Alternative Editorial: The Inspiracy Theory
From New Yorker, by Oliver Munday
By A/UK co-initiator Pat Kane
Week 27 in the lockdown, and at this moment, it feels like the Establishment is on serious manoeuvres. First we were served with the ‘leak’ that long-standing enemies of the liberal culture of public broadcasting, the Daily Mail’s Paul Dacre and the Telegraph’s Charles Moore, are being proposed as media regulator and BBC Chairman respectively.
Along with news of potentially two new Fox-News-like news/views broadcast channels for the UK - one from the Murdoch empire, the other helmed by ex-BBC anchorman Andrew Neil - the pearls of the “progressive” classes have certainly been tightly clutched. One can easily imagine that counter-enterprises are also being planned (see later in this blog).
But it looks like there is going to be an intensification between battalions of broadcast news media, one way or another. Tin hats on, shrapnel coming in.
I want to hazard a deeper question: whether we should be pointing our precious human attention at this kind of media spectacle in the first place.
Certainly, in A/UK’s own practice, we have committed to an alternative editorial process - a daily blog of tools and tips intended to change your world, and the world. This is hard work to compile, but it also very strongly helps us constitute our method, our community, and our ideals.
Furthermore, in any of our engagements with communities and localities, we often recommend that whatever “CAN” (citizen action/community agency network) they set up, has within its plans a locally-customised version of a “Daily Alternative”.
That means someone (or some few) dedicated to highlighting events, expertise, reportage, global reference in a blog (or other media form). This is intended to help that specific CAN feel confident and resourced in the execution of its visions for the future.
Yet while we think this is part of an antidote to your brain being seized and triggered by profit-driven media players, we’re not so naive that we think it could be a comprehensive enough response. There is much complexity and wayward energy in our media environment at the moment, defying most off-the-shelf solutions.
For example, a media of knowledge, practice and exemplars, serving concrete projects, embarked on by self-conscious communities might well produce a “local truth”, not just a local news - a reinforcement of “the way we do things here”. But such a truth is hardly pure and incontaminable.
Is our lovely matrix enough?
What do we say about conspiracy theorising, brought to anxious and struggling subjectivities by the algorithms of major social media (and those who game and exploit them)? Responses to these conspiracies often encourage local action and activism; people wanting to warn their beloved and nearby others about what seems like imminent danger.
Anti-vaccination campaigns have been taking to the local high street as readily as any more familiar campaign group. And when it comes to those with a theory about the toxicity or controlling nature of 5G mobile bandwidth stations, sometimes intertwined with COVID as a cover story for their installation, the active response can be local - and destructive or disruptive. Suspected masts have been burned down, and telecoms workers accosted at street corners as they do their business.
Each of these (you could also point to the American “QAnon” conspiracy about elites performing sex crimes in the shadows) at least stems from a sensibility we recognise. That is, establishments of all kinds do not act in the popular interest, and so the people must “take back control” from them - whether they be European mandarins, medical experts or broadcasting panjandrums.
Our case here for the last few years has been that such a charge can often be legitimate, and that the deep answer is more autonomy and self-determination over the services and infrastructures of our society. But we also believe that activists often wildly underestimate how prodigious and comprehensive a task this is.
It’s striking that alternative movements like Permaculture, Transition Network and the various recent climate Rebellions root their activism in a strong framework of “truths” and “facts” - a bedrock reality about environmental crisis (with their own back-up narrative of science), upon which their new ways of life can robustly stand. To use some old Greek words, their ontology justifies their praxis.
But this ontology/praxis link works the same way for conspiracy theorists. So are we looking at a shared savannah of struggle now? Whatever social form is more adaptive - helping that group of humans to sustainably flourish -will supersede the other?
Maybe we can coin a new phrase to counter “conspiracy theory”. Let’s call it “inspiracy theory”. What view of how the world works inspires the most hope-inducing, convivial and mutually-satisfying results?
And to chime with one of our constant emphases on A/UK, how could that view come from the achievement of an inner mastery - of our drives, our reactive and destabilising habits of the mind (see our forthcoming talk with Amisha Ghadiali in the Elephant Meets, our recent engagements with the Mindfulness Initiative, as well as our various archives)?
Why couldn’t the behaviour of mindfulness become as socially natural, in any alternative community, as sitting and being programmed and framed by the nightly news? There’s a lovely etymological support for inspiracy, from the phonetics version of inspirate, meaning “to articulate during inhalation”. As you are about to pronounce on your deeply held belief, take a deep and cautionary breath…
Inspiracy theory, of course, implies a crowd of inspirators. So who builds what, in terms of media structures? What links citizens’ knowledge about the world to the developing and constituting projects before them? Who can give them a mental and practical alternative to the growing surround of commercially-polarising media?
Of course we don’t downgrade, indeed we highly treasure, the existing ecology of websites, podcasts, meme warriors, and publishers of all kinds. Often absurdly undercapitalised, they provide a service to those seeking a different world-view (Amisha’s The Future Is Beautiful is a small but perfect example of this). Alter-media can be the means whereby you can “find the others”.
But this lovely matrix is surely not currently adequate to answer the battleplan we face from these new broadcast enterprises. A battleplan which aims to capture and foment outrage and resentment, and given the deregulated context in which to do so by figures from the deeps of the UK Establishment.
Inspirators Assemble!
This is perhaps time - indeed, it’s well overdue - for the liberal tech/finance super-rich in the UK to step out of their homeworking bubbles, and find a way to provide basic resources for an alternative media system. If, that is, they can be presented with a sufficiently original and persuasive plan.
The bad outcomes of a standard media-enterpreneur model are obvious. With the centre-righting of the broadcast media landscape clearly underway, the temptation would be to create the UK’s equivalents of CNN and MSNBC. That is, intensively and super-serving liberal/progressive/Remainer views. (To make it concrete, imagine the cancellation of Channel Four News, and where those staff and lead journalists might take their energies and focus).
But wouldn’t that just intensify and accelerate the tendency of news media to become an “air-war” of counterclaims and preferred truths? A shitshow that’s utterly ignored by many, as a ferocious turn-off? Or a melee that’s permanently available for many, providing a constant supply of emotionally-satisfying outrage, on every side?
Though they come from that part of the left that somehow believes they’ll finally seize the British state in a wave of parliamentary ecstasy, I’ve nevertheless come to appreciate the envisioning of media academics Tom Mills and especially Dan Hind.
Though Hind’s paper for The Next System Project assumes a directive state (not imminent, at least for his side), it strikes me that the decentralisation, accountability and diverse participants involved in his plan for a British Digital Collective (BDC) could easily be disaggregated, and pursued piecemeal. Meaning they could become a flotilla (or murmuration) of smaller projects, locations and networks.
Our scanning at A/UK over the last 3.5 years have unearthed quite a few concrete and located projects - Newspeak House, Furtherfield, FACT, the DISCO collective - that show how a different community relationship to media and technology is possible: where tech and info innovations arise in a context of localised need and self-provision. And where the “news” they transmit is useful to what is being concretely and mutually built, not to what is being feared, loved or loathed.
Yet the ideal pattern of funding for this, as a loose national network - an initial investment in technical capacity and liason with localities, and a smoothy-facilitated subscription culture - needs to grasped by those individuals and institutions with deployable assets and resources. And who can see the extreme crisis ahead.
Which is a world of manipulated polarisation and culture war. During COVID, we’ve begun to deeply recognise our shared human vulnerability, which is the mood-state needed to maximise our adaptation to climate breakdown. However, this will be entirely and precisely unravelled by the coming media onslaught from our political establishments.
So: Inspirators Assemble! (And if you’re interested in taking this further, please mail here).