← Conspirituality
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- [00:01]
A
Hey, sweetie. Your mother showed me this Carvana thing for selling the car. I'm gonna give it a try. Wish me luck. Me again. I put in the license plate. It gave me an offer. Unbelievable. Okay, I accepted the offer. They're picking it up Tuesday from the driveway. I haven't even left my chair. It's done. The car is gone. I'm holding a check anyway. Carvana, Give it a whirl. Love ya.
- [00:24]
B
So good you'll want to leave a voicemail about it.
- [00:26]
A
Sell your car today on Carvana.
- [00:29]
B
Pick up Fees may apply.
- [00:31]
C
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- [01:08]
B
Hey everyone, I'm Matthew Remsky. This is Conspirituality, where we investigate the roots and intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism. You can follow myself, Derek, and Julian on bluesky. The podcast is on Instagram and threads under its own handle, and you can support our Patreon. You can also find me personally on YouTube and TikTok. NTIFascistdad this brief is a little audio essay on a new theoretical lens I'll be applying to the subject matter of this podcast, Conspirituality, going forward, and I'll also be applying it to the way in which it is produced. The lens is Neo Feudalism, as developed by Jody Dean, but I'm also leaning into the theory of techno feudalism as articulated by Yanis Varoufakis. And in the background of both of these for me is something called vectoralism, theorized by MacKenzie work. All three of these thinkers are saying that industrial capitalism has now been superseded by a new form of production that we're immersed in but are struggling to recognize, information feudalism. And this has some interesting effects on the content that I work with and the conditions I work under. So let's start with some basics. Jody Dean says that platform capitalism is feudalistic for four reasons. First, when we interact with Spotify and Amazon and Google and Meta, we're navigating parcels of sovereignty or fiefdoms that compete with and replace state power with privatized governance structures. Second, this creates new lords and serfs amidst exploding wealth inequality. Hello, first trillionaire in the world. Elon Musk. Third, all of this leads to and depends upon hinterlandization, which is Dean's term for the abandonment of territories and populations as surplus. So we're talking about deindustrialized, defunded, and digitally isolated populations that become the primary recruitment base for authoritarian and conspiratorial movements. So here it makes me think about how MLMs will destroy what's left of entire communities in the Rust Belt and also become vectors for things like QAnon. Fourth, all of this unfolds with an affect of catastrophic anxiety or a perpetual state of apocalypticism. Now, into Dean's mix of four elements, Yannis Varoufakis adds a definition. He says that the extraction mechanism of this feudal form is cloud rent, the toll that platform lords charge on economic activity. Cloud rent replaces surplus labor value as the dominant mode of accumulation, he says, and a lot of people question his position. They point out that the cloud is a material asset that's dependent on resources extraction and physical labor, and it is moving commodities around that have been produced in the Global South. And he agrees with that, actually. But he says that the major part of the of surplus value produced in the traditional capitalist sector remains under the control of the techno feudal technology. And it's siphoned off by big tech as cloud rent, which causes the entire system to become more prone to crises. So in his terms, classical capitalism still exists, but it has become a vassal. The old capitalists are now paying rent to the cloud guys. Another key thing that Varoufakas adds is that cloud rent double taps both the worker and the consumer. So in addition to subscribing to a platform service, the data from your usage of that service becomes another form of value you give back to the platform for free. You have to pay them to be on it. And while you're on it, you pay them again with the data on your instincts, your desires, fears, needs, and vulnerabilities. And that data becomes part of the capital power. The owners can invest in new ways of locking you in. Now, on the working side, if you drive Uber, for example, you are told for your use of the app, but your use of the app also sends the data of your labor back to the platform, which learns how to optimize profit from it, but doesn't cut you in on that. So they get you coming and they get you going to. All of this McKinsey work adds the names of two new classes. The vector list class, which owns not factories but the vectors controlling information flow, and the hacker class, which produces all new value but owns none of the means to realize it. Now, if you've been following conspirituality for a while, you'll find some of these ideas to be familiar, especially in the zone where technology meets psychology. Because from the outset we have tagged conspirituality as a high speed, monetized online religion accelerated by gamification, which rewards engagement with likes and follows, and that incentivizes influencers to produce increasingly extreme reactive content to satisfy algorithmic demands with the peak of that extremity, you know, taking on religious dimensions because you know, how much farther can you go than God? So we described a well oiled Internet machinery that employs sophisticated conversion funnels and affiliate marketing to turn consumers into devoted in group members and that erases the line between spiritual worship and e commerce. So over many episodes and in our book, we wrote about how the curated Instagram aesthetics of movements like pastel QAnon served as bourgeois radicalization pipelines, sanitizing conspiracy theories for the wellness demographic, or spicing up otherwise boring and repetitive sales pitches for green juices and turmeric suppositories. We talked about how the digital landscape enlists believers as digital soldiers, paying them in dopamine for participating in the glory of global spiritual warfare. We described what we saw as a digital manifestation of mystical records, creating a hall of mirrors where misinformation can achieve a mirage of legitimacy. But speaking of mirrors, we also struggled with how to reflect on all of this we with positive interventions. And we noticed early on that many interventions actually provoked what we came to call the broken mirror effect. This was our term for how mainstream criticism or the deplatforming of disinformation influencers, when that was a thing briefly during the height of the pandemic, would usually drive them toward less regulated spaces like Telegram and Rumble and Odyssey, if you remember that one, which could further isolate their followers and intensify radicalizing parasocial bonds. And so we searched for best communications practices. We hosted Imran Ahmed from the center for Countering Digital Hate. We hosted Counter Disinformation creator Abby Richards. I interviewed Stephanie Kemmerer on what it was like to be in QAnon and what it was like to come out and what it was like to help others come out. We also studied Lee McIntyre's book How to Talk to a Science Denier, and we had him on the show. And so we picked up assiduously as many Tips and tricks as we could on how best to communicate to those who were lost down the rabbit hole, as we would say. And that was the job. Derek would painstakingly explain the pseudoscience animating the COVID remedy grifts. Julian would painstakingly explain the cognitive fallacies of anti vax discourse. And I would painstakingly explain how cult dynamics fueled these phenomena through affect, charisma and weird parasocial attachment bonds. We explained things over and over again. And whenever in an editorial meeting I would say, haven't we covered this already? Derek would quite rightly say, yes, but our bubble is small and people aren't as connected to this stuff as we are. They're not in the weeds every day like us. And so it was a grind, but also good work to investigate the disinformation dozen to to track the Yoga to QAnon pipeline, to name the specific charismatic influencers responsible for spreading vaccine misinformation and to show how they did it. And to bring cult dynamics analysis to illuminate how spiritual communities enabled the spread. We showed that conspirituality was not random. It had structural features and recurring patterns. But over time, I personally came to see the analysis I was doing as limited. I was in a pattern of conceiving the problem primarily as one of bad information spreading through inadequately critical or overly vulnerable communities enabled by charismatic figures exploiting spiritual seeking. That's not wrong. But through this focus, I could also feel certain uncomfortable ideological commitments creeping up behind me, such as locating the problem in epistemology and psychology rather than political economy, such as assuming that misinformation is a deviation from some norm of rational discourse or some golden age of media. Third, this feeling of being the fact checker, the cult researcher, the corrector, arriving from outside the affected community with better information, and then also treating the platform architecture as a challenging variable to be regulated rather than rather than a foundational driver of the discourse itself. So the method originally worked well for me in probing questions of belief, charismatic influence, cultic bonding and grifting. But it didn't satisfy my political questions. So after several years that I spent explaining things, I started to feel some different things about my role in the process. And it started with a political awareness, which I'll describe next. But then through reading work and Varoufakis and Dean, it has morphed into an awareness of my own status within what Dean calls communicative capitalism. So there's a chapter in our book called Conspiritualists are not Wrong. And the core argument is that the pandemic of misinformation is rooted in the failures and alienations of capitalism. The text argues that conspirituality exploits a pandemic of disenchantment, that adherents are reacting to a system where their humanity is reduced to consumer data and their angst is insulted by lifestyle marketing. We argued that misinformation thrives in the empire of predatory for profit healthcare, which incubates a rebellious religious response because it measures human worth by economic output, it enforces austerity, and it trickles down only as much survival as people can afford, to quote Beatrice Adler Bolton. Adding to this is the clinical alienation where doctors interrupt patients within 11 seconds and treat the body like a machine. You know, things that drive people toward alternative practitioners who can take personal histories in, you know, lovely clinics and spend caregiving time that the for profit medical model has to ration. We wrote that conspiritualists were not wrong to prophesy that the COVID 19 crisis would exacerbate class inequality. They correctly observed that while the working class faced precarity, the billionaire class increased their net worth by a trillion dollars. This legitimate economic grievance provided the moral gravity that made their more extreme fictional narratives like QAnon feel symbolically reasonable to those neglected by the state. We also wrote about the consumer cycle and how corporations sell solutions today for the problems they sold yesterday, leading to a cynical worldview where governments and Big Pharma are perceived to have a vested interest in keeping populations sick or anxious to drive further consumerism. We acknowledge that this was the landscape in which scientific literacy interventions could fall flat because conspiratorialists viewed mainstream institutions as inherently compromised by capitalist profit motives. Now that chapter I really loved working on it. It was the most important for me personally in the book, and since publication I've continued to dig down into that analysis, pushing harder and harder into my leftist origins. But even that process didn't really address the problem of the intervention itself. Like what was the difference between explaining over and over again how cult dynamics were really disruptive and toxic and explaining over and over that capitalism was really disruptive and toxic? It felt like the same loop, only a little bit more acrimonious and sometimes more self righteous. And then sometime in 2022, I stumbled on a Jacobin video called Log the Fuck off, which was a panel discussion with Ben Fong, Amber Frost, and Matt Christman. The last two I was familiar with from Chapo Trap House, which is the podcast for the terminally online dirtbag left, and Matt, who Had a stroke a few and isn't really on the show anymore. Said the following.
- [15:04]
D
The way I think about it is, so use a very awkward metaphor, political organizing of creating a political movement, being part of a political movement. It's like building a ship. So you're gonna get in the water and you're gonna go to a new place, a new place that's better than this place. And the way you build a ship is everybody gets together and you build a ship and you learn how to do it by doing it. You don't know how to sand a keel and stand up the mast and all that stuff. And the Internet is this, this lure to tell people, hey, we'll teach you how to build a ship. And people go on there thinking, thank God I'm going to learn how to build a ship. There's no shipyards in my town. This is a way for me to do this. But what you're actually learning is how to build a ship in a bottle. And then when it's time for everybody to get off the Internet and come together, instead of having the corpus of knowledge to actually take some wood and build a ship, they've all just got their individual ship in a bottle, which will get them precisely nowhere. And that's because the frictionless plane of online does not allow you to incorporate the feedback, the feedback loop of real world experience into your understanding. And that means that you will never be able to translate it to other people because it was not, it doesn't have a common referent way that experientially based understanding of politics does.
- [16:23]
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There was something uncanny about that metaphor for me, but also there was something he left out. Where was the bottle? Who owns the bottle? It's sitting on Mark Zuckerberg's desk, right? For his entertainment. So anytime he wants, he can pull the plug, he can choke it out of the algorithm, he can make it sink or vanish, or maybe worse, encourage you to keep building inside it, to create a whole ecosystem in the bottle, to make it into a diorama you never want to leave, and in which all your work adds value to the bottle. So hearing this from Matt, who is one of the most creative Marxist thinkers I know, is really where the neo feudalism analysis started to come into focus for me. Because even though I had leaned away from the sort of liberal epistemology I began with and more into the anti capitalist politics, I believe in both modes, I realized I was building a ship in a bottle. So what Dean Varoufakis and work all Marxists say is that content, as critical of capitalism as it can be, cannot escape the commodification of the platforms. But before I go to that level, I want to flesh out the detail that Jody Dean says is at the heart of these platforms. And lording over all the content categories I've named so far, the misinformation, the debunking of misinformation, and the leftist analys of these processes, all of it falls under the realm of communicative capitalism. Okay, what is communicative capitalism? At the granular level, it's the transformation of a message into a contribution. Now, roughly, this is analogous to the transformation of use value into exchange value. The sweater I'm wearing as I write this was knit by my late mother, and as I wear it, it confers meaning and love as well as warmth. Now, if I had to sell it, I would have to assess it in other terms. How does it compare to other available knitwear? What are sweaters like this going for on the open market? The sweater I wear and that gives me warmth and love is is its use value. The sweater I need to sell begins to express or take on an exchange value. Now, in communication terms, I'll just say I'm a big letter writer. For birthdays and holidays, my kids and my partner can always expect a full page of love and reflection on those mornings. This also saves money, which sounds like a joke, but it's part of the point actually, because that writing has the highest use value of anything I do. It nurtures our bonds, although sometimes it might be boring as well, especially for the kids. Now, just below those letters in terms of use value are emails or DMs or voice memos with my friends about the world and life. Below that are the messages that I create and share during organizing meetings, editorial meetings, and then all the way down. At the bottom end, away from that use value altogether, is the social media post, which might feel like it has use value for a moment, but almost instantly it gets converted into performance metrics that ostensibly measure its worth. Joe Dean says we organically send messages in order to elicit a functional response. But what happens on the platforms is that the main form of the message, the post, is offered with no guarantee of a functional response, sometimes not even a hope of a functional response. It's offered freely as a contribution to already circulating content. Unlike messages, contributions are communicatively equivalent to each other. What matters is not meaning or use value, but exchange value or the capacity to circulate. Dean also has a critique in which she says this creates a parody of democratic participation. But that's another story. Now, as a communist, Dean's primary focus is on what this economy does to political speech. She says that political speech now circulates as content rather than as deliberation or planning or bonding. Opinions, outrage, calls to action, these all substitute for political engagement. Dissent can be present everywhere and anywhere, but also effective in not many places, or maybe even nowhere. And the left, she says, is particularly vulnerable to this because every petition, every viral thread, every podcast episode completes the circuit of engagement that the platform requires, while converting political energy of all types into commodities. Now, what commodities are we talking about? Varoufakas adds to this analysis through the emphasis on cloud rental. Amazon does not compete with other retailers so much as it charges rent on the conditions by which retail can take place. Cloud capital is not produced by workers in the classical sense. It's produced by what Varoufakis calls cloud proles working for wages or on spec, and partly by users in their leisure time who work for no pay, uploading content, generating data, training algorithms. And what is the economic condition of the person who is contributing? It's Mackenzie Work who develops this in granular detail in a beautiful little book from 2019 called Capital. Is Is this something worse? Mackenzie Work hacks away at what she calls the rigid jargon of calcified Marxism to more honestly appraise this world of gig workers and screens the world in which the so much of the political information economy unfolds. And to do this, she jettisons two old Marxist ideas. First is the assumption that capitalism must last in a coherent and recognizable form until communism finally kills it off. So that's one sort of foundational belief that she says must be sort of put to the side or at least questioned. And then the second one is this principle of the hidden nefarious effects of capital. And on this second point, she means that classical Marxism says capitalism presents itself one way but works in another, that workers appear to freely sell their labor. But when you look carefully beneath that appearance, you'll see the reality of exploitation and surplus value extraction. And traditionally, the gap between what capitalism looks like and what it actually does is what you are supposed to look into as a critic. But work says, actually, it's not that hard anymore. What we see now is what we get. The appearance is the structure. The gig workers, isolated and atomized. Freedom is real. But so is her subordination to the app, and you can see them both in clear daylight. So imagine that Uber driver. She brings her car, her phone, her body, her knowledge of her town, her service skills. She owns or leases everything except the one thing that makes it all valuable, the vector. She is not working for wage labor in any classical sense. She is not selling her labor power to a capitalist who owns the means of production. She is paying rent in fees and data to access the customers without whom her labor produces nothing. So the exploitation happens not within the labor relation, but at the point of access, parallel to the work itself. And here's the crucial part, in terms of self perception, she does all of this for customers. But who's the boss? It appears that she owns the means of production. And back in the day, the call to seize the means of production was based on the reality of the factory, the mine, the shipping docks. These sites still exist today, but they are increasingly automated. But where they still do exist, they are important because as physical spaces, they offer the chance that workers can gather, communicate, complain about the boss, unionize, agitate, and shut things down and press for changes. But where do workers gather on their platforms? Work says that vectoralism, which is the primacy of the app or the platform, preempts solidarity by distributing the means of production to people, but one body at a time, each isolated from the others, each individually dependent on the same vector app. And the gig worker can't easily identify as exploited because she is formally her own boss. So the ideological work of vectoralism is largely done by the structure itself, without anyone having to lie about it or conceal it. She's not trapped by false consciousness. She's not being lied to. She is being trapped by the flow of data and who controls it. So if there is a struggle, it must be directed at the protocols, the data rights, the algorithms. And this calls for political and legal confrontations with infrastructure that the left just doesn't know anything about, because it's not about a labor confrontation with an employer. Now, to synthesize all of this, Jody Dean shows that platform capitalism converts political speech from message into contribution and from use value into exchange value, which dissolves deliberation into just circulating content. Varoufakis identifies the profit mechanism, which is cloud rent, extracted from every transaction that passes through the structure. And work shows what this means for the gig worker who owns her means of production, but is trapped by the app. So let me put all of this together now in relation to the project of analyzing conspirituality, which is an online religion and politics, and doing so in online spaces and using online tools. So this podcast hit the feeds at the right time. We were adversarial. The subjects were emotionally intense, morally charged. We found a pandemic audience anxious for clarity and understanding, and the attention economy rewards these affect qualities with amplification because, you know, it generates sustained engagement. However, from the platform's perspective, the debunker and the debunked produce content in the same commodity category. This means that the show's success partly depended on the ongoing health of the conspirituality ecosystem it was criticizing. A world in which Christiane Northrup and Kelly Brogan were effectively marginalized would have been a world with no market for us, really. And these platforms we use don't care if the show succeeds at its stated mission. It has every interest in the show and its targets coexisting indefinitely as mutually reinforcing engagement drivers. Now, Varoufakas would say that every episode, regardless of its content, generated data and engagement that flowed upward to Spotify, Apple and Google as surplus. So all of our explaining, all of the show's labor, the research, the emotional cost of sustained exposure to toxic material and abusive communities, all of the editing and production work, all of the paperwork, the business stuff, all of that was converted into platform value on terms we did not set. However, there was still use value. There were still messages that got through. We know because we got the emails. People did leave qanon and conspirituality pipelines partly because of the show. People did feel less alone in their confusion. We called out harm and sometimes we interrupted it. So who have I been along the way? Well, according to techno feudalism, I've been a highly productive serf who sometimes achieves the status of a minor lord. Work would put me in the hacker class. I own my gear, a desktop, a laptop, a 4K camera, an audiobox preamp, a rode condenser mic, an insta360 flow gimbal and an iPhone 13. I'm in a 54 year old body that has some recurring pain issues, cardiovascular vulnerabilities and just recently gout. Yay. Which I have to take care of with great vigilance as the sole earner in the house so that I can keep using these tools as my own boss. Sort of. Because with these tools I produce analysis, journalism, critique. But I owe none of the tech through which it realizes its value. They can and do change the terms at any time. And for six years I've made a living at it, working the land in part for Spotify and Apple, training their algorithms and building their audience retention data. The larger part via Patreon is cleaner. There's more of a direct exchange with the audience. But isn't it amazing to think that the very sentences that I'm speaking now are training the AIs of Spotify and Apple to somehow replicate what I'm doing in the future? I'm giving that to them. You're welcome. So Dean would say I'm an ideal worker in communicative capitalism. I'm self directed, self caring, intrinsically motivated, personally invested in the content, willing to absorb near total emotional and reputational risk. And I've also become a minor lord for my troubles. Now with an audience of almost 75,000 Instagram followers and a Patreon community that I influence. But what, if anything, does this have to do with improving material conditions and increasing justice in the world? I'm going to have to keep thinking about that One recent experience in which I felt these paradigms coming together was when I went to a gathering of Canadian socialists affiliated with the former NDP campaign for Eve Engler. Now, Engler was the hard left, like withdrawal from NATO end fossil fuel extraction yesterday candidate who was disbarred from the NDP leadership race most likely over his hardline anti Israel rhetoric. And that exclusion helped clear the path for Avi Lewis win. But Engler's network, now operating under the banner and potential new party name of Capitalism Can't Be Fixed, is still vibrant and committed to organizing and hounding Lewis from the left. And I think that's as it should be. And so recently I spent a day hanging with and listening to the most dedicated socialist thinkers and organizers in the country and working in process groups to discuss policy and communications. And I got to meet a couple of my fellow Instagram influencer buddies in the hacker class and we could actually speak together and then speak out to the group about the need to integrate online and in real life work in Capital's grave. Jody Dean talks about the demographic that I don't belong to, but that was in, you know, good representation at that meeting in the form of union workers and service workers. And this is the group that really has the chance of bringing these things together. And they became as visible as the hacker class did at the height of the pandemic. Jody Dean calls this the servant vanguard. So this is the labor force of nurses, teachers, grocery stockers, home care workers. She calls them collectively indispensable and also better able to mobilize because they still work in places of higher potential organization. Because if there's going to be anything like a general strike, it's going to be motivated and organized in those spaces. Dean says these are also workers with direct experience of social care and social reproduction being far more valuable than profit, and more of their work takes place outside of the vectors of the apps. So throughout that day, I was not in a bottle. And yet the day after, I'm back in the content mine, back in my basement, surrounded by my devices, and I can feel the cork of the bottle closing. I've been here for years, and while it hasn't been useless, I do need to increase my honesty about feeding the algorithm that feeds the thing I'm fighting. I can't think or write my way around it. I have to face it head on and see where I too might join the servant vanguard. Take care of each other, everybody. Sam.