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Apophenia is a term coined in 1958 by K. Conrad. It refers to the act of making connections where none exist. In an environment
like the Internet, which is structured entirely by connections between seemingly unconnected things, apophenia becomes a useful
mode of thought, since there is nothing on the Internet which cannot be plausibly linked to something else on the Internet.
Tenuous links thus begin to define the environment, a kind of Nowhere which cannot be navigated by linear thinking. Apophenia
becomes a way of anticipating the structure of this new environment.
Apparent apophenia is also a tool of creativity, which links things whose connectedness is merely hidden to conventional
thought. Carried to extremes, apophenia leads to an obsession with conspiracy theories, which can validate unacknowledged
emotional pathologies.
The nexus of rational non-liner thought, creativity and emotional pathology is the unsettled existential condition of
21st-Century human beings.
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