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politics & paranoia h e a t h e r b r o o k e Conspiracy Theo of Eve thing The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World By James Ball (Bloomsbury 304pp £20) Back in the mists of time, great idealism surrounded social media. There was a sense that global interconnection would shift us into a more egalitarian and demo- cratic age. How time makes fools of us all. If you are a woman or a person from an ethnic minority, someone with a public profile or anyone who holds a view contrary to the mainstream, chances are you’ve been viciously trolled online and little to no action was taken by either Big Tech or the police. Perhaps, like me, you have watched in dismay and bewilderment as wild conspiracy theories (about everything from political paedophile rings operating beneath a pizza parlour in Washington, DC, to Bill Gates engineering coronavirus) spread at speed across the world, infecting even seemingly sensible people and driving families and friends apart. Journalists who thought fact-checking would be enough to counter such theories have been proved woefully wrong. Factchecking, it transpires, is like bringing a fly swatter to a gunfight. Clearly, new solutions are needed to combat online conspiracy theories that increasingly result in violence in the real world. Into these fetid swamps wades the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and data expert James Ball with this meticulously researched book, in which he charts the rise and rise of online conspiracy theories. The book is an exhaustive and at times exhausting read. Ball makes the case that we can no longer ignore conspiracy theorists. Social media has ensured that even the most ludicrous theories can find a global audience. As Ball documents, QAnon is at the heart of these developments. It started out as a conspiracy theory on such message boards as 4chan and 8chan. The core QAnon theory first appeared in a series of posts made from an anonymous account called Q Clearance Patriot. These contained wild pronouncements about an elite global cabal who engaged in ritual child abuse. From here, it spread to the alt-right, Trump supporters and even the former president himself, spawning a movement. When Covid-19 hit, it found new life among anti-vaxxers. QAnon is, Ball writes, ‘our first digital pandemic – a threat to humanity that has evolved and gone global’. Misogyny racism and anti-Semitism are at the heart of QAnon. Ball traces the obsession among QAnon followers with ritual child abuse back to the original ‘ blood libel’, a centuries-old myth that Jews engage in ritual child abuse and murder. It was 4channers who wrote the playbook for digital information warfare, Ball contends – not for any political purpose, initially, but ‘just as a way to pass the time’. This was pranking for shits and giggles. But around 2009 things took a darker turn. Part of the reason for this, Ball explains, is survivorship bias. While most males mature and grow tired of such pranks, some do not. Forums like 4chan become gathering places for the most immature and extreme. Many of the men who populate these boards have a deep sense of insecurity and powerlessness, and are searching for meaning and purpose. Hence the appeal of QAnon, which, Ball writes, ‘turns global politics into a game with you as its hero’. To some grown-ups, the childish belief in the existence of an all-powerful global elite is ‘oddly more reassuring than the idea that everything is just random, and everyone is fumbling their way through life’. Ball says QAnon isn’t political, but there is one thing you can count on: there will never be a feminist mutation of it. Misogyny is baked in. Given that QAnon originated among insecure and alienated men, surely we need to know more about the dark side of male psychology. Ball, however, never properly engages with the issue of toxic masculinity. QAnon is unusual among movements in that it has no leader. Nor is there a coherent ideology. For a campaigner or activist, not having a clear goal is normally a flaw, but for QAnon it has proved a boon. People pick and choose whichever of the conspiracy theories associated with QAnon s u i t s t h em , b e i t t o do w i t h 5G, vaccinations or the deep state. To help explain QAnon’s evolution, Ball invokes Richard Dawkins’s notion of the ‘selfish meme’. In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins argued that memes – songs, ideas, fashion, words – are the equivalent of genes when it comes to human culture. The ones that find the largest followings sur vive and reproduce themselves. Ball presents QAnon as a kind of meme, constantly adapting to find a wider audience. I was surprised, and convinced, by Ball’s argument that the traditional responses to conspiracy theorists – ignoring and factchecking – are useless in the fight against bad information. Instead, more radical solutions are required. ‘You need to cut it off from the things that sustain it,’ says Ball, ‘tackling the grounds where it breeds, the hate that feeds it, the incentives for politicians to play along, the online advertising model that can make feeding conspiracies lucrative.’ Algorithms are a big part of the problem. They are the most insidious tools of radicalisation because people don’t even realise they ’re being radicalised by them. As they scroll, individuals are drawn surreptitiously into a bubble of increasingly extreme ideas. Who is going to clear the swamp? We can’t expect companies to do this out of the goodness of their hearts. It will take strong state action. Ball advises governments to set up digital health programmes. Prevention is cheaper than cure, so we would be better off spending our resources tackling the roots of conspiracy theories before they take hold. ‘We try to destroy the spawning grounds of malarial mosquitoes, we improve the quality of drinking water … and we generally try to make our lived environments hostile to bacteria, viruses and other pathogens that are harmful to us. Our online environments are not similarly safe, and we take few steps to make them so,’ Ball states. ‘Until informed regulators require digital public health measures, companies will continue to pay lip service to such measures while taking as little action as is possible.’ Literary Review | july 2023 8
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norma clarke Blast from the Past Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art & Life & Sudden Death By Laura Cumming (Chatto & Windus 272pp £25) art Small wonder: ‘A View of Delft’ by Carel Fabritius, 1652 As a teenager with an interest in art, growing up on London’s Old Kent Road with a father whose mantra was ‘God gave you legs to walk’ (he didn’t believe in God but he did believe in walking), I often found myself on Sunday afternoons walk- ing to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. I remember distinctly the day I discovered the Dutch painters. It wasn’t Rembrandt or Vermeer who caught my eye, but Hendrick Avercamp and, espe- cially, Pieter de Hooch. I was startled that a simple painting of a backyard with red- brick and white-plastered walls, an outside tap and a broom could be so compelling. I don’t remember noticing the little view of Delft by Carel Fabritius that meant so much to Laura Cumming, or Fabritius’s self-portrait in a fur hat that hangs in the corner of a room full of Rembrandts. Fab- ritius is perhaps best known now for his even smaller painting The Goldfinch (in the Mauritshuis in The Hague). ‘We see pictures in time and place … They are fragments of our lives, moments of existence that may be as unremarkable as rain or as startling as a clap of thunder,’ Cumming writes. A love of Dutch art and a passion for looking at pictures were bequeathed to Cumming by her artist parents. She wrote about her mother’s fragmented, mysterious early life in On Chapel Sands (2019). In Thunderclap it is Laura’s father, James Cumming, who takes centre stage, and like On Chapel Sands the book is infused with love – of parents, childhood, pictures and words. It is at once deeply personal and inclusive, because it is about the shared experience of looking at pictures and the shared desire to know and understand what these ‘moments of existence’ mean. I liked reading Thunderclap so much that I immediatel y reread On Chapel Sands. Together, these books are a remarkable experiment in form as well as a richly satisfying extended meditation on art, life and death. The thunderclap of the title is both actual and metaphorical. In October 1654, there was a massive gunpowder explosion, so loud it could be heard more than seventy miles away, that destroyed the centre of Delft. Fabritius, who had studied with Rembrandt and some of whose paintings hung in Vermeer’s house nearby, was painting a portrait in his studio when the explosion happened. The roof beams collapsed; everybody died. He was thirty- two. His death was ‘complete chance: the fatal coincidence of time and place’. The gunpowder had been stored in the arsenal and accident or human error set it off. Cumming compares it to the explosion in Beirut in 2020. Little is known of Fabritius’s life. He seems to exist ‘below the level of common knowledge’. Born in Middenbeemster in February 1622, he had many younger siblings, including two brothers who became painters. Cumming probes the sparse information, asking what pictures they can have seen and noting that Dutch people were zealous buyers of Dutch art. English travellers were astonished to see paintings for sale in markets. Brewers, bakers and carpenters furnished their walls with paintings. (Look at Dutch interiors – there’s almost always a painting.) Fabritius ‘married the girl next door’, but within a few years his wife and three babies were dead. In his first self-portrait you see ‘the eyes of a man who has suffered all this, who lives with the burden of such sorrow’. Just as her father took issue with what she was taught at school – that ‘Golden Age Dutch art was all about things ’ because ‘the Dutch just loved stuff ’ – so july 2023 | Literary Review 9

norma clarke

Blast from the Past Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art & Life & Sudden Death

By Laura Cumming (Chatto & Windus 272pp £25)

art

Small wonder: ‘A View of Delft’ by Carel Fabritius, 1652

As a teenager with an interest in art, growing up on London’s Old Kent Road with a father whose mantra was ‘God gave you legs to walk’ (he didn’t believe in God but he did believe in walking), I often found myself on Sunday afternoons walk- ing to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. I remember distinctly the day I discovered the Dutch painters. It wasn’t Rembrandt or Vermeer who caught my eye, but Hendrick Avercamp and, espe- cially, Pieter de Hooch. I was startled that a simple painting of a backyard with red- brick and white-plastered walls, an outside tap and a broom could be so compelling. I don’t remember noticing the little view of Delft by Carel Fabritius that meant so much to Laura Cumming, or Fabritius’s self-portrait in a fur hat that hangs in the corner of a room full of Rembrandts. Fab- ritius is perhaps best known now for his even smaller painting The Goldfinch (in the Mauritshuis in The Hague).

‘We see pictures in time and place … They are fragments of our lives, moments of existence that may be as unremarkable as rain or as startling as a clap of thunder,’ Cumming writes. A love of Dutch art and a passion for looking at pictures were bequeathed to Cumming by her artist parents. She wrote about her mother’s fragmented, mysterious early life in On Chapel Sands (2019). In Thunderclap it is Laura’s father, James Cumming, who takes centre stage, and like On Chapel Sands the book is infused with love – of parents, childhood, pictures and words. It is at once deeply personal and inclusive, because it is about the shared experience of looking at pictures and the shared desire to know and understand what these ‘moments of existence’ mean. I liked reading Thunderclap so much that I immediatel y reread On Chapel Sands. Together, these books are a remarkable experiment in form as well as a richly satisfying extended meditation on art, life and death.

The thunderclap of the title is both actual and metaphorical. In October 1654, there was a massive gunpowder explosion, so loud it could be heard more than seventy miles away, that destroyed the centre of Delft. Fabritius, who had studied with Rembrandt and some of whose paintings hung in Vermeer’s house nearby, was painting a portrait in his studio when the explosion happened. The roof beams collapsed; everybody died. He was thirty-

two. His death was ‘complete chance: the fatal coincidence of time and place’. The gunpowder had been stored in the arsenal and accident or human error set it off. Cumming compares it to the explosion in Beirut in 2020.

Little is known of Fabritius’s life. He seems to exist ‘below the level of common knowledge’. Born in Middenbeemster in February 1622, he had many younger siblings, including two brothers who became painters. Cumming probes the sparse information, asking what pictures they can have seen and noting that Dutch people were zealous buyers of Dutch art. English travellers were astonished to see paintings for sale in markets. Brewers, bakers and carpenters furnished their walls with paintings. (Look at Dutch interiors – there’s almost always a painting.) Fabritius ‘married the girl next door’, but within a few years his wife and three babies were dead. In his first self-portrait you see ‘the eyes of a man who has suffered all this, who lives with the burden of such sorrow’.

Just as her father took issue with what she was taught at school – that ‘Golden Age Dutch art was all about things ’ because ‘the Dutch just loved stuff ’ – so july 2023 | Literary Review 9

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