Headlined The great British Brexit robbery: How our democracy was hijacked, its intro blurb is “A shadowy global operation involving big data, billionaire friends of Trump and the disparate forces of the Leave campaign influenced the result of the EU referendum.” Despite what would seem to be a classic case of conspiracy, the word “conspiracy” appears just once among the more than 5,000 of the piece, in a quote from the head of a small interest group given £100,000 in the last week of the campaign by the same Leave organizers later slapped with record fines by the Electoral Commission. One of the great pieces of journalism of the past five years that captured 21st-century conspiring and the power realignments enabled by it was the May 2017 Guardian investigation by Carole Cadwalladr ( watch her TED talk here) exposing the role Facebook and Cambridge Analytica played in the narrowly-won Brexit referendum that unleashed the existential crisis currently tormenting the United Kingdom. Maybe with the role the internet, shock radio and Donald Trump have played in conflating real conspiracy with conspiracy theory - from birtherism to pizzagate - in the minds of the public, they’ve created a tacit interdiction against identifying real conspiracies as conspiracies based on the generalized fear among sane people of seeming as paranoid and tinfoil hattish as the current president of the United States. It could be that, like so many other words - “presidential”, “crime”, “misdemeanor”, “normal”, “sane” - that have undergone semantic shifts recently based on opportunistic re-branding, conspiracy has lost its true meaning. Which is why I’ve been fascinated by the recent evolution of the word “conspiracy.”įunnily enough, at this unprecedented intersection of motive and opportunity as to the enabling of conspiracy based on the irresistible combination of cybertoys, anonymity, unaccountability and impunity, the word conspiracy in its original, accurate meaning seems to have gone out of fashion. It’s why my favourite quote from the late, great Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee isn’t “I truly believe the truth sets men free,” but “Is dickhead one word or two?”, though both have never seemed more pertinent.
#Conspire magazine how to
Like most editors, I have a bit of a thing for words where to stick them, how to spell them, whether sh*tshow requires one or two asterisks to protect the delicate sensibilities of readers. The word “conspiracy” has been so tainted by crackpots, including the one in the Oval Office, it may be due for a semantic reclamation.
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