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What would distinguish a distributed conspiracy from a political coalition for me is methods and goals that the conspirants would not willingly disclose in the open. Without secret communications, coordination on those would be based on ideas that emerge naturally, that are downstream of memes shared by the distributed conspiracy. In a way this is like encryption, people with the correct key (sequence of memes) will decode the coordination instructions correctly. The left often accuses the right of this in the form of dogwhistles. If you want, for instance, to get widespread cheating in an election but don't want to say it out loud because that has consequences, you push very loudly memes that would justify cheating ("the other side will end democracy", for instance), so that without having to organize (at least not in large conspiracies), susceptible people will naturally wink, nod and act in support when they see hints that another person might be cheating in the direction they support.
This seems functionally identical to "dog-whistle politics" and/or "stochastic terrorism". As with those concepts, I could certainly see how something like this could be true, but in practice it only ever seems to get trotted out as a stick with which to beat one's enemies.
In any sufficiently large political faction, you'll have leaders who make impassioned speeches about the importance of accomplishing their goals, and subordinates who take this to heart and end up bending or breaking the rules in an effort to accomplish those goals. If caught, the leader will inevitably claim that he never explicitly instructed anyone to bend or break the rules. Should we believe him?
I predict that if we agree with the leader's goals, then the movement is only guilty of having a few overly literal-minded bad apples who have been swiftly dealt with; if we disagree, then the movement is really a "distributed conspiracy" in which the leaders use "dog-whistle politics" to escape culpability for "stochastic terrorism".
I am sceptical of the utility of any political term so susceptible to Russell conjugations.
Indeed, at object level they tend to just be unfalsifiable claims against the other side, but I think at least it offers a credible rebuttal to the idea that conspiracies cannot exist past a certain scale.
I would say that past a certain scale even referring to such things as conspiracies is losing an essential component of the definition of the word.
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