This website shows 3 different versions of the intro to Feelings Over Facts: Conspiracy Theories and the Internet Novel, an essay for the Cleveland Review of Books. The second version, Filed, is what I sent to my editor, Philip Harris. His feedback was essential in getting to the final Published version. You can read more about the process of writing the essay here.
One of the most psychologically difficult parts of writing is that you're always seeing your terrible first drafts and everyone else's beautifully polished final drafts. And the process for turning a first draft into a finished piece can feel so mysterious and obscure—how can something so raw and unrefined become sharp, clean, and beautiful? Because I'm always looking for examples of how other writers revise their work, I thought I would contribute an example of my own. (You can do the same by remixing this site and adding your own content.)
Remember Trump? I hardly do, even though Nancy Pelosi texts me five times a week about him. America is hurtling towards another election, and it seems as if nobody—myself included—really cares; there are more articles about how little anyone cares than there are reasons to care. Benjamin Wallace-Wells’s characterized Biden’s campaign, for the New Yorker, as having a “characteristic mutedness”. It seems as if the Democratic playbook is rooted in the past, in an age when you could reliably get both liberals and leftists whipped up through a fear that Trump was not just an anomalous, spontaneous expression of ressentiment politics, but the harbinger of a new age of politics. Now no one I know talks about Biden. There’s a schism opening up, as Ross Barkan recently noted, between the Democrats trying to get me to vote for Biden again—and the people who have abandoned electoral politics, reserving their energies for pro-Palestine rallies and doing something about the genocide in Gaza.
The period of 2016 to 2020, when we didn’t just remember Trump—we
were reminded of him, every day, every hour, feels incredibly far
away.
TK somehow transition to conspiracy theories lol, or maybe open
with them?? Maybe Trump is too exhausting a topic to start off
with; maybe open with the meme
There’s one particular image which I think characterizes the
epistemological inclinations of the early Trump years, from 2016 to
2020. You’ve probably seen it: a board with a map, lots of pins on
it, and red thread worked back and forth to trace out some obscurely
important web of connection between disparate figures. The image
comes from a 2008 episode of
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, when one of the
characters, Charlie, develops a conspiracy theory out of the
ordinary events in his office life. The office regularly receives
mail addressed to a particular person, and Charlie is convinced this
person does not exist. In the famous scene, Charlie lays out—to his
TK description: befuddled? friend—all the clues he’s
gathered that this person indeed doesn’t exist. Charlie is
wild-eyed, with a frantic kind of energetic glow in his eyes,
wearing business casual clothing that is slightly rumpled by his
urgent enthusiasm, ready to explicate the conspiracy theory on the
board to his friend.
The meme is interesting because it stakes out both the impulse to
trace conspiracy theories, as well as the aesthetic qualities of doing
so. The clues appear in your ordinary life; the strangest, small
events can be a sign of something greater, a sign that something about
your life is illusory or not what it seems; the need to explain to or
enlighten others, to disabuse them of the notion that they live in an
unremarkably ordinary world, one that isn’t inflected with sinister
intent in the smallest places. To map out the conspiracy theory, one
has to assemble all these clues, all these small things, trace the
connections between them, analyze. To do so provides an intrinsic
pleasure, a consuming passion: as the Slovenian philosopher Alenka
Zupančič notes in the essay collection Objective Fictions,
published in 2021, “The investment, the passion, involved in
‘conspiracy theories’ is not simply on the side of conspiracies and
their revealing, but at least as much on the side of fabricating,
forming, producing the theory, assembling or recognising the things
that attest to it, interpreting and connecting the clues.”
something about the internet x conspiracy theories especially
The Trump years were characterized by panic, paralysis, and a
relentless energy for politics (mixed with an inveterate skepticism
and continual infighting on what kind of political action was most
useful) on the left; on the right, there was panic as well (for
establishment Republicans) but also a kind of exultant glee (for the
Bannon-aligned right wingers). The emotion everyone could agree on
was paranoia. Paranoia was behind the hourly updates on the latest
offensive thing Trump had tweeted and what it said about his embrace
of alt-right, revanchist politics; paranoia was behind the QAnon, a
pro-Trump conspiracy theory initially developed in 2017 on small,
anonymous message boards online before hitting the mainstream. The
idea behind QAnon was that a small, elite cabal of “cannibalistic
child molesters”
TK quoting wikipedia here but should reword
(cannibalism and child molestation being the greatest crimes against
humanity possible, once you decide that racism, or even flirtations
with white nationalism, are permissible) operated at the highest
echelons of society, quietly controlling us all and running a child
sex trafficking ring. This elite cabal hated Trump and was
conspiring against him, just as much as they were conspiring against
good, ordinary people who would never engage in cannibalism or child
molestation—but maybe do things like repost racist memes from time
to time.
Everything about that period felt unreal. When Biden defeated Trump in 2020 and became president, it was supposed to be a return to reality, to normalcy—although it’s questionable whether a return to status quo liberalism was really the right kind of normal, and it’s questionable whether normal was the place we all wanted to go back to, anyway. So it was over then, was it? Those strange years when we energetically debated whether QAnon was real?
But if Trump was shut out of the political establishment, dwindling
in power and reach (especially after his account was banned from
Twitter TK citation),
then the paranoid style of politics in the 21st century, the
conspiracy theory style of politics, has only grown. It used to be a
fringe phenomenon; now it’s normal. In the 1970s and 1980s, Zupančič
argues, conspiracy theories were “marginal and positionally
subversive”. The fact that they have moved “from the social margins to
[the] centre” of political life—and I would argue artistic life, as
well—is interesting and worthy of analysis.
TK some transition
Two books published last year investigate how conspiracy theories
have affected art, politics, and culture: the British art historian
Larne Abse Gogarty’s
What We Do is Secret: Contemporary Art and the Antinomies of
Conspiracy, and the Canadian activist and investigative journalist Naomi
Klein’s Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World. Both
investigate how TK. And both raise questions about how
conspiracy theories should affect the kinds of art, literature, and
activism we practice today…
961 words before introducing the books
You’ve seen this image before: a man in rumpled office clothing stands in front of a wall covered in papers, gesticulating wildly as he traces out the connections between the documents. It comes from a 2008 episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, where Charlie starts working in an office mail room and believes he has uncovered an obscurely sinister plot: there are letters being sent to someone named Pepe Silvia, who Charlie believes doesn’t actually exist.
The meme resonates because it perfectly depicts the epistemological inclinations of a conspiracy theorist. First, a small event might reveal an unsettling, false aspect of ordinary life. Next comes the the zealous practice of collecting clues and tracing connections, creating the satisfyingly dense visuality of the conspiracy theory’s map, infographic, or explainer. Inevitably, the conspiracy theorist develops the urgent desire to share their theory, to disabuse others of their comforting delusions.
If the Pepe Silvia meme represents the aesthetic tendencies of conspiracy theorists, then the idea of the “red pill” represents their allegorical tendencies. The phrase originated from the 1999 film The Matrix, where the hero is asked to choose between taking the blue pill (retaining his peaceful, anesthetized understanding of reality) or the red pill (which will shatter his illusions/delusions). He chooses the red pill and discovers an unfathomably deep evil controlling his reality—but he also learns about his own messianic power to combat it. Today, redpilling has become extremely online shorthand for all kinds of ideological realizations. In the manosphere, taking the red pill means believing that feminism is destroying men, society, and Western democracy. But the metaphor is also used for more frivolous forms of radicalization: you can be fish oil–pilled for the omega-3s, zone 2 cardio–pilled for your cardiovascular health, and journaling–pilled after reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. “If the metaphorical possibilities of redpilling are so varied,” Geoff Shullenberg suggests, it’s because it’s “an update of one of the oldest stories about knowledge in Western culture”: Plato’s allegory of the cave. Imagine someone imprisoned in a cave since birth, who can only perceive the world through shadows from the outside world that are projected on the cave walls. Released the cave, he becomes reality-pilled, seeing for the first time that the shadows were a flattened distortion of the real world. “His ascent to the realm of truth,” Shullenberg writes, “is painful and dangerous, and as a result of his discoveries he becomes an outsider to the society he once inhabited.” Encountering the truth leads to epistemic isolation; your reality cannot be reconciled with the people who insist on staying in the cave. But there are egoistic consolations: if your newfound knowledge leads to social rejection or ridicule, it must be because the truth is too painful to others to confront. You’re not a conspiracy theorist; you’re Cassandra.
Conspiracy theories are conventionally understood to be discredited, deranged distortions of the truth. In the 1960s, Nico Baumbach notes, the term was used to “undermine not only the far-right paranoid fantasies of McCarthyists and the John Birch Society, but also the legitimate ‘paranoia’ of Black Power groups, who…had very good reason to be suspicious of the FBI and CIA.” Paranoia bled across party lines; the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that it was “a common ingredient of fascism, and of frustrated nationalisms,” but also “frequently…seen in the left wing press.” But in today’s paranoid style of internet politics, conspiratorial thinking is more legitimate—and more powerful. Some of this can be attributed to Trump, who showed how conspiracy theories could be leveraged for political gain. Ensconced in the Oval Office, he tweeted about a “deep state” conspiring against him, styling himself as an embattled outsider—despite being the president of the world’s largest military power. Trump became the cause célèbre for the intricate, obscurantist QAnon theory, which claimed that the world was run by a shadowy cabal of elites, who were conspiring against Donald Trump and simultaneously running a child sex trafficking ring. QAnon is not a fringe theory; it has powerful proponents, like the congressional representative Matt Gaetz, Florida’s congressional representative, who courts the votes of true believers. While the conspiracy theories of the 1970s and 80s were “marginal and positionally subversive,” observes the Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič, today they are at the center of political life.
In contemporary politics, it’s the alt-right that is most suspicious of power. This is a strange shift from the last decades of the twentieth century, when queer theorists like Eve Kokofsky Sedgwick noted the pervasive paranoic attitude of her fears. This “anticipatory” paranoia, she noted, seemed to operate according to the following rule: “There must be no bad surprises.” Being politically engaged seemed to require an unrelenting distrust of the world around you, and how it was distorted by capitalism, structural racism, imperialism, homophobia, and misogyny. Being surprised by cruelty was a failure of ethics, epistemology, and above all, style: it’s cringe to be caught off-guard by evil. And the disillusioned were eager to inflict their distress on others. Sedgwick and other affect theorists, as Hua Hsu notes, observed that “many people seem to derive their greatest pleasure from making others feel bad.” Which raises the question: What’s the difference between conspiracy theory and critical theory? And how do you know which one you’re doing? “Let me be mean for a second,” the French philosopher Bruno Latour began:
In both cases, you have to learn to become suspicious of everything people say because…they live in the thralls of a complete illusion…Then, after disbelief has struck and an explanation is requested for what is really going on, in both cases again it is the same appeal to powerful agents hidden in the dark acting always consistently, continuously, relentlessly.
The Trump and early COVID years were characterized by repeated attempts to reveal what was hidden, unknown, and under-reported. During Trump’s presidency, earnest MSNBC liberals laboriously documented and fact-checked all of his offensive tweets. And during the pandemic, homeowners with lawn signs saying In this house, we believe: Black Lives Matter…Science is real insisted on debunking the beliefs of COVID deniers and vaccine skeptics. Political disagreements were understood as tragic misunderstandings, easily solved with a shared understanding of the facts.
Naomi Klein—a veteran of left-leaning, anti-globalization, climate justice movements—argues that this approach failed. In her latest book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, Klein investigates how conspiracy theories came to dominate the COVID years…
[276 words follow before the next book is introduced]
The role of conspiracy theories in contemporary politics is also the subject of the British art historian Larne Abse Gogarty’s What We Do Is Secret: Contemporary Art and the Antinomies of Conspiracy…
1,032 words before introducing the first book
You’ve seen this image before: a man in rumpled office clothing, gesticulating wildly at a wall of papers with red yarn slashing across them. It comes from an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, where Charlie starts working in an office mailroom and develops a conspiracy theory: that someone named Pepe Silvia, whose mail is regularly delivered to the office, doesn't actually exist.
The meme depicts the zealous energy of an internet conspiracy theorist, desperate to present his evidence. Its verbal equivalent is the phrase “taking the red pill.” In the 1999 film The Matrix, the hero must choose between taking the blue pill, which would keep his existing, anesthetized view of reality intact or the red pill—which would reveal that his world is a deliberately engineered simulation created to exploit humanity. Since then, redpilling has become “extremely online” shorthand for various forms of radicalization. In the manosphere, the “red pill” is the realization that feminism is destroying men, society, and Western democracy. But there are more frivolous uses of the phrase: you can be fish oil–pilled for the omega-3s, zone 2 cardio–pilled for your cardiovascular health, and journaling–pilled after reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.
The redpill metaphor is used, as Geoff Shullenberg writes, to describe the creeping suspicion that the “official version” of the facts, the “consensus reality,” is wrong:
The feeling that something is off leads to further investigation, which uncovers more inconsistencies, and eventually evolves into…systematic doubt…a generalized distrust of the surface layer of reality, and a search for a more certain anchor point in a hidden realm beneath.
In today’s paranoid style of internet politics, this suspicion of the “surface layer” has made previously fringe conspiracy theories seem more legitimate. They’re useful political leverage for people like Trump, whose tweets about a “deep state” conspiring against him made him sound like an embattled outsider, despite spending four years ensconced in the Oval Office. Trump’s underdog narrative was reinforced by the intricate, obscurantist QAnon theory, which claimed that an elite, all-powerful cabal was conspiring against him and simultaneously running a child sex trafficking ring. Even the most ludicrous conspiracy theories, it appears, can’t be ignored; as the Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič observes, they are “forcefully entering the public space, the mainstream, even official politics.”
Two books published last year take a closer look at today’s conspiracy theories: Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World and Larne Abse Gogarty’s What We Do is Secret: Contemporary Art and the Antinomies of Conspiracy. Klein, a Canadian writer and veteran of anti-capitalist, anti-globalization, and climate justice movements, investigates how conspiracy theories dominated COVID-era politics; Gogarty, a British art historian involved in leftist political organizing, observes how they’ve affected contemporary art and its aims. Both writers are committed to taking conspiracy theories seriously—not what they claim about the world, but why they exist—and what feelings and subjective experiences they reveal…
380 words before introducing the books