Conspiracism

‘Constituent Covid-19 apocalypses: contagious conspiracism, 5G, and viral vaccinations’ by Tristan Sturm and Tom Albrecht in (2020) Anthropology and Medicine comments 

The uncertainties and scale of the Covid-19 pandemic has mobilised global anxieties and insecurities, and many cultural groups have conjuncturally embedded conspiracy theories within millennial and apocalyptic thought to explain and find meaning in the pandemic. The apocalypse lends itself well to conspiratorial thinking because conceptually it is flexible enough to reflect any crisis. To this end, the global development of Covid-19 conspiracism is what the authors term ‘contagious conspiracism’ which is defined as viral global cultural conspiracism. The paper explores how millennialist responses to Covid-19 in various media outlets transcend academic categories of analysis and cultural boundaries between, say, religious and secular, far-right and radical left. First explored is how the crisis became embedded in established (mainly American) contemporary millennial beliefs and prophecies through selected far-right, evangelical and radical left narratives. Second, it is shown how these theories have been ‘improvised’ to include 5 G and also travelled to Europe and taken on geographical significance in Belfast and Berlin. Third, the authors illustrate the shared ingredients, motivations, and semiotics across apocalyptic conspiratorial Covid-19 narratives, all of which resonate with concerns about power, specifically emergent surveillance technologies, governmental abuse of power, and neoliberal capital, with divergent truths about who is blame from 5 G/vaccine theories to corporate technocapitalism. The paper concludes that these shared discourses across apocalyptic and conspiratorial Covid-19 narratives mean many of us are conspiracists and/or conspiracy theorists at some level and is therefore both revealing of the similarities and has the potential to create democratic constituencies. 

The authors argue

 The crises of health systems and economies facilitated by a new and impalpable threat, the SARS-CoV-2 virus, induced societal and individual anxieties around the globe. Scientific uncertainties, catastrophic images from hospitals, profound changes to our everyday lives and an overflow of partially contradictory information by experts and politicians mobilize many people to look for security and meaning in millennial/millenarian and apocalyptic explanatory models (Van Prooijen and Douglas 2017). By apocalypse and millennium, the authors mean an abrupt and imminent crisis, the apocalypse, that ushers in a new world order via a revelation or revolution, the millennium (Stewart and Harding 1999). Such thought reflects contemporary fears, threats, and popular discourses about the unknown in an attempt to explain the present and future through causal and teleological assumptions (Boyer 1992; O’Leary 1998). Similar reflections can also be found in so-called ‘conspiracy theories’, or from a more Foucauldian perspective, counter-hegemonic knowledge claims which provide a wider narrative of political resistance (Foucault 1980; Robertson 2016). While the Covid-19 pandemic will re-define health and medical anthropology research programmes in the years ahead, this paper contributes here to emerging inquiry within medical anthropology concerning conspiracies around viruses and viral infections (Ali 2020; Durand and Cunha 2020; Manderson and Levine 2020; Sams, Desclaux, and Sow 2020). This is what the authors term ‘contagious conspiracism,’ which is defined as both viral global cultural conspiracism and, academically, the burgeoning interest in the relationship between viruses and conspiracism. 

Many conspiracy theories gainsay dominant explanations of the origin, spread and cure of the virus to offer alternative knowledge which claims that the pandemic is artificially precipitated to introduce a new millennium of suppression, surveillance and control. The apocalypse lends itself well to conspiratorial thinking because conceptually, the apocalypse is a plastic narrative, flexible enough to reflect and allegedly explain any crisis (Howard 2006). This paper contributes to the theoretical conceptualization and framing of the relationship between Covid-19, conspiracism, and apocalypticism. Primarily in this paper the authors are interested in the shared ingredients, motivations, and semiotics across apocalyptic conspiratorial Covid-19 narratives. The authors are particularly interested in the ways in which apocalyptic conspiratorial discourses combine, are conjunctural, and resonate across religious and secular, and left and right politics. To this end, what can responses to the Covid-19 crisis tell us about the presumed academic categories of analysis and cultural boundaries of apocalyptic and millennial thought? It is here that the authors offer in the conclusion a call for a democratic constituency. Secondarily, this paper is a theoretically motivated exploration, provocation and intervention into the current milieu for researching Covid-19 related apocalyptic and conspiratorial logics within medical anthropology and geography. Because of the primary and secondary purposes, methodologically the authors pull from a broad range of sources, examples, and instantiations with the intention of breaking down the three major, and yet in no way homogenous, analytical categories: far-right, evangelical, and radical left. 

Towards this framing, this paper finds a ‘bewildering diversity’ (Barkun 2013, 15) of millennialist responses to Covid-19 in alternative and religious media outlets or in user-generated content on social media platforms which transcend the boundary between what is thought to be religious and secular. The paper illustrates below that ‘the presumed dichotomy that separates religious and secular millennialists is increasingly undone’ (Wilson 2017, 424). The authors argue that broadly non-religious conspiracist millennialism have always borrowed apocalyptic thinking from Christianity (among other religions), unintentionally secularizing their teleology (Bull 1996) or where ‘millennial motifs’ provided a vehicle for radical or totalitarian movements (Barkun 1974, 8; Cohn 1957). For the authors, apocalypticism is not only a religious, conspiracist or spiritual discourse, but also a societal and political one which is founded in teleological thinking that assumes that profound change is imminently upon us and immanently behind us, ahead of us, and within us (Sturm 2012). 

American conspiracism, so far, was less concerned with pandemics and diseases as its focus in recent decades was on geopolitics, terror, wars and climate change, although the conspiracist anti-vax movement became increasingly popular in the United States (Uscinski 2020). As Humphreys (2002, 845) reflects on the popular imagination of pandemics: ‘in the US we have largely forgotten what it is like to feel that our place is contaminated, diseased, and unsafe… most of us feel that our homes and towns are safe from epidemic’. Besides the minor outbreaks of E. Coli, measles, West Nile, salmonella, a brief but localized anthrax scares at the turn of the century and later SARS, swine and avian flus (Davis 2005), such fears, like Ebola, were geographically repressed as ‘over there’. Even in the HIV/AIDS epidemics, there was always an outsider: gay men, minority racial categories, intravenous drug users, sorcery, or American conspiracy (Palmer 1997; Rödlach 2016). Many conservative evangelicals politicised HIV/AIDS and interpreted the ‘the increased visibility of gay and lesbian people as a sign of the end of the world’ (Long 2012: 226) rather than the disease itself. Such geosocial distancing of Other health crises is reflective of cis-gendered ‘white privilege’ (Manderson and Levine 2020, 368). But of course, popular films like Contagion (2011) and 28 Days Later (2002) (which became top downloads during lockdown) have, by combining anxiety with entertainment, primed us about the potential for an apocalyptic pandemic caused by an ethereal Other: a virus. In an accelerating and globalized world, viruses can theoretically reach anywhere in the globe in very little time; they are everywhere and visibly nowhere. The ubiquitous global reach of the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic makes it all the more apocalyptic and its invisible omnipresence stimulates what the authors call ‘contagious conspiracism.’ Alternative media and the internet are carriers for millennial and conspiracist discourses and they have the power to give rise to emotionally loaded street protests, incite the destruction of telecommunication technologies, and influence decisions made by state leaders and governments. 

This paper engages with the formation and contagion of millennial and apocalyptic Covid-19 narratives which deal with the virus. First, this paper explores how the crisis became embedded in established contemporary millennial beliefs and prophecies among right-wing conspiracist, evangelical, and radical left groupings which the authors argue is a testament to the narrative plasticity of such thought, rather than the proclaimed inerrant certainty of such prognostications. Second, the authors use Barkun’s (2013) concept of ‘improvisational millennialism’ which describes the formation of new conspirational narratives independently from any (mainly American) ideological tradition to explain the diverse interpretations of the 5 G/vaccine Covid theories. The authors then show how these theories ‘travelled’ and were locally incorporated into anti-state lockdown protests in the European cities of Berlin and Belfast. These newly formed millennial-conspiracist narratives draw, for instance, from evangelical millennialism, the anti-vaccine movement, New Age, left wing and right-wing conspiracism. In that context, this paper concludes that these cross-constituent responses to the pandemic in relation to the coronavirus illustrates that a wide-spread scepticism towards official accounts of truth as well as common political goals can bring together distinct millennial and conspiracist groups with varying political attitudes into democratic constituencies.

'‘Corona? 5G? or both?’: the dynamics of COVID-19/5G conspiracy theories on Facebook' by Axel Bruns, Stephen Harrington and Edward Hurcombe in (2020) 177(1) Media International Australia comments 

 Focussing in detail on one key component of the infodemic surrounding COVID-19, this article traces the dissemination dynamics of rumours that the pandemic outbreak was somehow related to the rollout of 5G mobile telephony technology in Wuhan and around the world. Drawing on a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods including time-series analysis, network analysis and in-depth close reading, our analysis shows the dissemination of the rumour on Facebook from its obscure origins in pre-existing conspiracist groups through greater uptake in more diverse communities to substantial amplification by celebrities, sports stars and media outlets. The in-depth tracing of COVID-related mis- and disinformation across social networks offers important new insights into the dynamics of online information dissemination and points to opportunities to slow and stop the spread of false information, or at least to combat it more directly with accurate counterinformation. 

The authors argue The novel coronavirus pandemic that has spread from its origins in Wuhan, China, around the globe since late 2019 has been accompanied by a similarly global ‘infodemic’, as the World Health Organization (WHO) has pointed out (Ghebreyesus, in United Nations, 2020b). This is unsurprising: the outbreak of the mystery disease now generally labelled COVID-19 and its gradual spread through the population necessarily resulted in many uncertainties about the severity and mode of transmission of the virus, about effective protection mechanisms and remedies, about government initiatives to detect the virus and slow its spread and about the longer-term personal, social and economic impacts of the social distancing, quarantine and lockdown measures put in place. At times of significant uncertainty, the circulation of rumours, misinformation and outright falsehoods tends to increase substantially, however (Allport and Postman, 1946): while official news and government information remains sketchy or contradictory, citizens are more likely to supplement their news diet with unverified information from less reliable sources, and may favour information that aligns with their pre-existing worldviews, downplays the severity of the crisis, or presents convenient external scapegoats that can be blamed for the disruption to their lives. 

In modern times, such infodemics are aided by the ease with which misinformation – ‘misleading information created or disseminated without manipulative or malicious intent’ (UNESCO, 2018: 7) – from alternative sources can be accessed and shared, especially online. This is also exacerbated by the activities of individuals, groups and organisations that deliberately aim to create confusion and discord through disinformation – ‘deliberate (often orchestrated) attempts to confuse or manipulate’ (UNESCO, 2018: 7), for economic or political reasons, or simply to disrupt public communication processes. The COVID-19 crisis provides a wealth of examples for such infodemic dissemination processes – and much as the tracing of actual viral contagion provides new insights into the dynamics of pandemics and highlights the critical inflection points at which such contagion might be slowed or stopped, the in-depth tracing of COVID-related mis- and disinformation across social networks offers important new insights into the dynamics of online information dissemination and points to opportunities to slow and stop the spread of false information, or at least to combat it more directly with accurate counterinformation. 

Focussing in detail on one key component of the infodemic surrounding COVID-19, this article traces the dissemination dynamics of rumours that the pandemic outbreak was somehow related to the rollout of 5G mobile telephony technology in Wuhan and around the world. The rumour also builds upon a series of related narratives regarding the possible health and environmental impacts of 5G technology, and arguably flourished in large part thanks to the pre-existing networks and misinformation surrounding it. These rumours fit very strongly into the category of ‘conspiracy theory’, which itself arguably forms a separate subset of the mis- and disinformation categories noted above. On the one hand, it is likely that conspiracies are promulgated by people who actually believe them (and want to let others ‘in’ on their knowledge), so this is presumably done with good intentions. On the other hand, conspiracy theories can be leveraged and amplified by malicious actors to stoke general discord, discredit an opponent or critic (such as when, in May 2020 via Twitter, Donald Trump indirectly accused TV host Joe Scarborough of once murdering an intern; see Baker and Astor, 2020) or to distract attention away from malfeasance or incompetence (the previous example might apply here, too). Finally, conspiracy theories sometimes (although extremely rarely) fall into neither category, because they reference something that does have a partial or complete basis in reality. To be absolutely clear, though, the connection between COVID-19 and 5G that is at the centre of the conspiracy theories we examine here is entirely fictional. 

The 5G connection is not the only COVID-19-related conspiracy, of course (one of the more prominent theories, for example, claims that the virus was developed in a laboratory in Wuhan, from where it was accidentally or intentionally released). Such theories circulate perhaps because people have been seeking some more tangible (rather than literally invisible) causes for such massive social and economic disruptions. 

Yablokov (2015) argues that conspiracy theories ‘function by helping to unite the audience as “the people” against the imagined “Other”, represented as a secretive “power bloc”’ (p. 302). It is no surprise, then, that so many have popped up that pivot around perceived intrusions upon freedom and civil liberties by governments, billionaires, the media or medical experts. One of the most significant – and ‘mainstream’ – of these is the idea that climate change is an invention by climate scientists, designed either to help secure more government funding for their research or – in more nefarious versions – to lay that groundwork that justifies a single world government. The rich vein of scepticism regarding the safety and benefits of vaccines work similarly, and are founded on a suspicion of modern medicine (with those ascribing to this belief often seeking out alternative, ‘natural’ remedies), and towards science and technology more broadly. 

Although it is hard to provide a complete picture of the interrelationship between the two ideas, it is notable that one of the main ‘hot spots’ for anti-5G protests in Australia – Mullumbimby in Northern New South Wales (NSW) (see Bibby, 2020) – is in an area which has traditionally had some of the lowest child vaccination rates in the country (MacKenzie, 2017). So, while we study this case in isolation, it shares dynamics with long-standing popular conspiracy theories (Amarasingam, 2019), albeit with new, pressing public health concerns in the context of a pandemic (Argentino, 2020). The gradual spread of the idea from fringe conspiracist groups to celebrity endorsements, mainstream media coverage and official government and WHO denials (e.g. Australian Government, 2020; UK Government, 2020; United Nations, 2020a) also demonstrates what are likely to be typical dissemination processes for such rumours. 

We focus on the COVID/5G rumour for the purpose of this article because, of the various COVID-related misinformation stories, it has arguably generated the most immediate and most visible impacts – in early April 2020, several mobile phone towers in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and other countries, as well as some of the technicians servicing them, were attacked by believers in the rumour (Osborne, 2020). This demonstrates that such mis- and disinformation does not necessarily remain limited to online circulation, but can result in substantial offline harm. We focus in this article on the dissemination of the rumour on Facebook as the most widely used global social media platform; subsequent work will supplement this study with analyses of similar processes on Twitter and coverage in mainstream and fringe online news media outlets. Drawing on a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods including time-series analysis, network analysis and in-depth close reading, our analysis shows the dynamics of the rumour from its obscure origins in pre-existing conspiracist groups through greater uptake in more diverse communities to substantial amplification by celebrities, sports stars and media outlets.