Reading :: Awful Archives

Awful Archives: Conspiracy Theory, Rhetoric, and Acts of Evidence
By Jenny Edbauer

What could be more timely than a book on how conspiracy theorists argue? In this highly readable book, Jenny Edbauer recounts her time in the archives of conspiracy theorists as well as her interviews with them, examining how they make claims, cite evidence, and respond to others' arguments. In examining conspiracy theories about ESP experiments, the hollow Earth, the Stargate project, the Holocaust, 9/11, the Apollo moon landing, President Obama's birthplace, and Pizzagate, Edbauer examines evidence not as a foundational material on which to build arguments, but in terms of acts, processes, and registers. 

Based on these investigations, she urges us to think of evidence as "composed of actions that build and move in many different registers, both material and affective. They are structures in motion" (Kindle loc 3635). Evidentiary structures and processes, she argues, are "embedded within larger public scenes" (ibid.). In her final chapter, she suggests that the method of debunking conspiracy theories offered by "debate culture" -- that of providing evidence and demonstrating its solidity -- is not effective, since debate culture always loses to theater in the eyes of conspiracy theorists (loc. 3635). For an example, she points to Lenny Pozner, whose son was murdered at Sandy Hook. When conspiracy theorists portrayed him as a crisis actor and claimed that his son was either still alive or nonexistent, Pozner initially responded by posting his son's birth certificate and providing other evidence. After years of such attempts, he switched tactics: whenever he saw his son's photo on a conspiracy posting, he reported it as a copyright violation. This tactic -- responding to the structures and processes of social media platforms rather than to a neutral, dispassionate audience that didn't exist -- worked. 

For those of us who are still hopeful about the role of evidence, this book is dispiriting. More to the point, although it helps us to understand this current moment -- in which conspiracy theories are going mainstream, amplified by the President, destroying faith in free and fair elections. Unfortunately, these conspiracy theories have gone so mainstream that the Pozner approach might not be viable: can the structures and processes of social media platforms be gamed when this many people have turned their backs on evidence? 

Should you pick up this book? Definitely.