An idea which has been bothering me lately is the question of how much of what happens within public visibility represents an actual attempt to make something happen versus an attempt to make the anti-something happen.

To sketch what I mean, consider a government, company, or celebrity forcefully and clumsily trying to make a certain situation happen. In response, the rest of the world around them acts to make sure that this situation can NOT happen, typically creating the opposite. Of course, there are also variants of this where someone uses multiple levels of this ruse to obfuscate their true intentions or where they fake an effort to obscure their efforts in order to make them seem more genuine.

I sometimes wonder how often these things happen. Of course, this line of reasoning will quickly drive you mad and down the road of desperate conspiracy theories if followed too closely.

It reminds me of an example of this back in the 90s: Marilyn Manson was putting on a show somewhere and the news was full of people protesting it or opposed to it in some way. My Dad kind of chuckled, and wondered aloud if those people were on his payroll. Interesting idea since it would actually be a cheap way of marketing that kind of show. At minimum, it draws a lot of attention by being mentioned on TV, over and over, for several days. Further, it might cause a reaction of people deciding to buy a ticket just to demonstrate independence in the face of people trying to control them. For the price of getting some random people to publicly shout nonsense in a parking lot for a few hours, probably a great return.

There was also that clever maneuver the provincial government pulled a few years ago which I suspect was such a ploy.

Or maybe I am just desperate for hope when I feel helpless against the sharp acceleration of our species toward worrisome forms of centralized totalitarian control.

Of course, madness is also a possible explanation,
...Nights