Last week in The Podcaster’s Guide to the Galaxy we discussed the mysterious disappearance of Malaysian Airlines MH370. Now it transpires that some of the families of the missing passengers are seeking to raise $5 million dollars to encourage a whistleblower to come forward and reveal what really happened.

A few things things:

1. This all rather assumes that there is a whistle to blow. It’s possible that no one knows anything more (or, nothing particularly interesting that isn’t already in the public domain)

2. What happens to the money if there isn’t a genuine whistleblower. Oh, there will be plenty of people who will contest the money, let there be no doubt, but there’s a very real possibility no real whistleblower might emerge. This could be because there is either because there is nothing to report or the people they report to can easily match the offered $5 million.

3. Expect the families to dispute who to pay out to, as individual family members may very well side with one alleged whistleblower over another. The $5 million could easily disappear in divisive litigation.

4. The parallels between narratives about the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 and 9/11 are interesting here. A common refrain in the skeptical community with respect to the body of Inside Job hypotheses is that a whistleblower would have come forward by now, given the financial reward by the press for doing so. People within the 9/11 Truth community either dispute there really would be a huge benefit to blowing the lid on 9/11 (given that the powers that be would have said person’s guts for garters) or the Establishment can take comfortably reward such potential whistleblowers or that no one person knows enough to blow the whistle.

Some of these theories get a bit confusing, since some in the 9/11 Truth community claim that whistleblowers come forward all the time. It just happens to the be the case that they are routinely ignored. I think that’s actually the most interesting hypothesis in play here. What if a whistleblower did come forward? You don’t have to kill them or bribe them to silence them; all you need do is spread enough disinformation about them that most people won’t trust a word they say.

Now, certain skeptics will say “That’s preposterous!” but worries about disinformation being disseminated by influential institutions should not be dismissed out of hand. Governments, for example, have engaged in disinformation campaigns in the past, sometimes to hide their conspiracy (or conspiracy-like) activities. It’s not out of the question that should a genuine whistleblower turn up, that disinformation will be disseminated to tarnish their reputation. Indeed, it would help if less-than-genuine whistleblowers were also on the scene, so you could tarnish the real thing via guilt by association. A really clever conspiracy would even manufacture the disingenuous “whistleblowers”…

My suspicion is even if the families do generate the $5 million dollars of enticement, it won’t produce much in the way of results. It will, I think, produce new conspiracy theories to explain away the lack of whistleblowing, or the fact no one accepts the testimony of whistleblower X or Y, but that’s to be expected. Meanwhile, I still think the most likely explanation is a tragic accident.

Not that my opinion really matters to the families of the missing passengers and crew. Arohanui.

“The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories” coms out in November of this year, according to this page on the Palgrave Macmillan site (Amazon. It will cost you the princely sum of £60, which is a lot of money, really (and I’ll get about £1.50 in royalties, so it’s not the best “get rich quick” scheme I’ve ever had).

However, this post is not really about “The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories”. Rather, I’m thinking about book two.

“Conspiracy Theories of Aotearoa” (provisional title) is my next planned book: here in the Land of the Long White Cloud/the Shaky Isles we have a crop of distinct conspiracy theories which needs cataloguing and reviewing/critiquing. New Zealanders like to think we punch above our weight. From inventions (Britten), science (Rutherford) to sport (Lomu), we like to think that even though we are a small nation, we still do good. It’s not surprising, then, that we can go toe-to-toe with pretty much any nation when it comes to conspiracy theories. From tales of airships over our skies at the end of the 19th Century, hidden tunnels under North Head, the claim the Celts got to Aotearoa before the Māori, our own troop of 9//1 Truthers, the work of Nicky Hagar, claims that the KGB controlled the 4th Labour Government, the circumstances of Norm Kirk’s death, tales of All Blacks being poisoned in South Africa, the theories of Ian Wishart, the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, claims Lord Lucan lives in Lyttleton, the existence of Mind control towers in Hamilton, the police version of what happened in the Operation 8 raids, rumours that lesbians controlled the previous Labour Government, the local Anti-Fluoride leagues, the real reason why DOC uses 1080, DDT contamination in the Taranaki, anit-vaxers, John Ansell’s “Treatygate” and, of course, claims that chemtrails criss-cross our skies, it’s fair to say that Aotearoa is awash with conspiracy theories.

So, who to approach in re publishing this proposed second book, I keep asking myself. I’m somewhat loath to go the way of self-publishing, because there’s:

a) a lot of self-published books on conspiracy theories, and they are, for the most part, keen but flawed analyses and
b) there is a certain cache to being with a reputable publisher (even though the legion of conspiracy theorists who think I’m against them will claim that this just proves I’m in on the conspiracy).

Yet, self-publishing has many benefits.

1. I would have total control over the book (which also means all copy-editting failures would be my own),
2. I could crowdfund the book and thus get myself some kind of advance and
3. I could go into paperback immediately and price the book at a point which is likely to sell.

Crowdfunding the the writing of the next book is something I’ve considered, since I’d like to do a fair bit of research. This would require some travelling around the country, and currently I can’t afford to do that. However, crowdfunding typically involves rewards, and the kind of rewards people want from crowdfunding are copies of the book. However, commerical books aren’t cheap and I’m not likely to get a publication contract which lets me give away x numnbers of books to backers: I’d likely be required to buy those copies at the author’s discount and gift them. Even then, that could be problematic, since generally author’s cannot sell copies of their books they procured with a discount: there might be some confusion as to whether fulfilling a pledge counts as a gift or a pre-order.

I’m still very much in the pre-planning stage of the next book: I intend to write a sample chapter before I start shopping the text around and, perhaps, I might rethink the self-publication route. Still, I worry that there are lots of conspiracy theory books out, and self-publication, if you want to keep any veneer of academic respectability, is still pretty much a no-no. Given that I research a field with little academic respectability in the first place, what respectability I have, I really need to keep.

A few weeks ago I gave a guest lecture at the University of Auckland on conspiracy theories. I decided to start proceedings with an extended reference to “Game of Thrones”

This post was writen a week ago but I’ve not had the energy or interest to give it the once over. As such, I’m publishing it now because if I don’t, I won’t ever.

Last Tuesday night John Campbell and his team of intrepid reporters and researchers presented the latest findings in the continuing saga of Prime Minister John Key and MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom. ((Like the last Star Wars trilogy, there’s an awful lot of references to banking policies and not much decent Han Solo action.)) You can watch the “Campbell Live” report (again) here. ((TV3 does not seem to like providing people with embeddable videos of their news stories, which just seems pointless in this modern age)). I’m not going to summarise or rehash the story: if you want an excellent detailing of the particulars and the peculiars of what has happened and is alleged to have happened, you can read Russell Brown’s post here or Danyl McLauchlan’s.

What I’m interested in is whether the claim a conspiracy exists, which seems to be at the root of the Campbell Live story, is warranted/justified by the evidence. Essentially, can he/they show that:

a) there exist plotters who
b) operated in secret
c) towards some goal?

If all three of these conditions can be satisfied, then it seems we have a prima facie example of a conspiracy on at least part of the Government of New Zealand, which would be grounds for asking/expecting someone to resign.

So, what about that evidence? Well, we know that Key and Fletcher met on several occasions, and that these meetings really don’t reconcile nicely with the Prime Minister’s public accounting of his relationship with his old chum/the new head of the GCSB. The Prime Minister’s accounting looks increasingly suspicious the more we learn about the relationship between the two men, and if someone isn’t hiding something, then they are doing a good job of pretending to hide something.

It also looks increasingly unlikely that the Prime Minister had never heard of Dotcom prior to the raid (which is not to say he was definitely briefed on the matter: there’s a difference between “not knowing” and “not knowing about”), all of which suggests some plotting by Key and the government. It’s this latter matter which is weird: Key could, at the very least, say he knew about Dotcom but not the GCSB’s interest in him. Someone suggested to me that Key denied knowing anything about Dotcom initially as a kind of reflex “This isn’t important!” action, and now has to stick with the denial in order to save face. If that’s true, it’s a dangerous situation to be in, since all the Opposition or Dotcom (who I guess is part of the Opposition now) need do is show that the Prime Minister knew about Dotcom before he claims he knew about Dotcom.

As to why the PM is denying knowing about Dotcom and claiming he didn’t really know Fletcher (when clearly he knows him really quite well, having suggested he apply for the job, asked him to fly to New Zealand for brunch, et cetera et cetera)… Well, the supposition is that Key, Fletcher and probably many other senior members of the Civil Service and the Government are plotting towards some goal along the lines of “appeasing the Americans” or “wanting to play in the big leagues of security”. As such, they are hiding both their intention/goal and who exactly is in on it, since they are, in effect, lying to the public to keep whatever it is they are up to secret. This supposition, if true, would satisfy either the claim it’s all about copyright or it’s all about terrorists using MegaUpload for malign purpose.

Thus, the mystery/central question is whether the Prime Minister is being dishonest about when he met with Fletcher and what he knew about Dotcom prior to the raid on the “Christco” Mansion (which strongly suggests a hidden goal) or is he merely weak of memory (which does not strongly suggest on its own a hidden goal, although it is not incompatible with some other evidence of such). It seems hard to shrug this off as a non-story, as David Farrar claims over at KiwiBlog. ((I’m not linking to KiwiBlog because the comments threads there are so deplorable.)) The more information which surfaces about the Fletcher appointment, the more questions it raises, questions which are neither answered by the Prime Minister’s prevarications or by shrugging and saying: “This is business as usual.” At the very least, we have a group of people who look to be be plotting, possibly together, operating under either the veil of increasingly implausible lapses of memory or contempt for the public. Certainly, this is not the kind of behaviour which instils trust in the Prime Minister, and given what else has happened under this particular government (Judith Collins, Maurice Williamson, to name but two recent examples), it’s not at all unreasonable to suspect something fishy is going on.

It’s what is fishy about the situation that is the issue, though. As Danyl McLauchlan points out, this entire story is framed by reference to the Kim Dotcom story. Yet there are a number of other people the GCSB “incorrectly” ((The GCSB, of course, denies that it did anything wrong. Other institutions might well disagree.)) surveilled, and our notion of motive seems entirely dependent on that framing. As such, the goal condition is vague, phrased in a way which makes sense of the Dotcom material. Now, I’m not saying the Dotcom interpretation/framing is incorrect, but it points towards a potential problem with this particular claim of conspiracy: we don’t really know the “Why?” of it all.

Now, this might be expected if a conspiracy is in existence: after all, a somewhat successful conspiracy is one in which the conspirators keep secrets. However, it also makes researching and warranting the existence of the conspiracy all the harder: if we don’t know what they were up to, then finding further evidence might be harder. As such, let’s hope that the Campbell Live team keep digging. If they find something, we have a serious story and a claim of conspiracy to investigate. If they don’t, well it still reflects badly on the Prime Minister, who increasingly looks like the kind of politician who is it for the power and the PR opportunities and not so much interested in taking responsibility for the awkward decisions and compromises of being in government.

Writing a book is an awful lot like writing a PhD thesis: it’s long, hard work filled with the feeling that, at some point, someone is going to work out that you are a fraud. Luckily for me, that day has yet to emerge. My editor at Palgrave Macmillan just sent me an e-mail to say that the book has survived the review process and publication is now assured. Now I just have to see what the copy editor is going to do to my sometimes lovely, sometimes awkward prose stylings.