conspiracy theory, digits and the GII

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, ICANN's fleet of black helicopter gunships (aka lbh) hovering just across the border). This page points to writing about the net and conspiracy theory, highlighting sociological studies, opinion polls and some of the more entertaining theories.

    the paranoid persuasion

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's a global vacuum cleaner and echo chamber folded into one. There's 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.

There's been surprisingly little academic study of net-related conspiracy theories. Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics & Other Essays (New York: Knopf 65) 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 97), George Marcus's Paranoia Within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 99) and Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 01) by Robert Goldberg.

Mark Fenster's Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy & Power in American Culture (Minneapolis: Uni of Minnesota Press 99) 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.

For a more extreme rendition see Mark Dery's The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (New York: Grove 99), a must for X-Files fans, or Erik Davis's Techgnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information (New York: Harmony 98). 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's a more nuanced analysis in Peter Knight's lucid Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to the X-Files (London: Routledge 00). Timothy Melly's Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Ithaca: Cornell Uni Press 00) and Jodi Dean's Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace (Ithaca: Cornell Uni Press 98) 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.

    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 98). 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'll 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're an lbh fan there's web-paranoia de jour here and some debunking in The World Wide Web & Contemporary Cultural Theory: Magic, Metaphor, Power (London: Routledge 00) edited by Andrew Herman & Thomas Swiss.

If you're tired of existing theories you can generate your own using the engine on the Make Your Own Conspiracy Theory site. Debunking sites unfortunately haven't 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 a useful benchmark is Ted Goertzel's Belief in Conspiracy Theories study.

    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's eerily present in some of the rants about ICANN or about 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". 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 aliens as part of the great 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 00), John Durham Peters' Speaking Into the Air (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 00) and Carolyn Marvin's exemplary When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communications in the Late 19th Century (New York: Oxford Uni Press 90). 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.

    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 01) 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"

Holy Blood, Holy Grail (New York: Dell 83) 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."






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