10 minute read
Looks Authentic
The aesthetics of conspiracy
by Haley Mlotek
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Illustration by Richard A. Chance
1.
In 1964, Richard Hofstadter, writing about what he called the “Paranoid Style in American Politics,” observed that its distinguishing trait was a “curious leap in imagination that is always made at some critical point in the recital of events.” On January 6, as I watched the Capitol riot unfolding, I knew that I was seeing as much as I reasonably could and also nothing close to the full picture. For weeks, I had been touring the websites and social platforms of far-right extremists, noticing how recollection lends itself to flourish, and how certainty, in the same way, tends toward oversimplification. The violence of the day—five people died—made widely visible what had, for years, metastasized across online forums.
Right-wing extremist media—the fractured, disparate representation of communities with various degrees of fascist sympathies—has an essentially reactionary aesthetic, in that it presents a distorted reflection of mainstream outlets, which are held up as a standard to be subverted, a threat to be eradicated. “I think the people who are attracted to these sources very often believe their legitimacy comes from what they are not,” Matt Goerzen, a researcher at Data & Society, a research nonprofit, told me. Theories and “information” appear in a discussion thread, where they proliferate anonymously and are disseminated atmospherically, negating credit and creation. This encourages a reading that tries to reconcile contradictions: the
amateur becomes authentic, the cryptic confident. The content, to a certain extent, doesn’t matter. “Style has to do with the way in which ideas are believed and advocated rather than with the truth or falsity of their content,” as Hofstadter wrote. This is a truth that every form of media must reckon with: what matters is that the material produces a mimetic effect, which gains power with every repetition; what matters is that someone clicked through.
There are two primary aesthetic modes of far-right extremist media. The first is an exaggerated austerity, which suggests an urgent message from the underground. Sometimes this style appears unassuming, like the work of just one person taking on the establishment. Elsewhere, austerity looks like blunt claims to authority—bright contrasting colors, oversize headlines with emphatic punctuation, nods to a former internet (e.g., a tagged-word
cloud). Drudge Report, which launched as an email newsletter in 1995, is a prime example of this style. “It’s the undesigned aesthetic, which became its own thing because it worked,” Irwin Chen, the design lead at The New School’s Journalism + Design program, told me. That imposed a certain aesthetic uniform. “Once you start saying This is the color we’re using, this is the typeface we’re using, it doesn’t matter if there is a lack of a style or a lack of design discipline,” Chen said. “It’s just that you’re being consistent.”
This aesthetic mode has proliferated since the nineties, as media conglomerates have largely destroyed independent alternative outlets in the United States—local newspapers among them— assuming control over both the substance and design of information; these behemoths now hold a monopoly over the look and functionality of most every website. The same period has delivered a loss of trust in mass media, according to Gallup, particularly among Republicans, for whom it’s now the lowest on record. Far-right outlets—Breitbart News, One America News Network, Newsmax—have, in turn, managed to take on a kind of legitimacy in part by adhering to a recognizable aesthetic standard. “The more you buy into this idea that the mainstream media—and all these polished websites—are fake news, then the things that look the opposite gain a sheen of legitimacy by default,” Goerzen told me. “This transvaluation happens where something that is scrappy, plucky, and maybe a little rough around the edges seems more authentic.”
The second aesthetic mode of far-right extremism is imitation to the point of invisibility. There may be no more prolific forum for this than Facebook, where unofficial fan pages of mainstream conservative hosts (Candace Owens, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson) push links to far-right blogs—a means of distribution specific to a platform that is largely devoid of context clues, verification, and accountability. “This cuts to the heart of the technology itself,” Joan Donovan, the research director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, told me. QAnon theories appear in the same news feed as baby announcements and beach-vacation photos. “It doesn’t show us the dangers in that content, because it’s all wrapped together in the same very mundane platform.”
Donovan views that as an important aesthetic dimension of white supremacy and its associated movements. “The very characteristics that allow them to be identified in public have propelled a movement to blend in,” she said. “To wear button-down shirts. To look the same as everybody else. And so we see that start to happen not just in style and manner of dress, but in websites.” Cloaked in normalcy, rightwing media appears disarming, palatable, shareable. “I think it’s easy for people who care about design to dismiss bad graphics—to be like, Oh, that’s just unskilled design,” Chen told me. But that would be a mistake. Looking at the aesthetic strategy of far-right extremist media is like observing a chameleon in existential crisis: How, after all, can one receive notice for achieving an almost perfect disguise?
2.
There is a common liberal assumption that QAnon theories spread—and far-right extremist ideologies attract new followers—because of “media illiteracy.” But those who become immersed in the media of conspiracy are more likely to be hyperliterate. It is the very fact that these readers are not passive, uninformed consumers of news media that makes them ideal members of a far-right extremist community. They are expert readers of languages beyond text—which is another way of defining an aesthetic sensibility. In a paper called “Searching for Alternative Facts,” Francesca Tripodi, a sociologist and media scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, described a practice called “scriptural inference”—a compare-and-contrast method of digging into sacred texts in order to facilitate individual interpretations—that is used to delegitimize reality-based news and assert a sense of sophistication defined by skepticism.
Extremist groups exploit scriptural inference for their own purposes, manipulating Google and YouTube searches that individuals might use to conduct (their version of) a fact check on something they’ve read, as a way to draw in potential followers. The Q “drops,” those cryptic missives, also encourage researched interpretation. (“Decoding” is, notably, both a popular term within far-right extremist movements and a suggested practice for those who aim to understand them.) More than reading the words, the sensory experience of finding and situating a text becomes its own end: a frisson of understanding. “It feels empowering, because you are ultimately the one who gets to interpret it as a reader,” Goerzen told me. “It’s participatory expertise.” Anyone can come up with a theory about what a particular post means and then persuade other readers to come along in their thinking—drawing the
analysis deeper, adding more layers. “By latching on to these ideas, they feel that they become the gatekeepers of a special esoteric knowledge.”
Forums like 8chan, where one can scroll further away from reality and enter new levels of commentary and conspiracy, were deliberately designed to suit an audience interested in this kind of hermetic textual study. Now known as 8kun, 8chan was created to allow what even 4chan, its eighteenyear-old predecessor, wouldn’t. Under a list of topic headers, chan image boards and text threads are blank slates for posting. In considering the way they enable endless annotation and reinterpretation, I was reminded of Susan Sontag’s observation, in 1967, that the art of her time was “noisy with appeals for silence.” The aesthetics of our time are often similarly confused with attempts to make sense. “These are the kinds of aesthetics that are really powerful here,” Goerzen told me. “They contribute to making people feel like they are invited to participate.”
Goerzen’s research has looked at the conscious efforts of white supremacists to seize cultural influence through memes and “start-over monikers,” the use of new words and labels to share old ideas: “It wasn’t something that spontaneously happened,” he said. In 2012, contributors to the 4chan board / pol/ discussed plans to “redpill” users of other 4chan boards, persuading them to embrace white supremacy by appealing to niche interests and railing against “political correctness.” The design of forums accumulates meaning in a boundless, endless network of shared references and allusions—a system that, like The Matrix, the origin of the red-pill concept, promises to be obvious to those who choose to open their eyes.
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3.
We live in a time of intuition and osmosis, our worlds created through influence and imitation. “I’m afraid that it’s going to be harder to separate propaganda and reporting,” Chen told me. “You could argue that the motivating forces are really destabilizers; in a sense this ground will always be shaky.” Those motivating forces—that the government doesn’t care about the people it represents, that democracy rests on an unsteady foundation, that communities can be turned against one another through a mix of fear and rage—are ever-present, felt without being named. In media criticism, one has to concede: Yes, there are conspiracies everywhere we turn. Yes, the powerful act in concert to consolidate power. Yes, there is something sinister to so much sameness—of ideology, of language, of aesthetics. Hofstadter’s text has become a necessary guide for understanding what we see, but in many ways, it fails to account for limits of perspective. To assume that we all approach information from a detached, “centered” standpoint is to see without looking. “In a world where no one need be delusional to find evidence of systemic oppression,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wrote in Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, an essay that critiques Hofstadter, “to theorize out of anything but a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naive, pious, or complaisant.”
It is the plot of science fiction that we find ourselves thinking thoughts that aren’t our own, through outside forces seeking to control us. But information does often travel that way, for reasons that are neither sinister nor calculating. Every journalistic outlet wants to claim history; their differences come down to direction. Institutional and accredited news sources usually seek to determine what did happen, whereas alternative and extremist sources more often have a predictive quality, interested in claiming what will happen. Sedgwick wrote that paranoia is an anticipatory style—the imperative is, above anything else, to avoid surprise. That may illuminate why so much far-right media appears, to the uninitiated or unbelieving, as purely reactionary: it is a defensive pose that builds a future from what is past. They seek, with explicit doomsday visions, to shore up power against that which may be used against them.
Like many historical moments of paranoid style, far-right extremism is a movement made up of converts. Redeemed just in time, they worship an anonymous leader or the collective control as a proxy for self-respect; after all, before anyone else could save them, they’ve had to save themselves. Many people are born or indoctrinated into this way of thinking; many more might see an idea online and find, simply, that to them it rings true. The primacy of faith in their media—above all, including fact— cannot be discounted.
There is another aesthetic element at play here, one that transcends the visual. Recently, a friend remarked to me how lucky I was to be focusing on the design of far-right media in this essay, rather than the sounds. “Imagine if you had to listen to hours of Alex Jones,” she said. For a moment I did, the better to experience my gratitude that the opposite was true. In the abstract, to look seems safer than to listen. An open tab might disturb my peripheral vision, but there is no equivalence between something hovering in the corner of my eye and what can be heard; to tune out is not anything like redirecting my view. Yet the more I thought about it, and the more I looked or watched or scanned or saw what might reasonably be considered a cohesive aesthetic understanding of far-right extremist media platforms, the more I forgot the feeling of that relief, or what that relief represented. Conspiracies, gossip, and misinformation always seem to have an auditory quality. In the same way, far-right extremist media—with its codes, camouflages, guarded yet widely circulated symbols—is designed to be absorbed rather than observed, a form of seeing that hides in plain sight. It is an aesthetics of eavesdropping. cjr
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