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This group of what I will call “hoax magicians” is a community for whom disinformation, false identity, plagiarism and a whole host of other mind games is the primary expression of their art and beliefs. They justify this behavior, when they bother to justify it at all, by suggesting that we are all stuck in this consensus reality..whether that is in terms of our interpretation and expression of art or capital “R” Reality. Their disinfo-magic is their attempt to liberate us from these ideological prison.
Problem of course is that there’s not much liberating going on. They simply offer new belief systems to step into. Long after they may have abandoned a particular hoax, followers and true-believers carry on.
This bothers me. It especially bothers me because the subjects they touch on affect people in the real world who are searching for answers. And, as will become clear, the terrain of “mind control” and the “illuminati” (made famous, let us not forget, by the master and guru of so much of this ideology of chaos, Robert Anton Wilson) is prime real estate for these folks. You’ll find them elsewhere too, of course. They like the UFO world as well. And, evidently, the music world.
A group. Using a real name. Creating media hoaxes. Hoaxes ARE the artform. There were a couple of spinoff groups. Here’s a hoax that sounds like loads of fun:
Luther Blissett’s most complex prank was played by dozens of people in Latium, central Italy, in 1997. It lasted a year, involving black masses, satanism, Christian witch-hunters in the backwoods of Viterbo and so on. The local and national media bought everything with no fact-checking at all, politicians jumped on the bandwagon of moral panic, there was even video footage of a (rather clumsy) satanic ritual abuse being broadcast on national tv, until Luther Blissett claimed responsibility for the whole racket and produced a huge mass of evidence. Blissett activists called this “homoepathic counter-information”: by injecting a calculated dose of falsehood in the media, they meant to show the unprofessionality of most reporters and the groundlessness of moral panic. The hoax was praised and analyzed by scholars and media experts, and became a case study in several scientific texts.
As you can see, while the general idea of this kind of hoaxing could appeal to the adolescent in all of us, obviously darker “storylines” are fair game, if you’ll pardon the pun.