Mimesis and Conspiracy: Bureaucracy, New Media and

infrastructural forms of doubtMichael Vine, University of Cambridge

Matthew Carey, University of Copenhagen1

Conspiratorial thought is one of the hallmarks of late modernity. This article focuses

on the wealth of conspiracy theories that crystallised around chemtrails and the

Californian drought to examine the genre more generally. It suggests that the

particular constellation of certainty and doubt present in arguments by conspiracy is a

product of the fundamentally mimetic nature of conspiratorial thought, which

espouses the contours of the infrastructural environment in which it emerges. In our

case, this infrastructural environment is that of bureaucracy on the one hand and the

architecture of the Internet on the other. Each of these infrastructures helps shape

conspiratorial thought in a distinct manner, and the confluence of the two imparts to

the genre its particular flavour.

Keywords: Conspiracy theory, chemtrail, mimesis, bureaucracy, Internet

Michael Vine is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge.

In August 2014, a crowd of several hundred concerned citizens piled into the David

Marr Auditorium in the rural Northern California community of Redding to hear

former solar panel contractor Dane Wigington offer an impassioned warning that their

skies had been hijacked by government “geoengineers” as part of a terrifying attempt

to control the nation’s weather. “There is NO NATURAL WEATHER at this point,”

Wigington asserts at his popular website geoengineeringwatch.com. “The climate

engineers decide when it will rain or snow, where, how much, and how toxic the rain

or snow will be, where there will be drought or heat.” Alongside the tall, muscular,

and imposing figure of Wigington, a panel of “experts” including a former California

Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist, a former U.S. Forest Service biologist, and

a U.S. Navy veteran presented “indisputable evidence” that airborne trails of toxic

chemicals (“chemtrails”) are in fact to blame for “extreme and unquantifiable

environmental and human health impacts.” Far less indisputable were the assumed

1 This article and the argument it develops is a collaborative effort; the principal ethnographic material, however, and much of its treatment is Michael Vine’s.

aims of the conspiracy, which emerged as a matter of considerable debate and

contention. Also in attendance, the Shasta County Board of Supervisors seemed

surprisingly swayed by the testimony on offer: “Credible and compelling evidence

[has been presented],” the local government officials concluded, voting unanimously

to investigate the issue of a chemtrails conspiracy further.

By then in its fourth consecutive year, California’s record-breaking drought

was being felt in many different ways: vanishing rivers and lakes, fallowed farmland,

rising unemployment rates, a spike in water bills and grocery costs, parched and

singed suburban lawns. Wild fires raged across the state and epic dust storms engulfed

once active agricultural land and the communities that reside there. As farmers

depleted the state’s ancient aquifers, the land above was sinking by up to two inches

per month, destroying millions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure in the slow violence

of gradual collapse. Having already declared a “state of emergency” in January 2014,

in April 2015 Governor Jerry Brown issued a further executive order mandating a

25% reduction in urban water use across the state and leading some pundits to

announce a new age of climate austerity. Even so, water supplies continued to

dwindle, causing the drought to percolate through into everyday experiences of the

landscape, which was in some cases quite literally shifting underfoot, giving anxious

new shape to local senses of self, place, and history (see Vine, forthcoming).

As such, California’s historic drought takes shape as something like a “total

social fact” of catastrophe (cf. Mauss 2001; Orlove 2010). While we might most

immediately think of natural disasters as sudden, self-contained, and highly localized

events, the drought demands a different politics of perception: one attuned to the

diffuse and enduring nature of “slow,” “chronic,” “ordinary,” or “everyday”

catastrophes or crises (Nixon 2011; Erikson 1994; Davis 1999; Matthewman 2015;

Vigh 2008). Rather than simply revealing the “deeper social grammar of a people that

lies behind their day-to-day behavior” (Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 2002:10), the

drought actively reworks that grammar over time into novel configurations: what one

San Francisco Chronicle reporter (Lochhead 2015) called a “relentless new reality

whose dimensions are just beginning to come into view.”

In so doing, the drought raises questions about temporal relations, the event

and the everyday, the perceptible and the spectral, and how different scales of reality

intersect. Although a slow disaster, for example, the drought still registers as an

embodied encounter with a capricious, convulsive, and unyielding environment. As a

long-term statistical abstraction, however, the underlying process of climate change is

a good example of what Timothy Morton (2013) calls a “hyperobject”: an object or

event so massively and complexly distributed in time and space that it is not directly

available to human sensory perception. Put differently, while a hurricane, a tsunami,

or indeed a drought may be a local manifestation or symptom of the hyperobject

called climate change, it is not climate change as such. This gap—between the seen

and unseen—constitutes a zone where the visceral incontrovertibility of the event

collides with uncertainty as to its precise nature to produce particular configurations

of certainty and doubt.

One example of how such configurations can play out is the emergent

scientific sub-discipline of extreme weather event attribution (Hulme 2014a), which

tackles such fundamental questions as whether the Californian drought, for instance,

is best understood as a self-contained event or as the mark of anthropogenic climate

change. An alternative configuration, meanwhile, is manifest in a range of

conspiratorial accounts of the ongoing drought, like the one presented above. These

challenge official explanations, with their appeals to cyclical weather patterns and

progressive climate change, and instead point to the shadowy activity of malevolent

forces leagued against the people of California and indeed the world. It is these

accounts and the infrastructures of technology and thought that underpin them that

interest us here. We suggest that the particular constellation of certainty and doubt

present in these arguments is a product of the fundamentally mimetic nature of

conspiratorial thought, which espouses the contours of the infrastructural

environment in which it emerges. In this, our use of the term mimesis differs

somewhat from standard philosophical and indeed anthropological usage (from

Aristotle to Taussig by way of Auerbach)2, which typically focuses on deliberate

literary, artistic or magical techniques for representing reality. We, in contrast, refer

primarily to the ways in which conspiratorial forms of representing reality

unconsciously imitate prevailing infrastructures of everyday existence. We suggest,

however, that many of the effects of this imitation (notably the sense of control it

helps establish over external realities) are essentially the same in both cases.

The idea that conspiracy theories develop along imitative lines is not, it should

be noted, a new one. In his foundational text on the phenomenon, The Paranoid Style

2 Respectively, the Poetics (1996), Mimesis and Alterity (1993), and Mimesis: the representation of reality in Western literature (1953).

in American Politics (2008[1954]), Richard Hofstadter noted that, “the enemy may be

the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid [conspiracist] will outdo him in the

apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry” (1996:32), pointing to the idea that

conspiratorial thought is always (and perhaps necessarily) parasitic upon more

legitimate, authoritative, or publicly-accepted discursive forms.3 Our argument takes

this initial observation and expands it, contending that the mimetic propensity of

conspiracy is not limited to questions of style. Instead, we argue, the encompassing

social infrastructure of bureaucracy both delimits and determines the content of

conspiratorial thought, while the specific architecture of the Internet qua infrastructure

(notably the hyperlink), which houses so much contemporary conspiracy, imparts a

particular structure of argumentation to these theories. Our use of the term

infrastructure is, therefore, notably less experimental than in several of the other

contributions to this special issue: we employ it less as an analytical, than as a

descriptive category to refer to material-semiotic systems that, to paraphrase Larkin

(2013), create the ground on which other systems operate and are in some sense prior

to them. Our interest in not so much in the nature of the infrastructures as in the

properties of the systems of (conspiratorial) thought they enable. We begin then by

sketching out the particular contours of certainty and doubt prevalent in the

conspiratorial climate of Californian drought.

3 The conviction that there is an overlap between conspiratorial styles of argument and those proper to, in particular, the social sciences is one that has been repeatedly defended since (e.g. Parker 2001, Boltanski 2012), as both social scientists and conspiracists often rely on the existence of invisible forces, such as hegemony, habitus or mind waves, operating in covert ways to explain the superficial workings of society.

Figure 1.

Conspiratorial Climates

Figure 2. “When indisputable photo-docs like the following are being circulated far

and wide, the geoengineers have a lot of extremely uncomfortable explaining to do.”

(stateofthenation2012.com)

One of the more speculative, and more hyped, possible responses to climate change is

so-called geoengineering: massive interference in the climate system as a way to

mitigate the worst of global warming’s planetary impact. This could potentially take a

number of forms, but most involve some sort of large-scale atmospheric intervention,

such as cloud-seeding or injecting aerosols into the stratosphere to increase solar

reflectivity. Such processes are understandably subject to intense debate with regard

to their technical feasibility, as well as to their political and ethical implications (e.g.

Keith 2013; Caldeira et al 203; Hulme 2014b). Taking place largely on Internet

forums, messageboards, and weblogs (blogs), however, a different public discussion

around global climate control is also unfolding, in which the notion of geoengineering

is used interchangeably with the term “chemtrails” to claim that a conspiratorial

programme already exists to control the world’s weather (Cairns 2016; Bakalaki

2016). Consider Figure 2. Where most people see contrails—relatively harmless trails

of cloud-like condensation produced as a normal side effect of jet aviation4—

4 There is, for instance, evidence to suggest that they have a limited short-term effect on surface temperatures by altering the earth’s radiation balance – i.e. they reflect heat back down to the

conspiracists see chemtrails, pointing to their undue persistence and grid-like pattern

as evidence that something more sinister is afoot. Exactly what, why, and under

whose orchestration, however, is a matter of intense conjecture and controversy.

In her analysis of online chemtrails conspiracy theories, science and

technology studies scholar Rose Cairns (2016:75) traces their emergence to a 1999

online article that claims “contrails spread by fleets of jet aircraft in elaborate cross-

hatched patterns are sparking speculation and making people sick across the United

States” (Thomas 1999, quoted in Cairns 2016:75). With the growth of the Internet not

only as a powerful mode of communication, but also a social environment in its own

right (Escobar 1994; Boellstorff 2008), belief in the chemtrails conspiracy has

progressively gathered momentum and, in some circles, acquired an aura of certainty.

At the same time, the theory has increased dramatically in both its complexity and

scope, shifting focus from individual instances of unexplained bodily illness to total-

planetary disorder.

In response, a range of institutions and organisations have felt compelled to

weigh in on the issue: for example, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (2000),

the U.K. Department for Transport (n.d.), and Greenpeace (2015) have all published

statements debunking chemtrail conspiracies. In the vast, digital echo chamber of the

Internet, each claim is met with a counterclaim, which in turn is met with a counter-

counterclaim—and so on. Beyond the single, unshakeable pillar of belief that

chemtrails are real, the theory’s remaining narrative architecture thus remains

unstable: continually shifting and being reshuffled though also remaining within the

bounds of a relatively well-anchored field of possibility.

Beginning from a concrete point of focus—the chemtrail—the conspiracy

theory thus radiates outwards in ever-widening circles of conjecture and spatial

encompassment. First, what exactly is being sprayed? Speculation is by its very nature

open-ended. According to one popular anti-chemtrails website, for example,

chemtrails contain, among other things, “ethylene dibromide, virally mutated molds,

nano-particulates of aluminum and barium and cationic polymer fibers with

unidentified bio-active material” (stopsprayingcalifornia.com). Elsewhere, the same

website claims that an “independent analysis of chemtrails fallout” has in fact

revealed the trails as a complicated cocktail of “toxic chemicals”—it lists 38 in total

—ranging from the familiar (arsenic, uranium) to the less so (enterobacteriaceae).

surface (Lee et al 2009).

Next, to what ends is this spraying directed? Again, theories abound. Indeed,

the point here almost seems to be to cultivate rather than circumscribe the range of

possibilities. As one chemtrails conspiracist (Look Up! 2014) notes, “the most

obvious ... reason is to control the weather”—either as an engine of corporate profit,

as a weapon or military “force multiplier,” or as an instrument of population control.

Journalist Stewart Howe captured the spirit of this all of the above approach when he

confided to the documentary filmmaker Paul Wittenberger: “There are obviously

several objectives. Whether it’s depopulation, mind control, weapon aspects,

communication aspects, all kinds of things, you know—wild cards that we know

nothing about. We don’t really know and I’m not going to attempt to speculate on

what exactly the agendas are, but we can see clearly that the agendas are not

benefiting mankind” (What in the World Are They Spraying, 2010). Likewise,

whether as a key component or side effect of the conspiracy, another popular website

blames chemtrails for such wide-ranging crises as: “drought in Africa, forest fires, bee

decline, fisheries collapse, increases in Alzheimer’s and autism, extreme weather

events, reduction of arctic sea ice, and species extinctions—among other ills”

(stopsprayingcalifornia.com; quoted in Cairns 2016:76).

But who is behind all this? As the British journalist George Monbiot (2015)

notes, this is where things get especially vague, although the usual suspects include

unchecked military activity, rogue scientists, corporate interests, and/or a cryptocratic

global shadow government as part of their efforts to usher in a nefarious New World

Order. In many ways, the chemtrail acts for conspiracists as a “floating signifier” (cf.

Levi-Strauss 1950; Lacan 1970), with a remarkably plastic capacity to channel

whichever fear or suspicion lies most readily to hand (Bakalaki 2016). In this way, the

precise contours of the global conspiracy can remain as shadowy and indistinct as

they are diabolical and all-encompassing: “the largest crime against humanity in

human history” (globalskywatch.com).

So, to recap, what we have is a basic architecture of infrastructure where a

kernel of certainty (that chemtrails are real and also really bad) proliferates and

ramifies out as incessant and at first glance near-formless speculation as to what

exactly is afoot and why: in the words of one chemtrails conspiracist, while “[t]here

are many arguments about the reason this is happening, there is no argument that it IS

happening” (SoCaL SkyWatch 2016). And both the certainty and the doubt that

surrounds it are, we argue, products of different aspects of the infrastructural

environment in which conspiracy proliferates. Our argument pursues two distinct

lines of reflection.

First, we suggest that upon closer inspection this speculation is neither quite so

uncertain nor quite so formless as it appears. Although both the powers supposed

responsible for laying the chemtrails and their motives for doing so are myriad, they

are not, in fact, so massively diverse. The exact enemy may be unidentified or

uncertain, but it is indisputably a powerful, typically secular network, with vast

organizational and material resources at its disposal, and one whose goal is absolute

mastery of a population. These enemies all share a common morphology that endows

them with a degree of certainty and this morphology, as we shall see, is recognizably

borrowed from the basic infrastructure that enables and shapes everyday existence in

both California and other locations where conspiracy theories abound: they are

bureaucratic in nature.

Second, we argue that though such speculation may not be entirely free-form,

it is nonetheless a central and incessant element of conspiratorial thought, which

dwells in the generation of uncertainty via the multiplication of possibilities. Theorists

take part in an “obsessive and sceptical practice of scanning and speculating from the

realm of the concrete, undeniable, tangible detail to the realm of the final word, the

system that makes sense of inchoate sensibilities and moments of strange

convergences” (Stewart 1999:16)—the spatiotemporal coincidence of chemtrails and

extreme weather events, for example. This is a practice that promises but never quite

delivers a moment of unclouded revelation, precisely because it is constantly

producing uncertainty.5 And the mechanisms it uses to do so are, we suggest, afforded

by the architecture of the principal medium by which conspiratorial thought now

propagates itself—viz. the internet and more particularly the form of the blog.

The Bureaucratic Machine

As mentioned above, one of the earliest chemtrail conspiracies dates back to

1999, when the American military was first accused of using trails to disseminate

“mysterious substances” across the country. That the finger of blame was pointed at

5 In this regard, it is not unlike the sciences of extreme weather event attribution, as described above, whereby both “combine the mechanics of eruption with the mechanics of [the] system” (Stewart ibid.; Webster 2013). In many ways, a global conspiracy is itself a hyperobject in the sense of Morton. But where the contemporary sciences see the blind working of nonlinear systems, chemtrails conspiracists instead detect a complexly interwoven web of malevolent intention located just beyond the visible world (cf. Evans-Pritchard 2002).

the military is no surprise: it is, after all, they who control the skies. But it is also a

logical place to locate responsibility because few people or organizations have the

logistical capacity to carry out an operation on that scale. To do so requires the

knowledge and wherewithal to marshal and deploy a fleet of aircraft, amass and then

mix the particular cocktail of toxic chemicals due to be sprayed, track weather

patterns to optimize dispersion, and then finally cover up the entire operation and

maintain deniability. And, as Carey (2017) has argued elsewhere, this logistical

sophistication is a hallmark of the conspiracy theory in general.

Although such theories often focalize around spectacular one-off events, such

as the September 11 attacks on New York or the death of Princess Diana of Wales,

their real interest is in the covert machinations and vastly complex organisational

management that subtend and enable them. Indeed, even where an apparently

straightforward explanation is available (nineteen Islamist terrorists trained as pilots,

boarded flights, hijacked them and flew them into several buildings), conspiracists

complexify the picture to an inordinate degree, introducing false flags, air-defence

stand-downs, concealed explosives and, of course, the cover-up. In other words, they

represent events in such a way that only a particular kind of apparatus could be

responsible for them – one, we suggest, that borrows its key characteristics from the

bureaucratic form.

Our contention is that the ways in which people imagine the enemy is shaped

by the key social infrastructures of their everyday existence. And for most

contemporary inhabitants of urban or peri-urban environments in more or less

functional states, these infrastructures are essentially comprised by bureaucratic

forms, which are both ground and horizon of their lives. It registers them, educates

away their childhood, structures their labour environment (whether they work directly

in a bureaucracy or simply conform to its fiscal requirements), marries them, attends

to their health, and accompanies them to the grave. It is no surprise that we see

bureaucracy everywhere and that our speculative reasoning and fantasy directly

mimic its contours – much as Bachelard (1958) suggests that the house of our

childhood shapes our memory and imagination.

As regards conspiratorial thought, this means that the enemy is imagined as

bureaucratic in shape (i.e. modular, distributed, and arborescent), in quality

(depersonalised and rational), and finally in intention: its goals are secular, frequently

opaque and imply the constant expansion of its authority and remit. This, of course, is

very close to Weber’s (1960) classic definition of the bureaucratic mode of

domination as characterised by centralised coordination, extreme rationalisation, the

monopolisation of force, disenchantment and rampant depersonalisation. Now a great

deal of work, both in anthropology and elsewhere, has convincingly demonstrated that

real-world bureaucracies typically fail to conform to this ideal type. In practice, they

often rely on personal relations (e.g. Eisenstadt and Roninger 1984: 43-44), situated

local interpretation of ideally abstract rules (Hoag 2011), and informal arrangements

(Sandvik 2011). Nevertheless, bureaucracies continually work to reproduce an

idealised image of objectivity, impersonality, universality and ubiquity – what

Haraway (1988) calls the “god trick” – and it is this that shapes people’s

understandings of their action and, in turn, governs the contours of conspiratorial

thought.

Let us turn to the ideas of the enemy elaborated in the conspiracy theories

discussed above. The other culprits for chemtrail spraying identified alongside the

military are corporate interests, associations of rogue scientists, or (most frequently of

all), the federal government, sometimes referred to as a Zionist Occupation

Government (ZOG), or some shadow equivalent operating under the radar. And what

is true for chemtrail conspiracies in the United States is equally true of other hotspots

of conspiratorial thought, such as the former Soviet Bloc or the Middle East. The

objects of Middle Eastern conspiracies are diverse and legion—including internal

political struggles in Turkey and Egypt, the rise of ISIS, the spread of AIDS, or shark

attacks in the Red Sea—but the agent behind them often looks remarkably similar: the

Turkish “Deep State” (derin devlet) composed of anti-democratic elements of the

military, civil service and judiciary (and now perhaps supplanted in the popular

imagination by the Hizmet movement); Mossad and its tentacular ramifications across

Europe, American and the Muslim world; the CIA and its own network; or Saudi

Arabia and its regional allies. In each case, the organisation has the structure and

shape of an ideal bureaucracy.

Even more striking are the nature and characteristics of the agents identified.

These lines of conspiratorial thought are rarely personalised. So whilst the event they

seek to explain may involve or be in the interests of a key figure such as President

Obama or President Erdoğan, the agents that stand behind the event are always legion

and mostly faceless, like bureaucrats. Conspiracists are not as a rule interested in

world-bestriding heroic individuals, in Hitlers, Napoleons or uniquely evil Bond

villains, but in vast, tightly organised networks of conspirators.

With this depersonalisation comes not only a lack of interest in individuals as

agents, but also an abandonment of the idea that they are driven by personalised,

wanton or transcendent forms of motivation, such as “sympathy, favour, grace and

gratitude” (Weber op cit.: 421); instead the conspirators have followed Weber’s ideal

bureaucrats in eradicating “especially irrational and incalculable, feeling” (ibid.: 421-

422). Control and its extension is all that matters for the bureaucratic machine and

these goals are also those of the bogeymen of conspiratorial thought. For instance,

though the supposed conspirators are often a religious organization like the Catholic

church or the Muslim Brotherhood, their goal (unlike more widely accepted

maleficent networks) is very rarely directly religious. Whilst ISIS or Al-Qaeda might

legitimately be described as pursuing transcendent goals, supposed conspirators tend

to be more worldly, wanting less to bring about God’s Kingdom on earth, than to gain

mastery of existing kingdoms in the here and now.6

For the same reason, they are rarely portrayed as interested in pure destruction.

Even when the immediate outcome seems nihilistic, it is seen as simply a means of

establishing control by generating consent. The point of spraying toxic chemicals is

not harm per se, but in the words of one unnamed writer at the “alternative news and

commentary” magazine, State of the Nation:

[the] California drought is being utilized to soften up the citizenry to accept

geoengineering 24/7. Not only will they tell us that it is necessary to conduct

this weather modification program in order to compensate for a debilitating

statewide drought, they will also invoke National Security. Because of the

seriousness of this unending drought, they can now point to sheer survival, as

in where else are we going to grow our food. Nothing produces quicker

widespread acceptance ... like [sic] an existential threat.

This highly bureaucratic quality of conspiracy is not, to the best of our

knowledge, something that has been dwelt upon in any depth in previous scholarship

on conspiracy theories. It is not, in other words, something that immediately strikes 6 There are, of course, exceptions to this rule and some chemtrail conspiracists, for instance, attribute them to millenarian fundamentalists: http://globalskywatch.com/stories/my-chemtrail-story/chemtrail-information/spraying-themselves.html#.V8WIMDWgvhU.

the observer (or indeed the conspiracist) as noteworthy, with attention instead being

directed towards the style of argumentation (Faubion 2001), the social position of

conspiracists (Quinn 2001), and what such arguments do for those for who propound

them (Dean 1998). That it passes unnoticed is perhaps largely down to the fact that

the same bureaucratic infrastructure that restricts and enables the everyday existence

of the conspiracists also undergirds the lives of those who write about them. The

bureaucratic nature of the potential enemy is almost self-evident. It is only if we cast

our net a little wider and look at the figures who haunt the imaginations of societies

where bureaucracy is not the principle, or even the only infrastructure of existence

that this becomes clear (see Carey 2017). It is not that ideas of, say, witches, monsters

or malevolent Gods are any less credible than assertions that an alien reptilian race

has established a shadow world government, it is simply that they do not fit into the

certainties of our everyday lives. These certainties—what goes without saying—are to

a great extent provided by bureaucracy and this is reflected in conspiracy. The

uncertainty of conspiracy, meanwhile, is a product of a quite different type of

everyday infrastructure: that of the Internet.

Curatorial Conspiracism

“When we try to pick out anything by itself,” the Scottish-American naturalist

John Muir (1997:245) famously said of wilderness, “we find it hitched to everything

else in the universe.” Importantly, this image of inescapable and all-encompassing

interconnection could be applied just as easily to conspiratorial cosmologies and the

communication technologies that enable their proliferation as to the planetary

environment. As the co-authors of the bestseller 70 Greatest Conspiracy Theories and

creators of the conspire.com website note, for example, “If ever there was a mass

medium that mirrored the psychotropic device of conspiracy theory, the World Wide

Web is it. With its vertiginous array of endless connections ... the Web fits the

paranoid mindset as snugly as a virus locks into a human receptor cell” (Vankin &

Whalen, quoted in Knight 2003:346; also see Dean 2002:88). Going even further to

posit a point of ontological (rather than merely metaphorical) continuity between the

workings of contemporary conspiracism and the infrastructural form of the Internet,

anthropologist Kathleen Stewart (1999:18, emphasis in the original) argues that: “the

Internet was made for conspiracy theory; it is a conspiracy: 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.” Thus, while conspiratorial thought is restricted neither to a

particular time (Hofstadter 2008) nor place (West and Sanders 2003), it is clear that

the rise of the Internet in recent years has fuelled a proliferation of conspiracy theories

(Soukup 2008).

In the contemporary context of digitally-mediated chemtrails conspiracism,

one genre of public culture has proved an especially virulent vector of this

proliferation—the blog—which sutures together a wide variety of texts and media to

produce an awkward, pulsing, and frequently paranoid informational assemblage that

defies the imposition of a linear narrative. Within the conspiratorial blogosphere,

common forms of text and media include traditionally formatted articles and blog

posts; photographs, videos, and documents; charts and graphs; meteorological reports,

forecasts, and satellite imagery; personal biographies and diaries; newsletters and

FAQ pages; and an ever-expanding archive of public comments on forums or

following an article. Significantly, each can be easily cut, copied, circulated, pasted,

posted, compiled, and otherwise manipulated to produce an endless variety of

(re)configurations—only gaining in efficacy and value to the extent that they are.

When read collectively, these blogs function to situate the conspiratorial

subject at the centre of an “unceasing [wave] of minute detail” (Dean 2002:95).

Working across multiple scales of social experience—from the cellular to the celestial

(Figures 3 & 4)—they fuse via both image and rhetoric the banal and often disorderly

details of everyday life to concerns of cosmological scale. Here the personal diary or

journal emerges as one dominant genre of blog in which meticulously documented

and often uncomfortably intimate personal narratives of depression, skin disorders, or

respiratory disease bleed into—or are juxtaposed with—accounts from the national

and global media of geopolitical unrest, economic instability, or ecological crisis and

catastrophe, like the Californian drought. Writing at chemtraildairies.blogspot.com,

for example, the unnamed blogmaster announces the site like so: “I’ve decided to

make a daily diary of the skies overhead to record and track possible patterns to try

and figure out if there is anything to this theory. I encourage and welcome discussion,

ideas, and personal experiences.” Combining countless photos of the Southern

Californian skyscape with sceengrabbed weather forecasts, news reports, and a

journal of their own day-to-day health and mood, this blogmaster recruits not only

their vision but also their whole human sensorium in an attempt to discern a causal

link between the presence of chemtrails in the sky and untoward environmental,

political, and personal events. In yet another common practice, this blogmaster also

posts a personalised “Hair Elements Analysis Report” which tracks the build-up of

heavy metals in the body and shows an “OFF THE CHART Aluminium

contamination that is beyond critical.”

In this way, the embodied practices of chemtrail conspiracism generate new

forms of biopolitical subjectivity as people—sometimes alone, sometimes collectively

—come to experience both “the environment” and “power” not as force fields that

surround and shape them from outside, but as constitutive threads in the intricate

weave of their bodies and lives (cf. Weston 2017:21). In turn, the figure of the body

as an isolated, armoured fortress is here giving way to a view of corporeality that is

inextricably embedded, ecological, and unbounded (cf. Martin 1995; Figure 5).

Although clearly rerouted through contemporary concerns, however, such a view of

the body as porous and permeable is not new (see Nash 2006:7). In at least one sense,

chemtrails conspiracism in fact revivifies what Kath Weston (2017:106) identifies as

longstanding tradition of consulting one’s body in order to decipher precipitous shifts

in the weather and climate, whereby headaches, creaking joints, or “scaly patches on

elbows” emerge as the physical signs of a state of mutual absorption between human

bodies and the industrialized landscapes they inhabit.

The practices and imaginaries of space and scale at work in chemtrails

conspiracism are therefore very different from those of conventional social theory,

which tend still to be undergirded by notions of “verticality” and “encompassment”

(see Ferguson & Gupta 2002). As political ecologist Ashley Carse (2014:10) explains,

“Encompassment is the notion that scales are nested like a Russion matryoshka

dolls... Verticality is the notion that the scales are organized in a stratified manner,

with the nation-state ‘above’ a region or locality and ‘below’ the globe.” By contrast,

the topological spaces and scales of digital chemtrails conspiracism are intercalated,

entwined, entangled, and superimposed. This, we argue, is a striking example of the

conspiratorial mode mirroring not only the object of its attentions—the planetary

environment—but also the primary infrastructure of its constitution—the Internet. As

described above, both are characterised by a densely networked form which, as Bruno

Latour (n.d.) notes, works to dissolve “the micro/macro-distinction that has plagued

social theory from its inception.” In this way, ethnographic attention to chemtrails

conspiracism also entails an attunement to the myriad ways in which large-scale and

sometimes abstract forces become actively layered into the forms, rhythms, and

spaces of everyday life.

Even as the densely networked form of digital chemtrails conspiracism defies

the imposition of neat Euclidean logics of space and scale, then, it also resists notions

of “holism.” In practice, this resistance is expressed in two main ways. First, on both

more established websites and personal weblogs, the site is often made to overflow

the immediate visual field. The ongoing addition of further images, movies, or text

combined with the ability of users to comment also means that this visual field is

always expanding. Importantly, the effect is not merely the slow but sure

accumulation of fact and opinion; rather, each new fragment of evidence might infuse

what proceeded with a new quality or rearticulated meaning.

Second, at the very heart of this paranoid media ecology is the seductive figure

of the hyperlink, which works to conjoin and entangle even as it separates and

fractures—simultaneously making and withholding that, in the end, “all will be

revealed” (Dean 2002:97). Again, through the action of the link, accessible content

always exceeds the immediate visual field of the user; like both the planetary

environment and the chemtrails conspiracy itself, the infrastructural network of the

Internet in its entirety is never available to the direct sensory perception of a single

situated subject. One could go further to say there is no such thing as the network in it

entirety; it is always pulsating and expanding. In contrast to what have become the

established normative aesthetics of the contemporary digital sphere, then, these sites

thus often deploy an overly cluttered and fragmented albeit information-rich aesthetic,

which works to give the effect of conspiracy unfolding on an ultimately ungraspable

scale. Thus, as Veena Das has written in another context, such a focus on fragments

should be taken not to suggest “various parts that may be assembled together to make

up a picture of totality” (that is, the totality of conspiracy) but as staking out the

impossibility of such a whole (2007:5; also see Pandian 2008:470)—a point to which

we will return below.

Figure 3. XXX

Source: http://chemtrailsmuststop.com/ Figure 4. XXX

Source: http://chemtrailsinourskies.wordpress.com

Source: http://thetruthdenied.com/

Source: http://exopolitics.blogs.com/Figure 5. XXX

The Curatorial Mode

In his account of the changing modes of American citizenship and politics,

The Good Citizen, the historian of journalism Michal Schudson (1998:8) argues that

the idealized “informed citizen” of the twentieth century has given way to the

“monitorial citizen” of the new media age who “scans (rather than reads) the

informational environment in a way so that he or she may be alerted on a very wide

variety of issues for a very wide variety of ends.” Interestingly, Schudson’s definition

of monitorial citizenship brings us close to Stewart’s (1999:14; see also Stewart &

Harding 2003) characterization of conspiracy theory as a particular kind of “scanning

practice,” albeit an obsessive and paranoid one. Helpfully, this forces us as students of

conspiracy beyond mere accusations of errant ideology towards an analysis of what

conspiracy theorists actually do (cf. Monbiot 2015). However, it is important to note

here that new media technologies have evolved considerably since the turn of the

millennium, when both Schudson (1998) and Stewart (1999) were writing.

In this way, we detect in chemtrails conspiracism the emergence of a distinct

mode of digital citizenship: what we might call the “curatorial” mode. Rather than

simply scanning the informational environment or tracing or following the pre-

existing linkages therein, the curatorial conspiracist may now (and perhaps must

[Dean 2010:114]) actively cultivate and extend those linkages by creating and

compiling a wide range of digital and informational artefacts. While once reserved for

the most tech-savvy of digital subjects, in recent years this capacity has become more-

or-less coincidental with Internet access itself.

Here, a comparison may be instructive. In the edited volume Thinking

Through Things, anthropologist Andrew Moutu (2006) interrogates collecting (and

curating) as what he calls “a way of being.” Specifically, he analyses an exhibition

that residents of small villages located along the north coast of Papua New Guinea

helped to create following a tsunami in 1998. “Whereas one might approach such an

exhibition as an illustration or narration of the story of the tsunami and its aftermath,”

as the volume’s editors note in their introduction (Henare et al. 2006:22), Moutu

“argues that the assembling of artefacts, film footage, [and] photographs [...] helped to

produce a story that could not have been anticipated prior to the gathering.” Rather

than a merely epistemological effect—the representation of the tsunami according to

the creators’/curators’ pre-existing classificatory schema—the activity of collecting

thus had an ontological efficacy, fundamentally altering the objects it gathered

together and retrospectively “re-constitut[ing] the event in a unique way” (ibid.).

Moutu (2006:95) locates his analysis at the intersection of what he identifies

as a Papua New Guinean proclivity to look for the “roots” of such tragedies—human

and spiritual agencies that are considered “integral to the explanations of devastating

misfortunes”—and a juxtapositional mode of thought, dominant among his

interlocutors, who “provide explanations for all kinds of things through juxtaposing

sets of analogies” (ibid.:101; Bateson 2011). Likewise, we argue, curatorial

conspiracism is fundamentally juxtapositional in its operation. As such, routed

through “half-glimpsed resemblances” and “hints of filiation” (Dean 2002:97),

curatorial conspiracism produces a “tense and twisted gathering of the elements that

do not meld but only feed on the mutual unsettlings they highlight” (Stewart

1999:18). As Jodi Dean (2002:92) notes, most conspiracy narratives “fail to delineate

any conspiracy at all.” Rather, they “counter conventional narratives with suspicions

and allegations that, more often than not, resist coherent emplotment.”

In this way, the dots are not so much joined up to reveal the full picture of

conspiracy—as if such a thing really existed or was the ultimate goal of

conspiracising—as swept up and made meaningful in the current of movement. It is

by its very nature open-ended and self-propelling; like all forms of desire, its impulse

is not to reach an endpoint but instead to always keep on going (Dean 2010). And as

we’ve seen, the curatorial mode of conspiratorial citizenship we outline here is

enabled, constrained, and afforded (some would say demanded for) by the distinct

form of infrastructural and informational environment that undergirds it: what former

U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton (2015) describes as “a surge of unprecedented

connectivity that is forming a new nervous system for our planet.”

“Sprawling and spreading,” writes literary theorist Caroline Levine

(2014:112), “networks might seem altogether formless, perhaps even the antithesis of

form” (see also Deleuze & Guattari 1987). However, she continues, “we can

understand networks as distinct forms—as defined patterns of interconnection and

exchange that organize social and aesthetic experience” (Latour 2005). Similarly,

anthropologist Brian Larkin (2016) reminds us that particular infrastructures, like the

Internet, are always accompanied by specific concrete forms and that these constitute

a critical aspect of their capacity to “induce distinct experiential states” and “hail”

their users as sociopolitical subjects. Located at the intersection of these arguments,

we suggest that curatorial conspiracism induces, registers, and also deploys a distinct

“aesthetics of doubt” (cf. Carey, 2017) that is actively shaped by the architecture of

the digital environments it inhabits. In this way, rather than an “activated uncertainty”

that strives towards its own resolution and therefore erasure (Pelksman 2013:16),

curatorial conspiracism channels doubt into a “never-ending, never-reconciled” (Dean

2002:94) account of paranoid possibility, which in turn is mimetic of the Internet’s

own sprawling and uncontainable form. There is always one more link to click, one

more connection to make—a fact captured in the anxious image of the bottomless

“rabbit hole,” which proliferates wildly within conspiracist discourse. As chemtrail

conspiracist Laura writes, for example: “These are well-documented facts and the

rabbit hole only goes deeper! Please keep digging but remember there’s lots of

DISinformation too! It’s taken me years of research and soul searching to get [...] a

clearer picture but I know it’s still so much bigger” (geoengeeringwatch.org).

Drawing on the five stages of grief, Cairns’ (2016:76) discourse analysis

emphasises the affects of “fear, anxiety, sadness and anger” that attend an individual’s

awakening to the global chemtrails conspiracy. Without discounting such feelings of

betrayal and rage, which are indeed palpable in the digital ethnographic record, we

argue that attending to curatorial conspiracism as a situated, practical act of

engagement with the specific form of the Internet qua infrastructure—and the specific

properties of the digital artefacts it enables—reveals a more complicated and

ambivalent affective make-up. “Forgoing the comfort of closure for the pleasure of

the search,” for example, the conspiratorial subject can perhaps find some degree of

gratification as well as anxiety or anger within “the excesses of evidence,

significance, interpretation, and meaning possible in conspiracy’s networks” (Dean

2002:95).

Conclusion

What this article has tried to show is two distinct ways in which the different

infrastructures of everyday existence help shape conspiratorial thought and, by

extension, the specific constellations of certainty and doubt it configures. On the one

hand, the structures of bureaucracy that now underpin existence in much of the world

is reflected in the particular ideas of the enemy that populate the conspiratorial

imagination; and on the other, the juxtapositional mode of demonstration proper to

much contemporary conspiracy thinking mirrors the basic architecture of the Internet

in which it flourishes. Both of these processes can be seen as broadly mimetic, insofar

as the epistemological form of the conspiracy mimics and is parasitic upon the social

and material infrastructures that precede and house it. They actually function,

however, in quite separate ways.

The bureaucratic idea both determines and limits the conspirator’s

understanding of how the world actually is and is governed – namely by complex,

sprawling, and faceless organizational forms intent upon the relentless expansion of

their sphere of control. It is the ground upon which the patient edifice of conspiracy is

constructed or the frame that delimits its conceptual extension. As such, it provides

the kernel of certainty necessary for the elaboration of any complex intellectual form.

And in so doing, it also perhaps performs one of the principle roles of mimesis, which

Taussig, following Frazer (2003[1900]), identifies as the capacity to establish a

control of sorts over one’s external environment. For Taussig, mimesis (like Frazer’s

sympathetic magic) allows one to “get hold of something by means of its likeness”

(1993:21) and so make it graspable; conspiratorial thinking does something similar,

not by imitating the form of its object, but by imitating the everyday infrastructures of

bureaucracy and projecting them onto its object. The Internet meanwhile functions

rather as a particular architectural technology that allows for the ceaseless

proliferation or ramification of conspiratorial doubt within this frame, like the

hexagonal structure of honeycomb. It espouses and extends the shape of its

subtendant digital architecture in an endless and constantly destabilising process of

mimetic reproduction. It is the confluence of these two infrastructural forms within

one style of reasoning that gives contemporary conspiracy its particular flavour.

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