It is March 13th, 2020. You're hearing talks of some kind of virus that's like the flu on steroids, but you’re not concerned – it’s mainly just a Europe thing. You were just given two weeks off of school and work to “flatten the curve”, whatever that means. You’re excited to take your time off to learn to bake bread. Life is good.

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COMFORT IN CONSPIRACY

Fast-forward to March 13th, 2021. Two-weeks quickly became a year. It’s been months since you spent a day away from your home. Songs about this virus have been released. You’ve backslid into some former iteration of yourself to stay sane. You now fantasize about the early stages of a yearlong lockdown caused by the virus that you barely took seriously at first.

Not only has the chokehold COVID-19 has had on the world birthed numerous conspiracies about its legitimacy and the validity of the vaccines being used to slowly combat it, but also about literally everything else. People with far too much time on their hands have fallen down every niche rabbit hole possible. From conspiracies about hidden meanings in songs that are multiple years old to in-depth analysis of T.V. shows to an increased level of concern for personal data security. VPN usage skyrocketed in the early days of the pandemic. I, personally, have seen one too many TikToks theorizing that Harry Styles and Taylor Swift committed manslaughter in the mid-2010s and then went on to write several hit songs about the experience (although the evidence is lowkey very convincing - check it out).

"THE FRINGES OF THE INTERNET HAD RETURNED TO THE CENTRE"

One could say that people are just trying to find something to fill their endless supply of idle days. However, with the number of days that need to be filled increasing with hardly an end in sight people have become desperate. When discussing conspiracy in his book, New Dark Age, James Bridle writes, “The fringes of the internet had returned to the centre” and although this is not specifically about the climate amid the coronavirus it could not be truer. People are searching for any rationale that explains why we’ve needed a year-long two weeks. Some have gone as far as to say that the virus is fake and being used to control us or that the government somehow benefits from constantly needing to reopen and lockdown once a month. Despite these ideas being super damaging, they can bring people comfort and a sense of certainty that has been noticeably lacking this past year. That, combined with the shitstorm of misinformation about the virus, has led to more and more otherwise sensible people becoming COVID-19 conspirators.

With everything in most people’s lives being turned upside down I don’t necessarily blame them for not taking the time to seek out accurate and trustworthy information amidst the endless contradictions last spring. Turning to readily available, easily digestible conspiratorial perspectives would have been a great outlet for the pain and frustration the pandemic brought along. COVID conspiracies essentially allow people to use the government as a scapegoat for the turmoil of the last year.

In my opinion, one can look at the past year in two ways when thinking about what it could mean for our future:

My camp is set up somewhere in the middle of these perspectives. Frankly, I don’t think very many things about this pandemic were properly handled, and I do think that we have learned a lot since it began. However, I also think that the amount of information we consume will always leave us vulnerable to overtheorizing in order to come to terms with it. Early in his chapter about the nature of conspiracy Bridle described a feedback loop wherein a lack of understanding leads to the need for more information which only further clouds our understanding. This feedback loop will exist as long as the information culture of the internet does. As well, the internet will always give “like-minded individuals” a place to meet and feed into each other’s ideologies, providing themselves with mutual reassurance. One can only hope that our ability to tell the difference between reliable and unreliable information will improve with practice. Even better, maybe people will just stop producing and circulating unreliable information to begin with. Maybe that’s a lot to ask, but a girl can dream.

*I was going to end with a joke about having to wait until the next global pandemic to see how things go, but I don’t even want to risk releasing that into the universe.

1. We should all be very scared if it only took a year for society to devolve this way.

2. We should be better off because now we know what not to do.

"CONSPIRACY THEORIES ARE THE EXTREME RESORT OF THE POWERLESS, IMAGINING WHAT IT WOULD BE TO BE POWERFUL."

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