immanence

This post continues my thinking about the cultural fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic (see here for previous posts) and about conspiracy theories and new media (see here) — all very relevant as the George Floyd protests and Trump’s response to them reveal this country’s open wounds.

As a longtime observer of global-subcultural epistemic cultures (ways of collectively making sense of a rapidly changing world), I’ve been fascinated, and occasionally disconcerted, to observe some unusual forms of interplay — what I will call “network realignment” — between media-based subcultures.

There are two forms of this that I want to comment on in this post. The first is a “strange bedfellows” variety that has been evident in the response to Covid-19 — specifically to do with the increasing overlaps and sometimes convergences between what used to be called New Age culture and what is now called alt-right culture. The second, which has to do with the “alt-right” and the “alt-left,” is more difficult to put one’s finger on, but may ultimately be the more interesting one. I’m going to suggest a possible link between the two, a link that is in the very nature of social media, and which is evident in the way the George Floyd murder is playing itself out across the United States.

Let me start with the first example of network realignment.

New Age and alt-right

By “alt-right culture,” I mean the panoply of far-right, identity-based (generally white-nationalist) movements and groups whose spread has been facilitated in part by the internet (including its shadier realms such as 4chan, 8chan, the QAnon cult, and others) and in part by the dramatic rise of the hardcore Trump movement (which could itself legitimately be called a cult).

By “New Age culture,” I mean the post-Sixties counterculture movement of holistic and spiritual thinking that emerged in the 1970s, consolidated in the 1980s, diversified in the 1990s, and simmers along in many different forms around the world today without having much of a noticeable impact on power structures anywhere. (My first book, Claiming Sacred Ground, examined the environmental politics of that movement during its diversification and, to some extent, divergence into “ecospirituality” and a range of more neo-gnostic, esotericist currents that I then called the “New Age millenarianism” or “ascensionism.”) Today, this “post New Age culture” (as I will be calling it, for lack of a more credible name) includes the wide popular interest in “Mind, Body, Spirit” literature and practices, the wellness culture of alternative and complementary health practice, and many of the nearer and farther reaches of popular spirituality.

In their origins, these are vastly different subcultures with apparently little in common. If the last half-century of U.S. cultural politics has been in large part an obsessive renegotiation of the divisions of the 1960s, New Age culture clearly came out of two trends: the political “softening” of the New Left and (more obviously) the institutionalization and/or co-optation of the Sixties counterculture. The alt-right, on the other hand, comes from the right-wing reaction against the Sixties, which first manifested in what might be called the Ramboization of the right, that is, the resuscitation of masculinity as a kind of libertarian, anti-government fighter, which contributed to the rise of Reaganism in the 1980s.

But “left” and “right” remain a fairly blunt tool of cultural analysis, and at the very least need a more permanent supplementation by some recognition of another structuring dyad, that which distinguishes between pro-status quo positions (which we could simply call “In”) and anti-status quo positions (“Out”). Both post-New Age culture, at least in its more extreme variants, and the alt-right can be fairly simply located on the “Out” side of that spectrum, and it shouldn’t be surprising, in highly networked and connective media conditions, to find connections being forged between these epistemic communities.

What’s interesting is that these should have become particularly evident in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. The role of the anti-vaccination movement (which overlaps strongly with the post New Age alternative health community) has been especially prominent in spreading Covid conspiracies more at home on the far right, such as about Bill Gates’ designs on world rulership. But that of UFO enthusiasts (a much larger subset of the U.S. population than typically assumed) has been there all along (as I documented in my 2001 book), with New Age extraterrestrial “contactees,” channelers, and other extraterrestrial enthusiasts finding common cause with more paranoid forms of X-Files type conspiracism.

With the ascendancy to the presidency of Donald Trump, himself prone to bouts of conspiracism and beholden to leading lights within the alt-right, some have even begun to speak of America as a “conspiratocracy,” with conspiracy cultures connecting parts of mainstream America with the farther reaches of its many subcultures.

Philosopher Jules Evans refers to the New Age/far-right overlap as a form of “conspirituality,” to which spiritual seekers seem particularly prone. Evans starts with a fairly accurate observation — that the history of western esotericism (or “occultism”) includes an overrepresentation of “secret orders of spiritual-political ecstatic globalists dedicated to a Millennarian project of global transformation” — and moves on to a claim that is interesting but perhaps overgeneralized: that the same form of thinking that underlies these “ecstatic” spiritual “globalists” — “schizotypal, magical, prone to seeing secret influences, hidden connections, and Grand Plans” — is found in an obverse current of “resentful, pessimistic, paranoid, disempowered conspirators.” He argues that both forms of thinking are extremes of more typical kinds of thinking that need to be brought into balance: the ecstatic “enriches” life and work, while the skeptical “holds power to account.” While this neurologizing gesture finds something to appreciate in both camps, it doesn’t help us understand the cultural dynamics at work between them.

Writing in the same venue (Medium), Julian Walker agrees that the overlap between the New Agers and the alt-right conspiratorialists is historically rooted (he points to nineteenth century “nature cure” movements, Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science, and other metaphysical groups). Walker more pointedly argues that for the “spiritual folks” the nub is a form of “spiritual bypass,” a “fetishization” of practices of “being defiantly out of touch with reality” as if these practices offered their practitioners a higher and more powerful truth. The spiritual bypass in turn creates a powerful “seeding ground” for the “Venn-diagram overlap between the alt-right/QAnon/libertarian/2nd amendment/prepper-bunker crowd and our pseudoscience/natural medicine/the Secret/higher truth crowd.”

The overlap is organized around 5G, vaccines, and the right to not have the government tell you what to do. The shared and now oddly bi-partisan conspiracy reasoning style perceives itself as skeptical, independent, open-minded and brave. [italics and bold in original]

So it’s actually skepticism that is the common attractor between the two movements (I agree with that), though Walker calls it “freshman skepticism,” arising out of a “lack of general knowledge, critical thinking, and scientific understanding” mixed with “paranoid speculation, fallacious reasoning, and glib over-generalization.” (In my own post-constructivist and “post-truth” accounting, that analysis doesn’t necessarily suffice.)

Charles Eisenstein raises some more interesting questions about how there’s “myth” beneath both the conspiratorialists’ claims and the orthodox attacks on them, but what I want to get at is something more specific to the workings of media today.

So, on to the second development.

Participatory conspiratology

One of the interesting claims made about QAnon (see my earlier post) is that it diverges from “traditional” conspiracy theories (and traditional Christian-right endtimes cults) in its radically participatory nature. Writing in MIT’s Journal of Design and Science last year, Ethan Zuckerman notes that:

the process of deciphering and interpreting these vague clues is a hell of a lot more interesting than reading the rantings of a paranoid mind. Author Walter Kirn identifies Q as a storyteller who has mastered a fundamental truth of narrative on the internet: “The audience for internet narratives doesn’t want to read, it wants to write. It doesn’t want answers provided, it wants to search for them.” Members of the QAnon aren’t just readers of Q’s “drops”—they are the “bakers,” assembling crumbs into coherent narratives and predictions. And while assembling and re-baking crumbs is unlikely to yield anything culinarily appealing, participation in constructing the Q narrative is clearly a fascinating pursuit for thousands of co-creators.

At a time when mainstream “truth” appears unsatisfying and reality seems elusive, QAnon offers an exciting form of decentralized and participatory truth-crafting in which support for Donald Trump equates with support for a dramatic clearing of the slate of a world seemingly captured by nefarious “deep state” interests. Where such ontological “fan fiction” would have remained utterly marginal in the era of mass media, today’s algorithmically distributed media ecosystem provides opportunities for such marginal actors to become key players.

In the broadcast model of media, the events of the world were interpreted by a group of professionals who selected a subset of possible narratives to amplify, then delivered them to audiences who had extremely limited channels in which to offer feedback and input. That model has been largely replaced by one in which the audience is a full participant, an essential circulator of information by retweeting, sharing and remixing it. The new centers of power in this ecosystem are discovery engines like Google and Facebook, which rely on feedback from users to determine what stories to feature or ignore. Additionally, the people formerly known as the audience are now creators of content, adding new chapters to existing stories, and telling entirely new stories.

In this new media landscape, as Zuckerman puts it, “Each story reported or ignored, each fact marshaled or forgotten is weaponized.”

QAnon’s talk of “red pills” and “blue pills” is not just a sly reference to The Matrix; it’s a full-scale revival of Gnostic-style dualism, an antagonism toward consensus reality that two millennia ago resulted in some sects building their own realities in the deserts of the eastern Mediterranean basin and others in failed revolutionary movements, and that contributed to the rise of Christianity as the power structure that replaced the Roman Empire.

At a time when the U.S. itself appears on the brink of collapse — with riots in the streets, a pandemic crippling the country’s heath care system and wreaking havoc on its economy, a president tweeting out nods of recognition to his QAnon fan base and hinting at “the Storm” that is coming — the sense-making apparatus of digital media is rife with opportunities for disinformational entrepreneurs to make headway in various directions.

These actors do not necessarily announce themselves. Americans have become aware of RT, Russia’s Internet Research Agency, Cambridge Analytica, and various other players active in influencing the 2016 US election, Brexit, and other global debacles. What’s more interesting to me is that there are likely to be actors whose goals and allegiances are not as easy to pin down, and may even be intended more to perplex and scramble the system than it is to have any specific and measurable impact.

For instance, there is evidence that the QAnon cult may have begun as a fictional spoof of right-wing thinking that has taken on a life of its own, possibly thanks to some “counter-pranksters” located somewhere in the alt-right/4chan/8chan/reddit universe. (Q was the name of a fictional novel, or “unidentified narrative object,” written by the Italian radical Luther Blissett collective, now known as the Wu Ming Foundation. The QAnon narrative follows the book in several notable details, though connections between the two remain speculative.)

If so, this would be an example of fiction reshaping reality not as a direct form of intentional meme warfare, but in a kind of prankster variation of Umberto Eco-esque, spy-versus-spy counter-intelligence squared, which then mixes with real people’s mixed agendas and produces… well, something no one can entirely predict.

QAnon is sometimes taken to be a prank on older right-wingers, especially conservative and disaffected baby boomers, who are perceived to be gullible and lacking in media savvy. The latter trait is something that might be broadly shared with the New Age health subculture, and if sly media pranksters with a loosely disinformational agenda wanted to test out their skills on a widely distributed population of middle-class Americans, why not that one?

Internet as monochord

What matters, for the case I am making here, is not that there are people out there practicing social media “psychic warfare,” as the Wu Ming group calls it, on unsuspecting populations, but simply that social media today enable that to happen. Networks like QAnon exist, and affect the broader body politic, because of that simple fact. The anti-vaccination movement is as large as it is for that reason.

If a highway is built to connect two cities, or a tunnel burrowed out between separated underground bunkers, that highway and that tunnel will be used. If traffic is allowed to flow through that underground tunnel (however invisible it remains to the overground world), someone will figure out ways to direct that traffic and refine their skills at traffic modulation.

The internet is like a huge instrument — a hyper-complex, Robert Fluddian monochord (see image above), that works by allowing for an infinity of connections through which flow the sounds and vibrations of human emotional and affective contagion.

When protests erupt across the country over the senseless killing of a black man in Minneapolis, the time scale in which large-scale action occurs speeds up and becomes affect-driven time, not a time in which collective deliberation is really possible. This means that informational, and therefore disinformational, bursts into that monochord become all the more powerful (see here, here, here, here, and here for examples affecting the George Floyd protests).

In the informational storm surrounding such events, new coalitions and cultural realignments become possible. That is neither good nor bad; it is simply a fact that indicates the viscosity, amplitude, and hyper-instability of a world connected by digital social media networks that are developing at a pace that can hardly be managed, either centrally or in any collective, distributed fashion.

QAnon may be right here in its meteorological prediction, if quite wrong in the details: Welcome to the storm.

We may be able to modulate our own participation in that storm, but the broader question may be whether there is a systemic surge protector in place somewhere. We were (most of us) surprised that the global economy had an emergency brake on it. But evidence for a surge protector isn’t plentiful.