Conspiracism

Conspiracy theories are particularly well suited to the creation of tribal biotopes on the internet because they allow for delimitation and exclusion, the mechanisms that constitute tribalism and its identity politics.

The effect of conspiracy culture is the opposite of calm; it is to spread panic.

when people place value on the role of evidence as a means of updating their beliefs, they are less likely to believe misinformation and conspiracy theories.

Intuitionism and the rejection of evidence and expertise are especially compatible with conservative populism.

Conspiracy theories, as we have seen, are both symptoms of confusion and powerlessness and tools of division and distraction that benefit elites.

As Gilroy-Ware puts it, “Conspiracy theories are a misfiring of a healthy and justifiable political instinct: suspicion.”

It is also a broader cultural sensibility composed out of the steady drip-drip of bureaucratic acts, a loose constellation of practices and postures that is diffused throughout society via the legal and executive branches of the modern state. In short, suspicion is less heroic and more humdrum and routinized than we might think.

In this context, conspiracy theories, as micro-narratives, are a remedy. They are taken up as resources that provide identity and meaning.

the imaginary waxes while the symbolic wanes.