Hi all,
Just thought I'd pop in with a little personal anecdote - sorry if it's in the wrong place, please feel free to moderate or remove!
I work as a copywriter for a small travel firm in the UK. Won't say which one, but it'll be easy enough to find with the info I give here - as this is more about passing on my experience with chemtrail conspiracy theorists than it is advertising the guys I work for!
As I say, we're a pretty small company so we have to be pretty creative when it comes to our marketing (I know this sounds OT, but bear with me!). Recently, and with the help of a PR company, we dreamed up a bit of a stunt - offering people getting married in France the chance to utilise a cloud-seeding service to get perfect weather for their wedding day. Sure you can see what we were doing here, and when I say "stunt" I do mean exactly that - though technically we could arrange for it to be done (so I'm told), the deliberately ludicrous £100k price tag means that no-one (bar the nuttiest Russian oligarchs) could afford it.
Didn't take long before the chemtrailers descended. For the last week or more, I've had to firefight on our social platforms (facebook and twitter mostly) to remove some deeply unpleasant comments directed towards us from what I can only assume is the more vocal and aggressive factions of those who believe in chemtrails. Comments ranged from the pious and unbelieving to threats of physical and sexual violence (luckily we're a fairly robust bunch and took it in good humour).
I've always had a bit of an interest in conspiracy theories (more from an anthropological/folklore approach than actually believing them - I'm a card-carrying skeptic and rationalist) but I really was kinda weirded our by the spite and misinformation of the comments we received. I know it's not uncommon (was reading the Chris Bovey stuff) to recieve online hate from these guys, but jeez - the psychology of it is mind-boggling to me. What's clearly a PR stunt has been interpreted by some quarters as a blatant show of power by those pesky Illuminati Reptiles. In one of the bits of copy I wrote, I jokingly referred to us using the service for "potential future supervillainy" which was taken by one particular crackpot as a genuine admission of guilt. The stunt itself didn't even have anything to do with chemtrails - just cloud-seeding, which people here have already pointed out is a legitimate, legal activity.
Not that I was a believer in the first place, but having been at the pointy end of some fairly repulsive threats (guess I'm probably not alone in that on this forum - we should start a club) any sympathy I might have had with chemtrail theorists is now negligible. But hopefully by posting here I can help a little with debunking - I would like to catergorically state I am not, in fact, a shadowy evil corporate overlord who's part of an international conspiracy to enslave/sterilise/destroy the world but a 33 year old single guy who lives in South London with his cat and writes sci-fi in his spare time, who as part of his job wrote a press release for a PR stunt that nobody in the company really thought anybody would actually use anyway.
Although that's exactly what a corporate shill would write, right?
Anyways, thanks for reading.
Jon
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