In April 2020, while Britain was adjusting to the first weeks of the Covid-19 lockdown, telecommunications masts began to burn. Fires were reported in Birmingham, Liverpool and elsewhere. Engineers maintaining communications infrastructure encountered abuse and threats. At a moment when much of the country had retreated indoors and relied more heavily than ever upon its communications networks, some people had become convinced that the infrastructure sustaining those networks was implicated in the catastrophe unfolding around them.
The source of their conviction was a set of claims connecting Covid-19 with the introduction of 5G mobile technology. The claims varied as they circulated. One version held that electromagnetic radiation weakened the immune system and thereby increased susceptibility to the virus. Another attributed symptoms associated with Covid-19 to 5G itself. Still others incorporated pharmaceutical companies, governments, technology firms and international organisations into increasingly elaborate accounts of what was taking place. The precise theory could change from one telling to another while the underlying suspicion remained intact.
A respiratory disease and a telecommunications technology don’t have much in common. Somehow they entered the same imaginative universe. Within that universe, implausible and somewhat funny rationales became the ultimate source of truth. For a number of people, that account became sufficiently compelling to justify vandalism.
Before anyone can believe a conspiracy theory, somebody has to construct it. Its constituent elements have to be selected from the vast quantity of information available in the world; relationships have to be established among them; agents and motives have to be assigned; coincidences have to acquire significance; and the resulting account has to become intelligible to other people. The” theory” can shape the architecture of belief.
The internet has transformed the scale and speed at which this construction can occur. A person confronted by an unsettling event can offer an interpretation to thousands of strangers within minutes. Those strangers can add examples, retrieve older controversies, identify possible culprits, produce images and diagrams, introduce analogies, and connect the event to grievances that predate it. Search engines and social platforms make enormous archives of material available for this work. This results in a peculiar form of collective inquiry in which explanation develops through successive acts of association.
This process forms the subject of Ctrl+Alt+Doubt: Decoding the Language of Online Conspiracy Talk, by the management scholars Hayagreeva Rao and Henrich R. Greve. Psychologists have examined the cognitive dispositions associated with conspiracy theories and the attraction of intentional explanations during periods of uncertainty. Political scientists and sociologists have studied institutional distrust, polarisation and social identity. Scholars of digital media have investigated recommendation systems, echo chambers and the rapid circulation of misleading information. Rao and Greve bring language to the foreground. They ask how conspiracy theories are made through conversations.
Analysis of conspiracy theories often begins once they have been fully formed. Researchers ask who believes it, which demographic characteristics correlate with belief, how exposure affects acceptance, and which interventions might correct the underlying misperception. Rao and Greve move upstream, towards the period in which the conspiracy theory is in its nascency, when seemingly implausible theories are floated on the internet.
They call one element of this process “distributed doubt”. The phrase describes a social condition in which uncertainty is shared, elaborated and organised through interaction. A participant in an online forum may be pulled in through a nagging doubt. Why did this happen here? Why did an institution change its guidance? Why does this photograph contain an apparent anomaly? Another participant offers an explanation. A third remembers a similar claim from several years earlier. Someone identifies a possible beneficiary. Someone else gives the suspected actor a motive. Through repetition and elaboration, a collection of observations begins to acquire causal form.
Rao and Greve use the concept of bricolage to describe this work of construction. The term, associated most famously with the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, evokes the activity of making something from materials already at hand. Conspiracy theorising proceeds in a similar fashion. People confronting an unfamiliar crisis draw upon familiar cultural materials: memories of previous scandals, suspicions about powerful institutions, established political narratives, fragments of scientific vocabulary, religious imagery, stories about elites, and earlier conspiracy theories. Novel explanations arise through new combinations of existing elements.
Covid-19 offered fertile conditions for such bricolage. The pandemic combined profound uncertainty with enormous personal consequences. Citizens had to make decisions about risk while confronting an unfamiliar pathogen whose behaviour scientists themselves were still learning to understand. Meanwhile, millions of people experienced the crisis through screens, often while physically separated from the institutions and communities through which uncertainty had traditionally been mediated.
Under these conditions, explanation itself became a form of social activity. The significance of language becomes clearer here. Words organise relationships among otherwise disconnected phenomena. Repeated associations can place concepts in semantic proximity: “5G” beside “radiation”, “radiation” beside “illness”, “illness” beside “Covid”. Other terms introduce agency: “government”, “pharmaceutical companies”, “globalists”, “cover-up”. As these associations recur, they furnish a vocabulary through which subsequent events can be interpreted. A new piece of information enters an environment already structured by previous connections.
Rao and Greve describe this consequence through the idea of a “semantic cascade”. Conspiracy theories can become connected through linguistic and conceptual proximity. Acceptance of one set of associations supplies materials for interpreting another. A person already accustomed to understanding institutions through a vocabulary of concealment and manipulation has a ready-made framework when the next crisis arrives.
This helps explain a striking feature of contemporary conspiracy culture: its capacity for combination. The boundaries between theories are porous. Narratives concerning vaccines can intersect with suspicions about technology companies; suspicions about technology companies can merge with ideas about government surveillance; those ideas can connect with older accounts of international organisations or financial elites. Each connection enlarges the explanatory system while preserving a recognisable grammar of hidden agency.
The word “grammar” is useful because the content of conspiracy theories changes much faster than their underlying forms. A claim can be repeated, modified and connected to another claim at great speed. Hashtags create temporary publics around particular vocabularies. Images can detach themselves from their original contexts and acquire new meanings. Automated accounts can amplify particular formulations. Influential participants can supply language that thousands of others subsequently adopt.
Rao and Greve are particularly interested in these linguistic traces because they make the formation of collective belief empirically observable. Online conversation leaves a record of words appearing together, associations strengthening over time and vocabularies migrating between communities. They use these records to study conspiracy talk surrounding Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter protests, examining how patterns of language reveal the emergence and diffusion of conspiratorial explanations.
Knowing how "5G" came to sit beside "radiation" tells us little about why the pairing gripped one reader hard enough to send him toward the mast, lighter in hand. Those who set the fires had probably encountered nothing resembling a theory. They slowly acquired a vocabulary, learned a new language, co-created meaning (which seemed “rational” to them), found a community to participate in vandalism together.
Conspiracy theories have many more revelatory elements. Tune in to find out.