‘Constituent Covid-19 apocalypses: contagious conspiracism, 5G, and viral vaccinations’

Abstract

The uncertainties and scale of the Covid-19 pandemic has mobilised global anxieties and insecurities, and many cultural groups have conjuncturally embedded conspiracy theories within millennial and apocalyptic thought to explain and find meaning in the pandemic. The apocalypse lends itself well to conspiratorial thinking because conceptually it is flexible enough to reflect any crisis. To this end, the global development of Covid-19 conspiracism is what the authors term 'contagious conspiracism' which is defined as viral global cultural conspiracism. The paper explores how millennialist responses to Covid-19 in various media outlets transcend academic categories of analysis and cultural boundaries between, say, religious and secular, far-right and radical left. First explored is how the crisis became embedded in established (mainly American) contemporary millennial beliefs and prophecies through selected far-right, evangelical and radical left narratives. Second, it is shown how these theories have been 'improvised' to include 5 G and also travelled to Europe and taken on geographical significance in Belfast and Berlin. Third, the authors illustrate the shared ingredients, motivations, and semiotics across apocalyptic conspiratorial Covid-19 narratives, all of which resonate with concerns about power, specifically emergent surveillance technologies, governmental abuse of power, and neoliberal capital, with divergent truths about who is blame from 5 G/vaccine theories to corporate technocapitalism. The paper concludes that these shared discourses across apocalyptic and conspiratorial Covid-19 narratives mean many of us are conspiracists and/or conspiracy theorists at some level and is therefore both revealing of the similarities and has the potential to create democratic constituencies.

Different Conspiracy Theories Have Different Psychological and Social Determinants: Comparison of Three Theories About the Origins of the COVID-19 Virus in a Representative Sample of the UK Population

“…While the 5G origin theory taps into a potential security threat, the development of 5G technology in the UK had the support of the government, and therefore is less compatible with an RWA worldview that would be largely pro-establishment. Rather, the various forms of 5G origin theories are often linked to the virus via somewhat convoluted and contradictory mechanisms, some of which claim the virus is real but caused by 5G, and some of which claim it is a hoax altogether (Sturm and Albrecht, 2020). One such conspiracy claims that COVID-19 is a pretense to cover-up to the negative health effects of 5G radiation established by those profiteering from the technology (Bruns et al, 2020).…”

“…In this vein, social distancing motivations may be undermined if the severity of the virus is understated or if the scientific consensus on human-to-human transmission is questioned, as insinuated by claims it is caused by 5G radiation or that the pandemic lockdowns were only a pretense for the cover-up and/or rollout of 5G networks (Bruns et al, 2020). Similarly, a number of conspiracy theories make unfounded claims regarding the supposed dangers of vaccines (Sturm and Albrecht, 2020). Indeed, social network analysis of the spread of COVID-19 conspiracies details the prominence of a conspiracy theory which overlaps across those origin theories tested in this study, suggesting the virus was engineered in China, but that its full effects will be realised via a vaccine that is activated by 5G (Bruns et al, 2020: 19).…”

Apocalyptic futures: morality, health and wellbeing at the end of the world

“…Clearly, however, any deployment of broader comparative notions such as 'The Good' or suffering needs to be undertaken with a view to simultaneously paying serious attention to particularity, which, in the context of this Special Issue, means attending to the social and cultural particularisms of human imaginations of catastrophe, mortality, health, and wellbeing. While many religious imaginings view the apocalypse as both singular and global, several contributors draw attention to the particular ways in which apocalypses are also scalar, be they global and regional (Sturm and Albrecht 2021), national (Foye 2021), or even confined within individual human bodies (Webster 2021). There are similarities here to what Williams (2010, 11) refers to as the 'combined and uneven apocalypse. '…”

Different conspiracy theories have different psychological and social determinants: Comparison of three theories about the origins of the COVID-19 virus in a representative sample of the UK population

“…Conversely, while the 5G origin theory taps into a potential security threat, the development of 5G technology in the UK had the support of the government. Furthermore, it might be seen as an umbrella term for a range of often contradictory conspiracy theories (Sturm and Albrecht, 2020), many of which are not explicitly related to the concerns about Huaewi's involvement in the development of 5G infrastructure.…”

“…Important factors reinforcing public health, such as individual motivation to socially distance (Miller et al, 2020), may be undermined if the severity of the virus is understated or if the scientific consensus on human-to-human transmission is questioned, as insinuated by claims it is caused by 5G radiation or that the pandemic lockdowns were only a pretense for the rollout of 5G (Bruns et al, 2020). Similarly, a number of conspiracy theories make unfounded claims regarding the supposed dangers of a potential vaccine (Bruns et al, 2020;Sturm and Albrecht, 2020). Thus, we expect conspiracy belief to be negatively associated with social distancing motivation (Hypothesis 6a) and positively associated with vaccine rejection (Hypothesis 6b).…”