From Conspiracy Theory to Conspiracist Ideology: Rethinking Social Critique in the Conspiracist Zeitgeist

During the COVID-19 pandemic, conspiracism has shifted from the fringes of society to the public mainstream, with many of its proponents willingly adopting the derogatory label of “conspiracy theorists”. Seeing themselves as “conspiracy analysts”, they not only aim to understand the inner workings of social reality but also offer alternative political frameworks and advocate for change. The condition in which people increasingly feel less shame in articulating political positions through conspiracy theories and where everyone can become a prosumer of these theories has ushered in the conspiracist zeitgeist. This transformation of conspiracist estrangement from the political mainstream into conspiracist engagement within the digital public sphere has been facilitated by the platformization, gamification, and democratization of conspiracy theorizing. Therefore, by shifting the focus from conspiracy theories to the process of conspiracy theorizing itself, this paper argues that we can better understand how conspiracism produces social critique that posits conspiracy as a fundamental organizing principle of contemporary global society. Using Michael Barkun’s three principles of conspiracy theory – “nothing happens by accident”, “nothing is as it seems”, and “everything is connected” – as a starting point, this paper argues that, in the face of a growing sense of unreality in our digitally mediated world, these tenets must be reconceptualized as complexity-reducing analytical tools of conspiracist ideology – which I designate as epistemic deconstructionism, political gnosticism, and ideological totalism – for arriving at a more nuanced sociological understanding of contemporary conspiracism as a non-pathological epistemic-cum-political standpoint.