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Technical Estrangement and the Ersatz Uncanny
It’s always strange when one’s professional life and one’s hobbies collide. I’ve been collecting guitar effects pedals for several years, not nearly as long as I’ve been researching conspiracy theories, but I hardly expected to see the Boss MT-2 Metal Zone pedal show up in a conspiracy theory. In January, however, a schematic of the much-reviled distortion pedal was being circulated as proof that the Covid-19 vaccine contained a secret 5G microchip to allow the tracking of innocent citizens.
The schematic was subsequently revealed to have originated as a hoax, but that didn’t stop its spread through Reddit conspiracy theory communities (note: hoaxes always take on a life of their own, and they’re never a good idea if you want to prove how stupid or gullible people are). Since then, I’ve thought a lot about why something as anodyne as a guitar pedal schematic might seem so mystifying, alluring, or uncanny that it could be swept up into a conspiracy theory.
One term that gets used a lot in connection with social media and the Internet in general is “context collapse,” a term coined by Danah Boyd in 2013 to describe social media environments where people from one’s different social groups (family, co-workers, friends, etc.) are all brought together. The net result can often be difficulty in navigating the various registers that one maintains in these different social groups all at once, potentially leading to aggression, hostility, offensive behavior, and other negative outcomes.
There’s a perhaps different version of this, one that operates in a great deal of conspiracy theories: a kind of context collapse focused on infrastructure, supply chain logistics, schematics, and other aspects of modern life that are brought strangely to light by the web. Call it “technical estrangement”: what happens when people are confronted with aspects of otherwise-hidden infrastructure and struggle to make sense of them, preferring instead to fold them into conspiratorial musings and paranoia.
In my last book, The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained, I focused on this phenomenon in regard to “FEMA Camps”: the conspiracy theory that the government has prepared large scale detention camps in advance of a nationwide crackdown depends on the…
