Gamer warns conspiracy-theorist TikTokkers are more dangerous than 'drunk drivers'

Laura Loomer arrives ahead of Donald Trump's debate with Democratic presidential nominee and U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S., September 10, 2024. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz/File Photo

Slate reports videogames stuff a lot of entertainment into one sandbox, and some of them augment their storylines with every kind of conspiracy imaginable.

The two-decade-old Assassin’s Creed games are peppered with “almost every kind of conspiracy theory you can think of,” reports Joshua Rivera. “In the fiction of Assassin’s Creed, humanity is descended from ancient aliens, and this knowledge is suppressed throughout history; the tide of world events is influenced by a shadow war between two secret societies; the media exists to manipulate the public. This makes for an exciting series of video games with a near-limitless scope. It also echoes uncomfortable real-world conspiracy theories that have proven consequential in our lifetime.”

But how seriously do players take conspiracies that try to rope aliens in with an over-controlling order of the Knights Templar and a “bloodthirsty” Pope Alexander VI — a pope more known for nepotism, unexciting papal decrees and for his reputation as a patron of the arts? Media critic and scholar Cameron Kunzelman tells Slate no more than any other media source.

“Conspiracy exists as a crime that you can be charged with, because conspiracies do exist!” said Kunzelman. “There are groups of people who make decisions together that can impact other people, and they can do that secretly. Seemingly lots of things that are involved in what’s being released right now in the Epstein files are what we would call dyed-in-the-wool, true conspiracy. From human trafficking to much more banal, but just as bad, practices of money moving around and political meetings.”

But Kunzelman said today a wide variety of conspiracies are getting “mashed together” into big ugly “metaconspiracies.”

“Where conspiratorial movements at one time were seen as discrete from one another, now they kind of attach to each other and they get folded into QAnon,” said Kunzelman, whose new book “Everything is Permitted” claims that this massive folding of conspiracies mirrors how entertainment franchises are now built.

But, like zombies and other things that should not exist, they are perpetual motion machines that sometimes keep churning away long after their creators are dead and gone, using the engine of capital “to keep themselves revolving and moving,” said Kunzelman.

But Kunzelman’s book points out that algorithms on things like YouTube and other sites shunt viewers into “harder stuff,” that even our basic entertainment patterns make us minor conspiracy theorists.

“Every part of our lives where we engage with the internet is about putting us in a ditch that leads to another ditch that leads to another ditch,” Kunselman told Slate. “And unfortunately, the scale of that, the allure of that, often leads into things that will harm us in some way. It’ll remove us from our actual communities. It will put us into kind of epistemic places that are only engaged with their own ideas. … whatever happens to you is whatever happens to you.”

Oddly, Kunzelman is one video game enthusiast who thinks platforms that shunt audiences down a rabbit hole need more policing, arguing that we don’t even build open roads without some guardrails.

“I think being a very influential conspiracy-theorist TikTokker is probably on the whole more dangerous than being a drunk driver for an afternoon,” said Kunzelman. “I think it’s harming more people in serious and real ways. But we don’t take it seriously at all. It’s a bipartisan belief that these industries should not be constrained by the law, and by any concern for other human beings. I think that’s bad."

Read the Slate report at this link.

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