conspiracy theory, digits and the GII

This page points to writing about the net and conspiracy theory, highlighting sociological studies, opinion polls and some of the more entertaining theories.

It covers -

• the paranoid persuasion
• academic centres
• skeptics and enthusiasts
• surveys
• the digital apocalyptic
• hoaxes and rumours
• offline

    the paranoid persuasion

The global information infrastructure's been a godsend for paranoids, both as a medium for disseminating rumours and as an object of fear and suspicion - the Trilateral Commission tracking your every keystroke, RFIDs embedded in every tyre, Echelon hearing every breath, ICANN's fleet of black helicopter gunships (aka lbh) hovering just across the border ....

The flipside of notions of the web as a jeffersonian democracy - a community of articulate yeomen (and the odd cybergrrl) in digital discourse after the death of 'old media' - is that every kook can publish and rumour flies faster than truth.

Salon magazine aptly commented that the net is a global vacuum cleaner and echo chamber folded into one. There is much to be said for the quality control used by 'old media', although we assume Matt Drudge would disagree, and for a 'digital literacy' that is based on the critical evaluation of content and skeptical about conspiracy portals such as disinfo.com.

Despite the emergence of conspiracy theory and 'sociophobics' as fashionable areas for academic research there are few major studies of net-related conspiracy theories.

Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics & Other Essays (New York: Knopf 1965) remains a starting point for discussion about anxieties in the US.

Its comments about cultural suspicion, status anxiety and political disaffectation are echoed by Daniel Pipes in Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes & Where It Comes From (New York: Free Press 1997), George Marcus's Paranoia Within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 1999), The Culture Of Fear Why Americans Are Afraid Of The Wrong Thing (New York: Perseus 2000) by Barry Glassner, Corey Robin's Fear: The History of a Political Idea (New York: Oxford Uni Press 2004), Joanna Bourke's Fear: A Cultural History (London: Virago 2005), The Age of Anxiety: Conspiracy Theory and the Human Sciences (New York: Wiley 2001) edited by Jane Parish & Martin Parker, foucauldian Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality & Popular Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press 2008) by Jack Bratich and Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 2001) by Robert Goldberg.

Pipes enthusiastically characterises grand theory as

a quite literal form of pornography (though political rather than sexual). The two genres became popular about the same time, in the 1740s. Both are backstairs literatures that often have to be semi-clandestinely distributed, then read with the shades drawn. Elders seek to protect youth from their depredations. Scholars studying them try to discuss them without propagating their content; with asterisks and dashes in the first case and short extracts in the second. Recreational conspiracism titillates sophisticates much as does recreational sex.

Mark Fenster's Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy & Power in American Culture (Minneapolis: Uni of Minnesota Press 1999) takes a more positive view: paranoia as an act of revisionism by a bored subculture that's fuelled by deep cynicism abut contemporary politics and longing for a utopian future. There are similar views in The Age of Anxiety: Conspiracy Theory & the Human Sciences (Oxford: Blackwell 2001) edited by Jane Parish.

For a more extreme rendition see Mark Dery's The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (New York: Grove 1999), a must for X-Files fans, or Erik Davis's Techgnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information (New York: Harmony 1998). Fredric Jameson, in one of his less hermetic utterances, characterised conspiracy theory as

the poor person's cognitive mapping in the postmodern age; it is a degraded figure of the total logic of late capitalism, a desperate attempt to represent the latter's system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer theme and content.

There is a more nuanced analysis in Peter Knight's lucid Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to the X-Files (London: Routledge 2000) and Jodi Dean's Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace (Ithaca: Cornell Uni Press 1998). Timothy Melly's Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Ithaca: Cornell Uni Press 2000), Terry Matheson's Alien Abductions: Creating a Modern Phenomenon (Amherst: Prometheus 1998), Susan Clancy's Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 2005) and Benson Bobrick's The Fated Sky: Astrology in History (New York: Simon & Schuster 2006) are also of value.

    academic centres

Two academic centres are the UK Centre for Conspiracy Culture (CCC) and the US Center for Millennial Studies (CMS). We'll be adding other pointers shortly.

Regrettably there has been little academic analysis of fear, loathing and free-floating anxiety within the academy, evident in the sillier conservative claims about liberal conspiracies or uncritical reception on the left of some of Noam Chomsky's zanier pronouncements (grand theory with a striking disconnection to historical fact).

    skeptics and enthusiasts

For Contemporary Urban Legends (email taxes, web cookies from the NSA etc) see the site of that name.

Connoisseurs of the bizarre and ridiculous will enjoy Robert Anton Wilson's Everything is Under Control: The Encyclopedia of Conspiracy Theories (New York: Collins 1998) or Pat Robertson's The New World Order (Dallas: Word 1991).

The Conspiracy Theory Research List site seems to be for those who want to pull it all together - the truth is out there and if only you can join the dots (or is it dot coms) you will understand the interrelationship between Elvis, Skull & Bones, the Masons, the Vatican Bank, alien abductions ...

An example of dot-joining - everyone seems to be within nine clicks of separation - is the PIR site. If you are an lbh fan there is web-paranoia de jour here, with some debunking in The World Wide Web & Contemporary Cultural Theory: Magic, Metaphor, Power (London: Routledge 2000) edited by Andrew Herman & Thomas Swiss and in Michael Barkun's A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 2003).

If you are tired of existing theories you can generate your own using the engine on the Make Your Own Conspiracy Theory site. Debunking sites unfortunately have not kept pace with the zealots: examples are here, here and here.

    surveys

We'll be pointing to particular surveys in the near future. In the interim two useful benchmarks are Ted Goertzel's Belief in Conspiracy Theories study and the 2001 Gallup study (which among other delights suggests that over a third of US citizens believe in ghosts)

    the apocalyptic

Hofstadter differentiated between clinical paranoia - an individual convinced of the existence of a hostile and conspiratorial world "directed specifically against him" - and the paranoid style, characterised by belief in a conspiracy "directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life".

That style was less tied to a specific political goals than to a way of seeing the world, a way of understanding how things work by invoking the forces of conspiracy (corporate interests, for example, pulling the strings of a compliant government).

The paranoid spokesperson sees the fate of this conspiracy in apocalyptic terms ... He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point: it is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy. Time is forever just running out .... The apocalypticism of the paranoid style runs dangerously near to hopeless pessimism, but usually stops just short of it.

That apocalypticism is eerily present in some of the rants about ICANN, ECHELON or the DCMA.

Jaron Lanier's alarmist article in defense of Napster for example asserts that copyright is "a massive government-sponsored protection racket" and "if we make Napster-like free file sharing illegal, we'll have to rid ourselves of either computers or democracy". EFF luminary John Gilmore frets about photocopiers including invisible identifiers in routine copying "... under a long-standing private arrangement" with the US Treasury Department" and decries anti-spam legislation as "absolutely evil". Many of the postings on Australia's LINK list, the auDA DNS list or ICANNWatch echo claims about auDA or ICANN that have little credibility.

And among the lunatic fringe you can, as we suggested above, find examples of almost everything - including claims that the net is run by tall green lizards as part of the great alien invasion.

Such fears about 'new media' have a long history, explored in works such as Jeffrey Sconce's Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke Uni Press 2000), John Durham Peters' Speaking Into the Air (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 2000) and Carolyn Marvin's exemplary When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communications in the Late 19th Century (New York: Oxford Uni Press 1990). Other works are highlighted here.

These days - as one correspondent warned us (by email, of course) - the solution seems to be to wrap your head and personal computer in aluminium foil and thus ward off the dangerous web rays.

The role of digital technologies as a focus of apocalyptic thinking and mechanism for the expression of chiliasm is discussed in more detail here.

    hoaxes and rumours

We'll be adding information about web-based hoaxes, of interest as an illustration of how people perceive the net and the extent to which they critically evaluate information.

For the moment one recurrent hoax - the email tax - is discussed here.

    and offline

We suggest that readers make their own assessments about the literature. As points of reference for C-theory online we note that the following have been published by mainstream publishing houses -

Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids (New York: Harper 2001) by Jim Marrs - "the real movers and shakers covertly collude to start and stop wars, manipulate stock markets and interest rates, maintain class distinctions, and even censor the six o'clock news. And they do all this under the mindful auspices of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderbergers, the CIA, and even the Vatican". Presumably they are also responsible for toast falling butter side down

Holy Blood, Holy Grail (New York: Dell 1983) by Michael Baigent, Henry Lincoln & Richard Leigh - "the story of the Knights Templar, and a behind-the-scenes society called the Prieure de Sion, and its involvement in reinstating descendants of the Merovingian bloodline into political power ... Jesus may not have died on the cross, but lived to marry and father children whose bloodline continues today."

Nicholas Haggar's The Syndicate: The Story of the Coming World Government (Loughton: O Books 2004) and The Secret History of the West: The Influence of Secret Organizations on Western History from the Renaissance to the 20th century (Ropley: O Books 2005) similarly collect the usual suspects: "the Rockefellers and Rothschilds, their occult and esoteric connections", Kabbalists, Freemasons, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission ...

If you are into that sort of 'non-fiction' you might instead graze Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (New York: Doubleday 2003), nicely debunked in works such as Bart Ehrman's Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code (New York: Oxford Uni Press 2004) and sites exposing Pierre Plantard's Priory of Sion forgery.



   next page (the surveillance agency zoo)