. As with accurately interpreted patterns
2:10.8	like the paw prints left by an animal or the harvest season beginning when the moon rose in a
2:16.2	particular constellation versus more paternistic beliefs that say sacrificing a goat could make the
2:23.2	harvest plentiful. So too there's a distinction here between regular epiphanies and the type of
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