Episode 173: The Disinformation Society w/ Marcus Gilroy-Ware
A bird's eye view of how the market-driven society has evolved into a potent catalyst for "disinformation" and conspiracy theories. This week’s guest is Marcus Gilroy-Ware, senior lecturer in digital journalism at the University of West England and the author of 2017’s 'Filling the Void: Emotion, Capitalism & Social Media' and 2020’s ‘After The Fact: The Truth About Fake News’.
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Welcome, listener, to Chapter 173 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Disinformation Society episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Liv Agar, Julian Field, and Travis View.
Hello, everybody!
It is the first episode of the new year, and that makes me very excited to be doing this together with all of you.
And so, you know, as such, my beautiful friends, before we jump into things with the episode, any resolutions this year?
Stop posting.
I just, it's too, it's... You just stopped yourself from posting there, right there.
See, you're already doing it.
Right, right.
Perfect.
I'm going to resolve to be less of a doomer and get more politically involved.
And by that, I mean, I'm going to petition my congressman to make stealing blockchain based assets legal, because I think that obtaining, you know, NFTs by means of fraud or deception ought to be legal and encouraged, especially, I mean, The seeing people's, you know, NFTs be stolen on Twitter.
I wasn't on Twitter very much this past couple weeks.
I was trying to like, you know, spend time with my family and doing other things I enjoy.
But the occasions I did hop on, I did see the drama of people's, you know, apes being stolen.
And that was the delight, I thought.
We need to see more of this.
This is very fun.
We need the Purge, but for bored apes.
Exactly.
We need all those apes gone.
Yeah, you go out in the middle of the night, one day a year, and you can wear scary masks and destroy or steal as many bored apes as possible.
Yeah, I think that yeah, it's like, I think that that should be part of the game is that is that if you're too slow, and you click on the wrong link, or you're, or you know, you trust the wrong person, like a fake, you're like, you're a Facebook grandpa, you don't deserve your apes, they should they should just be gone.
Yeah.
Does anyone really deserve their apes?
I have deeply read John Locke.
The British empiricist, and there is no case be made that crypto bros have property rights.
Yeah, I don't see any labor being mixed in those apes.
Yeah, so he started with a kind of a positive statement and by the end, of course, it's put all apes to death.
Okay, so that's great.
We need a storm for apes.
You got anything going on?
Yeah, for my New Year's resolution, I'm just gonna read this quote from Exhibit, the rapper.
Because I think it's appropriate.
Right.
He says, yeah, check this out.
Let me tell y'all something about shit.
Because motherfuckers try to do it to you every day.
Try and shit on you, right?
Check this out.
Don't shake the shit off.
Because when you shake the shit off, you never know where the shit is going to land.
It could land on your girl.
It could land in your food.
It could land in your car.
Man, let the shit slide off you, homie, and hit the ground.
Cause when you shake the shit off, you have no idea where it lands.
Wow.
Wise words.
Yeah, that's very good.
No, I mean, and also, you know, I'm gonna try to, uh, you know, eat healthier.
I've, uh, I've got a wedding coming up.
I think I let it slide in an episode last year, but I have a wedding coming up very
soon and I'm trying to look handsome, you know, so there's no regrets on her side up
at the altar.
And yeah, I'm just going to try to eat healthier, maybe order McDonald's a little bit less.
You know, I'm going to try to not take Twitter so seriously.
I think a lot of times we were so we're so in the phones were so in the scrolling that we forget that Twitter is not real and it's not real life.
It doesn't represent the majority of what people believe or what they think or their values.
So I'm going to to start looking, you know, More outward for my information about where we are as people, at least within my small community, and not look so much down into the flat screen to try and gauge where our society is sort of at.
I think that that'll be good for me.
Instead of doing that, you can just press play on the podcast app and put it in your pocket.
You're not looking at the screen.
In fact, you're detoxing, technically, if you listen to us.
That's true.
You're doing a digital detox.
Oh, well, I listen to every episode, of course, you know, to hear my own voice.
I skip everybody else.
I skip around.
Right.
But I do like to hear my sections.
Wow.
Also, would anyone like to split the cost on a shed in Montana?
Yes, I would actually.
It's a good location.
But a shed anywhere, I would be totally down.
A farm?
Also, when I said I would stop posting, I'm going to continue posting but through a different medium.
Okay.
Okay, I see where this is going.
In fact, on Medium, actually.
I'm gonna pass on this.
Travis seemed to be interested though, so...
Yeah, yeah, you're just gonna send, you know, uh, threatening letters to the Washington Post or something.
Um, but yeah.
Hey, stop, stop, stop saying what you want to do and putting it in her mouth.
Maybe I'm projecting a little bit.
Those are the best resolutions are the ones that you influence somebody else to have.
Exactly.
That's so true.
And I do have a resolution of my own, which is to just be nice to everybody, all the people who listen, you know, be nice to Jake.
Nicer to me is a good one.
And just be nice to everybody.
Be nice to Travis, be nice to Liv, you know, be nice to Annie, and be nice to anyone I can be nice to, if it's within my power.
This is the year of nice Julian, and I want that on record.
Wow, alright!
On record, Julian will be being nice to Ghislaine Maxwell.
I... She's a misunderstood woman.
But yeah, so that's our year.
It sounds like it's going to be quite a banger.
We do have lots of cool stuff in store for all of you.
But to kick off the year, we have maybe the brainiest episode in a while.
I apologize for after a two hour episode on babes in Toyland and A bored ape meltdown from hell in this time of renewal and resurrection.
I thought it might be interesting to pull back a little and try to catch a bird's eye view of how we got to this particular moment in history and why conspiracy theories continue to be generated and popularized at such a dizzying rate.
That's why this week's guest is Marcus Gilroy Ware, Senior Lecturer in Digital Journalism at the University of West England, and the author of 2017's Filling the Void, Emotion, Capitalism, and Social Media, and 2020's After the Fact, The Truth About Fake News.
We'll be focusing more on the latter book in this episode, which explores not just conspiracy theories and quote-unquote disinformation, but also the powerful structures that give rise to these phenomenon.
So welcome to the show, Marcus!
Thanks for having me.
It's a real pleasure to kick off the year with a big brain, a new brain, and we're all going to get smarter together because, you know, we're all going to read your book after the fact.
I thought that it was, I don't know, it really builds this convincing portrait of how conspiracy theories and disinformation arise in what you call a market-driven society.
You're very good at providing historical context for your arguments, which is why you kind of decide and you admit, hey, we could go back a lot further, but it's a good place to start the post-World War II period, this kind of crucial juncture.
So could you tell us a little bit about that?
Yeah, absolutely.
So I mean, the book is very much, I mean, it's very much about the relationship between kind of that market driven kind of, I use the word neoliberal, but I don't use it so much in the book for certain reasons.
But anyway, the relationship between that world and the kind of phenomenon of, you know, heavily scare quoted fake news that arose, particularly after the election of Donald Trump in 2016.
And, you know, not only the kind of copious misinformation and disinformation that we we were seeing at that time, but also the kind of political
turn that that moment, like Britain's exit from the European Union represented. And, you know, I'm
also a teacher, I don't just write. So one of the things that I, you know, really enjoy about that
is having kind of conversations with the students and whether it's learning from them, or just
the conversations that I'm having in public or, you know, recalling my own education here as a
teenager in Britain in secondary education.
Just feeling that actually the way that the kind of recent history of the society we now have is told, is remembered, is constructed.
It's just really woeful.
But not only that actually, but the erasure of many details and aspects and contours of that story is a part of how we then arrived at this juncture.
That the machine, if you like, erases the traces of its own operation.
Not to speak too mechanistically, but you know, there's something about that kind of erasure which is part of the story that I wanted to tell.
It's a little bit like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where the erasure is the story.
So I felt that in order for us to reverse that, the first chapter, in a way it's kind of an introduction.
It's sort of separate from the other chapters, but I think it had to be this sort of, you And so, you know, in this period and then moving into the 60s, you're kind of wary of this idea that there's this great change that occurs, you know, in the 60s and then everything is different.
So can you tell us a bit more about, like, how the post-war period evolved into the 60s and then into, you know, the 70s?
This kind of consolidation of global capitalism into the 80s and beyond.
Yeah, well, maybe we can, you know, we can break that down because I mean, I was recording a podcast about a year ago and someone basically asked me, so you tell a lot of history in your book.
Can you summarize that for us?
And I was like, no, it's so long.
But you know, as far as the 60s is concerned, I mean, I just wanted it to be accurate whilst also brief.
So I had to do a lot.
I mean, that was the hardest chapter to write.
I think that and the conspiracy chapter were the two hardest.
And part of that was because, you know, I mean, At one stage it was 20,000 words as a chapter.
When you start trying to tell a history in one chapter, you realise how much there is, how many details there are.
It's always going to be an imperfect and incomplete story.
But where possible, even in parsing, you try to be as accurate and theoretically grounded as you can.
Although, of course, I'm sure we all always feel like there's more we could be reading.
We've never read enough.
But, you know, so one of the places I went for the 60s was Frederick Jameson periodizing the 60s, a really important essay on that topic.
And, you know, he's very kind of skeptical about the idea that the 60s is a sort of decade that changed everything.
The reason why that matters, though, as far as looking at, well, I guess all of the different, you know, elements of this This story in terms of tracing how we got to where we are now, is that I suppose I feel that something about that political turn that you know, Trumpism or Brexit or
Many other so-called populist movements in the world also represent is a backlash.
And it's a backlash against a certain kind of Nietzschean value free approach to life, you know, and that really that market driven kind of neoliberal world is sort of hostile to all other systems of value and valuation.
And that, you know, that was When when the neoliberals and the kind of conservative right working together in the kind of Soviet era, you know, the enemies were kind of left wing bogeymen, ostensibly left wing bogeymen called communists, there was a sort of certain kind of alliance there where certain questions about how these things fit together the kind of aspirations of neoliberal to neoliberalism to build a market driven society and, you know, the aspirations of, of
of conservatives always to try to make the world as kind of structures as possible around around their values, you know, that didn't have to be kind of picked apart too much that kind of alliance.
But more recently, you see that there's, there's been a kind of really a breakdown in that.
And so kind of exploring this, this backlash idea, I was thinking, well, where did a lot of the kind of more permissive elements of our, you know, of the society that we now inhabit as far as things that really piss conservatives off.
Well, there's a sort of story that is often told and like many stories, it turns out to be kind of, you know, incomplete and inaccurate and oversimplified.
But there's a story about how our society suddenly became very kind of permissive as a result of the 60s, the swinging 60s.
And so I felt that that was an important thing to include in the overall story being told.
So, you know, the kind of safety net, you know, in the West and this idea of taking care of one's society emerges after World War II.
And then in the 60s, there's these supposed kind of social changes that actually, you know, in your book, you make a good argument that the changes that were allowed to occur went towards this consolidation of power outside of the hands of what, you know, these people and these thinkers thought were totalitarian rulers.
So instead of ever having the rise of a new totalitarianism, they said, well, what if, you know, what if the market, this kind of supposedly neutral force, was, you know, dictating structure?
And obviously the 80s are kind of the explosion of that.
And so And then by the 90s, people are discussing the end of history.
So that seems pretty quick.
We did the revolution in the 60s, the 90s are the end.
Can you describe a bit this concept of the end of history and how you connect that to the resurgence of the right and Brexit and Trump?
Wow.
Well, you mentioned so many things there.
Sorry.
I mean, the end of history, I think we can come back to one of the things that we need to kind of say before we get to that is that this kind of proliferation of neoliberalism isn't a straight line.
You know, when I was researching the book, I discovered some really interesting kind of ruptures there, you know, as far as like, what the neoliberal relationship to internationalism or globalisation or, you know, different those kinds of forces were, for example, the original architects of Neoliberalism imagined a world in which certain kinds of valuation outside of the market would continue.
The structure of the family, for example, was very, very important.
So what seems to happen around about that moment in the 80s or early 80s, late 70s, after the kind of rubble of the kind of European social democratic project, is a kind of change in direction for what counts as neoliberal thinking towards a much harsher and much more kind of ruthless world in which those other kind of vestigial structures of
valuation are gone. And actually, it's a sort of really kind of abject, Nietzschean version of where the market
really drives everything about a society and those other values
aren't present anymore. So that that has to be said, because I
think otherwise, we sort of assume that the thing we call neoliberalism, you know, in 1940 standards, and the thing
we call neoliberalism, instead of 1989, are the same project, and I
just don't think that they are, I think there's things you can
trace about them that are the same, but also some important differences.
We can maybe come back to that if you want to.
But as far as your question about the end of history, I think, I mean, I sort of alluded to that already, but I think there's this kind of sense of when the world is structured by something as kind of scary, as, you know, The Cold War undoubtedly was.
I mean, I wasn't born when it was happening.
But you know, there's a sense of like, you kind of know who your enemies are, and the world is structured around a particular kind of order of friends and foes and all the rest of it.
And, you know, in this, I mean, one of the points that I'm trying to make in the book is that in this kind of story about what happened after the Second World War, and the kind of, you know, world, particularly on the European side, being kind of rebuilt after that, You know, enormous, enormously violent conflict and all the atrocities that occurred during it is that, you know, we talk about kind of conservatives versus radicals and the 60s and all this kind of stuff.
But while all that's going on, capitalism is slowly mainstreaming itself in the West.
Capitalism is certainly mainstreaming itself in the West and making itself fun and enjoyable.
And it's got a sort of optimistic utopian feel as a way of trying to get buy-in, right?
Hearts and minds.
And so that that's kind of happening all the way through the 50s and 60s.
And lots of the things that we associate with kind of classic Western culture, as far as, you know, rock and roll and, you know, types of architecture really are part of that process.
And much of which, of course, is actually borrowed from the ways that fascism tried to make itself appealing, kind of earlier in the kind of World War Two.
And before that, Nazis were absolutely pioneers of that kind of cultural, you know, cultural stuff.
But anyway, so You have this kind of capitalism is building its eight lane highway through the development of, you know, of Western culture as we know it.
And that's occurring within a context in which, you know, market capitalism and the kind of conservative American and British establishment is trying to keep the communists at bay all around the world.
And then suddenly along comes the end of the Soviet Union.
And that whole sense of, like, who's friends with whom and what does the world have to look like now in order to kind of encourage people's participation suddenly looks very different.
Because suddenly the capitalist world doesn't have to try very hard anymore to kind of incorporate people into participating with it.
It certainly doesn't have to give any more concessions to what we might call left-wing causes, you know, vis-a-vis kind of welfare state or those kinds of things.
And so that that produces quite a dramatically different order.
And for me, that's the moment I mean, not just me, but for lots of people, you know, I mean, Tariq Ali's book on the hard centre and kind of tracing that moment of the 90s and the early 2000s is, you know, I think for a lot of people that that's a very important moment as far as saying, well, suddenly, That kind of alliance between the conservative right and the market neoliberals doesn't really, it's not really necessary anymore, because the thing for which they were united has been achieved.
And now actually, capitalism has a sort of different job to do, as far as What kind of politics it's going to represent.
And yeah, so I guess that's kind of where a lot of scholars have identified a kind of death of the future, the loss of this kind of optimistic thinking around what governments and politics will be, and also the kind of loss of cultural innovations as well that were kind of always part of that project as well.
If you kind of see that kind of change happen, the loss of the future and all those kinds of things, and the kind of rampant neoliberalism that's cutting back welfare states, that's privatising everything, you're kind of setting in motion a collision course for, what will undoubtedly be at some point, a realisation that the idea of a capitalist democracy can't really work anymore.
Something that doesn't actually work on behalf of most people, and it's only a matter of time before that becomes evident.
You know, on the left, we've known for a long time that capitalism doesn't work for us.
But I think for the right, that's been a nasty shock a lot more recently.
And so the kind of backlash and the anger around that, even if it's totally misguided and sort of ill-informed, there's a sort of confused, blind, belligerent anger around that same betrayal.
Neoliberals don't work for anyone except neoliberals.
Right, and so the idea here is that slowly the values that conservatives thought would be ushered in through this coalition are being cannibalized by this thing that is kind of out of the control of even the people who had thought it up, you know, in the think tanks and all of this.
And so you get this kind of automatic development that starts to set in in the 90s and the concept of the end of history arises to, you know, explain that we've basically found the final logical state, this market-driven society, and that, you know, At least in the pamphlets that were selling it to us like this was going to lead to essentially, you know, everyone having a fair shot and more kind of equality of wealth and opportunity.
But what instead of that, we had a reduced amount of opportunity and the conservatives started to lose things like, you know, the primacy of the nuclear family and all of this.
And so you see the rise of, even in the 70s, kind of far-right parties that are essentially, you know, rising to meet the destruction of some of these values as they start to realize, uh-oh, it actually looks like, you know, even though we liked some of the cruel aspects of neoliberal capitalism, it actually won't spare the things that we value, the things that we call a kind of coherent society and set of values.
Absolutely.
Not only will it not spare those things, But it also, it has, we can get into the reasons why, but around that time, that sort of prevailing politics starts to use the language, a much more progressive sounding language, right?
And that's kind of through the 90s, I mean, you can really sort of see that, especially, I mean, I don't know about the States so much, but certainly in Britain, that's kind of become more and more and more the case.
And that this kind of harshly neoliberal government, think about the Tony Blair government, for example, are using pretty progressive sounding language to realise harshly neoliberal policies and to sort of justify them and so forth.
And, you know, having our language borrowed has turned a lot of people who might have been kind of open to progressive ideas completely against them, because that sort of anger can be focused towards those values because that that rhetoric has been used I mean, I caveat all of this because I actually think that racism is not a thing that has necessarily any economic origins and I think it's really important to be clear that racism is an old phenomenon that has been around for a long time and doesn't come
Well, you know, all of this is neoliberalism's fault.
And all of this is explicable, according to a kind of economic logic.
and it's there as well. And and other kinds of forms of social prejudice as well. I think
the dangerous thing is we try to say, well, you know, all of this is neoliberalism's fault. And
all of this is explicable, according to a kind of economic logic. And I think that what has happened
is that, you know, the things we've been talking about have poured a lot of gasoline on the fire.
But I wouldn't say that I think you can just explain all of the nastiest elements of this kind
of so-called populist turn just by just by telling these particular stories, because I think it's
there's more to it than that.
So, you use the term fake democracy and kind of zombie democracy.
Could you kind of explain how you use those terms?
Sure.
So zombie democracy, I suppose, any zombie anything really is the idea that something that kind of is dead, but refuses to die.
Right.
And so I mean, a zombie democracy is kind of the sense that there's this idea about a particular kind of democracy, Which has been kind of extolled and talked about for a long time.
The idea that, you know, I mean even going back to the Cold War, the idea that communists are kind of repressive and violent and often they were.
Therefore, ergo, capitalism is free and you can make your life under capitalism etc.
And of course anyone who's even looked with one eye at the history of neoliberalism knows that in fact capitalism doesn't produce freedom in a very systematic way.
You have this idea that capitalism is democratic And the idea can kind of outlive its own veracity, right?
In comparison to kind of certain forms of violent Soviet governmentality, maybe that's true.
But actually, it, as we've been talking about, sets up a world in which there's this sort of really inaccessible and harsh thing called the free market, in which most people are less free, not more.
But yet, even though the kind of harms that that system Produces continue, the idea of capitalism being something that makes us free also continues.
And the two things, although they're completely opposed, exist side by side.
And the persistence of the idea is the thing that enables that structure, that system to continue.
And so that was the sense in which I felt it was it was zombie because it was the sort of idea that refuses to die and kind of keeps itself keeps itself alive.
As far as fake democracy, I think, I mean, that was really more that I was hearing the phrase fake news, which, as you know, I take issue with in the book quite a lot.
And I wanted to kind of Find a quick and easy way for people to understand that the problem is not anything really to do with news.
That's really just a symptom.
But actually, it's important for people to understand this has a political and an economic kind of engine underneath it, which is much more complicated.
And the role of journalism, which is something I explore in Chapter 5 of the book, you know, is relevant enough for us to talk about is there's
something there. But actually, this is this is a much broader problem that's to do with
the kind of functioning of democracies themselves rather than simply the ways that the news media
work.
So you have these kind of growing contradictions and breaking apart of this, you know, conservative
center, even though the Overton window has shifted quite a bit. And like you said, you
know, neoliberalism in the in the late 40s was not the same idea that we're seeing put
into effect in the 80s is not the same idea that we're seeing put into effect now.
So the contradictions are rising, and there's this passage from your book that I wanted to read and have you develop a little bit for us.
Against the backdrop of fake news, we tend to talk about misinformation and disinformation as a very specific type of problem that certain people are responsible for.
Online extremists, big tech, the Russians, or unreliable social media users who are apparently stuck in echo chambers.
At the very least, any threats posed by these villains turn out to be more nuanced, but there is also the case to be made that this is an incredibly selective, exaggerated, and at times disingenuous understanding of misinformation and disinformation that has arisen in response to the highly specific historical conditions.
If we're going to talk about misinformation and disinformation, there needs to be an honest engagement with the ways that power and the shiny, appealing, market-driven forms it has assumed in the 20th and early 21st centuries wormed its way into our lives, invited us to participate, and guided what we know, believe, and accept about the world we inhabit.
So yeah, could you develop that a little bit?
Because I, you know, it rang true because we've been exploring on this podcast just the variety of things that feed into the birth and the adoption of these conspiracy theories.
It is dizzying how many kind of cultural vectors are involved.
So yeah, yeah, could you just kind of develop that a bit?
Sure thing.
I mean, that's the point of the book, right, is that this is a very multi threaded and complicated picture to try to pull apart.
And there are many things that you could say about kind of where this has come from.
I don't really want to try to kind of rephrase the thing that is already the whole point of the book is it's already the best phrasing that I could find, really.
So I think What I would say is just that I, in some ways, this book is a sequel to the last one I wrote.
And the last one I wrote was about social media.
And I was given three extra weeks to add to it because of the election of Donald Trump.
They thought that Donald Trump wouldn't win.
I thought that he would.
And then when he did, they gave me some extra time to kind of incorporate that into the book.
And one of the things that's just starting at the end of filling the void is this sense of kind of the structures by which we come to know about the world having been eroded.
And so it's no wonder that, you know, so called fake news is a thing.
And one of the questions at that moment that nobody was asking was, okay, let's say I really published something that is, by the most literal definition of the phrase fake news, you know, like these stories that were circulating about how You know, the Pope has endorsed Donald Trump or whatever.
If I'm pushing that kind of thing and people are actually believing it, the question becomes, well, why were publics so vulnerable that they would believe that kind of thing?
What is it in us that makes us so ready to believe that kind of nonsense?
When everything we could know about the world, you know, and in some ways we've never been more exposed to opportunities to learn about the world.
I mean, Wikipedia is not exactly the kind of beacon of You know, of knowledge, but it's certainly a reliable source for most things most of the time, right?
We could easily learn about the world much more than most people actually do know about it.
Why would we be so vulnerable in the face of all that information?
And that's the point at which this all these stories about, you know, Mark Zuckerberg is kind of single-handedly responsible or this was the Russians fault or whatever all of these kinds of liberal kind of explanations just fall to one side like they just can't really answer that and to answer that you have to you have to kind of look much more deeply at the ways in which we are kind of conditioned not to really want to know much about the world because it's you know for all sorts of reasons much more kind of fun and enjoyable and easy not to know and I mean you know this is what
The kind of thing that my students are being sort of tormented with all the time on a weekly basis by me.
But there's obviously a social side to that.
The fact that, you know, the cost of being wrong is so little, but the cost of losing your community, your friends and so forth over a very polarizing issue is much higher.
So if your community and your friends are all convinced of something that isn't true, it's much easier just to carry on convincing yourself of that same thing as well.
There's a cultural side to it.
If you look at the history of propaganda and advertising and Those types of things, we're well aware of that history.
People like Bernays.
Then there's the kind of ways in which think tanks and those kinds of institutions also decided that they had to enclose and take control of certain forms of knowledge production in order to serve quite specific and usually highly neoliberal, you know, market-driven interests.
There's, I mean, there's advertising, the list goes on, right?
There are all these things that are there that should show us that there's this kind of multi-decade history of making misinformation Commonplace, enjoyable and completely inevitable.
I mean, the last book, Filling the Void, was about this idea of depressive hedonia, that when people feel low, when they're looking at the world and they're disappointed with their lives or whatever, they need an escape, they're going onto these same networks of online media that we think, and the journalists that I've taught with for years, think are the means by which people are learning about the world.
If it ever was an information superhighway, now it's just the information lane.
Meanwhile, all the other lanes on the highway are disinformation, misinformation, you know, cat videos, whatever.
Lots of other things that have no real kind of informational merit at all.
And why is that like that?
Because, well, consumer capitalism finds that easier, right?
This is an attention economy.
It's not an information economy, at least as far as consumers are concerned.
So, you know, there's lots of threads here that I think are kind of, I'm trying in the book to weave them together.
Right.
One of the interesting things around conspiracy theories that I felt I had to deal with was the kind of hyperabundance of suspicion.
And I talk about this as the kind of politics of suspicion because I think there's a hyperabundance of suspicion amongst people we would call conspiracy theorists and there's also a real lack of suspicion in amongst certain sometimes a lot more sort of educated audiences as well which also lead to equally damaging forms of misinformation but in the case of conspiracy theorists that abundance of suspicion has political origins as well it has a structural origin right we are convinced that we're being lied to and fucked over all the time because basically we are just by different people than the people conspiracists think we're being you know lied to by so that's
I think there's lots of different things here that are kind of all relevant in terms of tracing that relationship to misinformation that we've developed.
Marcus, do you think that there's also an element of people sort of realizing whether actually or sort of unconsciously that these systems are kind of eroding and they might know that the thing that they choose to believe in is most likely bullshit, but at this point they don't care because it's a more Fun, or like you were saying, it gives them a community and they actually make the conscious decision to kind of just decide to believe in the thing that they like the most or makes them feel the best, even if they know, you know, on some level that it's unlikely to be true or real.
That's a really interesting question.
I think that, I mean, I'm not a psychologist, I should say, but one of the things that has been bothering me about this is the sense that the binary between unconscious and conscious fails to deal with an aspect of this really important aspect of this kind of informational paradigm that we're in where people kind of Half no, but it's never a fully conscious decision.
You can't be in denial about something unless on some level you know that thing.
But at the same time, that denial can be so pervasive and so reinforced by the structures that surround you, that you can never perhaps consciously be aware of the very thing that you're denying.
And so you end up in a kind of really interesting halfway point where you sort of know and don't know at the same time that you're wrong, you know, and I think that's, it's a sort of fascinating paradox and I don't have the answers around that, but it's definitely something I would like to explore further.
And one thing that I really liked in your book was the way you kind of conceptualize literacy, because I think it allows for an understanding of, say, someone believing in QAnon while having attended fancy schools and being financially well-off.
You know, these people's supposed, like, basic material conditions are met, they have the education, but they're still totally deep on QAnon.
So how do you use a word literacy In, I guess, a different way than a lot of people, which is like, oh, if you didn't get a good education, you are illiterate.
And, you know, that kind of simplistic thinking.
Well, I mean, actually, it's interesting, because real literal literacy is also declining in much of the kind of overdeveloped world.
And so that's, you know, that's the kind of interesting thing to have on the table, I suppose.
But yes, I mean, I suppose I've, I've been, because I'm a teacher, I've been following education policy for a long time.
And, you know, at least, you know, in the UK, there's a kind of steady push by the Conservatives who have been running things since 2010, to basically to send the education system back to a sort of like very traditional boarding school education, where you do your maths, you do your You know, English language, you do your science, you do the hard subjects, and kind of away from, you know, humanities, arts, forms of thinking about culture that, you know, had a moment where they were slightly more present in the educational curriculum.
And that's a sort of, like, more specific and identifiable version of a much more general pattern in which, you know, neoliberalism has an interest in producing certain kinds of graduates.
Right, certain kinds of thinking, certain kinds of competence.
And, you know, that's what markets want.
It also has an interest in, if you like, not producing people who are able to read what's going on and challenge those patterns as they unfold.
And so, you know, that creates a kind of prevailing wind that pushes people in a certain way.
So yeah, you can be the most over-educated person in a traditional sense, as far as getting all A's and a 1600 on your SATs or, you know, whatever it is, and yet still be lacking a kind of really fundamental understanding of the way that the capitalism runs the world.
And again, that's the sort of interesting, I mean, maybe it's an irony, maybe it isn't, it depends what you think education is, but I felt that that was something that, you know, Had to be a very important part of the book, this kind of sense that, you know, because there's this, even people on the left slip into this idea that somehow more privileged people are smarter, you know, or that formal education equates to kind of having better politics or whatever.
And it's just so not true.
And it's, it's really kind of insulting to a lot of working class comrades who would Very easily disprove those kinds of prejudices.
So I suppose that is another reason why the distinction between literacy and education for me was really important.
I was also kind of thinking about Bell Hooks and her idea of education as a practice of freedom, and I wanted to kind of distinguish that a little bit as well.
Right, right.
And so, you know, we've kind of explored now some of the forces that are, you know, pushing and pulling in a macro sense.
But how do you fit that in with the rise of something like QAnon?
You know, this kind of, you know, ur-conspiracy theory, this umbrella for other conspiracy theories in the context of what we've been discussing.
Well, I mean, you know, everything is a product of its historical circumstances.
Obviously, QAnon was building for a while, I think that you can say certain things about pre-COVID QAnon, you know, and Petergate and that kind of stuff that relate to really the ways that that kind of hyperabundance of suspicion that I mentioned earlier, addresses that sort of Yeah, there's a lot of hard centrist kind of end of history arrogance, and tries to make sense of it.
You know, the sort of obsession with the Clintons is a really interesting one, or Bill Gates, these people who don't really represent the left or the right, they just represent money.
And, you know, With conspiracies generally, but I guess particularly of late, you know, the line I've been walking, which I know is a kind of perilous one, given how much I disagree with, you know, basically all of those theories, is to say that on some level, that at least the hyper abundance of suspicion that they represent, has a kernel of truth to it, right?
I mean, I kind of think that That very starchy kind of rich centre is morally bankrupt and, you know, hypocritical and arrogant.
I really do believe that.
The Macron's of this world, the Tony Blair's of this world, the Keir Starmer's of this world, you know, there really is very little good to say about them.
And even if they're not ideologically neoliberal, they're certainly enablers, really kind of foolish, arrogant enablers of The very worst things about the world we've built, including of the far right, actually, in a kind of interesting symbiotic way.
But anyway, so there is a kernel of truth in the sense that we should be looking at that at that centre.
And in fact, I spend a whole chapter kind of basically trying to take them down as best I can.
So, you know, as far as pre-Covid QAnon, I think there's a sense of like you're faced with something that's bad or doesn't feel right, or it's extremely arrogant about its own forms of an expression of exercise of power.
But you haven't been endowed by the market-driven world and its education systems and lack of literacy to really make sense of that properly.
So the most appealing narrative, the most exciting narrative, or the one that your family and friends already believe, ends up being the one that you adopt rather than the one that, say, Based on, you know, on books or on historical precedent or on learning in a different kind of way.
I mean, back in November when, well, last November 2020, when my book came out, I was asked by James Butler, like, well, if this is what you believe, Marcus, why aren't you a conspiracy theorist?
And I was, I mean, I was kind of He's a brilliant interviewer.
And he asked me a lot of really great questions.
And I wasn't anticipating that one.
But I guess the words that I blurted out were, because I have marks.
But certainly, I think that, you know, because on the left, we've been kind of dealing with that exercise of power, that sort of bourgeois, arrogant, you know, those forms that power takes for a much longer time, we have a kind of abundance and wealth of theory and thinking about how they operate.
With I mean, to some extent, a little bit kind of more inoculated against some of those kinds of more fanciful ways of trying to make sense of our circumstances.
Meanwhile, I don't think you can say the same about conservative communities at all, for reasons we were talking about earlier, that kind of betrayal and so forth, and that sense of being on the same side as them.
So that's the kind of general picture.
And then and then obviously, the pandemic has just been a kind of incredible opportunity for this Conspiracist, I don't know what you want to call it, disinformation economy to sort of amalgamate and for all the different nodes to find each other and to kind of strengthen one another.
And obviously, anytime there's a crisis, I mean, the work of Kate Starbird is brilliant on this.
There's always an abundance of conspiracies about what's really happened and, you know, filling in the kind of the gaps, you know, the sort of loud silences.
And so obviously this has been a huge crisis, been a huge collective trauma.
It's been a moment where we've been asked, rightly, it's the one in a hundred time when we've been asked rightly to put our faith in the system a little bit in order to get through it.
And of course, conspiracists have a field day with that.
So that's, you know, really proliferated everything.
And I think, you know, one thing that's interesting is that you kind of, you mentioned that, you know, disinformation and even this resurgent kind of far-right belief system is kind of the lifeblood of social media engagement and that a lot of it kind of is almost like necessary to the larger management of the system, like they arose together instead of in opposition.
Maybe, am I misinterpreting that?
No, that's right.
I mean, there's a couple of things there.
I mean, I do think that, you know, foolish conspiracy theories are helpful to the system in the sense that if you have a really exciting and appealing story about, I don't know, the basement of a pizza parlor or something, you're much less likely to be paying attention to what the real story is, which is probably more boring.
There's more bureaucracy, there's more paperwork.
It's not fun to discover, you know, what's actually happening, as many investigative journalists will tell us.
It's kind of dreary and depressing, and in the end we need to know it, and there may be some kind of surprising exposés, but... So, you know, in a way, social media, first and foremost, is not about misinformation or disinformation.
For me, I felt that it's about non-information, right?
It's an attention economy product.
That's what it sells, and they want to command our attention with whatever They can get with whatever is going to kind of distract us and pull us towards them.
And so that might be cat videos or people on TikTok dancing or whatever, all of which is relatively harmless.
I happen to quite like cats.
But then there's also all of the misinformation and other aspects of that which are much more kind of concerning.
The social media companies I don't think really care one way or the other.
I don't even think that they necessarily even have the literacy to be able to kind of make a decent theory
about all of this. They are very much of that system that says that market valuation,
including their own share price and shareholders' interests, are paramount. And the rest is
kind of collateral damage.
Yeah. On the notion of Marx, I think his concept of ideology seems really important here. And to
inoculate one against conspiracy theories.
Because for Marx, ideology is autonomous, right?
So it's not as if all of this is the product of some scheming backdoor CEOs and billionaires saying, this is the narrative we're going to drive.
And to a certain extent, maybe somewhat, it's a part of that.
But it's like they're being bamboozled as well.
Yes.
We're all being sort of misled here.
And I think that, like, especially in relation to social media, like one of the reasons why it's so conducive to producing these fantastical stories about, you know, how these backdoor, you know, deals are being made that decide the world.
You know, these these absurd conspiracies about children in basements is because they get, you know, clicks basically.
And the algorithm is just censored around, like, How many clicks can we get because that makes money?
We get more ads and then the revenue continues.
And so it's almost, in a certain sense, like these social media companies are pushing this just because it makes money.
It's not even a, to a certain respect, it's not even an elaborate plan.
Red, I want to hear your thoughts on that.
Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's absolutely right.
I think the kind of Marxian approach to seeing this as a self reproducing system that doesn't have some kind of evil genius stroking a white cat in a high back chair was really important.
It's the only way really that we can we can kind of make sense of the of the crisis that I'm talking about is very much through looking at that.
And that was why kind of looking at liberalism and looking at conspiracy theorists and looking at, you know, I mean, one really good instance of the pattern you describe is in journalism, Something I know well from having taught alongside a lot of quite seasoned journalists, who are I'm sure great journalists, but very wrong about, or some, I should have some amazing colleagues, but over the years, I've also had some colleagues that were very wrong and very positivist about what they believe journalism was, they really thought that they're the ones who go and find the information through news gathering,
and then share it with the public and that's a public service that's kind of sacred.
And I just felt like, no, sorry, you have idiots in the newsroom and idiots reading the paper and
they're kind of, there's a sort of closed cycle there. And you know, in a sense, what social
media companies do is they've taken that same cycle and they've just kind of really accelerated
and intensified it.
You know, I don't even think that they consciously push certain stories.
I mean, the jury is kind of out on that.
just think that they are producing what they have created is the algorithm that does, you know, we
call pre selected exposure, right, where it reads your preferences, and then tries to feed you things
that fit those preferences. It's not very sophisticated, it's just kind of mostly a
quantitative machine. So the idea, for instance, that it's selecting for you based on sort of your
ideological commitments, or that people only see left wing content, if they're left wing,
and that kind of stuff is mostly not, not well founded. But, you know, the algorithm is a means
of production, it's a way of making money, it's a way of harvesting our attention. And they are
constantly trying to improve it to make it better, you know, commanding our attention. And that's,
that's their focus. And, you know, with these kinds of like networks of people, and these kinds of
structures, in which it's never one person, there's no, there's no singular bad guy. I think
one of the interesting things about this, as far as like, accountability, which, again, is something
that I would like to work more on, thinking about how these patterns we've been talking about,
you know, apply to the idea of accountability.
But here we have kind of a network of the naives and the cynics.
We don't really know who is who, which is which.
We just know that like some people probably know the harms that they're doing and others don't.
I mean Nick Clegg, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats, is a really good example.
He seems to be utterly convinced of the benevolence of Facebook.
But on the other hand, he's paid a large sum of money to be convinced of that and to go and communicate that.
that. Are there people at Facebook who really know how harmful their products
are? Well actually recent exposés have shown that yes there are, but whether or
not they're really in charge or you know exactly what the balance of power is and
what the ways are that they think about these things, we don't know.
And we may never know.
But I think it's a kind of interesting kind of shredding is, you know, who are the evil ones?
And who are the good ones?
And actually, everyone's kind of in between, because money conditions, you know, the ways that people think about these things.
Yeah, which I think is a better attitude because it relates to structures, not to speak too mechanistically, but it's not as if like, oh, well, we just need to replace Mark Zuckerberg with a nice guy to run Facebook.
Yeah, exactly.
That wouldn't work.
Well, and and specifically, I mean, talking about social media in relation to QAnon and Travis can tell us more about this than I can.
But there's also this element that you have politicians, you know, people who are in power, who, you know, one would one would think, you know, has some sort of You know, ability to influence, you know, the current system.
They are reading the same shit that their followers are on Twitter.
They're getting pilled on something that they, that, you know, bubbled up from QAnon onto a message board or onto Twitter and then they are adopting those beliefs and then, you know, influencing the system on something that was essentially made up online that they believe.
You know, uh, we saw this, um, uh, the episode a couple weeks ago where we were talking about this, this PowerPoint presentation that went around, uh, you know, in the, uh, in the lead up to January 6th, you know, about how the, you know, Donald Trump could reclaim the presidency or, or, uh, or state, you know, stay president or, or, or root out the, the, you know, the quote unquote fraud.
And, and this stuff is just bubbling up from online.
You know, it's just bubbling up from the same, I guess we're all feeding at the same trough.
And that includes the people that are supposed to be sort of protecting us.
Yes, there's a kind of cyclical nature to it.
I mean, I think I'm a little kind of cautious around, you know, I mean, not for a second.
Am I criticizing your your rhetoric?
But I think when we talk about politicians, we have to be very careful because there's so many different kind of approaches to that.
And, you know, one of the things about Trump or Marjorie Taylor Greene or one of these other crazies is that they represent Yeah, there are politicians who are simultaneously very much inside the system, but also completely don't believe in the system and are trying to kind of undermine it.
And that kind of turn against democratic systems is something that, you know, has its own its own origins in this in this populist turn, whereas like a classic kind of establishment politician, for example, It's someone who probably thinks that they still do believe in the system.
Maybe sitting on a few committees and be getting kind of intelligence briefings or whatever and maybe taking like a John Bolton type, you know?
I mean the breakdown in relations between John Bolton and Donald Trump was kind of predictable in a way, precisely because there's a rupture there between two very different kinds of doing politics.
Yes.
And John Bolton, you know, not for a second do we want to make him into the good guy.
But, you know, there was a kind of, he believes very much in a certain version of the political machine in a way that like Trump's whole platform is that he was against the machine was going to kind of completely change it from outside.
So I don't know, I think, I think I would like to, I think that distinction is a helpful one.
There's still It's terrible on both on kind of both sides.
But then you have the sort of one or two or possibly three politicians who actually may be trying to do something good.
But of course, they're always a tiny minority.
Travis, you wanted to ask something?
Yeah, you know, I'm curious, and you mentioned say, you're not a psychologist, but I'm curious, like how much of the destructive I mean, I'll draw a parallel to the food industry.
The reason that there's a Burger King and a Pizza Hut and a Quinoa King and a Romaine Lettuce Hut is because the people desire sugar, the people desire grease, the people desire salt, the people desire the things that hurt them.
Ultimately, if you take too much of it.
And this is just the way our human brains were evolved in the savannas of Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago.
And it's just hardwired in how we are.
And of course, there are systems that provide, you know, excess amounts.
Of course, Americans suffer obesity and the old disproportionate rates, whatever.
But but at the same time, I feel like, you know, the reason that people seek out these destructive, ludicrous stories or misinformation or, you know, destructive or, you know, foods which can be harmful in excess is because of like how they are just like in a root software programming.
And there will always be people who, you know, who crave sugar and there will always be people who are willing to provide those people.
I mean, that's a fantastic question.
I mean, I actually deal with this pretty head-on in my previous book, Filling the Void, partly because, you know, there's people who have a problematic relationship to refined sugar.
I'm one of them.
I have been my whole life, really, certainly my whole adult life.
And, you know, in my classrooms we often talk about, from an informational perspective, the idea of, like, making the people eat their veggies.
And, like, what do you have to do?
If you run a restaurant and you want people to eat vegetables in a way that is, like, plant-based and healthy and all the rest of it, you have to do quite a lot of work on those vegetables to make them palatable.
And this idea of palatability in a kind of consumer economy, I think, is just really, really important.
And obviously, you know, there's lots of industries that have, for quite a while, They make their money on selling us things that link into various kind of structures of the brain, as far as our reward system.
There's a lot of talk about dopamine, mostly quite oversimplified, but I did a sort of deep dive into this stuff when I was writing that book, looking at, for instance, why if you look at pictures of food on social media, so-called food porn, well, firstly, why is it called that?
But secondly, the fact that the Facebook page At the time, Facebook was still the main social media, but the Facebook page for chocolate ice cream had hundreds of thousands, if not millions of likes, but the one for celery had 900.
had, you know, 900. And, like, I mean, that's pretty, like, crude, kind of
quantitative data, you know, but I felt that I put that against some research
that I had found into the kind of the impact of internet porn on the brain and
the ways that that is actually very similar to what I saw happening with
with social media, with the social media timeline.
I think there's definitely things, I mean I'm always a bit wary of like the appeal to nature thing, but I think there's definitely strong parallels that you could draw as far as thinking about, you know, On some level, like, every cell in your body needs glucose to stay alive.
So, I mean, is it so strange that you would crave sugar?
I mean, lots of my kind of more sensible friends claim that they hate candy, but on some level, maybe deep down, there is a desire for sugar and fat and salt.
Primarily those things, but also if you're IN deficient, for example, you start to develop all sorts of other strange cravings.
So there is a kind of psychology of food.
Comfort food is a real thing.
I've also looked at research on that.
So yeah, I mean, I think as far as information, it to me isn't strange at all that there would be similar patterns here because certain forms of media do feel better and other forms of media are more difficult, certainly a lot less palatable.
And I also want to clarify, I'm not judging anyone's eating habits.
It's very real and the people at Facebook and Instagram know that.
That's one of the areas where they have done a lot of research.
I also want to clarify, I'm not judging anyone's eating habits.
I literally ate an entire large pizza by myself last night.
So yeah.
No, of course.
I mean, I'm sure we all have confessions we could make there.
But, you know, that's that's the nature of the system we're in, isn't it?
I think I think also just to briefly add on to that, like like psychologically speaking, people always have sort of stupid thoughts, so to speak.
But it's just like about creating a system where those stupid thoughts don't attach someone to like a far right, you know, fascistic movement.
It's right.
Quite, quite.
Because that's very historically contingent.
It is absolutely and geographically contingent as well, even in a globalized world.
I mean, in 2019, I had an interesting experience, briefly being a guest of the Norwegian government and sort of got talking to some some government functionaries, their speech writers, that kind of thing, low level civil servants, and I was talking to them about their populism, and the kinds of issues They have to deal with and so forth and they were saying I mean maybe they were a little bit kind of rose-tinted about this because they're in the government but you know they were saying well we can correct misinformation like really easily much more easily than we see you guys having to deal with this but more to the point you know I remember at that time the mayor of Bergen was about to start seeking re-election and the main issue that the sort of UKIP equivalent Republican equivalent people had fastened on to was tolls, road tolls.
And I was like, I wish I lived in your country where, okay, there's lots of other problems, but like, if that's as bad as it gets, you know, then definitely it's a very different term.
You could see the same contours, but the issues were different.
I think that's the point that I'm making.
So yeah, it's definitely very historical and geographically contingent.
And that was one of the hard things about writing about this.
It's like, I didn't want to write a book about Britain only because that, that was me.
I didn't grow up in Britain entirely.
And, you know, I think a global outlook is important.
But then at the same time, Rodrigo Duterte and Donald Trump might seem like they're similar in some ways.
But the things that have been happening in the Philippines, things that have been happening in, you know, the United States, and let's say, you know, the things that have been pushing Fidesz to the top of the polling in Hungary and keeping Viktor Orban in power are all kind of actually there's points at which they, you know, they They're very different.
So, I mean, I guess the question, to kind of finish off that sugar conversation, the question is, are we doomed to create systems that ever accelerate and kind of pornogrify, whatever word you would use there, but pornogrify our natural desires?
So, for example, you might wake up craving sugar and fat and salt, but There's a difference between that and opening your social media feed and seeing a bunch of photos of hamburgers and then having those rise to the top because of engagement, and then your kind of addictive, you know, tendencies will start to feed back into that system and create a kind of ever-worsening and tightening cycle.
You know, it's hard to talk about human nature when we get up in the morning and the first thing we do is check a feed, again, curated by a company, that is only interested in your attention. And then our
desires, our natural desires, have to play out through that existing system. So the
question is, are we just going to make worse and worse fast foodified versions of social media that will
make us want fast food even more? And I mean, is this intractable? You know? Yeah, that's a good
question.
I mean, I think I wouldn't separate them because I think there's one or two companies or five companies whose interest is our attention, but there's probably, you know, 500,000 companies who are their clients, whose interest is in selling those other things.
And let's not forget that they're paying the bills of the first group of companies.
And that when you have these kind of structures of economic relations that are about pushing one thing, and then that's the whole basis on which your society is constructed, you have something that, again, I feel like the metaphor of the prevailing wind, the fact that winds will slowly blow from west to east is kind of a good one, because it's like, well, if you want to sail in one direction, you've got to push harder than if you're going to sail in the other direction.
In other words, there's always going to be a tendency Within these societies, for certain things to be, you know, easier.
And this kind of, I mean, as you call it, pornogrification of our information, I think is definitely one of those effects.
You can't sort of see it in isolation and just say, well, you know, we wake up, we see the thing on the time, and then we kind of The fact that McDonald's exists or the hamburger exists or the hamburger has been commercialized in this way over the last you know again 70 years or something is also part of that story and I think this is one of the points that I wanted to make generally about social media and and culture and information is that
We tend to, I mean I'm not saying that we're doing this now, but I think in general these conversations tend to look at social media in isolation.
And they often do that as a way of not having to talk about capitalism more generally, which is flawed and will produce lots of harmful outcomes with or without social media.
The tobacco industry is another fantastic example of that.
Where you have, you know, not only do you have organized disinformation, which is always fun, but you also have, you know, something which is not even part of our kind of so-called natural urges, right?
It's just the sort of like chemical that's in this plant that once you start smoking it, it's addictive, you know, and also really carcinogenic and harmful to your body, to everyone's bodies.
And yet, look at the kind of fortunes of the tobacco industry over its history.
No.
And of course, then it's relationships to other parts of the machine, it brings us back to those think tanks again.
So it's, you know, this is the challenge, right?
I mean, one of the reasons why, you know, we're talking about literacy, or these kinds of big pictures that we've been making here today is that, like, it's a very difficult thing to make sense of all of these things.
At once, you know, it's it's like really takes a lot of work, even if you're used to researching and writing about these things, it's still a lot of effort.
And so it's kind of no wonder that like these kind of ways of looking at the problem are either erased, or misunderstood and simplified.
Or, you know, lots of other things happen to prevent that kind of I like to go back to your example.
It's like, you know, uh, I think it was celery, right?
it's like a sort of, not exactly grand unifying theory, but there's a way in which, you know,
it is a sort of extremely big picture that's kind of irreducible.
I like to go back to your example. It's like, you know, I think it was celery, right? It's like,
if you're presented with a photo of celery and a hamburger, most people will click on the hamburger,
but that doesn't mean that they wish their entire society was structured around the
worship of the hamburger. And that's what they're already born into.
So, you know, it's not like... They might be... I mean, it's questionable if they're even aware of what the original natural relationship you would have to any of this, because there's so many layers of, like, previous creation that are... Yeah, it obfuscates, you know, I think, like, any clarity.
Yeah, I mean, I think obfuscation is the key word here.
You know, this is not only a self-reproducing system, it's also a self-obfuscating system.
And so I wanted to explore a little bit, you know, the one big part of QAnon and a lot of the kind of far-right reaction to media involves just this, like you said, just insane levels of suspicion, especially at the mainstream media, the MSM.
Just absolutely central to almost all conspiracy movements, at least since, you know, 2015.
And you kind of took a look at some particular British outlets that I thought were pretty interesting.
For example, you know, when you're looking at suspicion, could you describe kind of what happened to the Guardian from about 2015 onwards and what the DSMA notice system is?
Well, I can do I mean, I have to say I'm very much indebted to an investigative journalism outlet called declassified there.
That's their story, really.
So well, I can I mean, it was a good illustrative instance, but in a way, it's not, you know, I, I would recommend your listeners to go and kind of look that up and read it.
But just very briefly, what Mark Curtis did in that article was to look at the change in editorial stance at the Guardian, sort of through the second decade of You know, basically from like 2010 onwards, I think, and to kind of consider The Guardian's relationship to power as kind of formerly having been the sort of progressive or even left-leaning newspaper in Britain, the primary one.
And I mean, without wanting to be sort of ad hominem, I think there's one of the theories there is around the kind of change in editorship, but also perhaps also the change in conditions.
As Liv said, it's rarely one person.
It's much more, you know, The kind of structure overall and the historical conditions overall that are interesting.
But what this article did, Mark Curtis's article, was to think about Alan Rusbridge's kind of editorship of The Guardian as culminating in the sort of Edward Snowden expose there around You know, what GCHQ and their friends at the NSA had been doing.
And to see the kind of the Guardian's expose of that as a sort of combination of a certain kind of like hostility to power, challenge to power that they felt was their role.
And, you know, one of the bits of that article that really stood out to me was the sense that like journalists who had brought that story to print, Right, who had then watched as British spies had required the destruction of computer equipment containing that story as a way of trying to stamp it out, like literally going there and drilling through hard drives and that kind of thing.
Journalists who you would think would be horrified at that kind of suppression very quickly then end up sitting on the DSMA notice committee.
So for the non-British I should just explain quickly what that committee is.
The committee is made up of government officials, military officials and journalists working together to decide if and when there is a story where publishing that story and publicising it heavily would be harmful to the national interest.
The committee decides to put out a voluntary notice called the DSMA notice.
SMA is Strategic Media Advisory, right?
So they basically say, we would prefer if you didn't publish anything about this, either ever or until we're ready.
Outlets don't have to follow it, and The Guardian didn't used to.
But what happened was that one of these journalists who was involved in this kind of Snowden thing ended up sitting on that committee, which is quite a sort of inversion.
And, you know, The Guardian also then transferred to the editorship of Katherine Viner, who had had a kind of rather different background in journalism, a lot less kind of hard journalism, investigative, newsy stuff.
This is not an ad hominem criticism of Katherine Viner, but just to say that the paper kind of did change its focus, as would be, you know, common with any change of editor-in-chief.
So, Then you have Guardian journalists sat on the DSMA notice and a lot more proximity to the security and military establishment and a lot less rocking of the boat in the years from around 2015 onwards really.
So that's the kind of instance that I gave, just the proximity between journalism in a mainstream sense and power in a mainstream sense.
And, you know, most of the best journalism that I'm seeing is coming from startups and kind of insurgent small organizations like Declassified, like Open Democracy, like The Intercept, Democracy Now!
have been going for years, you know, many others, but definitely not The Guardians and The New York Times of this world.
I don't think that's their role any longer.
If you look at The New York Times' support for the war in Iraq, for example, I think that's another rather galling example.
And so do you think that over time, you know, this shift, you know, for example, you also studied a bit how the BBC progressively shifted the references to think tanks towards more conservative think tanks over the last, like, couple of decades.
Do you think that there's that shifting of the Overton window and at the same time stuff like the DSMA notice system, which, you know, is then creating excess suspicion And then people are saying, well, it's the mockingbird media.
They get their talking points every morning from the CIA and MI6 and, you know, and take it too far and create that backlash or?
Well, I mean, there is a simplification.
I mean, you know, one of the things that I think we can wrestle with is the fact that, like, are people knowledgeable enough to even have read the journalism that We could say has produced their suspicion because a lot of the time, you know, if they had they wouldn't be coming up with these kind of alternative narratives because there's lots of like independent investigative journalists that are giving us the kind of the real story already.
But yeah, that's not the kind of narrative that the conspiracy theorists are adopting.
They're taking Something which is neither the official line, which they know to be suspicious of, or the kind of so-called truth, you know, that these kind of journalists who don't have an agenda or have a lot less of an agenda besides, you know, paying their rent, have.
They're taking something else.
And so, like, there's a bit of a kind of oxymoron there.
Well, how can they be suspicious because of the real abuses of power that are happening if they're not actually reading about those kind of real abuses of power?
And so I think you kind of, it's more that there's a kind of generalised malaise, a generalised kind of suspicion that kind of slowly accumulates like a sort of sludge within the system where, you know, when do people get to see a politician really do something for them, put their, you know, put their necks on the line for them?
When do we ever see anything other, you know, if there's a hundred stories showing politicians being lying and cheating and, you know, and none showing them doing good things that would already be bad enough but of course it isn't even like that there's just like the thousands that have the establishment line a hundred that have the kind of more kind of um ethically motivated kind of journalistic thing going on and then um the kind of sobering truth that the actual there's nothing saying that the system that is working in your favor these things really are you know there's there's like um that so so what i'm saying is that suspicion suspicion can like slowly accumulate and i i see
No, it's okay.
being the thing, the suspicion and the anger that this kind of system produces, or the
things that have slowly accumulated. And that eventually it's like a kind of, well, it's
a bit like a dam collapsing. So yeah, I mean, I feel like I've sort of slightly strayed
away from your question. So if you would like me to follow up.
No, it's okay. You know, you kind of, we've kind of talked about how the system after,
after, you know, the fall of like actual global left wing powers, the system basically moved
into management mode because it didn't have as much opposition. And so it's trying to
kind of vent these suspicious tendencies, right. Through a variety of mechanisms.
And, you know, there's been all these different attempts at doing that, both ill-intentioned and well-intentioned, but you're saying basically that the system over time has basically not been able to catch up to the rise in suspicion, and it's now becoming overwhelming.
Well, I mean, it goes back to what we were saying earlier about the kind of illiteracy within the newsroom, within the system as well, right?
So I don't know that they necessarily even have enough of the right kinds of analysis to show them that that's what's happening.
I mean, the levels of arrogance about the kind of you know, how good how great the system is, you know, are pretty staggering.
So I think it's a sense of like, if you're arrogant about the kind of harms that you might be doing, then those harms can sort of multiply and, and, you know, accumulate over time.
And I think it's, it's more that rather than I mean, sometimes there may be an intentional kind of venting of, you know, but I I'm always kind of a bit reluctant to go down the kind of intentional route, because you just never really know with intentions, right?
Exactly whose intentions are what.
Right, right.
Yeah, no, the system itself doesn't exactly have intent.
It just, you know, it's like when conspiracy theories rose, you saw the rise of like fact checkers and stuff like that, that attempted to kind of help people process some of the suspicion. And that's,
again, the system just kind of self managing, right? I mean, it's like the algorithm
trying to compensate for excess of something. Yeah, I mean, fact checkers is always a bit
kind of bit of a bemusing development in a way, because they're sort of, you know, at
best, decades too late. But also, it's the sense of like, I mean, you know, I've had all my
vaccines, and I'm not an anti-vaxxer.
But like the idea that you can sort of like get rid of the problem of vaccine hesitancy by just
kind of forcing everyone to participate in the system is a sort of like, that's a great example
of the kind of positivist arrogance that I think I see as being so central to these processes of
It just isn't going to work and it's probably going to make the system worse.
And so yeah, you know, continuing on that kind of dam metaphor, I think Liv had a question for you.
Yeah.
On the subject of the dam breaking metaphor, it seems that the only movements that are, or at least most of the movements that are exploiting the proverbial cracks in the system are either explicitly on the right or some sort of confused amalgamation of local problems without, you know, a central left-wing critique.
So like the Yellow Vest Movement, for instance.
Why do you think it is that the right has been seemingly so much better at exploiting these cracks in the system?
I think that's a really good question.
I mean, I don't necessarily know that I'm qualified to give you the entire answer.
But I think one of the things we can say is about temporality.
I sort of alluded to this earlier, but I sort of feel like, you know, I mean, again, these labels are not don't fill me with joy.
But the left has sort of got about 150 year history of kind of arguing about what's going on and about the exercise of power.
But in almost none of that time have we really, you know, in the sense that most kind of contemporary left wing people would think of, we've never really been in power. So
there's always this kind of external, rather academic arguing about what's happening, often in
the face of things that we can see are crises, but which, you know, perhaps the other participants
don't necessarily recognise the harms that are being created. But as we were saying earlier,
there's been this kind of, the system sort of works if you're right wing, and it works
if you're a free marketer, or at least that it did until relatively recently, right?
Basically 2008 is kind of the drop off point there.
And so it's a much more kind of sudden shock.
And I think that sudden shocks are always going to kind of hit the cracks a little different than a sort of 150 year conversation about base and superstructure or historical materialism or, you know, what the bourgeoisie is up to. And the other thing is of
course, I mean, I really want to talk about this a lot, but there's a lot of infighting
on the left about exactly which is the right analysis, which is always kind of a bit
heartbreaking. But at the same time, we've all been there, we've all been involved in some of
those kinds of heated discussions, and a lot of them do matter.
So, you know, it's, I think there's probably a lot more that one could say about perhaps, if the world has been constructed in a kind of image that's that's an amalgamation of right wing and free market thinking, then, then in a sense, that's going to be the best placed ideological system to kind of to take advantage of whatever vestigial pieces are lying around and left over by those formerly, formerly empowered systems that did work.
Before this kind of moment of rupture.
It's the sort of, I mean it makes me think of that rather creepy Milton Friedman quote about like our job is to generate ideas and have them be lying around and then when the crisis comes you know these are the ideas people will pick up.
We have not really been in a position on the left where we're kind of churning out ideas that people could use when a crisis comes along.
I mean a little bit yes but not really as much.
Yeah, no, the ideas that are picked up are definitely not that.
It's a combination of, you know, on the left, like, a think tank that, you know, would be already pretty horrifying, and then on the right it's the Cato Institute and, you know, the whole Koch machine.
There is a, you know, that dark money and, I guess, the structure of manipulating human feelings and of being those ideas laying around when the crisis comes, that's a long time It's not just like a natural process, you know, they invested a lot of time into making the system, you know, have those things be the available buttons when you need to press something on the machine.
Yeah, absolutely.
And let's not kind of underestimate money as well itself.
I mean, like anyone who's ever tried to set up like a left-wing Mont Pelerin or a left-wing Cato Institute or a left-wing any version of these things knows that immediately that's the problem you run into, that they have all of the kind of oil wealth and, you know, All these kinds of things that just aren't available if you're kind of coming at this from a kind of, you know, perspective.
I mean, that's why figures like Bernie Sanders and, you know, Jeremy Corbyn and others are interesting because what successes they have had, you know, even if bitterly defeated at the last or whatever, are kind of remarkable in the face of that kind of incredible difference in resources.
Yeah, and it seems like we have to deal with the problem of, like, ensuring that the discourses and ideas that are picked up in Crisis that were initially left don't just turn into, like, basically, like, Blairite sort of new labor, where the ideas are sort of shifted to be used for the sake of profit, while maybe appearing still somewhat on the left.
We have to make sure that those ideas are being picked up against the system to sort of make the cracks show even more, and for the benefit of the worst off.
Yeah, so you don't have one enemy, you have two, because you have people appropriating those ideas to the wrong ends, and then you have people who are just completely against those ideas to begin with, and you're kind of fighting both simultaneously.
Maybe that's why we can never have any kind of power.
Yeah.
And so, you know, since you wrote this book, Marcus, the world has changed and we no longer need to worry about anything you laid out.
But still, I'd love to get your observations on like the last couple of years since you finished it.
Wow.
Okay.
That's quite open-ended.
I mean, I think we could, I mean, well, let's just say this.
I mean, one of the things that I was asked about a lot when the book came out is about solutions.
And I think that, you know, I didn't quite realise how big the pandemic was going to be, right?
I mean, I finished writing the book, I sent the book off very last, you know, corrections in sort of August 2020.
And, you know, then we were sort of like, we'd done the first wave, and we sort of hoped, you know, maybe there might be a second wave.
And after that, we kind of go away.
So I didn't realise it was going to go on like this.
And I think maybe, I now think it may never go away.
But, um, sorry if that's kind of pessimistic.
Jake just coughed in reaction to that.
Yeah.
Dying right here on the call.
But, um, so I think, you know, the conversation around solutions is one that people wanted to have a lot with me and it's a very difficult one, but I think it's a very important one.
And I think that, again, it sort of relates to what we were just talking about, actually, as far as like, you know, um, when I, in my sort of limited attempts at organizing, um, I have found it very difficult to get, um, People who have a sort of like basic politics of wanting to look after people who they do not know personally.
It's very difficult to get those people to like line up.
It's very difficult to get them to kind of cooperate with one another.
It's very difficult to get them to have a kind of policy around when are they going to be transparent and when are they going to be strategic about their, you know, declaring what they're up to.
It's very difficult to get people to like start an institution and have a sort of constitution within it and stick to the rules that they make.
And it's very, you know, it's very difficult to get people of conscience to talk about taking back power, actually, as well.
All of these things have been enormous obstacles to my limited attempts at trying to organize anything.
And so, you know, I know that there are some people already kind of writing about this but I think I've certainly been reflecting on this a lot more since the book came out because I mean I got a bit of shit from the publisher for not having more solutions in the book which I think is entirely justified actually but certainly I would like to kind of to focus on that more and I've been thinking about that a lot in the last two years.
I think I was going to say something else but I can't remember what it is now.
No, it's fine.
I mean, you know, what do you make of the way, you know, more specifically, conspiracy theories are propagating?
I mean, do you see this dam basically continuing to break down, or is there a point where some of these factors might change, you know?
I mean, I'm really not trying to make an episode that's fatalistic.
No, no.
No apologies needed.
It's just that it's more of an observation of history rather than a proposal to change it.
It's just kind of seeing the factors and what is now the dominant structure.
So yeah, sorry, go ahead.
No, no, no apologies needed.
I think there's lots of solutions that have been proposed.
Solutions that have been proposed to the general problems that we've been talking about
and to the problems specifically of conspiracy theories.
In both cases I think we're looking at a very slow solution, if there is one.
Even the things that we've been talking about didn't come about overnight.
That's why the history of it is so important.
The big question for me is, do we have time to put in place a solution like that before it's too late?
We have lots of time In theory, if we're talking about fighting fascism or, you know, fighting big tech, but as far as the environment, and the kind of denialism and conspiracism around that issue, and also just the ways that, not even conspiracy theorists, but just the structure generally doesn't really want to change its direction in relation to that crisis.
I worry that we'll run out of time in relation to that crisis before we can really put in place the things we need.
So don't worry about the conspiracy theory the tsunami will be hitting first.
Well I mean I am worried about all of these things and like much the frustration of some of my comrades I am kind of eternally optimistic about this because I think basically you have a choice to kind of stand up and try and make the world better or crawl into bed with a bunch of haribo and give up you know I don't I don't really see that I mean I think most people are doing neither but I actually think that the choice between us really is one or the other not to be too sort of like binary in our thinking but I think that's kind of You know, it's sort of somewhere there, really.
And, you know, I suppose it's, I mean, one of the conversations that's really interesting, I think, is about what the imagination can do in these contexts and how, if you can get people to imagine different outcomes and to think about the world and imagine it differently, then you can probably produce different outcomes.
And one of the things is in relation to people's own agency, getting them to kind of imagine that they actually can do something.
And I don't mean like stopping using plastic drinking straws, you know, I mean something a little bit more material than that, even if it's just like, join a group, join a group, you know, even if it is arguing about whatever left wing, you know, philosophy, I don't care.
I'd rather people were doing that than doing than doing nothing, you know, and I mean, I think, um, If you want to do music, join a band.
If you want to save the world, then join a group that's about doing that.
But the idea that any of us can do much by ourselves, I think, is one of the things that prevents action from being taken.
And there's lots of world building we can do in groups.
Some of those groups are going to be really frustrating and annoying, and some of them are going to be really powerful eventually.
But it's just, you don't know unless you start.
Travis is holding up a very obscure Leninist pamphlet that he wants us to read.
He's holding up the Unabomber's manifesto.
Oh, that's what it is.
One of the more recent Michael Moore films, whatever you think of Michael Moore, I think there's a quite powerful section where he he talks about like, well, when you know, when did America
become such a kind of right wing country? Well, the truth is, it never never was
actually, if you take the party names off the policies and talk to people about just
general ideas for how to kind of, you know, how to make things better, they actually support
quite a lot of progressive ideas. And, I mean, it's, it's always a bit tricky to say,
well, people's kind of grievances are well founded, because, you know, it shades into a lot
of other things that perhaps aren't.
But actually, their basic affective frustration at the system, even if they're not entirely sure why, often is.
And it often is about, if you were to drill down enough, it often is about the kind of things that we've been saying for however long.
But it's just like the polarization is kind of cutting across that.
You know, it's like they'll support something until they figure out that it's a A democratic, you know, policy and then and then they'll suddenly drop it.
But what's really interesting actually is the people who say they'll either support Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders, they just won't support like Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or, you know, whatever.
And like that kind of thinking is just getting so common now.
Like I'm seeing so much of it kind of out there in the in the environment where these people who are sort of like got a weird fascination with like left-wing critical theory but then also are kind of clearly outright in a way as well.
I've had my book talked about and recommended to each other by some people whose politics I find absolutely abhorrent.
The first book, the Filling the Void book, I was really kind of stunned by that.
There's nothing in that book that could possibly be construed, I don't think, in a way that's anti-Semitic or anything.
But there was something about its approach to dealing with power and centrist hypocrisy That they like.
So there's a lot of confusion and sort of weird, you know, it's like a sort of belligerent, confused anger, like, like people have like blindfolds around their eyes, and then they're kind of provoked into anger, and they don't really kind of know which which way to stab, you know, that's sort of, I mean, it's probably a bit of a patronising metaphor, but in some ways, I think it's not far off.
Yeah, it's like, it's almost like we need to redefine the terms, you know, as Mortimer Adler says, is that, you know, so many people's, like you were just saying, you know, they think that this idea is good and then they find out that, oh, that's a social, that's a progressive thing.
Well, wait a minute, no, I don't like that.
If we didn't have any of these terms to label these things, people would just know an idea that feels right and feels like, feels like it's something that is for the good of the people.
Absolutely.
I mean, I'm not one for policing language.
But you know, I mean, I think as far as how we talk about political ideas, that's definitely there's only a case to be made.
I mean, I tried to write a whole chapter around what I would call liberals without using the word liberals.
Because I was talking to one person who's kind of advising me a little bit and I was like, but how can I talk about this thing if I don't, I don't like the words?
And he was like, well, just don't use the words.
I was like, how could you even do that?
But I think, you know, liberal, to me, that's a problem because it means so many different things in different places.
The idea that like Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton supporters have are on the same team is ridiculous to me.
But to many people, they're all liberals.
That's clearly crazy.
Progressive isn't that much better, particularly as it, you know, encodes the idea of progress, which, you know, I think is really problematic.
I mean, then you have moderates, you know, which are basically set up to kind of make you making them sound like they How, I mean, how could that possibly be a bad thing to be sort of moderate?
It sounds sort of like a warm bark.
It's like vanilla ice cream, you know.
And then, and then centrist, which is the same, you know, like, I mean, it's like, not too spicy, please, right?
Not left wing, not right wing.
It's just in the centre, therefore it has no ideology.
I mean, the number of times I've seen, you know, like schemers that talk about like the media, or how left wing or right wing is this particular media outlet, and then the sort of ones in the middle are considered to be objective and balanced.
And it's like, No, they're just as ideological.
It's just that their ideology is just money.
No, because the right will read the paper and be like, well look, there's a fucking ad for McDonald's that's pro-LGBTQ.
And then the left is like, that's a fucking ad for McDonald's.
And so everyone's fucking pissed.
Well, like, it's crazy.
I've had friends, I've had...
You know, long political discussions with friends where we're like playing video games late at night, we're chatting on a headset and they're talking about all of the, you know, their politics and what they believe in and it's totally, you know, what I would consider somebody who is left, uh, or progressive.
And then I would say, well, you know, how do you, how do you define yourself?
And they say, oh, well, I'm a centrist.
And I think that it just, people, like you said, the definition of the term can even just come down to somebody's just individual idea of what they think it means, you know?
It's wild.
And often it doesn't match anything to do with like policy or even an understanding of ideology on the right or the left, right?
It's just the idea of like, hey man, like I'm chill, I'm not gonna like argue with my racist uncle too much, you know?
All the racist uncles have also learned a thing or two about this, right?
Yes.
I mean, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, often known as Tommy Robinson, is sort of, you know, kind of right-wing, I guess you'd say, agent provocateur of a certain kind, who's, you know, known for his Islamophobia and all this kind of stuff, and is funded by American and Australian dark money.
I was very good at saying no, but I support gay rights and I'm a liberal and I'm this and I'm that and has a certain way of talking about himself that is aimed at borrowing that technique that real liberals have.
It's like the borrowing of the borrowing, like these kind of centrists take left-wing language and use it about themselves so they can push free market policies and he's learned Right from that and is doing the same.
So he can push Islamophobia and all sorts of other kind of unsavory things and harmful things.
And it's like, I mean, this is no wonder people are suspicious, because nobody's really being honest or truthful about what they actually believe.
I mean, you know, even if you are kind of quite clear about your left wing politics, and you have read quite a lot about left wing politics, there are still situations in which you can't really say exactly what you stand for.
And certainly in my institutional life, I have to kind of Tone it down.
I have a wager with one of my colleagues about which one of us is going to get written up in the Daily Mail first.
So yeah, I mean, it's that.
Yeah, that's the confusion.
That's the illiteracy.
That's the kind of suspicion that these are the conditions that produce that kind of like, extreme obfuscation that we've been talking about.
There's one general idea I was thinking about briefly that I could ask you about.
It seems like, especially in sort of my impulse to analyze where these movements came from, there are two general like polls where I'm being pulled to.
One is to make like an overly structural analysis and to say like, well, this is a product of capitalism.
This is almost like, you know, Not inevitable, but like, of course this is going to come about in relation to this system that's existed.
This is, you know, profit, MCM Prime, you know, making money.
This is a product of structuring our society around the market.
And the other sort of poll is essentially to say, no, this is a very particular phenomena.
We can't universalize this.
We can't say that, like, this was inevitable in some sense.
I almost see this in, like, Fisher's writing about Neoliberalism and the Thatcher government, like, we take this to be an inevitability, but then it turns out that it was actually quite contingent.
There were many moments where it could have broken up.
We weren't necessarily going to land on this position.
I wonder what your sort of, because I see sort of both our polls to some respect, and what you've been talking, how you've been analyzing this, where you position yourself there.
Well, I think, I mean, that's a really perceptive thing to say.
No one's ever asked me about that as far as my work.
I think I try to have my cake and eat it, to be honest with you on that.
I sort of think it doesn't have to be one or the other.
I think you can say that there are aspects of the ways that capitalism works that go back to its very origins in the 16th century that kind of, you know, in hindsight, make this situation kind of a likely culmination in a way.
But then, obviously, there are so many contingencies and so many things that that happened. And there's so much historical and
geographical specificity. And, you know, the important thing, I suppose, is how we then take account
of that in any solutions we try to implement. Because, you know, obviously, if we're too
deterministic about it, then we sort of end up being kind of either resigned to our fates, or,
you know, we end up saying, well, the best thing we can do is just kind of hasten our, you
know, the sort of acceleration is thing, But I mean, the danger of the kind of other extreme is that we fail to see that, I mean, to a large extent, each version of capitalism is the product of the previous version of capitalism.
And so even if there isn't one thing that you can blame that's the kind of, in a grand unifying theory way, there is a way in which a kind of more abstracted, structural, joined up analysis of capitalism's tendencies It's essential to how we do build that solution, because there are some of those fundamentals that, you know, have to be gotten rid of, right?
I mean, I believe the free market, as we know it, has to go.
There have to be other systems of valuation that have to come back.
And that's basically, you know, I mean, that's what we were saying.
That's what the right have been trying to do, is reassert their kind of, all of their moralistic anchors, because they don't know it, but they're fed up with the kind of extreme, valueless approach to everything. And so it doesn't have to be those
values, it could be other much more kind of useful ones that I think we could be much better about
articulating. If we, to go back to what we were saying earlier, if we can kind of make the
people eat their veggies then maybe we can do some of that work. And that's one area where Mark
Fisher's work I think has been inspiring to lots of people. This kind of quote that his students, a
quote from I think it's chapter three of Capitalist Realism that his students went and
wrote on the wall after he died.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
The idea that imagining things to be impossible is part of how you make them impossible and likewise imagining them to be attainable is part of that.
You don't have to love all of Fisher's work to actually really take something from that.
Imagination and values and togetherness I think are A part of how you can do that.
Byung-Chul Han's work has actually been really helpful to me as far as thinking through some of these problems as well.
But yeah, I mean, it doesn't have to be either or.
It can be both.
It can be locally and historically specific and also structural and abstract.
And I think it's really kind of a yin-yang sort of situation.
And there's probably other approaches that are neither that could be helpful as well.
It's like, you know, there was always going to be a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sequel.
You know, the first one was incredibly, it did incredibly well.
It was based on this, you know, this IP that had swept, you know, children of the 80s and 90s by storm.
There was always going to be a sequel.
Now, whether that sequel, you know, nobody knew that they were going to send the turtles through time to like, you know, feudal Japan and make an absolute fucking mess of it.
It's like the sequel was inevitable, but how shitty the sequel is, that is down to the specificities and the details of the creators.
I'm sure Fisher would agree.
Yeah, Fisher would agree with that.
He was definitely against, Yeah, it's like, come on, the whole idea of the Ninja Turtles that's cool is that they're in New York, you know?
They're kind of like living in the sewers.
You send them to Shogun, Japan.
Do they even have a sewer system?
I mean... I believe that was a critique he made of the sequel on his blog, K-Punk, at some point.
Oh, there you go.
Yeah, I mean, I was thinking of another slightly more, well, another example that came to mind.
Please save my analogy, please.
Yes, perhaps.
I mean, for those people who, I mean, I was really entertained reading Ninja Turtles when I was little, so that analogy worked fine for me.
Okay, excellent.
I think another one could be, I was just thinking of a story that my mum tells in her book which
is coming out next month, called Return of a Native, where Anthony Fisher, who's the
founder of the Institute of Economic Affairs, obviously one of the really important institutions
in the history of development of free market capitalism, made his money from industrialised
chicken farming.
And the way he was able to do that was by going to the United States and bringing, illegally, bringing eggs back into the United Kingdom from the States in his luggage in a very kind of carefully concealed way that then enabled him to build this kind of business empire that would then fund the Institute of Economic Affairs.
But if either of those eggs had broken, then, you know, perhaps the whole world would be different.
The effects of the Institute of Economic Affairs would not have been felt.
In a year since 1955.
So, I mean, I'm sure we could, for hours, we could probably find lots of other examples like this, but, you know.
Yeah.
But that's a great one too, because eggs by nature are so fragile.
And, and I mean, hell, like if you're traveling, I mean, everybody, you're always going to break something in your suitcase if you're traveling.
So especially like, but you know, back in those days, you know, you didn't have the smooth airplane rides and the careful baggage handlers.
This is a call to all baggage handlers to really beat the shit out of every suitcase you can get your hands on.
Especially if it has an upper-class luggage kind of tag on it.
Oh, Louis Vuitton, me thinks you are smuggling eggs to create capitalism.
Smash!
Well, thank you so much, Marcus.
And really, I do recommend people read your book.
It is so much more coherent than anything we're going to be able to explore.
And like you said, You, you know, carefully crafted each word to be the kind of simplest and most straightforward kind of way of saying these things.
And yeah, I really appreciated it because it doesn't, you know, even though the conversation today has been quite heady, I don't think your work is inscrutable in any way.
It was a great read and an easy read.
So I do recommend people go check out After the Fact by Marcus Gilroy Ware.
And where else can people find and support your work or follow you?
Oh, wow.
I mean, I have a website, mjgw.net.
I don't have any, I don't have a more recent book that I can plug here.
But I can definitely say thank you to you all for your attention to my work and for your enjoyment of it and your attention in this attention economy.
And please support your local independent, well it doesn't have to be local, but an independent journalism outlet.
Especially if it's a startup, like people really trying to make a difference and do kind of good investigative work because the idea that all journalists are bad And people could also follow you on Twitter.
problem. And I'm by no means a defender of journalism. But I
think some of the kind of younger independent insurgent voices that I see already, you know, they give me hope. So
I think if $5 a month, $10 a month, we can all support
something like that, I think we would definitely be going some
way towards kind of making that long term solution that we've been talking about.
And people could also follow you on Twitter. Your handle is MJGW.
That's right.
Thanks so much for joining us, Marcus.
Thank you so much to you all for having me.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Please go to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and subscribe for $5 a month to get a whole second episode every single week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
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Liv, where can people find your other content?
Yeah, I have a sort of philosophy-related podcast that's just called Liv Agar Podcast.
Just search Liv Agar, whichever podcast hosting site you use.
The Patreon is also Liv Agar.
I also stream on Twitch, also under Liv Agar.
And my YouTube is Liv Agar YouTube.
It's a one-stop shop.
You put Liv Agar into any box that has a blinking cursor where you can write text, and you will open up a wealth of incredible content.
You know, similar avenues to some of the stuff we talk about on the show.
There are some platforms that they don't need to type Liv's name into.
What?
I'm just saying.
Well, there are, of course.
You never know.
You never know, folks.
Okay, maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.
You know, not any platform, okay?
Use your brains on this one.
It's a new year.
Everybody's thinking better.
Use your brains!
Use your brains and, as such, your judgment.
Yeah, no, go check out all of Liv's stuff.
You can also go check us out on Twitch at QAnonAnonymous, and I'm Julian Field on Twitch as well.
And for everything else, we have a website, QAnonAnonymous.com.
Listener, in this new year, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's a fact.
And now, today's Auto-Q.
Government just isn't working for the hard-working families of America.
We need fundamental change, not more of the same.
That's why I've offered a comprehensive plan, a real plan to rebuild America.
Create 8 million new jobs, invest in education and job training, ensure quality, affordable health care for all.
We're going to ask the rich to pay their fair share so the rest of America can finally get a break.
