Conspiracy Culture Notes

After delving into what I am going to call "The Conspiracy Culture" a few ideas have begun to gel in my mind about where and how this all came about. Most of it centres around and old idea I've been developing about the codifying effect of mass-media on popular imagination. Unlike the conspiracy theorists themselves I don't actually see an agenda behind this, it's more a function of a feedback loop. I hate to say it, but it looks like I am going to have to dig out "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" by Walter Benjamin. This idea first occurred to me when considering the cyclical, yet stagnant, nature of trends in clothing fashions. It's become an accepted and predictable fact that items come back into fashion every roughly twenty years. This wasn't always the case. Prior to the twentieth century clothing fashions changed more slowly and more linearly, with patterns of geographic dispersion.

Movies and television have played a significant role in the development of these cycles as well as the standardization of imagination in general. If one observes the difference in the way small children that have been exposed to television play compared to children who have not been exposed, it's immediately striking that the unexposed children have much more imaginative play than the exposed children. The children that watch television tend not to make up their own characters and scenarios, but rather "recycle" the ones they have watched. This is applicable in the fashion example. Designers, influenced more by the examples of fashionable dress they saw on television as children than by the world around them grow up to "reinvent" the comfortable images from their childhoods.

I noticed this in science-fiction depictions of aliens as I was growing up. As a kid I read a lot of 19th century through to Golden Age science fiction and became interested in the slow homogenization of a wealth of alien forms into the familiar "Greys", lizard-men (whom I've now learned to call "Reptoids"), hairy-men ("Wookies" et al.), and the indistinguishable-from-human ones ("Nordics"). The progression is easy to observe through a survey of science fiction illustration over the course of the 1920's through the 1960's.

The psychology of fear was the motivating factor in early depictions. The early aliens were generally compiled from the things people tend to find most creepy: insects, snakes, lizards, spiders, unblinking stares and the physically intimidatating. Basically this amounts to lots of creatures with multiple limbs (spiders and insects), exoskeletons (also spiders and insects), scales (snakes and lizards), tentacles (snakes), bugged eyes (unblinking stares), and often much larger than us (physical intimidation). In addition to these there were nearly always aliens crafted to be easy to identify with, either as protagonists or antagonists, these were the alien-humans. In addition robots always played a role as representatives of industrial-age hopes and fears. With the advent of movies there was a bit of an upswing in humanoid aliens, mostly because in a low budget sci-fi movies a guy in a costume had to suffice for the alien. In keeping with the issues of the times in the 1930's and 1940's this meant an upswing in robots (mechanised warfare) and orientalized alien humanoid villains like "Ming the Merciless" (Japan). Come the 1950's humanoid aliens pretty much had the monopoly on extraterrestrial representations. The unblinking, big-headed intellectual-threat type aliens began to gel into "Greys", robots gelled into the "garbage can" variety and the humanoid variety, the physically threatening type aliens gelled into the hairy-men and "Reptoids", and the barely-distinguishable-from-human infiltrators (representing cold-war anxieties) and better-than-human humanoid noble-protectors.

Crusading "I'm the only one that knows the truth" and "something is wrong I must find the truth" type characters began appearing at this time as well, making their mark in the popular subconscious with shows like "The Invaders", "The Prisoner", "The Fugitive". The extensions of military intelligence extrapolated from WWII intelligence operations and cold war techno-spying fed into programs such as "The Man from UNCLE", "The Avengers", "Mission Impossible" and others. The reality of the space-race mingled the concepts around "The Invaders" and the techno-spies leading to current mythologies such as the "Men in Black" and other secret government/alternate-power-structure conspiracies. Like the cycles of clothing fashions these mythologies are now being regurgitated, repackaged, and re-presented. For example "The X-Files" was nothing more than a repackaging of mostly "The Invaders" with a little "Mission Impossible", "The Prisoner", and "Twilight Zone" thrown in.

The role of the much-mailigned, crusading truth-seeker is very well defined by the genre. Just what the government lies about and how they lie is also well defined. The "science" adhered to in this sub-culture is often adamantly rooted in 19th century hypotheses that tend to be soundly argued and accessible, but long since debunked by more factual but less accessible science, coupled with the popular and dramatic pseudo-science of "Star Trek" and "Star Wars". Mild credibility comes from piling sci-fi baffle-gab on top of the (debunked) hard science of the 19th century. The credibility is enhanced by the "universality" of the reports coming from consistently from "all over", when in fact this perceived universality is not based in an empirical realty but rather a well-distributed and codified mythology -- preprogrammed delusions spread around the world by TV, movies, and printed media. Further spurious credibility is gained by the way these mythologies are "corroborated" by the cultural queues they were initially derived from in the first place.

For example you have members of the conspiracy culture pointing to stories of faeries and faerie-circles as uneducated, rustic attempts to explain alien visitations and related phenomena, when in fact the "aliens" are derived, via fiction, from the faeries and the phenomena attributed to them are explained by less glamourous and less accessable facts. By similar means it the conspiracy theories can frequenlty point to centuries old "evidence" for a variety of items in their mythos.

(So, folks, what do you think? Do I have the kernel of a book here? These are embryonic notes and need a lot of fleshing out and corroborative research, of course.)