Do you suffer from what my husband calls Pollyannoia, the irrational belief that no one is out to get you? Both this coinage and pronoia, the official term for this condition, are modeled on “paranoia,” the opposite affliction. You see little pronoia on the Internet, where, as Hesiod said, Strife rules and “potter hates potter … beggar strives with beggar and poet with poet.” On Avenue Q they say “The Internet is for porn,” but I think it’s actually for conspiracies fueled by Strife. The medium lends itself to sparking tiny flames amid the unsuspecting and blowing gently on the fragile human tinder beneath until they are engulfed in the resulting bonfire.

In a sense, conspiracies are built into the genetic structure of the Internet. Or at least into its memetic structure. The idea goes like this:

Real world : Internet = gene : meme

Richard Dawkins, who coined the term meme, defines it as follows, “self-replicating units of culture that have a life of their own.” By synecdoche, the word is used to refer to the Internet meme, a clever idea or a hoax that spreads from person to person and can create a feeling of cleverness or trendiness among those who spread it, as Wikipedia says.

It has been argued that the nature of a meme is to be selfish, as a gene is selfish from the perspective of gene-based evolutionary theory, also Dawkins’ idea. This view argues the nature of organisms (us!) is to a significant extent determined by social characteristics which are not inherited, so evolution is best understood by studying the gene, and not the organism that results from it.

Genes are selfish: their aim is to continue to propagate (make more genes) and optimize themselves at the expense even of the organism as a whole. And in the view of some discussants on the Usenet memetics discussion group, discussion can be seen as a competition between memes which, like genes, can combine and mutate. For example, the JFK assassination conspiracy (on which more in a minute) has been “a source of inspiration for the development of other conspiracy theories,” enriching the “conspiracy meme-pool.”

The assassination was the first time I was aware of the kinds of coincidences that feed conspiracy theory today. In 1964, Jim Bishop wrote A Day in the Life of President Kennedy which listed coincidences between the deaths of presidents Lincoln and JFK. William Hanchett notes that Bishop had already identified the death of Lincoln as a conspiracy, so the parallel was obvious. These “remarkable facts” somehow melded with or even triggered the ongoing dissatisfaction with the Warren Commission’s 1964 report that the assassination was caused by a lone gunman, not a conspiracy.

The coincidences identified by Bishop are today explained away by a wide variety of websites including Greyfalcon, which notes, “It is always possible to comb random data to find some regularities.” The site adds:

A week before Lincoln was shot, he was in Monroe, Maryland
A week before Kennedy was shot, he was in Marilyn Monroe

But coincidences are not sufficient for conspiracy theory: there needs to be a certain sentiment that accompanies them. I was in high school when JFK was assassinated. On the day of his death, I thought back to the Democratic Convention. I remembered whirling around our living room with a Kennedy for President sign I made from my hula hoop, while my father put a Stevenson sign on the floor mop and waved it at the TV where the convention delegates rendered their votes. Devastated by the events in Dallas, I crocheted a black ribbon and tied it into a bow which I pinned above my heart on my school uniform.

I still remember Joanne Di Martino coming up to me between classes one day, asking why I wore “that thing,” and, cracking, upon my answer, “Looks to me you’re wearing it to call attention to a place no one would look at otherwise.” Ouch. I don’t know what happened to Joanne after high school, but I think she had great potential for stand-up, instant delivery of a line that was painfully nasty but funny too.

I assume she and her family were Republicans. Or maybe she just hated me, though there was no especial sign of that, before or after. In any case, the exchange must have been enormously satisfying to her, and to anyone else like-minded who was listening. I’ll never know who was there because I was so devastated I virtually reeled.

I think we’re increasingly experiencing the kind of frustration Joanne voiced at Mater Christi H. S. in 1963. This sentiment is inseminated by violence and now, as then, nurtured by extensive media attention, but today it operates on a much larger scale and in an exceptionally well-suited medium.

The frustration behind what I would call the flash-conspiracy has shown signs of developing for quite some time. For example, there was the wonderfully prescient 1976 film Network with Peter Finch’s wonderful speech that chronicled the woes of modern times and urged everyone to go their window and yell “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more.”

One discussant on the Transhuman Space Game Forum agrees:

Conspiracy theory is a cop-out/escape, in two different ways. Firstly, if all the world’s problems are caused by a mysterious group of “Them,” then all the world’s problems can be solved if we can just discover and destroy “Them.” Secondly, since “They” are so powerful and diabolically clever, Regular People (“Us”) can never find out who They are, what They want, or how They work. Ergo, the world’s problems cannot be solved by regular folks, so that means its perfectly okay to set back, watch the world go to hell, and do nothing.

And I would add, launch a website.

Even a casual observer can see the Internet is full of sites where conspiracies are touted, espoused, nurtured and spread. Conspiracy Planet is one such place. I like to think I can figure out what a web site is about, but with my first look at Conspiracy Planet, I was not sure. It didn’t seem to come down on one side or the other that I could see, it just wanted to see conspiracies everywhere. Some of the time I thought the stuff I was reading was a joke, but probably not.

The site lists 82 different topics, if I counted right, everything from moon landing coverups, to 9-11 conspiracies to discussion of the “Bush/Clinton Crime Family” and something called “Criminal Government” which had a story denouncing Hillary Clinton because she “gave off mixed signals” about recent events in Honduras.

This article was called “Hillary Moves State Dept to the Right of Rice” and included a denunciation of Clinton because her father had been known to use the word “nigger” and Hillary had allegedly responded to this by becoming a Goldwater Republican. All of whom presumably  approved of such language, I guess. I should ask my colleagues in the Philosophy Program if they use such sites as examples to mine for fallacies in their Logic courses.

The place where I got really worried was when I saw the article stating that the U. S. Constitution was a conspiracy because it had been signed on the day of the summer solstice. I guess that pages like Conspiracy Planet are libertarian in their underlying structure, but I think really the point is to be angry all the time. Here is a passage from the site on the murder of Dr. George Tiller:

Just who defends what George Tiller did for a living? What kind of people are they? They’re all over the Internet defending him. Politicians in the Democratic Party … doctors who went to medical school … they’re everywhere it seems … no shame, brazen even. What is the rationale for their viewpoint? “Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong,” as the old song says.

The truly amazingly great Mr. Obama, while still serving in the Illinois State Legislature, was deeply involved in a late term abortion political controversy. Why do the Democrats always seem to get caught up in these things? Do they support this in their heart of hearts? What drives them to be involved? How can they sleep at night?

Are they confused? Sold out? Is this a “must do” tenant (sic) of Satanism –blood sacrifice? They’re uninformed about what’s really going on? King Herrod (sic) complex? What …? Probably they see all abortion as a zero sum game and they feel they have to defend all of it or none of it.

I’m not Miss Pollyanna, but there must be more therapeutic ways to pass your time. I mean some of these people could probably benefit from giving themselves a pedicure or cleaning the black stuff from the grout of their bathroom tiles. Myself, I find that if I engage in either of these activities, I achieve a Zen-like peace that results in the inability to criticize anyone for hours. Some of that may be the Tilex, but still…

At their best, though, conspiracies can be fun to look for. The best one I know of on the Internet right now is about Howie Long and the Chevy commercial. I mean the one with Maggie, “the smart little girl” who wants the Chevy because it’s the “big girl car.” Now the commercial would raise the hackles of everyone who hates smart-ass kids, and, like others in the series, it plays fast and lose with the facts with respect to the comparative superiority of the product in question over and against its rivals.

All the same, I think it’s interesting that the commercial has raised such ire and been the source of a conspiracy theory. I have seen this reaction in a couple of places on the Internet:

… the Chevy commercial with the little girl that feels she deserves a ‘big car’ leaves me feeling uncomfortable. Especially when her finger is positioned as such as to be pointing right at Howie’s unmentionables.

Here’s a still captured from YouTube:

So do you think Chevy is using taxpayer dollars to fund a conspiracy to insinuate child pornography into our mainstream media? Even relatively silly conspiracies like this are, I believe, fueled by anger. I’ve wondered where all that anger comes from, and some of it I guess is just disaffection with the pressures of post-industrial society. We strongly suspect our lives don’t have meaning, or at least that every aspect of our existence is conspiring (see there’s that word again) to take it away, as in The Matrix, and it makes us angry, rubs us raw.

I don’t want to go all socialist on you, but there is a sense in which all of our activities have been turned into commodities, and it’s more than we can take. I still remember the scam perpetrated on Denny Crane, the wonderful lawyer played by William Shatner on Boston Legal. One night, Denny is out on the town and discovers that his date is a hooker who wants to charge for going down on him (“Beauty and the Beast”). He goes along, even finding the event titillating until he discovers she’s actually an undercover cop wanting to arrest him for soliciting.

These days we are all a bit like Denny Crane, finding out that behind every sincere effort there’s a commercial scam, and we are the dupes of it. Internet conspiracy theories allow the dupes to feel like tricksters in their own right.

Tweet  Print This Post

Tags: stone age memes, technology // Add Comment »