Shadowland

Thank you to Joe Berlinger and The Atlantic for being another media outlet, in addition to Vice, that treats the spread of this conspiracy cancer on America seriously. Q-Anon is no longer cute or funny. It and all its offshoots are dangerous to our society and this series brings it to the forefront like none I've seen.

Vice News did an excellent job of talking about QAnon for the sham that it is with their "QAnon: The Search for Q," but that series focused more on the leaders and not the participants. The leaders are few, the participants are legion, and that is what is dangerous.

If you are non-Q, and not easily led into a conspiracy mindset, you will enjoy this series. I'm not saying it won't make you mad, because it likely will. Personally, I could not be more fed up with what alleged ADULTS are doing in the US to tear down democracy, and why? Money. As the program points out shortly into the first episode, conspiracy theories are a billion-dollar industry, and the people that are believing them and acting on them are NOT the people making the money -- in fact, they're the ones that are ruined the most; financially, emotionally, and in their lives and relationships with other people. The people telling them to believe are the ones making the most money.

The show lets this play out on your screens with little commentary, and the participants show you who they are, and tell you what they believe. This is an important show, but a mere drop in the bucket against the conspiracy theory industry. I wish there were MANY more shows that exposed truth to people like this one does. It's what is needed now more than ever. This scourge is not going away as much as we may want it to. It's only getting more serious by the day.

Yet another brazenly fake 'documentary' using actors and staged events (how do you get three different camera angles during the same phone call, by a lady in a pizza kitchen smaller than an RV?), to promote whatever is the latest trending pop-culture version of what everyone is supposed to think.

Advertisers and entertainers have been using audience data since long before the time of 'social media' to craft narratives, based in part on what audiences will respond to, and in part on what ideas might best manipulate their interest going forward.

It isn't any conspiracy, it's just a tried-and-true business model: find out what they want, use it against them to make them want other things too, and build in enough ideological cues to have them believe that by taking this maneuvering of their viewpoints at face value, they are somehow ending up on the correct side of things.

This kind of mind-candy isn't even about politics or ideology really, it's just about what entertainment and marketing have always been about: finding one way or another to part fools from their money. If it didn't work so well, nobody would produce this kind of transparent fiction and call it 'information.'

It doesn't really talk about the psychology or mechanism of coining and spread of conspiracy theories, that I expected it to do.

It goes on to pick several conspiracy theories, meet persons who coined or spread that or believe in that, and those people chat endlessly trying to prove that their theories are correct.

So, it is a long blabbering, chat show, that ends up proving that the conspiracy theories are actually correct.

I was tearing my head seeing repeat mention of Capitol Hill incident or covid-19 being pharma-company generated or elections hacked by google/ facebook.

They should have left out individual conspiracy theories altogether and rather have concentrated on analyzing why people feel the need of coining such theories, why they put their time and effort and money to spread them and what psychological need causes other gullible people to subscribe to any such trash theories. It could have been heavily edited to limit it to 2 to 3 hours, all the originators of various conspiracy theories should have been strictly kept out of it, they happily used this series to sell their trash theories.

It is a waste of 8 hours to see the series, you are none the wiser after seeing it full, actually you end up getting convinced that various conspiracy theories were actually correct.

Don't waste your time on it.

I was hoping this show would dive deep into some of the conspiracy theories that are going around, showing where they started and why they are so convincing to a lot of people. But instead it concentrates on a few people's lives that have been disrupted after being arrested or kicked out of their families for their beliefs with a few video clips of enraged people tossed in. It seems the producer and the director have their own beliefs that all the conspiracy theories out there are just wild imaginations of misfits, and so they don't seriously look into them, even after some of the so-called conspiracies a year ago have lately been proved to be factual. I had a feeling the show was not going to show that any theory had any merit to it and I was right. How about presenting both sides of the story from an un-biased POV and then the viewer decide on what makes the most sense? I will now delete this from my PVR recordings, as I know where this is going. Can you say Propaganda?

It never ceases to amaze me how many complete and utter dinlos exist out there. It is actually quite sad, as most the individuals appear to have their heart in the right place - that is they want to help others. But their thinking is just so distorted and extreme, and in some cases result in their prosecution. They see themselves as victims or martyrs. They are victims - not victims of the system as they perceive themselves to be - but victims of the very nonsense they peddle out in the first place, brainwashing others after being brainwashed themselves.

It is both sad and disheartening to watch this series, but it does provide an eye opening account into the backgrounds and motivations of the conspiracy cults and people involved in these.