Today's links
- Conspiracy fantasy: The political significance and personal appeal of conspiratorialism.
- Podcasting "Self Publishing": My column on monopolism, publishing, and the fortunes of authors.
- This day in history: 2001, 2011, 2016, 2020
- Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading
Conspiracy fantasy (permalink)
When we talk about conspiratorialism, we tend to focus (naturally) on the content of the conspiracy. Not only are those stories entertainingly outlandish – they're also the point of contact between conspiracists and the world.
If your mom is shouting about "Hollywood pedos," it's natural that you'll end up discussing the relationship of this belief to observable reality. But while the content of conspiratorial beliefs gets lots of attention, we tend to neglect the significance of those beliefs.
To the extent that we consider why the beliefs exist and proliferate, the discussion rarely gets further than "irrational people have irrational beliefs." This is a mistake. The stories we tell one another are a kind of Ouija board, with all our fingertips on the planchette.
The messages it spells out don't describe external reality but they do reveal our internal, unspoken anxieties and aspirations.This is why we should read science fiction: not because it predicts the future, but because it diagnoses the present.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/26/meaningful-zombies/#oracles
Sf is an ever-mutating ecosystem of fears and hopes, and readers apply selective pressure to those organisms, extinguishing the ones that don't capture the zeitgeist and elevating the ones that do, a co-evolution of our fantasies and our narratives.
http://locusmag.com/Features/2007/07/cory-doctorow-progressive-apocalypse.html
This is why Alternate Reality Games are so central to their players' lives. They're a form of narrative co-creation, with the players throwing out theories and the game-masters actually changing the story to incorporate the best of them.
ARGs are an environment where your coolest and most deliciously scary ideas become reality. It's a powerful way to galvanize collective action.
As anthropologist Biella Coleman writes in Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy, it's the organizing principal behind Anonymous.
Anon Ops begin life as victory announcement videos. If the vision of success captures enough Anons, they execute the op.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-anonymous-ghost-in-the-machine
In other words, the degree to which a shared fantasy of victory compels its audience predicts whether the audience realizes its fantasy. Long before the alt-right, Anons were memeing ideas into existence (no coincidence, as both were incubated on 4chan).
On the Conspiracy Games and Counter-Games podcast, three left academics – Max Haiven, AT Kingsmith, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou – analyze "conspiracy fantasies" (as opposed to conspiracies, e.g. the Big Lie behind the Iraq War) for what they reveal about late capitalism's anxieties.
As leftists, they naturally focus on the relationship between material conditions and people's behaviors and beliefs. This is an important part of the discourse on conspiratorialism that's often missing from liberal and right-wing analysis.
Conspiracists aren't just "irrational" nor are they just "racist." They may be both of those things, but unless you look at material conditions, then the surges and retreats of conspiracism are mysterious phenomena, strange tides raised by unseen forces.
A decade ago, then-PM David Cameron – the architect of a brutal, authoritarian austerity – dismissed the Hackney Riots as "criminality pure and simple," and demanded a ban on discussion of the relationship between austerity and unrest.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2011/aug/09/david-cameron-riots-criminality-video
But without that discussion, there's no explanation. Even if you believe that "criminality" is a thing that is latent within some or all of us, what explains a rise or fall in that criminality? Is it like pollen that alights upon some of us, turning us bad? Or the full moon?
Likewise the "conspiracists are just racists" or "they're just deranged." Without looking at the material world, there's no explanation for why that racism suddenly became more (or less) important to how conspiracists live their lives.
We can't talk about conspiratorialism without talking about material considerations, and we have to talk about the form and substance of the conspiratorial belief. The ARG-like structure of Qanon is a hugely important part of its popularity:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/05/behavioral-v-contextual/#adrian-hon
Memeing things into existence in a game-like way is hugely compelling. You can tell when a D&D game is hopping when the players and the DM start co-creating the story, with the DM slyly altering the dungeon and the NPCs to match the players' super-cool theories.
A recent episode of the CGACG podcast present a mind-blowing analysis of the interplay of the material conditions, mythology and structure of Qanon. It's a two-part interview with Wu Ming 1:
https://soundcloud.com/reimaginevalue/wuming-one-1?in=reimaginevalue/sets/unmanageablerisks
https://soundcloud.com/reimaginevalue/wuming-one-2?in=reimaginevalue/sets/unmanageablerisks
Wu Ming 1 is part of Bologna's Wu Ming Collective, the successor to the 1990s Luther Bissett net-art collective. Bissett did many wild, weird things,including publishing "Q," an internationally bestselling conspiratorial novel in 1999 (!!)
https://www.wumingfoundation.com/giap/what-is-the-wu-ming-foundation/
The plot of "Q" involves a high-level government official, privy to top-secret info about a state conspiracy. It closely mirrors Qanon beliefs, right down to a call for a Jan 6 uprising (!!!!). The major difference is that "Q" is set during the Protestant Reformation.
In the interview, Wu Ming 1 talks about the proliferation of conspiratorial, ARG-like 4chan hoaxes that predated Qanon, and hypothesizes that the original Q posts were plagiarized from the novel.
The strange experience of seeing a novel turn into a cult prompted Ming 1 to write "La Q di Qomplotto" ("The Q in Qonspiracy"), a book that defines and analyzes "conspiracy fantasies."
https://edizionialegre.it/product/la-q-di-qomplotto/
Ming 1's interview digs into this in some depth, including setting out criteria for distinguishing conspiracies from fantasies (for example, a conspiracy doesn't go on forever, while a fantasy can imagine the Knights Templar running the world for centuries).
I was taken by Ming 1's discussion of the role that "enchantment" plays in conspiratorialism – the feeling of being in a magical and wondrous (if also anxious and terrible) place. He says this is why "debunkers" fail – they're like people who spoil a magic trick.
Ming 1 and the hosts talk about replacing the enchantment of conspiratorialism with a counter-enchantment, grounded not in the conspiratorialist's oversimplification and essentialism, but in the wonder of reality.
Ming 1 analogizes his "counter-enchantment" to the "double-wow" method of Penn and Teller: first they blow you away with a trick, and then they blow you away with the cleverness by which it was accomplished.
He describes how the Luther Bissett collective performed a double-wow during Italy's Satanic Panic, creating a hoax satanic heavy metal cult and a counter-cult, promulgating stories of their pitched battles, then revealing how they'd faked the whole thing.
The action was taken in solidarity with actual Bolognese heavy metal fans who'd been framed for imaginary Satanic "crimes." Luther Bissett wanted to demonstrate how a panic could be created from nothing, to reveal the method behind the real hoax with a fake hoax.
The double-wow method reminds me of Richard Dawkins' manuever in "The Magic of Reality," his excellent children's book about the virtues of the scientific world, revealing how the numinous wonder of faith is nothing compared to the wonder of science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_of_Reality
The idea that conspiratorialism is a leading indicator of capitalism's anxieties is a powerful one, and it ties into other compelling accounts of conspiracy, like Anna Merlan's REPUBLIC OF LIES, which discusses the importance of trauma to conspiratorial belief.
Like Ming 1, Merlan stresses the kernel of truth underpinning conspiracy fantasies – the real aerospace coverups that make UFO conspiracies plausible, the real pharmaceutical conspiracies to cover up harms from drugs that underpin anti-vax.
In the podcast, Ming 1 and the hosts stress the importance of identifying and addressing the kernel of truth and the trauma it produces in any counter-conspiratorial work – that is, a successful counter-enchantment must address the material conditions behind the fantasy.
I really like this approach because of its empathy – its attempt to connect with the conditions that produce behaviors and beliefs, not to be confused with sympathy, which might excuse their toxic and hateful nature.
It reminds me a lot of Oh No Ross and Carrie, whose hosts have spent years joining cults and religions and digging into fringe practices and beliefs in an effort to understand them; they laugh a lot, but never Mem>at their subjects.
But Ming 1 brings something new to this discussion: an analysis of the role that novels have played in conspiracy fantasy formation: not just the plagiarizing of "Q" to make Qanon, but things like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion plagiarizing Dumas.
The interview also brought to mind Edward Snowden's recent inaugural blog-post, "Conspiracy: Theory and Practice," which seeks to separate conspiracy practice (e.g. the NSA spying on everyone) from theories (what Ming 1 calls "fantasies").
https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/conspiracy-pt1
Snowden connects the feeling of powerlessness to the urge to explain the world through conspiracies, relating this to his experience of revealing one of the world's most far-reaching real conspiracies, and then becoming the subject of innumerable conspiracy fantasies.
Snowden's perspective is one that has heretofore been missing from conspiracy discourse – the perspective of someone who has been part of a real conspiracy and then the central subject of a constellation of bizarre and widespread conspiratorial beliefs.
These different works, focusing as they do on the character of conspiratorial beliefs, the nature of conspiratorial practice, and material conditions of conspiracists, comprise a richer analysis of our screwed-up discourse than, say, theories about "online radicalization."
As I wrote in my 2020 book "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism," the "online radicalization" narrative requires that you accept Big Tech's unsupported marketing claims about its power to bypass our critical thoughts at face value.
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59
Claims to be able to control our minds – whether made by Rasputin, Mesmer, pick-up artists, MK-ULTRA or NLP enthusiasts – always turn out to be cons (though sometimes the con artists are also conning themselves).
But there's a much more plausible, less controversial set of powers that Big Tech possesses. By spying on us all the time, it can help scammers target people who are ready to hear conspiratorial explanations.
By monopolizing our discourse, it allows SEO scammers to create default answers to our questions. By locking us in, it can keep us using a platform even if the discourse there makes us angry and anxious.
And by corrupting our political process, it creates "kernels of truth" for conspiratorial beliefs.
As with Scooby Doo, the monster turns out to be a familiar villain in a fright mask: a monopolist whose abuses and impunity create the anxiety that make conspiracy plausible.
>Podcasting "Self Publishing" (permalink)
This week on my podcast, I read my latest Medium column, "Self-Publishing," an essay about the structural shifts in the publishing industry over the past half-century and how and why that has driven people to try self-publishing.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/04/self-publishing/
The tale starts with the rise of Big Box stores, after Reagan's deregulation got Sam Walton to take Walmart national. This concentrated the "mass market" – the huge, variegated world of pharmacy and grocery and cornerstore spinner racks that were the cradle of genre fiction.
The big boxes demanded a single national distribution system, and hundreds of local distributors – whose unionized Teamsters stocked the spinner racks based on long territorial experience – collapsed to a handful of database-driven decision-makers.
The number of titles for sale fell off a cliff. Writers who had a single underperforming book were no longer welcome in the big boxes and thus no longer economically viable (remember all those established writers who switched to pen-names? They were trying to beat this).
Monopoly begets monopoly. The predatory discounting of the big box stores put the squeeze on chain bookstores and indies. The chains merged and merged into a duopoly, while the indies underwent a mass die-off.
Publishers were caught in this squeeze: the two national bookstore chains and the big box stores demanded extra co-op payments, preferential discounts, and more generous credit and return policies. The publishers merged and merged, down to six (now four).
This also happened with trade distributors (who sold to bookstores, not the mass market) – the industry collapsed into a duopoly (today, it's a monopoly, run by Ingram).
This is a familiar pattern across all monopolized industries.
As David Dayen described in MONOPOLIZED, this neatly parallels the monopolization of health care: pharma monopolized and gouged hospitals, who monopolized in self-defense and gouged insurers, who monopolized in self-defense.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu
Both monopolistic trends had the same end-point: after all the companies had finished monopolizing, the disorganized group of suppliers and workers were the only ones that the monopolies could strong-arm. In the case of hospitals, that's health-workers and patients.
In publishing, it's workers and writers. If you work in publishing and your resume is rejected by four companies, it has been rejected by every major publisher. If you're a writer whose book is rejected by four publishers, then you've been rejected by every major house.
That's why writers are now expected to give up graphic novel, audio, world English, and other valuable rights for the same advances – with fewer companies bidding on books, the likelihood that one will pay more or demand less goes down.
In the 2000s and early 2010s, some writers hoped that they'd be able to sidestep publishing by allying themselves with a different monopolized industry, locking themselves to Amazon's platform. But as competition from publishers dwindled, so too did Amazon's largesse.
The authors who shackled themselves to Amazon now face tens of millions of dollars in wage-theft. The solution to unfair treatment at the hands of giants isn't to ally yourself with an even bigger giant and hope for its ongoing generosity.
https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/03/somebody-will/#acx
A more promising sign is in the wave of mid-sized houses that have snapped up the workers shed by Big Publishing during mergers as well as the promising new publishing workers who are surplus to the Big Four's needs.
These presses punch way above their weight, thanks in part to the number of great books that just don't fit into the publishing needs of four giant houses. But as great as this is, it's intrinsically precarious.
These mid-sized houses can't stand up to the might of one distributor, one national bookseller, four big box stores, and one giant ecommerce monopoly. Earlier mass die-offs in indie publishing (like the American Marketing Services horror story) show how fragile this is.
Which brings us to self-publishing. There have never been more sophisticated tools for making polished, professional books on your own – Lulu.com, Smashwords, Bookbaby – and (thanks to layoffs) it's never been easier to find publishing pros to help with that process.
But that's not "publishing." As Patrick Nielsen Hayden once told me (paraphrasing), "Publishing is identifying a work and an audience and doing whatever it takes bring the two together." In other words, how do you convince people to give a shit about your book?
This is an incredibly hard problem. It's the hard problem of advertising, religion and politics. There's no established method for it because the attention wars are a race against adaptation – what worked yesterday won't work today.
If you want to self-publish, you need to observe books like yours, identify how they are discovered by their audiences, formulate a plan to do the same, execute the plan, measure your results, and change the plan and do it again, and again, and again.
Publishers don't just have systems and experts – they also have multiple data-points, a stream of books where they get to try different things, refine their successful tactics, and try again. You have a data-set with one point in it: you.
It follows that if you're not prepared to work as hard (and well) at marketing, sales and promotion as you did at writing, you probably shouldn't self-publish. Doing those things won't guarantee your success, but without them, failure is all but assured.
That said, the one area where self-publishers can sometimes outdo publishers is accessing (parts of) the mass-market. The vast majority people aren't "readers" (in the sense of being people who regularly buy books, go to bookstores, etc).
Every mega-bestseller is just a book that succeeded with a tiny sliver of nonreaders. And you might know more about a community of nonreaders – a faith group, fandom, subculture or political movement – than anyone in publishing.
If that's the case, and if you are both diligent and lucky, you might be able to successfully market you book to that group and even leverage that success into a publishing deal that brings your book to "readers" – whom a publisher knows more about than you ever will.
I published by first book in 2000. Since then, I've published a couple dozen more, everything from novels for adults to YA novels to a middle-grades graphic novel to a picture book to essay and short story collections to book-length nonfiction.
I've published many books, including multiple bestsellers, with one of the Big Four publishers, and I've also published with several mid-sized boutique presses (some of which have merged with bigger publishers since).
I've successfully self-published, including a $267,000, record-smashing Kickstarter campaign. I'm a recovering bookseller and I'm unhealthily drawn to great bookstores, which are doing surprisingly well (thanks partly to Libro.fm and Bookshop.org).
Despite all this, I'm keenly aware that runaway consolidation makes my position as a worker in this system intrinsically precarious. The wonderful people in big publishing love books and treat me very well, but they can't fix the system.
I've met sincere, talented people at Amazon doing their best to support publishing, but they can't fix the system either. Neither can James Daunt, a true hero of bookselling who has come to America to transform Barnes and Noble.
Monopoly begets monopoly. If any part of the supply chain is allowed to monopolize, the rest will follow in self-defense, and it will always be the workers – the writers and staff – who struggle to push back.
That's why the current resurgence of both trade-unionism and antitrust are so important. In a world whose outcomes are more determined by power relationship than by good intentions, the only way to secure workers' futures is to make them stronger and make business weaker.
The essay is here:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/04/self-publishing/
The podcast episode is here:
https://craphound.com/news/2021/07/05/self-publishing/
The MP3 is here (hosting courtesy of the Internet Archive, they'll host your stuff for free, forever):
And here's my podcast feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast
This day in history (permalink)
#20yrsago Municipal code's list of code-words for escort services that may not be used in classified advertising <a 07doctorowcommentary.html"="" 2006="" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20010716172254/http://www.ci.sparks.nv.us/municode/Title_5/66/100.html>https://web.archive.org/web/20010716172254/http://www.ci.sparks.nv.us/municode/Title_5/66/100.html</a>
#15yrsago Sf is the only literature people care enough about to steal on the Internet <a href=" http:="" issues="" www.locusmag.com="">http://www.locusmag.com/2006/Issues/07DoctorowCommentary.html
#10yrsago Steven “Jumper” Gould’s new novel 7TH SIGMA: genre-busting science fiction/western kicks ass https://memex.craphound.com/2011/07/05/steven-jumper-goulds-new-novel-7th-sigma-genre-busting-science-fiction-western-kicks-ass/
#10yrsago RIP, Len Sassaman: cypherpunk and anonymity hacker https://news.hitb.org/content/rip-len-sassaman-crypto-expert-and-privacy-advocate
#5yrsago Peak indifference: privacy as a public health issue https://locusmag.com/2016/07/cory-doctorow-peak-indifference/
#5yrsago Nigel “Brexit” Farage, having tanked the UK economy, retires to “get his life back” https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-36702468
#5yrsago Hidden “anti-crime” mics are proliferating on US public transit, recording riders’ conversations https://www.csoonline.com/article/3090502/big-brother-is-listening-as-well-as-watching.html
#5yrsago Frederick Douglass’ “The Meaning of July the Fourth for the Negro,” read by James Earl Jones https://www.democracynow.org/2015/7/3/what_to_the_slave_is_4th
#5yrsago New York’s stately libraries sport hidden apartments for live-in caretakers https://www.6sqft.com/life-behind-the-stacks-the-secret-apartments-of-new-york-libraries/
#5yrsago Tories use Brexit as an excuse to slash corporate taxes to the lowest of any major economy https://www.ft.com/content/d5aedda0-412e-11e6-9b66-0712b3873ae1
#5yrsago UK cops routinely raided police databases to satisfy personal interest or make money on the side https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp3n3y/uk-police-accessed-civilian-data
#1yrago The real racial wealth gap https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/05/racial-wealth-divide/#class-war
#1yrago What to the Slave Is the 4th of July https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/04/pluralistic-04-jul-2020/#corinthian-hall
Colophon (permalink)
Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/).
Currently writing:
- Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. Friday's progress: 263 words (8425 words total).
-
A Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. PLANNING
-
A nonfiction book about excessive buyer-power in the arts, co-written with Rebecca Giblin, "The Shakedown." FINAL EDITS
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A post-GND utopian novel, "The Lost Cause." FINISHED
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A cyberpunk noir thriller novel, "Red Team Blues." FINISHED
Currently reading: Analogia by George Dyson.
Latest podcast: Inside The Clock Tower https://craphound.com/news/2021/06/21/inside-the-clock-tower/
Upcoming appearances:
- Launch for Neil Sharpson's When the Sparrow Falls (Mysterious Galaxy), Jul 10, https://www.mystgalaxy.com/sharpson71021
Recent appearances:
- The Bitcoin Podcast:
http://thebitcoinpodcast.com/the-bitcoin-podcast-359/ -
The Rent's Too Damned High, Macro n Cheese:
https://realprogressives.org/podcast_episode/episode-127-the-rents-too-damned-high-with-cory-doctorow/ -
3D Printing Sci-Fi, 3DPOD:
https://3dprint.com/282547/3dpod-episode-68-3d-printing-sci-fi-with-cory-doctorow/
Latest book:
- "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
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"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
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"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
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"Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.
Upcoming books:
- The Shakedown, with Rebecca Giblin, nonfiction/business/politics, Beacon Press 2022
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