lockdown protest
(Image: AAP/Scott Barbour)

If the protesters who gathered in a violent demonstration in Sydney on Saturday were a thoroughly eclectic group — right-wingers, anti-vaxxers, fundamentalist Christians, disgruntled small business owners, anti-government types, Gladys Berejiklian haters, self-appointed tribunes of south-west Sydney, spivs and chancers — they also reflected that conspiracy theorists are increasingly a threat to public order.

A lot of contumely was heaped on the protesters — quite correctly — in Sydney, along with considerable mockery. The police minister resorted to a term of yesteryear (“boofheads”) in lieu of something less evening news-friendly. But the presence of conspiracy theorists — claiming that the virus is a hoax, that vaccines are a threat, that the media is manipulating people — shouldn’t be treated as a subject of derision.

As we saw on January 6 in the United States, conspiracy theories can lead to insurrection, attacks on democracy and killings. In fact the logic of many of the COVID conspiracy theories parading on Saturday in Sydney, Melbourne and elsewhere leads inevitably to violent insurrection.

If you think governments have invented a virus, or the story of a virus, as a pretext for destroying your freedom, or that vaccines may be a tool of mind control created by large corporations and governments, or that the media is complicit in manufacturing a grand narrative justifying oppression, then violence is surely required — there can be no democratic response against such powerful measures. Indeed, you may conclude you don’t even live in a democracy if both sides of politics believe lockdowns and vaccinations are essential.

Conspiracy theorising was dramatically accelerated by the arrival of the internet. Long a small and disconnected minority, conspiracy theorists — whether legitimately sufferers from apophenia (the tendency to see patterns in random information) or actual paranoiacs — were now able to link together online, sharing information, reinforcing one another and recruiting in ways they were unable to in the analog world.

But conspiracy theories have been turbocharged over the last decade. Social media has enabled an even more rapid spread of conspiracy theories; platforms like Facebook mainstreamed them as a part of people’s news and information feeds; platforms like YouTube provide hours-long videos cherry-picking all the evidence required to demonstrate that reptile-people control the world, that the UN plans to impose a world socialist government, that the Jews control world finance, that governments spray their populations with chemicals from aircraft for reasons unclear, etc, etc. And each time you watch one, YouTube’s algorithms will serve you up another like it, taking you further and further down the same path.

But it’s not technologically determined. The internet enables; it doesn’t cause. The cause lies with the precarity and uncertainty of modern economies and cultures. In abandoning the communitarian and economically secure world of the post-war Keynesian consensus for the neoliberal consensus of individual freedom and responsibility — by trading economic security for freedom and self-reliance, at least for those not powerful enough to sway policymakers in their own interests — we’ve moved into a far less solid, certain world.

And we’ve encouraged tribalism and nativism by imposing globalism, free flows of labour and finance and temporary migration on western workers while preventing them from enjoying the benefits of those policies — which have instead accrued to corporations, wealthy elites and knowledge workers. Ordinary workers believe, with plenty of justification, that they’ve got the worst end of the neoliberal bargain, and live in a world of dangerous uncertainty — economically and culturally — as a result.

Conspiracy theorising is one way of seeing such a precarious world. Conspiracy theories are a kind of populism, in which a small in-group (including you) has worked out that a powerful elite is exploiting and controlling the people. The powerful elite changes from theory to theory, sure — reptiles, liberal paedophiles, the Illuminati, the Jews, the Masons, the Templars, the Catholics — but it’s always a sinister elite.

But it’s also a psychological balm: faced with an existence that seems more precarious and less certain, the conspiracy theory provides comfort that someone is in charge, that it’s not all random, that a virus couldn’t suddenly emerge from nature and kill millions of people, any more than the planet start heating up, or a lone gunmen kill JFK.

The drivers of conspiracy theorising aren’t going away, and the platforms that enable it and accelerate it aren’t going anywhere either. It will become more widespread, more aggressive and more violent. It’s not a movement, it’s not organised, it’s not led, other than by opportunists; it’s a condition of our precarious society, which is only becoming more so.