User:Annasandri/ref synopsis

→ ►█ "Feels good man" [1]
Movie, 2020
→ ✒ "Meme magic is real, you guys"[2]
Article, 2016
→ ✒ "This Is Not a Game - Conspiracy theorizing as alternate-reality game"[3]
Article, 2020
→♫ "Rabbit hole"[4]
Podcast, 2020
→ ✒ "The Apophenic Machine" [5] Article, 2017
"A medium’s materiality affects the way we can think with it."
The invention of the press created a way to read and experience information in a linear way, through a sequence of indexes, numbered pages and table of contents.
"The modern condition is networked, and thus modern thought is networked too — or it at least tries to be."
When John Perry Barlow wrote his "“Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” in 1996 he was looking at the nascent internet as the medium that would concretise a new era driven by "ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal.” Needless to say, we find ourself in a very different situation now: the network became a place that where we don't feel anymore at the center if not for being played by it.
"We are not in the network; we are on it".
The internet that we know and experience is the one build upon hyperlinks and "deep linking", a practise that is creating a web of individualised thoughts and unique connections: every index is personal and built by an individual in realtime.
"Humans are storytellers, pattern-spotters, metaphor-makers. When these instincts run away with us, when we impose patterns or relationships on otherwise unrelated things, we call it apophenia. When we create these connections online, we call it the internet, the web circling back to itself again and again. The internet is an apophenic machine."
Conspiracy theories might be seen as a side-effect and a mere product of psychological biases: they in-fact are a human product. But what happen when we create a technology that has the power of encouraging this behaviour? The anthropologist Kathleen Stewart tries to answer this question in "Conspiracy's Theory Worlds": “the internet was made for conspiracy theory: it is a conspiracy theory: one thing leads to another, always another link leading you deeper into no thing and no place, floating through self-dividing and transmogrifying sites until you are awash in the sheer evidence that the internet exists.” Conspiracy theories are claiming that the structure of power and events surrounding us is traceable and can be easily ordered and mapped through a tidying practice that gives its practitioners the feeling of maintaining an agency on the world while disconnecting themselves from responsibilities.
They might be the last true believers in an ordered universe.
Considering this can help us in understanding that conspiracy theorising is not only a delusional activity but it can still be linked back to a mode that is not completely irrational: the idea of attributing an event to the plan of a cabal means that the events around us can still be controlled. Conspiracy thinking does not seem unreasonable in a " complex global networked capitalism — where actors like Maersk, Walmart, or ExxonMobil organise world-spanning feats of logistics, extraction, and finance-backed violence, or where the Catholic Church priest abuse scandal was front-page news across the globe for years "-"It finds intentionality and a purposeful human hand where other epistemologies might see, as Keeley puts it, only the “absurdism of an irrational and essentially meaningless world”".
There must be a reason- and sometimes there is.
It is getting even more complex if we consider the fact that humanity is now facing a global catastrophe where the responsibility lies both on no one and everyone at the same time. When analysing climate change or global capitalism we can see how the plot ended up being too complex to trace its heroes and villains: what we are seeing in conspiracy thinking is the resilience of people that are still trying to put it into a narrative with all the tools they can find. It is easier to believe that an obscure sect is ruling the world that accepting and taking our slice of responsibility.
"[...]networks (like conspiracy theories) excel at creating the illusion of the world as graspable, strung together with links even as the socially contingent markers of importance, trust, and validity are increasingly on the fritz"
When it comes to build a conspiracy theory meticulousness is an imperative requirement and the internet is just an exquisite environment to make it happen. It is embedded with such a broad collection of irrelevant data where every piece of information might be chosen to become the crucial tile of the mosaic. According to Sauter "In the conspiratorial mode, sheer availability is the primary criterion for significance.".
"As the complexities of the hyper-networked world exponentially compound beyond the ability of anyone to fully grasp, it’s unsurprising that the broader political culture should tumble backward into familiar moral narratives, familiar villains, all bolstered by the mediated opportunity to link, link, link, link"
Conspiracies are not an irrational response to the complex networked environment that we created: they are emerging from the very same structure that they are striving to understand and place into a narrative - " link by link by link". What they are not doing is creating a response that goes beyond the search for the ultimate villain. They are comforting themselves in a handcrafted answer, making the rest of the non-linked world act under their hypervigilant sight.