A LIMITED HANGOUT is a phrase used in the intelligence community to describe situations where leaking or revealing parts of the truth operates to control the public narrative.  Manipulative partial disclosure. 

It is also the name of a mysterious website that has haunted the edges of the integrative and meta-sensemaking communities for several years. 

The pseudonymous authors (Son of Korg, Ezekiel-73) of this online accumulation of articles have been the premiere source for intelligent, well-informed deep dives into conspiracy topics viewed from a transpartisan, depth-oriented, playfully pop-cultural, soberingly ethical, multi-aspectual perspective.  Try saying that three times quickly.

Since they have just closed their doors, and officially stopped publishing their strange articles, it might be time to take a cautious second look at their literate wanderings in the parapolitical, paranormal & anomalous dimensions of human society.  The article called The Network, Pt 1 is a good place to start exploring their peculiar style of mapping.

Conspiracy theorists, of course, get a bad name for good reasons.  The people we apply that label to are often gullible reactionaries who cobble together their own mythic worldview from the lurid misinformation and odd juxtapositions of our degraded media landscape.  There is something zealous and superstitious about their agitated desire to awaken the rest of us deluded fools.  And while they are busy cultivating an atmosphere of irrationality and mistrust, they are also distracting us from the glaring systemic biases that are accelerating the general metacrisis.

True.  But partial. 

It is also the case that our collective sensemaking is always being intentionally distorted by numerous agents, networks and interests.  And no matter how many times we find out (after the fact) that our consensus worldview was manipulated by political parties, clandestine services, corporate propaganda, etc. we typically relapse into feeling that -- all things being equal -- we are probably not being significantly misled at the moment.  But all things are not equal.  The public worldview is notoriously vulnerable to deliberate distortion.  Especially where large flows of money, advanced technologies, ontological mysteries and extra-governmental forms of social control are involved. 

How can we possibly do high-quality, integrative sensemaking if we instinctively reject any facts or sources that fall outside of the dominant consensus narrative? 

The ambiguity around these topics exists as a largely unexplored tension within the field of emerging meta-communities.  Like most human beings, we are often either too credulous or too skeptical.  Many of us feel than any discussion of government lies, intelligence agencies, ufos, hidden power networks or even spiritual phenomena is evidence of a softheaded (perhaps uniquely North American?) paranoia.  While others of us feel it is cowardly, blind and self-soothing to reject critical data for collaborative sensemaking merely because it is tarnished by association with the exaggerated fringe. 

The anxiety, shared by both temperaments, is that people are sabotaged by the attitude they take toward marginalized and anomalous aspects of history, politics and technology.  Yet it is specifically here that meta-communities, with their creativity, clarity of mind and capacity for integrative synthesis might be able to grow beyond these tensions.  The first step, of course, is to name it and start to engage more transparently in dialogue on the subject. 

Maybe that's what the legacy of Limited Hangout could be.  And now that it is safely dead, this might be a good time to challenge yourself with their curious offerings...