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Wireless customers with AT&T, Cricket Wireless, T-Mobile and Verizon have reported power outages across the country. today morning, And like a trick of the times, some people online presented the disruption as evidence of a global conspiracy.
Alex Jones, arguably America’s most popular conspiracy theorist, believes the telecom outage is a direct result of Chinese hackers.
“Is this a cyber attack? AT&T has been very tight-lipped,” Jones insisted in his typical “just asking questions” style in a web broadcast Thursday.
In fact, even people who aren’t conspiracy theorists were bringing up the apocalyptic Netflix movie leave the world behindDue to which the title started trending on X.
“Predictive programming from the Netflix film ‘Leave the World Behind,'” a Major QAnon conspiracy theories wrote on Thursday,
“No internet. No phones. No going back to normal,” the account continued, repeating the film’s promotional tagline.
And while the film is in fact promoted that way on Netflix, there is no evidence that this interruption is “predictive programming”, a term used by some conspiracy theorists to explain how fictional narratives ever -Sometimes accurately predicts events in the real world. In the real world, sometimes artists predict events simply because they are lucky or have a good grasp on things that will happen in the future.
leave the world behind The film stars Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke and Mahershala Ali, and follows two families who try to navigate the world after a mysterious attack, possibly by an alien enemy, despite modern technology such as cellphone service, Internet access, and TV broadcasting. is destroyed.
Believe it or not, the film was already a popular film among those who might have a screw loose. Why? It was executive produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, who have a producing deal with Netflix. Obama’s name features prominently in baseless conspiracy theories based on a worldwide network of pedophiles controlling the world Michelle Obama is transgender, Not to mention the birther conspiracy theory, an idea that President Obama was not born in the United States that President Donald Trump helped spread.
But it wasn’t just conspiracy theorists who were comparing this outage leave the world behind, Apocalyptic movies work by tapping into our greatest fears for the future. In this case, the movie did a good job of making the audience feel like they weren’t sure what was happening. And when real information becomes difficult to obtain – as it apparently was for the film’s characters – many conflicting stories can begin to spread, including rumors about who or what actually caused the communication breakdown. .
We use movies like leave the world behind As a cultural touchstone – a shared shorthand for when something scary or unjust happens. If the film is popular enough, it makes sense and everyone immediately knows what you’re getting at, like when the Syrian refugee crisis hit Europe in 2015 and people compared those horrific pictures to the dystopian 2006 movie. Was doing it from the film. children of Men,
Other times a film’s meaning requires a lot of interpretation, like when I made this argument in 2018 bird boxThe Netflix movie, starring Sandra Bullock, was the first great monster movie The unseen horror was social media, but is it bird box Or leave the world behind, we clearly live in an age of incredible uneasiness around technology. We’re all staring at our phones and other screens for hours every day and none of these “connections” are making us feel connected to other human beings.
It’s this isolation that can push many people toward conspiracy theories in a vicious cycle that is attractive for its simplicity. But why would President Obama make an entire movie about a plan to intercept communications and then actually help execute that plan? Apparently in the minds of conspiracy theorists, all people like Obama are James Bond movie villains who tell you their entire plot before they execute it, giving the hero just enough time to save the day.
Again, there is no evidence that what is happening with today’s telecom outage is anything other than a normal service disruption. But if you start seeing hundreds of self-driving Teslas piling up without a human on board, you might start to worry.
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