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None Dare Call it Conspirituality!
28 Plays2 years ago
M and Josh take a look at the sadly departed Dean Ballinger's last paper - published the day of his funeral - to see what he and Ann Hardy had to say about David Icke's brand of "conspiritualism".
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
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Transcript
Introduction to Conspiracy Theories
00:00:00
Speaker
Here it is, the very cornerstone of conspiracy scholarship. This book, sir, contains every conspiracy theory concept in our beloved literature. You've written a book. I have. It looks so surprised.
00:00:12
Speaker
I'm surprised because a person who doesn't read has apparently written a book. Just because I don't read doesn't mean I can't write. Admittedly, not reading does make copy editing a problem, but that's why we have publishers. Make them do the work. It's like clips so much of the ticket. Indeed. It seems wrong to mention royalties after a monarch's death, and I guess it will remain so. So this book, then, it covers everything conspiratorial, does it? Every single conspiracy theory, concept, and topic.
00:00:42
Speaker
Gosh blinds your impudence sir, yes, every single concept. Oh well in that case I hope you will not object if I offer you my most enthusiastic appreciation of a text expounding on the vices of conspiratualities. What? Conspiratuality is a common term in epistemic lexical.
00:01:02
Speaker
Oh, I'm sorry. I'm aniseptic, phrasmotic and even compunctious to have caused you such pericombobulation in your unwarranted analyses into the credence of beliefs, conspiracies, complotable, conspiratorial and conspiratorial. Are these more conspiratorial terms? No, just lines written by Ben Elton co-opted by me and dedicated to Dean.
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy
00:01:30
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy featuring Josh Addison and Em Denton. Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy here in Auckland, New Zealand. I am Josh Addison and in Zhuhai, China, we have associate professor of philosophy and creepy long-haired Japanese girl crawling out of a well, Dr. Em R.X. Denton.
00:02:01
Speaker
No, that's the wrong creepy Japanese girl. That's the other one. And I'm pretty sure you can do it for that long, but seriously, that's a good Christian ring reference and you're messing it up with your grudge malarkey. Honestly, I'm not. I don't approve.
00:02:20
Speaker
Well, this mixing of franchises, even though they literally mixed the franchises, I don't stand for that. For an entire trilogy. There's a trilogy of... Oh god, well there are three of them. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I didn't even know that. Yeah, Sardigo versus The Grudge 1, 2 and 3. Goodness. I've only seen the first one, and that is why I've never seen the other two.
Dean Ballinger's Delayed Paper: A COVID-19 Impact
00:02:44
Speaker
Yep, I think that's fair.
00:02:46
Speaker
So, how many episodes in a row has this been of us looking at academic papers? It seems to be the thing. Three for me and technically four for you, but we won't explain it. We won't get into that just yet, no. So we have another paper to look at, but it's a special paper. Again, it's not an edition of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre.
00:03:12
Speaker
It's another send-off to the dearly departed Dean Ballinger, whose paper was published just after, just posthumously? On the day of his funeral. Ah, well there you go. I see. I'm, in theory, I think was an accident, but seems a little bit on the nose, because this paper was received at the Journal of Contemporary Religion back
00:03:38
Speaker
in October of 2018, it was accepted for publication in November 2020.
00:03:48
Speaker
And then almost two years later went into print. So that's four years. And that four years is no. No, I mean, well, it's not normal in philosophy. I know the few fringe cases of people three years later still waiting for their final acceptance. But normally papers take anywhere between six months to 18 months to get from
00:04:15
Speaker
submission to acceptance so this this seems like a long time apparently it's a covid related ordeal but there is four years between the first draft well i see there are two years between
00:04:29
Speaker
the first draft and the finished product, and then two years between the finished product and publication. And some of that is evidenced by what's in the article itself, because this article concerns David Icke, and it makes some claims about David Icke, which are no longer true, notably that David Icke has a YouTube channel, which used to be true in 2018, stopped being true sometime in 2020,
Exploring 'Conspiratuality'
00:04:58
Speaker
and then reading it in 2022 going I can't remember when did I lose out in a footnote post submission this has changed so um how about we play a sting then and actually start looking at this thing indeed now I feel I get to do the abstract this time because you've been doing the abstract a lot Joshua a lot I like an abstract
00:05:27
Speaker
This is Conspirituality and the Web, a case study of David Icke's media use, and it's written by a dear friend of the show, but now unfortunately deceased, Dean Ballinger and Anne Hardy, who are both, well, who were both and are both at the University of Waikato in media studies. And the abstract reads like this.
00:05:48
Speaker
Recent scholarship, notably that of Charlotte Ward and David Vowis, has developed the category of conspiratuality to describe the contemporary melding online of New Age beliefs and conspiracy theories. This article seeks to interrogate the premise that conspiratuality is primarily web-based through an examination of the media practices of leading UK-based conspiratalist David Icke.
00:06:14
Speaker
It argues that conspiruality operates through a synergistic model of media use, in which the web functions in a complementary fashion alongside other media such as books and lecture presentations. Drawing on frameworks from digital religion studies, the article further argues that this model serves to reinforce Ike's authority as a conspiratorialist, along with developing a sense of community among his audience.
00:06:43
Speaker
as we will see shortly. Conspiratorialist obviously is a portmanteau of conspiracist and spiritualist. It also could be a portmanteau of con man and spiritualist, which would also work quite well. It does actually, yes, yes. So there's an introduction section, which seems quite long, but it
00:07:06
Speaker
as an introduction section should, introduces a bunch of stuff, gives a bunch of background, which I don't know. Whether it's a philosophy paper would probably be the sort of stuff that we'd skip over and get straight to the main bit, but since it's talking about things we don't normally discuss, it's probably worth going through to actually set things up. So it begins...
00:07:28
Speaker
With a bit of the usual definition and introductory staff starts, new age spiritualities and conspiracy theories are bodies of alternative knowledge and practice that, respectively, have had a high degree of cultural visibility and influence in the millennial period of the late 20th and early 21st century. Both possess long and complex cultural histories and are the subject of academic discussions across disciplines such as religion, politics and sociology.
00:07:53
Speaker
I think a little bit later on they'll be talking about exactly what sorts of strange random individuals across these disciplines might be discussing this kind of thing but we're not there yet.
00:08:05
Speaker
So it goes through a little bit of sort of the history of New Age spirituality and starts defining things by saying, regardless of the diverse historical and cultural context associated with the concept, scholarship recognizes certain key principles or beliefs as distinctive identifiers of New Age spirituality.
00:08:26
Speaker
For example, Olav Hammer delineates the New Age as a large and diverse body of alternative spiritual teachings and practices that are based upon some core metaphysical principles. In summary, these are a holistic view of reality encompassing the cosmos, the Earth's natural environment, and humans envisaged as an organism combining mind, body, and spirit.
00:08:45
Speaker
an epistemology that recognises modes of knowledge such as intuition and indigenous spirituality alongside or superior to scientific rationalism, and an ontological sense that humans are significant parts of the system and that our mental shapes state reality." So that's the setup of vague spirituality. And they conclude this paragraph with, these principles inform a significant new age... I can't say eschatology today.
00:09:15
Speaker
Eschatology? Eschatology, yes. A New Age eschatological trope, the belief that humanity is undergoing a paradigm shift in spiritual consciousness and awareness away from the dominant, spiritually corrupt paradigm of Western materialism. And when I read that, I was going, hmm, I can kind of see if this is how you're characterizing this kind of New Age ethos or
00:09:41
Speaker
period of time we're seeing at the end of the 20th, beginning of the 21st century, how these ideas can be easily co-opted to political ends. Because if you're going, well, there's a paradigm shift going on. And that paradigm shift from the new age, the dawning of the age of Aquarius, is also happening at a point of increased liberalization, at least within Western-style democracies. And so you might go, oh,
00:10:09
Speaker
who's actually leading this paradigm shift? What's causing the shift in consciousness?
New Age Spirituality and Politics
00:10:17
Speaker
So you can kind of see how you might end up going, yeah, I can see if you've got a particularly conspiratorial bend, you might go, hmm, is this change really for the better? For whose benefit is this change occurring?
00:10:32
Speaker
Yes, no, they do dovetail nicely as we will see. So having talked about what they mean by spiritualism and new age spirituality, they then give a bit of an intro to conspiracy theories. They start by saying the subject of conspiracy theory is similarly diverse in terms of the epistemological scope and cultural factors involved.
00:10:55
Speaker
and refers to Michael Barkun's categories of, I'm sure we've talked about this before, haven't we? The super-conspiracies and systemic conspiracies and stuff? Event conspiracies, systemic conspiracies, and super-conspiracies. And Barkun goes, believes about event conspiracies, they seem reasonable because conspiracies do occur. But the systemic conspiracies are the ones which are
00:11:17
Speaker
slightly dicey and the super conspiracy is the all-embracing conspiracy theories. They're the ones which are really bad. Now I'm no fan of Bakun's categorization of conspiracy theory because I feel it's a very, very, very blunt hammer trying to make a round peg go into a square hole or however that metaphor works. And that works on the surface but the more you try to plug examples into a schema
00:11:46
Speaker
the less it works. But I haven't gone back and looked. I know we've covered this stuff before. Would it have been the likes of Lee Basham's Malevolent Global Conspiracies or something having a go at that? But at any rate, I think Johar Reicher talks about Bakun and either political or ethics of conspiracy theory. So I think we covered it back then. So there are things we've looked at before.
00:12:14
Speaker
But then, yeah, so now, having defined that, we talk about how people talk about this. The paper says, academic perspectives on the meanings and function of conspiracy theory span numerous disciplines and gives a few examples. They talk about good old Sunstein and Vermeule as people who talk about them in the area of political studies and the social sciences. They talk about night.
00:12:39
Speaker
Peter Knight. Peter Knight. Not Michael Knight. Michael Knight, as far as I'm aware, has not published anything on conspiracy theories. I believe Kit might have done, but Michael definitely not. You'd think so. And then says that while philosophers have become interested in conspiracy theories as manifestations of shifts and tensions in Western thought regarding standards of epistemological authority, referring to one dentist of 2014.
00:13:10
Speaker
Frankly, I have no idea who that could be, but sounds like they know what they're talking about, I guess, if Dean saw fit to quote them. Got the strange sense of deja vu. I've probably done that joke before. Yeah, I can't remember. Anyway, I think not only you've done that joke before, I think you made the comment about haven't I done that joke before the last time you made this joke.
00:13:35
Speaker
Well, that was there, so you could have added something and said, yes, you have, make a different one, but anyway. So yeah, basically, this is now the area of stuff that we're all actually, we're all fairly familiar with. Although there was the bit where they say, although conspiracy theories generally operate in the domain of politics and new age beliefs in the domain of spirituality, there have long been instances of crossover between the two, which maybe you think, is that?
00:14:02
Speaker
Being a thing, conspiracy theories are generally in politics. I wouldn't have thought so, but I don't know, maybe the ones people are most interested in. I think there's also an issue with looking at conspiracy theory scholarship, because everyone has their own particular interest in what they take to be the kind of exemplar examples. And actually, this comes up a lot when philosophers are talking with, say, social psychologists or other social scientists.
00:14:31
Speaker
about our interest in conspiracy theories because particularists by and large want to focus the conversation on political conspiracies because we're concerned that political conspiracies might go unnoticed if we're using a pejorative term like conspiracy theory to dismiss any warranted conspiracy theorizing.
00:14:51
Speaker
Well, social psychologists tend to be much more interested in, to put it in air quotes, the wackier conspiracy theories that people believe. So flat earth beliefs, the idea that Elvis is still alive, the fact that Diana may have faked her death or Prince Charles was involved in the assassination. And so people kind of pick out the category of belief they think is interesting, and then they find examples going back through history.
00:15:17
Speaker
So part of this is, this is a paper looking at mysticism, supernaturalism, and conspiracy theories at the same time. So the category that Dean and Anne are looking at is slightly different from the kind of ones that we routinely refer to in our conversations.
00:15:36
Speaker
Right. So, having set up what they mean by spirituality and conspiracy theories, they then introduced this idea of conspiratuality, saying in their article of 2011, the emergence of conspiratuality
00:15:53
Speaker
Charlotte Wharton and David Vos argue that the millennial period has spawned a substantive and integrated synthesis of conspiracy theory and New Age belief that is distinctive enough to be discussed as a specific strand or movement of 21st century alternative spirituality.
00:16:09
Speaker
They describe conspiratuality as a syncretic cosmology of progressive spirituality and paranoid politics wherein the potential for new and improved modes of spiritual and social development is perceived as being actively resisted and suppressed by conspiratorial forces which control the major systems of political and social power and for whom such prospective change by necessary constitutes a fundamental threat.
00:16:31
Speaker
solutions to repelling the threat represented by this conspiratorial control group predominantly lie in acting in accordance with a spiritually awakened new paradigm worldview. Now they say it's a relatively new
00:16:47
Speaker
occurrence, a new phenomenon. The paper goes on to point out that some people argue that it's not actually that new, that this intersection of the two things has been around a while, although part of Borden-Vos' view is that, as they say, conspiratuality appears to be an inter-net-based movement with a relatively modest presence in, quote-unquote, real life. So
00:17:11
Speaker
This kind of it that they're talking about is dependent in large part on the internet, which I guess means it can't help but be a more modern phenomenon, I suppose. It's true. The ancient Romans didn't seem to have much in the way of decent Wi-Fi. No, no. It was fun because they had all those aqueducts. You could have just put little aerials on top of them or something in the
00:17:34
Speaker
They could have just poured the Wi-Fi down the aqueducts and it would have come into everyone's houses. I mean, it literally would be the definition of streaming.
00:17:42
Speaker
Hmm, do I approve of that pun? Yes, no, I think I approve. Yeah, I'll take it. And so anyway, so this is the definition of conspirility and they finish out the introduction by saying this article seeks to contribute to this topic by interrogating the extent to which conspirility can be considered a web-based movement by an analysis of the media use of leading UK conspiratulist David Icke. Never heard of him.
00:18:13
Speaker
No, no. Sounds like a, sounds like an interesting fellow. Maybe we should read on. Um, so yeah, I'm about to contradict that in almost the immediate next section.
00:18:29
Speaker
The remainder of the paper is sort of using David Eike as kind of a case study and looking at how he works and how his brand of conspiratorialism is furthered by the internet, among other things.
David Icke's Influence in Conspiracy Theories
00:18:43
Speaker
So the first section following the introduction is Ikean conspiratuality and synergistic mediation. And a lot of it is mostly just sort of background on David Icke, which we are fairly familiar with. Yeah, although what I mean, what interesting about this, and I know this from experience. So those of us who study conspiracy theories tend to know who David Icke and Alex Jones are.
00:19:08
Speaker
People who don't study conspiracy theories often do not know who these people are at all. So what you get is you submit a paper to a journal and you say, I'm going to look, you know, prominent conspiracy theorist David Icke, and then Reviewer Bee goes, never heard of this person, don't see why it's important.
00:19:28
Speaker
So then you have to rewrite the paper to try to explain to someone who's an outside reviewer that actually it's important to look at this person they've never heard of because they're famous. It's just not famous in the way that they're a household name. They're famous within a very particular
00:19:46
Speaker
avenue of discussion or investigation. And I know of several people who've had a lot of trouble getting papers published, because they, you know, they want to talk about a prominent individual in a conspiracy theory movement. And reviewers simply go, well, I've never heard of this person, they can't be that important. And papers get rejected just on that. So this does a very good job of
00:20:12
Speaker
pointing out who Ike is and his background and giving him enough gravitas to then say well look given his prominence we should probably look at exactly how he acts and how his business model works
00:20:27
Speaker
Yes, yes, exactly. So as you say, this first section does a good job of introducing David Eich to people who may not be familiar with his body of work. It mentions a couple of times that Dean attended one of his day-long presentations in 2016. I assume you would have been present then as well.
00:20:46
Speaker
Yes, that was the time where I gave you a cold. It was the one where you gave me a cold and I was getting more and more ill and actually quite drastically ill through the entire eight hour presentation.
00:21:05
Speaker
And remember people, this is 2016. This is before we even realize that you should, if you've got a coronavirus, you probably shouldn't be in the presence of other people. This was back in the old days, we just wanted about giving illnesses to people willy-nilly. And I'm saying back in the old days, we seem to have gone back to the dark ages of just giving people viruses wherever we go. So yes, I was sitting there,
00:21:27
Speaker
in the audience with Dean and Isaac getting progressively iller and iller to the point where, kind of two hours before the end, it looked like I was going to die. And Isaac promised me that if it did seem I was about to draw my last breath, he would drag me to the stage so I could die at the knees of David Ike.
00:21:52
Speaker
That would have been nice. But it was not to be. So I guess the main thing for us to take from this first section is it talks about the kinds of things that David Eich produces. He has, as we know, many, many books. I think at the time this was written, they say he had 15 books. I imagine there's probably been a couple more come out since.
00:22:12
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's 17 or 18 now. Although the problem with David Icke's books is they're kind of all the same book but with a different dust jacket.
00:22:22
Speaker
Yeah, he has the books and he has the day-long lectures, such as the ones you've attended. And then, of course, he has his content on the internet. And as they sort of put it, the books tend to form... That's sort of the bulk of the content that then gets disseminated via his lectures and via the web, although, as we'll see, he tailors them a bit.
00:22:43
Speaker
They say most of the books are constructed around a couple of key approaches. Autodidactism, in which Ike Marshall's numerous references from a wide variety of subject areas to back up his conspiratorial ideas, and topicality, in which Ike endows his ideas with cultural currency by articulating them in relation to contemporary political, social, and scientific developments. I mean, the last couple of times we've gone and had a look at his website, it's all COVID.
00:23:10
Speaker
I, in fact, the last time we looked, he hadn't even got on to Russia and Ukraine, Eddie, it was still just, it was still just COVID, COVID, COVID and vaccines. It was, yeah. The other thing which Dean and Anne note here is that he's actually a very good public speaker. And I mean, he really is, he's, when we interviewed him,
00:23:32
Speaker
He's charming, he's pleasant to talk with, he's friendly, he's excitable. Once he starts talking, he doesn't stop. He's a very charismatic person, which is problematic given his content. Yes. And they introduced the idea basically that the books and the lectures and the web content, they all sort of work with each other to further his brand, I guess is the right word. You'd almost say, Josh, it's synergistic.
00:24:01
Speaker
It is quite synergistic, yes, synergistic mediation, you might say. That would be a good name for a title of the section.
00:24:11
Speaker
But there would be a world to live in, but it's not to be, unfortunately, as far as I'm aware. I'd have to look backwards and I'd have to scroll back up a page in my notes to find that out. And our scroll reels only go in one direction. That's why we must always push forward and never correct. Yes, never. So the next section now is, how does IKEAN conspiratuality work? Authority and community.
00:24:36
Speaker
And so they sort of talk about exactly the model in which his whole conspiratorialist worldview sort of gets put across.
Media Use in Credibility and Appeal
00:24:46
Speaker
They ask, what is it about the ways in which Ikean conspiratuality is communicated to audiences through the synergistic model outlined above, that is the books and the lectures and everything together, that render it credible and appealing for people to believe in, or at least to find it worthy of some form of deeper consideration rather than outright dismissal?
00:25:05
Speaker
And so I'm looking to answer that question. They borrow their approach from the area of digital religion studies. I don't know. I mean, I assume that's why this is in the journal of contemporary religion rather than something else.
00:25:23
Speaker
um I don't know I don't know how these things work is is could is this a thing where you decide to take an angle so that it'll get into a particular journal or do you reckon they would have been using this and I mean actually not not knowing what kind of articles the journal of contemporary religion publish on average because it's not a journal that I submit any work to it's also not a journal I have easy access to as an academic here at BNUZH I actually got
00:25:53
Speaker
the article we're looking at directly from Anne Hardy, my university does not subscribe to this particular journal so I can't also go and check what else they publish. I imagine
00:26:07
Speaker
it's a journal of contemporary religion. They're doing work which kind of spans the traditional churches and what they do in the modern age and also the new kind of outcropping of Pentecostal churches and spiritual beliefs in the modern age as well.
00:26:24
Speaker
The section then gives a bit of work on talking about what digital religion studies is, basically, and how it works. They refer to Heidi Campbell, who has written Digital Religion, which apparently is one of the key texts on Digital Religion Studies.
00:26:45
Speaker
They say, building on a study of a decade's worth of prior research into religion online, Campbell and other contributors to digital religion discuss online religious content in relation to a suite of five traits, ritual, identity, authority, community, and authenticity.
00:27:02
Speaker
And they say so when it comes to conspiratuality and David Icke's particular flavour of it, there's not so much ritual, there's maybe a bit of identity and questions around authenticity, but they say that they consider authority and community to be the two digital religion traits most relevant to understanding how IKEAN conspiratuality, as expressed through synergistic media, may come across as credible and appealing.
00:27:31
Speaker
And so in the following sections, they talk about these concepts of authority and community and how David Ike portrays himself as an authority and how a sense of community sort of brings together this, what could possibly be called a conspiratorialist movement, which I think is the end of that section, which leads us into the next one, synergistic media and Ikean conspiratiality, expertise. Expertise indeed, Ulrich.
00:28:01
Speaker
So David Eich, he certainly portrays himself as an expert, doesn't he? He's possibly the world's leading authority on specifically the stuff that he talks about.
00:28:13
Speaker
And crucially, his expertise is very special because it's by reform of, and I'm going to use here in quotes, divine revelation. He's being given information by some power outside of human consciousness, which allows him to be able to detect correct information and be able to combat bad information he finds within the world.
00:28:38
Speaker
I think we've talked about this and we've talked about Ike in the past, but Ike's epistemology is one of synchronicity. If he has a thought and then he finds evidence supporting that thought, that is that higher power providing him with the evidence he needs to pursue his intellectual agenda. So he takes it that the best guide to truth is what the heart tells you is truth.
00:29:04
Speaker
Now, in non-Ikean epistemology, we call that confirmation bias, and that's a very bad way to generate information about the world. But in the world of Ike, confirmation bias isn't confirmation bias, it's a guided intelligence.
00:29:22
Speaker
So in the paper, they say, in relation to digital religion frameworks of authority, the most prominent way in which synergistic media can be seen to validate Aichian conspiratuality is in terms of establishing his authority as an expert within the wider culture of Western conspiracy theory. They say Aich's stature as a conspiracy expert is most really visible in regard to the depth and breadth of his erudition.
00:29:48
Speaker
Now at this point I was going, I think statue is a weird word here. I mean I know they need to build Ike up as this major figure here. But once again, Ike isn't really very well known outside of its own particular domain of alien shapeshifting reptiles control the world. So statue is an interesting way to put his role as conspiracy expert. Statue kind of
00:30:17
Speaker
intimates that he's big and prominent. And the thing is, he is for people like us. Don't think he is for anyone else, even within various conspiracy theory communities.
00:30:33
Speaker
He's probably not got much stature. I don't think David Eich has much stature in the JFK research community or the 9-11 truther community. Also, there's a video glitch going on here that means your head is shaking back and forth rapidly as if I'm in a horror film. Yeah, but I'm not getting it at my end, unfortunately. I feel like I'm missing out now.
00:30:57
Speaker
Yeah, I'll just lick you. I mean, I feel as if I died in Vietnam and some kind of weird dreamlike state where I think I've come back to America. Yeah. Climb the letter. Climb that letter, Jacob. Climb that letter.
00:31:13
Speaker
Anyway, when they're talking about the depth and breadth of his erudition, they basically mean that he's written a lot of books and there's a lot of information. They talk about his book knowledge. I kind of hesitate it.
00:31:29
Speaker
using the term knowledge to describe the stuff that's in his books, but there's a lot of information, no denying that, and his... Wait, you know, Josh, I would go further. There are a lot of words in his books. A lot of words. There are numerous words. There's more words than information in his books. Those books are replete with words, not so replete with information, and sadly lacking in knowledge.
00:31:54
Speaker
But there are a lot of words. And for that, I will give David Ike his credit. He can put words on a page.
00:32:00
Speaker
Yes. And so they talk about the fact that there is this volume, lets him, he can use the speaking tools to then spread his quote unquote knowledge. And in particular, they make point of the fact that while his books are static, his lectures can be a bit dynamic and he has the opportunity to tailor them to his specific audience as he delivers them. And they sort of again mentioned the 2016
00:32:30
Speaker
presentation where he included token references to politics and current events in New Zealand. And then they say, so apart from the books and the lecture tours, they say, alongside these media, the web plays a vital role in maintaining and reinforcing Ike's status as a conspiratorial expert due to its affordances and providing audiences interested in his ideas with access to vast quantities of news and other information that appear pertinent to the Ikean worldview.
David Icke's Web Presence and Authority
00:32:57
Speaker
And indeed, they list how the website at the time of writing, which was either 2018 or 2020, depending on when revisions were made, you know, there are category tags you can go to on Davidyke.com. So, you know, you've got medical health, movies, new physics, reptilian agenda and Illuminati.
00:33:16
Speaker
So there's this wide range of information that's available. They make reference to that Jimmy Savile, a fear, is sort of boosting David Icke's cache. They stop short of saying that David Icke had been talking about Jimmy Savile prior to Jimmy Savile being outed. Because as we've seen, there isn't actually a lot of evidence that he was specifically making accusations of Jimmy Savile.
00:33:46
Speaker
I mean, I'd say it's even worse. There's no evidence that David Icke ever mentioned Seville in lectures or books prior to Seville's, I won't say arrest, but actually he died, prior to the discovery of that. Prior to Jimmy Seville's posthumous arrest. I mean, basically they should have done what they did to old popes. They should have disinterred his corpse and put the corpse on trial.
00:34:10
Speaker
But yeah, there's no reference to Savile's activities until the media is printing claims about what Savile did. Ike has rewritten his history in the way that Alex Jones seems to rewrite his history all the time.
00:34:25
Speaker
Yes, although in this paper, though, they they they, like I say, they don't actually say that he specifically made claims about Jimmy Savile. They simply say the fact that that David Eich, although he'd never mentioned Savile, he had for a long time been saying that that organ what's the quote, organized child abuse was a core part of the atrocities committed by the Illuminati elites. So I think that they're making the weaker claim that the Jimmy Savile business showed
00:34:55
Speaker
child abuse happening within higher levels of society and saying that that by itself was enough to give David Icke a bit of a boost in stature.
00:35:08
Speaker
Yes, and this is all due to the fact that David Eich has been repeating tired anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish people abducting children to engage in blood sacrifices, just updating it for the modern age, and now it's not the Jews, it's the Illuminati elites.
00:35:26
Speaker
And it just happens to be the case that accidentally it turns out that one of Ike's old mates at the BBC, Jimmy Savile, was the kind of person who was engaging in terrible predatory practices towards children and people in the BBC and it turns out the British government had inklings about this and decided that they really weren't going to look into it at this time.
00:35:56
Speaker
So that's the section on expertise, how Ike is able to portray himself as an expert in his particular field. The next section is synergistic media and Ikean conspiratuality, embodiment and charisma. Yeah, and this is the section where they point out, David Ike, actually quite charismatic.
00:36:16
Speaker
They start by saying, while it is relatively straightforward to see how synergistic media usage served to bolster Ike's status in the area of conspiracy theory by enhancing his ability to access information, e.g. news history science, and convert it into evidence of his theories, the ways in which synergistic media may convey the new age aspects of Ike's worldview are comparatively less clear-cut. But they say,
00:36:40
Speaker
Follow that up by saying we posit that one of the key ways in which the synergistic media model may serve to convey the new age dimensions of Ike's worldview is by appealing to embodied and intuitive modes of knowledge and experience in relation to both Ike himself and those of his audience who subscribe to an Ikean worldview.
00:36:57
Speaker
and go, I think I skipped over everything. It was the part where they contrasted sort of new age and conspiratorial sort of knowledge as new age being sort of spirituality being intuitive and quote unquote feminine, whereas conspiracy theory stuff is more sort of scientific, rational and quote unquote masculine.
00:37:20
Speaker
And so here they sort of talk about how they bring those two different modes of knowledge together. And one way they can do that is by making it personal. And as you talked about just before, his sort of intuitive way of coming to knowledge, in addition to all the research into what's going on in the world.
00:37:45
Speaker
They say, arguably the most important method through which synergistic media helped construct Ike as an embodiment of conspiratorial authority is by endowing him with a sense of charisma. And they go through a way of defining exactly what they mean by charisma that at no point refers to Dungeons and Dragons.
00:38:03
Speaker
Well, I mean, have you seen Gravity Falls yet? Have you seen Gravity Falls yet? No, but if they were referring to D&D, they'd have to decide which version, first edition, second edition, third edition, fourth edition, fifth edition, Pathfinder. I mean, there are so many different versions of D&D and definitions of Chris Minow. I mean, it's just a can of worms to work out which one you're going to. I mean, maybe you don't even go for
00:38:29
Speaker
a D&D version, of course. There are other role-playing systems out there, Josh. I mean, it's too difficult. You would never get it. You never get the true peer review if you say went with third edition and you got a fifth edition person as your reviewer. It would just be rejection, rejection, rejection. Well, maybe it's for the best. But no, Gravity Falls has the joke when they have an episode with it. There's a parody of Dungeons and Dragons, basically.
00:38:55
Speaker
And one of the characters says, you know, this game must have been invented by nerds if charisma is considered a special ability. Anyway, they say that having defined charisma, they say in this respect, the lecture tours may be regarded as the key medium through which Ike is constructed as a conspiratually charismatic figure.
Live Performances and Emotional Connection
00:39:14
Speaker
And yeah, because they point out the books, the books don't give you much in the way of charisma.
00:39:21
Speaker
The website doesn't, although they also point out that with things like the Ike.connector and the other kind of video clips he does.
00:39:32
Speaker
there's a way of giving you short content, which gives you an idea of the kind of speaker and character Ike is. But if you want to experience the full, like charismatic flow, you need to go to one of these eight hour lectures and then see that for all of his faults, not many people can keep an audience going for eight hours whilst you're trying to persuade them that an iconic virus has taken over the world.
00:40:03
Speaker
So in light of that, they say, in this way, Ikean spirituality is conveyed to audiences as a belief system that is an active and vital spiritual and emotional experience, rather than a series of theoretical arguments presented in the text-based form of books and webpages that the audience as readership is asked to weigh up evidentially.
00:40:21
Speaker
It can therefore be hypothesized that the live, interpersonal nature of the lecture format enables Ike to translate the conspiratorial expertise evident in his books into the embodied authority of charismatic performance. Such performance may in turn serve to forge a sense of emotional and psychological connection between Ike and his audience, a personal bond that may help people find Ike's ideas convincing or believable.
00:40:43
Speaker
Is it in the section that they mention how Ike showed off how modestly he lives? So there's a section in the article where they talk about how someone implied that Ike lives in a mansion and drives a Bentley, and Ike got
00:41:00
Speaker
almost pleasure out of giving people a video tour of his very ordinary bungalow-esque home, which once again kind of posits him not as this super mega-rich conspiracy theorist, but just an average bloke like you and myself who is concerned that maybe alien shapeshifting reptiles have taken over the local primary school.
00:41:26
Speaker
Yes, that comes at the end of this section where they're talking about his video content and his web content. After talking about the lectures, they note that Ike himself is aware of the worth of his lectures as
00:41:42
Speaker
I mean, as they put it, this is the way he really forms connections with people and gets and puts himself across when they note that while he has or rather had a YouTube channel with lots of content going up for free, actual recordings of his lectures were never available for free on his YouTube channel. If you wanted to see them, you had to buy them on DVD.
00:42:04
Speaker
But they point out that by supplying free YouTube content as well, and in his video, his live video cast as well, that prevents his charisma from becoming, as they put it, an exclusive experience. So you can get the David Icke experience without attending one of his lectures through some of his other content. Do you think that David Icke has an OnlyFans?
00:42:26
Speaker
Imagine, you know, pay five pounds a month and then David Eich, you know, photos of him having breakfast, a little, little video snippet of, oh, this is something that alien jet shifting reptiles don't want to do, maybe a little nude shot from time to time. I mean, that would, that would really humanize David Eich if he had an OnlyFans page.
00:42:48
Speaker
It might, I don't know. Maybe we should have a podcaster's guide to the conspiracy only fans page. I mean, we could do that. We could.
00:42:59
Speaker
We could. That's all I'm saying. And yeah, yeah, so as they say, alongside these overtly political video casts, Ike's websites also feature many items relating to his domestic life and personal circumstances, which is, you say, again, the thing about giving a tour of his house and so on. So it does, it keeps him down to earth. It keeps him human. It means he can present himself as this every man figure, which I guess is important when you're talking about all it's these evil elites.
00:43:26
Speaker
controlling the world and making everything horrible, you don't ever want to be in a position where people might see you as being in any way part of the elite. So as we're going through the paper, I think that the point they keep coming through over and over again is
00:43:41
Speaker
You've got these three aspects of his content, the books and the lecture tours and the online presence, and all three of them work together in different ways to sort of put him across as the figure that he is today. And you know, to my mind, the thing that really humanizes him is that when you put his domain name down in italics, it really does read like it's devydicky.com. It does a little bit, yes.
00:44:09
Speaker
Please come see my contact at daffydicky.com So the website originally owned by actor Robert Darvie and used it for completely different persons. So Robert Darvie is the person who's named. Isn't he directing that Gina Carino
00:44:33
Speaker
Yeah, you know, I think you're right. Oh, this is this changes everything. We've blown it wide open. Okay, anyway, before we go too far down that rabbit hole, we have the the final section. Before the conclusion, synergistic media and icon conspiratuality online community.
00:44:52
Speaker
So they say, as discussed above, Ike's charismatic performances, both live and recorded, not only serve to present him as an embodiment of conspiratorial ideas, but also engage audiences enough so that they may feel a connection with Ike and his conspiratorial worldview in their own bodies, a connection that may be translated into an intuitive understanding and appreciation of Ikean conspiruality.
00:45:12
Speaker
In other words, audiences may come to believe, to feel, or just to quote, unquote, know that Ike's ideas are valid or true without having to think them through critically or rationally. So that's sort of where you get at with the mixture of the two, of the volume of content behind the books and the charismatic delivery of the lectures and the web content. But they're going to say that at this point, though,
00:45:35
Speaker
We're still not talking about a spiritualist movement of any sort. For that, you need, you really need a wider community for it to counter something like that. And that's where the online- Yeah, so what you need is for there to be a figurehead, like David Icke, the kind of spiritual master you're referring to, but for him to be a spiritual master, there needs to be acolytes. And that's where the forums on DavidDickey.com really come into their own.
00:46:02
Speaker
Mm. They say the existence of a shared cultural identity and symbolic boundaries among users is really apparent as a good knowledge of hiking and spirituality is required effectively to understand and engage as much of the content presented, which I think you need to study your eye. You need to study your eye. Something come into it blind will have no idea what the hell they're talking about a lot of the time.
00:46:24
Speaker
They mention some of the forum sections such as political manipulation slash cover-up slash false flags. Another one is vaccination slash big pharma slash biowarfare. Another one new world order slash global government. There's stuff about reptilians and ET races. The matrix, the nature of reality.
00:46:46
Speaker
and all but this one big brother microchipping problem reaction solution that's case of yeah we've got these other categories that we're not entirely sure how to sort so we'll just put them all we'll have a misc section misc
00:47:02
Speaker
But they do point out, though, that you have the stuff that is very, very, is borderline incomprehensible when you're first coming into it. But they point out that although such topics may suggest that the davidite.com forums reflect a culture of exclusivity centered around an insider knowledge of IKEA and conspiratuality, forum interactions are facilitated by users in a manner that fosters a communal sense of inclusive connectivity.
00:47:28
Speaker
and hiccups inclusive connectivity and they talks about how there's a lot of Lots of stuff. There's a new members forum. There's threads that say welcome newbies. Please introduce yourself and they talk about you They make a point of having lots of resources for people who are new to it to to get them to get them in there and there's There isn't a lot of the
00:47:52
Speaker
gatekeeping and exclusivity that you might find in other online communities where people are downright hostile to folks who aren't already on the inside. This is welcoming because that's how you get a movement to grow, basically. And they finish this up by saying,
00:48:09
Speaker
In terms of the synergistic model of conspiratorial media use, the sense of communitas provided by the davidike.com forums presents a necessary complement to the gravitas of Ike as conspiratorial authority figure that is conveyed through his books, lecture presentations, and web videos. From the point of view of prospective audiences, Ike's conspiratorial worldview is articulated theoretically in his books, emotionally in his performances, lectures, and videos, and communally in the web forums and other forms of social media.
00:48:38
Speaker
So there you have it, basically. Tying it back to what they talked about at the beginning, why we went through all of this. Using David Icke as a case study, I guess, to show how this sort of conspiratorialism works in the modern age and how the internet is a
Conclusion: Media Synergy in Conspiratuality
00:48:59
Speaker
is an essential, I guess, part of it, of making a worldview like this. So we've had spiritualism for a long time, we've had conspiracy theories for a long time, but this particular brand of conspiratorialism wouldn't be able to work in the way that it currently does if you didn't have the internet content working synergistically with your books and your lectures and what have you.
00:49:26
Speaker
Indeed. And the shame about Dean no longer being with us is that the question I want to ask him is, can we apply the same analysis to Alex Jones? Because of course, Alex Jones goes on and on and on about how demons are literally
00:49:45
Speaker
invested in the souls of the members of the democratic party. So in the way that Ike blames everything on alien ship shifting reptiles from another dimension, Jones is now very much of the opinion that it's literal
00:50:01
Speaker
It's not figurative evil which drives the Democrats, it's literal demons who drive it. And presumably, given that Jones' economic model for infowars in PrisonPlanet.com is pretty much identical to DavidDickey.com.
00:50:19
Speaker
It should work in the same way, presumably. Well, it's interesting, yeah, because his isn't a new age spirituality, I guess. It's very much at old school. It's good old Bible thumping Christianity.
00:50:36
Speaker
But at the same time, there's a lot of crossover between the new age stuff and the wellness stuff. And Ike Jones is all about his nutritional supplements and things like that. So there's, there's been a lot of a lot of a lot written about the relationship between sort of well the slide from sort of wellness into
00:51:00
Speaker
anti-vaxxist stuff into white supremacist stuff. I think they sort of charted a bit of relationship there given that in sort of white supremacist ideology there's a lot of emphasis on purity and so on and purifying the body and the spirit and so on. So you can actually, it is possible to go from just sort of general wellness into much more dodgy beliefs but
00:51:29
Speaker
That's possibly a topic for another time. But as we still have the conclusion of all of this, do you want to take the conclusion you did the abstract? Indeed. The recent formulation of conspiratuality is a category for discussing the synthesis of conspiracy theory and new age spirituality constitutes an important contribution to religious studies and other disciplines engaged with the realms of conspiracy theory and alternative spirituality, such as political science and sociology.
00:51:59
Speaker
However, as a relatively new formulation, conspiratoriality needs to undergo critique and further elaboration in order to develop its theoretical potential. To this end, this article has sought to interrogate one of the formative premises of conspiratoriality proposed by Ward and Vos, that it is essentially web-based by examining the communicative practices of leading UK conspiratorialist David Eink.
00:52:26
Speaker
in order to argue that conspiratuality operates in a synergistic fashion across a range of media. The configuration of conspiratuality as a multimedia phenomenon serves to widen the scope of the scholarly consideration of the significance, meaning and impact
00:52:44
Speaker
of conspiratorial belief systems within contemporary Anglophone societies, away from the more culturally restrictive and reductive theorising that is likely to result from a dominant focus on conspiratoriality as a phenomenon that happened almost exclusively on the web.
00:53:02
Speaker
In undertaking this work, this article has used trays employed in the field of digital religion studies, notably authority and community, to explore and describe how the operation of conspiratuality occurs across those media linked together in the synergistic framework. It has asserted the position that digital religion perspectives should be considered in relation to broader context of media usage.
00:53:29
Speaker
This position suggests numerous areas of further research into conspiruality. For example, the question of how mediation may serve to actualize the possible ritual dimensions of conspiratorial belief and practice, or consideration of the way the development of conspiratorial belief systems may be influenced by social media science.
00:53:50
Speaker
Now I have to say, I didn't notice until we started reading through this, but I'm quite like the fact that Google Docs doesn't recognize the word conspiratorial, and so has it underlined and red wiggles every time, because I swear, if I'd been reading this without that, I would have been saying conspiratorial instead of conspiratorial over and over again. And fortunately, Google Docs' ignorance was my gain. So there, conspiratuality.
00:54:18
Speaker
Do you think you'll be using that term much more in the future? A bit niche. Yeah, it's one of those things where I can see what Ward and Vowis were trying to do with their postulation of conspiratuality. I just don't think it's a necessary term we need in our lexicon of conspiracy theory, theory terms.
00:54:42
Speaker
In that, yes, there are conspiracy theories that have spiritual aspects to them that trade upon revelations of a spiritual kind or the claim that the conspiracy is orchestrated by some kind of supernatural power.
00:54:57
Speaker
It's also true that a lot of conspiracy theories occur on the net. One thing which I was thinking about when I read this paper was Steve Clark's paper on conspiracy theories and controlled demolition conspiracy theories in the age of the internet.
00:55:12
Speaker
and the way that he's talked about how conspiracy theorizing has changed in an online milieu. And what's interesting about Clark's paper, it was written largely before what we now call social media existed. So it would be right to kind of go back to that and look at it from a social media lens. And you can do all of this work without necessarily thinking that this new form of conspiracy theorizing
00:55:40
Speaker
is different from what came before and Bellinger and Hardy do kind of hint at that at the beginning. They point out that you know there have been spiritual conspiracy theories in the past. The example they use of Pelly is a nice one to show that look there has been this crossover in the past
00:56:02
Speaker
And it's interesting that the criticism of conspiratoriality is to say, well, look, Warren Vos is wrong to say it's mostly an online phenomena. If we want to understand how Ike works as a conspiratorialist, we need to talk about his books. We need to talk about his lecture presentations.
00:56:21
Speaker
And I think maybe it's better to bite the bullet here and go, well look, conspiratoriality is a nice concept, but it may not be as explanatory or as useful as some theorists think.
00:56:33
Speaker
Well, fair enough. And so that brings us to the end of this look at a paper that is a little bit outside the usual of things that we look at, but very interesting nonetheless. Largely, I think, because we like a bit of Ike. We like Ike to talk about, anyway, to discuss. Yes, we like Ike in the sense that we endorse his views or wish to espouse those views on this podcast.
00:57:04
Speaker
So, that is the end of this episode, but there is of course a bonus episode coming for our patrons. And what a bonus episode is! We've got trumpets of trump news. We've got some royal funeral news. How could we not, yes. A bit of local stuff. Yeah, a little bit of local stuff. And then we've got the chess grandmaster anal bead conspiracy to round things off with. Yes.
00:57:32
Speaker
Don't know if it quite counts as a conspiracy, but we're going to talk about it. You can be sure of that.
00:57:37
Speaker
Yep, because you know what they say, Lisa needs braces, anal beads, Lisa needs braces, anal beads. God damn it, that's what I'm going to think every time I hear that quote from now on. Curse you. So while I sink into my new life as a person who thinks anal beads every time he hears Lisa sees braces, you can get along with your lives.
00:58:02
Speaker
and oh I suppose I should do the usual spiel of course if you want to become a patron go to patreon.com and search for the podcasters guide to the conspiracy then you too can listen to us talking about chess masters and their anal beads if you're already a patron then you're then you're quite frankly sort and if you don't want to be a patron for some reason
00:58:19
Speaker
for reasons that are completely beyond me, you don't want to hear us talk about chess grandmasters and their alleged anal bead conspiracies. Well, that's fine. You do you. You've listened to the end of this one. So good for you, quite frankly. So to one and all, I guess a final farewell to Dean Ballinger. Nice little post-script to his career. And to the rest of you, goodbye. We'll see you next week.
00:58:47
Speaker
Valé, Dean. Valé. The podcast is Guide to the Conspiracy, stars Josh Addison and myself, associate professor M.R.X. Denton. Our show's cons... sorry, producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com and please do consider joining our Patreon.
00:59:17
Speaker
And remember, it's just a step to the left.