Erling Hope

 Things I Learned While Building a Conspiracy Theory

A CrazyMaking Project

I started the strange project of building a novel, collaborative, pro-social conspiracy theory to gauge how possible it would be to thread a random narrative through the ocean of information available to the average digitally-literate human. This was provoked largely by the right-wing conspiracy narratives that had blossomed into an infectious, nihilistic ethos, built often on seeds of truth, but then elaborating into baroquely absurd claims. If it was possible to mobilize a deregulatory agenda using tales of shape-shifting alien reptoids, then what else was on the table? And if storytelling is more persuasive than facts, then maybe we should be telling the story of history and current events through a speculative fiction lens. Maybe, in short, we should be crafting better conspiracy theories.

And so here are some of my takeaways, from the time I spent building a better conspiracy theory.

• That Ideas are Nestled in the Nonsense

OR:

Notes on Some Contours of the Conspiracy Critique

Everyone knows what a “crazy wall” is, even if they don’t. It’s that moment in the movie when we find, in the dimly lit back of the psychopath’s—or the eccentric prophet’s— basement, a wall covered with articles, photographs, maybe some obsessive image scrawled repeatedly, and usually with strings connecting everything. There’s a variation (with some cross-over) called The “Detective Wall,” and in fact investigators hold seminars on how to do a better “Anacapa” wall, as they call it. By whatever name, it has been a favored trope of Hollywood, and in this double valence, pointing at once to delusional psychopathy, and to a dogged, rational hunt for the truth among noisy facts, it illustrates both the voracious pattern-seeking faculty of humans looking for the sense of the world, and the treacherous apophenia of the mind folding back on itself.

Mark Lombardi’s work is probably the most aestheticized expression of this basic graphic idea. Until his arguably suspicious suicide in 2000, on the cusp of international acclaim, he executed large-format, loosely geometric diagrams describing the intricate and corrupt webs of connection between powerful individuals, corporations and governments. His works drew scrutiny from the FBI and other security state entities. They stand as a landmark experiment in applying aesthetic concerns to the sinister dynamics of power, and a formidable inspiration for this project.

In December of 2022, I served in residency at The Church, an arts center housed in a converted Methodist house of worship on Eastern Long Island. With some space and some time to devote to this project, it seemed that the moment was ripe to give the Q.Public conspiracy theory a proper Crazy Wall.

As an artifact, as an aesthetic object or experience, it was, I think, a failure. But as an experiment and as a prototype, it generated a lot of interesting material (more on this elsewhere).

At the heart of these kinds of projects, of this impulse to form a totalizing graphic representation of some illusory order governing the chaos of human life, is the tendency to see the social phenomenon in question as, itself, a kind of artifact. This pattern-seeking drive is voracious, and when it is trained on the immense and complex dynamics of something like a human society, interesting things happen. A human culture, by turns and by nature, both asserts and subverts patterns. In this way, it lies in that sweet spot that music owns—just enough predictability to keep us viscerally engaged, just enough randomness to keep us guessing.

This practice, of viewing a culture, whether national or global, as if it were an object, designed with intention and purpose, and some amount of aesthetic consideration, is what I call the conspiracy critique. This critique insists that we treat the dynamics of a society as an inherently intentional and designed thing, as an artifact. Like many artifacts, a society is intrinsically a collaboration, one in which we all play a part. The conspiracy critique insists that we extract meaning from from every aspect of the society, that we evaluate it aesthetically and ethically, even as we continuously build it, brick by brick, word by word, gesture by gesture.

The conspiracy critique holds at its core a fundamental insight that haunted the European Enlightenment, and that was expressed perhaps nowhere as pervasively and articulately. This is the deceptively humble observation that power corrupts. It’s not the most uplifting insight, except to the degree that it motivates liberational movements and inspires social and political structures that counteract this indelible fact of human social life. And the conspiracy critique shares this fixation, this value, with a broad range of contemporaneous movements, from Me-Too and Black Lives Matter, even the Arab Spring, to, nominally at least, the Proud Boys and the “Second Amendment Community.”

Gun rights advocates are motivated by several things, but probably the only defensible argument is that a well-armed populace is the only practical check to the (corrupting) power of the super state. This argument only works if the electoral process is unreliable, and so “Stop the Steal” becomes the rally cry. In one of the great ironic, inversionist turns of this moment, Trump, their populist champion, becomes the full confirmation of this instinct. The prospect of the return of Trump to the presidency begs the question of everyone to the left of lunacy: Do we want to be without recurse in the face of actual depraved, corrupt tyranny?

The conspiracy critique is, among several other things, an indictment of the radical consolidation and misuse of power in a world careening toward the sixth great extinction while billionaires build space ships, in a country where the rampant graft and corruption is almost all of the legal kind while the carceral state treats disenfranchised humans as abidingly flawed and disposable, in a society in which we are all tightly embedded into a vast system of extinction, in living conditions laden with a stew of complex volatile chemicals and meticulously engineered addiction delivery systems—we are all powerless in the face of the vast machinery of modern life.

Contemporary conspiracy culture is steeped in delusional fever dreams, many of them ultimately anti-semitic and racist and in general radically retrograde and frankly stupid. Many of those on the right who rail against the sense of powerlessness are really just lamenting the dismantling of privilege they’ve been groomed to expect. Loss of power feels like powerlessness. But the sense of pervasive malevolence that is conspiracy culture’s signature affect—This is on the mark. Conspiracy theories are the mood ring of modern life. Chemtrails are a metaphor for the ambient menace of life in a society zombie-shuffling toward environmental collapse.

The conspiracy critique is fundamentally a language of resistance, but that’s not really saying much. It is agnostic about what it resists. The conspiracy critique can be deployed by fascists to resist our stronger and more humane impulses, or by sociopathic corporate entities like tobacco or oil companies to resist accountability. It can be used by liberational movements to reframe the habitual malevolence of system dynamics. It can be exploited or leveraged for a range of functions.

The Q.Public conspiracy theory uses this function to examine the destructive and deadening systems we have embedded ourselves into. It seeks to harness the power of imagination and apply it to the tasks of holding power accountable, and of cultivating ways to be accountable to one another in this evolving, dynamic, enchanted work of art that is life together.

• That the Youngs are Right About Gender

A few weeks ago my wife and I were propelled into a domestic abuse situation among strangers. On a quiet Friday night ruptured by screaming in front of our house, a scene unfolded like some kind of compulsory pop-up theater. On the other side of the otherwise strangely serene turnpike, perfectly centered across from our driveway, a young woman (stage right) sobbing and running away from a large pickup truck, pulled over and askew (stage left). But this is immersive theater, and in an eye blink I am no longer audience. A couple of beats forward and now I am squaring off with the dude, obliged to enact a convincing menace of violence, through a timeless choreograph of word and stance and glare. I am a former Quaker clerk, far more jester than jouster, and these ligaments have logged some taxing mileage. Turning the other cheek is almost always my preferred posture. But turning someone else’s cheek for them is never a just proposition. And anyway I am also the father of a daughter, so my display was not contrived. It was what was required in the moment, and in any case, it was effective. In a turbulent situation, this performance pried what was needed from the young man—a commitment not to return home unless and until the woman contacted him and told him it was ok, among other conditions. They lived in an apparently safe, group setting, she was not physically harmed, so far as we could tell, and she had insisted we not involve the police or anyone else.

In that seething moment though, in the urgent etiquette of young man and old man negotiating coercion and rage, an ancient economy was at work. It felt, even in the moment and for days of reflection afterwards, like a highly gendered interaction, a primally masculine exchange. Two bulls fuming, until the one persuades the other that risks outweigh rewards. That is of course if you’re lucky, and we were both lucky on that warm Spring evening.

“Masculine” and “feminine” are not words that I use, almost ever, because I don’t generally know what they mean. Describe for me a solitary masculine quality that is not ultimately about anatomy. Tell me one feminine. There are none. They are like “honor” or “authenticity” or “righteousness.” They seem to mean something, but as soon as you try to articulate it, as soon as you account for the multitude of exceptions and variations, everything falls apart. When you reckon with their baggage, you realize their moment has passed.

If, say, nurturing is an archly feminine quality, then will you say, when my child is in pain and I scoop them up and hold them close, that I am somehow not being fatherly, not being masculine? Or, better: Set yourself between mama bear and cubs, and ponder, as she destroys you, what masculine qualities of aggression she displays.

No. This is clearly wrong. Especially among large mammals, but even going back to creatures we haven’t shared kin with in half a billion years, it is rare for males to defend vulnerable youngs. They will guard their territory, their breeding pool, their food supply. But it is the female bear, or chimpanzee, or lion,… or octopus, who protects the youngs from the often murderous males.

And yet, among right wing worriers about American Manhood, the idea of man the protector works its enchanting, and occasionally useful, and ultimately poisonous magic among the self-elected gun-toting guardians against the bad guy with a gun. They justify the public carrying of firearms as an assertion of manliness, by claiming to be protectors, “sheepdogs” in a world full of blitheful sheep and hungry wolves. This Friday night exchange took place in a country being poisoned with a nihilistic marketing scam masquerading as ideas about sovereignty and virility. It embodied the keystone of its pitch—the dramatic and volatile confrontation— notably without the use of its finely crafted products, thank you baby Jesus.

Fretting over the status of men in a maybe-late-stage capitalist service economy is not solely the concern of the right. Much has been written and spoken from many quarters regarding the “problem with men.” And locating some essence in ideas of protection is a standard redoubt. But it rings acutely desperate in a moment when the youngs are reevaluating the very notion of gender. “When I try to nail down what masculinity is” writes Phil Christman in the Hedgehog Review, “what imperative gives rise to all this pain, seeking and stoicism, this showboating, aesceticism  and loud silence, I come back to this: Masculinity is an abstract rage to protect.” 

Beautiful, maybe, but wrong. That rage to protect is feminine. In the animal kingdom, it is female. It is “abstract” because we, the human animal, have “gender transitioned” that impulse. It’s become as nakedly clear as daylight to me that this standoff with the young man was among my most feminine moments. Should we, I can’t help wonder, inform the men who accessorize with SIGs and Glocks that they are behaving in a deeply feminine fashion? That could be useful information to them.

_________________

A former friend and colleague, in the throes of the (first) Trump presidency, tried winning me over, before we finally parted ways, with lengthy articles detailing various plots and fantasies. But he leaned in particularly on one thread that argued that feminism was first and fundamentally a CIA plot to emasculate men. A passage:

“Feminism has done the most damage. There is no more fundamental yet delicate relationship in society than male and female. On it depends the family, the red blood cell of society. Nobody with the interests of society at heart would try to divide men and women. Yet the lie that men have exploited women has become the official orthodoxy.

 “Man loves woman. His first instinct is to nurture ("husband") and see her thrive. When a woman is happy, she is beautiful. Sure, some men are abusive. But the vast majority have supported and guided their families for millennium [sic].

“Feminists relentlessly advance the idea that our inherent male and female characteristics, crucial to our development as human beings, are mere “stereotypes.”…..Feminism is a grotesque fraud perpetrated on society by its governing elite. It is designed to weaken the American social and cultural fabric in order to introduce a friendly fascist New World Order.” 1. 

That’s where they’re at. Everything seems to hinge on the stability of these categories. But what are these categories?

Once the ugly task of wrangling compliance from the young man in the pickup truck was settled, it would have been easy, in the moments after, to rub his face in the shame and self-hatred of his failings. But that probably would have made matters worse. So the next item on the evening’s agenda was to try welcoming him back into the human community, if he would accept it. A fine line: Maintain the credible threat of violence, while extending a hand. In the end, I offered him a cot in my shop, and he agreed to call me the next day, to check-in; my wife kept in contact with the woman. He called me three more times after that, in the following weeks. On the last call, I asked him where he was on the conspiracy paranoia spectrum, though not in so many words. I had a hunch, and a working hypothesis that, if you believe the world is a fundamentally sinister place, that’s going to effect how you treat the people around you. And yes, they were both deeply embedded in that landscape. Imagine the sense of helplessness, to live in a world as malevolent and implacable as the one conjured by these belief systems, and yet your identity is tethered to the idea that you are here to protect. There is an impossible tension here.

My wife, secret hero of this story, had displayed a super-power of consolation and comfort to the young woman. She claims, though, a more niche ability that I can’t account for. She claims to have perfect “canine gen-dar”. She can tell the gender of a dog, just by looking at it, but without peeking. I don’’t know how she does it. Just a few quick glances, even a photo, and blam, she calls it. When I told my daughter about this, she confided that she too has this ability, but that sometimes the dog doesn’t identify with the gender it was assigned at birth. That, of course, was a joke. But the real punchline is this: Dogs don’t have gender. Cat’s don’t have gender. I didn’t actually know this, but according to most biologists, humans are the only creature that has gender. Other animals have male and female, and hermaphroditic, sex, with associated behaviors and lots of variation. But gender is a human, social, construct.

This puts gender in the fundamentally human exercise of pattern-naming, or somewhere between pattern-making, and pattern-perception. Conspiracy theories also belong somewhere in this family of behaviors. We spy similarities between phenomena, name them, and then attempt to cram new information into these categories, however forced the fit.

All of which suggests that the youngs are correct. Not about everything; these Victorian strains have me concerned. The language-policing and relentless taxonomizing often, historically, track a course that is not so savory. But it’s clear, from how questionable our bedrock assumptions are, that we have this whole gender thing fetishized and fucked up. Gender is not wholly random, but there is statistically relevant noise in the signal, and they, the youngs, are focusing on the noise, on that dynamic area of unpredictability. Because that is where the Spirit lives. In the margins. Incidentally, or not, that’s also where we live. Humans are fundamentally creatures of the in-between. And the world is full of surprises.

By necessity, there is much that must be left out of this account. And my thoughts here are as yet unfinished. Help me think through this complicated question. Share your thoughts on gender and conspiracy theory at the bottom of the page.

Sources, resources:

1. The link is here, but contact me if you don’t want to traffic that site: Gloria Steinem - How The CIA Used Feminism To Destabilize Society

Duff Norris On an Expansive Definition of Manhood

What Is It Like to Be a Man?

Females, Andrea Long Chu

Manhood, Josh Hawley

• That It Really Is All Connected

• That Americans are Civically Trained to Think in Terms of Bogus Binaries

To live in the US is to be civically trained to think in terms of bogus binaries—black/white, gay/straight, masculine/feminine, capitalist/socialist. Civic life in the US is a parade of these false choices: freedom vs equality, religious vs secular, pro-vax vs anti-vax. No middle ground is figured between pro-gun and anti-gun, pro- and anti-science. Change comes either through system change or individual responsibility, ultimate blame lies with corporations, or with government. And this dynamic drills down deep into what makes us human: Us vs them, self vs other, free will vs determinism. These are the kinds of dumb dualities that serve as the currency of US politics.

Consider: When we go wreck some other poor chump of a country, and then ‘build it back up,’ we don’t situate them with US-style presidential democracy, with winner-take-all regional vote allotment. They get parliamentary democracy, with complicated coalitions of compromise. It’s like we know this red state/blue state system is inherently and fatally flawed. We know intuitively that it’s only managed to sustain this country by virtue of luck, timing, and the fact that until recently, the tools of manipulation and disinformation have evolved relatively slowly.

The US did not invent this kind of reductionist pressure, and it is hardly the only country to be subject to it. But unlike most other countries that aren’t currently engaged in civil war, the US frames the binary as an internal dynamic of the body politic. Elsewhere, phenomena like Brexit, or Russian or Indian or French or Chinese nationalism, or Japanese racial chauvinism, direct this impulse outside the boundaries of the nation state, consolidating national identity. Here, it is an active catalyst in the ongoing Cold Civil War, otherwise known as the Culture War, stoked by interests both within and outside of that arena.

As an artisan, I respect and admire the consummate craftsmanship with which this country has been split so precisely down the centerline. That a few hundred or thousand votes every few years could determine effectively the fate of the world reflects a truly stunning precision with which the populace has been portioned out to the binary factions.

Evolutionarily, biologically, this binary thinking would have evolved to enable quick decision making, when action is urgent. And it’s very effective at cementing tribal cohesion, whether the tribe is the party or state or religion. But it renders people, and USians in particular, it seems, vulnerable to the appeal of the simplified landscape of conspiracy theory. Any ambitious CT relies on some kind of villain, and the more dehumanized the better.

But also and aside from this dynamic, binary thinking impoverishes our civic dialogue and is ruinous to our ability to engage with the biggest problems that face us. Climate change, global economy, pandemics—these are problems of statistical probability, not of on/off, yes/no duality. Gender and abortion and gun control are only binary questions when they’re reduced to the laziest and most willfully ignorant equations.

Why an entire country should divide itself internally, and consistently, according to this instinct is a subtler question. History (read: slavery) plays its part. But I have not come across any adequate explanations for why the US consistently redounds to a two-party binary. I suspect that market effects play a role. How many SUV’s are on the roads right now because of romantic Libertarian-ish visions of rugged off-road independence? Simple demographics are easier to sort and advertise to, and political parties themselves have been using increasingly refined market strategies to consolidate power for decades. But the US is a system which was engineered to resist the consolidation of power (within a specific framework), with terms and term limits and bicameral houses and co-equal branches and states balancing federal authority—it really was a brilliant arrangement when it was cooked up. In such a setting, the only remaining way to consolidate power is to constrict the number of parties sharing power to the lowest number; two. At this point, as the oldest continuous government in existence, the mechanisms are largely unconscious and ingrained. Even the outliers, like Sanders and Trump, know to play within that binary.

The good news is, at least cognitively, there are well trod paths through this malaise. From Vedic Monism to Elder Marshall’s Two-Eyed Seeing, to Integrative Complexity dynamics, to Adam Gopnik’s “learning to count to two”, USians and humans in general have wrestled with the tension of this pressure and have arrived at an array of variations on a singular theme. What this looks like in day-to-day life, and how this might help us as members of communities, and as communities of communities, we will tackle in a later entry.

• That the Nature of Storytelling is Changing

The story that QAnon told was nothing original. It was merely a reworking of shopworn, if sinister, Blood Libel themes, flavored with a kind of Manichean Neo-Gnosticism. But the ways that the story was told, partially by the anonymous authors, partly by eager acolytes, through the dynamic media of posts, threads, tangent riffs by their many minions, listicles compiled by otaku lickspittles; this was something novel and innovative. The stewards of QAnon created a lush rookery in which teeming fever dreams could find compatible ligatures and organize themselves into vibrant, responsive organisms. Curatorial agency was less authorial than it was nimble and responsive to what was igniting spontaneously.

This kind of collaboration has always been interesting to me. It isn’t easy to conjure the right ingredients to ignite that collective imagination. But when it happens, it is highly volatile; it can be magical, or it can be toxic and explosive. And as novel as it might seem, this is probably a far older style of storytelling than what arose in the age of the novel. Before writing, before the printing press, storytelling would have been a far more collaborative and participatory enterprise. Classical Chinese and Japanese literature is rife with sampling, quoting, riffing. And Torah and New Testament are certainly filled with tracts that were compiled and altered in a collaborative fashion.

Maybe that’s why QAnon and others like it are so effective. They’re using time-tested storytelling modes, jacked into the interweb.

• That There are God-Shaped Rabbit Holes

I was an early adopter to the notion that conspiracy theories are a new form of religious expression, even that QAnon was the first digitally mediated religion. CTs do a lot of the heavy lifting that used to be the wheelhouse of traditional religions. They organize the chaotic world, traffic in secret, saving knowledge; they consolidate community, and probably most significantly, they mediate enchantment. They make the world magical again. These features become increasingly important the more people feel alienated and, perhaps more significantly, feel a loss of agency and understanding of the wider world.

But where CTs tend to fall down is in developing anything like transcendent values, or mechanisms for consoling us in our suffering, or methods for engaging our mortality or empathizing with the radically other. These are also important, watershed features of any belief system aspiring to be more than a cult.

All of which reveals that what CTs really are, for the most part, is instruments for political manipulation. And the ultimate beneficiaries of the current epidemic of CTs are for-profit corporations with an interest in weak oversight and lax regulation, as well as the party and the candidates that adopt this as their mission. Separation of church and state indeed.

• That There’s No Way Out But Through

I was chatty for a time with the head of the “Task Force on Disinformation” for one of the Big Social Media companies. Its mission statement reads: “To give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” Ideas are one thing, and information is another, and any overlap there should be minimal, if we’re committed to honesty. So I asked this person point blank if disinformation was a subset of information—if lies are a kind of information—or the opposite of information. Think about that for a second, don’t answer impulsively. Because there are some possible complexities there but again, they’re mostly in the margins.

We’ve all seen how squeamish those companies are about recognizing that they are playing a role in shaping modern epistemology, or the “investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.” They don’t want to decide what’s true and what’s false. Who can blame them? Except that, in the age of climate change, of Anti-Vax movements, of the January 6 Insurrection, epistemology is bluntly existential. The lies are leading us to some very bad places. The deaths of individuals, of democracy, possibly of civilization or even complex life on the planet—all of that hangs in the balance.

“Isn’t it all just entertainment?” That was the disappointing and depressing response to my question.

So for the foreseeable, we’re stuck with this condition. This phenomena, of chronic anxiety and insecurity priming us relentlessly for apophenia—for seeing patterns where none exist—is only going to become more pronounced. I am convinced this is true. This will continue to amplify conspiracy paranoia, and ensure that the suspicion heuristic remains the go-to posture for many or us. Conspiranoia and its proponents are not going to be beaten back by data and accurate information. The human imagination and hunger for meaning and belonging are just too robust for facts. And digital literacy, digital critical thinking—entirely new fields—are too heavy a load for our educational systems to be able to develop and implement in a timely fashion. Add to that the burgeoning effect that AI is having on the effectiveness of disinformation. The world is going to get curiouser and curiouser. Which means we have to get curiouser and curiouser, and somehow keep a sense of humor.

• That It’s a Blast 

This was an alarming discovery. This last stage of the multi-year CrazyMaking project started as a way to occupy the hours that insomnia introduced to me, with the arrival of the COVID-19 lockdowns and the disorientation and anxiety that attended that moment. But it became the kind of obsession that Sudoku or Animal Crossing fanatics will understand. These are of course games I’m comparing the project to. And games are, well, mostly fun.

To be clear, fun isn’t all this thing was or is. Neither is it satire. This isn’t “Birds Aren’t Real” or “The Realist.” This is a focused exercise in exploring the tension between making and finding meaning, in pattern creation and pattern perception. It is an exploration of the relationship between the fraught human project of sorting the world, and the world’s responsiveness, if any such a thing exists, to that sorting.

So it is serious. It is highly speculative. And it is also a hoot. The satisfaction—the dopamine hit— that comes when a historical detail fills a role in a narrative arc, is the same as the ones that come from any good puzzle/game. That is surely the same experience that the global team that put together the QAnon project experienced, when yet another datapoint was found to fit (sometimes sideways, pinched and folded) into the story they were creating.

And so I think it’s safe to assume that the same addictive pathways that convince us to carve out regular portions of our precious days to find a word or number from a daily puzzle are at work with the people who are vigilantly striving to uncover how the latest minor scandal can confirm a shared fever-dream meta-bias. Conspiracy theories are fun, and also, addictive.

Forthcoming:

That Our Hunger for Simplicity is Dangerous

That People Treat You Differently When You Become “That Conspiracy Theory Guy”

That It’s All About Cosmic Horror

That with Enough Data Points, Nearly Any Story Can Be Told Through the Documented Facts of History and Current Events

That We Are Functionally Illiterate at Reading the World

That the Zombie Apocalypse is Upon Us

That Something Interesting Happens When We Look at All of Society as an Artifact

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Continue to PART 6: Q.Public Glossary Words and terms associated with the Q.Public conspiracy theory.