Conspiratorial imaginations: making sense of crisis
Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, a variety of conspiracy theories have proliferated regarding everything from the virus’ supposed ‘real’ origins, to the ‘real’ numbers of infections and deaths, to the ‘real’ intentions of national governments and international organizations attempting to mitigate the effects of the pandemic. Many of these theories have attempted to make sense of an entirely novel global crisis by recycling old tropes and old enemies – from the corporate power of ‘Big Pharma’, to sinister networks of global elites, to racialized stereotypes of dangerous ‘viral’ others (first China and, later, migrants)
It would be tempting to discount such fanciful imaginaries as simply the province of marginal fringes that have no impact on the conduct of mainstream politics or scientific practice (in this case, public health choices). That, alas, is increasingly not the case. When policy choices begin to fall victim to conspiratorial imaginaries, it is time to take such imaginaries seriously – and actively combat them, as various scholars have urged us to do. As I will try to argue in this brief comment, conspiracy theories are simply the most extreme versions of collective as well as individual attempts to ‘make sense’ of the pandemic world. Conspiracies are also simply the most extreme manifestation of the ‘post truth disposition’ in contemporary social and political life.
In a piece entitled ‘Of Plots and Men: The Heuristics of Conspiracy Theories’[1] anthropologist Didier Fassin suggests that to understand conspiracies’ power we must ask, first of all, “what they tell us about contemporary societies”. As Fassin argues, “conspiracy theories do not only belong to the realm of delusion. They are also indexes of social relations, political tensions, cultural disquietude, and moral uneasiness”. As such, conspiracies are, at base, attempts to make sense of an uncertain and changing world, and can usefully be compared to witchcraft theories that similarly see misfortune as the consequences of the actions of occult powers. Fassin notes that just like witchcraft theories, conspiracies “imply a systematic search for an explanation of adversity (it cannot just happen by chance), a capacity to find evidence (interpreting a variety of events), the existence of maleficent forces (someone is out there manipulating fate), their belonging to secret societies and the development of an accusatory system”. Conspiratorial imaginations thus provide a simple and omni-comprehensive account of the world: they narrate, often very convincingly, who are the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’, and who is to ‘blame’ for the current state of affairs.
But beyond their limited core of ‘true-believers’, conspiratorial imaginings also provide ideal fuel to wider populist politics: from the sovereigntist and libertarian right, to the natural-wellness left.[2] Yet another anthropologist, Gideon Lasco, has written extensively in the past two years on what he has termed ‘medical populism’ in the pandemic, defined as “a political style based on performances of public health crises that pit “the people” against “the establishment”, and pure and healthy natives against dangerous ‘others’”.[3] While Lasco’s initial work has analyzed the use of medical populist narratives by authoritarian ‘strong men’ like Bolsonaro in Brazil, Duterte in the Philippines and Trump in the US, various aspects of medical populism can be observed also in European democracies: engaged by both state actors as well as those contesting pandemic measures on the streets. While most official actors in the EU have stopped stop short of directly endorsing the conspiratorial imaginaries of sinister global elites and their aims of subjugating and controlling the masses (whether through biological ‘depopulation’ via vaccination, or other forms of biopolitical control via mandatory digital certificates), nevertheless a significant number of political actors ‘wink’ at them in highly problematic fashion, consenting the circulation of such imaginaries to build political support.
The Covid Infodemic and the weaponization of data
But conspiratorial imaginations are not the only challenge to science-led political and public health choices. The pandemic has also accelerated the spread of disinformation and its weaponization, both by hostile foreign actors, but also domestic ‘merchants of doubt’[4], leading scholars to speak of a Covid ‘infodemic’.[5]
As geographer Taylor Shelton writes in his piece ‘A post-truth pandemic’[6], since the start of the pandemic, we have been faced with an overwhelming quantity of data: data that “is at once valorized and ignored, preeminent, and completely useless”. Why is this the case? While one would assume that data-driven narratives are somehow the ‘opposite’ from the wider ‘post-truth apparatus’ that questions the objective validity of facts and data, Shelton argues that these two ostensibly opposed dynamics are actually fundamentally intertwined – and are easily made the object of populist (and science-denialist) politics.
Shelton identifies several strategies through which data feeds into the wider ‘post-truth apparatus’. The first is ‘wilful obfuscation’ by political actors: not necessarily hiding existing data but, for example, not gathering data in the first place, or reporting it in selective fashion. Such obfuscation is potentiated by a second strategy: that of social media mis/disinformation. As he notes, already the very first analyses of social media discussions about coronavirus revealed that as many as half or more of the Twitter accounts discussing Covid-19 were bots (including the majority of the platform’s most popular accounts). But the propagation of
misinformation doesn’t even require bots, for the pandemic has mobilised (and potentiated) numerous existing right-wing and anti-systemic networks, fed (also financially) by a variety of hostile actors, as both the EEAS EUvsDisInfo taskforce has repeatedly documented,[7] as too various investigative reports on Chinese and Russian-paid ‘influencers’ engaged to diffuse both anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown narratives.[8]
Shelton thus argues that today’s ‘post-truth society’ is, in many ways, the logical outgrowth of a data-centric society “where individualized, decontextualized data points serve as the focal point for social and political life. But when these decontextualized data points are foregrounded, we lose the meta-narrative that binds this data together into a comprehensible whole. And in the absence of such a coherent narrative about what’s going on and how things got to be this way, each of these ostensibly objective—but not always related—data points lead us to a place where the contrived narratives of right-wing trolls can come to counteract “truth,” if not overcome it outright”. And it is here that conspiratorial imaginations enter into the fray, combining in potent ways with datafied disinformation.
Conspiracies are age-old – as old as belief in witchcraft and the occult. In today’s uncertain world, however, they have resurfaced in new, ever more potent forms to ‘make sense’ of the pandemic condition, offering a series of tempting narratives for individuals and societies alike. One more reason to take them very seriously indeed, for the effects their uncontested diffusion may have not just on the relation between science and politics, but also on democratic politics tout court.
[1] First delivered as the Eric Wolff Lecture at the University of Vienna in the autumn of 2019: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/713829
[2] As I have argued in a previous piece republished on the IIP blog: https://www.iipvienna.com/new-blog/2020/9/28/individual-sovereignty-in-pandemic-times-a-contradiction-in-terms?rq=bialasiewicz
[3] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17441692.2020.1807581
[4] https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/09/13/covid-19-and-the-new-merchants-of-doubt/
[5] See the special issue of Big Data and Society on ‘Viral Data’: https://journals.sagepub.com/page/bds/collections/viraldata
[6] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2053951720965612
[7] https://euvsdisinfo.eu/category/blog/coronavirus/
[8] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/may/25/influencers-say-russia-linked-pr-agency-asked-them-to-disparage-pfizer-vaccine
Mw. Prof. Dr. L.a. Luiza Bialasiewicz is a political geographer and Professor of European Governance at the University of Amsterdam, where she also acts as co-director of the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies (ACES), an inter-faculty centre of excellence for research, education, and public debate on the contemporary European Union.