The Fog Machine Needs No Operator

I. Two Older Gentlemen and a Murder

A YouTuber who calls himself Winter runs a “Schwurbel department”, from the German slang for muddled conspiracy talk. There, as he explains himself, the greatest nonsense is presented with a straight face in order to expose it as nonsense. In a recent episode a lawyer sits across from him, and the subject is the murder of Alfred Herrhausen, chief executive of Deutsche Bank. This time, Winter says, it is a “hybrid”.

For almost half an hour the two draw a line from Herrhausen via Aldo Moro to Uwe Barschel, touch on Raisa Gorbachev and Angela Merkel, and end up with weapons that kill with energy. In between, the same sentence keeps coming: forget everything, this is nonsense, we are a conspiracy channel. At the end comes the pitch for the paid community.

II. What Is True About the Herrhausen Case

To be fair, one begins with what is true. On 30 November 1989 in Bad Homburg, a seven-kilogram bomb on the luggage rack of a bicycle exploded, triggered by a light beam. Herrhausen bled to death in his armoured car. At the scene lay a sheet bearing the emblem of the Red Army Faction (RAF). To this day the perpetrators have not been identified.

The investigation had a real scandal. In 1991 the authorities presented a key witness, a former informant of the Hessian domestic intelligence service. He later retracted and said he had been put under pressure. Since 2004 no one has been named as a suspect. Whoever asks questions here asks legitimate questions. And Herrhausen was indeed an unusual banker: he publicly advocated debt relief for poor countries.

III. How Confusion Is Made

This material could make for a serious conversation. The programme does something else, using recurring moves.

The series instead of the proof. “Mr Moro dies, Mr Herrhausen dies.” Eleven years and two countries lie between the two murders. Neither case on its own carries anything. The series is meant to create a pattern where none has been shown.

The question as assertion. “Does the RAF have such good connections to the state police?” A question asserts nothing, so it need prove nothing. It sticks all the same.

The gap that is none. The lead car was supposedly “gone” that day. The usual account speaks of three vehicles. The weak point of the armoured door was supposedly known only to insiders. But the bomb worked on a principle found in textbooks and developed precisely to penetrate armour.

The dead who do not belong. Raisa Gorbachev supposedly died “under mysterious circumstances”. She died of leukaemia in 1999, at the university hospital in Münster. And Merkel’s trembling in 2019 is explained by tranquillisers and red wine, packaged as a joke, without any evidence.

IV. Fool or Fog Machine

One could take this for a fool’s licence. The fool may say anything because he identifies himself as a fool, and precisely thereby the nonsense becomes visible. But this only works when the frame is clear. At carnival everyone knows when it begins and when it ends.

In the “hybrid” the frame is blurred. The guest means some things seriously; he disagrees with other authors “unfortunately” and is “of a quite different opinion”. And Winter does not close with an unmasking but with a serious sentence: Herrhausen is not granted the honour of having the truth revealed. So everyone hears what he wants to hear. The sceptic hears parody, the believer hears confirmation with a wink.

This is not a court jester exposing the powerful. It is a fog machine.

V. What Remains: Indifference

Whoever watches such programmes regularly without bringing an opinion of his own, grounded in facts, ends up knowing not more but less. When everything is possible, nothing matters any more. Confusion turns into indifference.

This is not a new observation. Hannah Arendt wrote in her work on the origins of totalitarianism that the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is the person for whom the distinction between true and false no longer exists. In 2014 the journalist Peter Pomerantsev described how the Kremlin under Vladislav Surkov made exactly this a method. One does not refute the truth; one places so many versions beside it that people say: nobody knows anything anyway. In 2016 the RAND Corporation called this the “firehose of falsehood”: many channels, high frequency, no commitment to consistency.

VI. Who Benefits?

This raises a question that itself sounds like conspiracy: who has an interest in it? The first answer suggests itself. A resigned population can be governed and exploited without much friction. So the conspiracy talkers are in truth vassals of the system.

This answer is seductive, and it fails exactly the test we applied to Winter. It infers intention from benefit. And it is irrefutable: if the conspiracy talker attacks the system, that is camouflage; if he does not, that proves his vassalage. That is how one builds a conspiracy theory, not an explanation.

VII. The Machine Needs No Agents

The better explanation is more uncomfortable. Nobody needs to commission Winter. The platforms pay for attention, and confusion holds attention better than clarity. A riddle brings the viewer back; an answer releases him. The algorithm recommends what is watched, the community pays its fee, and indifference falls out as a by-product without anyone having ordered it.

This is what we describe in our series on the Megamachine: systems that reward behaviour nobody planned. Engineers call it positive feedback. A signal amplifies itself, without a conductor, until the system oscillates. The fog machine needs no operator. It runs because it pays.

VIII. Who Wins in the End

Even the “who benefits?” does not work out as it seems. A resigned population cannot be governed smoothly for long. Whoever believes in nothing will at some point follow the first person who promises certainty. The established institutions lose trust in the process; they do not gain power.

The winners are the sellers of simple answers. The fog prepares the ground on which someone then appears with a torch and says: follow me, I know the way. The system people are not at the helm; they are in the same boat.

IX. The Antidote

Against fog, counter-fog does not help; measurement does. An opinion that can be checked against facts is the only thing that does not evaporate in the fog machine. That includes the willingness to give up one’s own assumption when the facts speak against it. Karl Popper built an entire theory of knowledge on this: what cannot be refuted by anything explains nothing.

And it includes an attitude we described in the Outlines of a Rhenish Philosophy. It asks of every story: “Wat soll dä Käu?” – what is all this chatter for? And it reads “Wat wells de maache?” – what are you going to do? – not as a shrug but as a real question.

The fog machine lives on our ceasing to distinguish. It dies as soon as we start measuring again.