Feelings Over Facts: Conspiracy Theories and the Internet Novel
Larne Abse Gogarty | What We Do Is Secret | Sternberg Press | June 2023 | 184 Pages
You’ve seen this image before: a man in rumpled office clothing, gesticulating wildly at a wall of papers with red yarn slashing across them. It comes from an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, where Charlie starts working in an office mailroom and develops a conspiracy theory: that someone named Pepe Silvia, whose mail is regularly delivered to the office, doesn’t actually exist.
The meme depicts the zealous energy of an internet conspiracy theorist, desperate to present his evidence. Its verbal equivalent is the phrase “taking the red pill.” In the 1999 film The Matrix, the hero must choose between taking the blue pill, which would keep his existing, anesthetized view of reality intact or the red pill—which would reveal that his world is a deliberately engineered simulation created to exploit humanity. Since then, redpilling has become “extremely online” shorthand for various forms of radicalization. In the manosphere, the “red pill” is the realization that feminism is destroying men, society, and Western democracy. But there are more frivolous uses of the phrase: you can be fish oil–pilled for the omega-3s, zone 2 cardio–pilled for your cardiovascular health, and journaling–pilled after reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.
The redpill metaphor is used, as Geoff Shullenberg writes, to describe the creeping suspicion that the “official version” of the facts, the “consensus reality,” is wrong:
The feeling that something is off leads to further investigation, which uncovers more inconsistencies, and eventually evolves into…systematic doubt…a generalized distrust of the surface layer of reality, and a search for a more certain anchor point in a hidden realm beneath.
In today’s paranoid style of internet politics, this suspicion of the “surface layer” has made previously fringe conspiracy theories seem more legitimate. They’re useful political leverage for people like Trump, whose tweets about a “deep state” conspiring against him made him sound like an embattled outsider, despite spending four years ensconced in the Oval Office. Trump’s underdog narrative was reinforced by the intricate, obscurantist QAnon theory, which claimed that an elite, all-powerful cabal was conspiring against him and simultaneously running a child sex trafficking ring. Even the most ludicrous conspiracy theories, it appears, can’t be ignored; as the Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič observes, they are “forcefully entering the public space, the mainstream, even official politics.”
Two books published last year take a closer look at today’s conspiracy theories: Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World and Larne Abse Gogarty’s What We Do is Secret: Contemporary Art and the Antinomies of Conspiracy. Klein, a Canadian writer and veteran of anti-capitalist, anti-globalization, and climate justice movements, investigates how conspiracy theories dominated COVID-era politics; Gogarty, a British art historian involved in leftist political organizing, observes how they’ve affected contemporary art and its aims. Both writers are committed to taking conspiracy theories seriously—not what they claim about the world, but why they exist—and what feelings and subjective experiences they reveal.
While conspiracy theories are now often associated with right-wing, revanchist politics, the term has historically been used across the political spectrum. In the 1960s, as Nico Baumbach notes, calling something a conspiracy theory was used to “undermine not only the far-right paranoid fantasies of McCarthyists and the John Birch Society, but also the legitimate ‘paranoia’ of Black Power groups, who…had very good reason to be suspicious of the FBI and CIA.” Paranoia bled across party lines; the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that it was “a common ingredient of fascism, and of frustrated nationalisms,” but also “frequently…seen in the left wing press.” By the 1990s, the queer theorist Eve Kokofsky Sedgwick observed that “paranoid reading” had become de rigeur: “In a world where no one need be delusional to find evidence of systemic oppression, to theorize out of anything but a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naïve, pious, or complaisant.” Critical theorists exhibited an “anticipatory” paranoia, convinced there was always something wrong under the surface. Being surprised was a failure of ethics, epistemology, and above all, style: it’s cringe to be caught off-guard by evil.
Which raises the question: What’s the difference between conspiracy theory and critical theory? “In both cases,” wrote the French philosopher Bruno Latour:
You have to learn to become suspicious of everything people say because…they live in the thralls of a complete illusion…Then, after disbelief has struck and an explanation is requested for what is really going on, in both cases again it is the same appeal to powerful agents hidden in the dark acting always consistently, continuously, relentlessly.
How do you respond to a hidden evil? Reveal it. What do you do when others believe in a complete illusion? Debunk it. These paranoid strategies reveal a surprisingly naïve faith, Sedgwick observed, in “the efficacy of knowledge…knowledge in the form of exposure.” Today, this naivety persists across the political spectrum. During Trump’s presidency, white nationalists warned their followers about the Great Replacement of white people with ethnic migrants, while earnest MSNBC liberals documented and fact-checked all of Trump’s racist tweets. When COVID hit, anti-vaxxers urged everyone to watch Plandemic, while blue state homeowners put up lawn signs saying In this house, we believe…Science is real. Political disagreements were framed as tragic misunderstandings, easily solved with a shared understanding of the facts.
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This obsession with the facts, Klein and Gogarty argue, has failed. In Doppelganger, Klein suggests that liberals and leftists were too quick to dismiss right-wing conspiracy theorists. Take Naomi Wolf, a liberal feminist turned Stephen Bannon subordinate who is frequently mistaken for Klein. During the pandemic, Wolf was one of many COVID skeptics who raised the alarm about “vaccine passports,” claiming that vaccination records would be used for a “social credit system” that would lead to “slavery forever.” The theory, Klein notes, is inaccurate in its specifics and co-opts the language of structural racism in perverse ways. But it also reflects very real fears, which are substantiated by historical events and mirror leftist critiques of power. Before the CDC became every Democrat’s favorite government agency, it was also the organization that helped oversee the Tuskegee study, which deceived hundreds of Black men about their syphilis diagnoses and denied them necessary medical treatment for four decades. The right wing’s paranoia about vaccine passports reflects anxieties about Big Tech and big government. Leftists familiar with surveillance capitalism and the CIA’s history of domestic espionage share the same concerns. As Klein notes:
Conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right…the feeling that every human misery is someone else’s profit, the feeling of being exhausted by predation and extraction, the feeling that important truths are being hidden. The word for the system driving those feelings starts with c, but if no one ever taught you how capitalism works…then it’s easy to see how you might confuse it with another c-word: conspiracy.
Gogarty makes a similar argument in What We Do is Secret. She pushes back against the tendency to trivialize or dismiss conspiracy theories as “garish” or intellectually “impoverished.” To describe something as a conspiracy theory is to “pejoratively” situate it as unworthy of attention, “an accusation [that is] leveled at varying modes of political thought and action.” While Gogarty stresses the importance of opposing particularly insidious conspiracy theories, especially ones that involve “racial preoccupations,” she notes that other conspiracy theories usefully express how power is “experienced, subjectively, by individuals and communities.”
What We Do is Secret criticizes a tendency towards a form of “legibly political art” that reveals and explains abuses of power, such as Trevor Paglen’s meticulous photographic documentation of the CIA’s “black sites” and the NSA’s wiretaps. While Gogarty is politically sympathetic towards these works, she’s skeptical of their aesthetic inclinations. Legibly political art assumes that “a successful artwork is…an informative image,” and places its faith in transparency as a form of political action. Gogarty argues that such informationally dense works might instead inhibit action, by “suggest[ing] nothing can be changed until all facts are present and approved.” By centering covert forms of state oppression and violence, legibly political art also assumes that “secrecy nourishes the worst excesses of power.”
This belief is what brings together “respectable liberalism and its garish, populist cousin,” Gogarty writes. Liberals believe that systemic problems are caused by secret forms of corruption and solved with exposés. Similarly, conspiracy theorists imagine an omnipotent cabal of individuals, quietly pulling the strings of power and yet vulnerable to a grand reveal. Both groups assume that, by bringing the right information into public awareness, we’ll be able to build a better world. In reality, Klein argues in Doppelganger, our liberal democratic societies are characterized by “unmasked plutocracy;” there’s no secret to reveal. Instead of the Illuminati, we have the attendees of the annual Davos conference, where the politicians and capitalists most responsible for climate change and capitalist extraction pretend to be our heroes, solving the world’s hardest problems for the greater good. Our world might be more corrupt than the conspiracy theorists realize. In the midst of the AIDS epidemic, Sedgwick once asked the activist Cindy Patton whether she believed the conspiracy theories about HIV’s origins as a deliberately engineered bioweapon. In response, Patton said:
Suppose we were sure of every element of a conspiracy: that the lives of Africans and African Americans are worthless in the eyes of the United States; that gay men and drug users are held cheap where they aren’t actively hated; that the military deliberately researches ways to kill noncombatants whom it sees as enemies…Supposing we were ever so sure of all those things—what would we know then that we don’t already know?
For the oppressed and disempowered, it doesn’t matter if the conspiracy theories are actually true. The cruelties inflicted by the elite are already clear. Conspiracy theories aren’t factual portrayals of the world; they’re emotional ones. Categorizing them as true or false is missing the point.
We might need to approach conspiracy theories empathetically—as a reflection of someone’s political anxieties and fears. I’m reminded of a common form of interpersonal advice: When someone comes to you with a problem, don’t try to solve it. Just listen. Acknowledge their feelings. This advice, scaled up, is Klein’s prescription for us. Failing to listen to the underlying fears, she argues, only makes conspiracy theories stronger, and cuts off the possibility of building coalitions around those fears.
Even an “unverifiable” narrative, which never attains a coherent analysis of power, has the capacity to convey someone’s fear, terror, and pain. To understand conspiracy theorists, we can turn to novels that express their subjective experiences and emotions. Three books, published in the late Trump to early COVID years, depict the power of online conspiracy theories: Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill (2019), Tao Lin’s Leave Society (2021), and Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts (2021). By exploring the anxieties that dominate a paranoiac’s inner life, they reveal how conspiracy theories shape our shared political lives.
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Let’s say that there are two kinds of conspiracy theories. The first, big C conspiracy theories, operate at the level of nation states, ethnic groups, and politics. Two of the most insidious examples are Holocaust denialism and Great Replacement theory (the belief that elites are replacing white people in Western countries with non-white immigrants). A big C theorist, in Richard Hofstadter’s characterization, “traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization.”
Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill, which depicts the anti-immigrant, white nationalist tendencies emerging within multicultural Western democracies, shows how big C conspiracy theories can have both right-wing and left-wing forms. In the novel, a British Indian writer leaves New York, where he lives with his family, for a much-anticipated residency in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. But the residency isn’t what he expected: he is routinely surveilled and evaluated on his literary productivity and collaboration with others. This surveillance, along with the sneering hostility of another resident, makes the narrator increasingly paranoid. He becomes obsessed with a cop show created by a man named Anton, and convinces himself that Anton and his fans are part of a greater ideological project to spread racist, anti-migrant beliefs.
As his paranoia deepens, the protagonist begins to catastrophize about a “bloody and atavistic” future. But his wife, an immigration rights attorney campaigning for Hillary Clinton, can’t relate to his fears. She begins to suspect her husband is unwell, in thrall to a distorted and pessimistic view of the world. It’s a common problem for conspiracy theorists. If you insist that a situation is being manipulated by a covert, malicious force, your audience might accuse you of being delusional. But, as Naomi Klein observes in Doppelganger, many “financial crises, energy shortages, and wars” are being manipulated by the powerful in ways that harm society. “Believing that,” she writes, “does not make you a conspiracy theorist; it makes you a serious observer of politics and history.” Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.
Much of the tension in Red Pill comes from trying to decide if the protagonist is paranoid or merely prescient. He becomes increasingly obsessed with Anton, confronting him at a public event about his fascist beliefs, and then stalking him online to find Anton’s vacation home. He flies there and breaks in, only to be apprehended by the police and transported to a psychiatric hospital back in New York. Medicated into a fragile passivity, he is released shortly before November 8, 2016. On election night, his wife and her liberal friends are speechless as they witness Clinton’s loss to Trump. But the protagonist, who watches the results roll in while reading one of the “far-right message boards” that Anton’s fans post in, isn’t surprised at all:
It’s a frenzy of memes and exultation…Many of the posters appear to believe semi-sincerely that they are bringing a Trump presidency into being with “meme magic,” the occult power of their content leaking out into the offline world.
Kunzru’s protagonist is no longer the unhinged paranoic; he merely noticed the subterranean influence of the alt right before his peers. “My madness,” he reflects, “the madness for which I’ve been medicated and therapized and involuntarily detained, is about to become everyone’s madness.”
If big C conspiracies take on the vast sweep of national politics and racial strife, then little c conspiracies operate at a more intimate, domestic scale. Sometimes, they focus on the self and health: Are seed oils going to kill me? Is mewing better than braces, and is the orthodontic establishment suppressing the truth? Wellness conspiracy theories are at the center of Tao Lin’s Leave Society, where the protagonist obsessively investigates the failures of modern medicine and tries out alternative holistic treatments.
The comparatively small stakes of little c conspiracy theories can make them seem hardly worthy of the name. But they’re often tied to larger anxieties about society, and can reflect a politically potent distrust of professional elites. In Leave Society, the protagonist Li turns away from modern medicine after doctors fail to help him with a collapsed lung. His self-directed research reveals the benefits of fermented brown rice, chiropractors, and forest bathing—and the corrosive influence of electromagnetic radiation and dental fillings. Li concludes that “his body wasn’t defective; rather, his society was damaging.” He explicitly contrasts an idyllic, pre-modern past (“Nothing had been missing: birdsong, starlight, teeth, soil microbes, survival skills, natural scents, clean air”) with the degraded, toxic experience of modernity. Holistic medicine helps Li regain control and agency over his health—a welcome change from his early, helpless reliance on doctors.
Because Li spends much of the novel on more far-fetched theories (including the health benefits of “air vitamins”) it’s easy to forget that others are, well, true. The novel criticizes the dairy industry’s overuse of antibiotics and growth hormones, the human cruelties of the CIA’s MKULTRA program, and the contaminating influence of industrial manufacturing on ecosystems. In those examples, Li’s suspicion of convention and institutions feels appropriate—the sign of a critically engaged mind, not a hippie lunatic:
Li didn’t think anymore that he was going down “rabbit holes” when he researched nontrivial topics through individuals, papers, and books. He felt more like he was tunneling up out of the small, underground, man-made hole where he’d been born…He’d begun to distrust what he thought he knew, instead of everything else.
As in Red Pill, the conspiratorial thinking of Leave Society is motivated by concern for one’s family. Li convinces his mother to switch from Pfizer’s branded thyroid medication to a natural supplement. He also suspects that their dental fillings, which contain mercury, are responsible for “dizziness, headaches, amnesia, tremors,” leading to an extended quest for a dentist that can perform “demercurization” for the family. His distrust of Big Pharma and conventional dentistry reflects his suspicion of mainstream society’s uncritical acceptance of expert opinions. Li’s “public education had taught him that everything was already discovered…and that objective experts were working together to find and spread truth.” Li is convinced, in true conspiratorial style, that “things weren’t that simple.”
It’s easy to sympathize with his paranoia. But COVID19 showed how conspiracy theories about health and wellness can transform personal fears into political causes— destabilizing existing political affiliations and reshaping electoral politics. Leave Society features Li’s own idiosyncratic theories on what causes autism (“chronic brain inflammation,” the protagonist believes, from all the toxins present in modern society). In the real world, however, one particular theory has taken hold: that autism is caused by vaccines. During the pandemic, this theory brought together wellness-obsessed moms and those who decried lockdowns and mandatory vaccinations as an attack on their civil liberties. COVID skepticism united people from seemingly disparate political positions, in what the historian Quinn Slobodian and political theorist William Callison describe as “diagonalist” alliances. In Germany, for example, many COVID skeptics were reliable Green Party voters. They didn’t hate immigrants and Muslims. They weren’t climate change deniers. But their fear of vaccines aligned them with voters of the far-right, anti-migrant, Islamophobic Alternative for Germany, the only party in German parliament that explicitly denies human causes of climate change. Such alliances, Slobodian and Callison note, “blend convictions about holism and even spirituality with a dogged discourse of individual liberties…diagonal movements share a conviction that all power is conspiracy.”
In Doppelganger, Klein describes her own experiences with diagonalist voters, while canvassing for a leftist Canadian politician. A woman with solar panels on the roof and an electric car told her she was flipping her vote from the left-of-liberal NDP to the far-right People’s Party. Another woman wearing “yoga gear,” with a Buddha statue on her windowsill, confronted Klein’s partner about his stance on “vaccine passports.” The immunocompromised, she told him, deserved to die.
Diagonalist alliances, which destabilize our existing ideas of left and right, existed before COVID. The pandemic just made them more obvious. In 2017, the journalist Nikhil Sonnad observed that “All the ‘wellness’ products Americans love to buy are sold on both Infowars and Goop.” On the surface, the websites represent two distinct Americas: well-off, liberal women and economically dispossessed men. But the two Americas share an interest in niche wellness ingredients: ashwagandha, chaga mushrooms, and colloidal silver. Many of these supplements are drawn from Ayurvedic and traditional Chinese medicine—an interesting choice for the white women of Goop and the white nationalists of InfoWars. What did these two Americas have in common? “Both are certain,” Ethan Sapienza observed, “that everything is trying to kill you.” The artist Joshua Citarella, who named a series of photographs after Sonnad’s article, suggested that beneath the superficially distinct aesthetics of these two websites “lies a shared material politics of hyper-individualism and self-sufficiency.” For the InfoWars and Goop consumers, modernity (modern petrochemicals, or modern identity politics) is inherently corruptive. Escaping this threat requires a retreat into tradition, and away from collective politics.
Kunzru and Lin’s novels show how paranoia about safety and wellness can influence the political sphere. But other conspiracy theorists have more prurient motivations. Little c conspiracy theories can also focus on the interpersonal and parasocial: Is my significant other cheating on me? Are all women trying to exploit men? Is my favorite celebrity hiding something from me? These are the questions powering Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts, which begins where Kunzru’s ends, with the election of Donald Trump:
Consensus was the world was ending…if not by exponential environmental catastrophe then by some combination of nuclear war, the American two-party system, patriarchy, white supremacy, gentrification, globalization, data breaches, and social media.
But Oyler’s protagonist doesn’t respond to the political chaos by becoming invested in theorizing and knowing. In Fake Accounts, paranoia is, first and foremost, a form of egocentric entertainment. Early on in the novel, she unlocks her boyfriend’s phone, idly speculating if he’s cheating on her. Instead, she discovers that he’s secretly running a popular conspiracy theory Instagram account. She isn’t distressed by this discovery; instead, she experiences an exultant joy and resolve: “I was overtaken with a sense of purpose unlike anything I could recreate in a workplace environment.” Crucially, her excitement comes from her awareness of her boyfriend’s secret, not from understanding why he’s doing it. She’s always seen Felix as “annoyingly logical” and “resistant to health trends”. He defies her image of a typical conspiracy theorist: “a wayward soul down on his luck, uneducated and left behind, who had turned to conspiracy as a way to explain his pain.” What could motivate her Jewish boyfriend to post crudely anti-Semitic, anti-establishment memes?
It’s perfect material for a little c conspiracy theory. Felix’s secret account gives the protagonist of Fake Accounts a “weightless feeling of righteousness,” the ability to be “purely and entirely the good one” in a relationship that she’s become dissatisfied with. Felix isn’t a bad boyfriend, just a disappointing one. In the weeks after her discovery, Oyler’s protagonist deliberates over the perfect way to break up with him, “with the calm dignity befitting the partner of a person who needs help.” Little c conspiracy theories can focus on how men treat women, how women treat men, and the “problematic” qualities that a partner or public figure might have. But Fake Accounts suggests that the most useful aspect of such theories is to lay claim to the moral high ground in a relationship—to be clearly better than the cheater or the politically incorrect conspiracy theorist.
Unfortunately, Oyler’s protagonist is denied the pleasures of paranoia. She is at the Women’s March in Washington, D.C. when she receives a phone call informing her that Felix has died. The news destabilizes her. She skips the funeral and flies to Berlin instead, wandering around in a dissolute stupor. The anticipatory excitement of breaking up with him, for a “far more original” reason than a lack of affection, has been replaced with an unfulfilling grief at “the force of knowledge never to be acquired” about his intentions. Felix’s death means there is no one to theorize about or understand—an occupation that would have distracted her from the post-Trump political disorientation. In Berlin, she scrolls hungrily through her phone, aware that nothing can permanently occupy her attention: “No joke or complaint or article or breaking news would have sated me, but each fragment would have distracted me for a moment.” A dead boyfriend can’t post content for her to analyze—not in a quest for truth, but in an escape from boredom.
Conspiracy theories that make claims about national politics and institutional power, or merely one’s personal wellness or relationships, can offer distraction and purpose. But without a theory to occupy her, Oyler’s protagonist struggles to fill her time. Eventually she finds an outlet: going on first dates and inventing fake personas for each one. If there’s nothing unsettling in her own life, no clues to collect—she’ll simply make up a mystery herself.
But there is a mystery in her life; she just doesn’t realize it. Her desire for entertainment is what leads her to go through Felix’s phone, but it’s her apathy towards the relationship that makes her accept, without proof, the phone call about Felix’s death. There’s a liberal, rational belief that an emotionally neutral, disinterested standpoint offers the best way to understand reality. But in Red Pill and Leave Society, the protagonists—who are emotionally invested and implicated in their paranoia—are more critical of the narratives they’re offered about the world. In contrast, Fake Accounts shows how a more detached, removed stance towards the world can actually make someone more naive about what’s going on under the surface. Oyler’s protagonist, absorbed in inventing mysteries to entertain herself, doesn’t notice the one right in front of her—that there might be something unusual about Felix’s death.
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While writing this, a friend asked me if I had any conspiracy theories of my own. “It’s kind of dumb,” I confessed, but I did: that the hysteria around seed oils was secretly a psyop by dairy companies to destroy Oatly as a competitor. Previous alternative milks had never gained mainstream acceptance: soy milk was supposedly full of emasculating phytoestrogens; and almond milk was responsible for California’s drought (despite all the evidence, I complained to my friend, that almond milk is less water-intensive than dairy milk). Oatly’s popularity legitimized plant-based milks, and therefore posed a threat to Big Dairy.
I was joking. Mostly. The truth was that I did believe in my theory—the feelings, at least, if not the facts. I knew that entrenched corporate interests would rather run a PR campaign than take responsibility for environmental destruction, as BP had done with the concept of a “carbon footprint.” And that meat and dairy companies were, in fact, spending millions on lobbying efforts and claiming that alternative “milks” were misleading consumers. Even if I couldn’t prove that anti–seed oil influencers were covertly sponsored by Dairy Farmers of America, it seemed undeniably true that corporations were doing something that violated my ethical convictions.
Other friends had their own conspiracy theories, which they described with an ironic remove or embarrassed tone. As with mine, their theories were closely tied to a core political belief. One friend said he half-believed that Elon Musk had bought Twitter to sabotage the platform ahead of Biden’s reelection campaign. Is he right? Does it matter? Any serious observer of politics knows that Twitter has transformed political organizing, from Black Lives Matter to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns. And we know that tech billionaires can reshape technological platforms on a whim—and thereby change the politics disseminated through them.
When we talk about our conspiracy theories, what we’re really doing is describing our vision of a just world—and what we fear is getting in the way. The prevalence of conspiracy theories reflects a nearly ubiquitous feeling of disenfranchisement and despair. Both left-wing and right-wing paranoiacs recognize that they can’t control their material conditions—but they can, at least, control the story they tell about them. Online—where we confront all the crises of capitalism, society, and politics—conspiracy theories are fairy tales for the paranoid. The Brothers Grimm had the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, two angelic German children nearly taken in by a witch’s trap. We have QAnon’s contemporary retelling, where children are endangered instead by a sex trafficking ring run by Democratic party elites.
These dark narratives have a function: they teach us to fear the primordial, foundational evils of the world. But they also promise a conditional escape: if you attain the right knowledge and listen to the right people, you might be able to save yourself and those you love. The ideal happy ending is for the conspiracy to be revealed, the elites humbled, the people safe and even prosperous. But the second-best ending for the conspiracy theorist is that their fears are heard and acknowledged. Only then, perhaps, can they finally feel understood and seen by the world.