Arts by Dylan

Fiction, Fear & the Deep State

Fiction, Fear & the Deep State

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How 1970s Suspicion, 1990s Screens, and AI Nightmares Shaped Our Modern Conspiracies

We didn’t wake up one morning and stop trusting the news.
We were trained to.

And the teachers? Hollywood.
The syllabus? Fear, corruption, and always a guy with a file too dangerous to live.

Welcome to America, where the most common civic emotion isn’t trust — it’s paranoia.

🕶️ The Seeds of Suspicion — 1970s Cinema and Post-Watergate America

The 1970s cracked open something in the American psyche.

After Watergate and Vietnam, faith in institutions cratered. But instead of rebuilding it, Hollywood fed it. Films like The Parallax View (1974) weren’t just thrillers — they were mood pieces of dread, asking us to believe that every politician has a handler, every reporter ends up dead, and every assassination has a second gunman we’ll never see.

These weren’t just movies.
They were training wheels for a generation that would grow up expecting corruption behind every curtain.

You can draw a line from Warren Beatty’s haunted eyes in Parallax to the memes people now post about shadow governments, elite rings, and coded pizza orders.

🖥️ The Internet Age Meets the Deep State — 1990s Tech Noir

Fast forward to the 1990s — a time when America went online, but still didn’t know what “online” meant.

In The Net (1995), Sandra Bullock plays a hacker with no friends, no family, and no real-world footprint. Her identity gets wiped by one keystroke.
In Conspiracy Theory (1997), Mel Gibson plays a cab driver obsessed with black helicopters and secret programs — and, in true Hollywood form, he turns out to be right.

These weren’t just popcorn flicks.
They were parables warning that once you log on, the system already knows more than you do.

The villains weren’t foreign spies or street-level criminals.
They were faceless databases. Rogue government contractors. A “deep state” before the phrase had entered the political bloodstream.

🧬 COVID-19 and the Collapse of Narrative Control

And then came COVID — and whatever remaining trust people had in science, media, and public health was quietly shredded in a thousand different ways.

Early in the pandemic, the idea that the virus may have leaked from a lab was widely dismissed as conspiracy — fringe, xenophobic, or both.
But years later, major government agencies (including the FBI and the U.S. Department of Energy) publicly acknowledged that a lab leak origin was a credible hypothesis.

It wasn’t confirmation of anything sinister — it was just a crack in the official story.
And in that crack, a thousand doubts were born.

For many, the shift felt like déjà vu. First you’re told to “trust the science,”
… then you find out the scientists didn’t agree.
First you’re told it’s misinformation,
… then you see headlines quietly reverse course.

That’s how belief collapses.
Not all at once — but in drips.

It’s not that the lab leak theory is proof of a cover-up.
It’s that the refusal to even allow the question… felt like one.

🤖 The Matrix, AI, and the Mechanical Mind Behind the Curtain

By the early 2000s, Hollywood introduced its next boogeyman: the machine.

The Matrix (1999) wasn’t just a sci-fi flick. It was a cultural reset.
The entire premise — that reality itself is a simulation designed to pacify the masses — took post-Watergate paranoia and dressed it in leather and green code.

Neo wasn’t just fighting robots. He was rejecting consensus reality.

That film, along with others like I, Robot (2004), Eagle Eye (2008), and more recently Westworld, fed us the same narrative:

You’re not crazy for questioning the system.
The system was built to keep you asleep.

Now fast forward to 2024.
Artificial intelligence isn’t science fiction. It’s real.
It writes, paints, talks, generates faces, mimics voices, and even predicts behavior.

And guess what? People don’t trust it.

Not because of what it is — but because of everything they’ve already been told to fear.

The idea that a machine could influence elections, sway public opinion, or fabricate a person out of thin air sounds like plot armor from Enemy of the State. But today, it’s just Tuesday.

We spent decades watching movies where technology betrayed us.
Now that it’s here… what did we expect?

🌪️ “They/Them” and the Fog of Meaning

If conspiracy is the art of the unseen hand, then pronouns have become the smoke in the room.

The word “they” used to conjure up secret governments, alphabet agencies, and mysterious boardrooms filled with half-truths and hush money. Now, it might refer to a teenager discovering their identity. A celebrity expressing gender fluidity. A coworker politely asking you to shift how you see them.

And that shift — from shadowy actor to personal pronoun — has scrambled the signal.

🧠 When Grammar Becomes the Conspiracy

What happens when a culture uses the same word to describe both:

Confusion. Projection. Fear.

It's not just language — it’s identity, politics, and myth all rolled into one sentence:

“They are trying to control us.”

Who is they?

Is it the government? The trans lobby? The teachers? The bankers? The neighbor with the pride flag?
Or just… someone asking to be called what makes them feel seen?

📡 Pronouns Are Not a Plot

The real problem isn’t identity.
It’s our inability to slow down long enough to understand what we’re even talking about.

“They” has evolved — just like “queer” did. Just like “freedom” did.
And just like every word in the American story, it’s being fought over, redefined, and reused.

But mistaking a personal pronoun for a political threat? That’s how paranoia wins.

📡 News in the Era of Noise

Today, the line between fact and fiction feels thinner than ever.
And that’s not just because of bad actors.
It’s because we’ve spent decades blurring that line ourselves.

Cable news didn’t help.
Reality TV trained us to think every expert was faking it.
Social media made every user a publisher and every feed a panic button.

The result?

We don’t know who to trust — so we trust nobody.
And into that void rush the conspiracy theories, dressed in just enough truth to sound plausible, just enough fiction to go viral.

🧠 What We Miss When We Chase Ghosts

The irony of conspiracy culture is that it gives us villains, but takes away the real ones.

Instead of focusing on economic inequality, healthcare gaps, housing policy, or mental health, we get distracted chasing lizard people in the Federal Reserve and secret codes in pizza shop signage.

And because the villains in our fiction always wore suits, had badges, and spoke in code — we now treat every expert as if they’re hiding something.

✍️ A Civic Call to Rewrite the Script

Maybe it’s time to stop expecting the news to be entertainment.
Maybe we need new stories — ones that don’t just expose the corruption, but also explain the systems behind it.

Because transparency shouldn’t mean chaos.
And skepticism shouldn’t mean nihilism.

The truth is: democracy doesn’t work without trust.
Not blind faith. But earned, accountable trust.

And that trust can’t be rebuilt with another Netflix special.
It takes civics. Conversations. And a little more grace for people still figuring out what’s real.

 

🎯 Truth Check: Belief ≠ Agenda

If we want to fight disinformation and conspiracy, we have to stop confusing new realities with hidden motives. Not everything we don’t understand is a plot. And not everyone we disagree with is part of some dark cabal.

Sometimes, they just want to be called they.
And sometimes they really are watching us — but that’s probably your phone’s location tracker.


📖 Written by Dylan Carpowich
🧠 Arts by Dylan | Stories for a Wiser Republic