I wanted to make a video of myself opening up a converter box, only to discover that there was a camera hidden inside. Of course, the camera inside the box would have been planted there by myself, with the intent of perpetrating a hoax. You see, I thought it would be funny to post the video on YouTube, and try to spread it around various online conspiracy theory groups. "The digital switch is merely a government attempt to watch all of us more closely!!!" would have been the idea. If just a few hard core conspiracy theorists were to find my video, it could easily go viral -- at least in their circles.
Those people are easy to rile. My favorite example of a conspiracy nut is my old pal Drew. I met him on an online forum around 1999. He was another intelligent and creative guy who frequented this rather vibrant BBS ("BBS", by the way, means "Bulletin Board System") of which I had the privilege of being a part for several years. It was an odd collection of personalities, many of whom had interesting insights on whatever the topic of the day may have been. Some of us were nuts; some of us just grumpy; but the discussions were always lively and worth reading.
Anyway, in the early days of this community, Drew was a regular guy with a good sense of humor. He made intelligent posts...his interests were varied...and he had one hell of a record collection. Vinyl. He'd update us on the latest additions he'd made to it, and I once even sent him a couple of old records that I had stashed away in a closet from my younger days.
So one day, Drew started getting a little weird. It all began when he got really into the JFK assassination, posting lengthy explanations of the various conspiracy theories surrounding that incident. Now, THAT I can tolerate, since many of the JFK conspiracy theories are actually fairly plausible. However, Drew didn't stop with JFK. As the months went on, more and more of Drew's forum posts focused on bizarre conspiracies -- the Illuminati...the Masons...the Israelis. It reached a point at which Drew had lost all interest in anything other than his nutball theories. He'd post PAGES of links to the blogs of crackpots who, in turn, wrote PAGES and PAGES of insane explanations for everything from the World Trade Center attacks to why bumblebees were disappearing.
(The websites of mentally unbalanced conspiracy nuts tend to have a certain look to them. They're chaotic. You load up the front page, and you're bombarded with an explosion of text in several different fonts and colors. None of it makes any sense; it's just a giant mess of crazy ramblings, with endless links to similar sites, and, for some reason, the pictures are always really low resolution. As a reporter, I'll occasionally get press releases from fringe political groups, and they have the same look -- manic, unrestrained. You have to read through four or five paragraphs of these things to even get to the point, as though the person who wrote them doesn't understand that not everyone will be fascinated enough by the topic at hand to carefully read a full page of text just to understand what they're getting at. These people have extremely active minds, and that doesn't mix well with writing a concise press release. A good press release should contain all of its essential information in the first paragraph....)
Anyway, to this very day, my old pal Drew is still obsessed with conspiracies. He continues to make posts at our old BBS, and ALL of them are long explanations of the latest government or secret society plot to control the world. He's totally gone, like he's turned into some kind of a machine. A few months ago, I asked him if he has any Dead Kennedys on vinyl -- just to see if he still has interests outside of the Art Bell world -- and he barely acknowledged my question. He gave me a sort of uninspired "I'll check" response. Kind of sad.
SO, back to the converter boxes....
I wanted to make a fake video of myself discovering a camera hidden in a converter box, just to mess with whackjobs like Drew. Sadly, it appears as though someone else has already beat me to the punch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQ4iIM8Eljc
And if you need any proof that the above video is, in fact, faked, here's Snopes' investigation:
http://www.snopes.com/photos/technology/converter.asp
I still may produce such a video, just to add fuel to the fire. I urge all others to do the same. Why not screw with Drew?
b.
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