8

Conspiracy

In Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22, the airmen of the 256th USAF Squadron find themselves trapped in an impossible position. The war is at its height, and the fighting in the skies over Italy is intense. They run the risk of being shot down every time they climb into the cockpit, and it’s clearly insane to choose to fly more of the dangerous missions; the sane choice would be to refuse to fly. But to get out of flying missions, they would have to plead insanity, at which point they would be declared sane for trying to get out of them. The airman ‘would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to, but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to.’¹

Catch-22 exemplifies the dilemma of rational actors caught up within the machinations of vast, irrational systems. Within such systems, even rational responses lead to irrational outcomes. The individual is aware of the irrationality but loses all power to act in their own interest. Faced with the roiling tide of information, we attempt to gain some kind of control over the world by telling stories about it: we attempt to master it through narratives. These narratives are inherently simplifications, because no one story can account for everything that’s happening; the world is too complex for simple stories. Instead of accepting this, the stories become ever more baroque and bifurcated, ever more convoluted and open-ended. Thus paranoia in an age of network excess produces a feedback loop: the failure to comprehend a complex world leads to the demand for more and more information, which only further clouds our understanding – revealing more and more complexity that must be accounted for by ever more byzantine theories of the world. More information produces not more clarity, but more confusion.

In the 1970 film adaptation of Catch-22, Air Force Captain John Yossarian, played by Alan Arkin, utters the immortal line, ‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.’ Yossarian’s dictum has found new life in today’s paranoid conspiracy thrillers engendered by technological advances and mass surveillance. One of the first symptoms of clinical paranoia is the belief that somebody is watching you; but this belief is now a reasonable one. Every email we send; every text message we write; every phone call we make; every journey we take; each step, breath, dream, and utterance is the target of vast systems of automated intelligence gathering, the sorting algorithms of social networks and spam factories, and the sleepless gaze of our own smartphones and connected devices. So who’s paranoid now?

It’s November 2014 and I’m standing on an access road in a field near Farnborough, in Hampshire, England. I’m waiting for a plane to fly overhead. I don’t know when it’s going to take off, or if it’s going to fly at all. There’s a camera on the hood of my car that has been filming empty sky for a couple of hours now; every thirty minutes or so I wipe the memory card and start it up again. The thin, high cloud shimmers and disappears.

The plane I am waiting for is one of three Reims-Cessna F406 aircraft based at Farnborough Airport, home of the famous air show and location of the first powered flight in Britain, in 1908. The Royal Aircraft Establishment, which researched and built first airships and later planes for the British military, was established here – as the Army Balloon Factory – in 1904. In the hangars to the south of the runways, the Air Accidents Investigations Branch, reassembles the shattered fragments of downed aircraft, in order to piece together the circumstances of their demise. It is thus a mecca for plane nerds, like myself, as well as the favourite airfield of oligarchs and foreign royalty, coasting into Airstrip One in unmarked private jets.

The Cessnas aren’t jets; they’re little twin turboprops, designed for civilian and military surveillance, particularly favoured by coastguards and aerial survey companies. The three who make their home at Farnborough first came to my attention when I encountered one of them doing tight circles over the Isle of Wight one summer afternoon, for hours on end. I was spending a lot of time on the website FlightRadar24, initially looking for the private charter planes being used to deport rejected asylum seekers in the middle of the night², but I slowly became entranced by the sheer wealth of data beamed down from the skies, and the intricate patterns of aircraft over southern England. At any time of day there are thousands of planes, large and small, speeding through or pottering around this heavily congested airspace, one of the busiest in the world. Among the long-haul jets and budget city-hoppers weave trainer aircraft and military transports – and sometimes, flights that the government would prefer to remain hidden.

Few people know more about what is hidden from view by the British Government than the investigative journalist Duncan Campbell, who was the first person to report publicly on GCHQ back in 1976. In 1978, the government punished Campbell and his colleagues Crispin Aubrey (another journalist) and John Berry (a former intelligence officer) by prosecuting them under the Official Secrets Act.³ The so-called ABC Trial, which ran for months, revealed that almost all the information used in the reports was in the public domain already. ‘There are no secrets, only lazy researchers,’ as Richard Aldrich, a historian of the intelligence services, wrote in an account of the trial.⁴ In 2010, Campbell reviewed Aldrich’s book on GCHQ for the New Statesman, writing,

This, and other scattered references, were what I found when I started looking for information about the Cessnas circling the Isle of Wight. On G-INFO, the publicly accessible database of UK-registered aircraft, I found two of the planes listed as belonging to Nor Aviation, an otherwise mysterious entity with an address at a Mail Boxes Etc. store in Surbiton, a few miles from the airfield. The same anonymous location was the registered address of a second Cessna belonging to Nor Aviation, while a third, performing the same low passes over Bembridge and Blackgang, was registered to Aero Lease UK at the Mail Boxes Etc. in Farnborough itself. The names of several owners were the same as serving or former Metropolitan Police officers, a strangeness confirmed by the discovery of a newspaper article from 1995, detailing a decade-long fraud perpetrated by a former Met accountant, Anthony Williams.⁶ Williams was tasked with setting up front companies for the Met’s secret air wing, but funnelled most of the funds – some £5 million over nine years – into his own bank account, from which they were used to buy up a large chunk of the Scottish village of Tomintoul, as well as the manorial title Lord Williams of Chirnside.

Attempts to find out more about the planes on pilot and planespotter forums was frustrated by the usual British deference to authority: those who posted about the planes were warned off by other users; administrators of the Farnborough planespotters groups banned all mention of their tail numbers. This wasn’t a surprise: investigations into the deportation flights had led to my being unceremoniously banned from several forums previously. ‘We’re interested in the planes, not who’s on them,’ I was told. Or – in the case of the legally dubious blanket surveillance of the general public’s mobile phone calls by a secret fleet of police aircraft – not even interested in the planes, despite photographs of them littering the websites of air photography enthusiasts. (I suspect, too, that it is the existence of these aircraft that strengthened the Met’s insistence upon secrecy when I naively requested information about their aerial capabilities, as related in the previous chapter.)

So here I am in the field in Hampshire, and after several hours the lawnmower rasp of a light aircraft becomes audible, shortly followed by the appearance of a small, twin-engined plane, its registration number clearly visible on the underside of the wings. Shortly after it disappears over the horizon, it pops up on FlightRadar24, heading southwest. I watch it on my phone for the next hour, as it performs its usual pattern of mid-altitude loops off the south coast, and then heads back toward me. Ninety minutes or so after it took off, it returns to Farnborough. I still don’t know what they’re doing down there. Later, I will write a small piece of software to scrape the website and log all the flights of the three planes, as well as others – the 3 a.m. deportation flights out of Stansted Airport, the CIA’s unmarked excursions over Los Angeles and Boston, the high-altitude lurkings of MI5’s Islander aircraft from Northolt. Big data flows out of the sky at a rate I can barely keep up with, and that I don’t really know what to do with anyway. Sometime in 2016, the planes stop broadcasting their location after take-off.

While I’m waiting by the airfield, another car pulls up – a minicab, according to the licence decal in the rear window. The access road is a good spot, just off the A325, for cabbies to wait between jobs. The driver gets out of the car, and I take the opportunity to borrow a lighter. We share a companionable cigarette; he notices my radio and binoculars. We talk about planes. And then, inevitably, we talk about chemtrails.

‘They’re different now, aren’t they, the clouds?’ says the taxi driver. It’s becoming a familiar conversation. Go on YouTube and you can find countless videos detailing, often in anger, the changing nature of the skies, and the aircraft producing such changes. Many of my web searches for the aircraft logging mobile phone calls lead me not to accounts of surveillance, but of covert geo-engineering: the use of planes to control the atmosphere with chemical sprays.

Something strange is afoot. In the hyper-connected, data-deluged present, schisms emerge in mass perception. We’re all looking at the same skies, but we’re seeing different things. Where I see covert deportations and secret surveillance planes – supported by flight logs and ADS-B data, newspaper reports and Freedom of Information requests – others see a global conspiracy to doctor the atmosphere, to control minds, to enslave populations, or to reengineer the climate for naive or nefarious purposes. In an atmosphere measurably filling with carbon dioxide – a gas that warms the planet and makes us dumber – many are convinced that far more than greenhouse gases are being dumped upon us.

Chemtrails have been around for a while, since at least the 1990s, when, according to the conspiracy theorists, the US Air Force let slip what they were really up to. In a report entitled ‘Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025’, a group of Air Force researchers proposed a series of measures by which the US military might use weather modification to achieve ‘battlespace dominance to a degree never before imagined,’ including inducing and preventing precipitation, controlling thunderstorms, and selectively activating the ionosphere with microwave beams to improve or degrade radio communications.⁷ While weather modification has a long history, the particular conjunction of speculative meteorology, military research, and the nascent internet caused chemtrails to go viral – perhaps the first truly mass folklore of the network.

Within a few years, assisted by online forums and talk radio, the belief that aircraft were intentionally spraying chemicals into the upper atmosphere was widespread, even global. Questions were asked in parliaments; national scientific organisations were flooded with enquiries; atmospheric scientists were barracked at conferences. Online, shaky videos of blue skies besmirched with smog, and planes trailing black smoke, proliferate. Groups of individuals gather in forums and Facebook groups to swap anecdotes and images.

The chemtrails theory is multifaceted and hydra-like; its adherents believe in fractal versions of the same idea. For some, the chemicals sprayed by commercial, military, and mystery aircraft are part of a widespread programme of solar radiation management: the creation of cloud cover to reduce sunlight and slow – or accelerate – global warming. The chemicals used cause cancer, Alzheimer’s, skin diseases and deformities. Global warming itself might be a lie, or a plot by shadowy forces to take over the world. Others believe the chemicals are intended to turn people into mindless drones, or to make them sick in order to profit the pharmaceutical industry. Covert geo-engineering, climate denialism, and the new world order meet in the churn of online misinformation, user-submitted videos, claims and debunkings, and contagious distrust.

Chemtrails become the vortex of other conspiracies, pulling everything into their orbit. ‘Take Ur Power Back: Vote to leave the EU’ exhorts one YouTuber, with the perhaps unsurprising username of Flat Earth Addict, over a montage of blue suburban skies criss-crossed with contrails.⁸ In this telling, covert climate engineering is a project of the European Union to suppress the will of the people. A few days later, the morning after Britain does indeed vote to leave the EU, Nigel Farage, de facto leader of the Leave Campaign, appears on national television. ‘The sun has risen on an independent Britain,’ he says, ‘and just look at it, even the weather has improved.’⁹

The pervasiveness of chemtrails is deeply akin to Timothy Morton’s hyperobject reading of climate change itself: something that clings to the skin and inserts itself into every facet of life, as perfectly captured in an account by journalist Carey Dunne of a month spent with chemtrail believers in California: ‘I wish I didn’t know, because now that I know, it’s really making my heart sad.’¹⁰ Conspiracies literalise the horror we feel lurking unspoken in the world.

Dunne’s initial enthusiasm for an idyllic working break on an organic farm turns weird when she discovers the beliefs of her employers, hippyish back-to-the-landers who, through Facebook, discovered a community of local chemtrail believers – and a doctored tweet by Donald Trump claiming that his administration would end chemtrailing:

Conspiracy theory, nevertheless, serves a vital and necessary function, by bringing into view objects and discourses otherwise ignored – the edge cases of the problem space. The term ‘conspiracy theory’ has more to do with the relation of people to power, than that of people to truth. The ‘black smokers’ of the chemtrailers can’t simply be ignored, when it is so clear that they point directly toward the actual and ongoing cataclysm in the atmosphere. Ruskin’s Plague-Cloud may or may not have been the first visible emanations from the chimneys of a rapidly industrialising Britain, or it might have been a deeper metaphor: a miasma rising from the thousands of corpses littering the battlefields of Europe, the first casualties of the twentieth century’s wars of industrial capital.

As in Ruskin’s time, the fundamental uncertainty of the present manifests in the form of weather formations: an array of new and strange clouds. In 2017, the latest edition of the International Cloud Atlas, published by the World Meteorological Organization, added a new classifier to its official list of cloud formations. This is ‘homogenitus’, and it is used to describe those cloud formations that develop as a result of human activity.¹²

In the lower part of the atmosphere, warm and moist air from urban and vehicle emissions creates a fog: these are layers of Stratus homogenitus. In unstable atmospheres, these layers lift up to form free-floating clouds of Cumulus homogenitus. Thermal power plants, which eject their waste heat into the middle atmosphere from their cooling towers, swell existing nimbostratus and altostratus, casting themselves into shadow. But it is in the high atmosphere, far from the surface of the earth, that homogenitus comes into its own.

The combustion of kerosene in jet engines produces water vapour and carbon dioxide. The water vapour cools quickly in the freezing air, first forming tiny droplets of liquid water, and then hardening into ice crystals. At high altitudes, ice crystals require a tiny nucleus around which to form: this is provided by the impurities in the jet fuel. Millions and millions of these crystals form the track that marks the plane’s passage. This is Cirrus homogenitus. Contrails are officially man-made clouds, and on cold, still days they can persist for hours, or even longer.

The criss-crossing of the skies is repeated everywhere. In Grant Morrison’s comic book series The Invisibles, one of the characters takes a polaroid snap of the desert sky, commenting, ‘A cloud head rising over the mesa in Dulce, New Mexico – that is exactly the same, in every detail – as one photographed in Queenstown, New Zealand.’ In The Invisibles’ cosmology, this is one of the dramatic moments when the narrative collapses, and evidence of time travel and much else is revealed. For us, the strange, global entanglement of Cirrus homogenitus and its endless circulation and reproduction online through climate research and conspiracy theory is the moment when the weather becomes active data: a Storm-Cloud of the Anthropocene, unlimited in physical space and spreading through the network, and the paranoid imagination.

Scientists are at pains to disassociate ‘normal’ contrails from the conspiracists’ chemtrails, but they contain the seeds of the same crisis. Contrails are the visible sign of what is ejected invisibly from jet engines: carbon dioxide, the stupefying insulator that is increasing so rapidly and dangerously in the atmosphere. Jet exhaust also includes nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, lead, and black carbon, which interact with each other and the air in complex ways which we do not fully understand. While airlines have continued to introduce fuel-saving efficiencies over the decades, this financial and ecological saving is far outstripped by the rapid growth of aviation in its totality. At its current rate of expansion, the aviation industry alone will by 2050 account for the entirety of the carbon dioxide emissions permitted to hold global warming below the two-degree-Celsius crisis point.¹³

Contrails do affect the climate, particularly when they persist, spreading out across the sky to form vast swathes of whiteness resembling cirrus and altocumulus. It is not merely their chemical composition, but their very cloudiness that affects the atmosphere: they trap more long-wave thermal radiation beneath them than they reflect back into space, resulting in increased global warming. The difference is particularly pronounced at night, and during the winter.¹⁴ Long-term studies of the atmosphere have shown that it is in fact getting cloudier up there: the contrails are changing the skies, and not for the better.¹⁵

In ancient Greece, certain seers practised ornithomancy: divination of the future by observing the flight of the birds. According to Aeschylus, it was Prometheus, the bringer of technology, who introduced ornithomancy to the ancients by designating some birds as fortuitous and some as sinister.¹⁶ Prometheus also promoted haruspicy, the examination of birds’ entrails for omens – a kind of primitive hacking. Today’s haruspex is the obsessive online investigator, spending hours picking over the traces of events, gutting them and splaying out their innards, poking at their joints and picking out fragments of steel, plastic, and black carbon.

Many conspiracy theories, then, might be a kind of folk knowing: an unconscious augury of the conditions, produced by those with a deep, even hidden, awareness of current conditions and no way to articulate them in scientifically acceptable terms. But a world that has no way of admitting such differently articulated accounts is in danger of falling prey to far worse stories – from antiscientific public panics to blood libels – and of failing to hear voices of genuine and necessary warning.

In the far north of Canada, indigenous people claim that the sun no longer sets where it used to, and that the stars are out of alignment. The weather is changing in strange and unpredictable ways. Warm, unstable winds blow from new directions; severe flooding threatens towns and villages. Even the animals are changing their patterns of life, struggling to adapt to the uncertain conditions. This is how the world is described in Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change, by Nunavut filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk and environmental scientist Ian Mauro, a series of interviews with Inuit elders in which they recount their experiences of the world around them – experiences informed by decades of observing the climate firsthand. The sun is setting in a different place, they say, often kilometres from where it used to. The earth itself is off-kilter.

When the film was screened at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference (COP15) in December 2009, it caused many scientists to complain that while the Inuit viewpoint was important, their claim that the earth had actually moved – had tilted on its axis – was dangerous, and would lead to them being discredited.¹⁷ But the direct experience of the Inuit is upheld by scientific theory: at high latitudes, the appearance of the sun is hugely affected by the snow covering the ground, which reflects and refracts it myriad ways. Changes in the snow and ice correspond to changes in visibility. At the same time, the atmosphere is indisputably filling up with particulate matter, the impurities of jet liners and the exhaust of fossil fuel fires. The bright red sunsets seen over dirty cities are the result of the smog and smoke the city itself exhales. In this way, the sun above the Arctic is distorted, and appears to set further and further away. The sky, like everything else, is seen through the lens of climate change. Not knowing why doesn’t make it not so.

‘Over the years, nobody has ever listened to these people. Every time [the discussion is] about global warming, about the Arctic warming, it’s scientists that go up there and do their work. And policy makers depend on these findings. Nobody ever really understands the people up there,’ Kunuk reported.¹⁸ In this regard, the knowledge of the Inuit is much akin to the Kenyan victims of torture, whose embodied evidence was ignored until it was validated in the language of their oppressors, through formal documentation and analysis. Scientific and political knowledges cannot escape the horizon of their own experience any more than embodied ones can, but it doesn’t mean they’re not looking at the same thing and seeking ways to articulate it.

Some of the most spectacular sunsets seen in Europe in recent times occurred after the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, the Icelandic volcano that filled the heavens with ash in April of 2010. These sunsets are also caused by aerosols in the atmosphere, particularly sulfur dioxide. As sunset approaches, ash and sulfur dioxide produce ripples of white cloud on the horizon, before the blue light scattered by atmospheric particles combines with the extended red of sunsets to produce a unique tone known as volcanic lavender.¹⁹ The sunsets appeared across the continent as the ash cloud moved south and west over several days. Volcanic ash was known to interfere with jet engines, but despite several incidents over decades, few studies had been performed. As a result, the whole of European airspace shut down. Over the course of eight days, over 100,000 flights were cancelled, almost half the world’s air traffic, and 10 million passengers were stranded.

Apart from the sunsets, the most unsettling thing about the Eyjafjallajökull event was its silence. For the first time in decades, the skies over Europe were quiet. The poet Carol Ann Duffy noted its stillness:

Others commented on the archaic strangeness of a sky without contrails. It was a strangeness that crept up on us slowly, an inversion of the event. While the media reported on the ‘chaos’ of travel disruptions, we sat in sunlight beneath clear blue skies. The eruption was a hyperobject: an event of almost inconceivable violence, present everywhere but experienced locally as an absence, like climate change, like Roni Horn’s paradox of the weather: ‘The nice is occurring in the immediate and individual, and the wrong is occurring systemwide.’

For a long time, climate sceptics have claimed that volcanoes produce more carbon dioxide than human activities. Indeed, volcanoes have historically been responsible for periods of global cooling, and of paranoia. In 1815, the colossal eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia was the final cataclysm in a series of events that caused 1816 to become known as ‘The Year Without a Summer’. Crops failed across North America and Europe, with snow, ice, and frost appearing in July and August. Bright red and purple skies appeared, and famine spread across the land, along with ominous portents and apocalyptic beliefs. In Geneva, a group of friends decided to set down their most frightening stories. One outcome was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus; another was Byron’s poem ‘Darkness’, in which he wrote,

The explosion of the volcano Krakatoa in August 1883 also produced purple sunsets and global falls in temperature, and has been associated with both Ruskin’s Plague-Cloud and the flaming skyscape of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.²² Like Tambora before it, it took several months for news of the eruption to reach Europe: in the meantime, apocalyptic predictions flourished.

The eruption of Eyjafjallajökull provided an opportunity to lay certain misconceptions about volcanic carbon dioxide to rest. The volcano was estimated to have emitted between 150,000 and 300,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a day;²³ by contrast the grounding of the European air fleet prevented the emission of some 2.8 million tonnes in just eight days,²⁴ a figure greater than the total global annual emissions from all of the volcanoes in the world.²⁵ If painting The Scream today, the appropriate backdrop would not be the blood-red sky of Krakatoa’s eruption, but a firmament criss-crossed with contrails: the same contrails that litter the websites of chemtrail conspiracy theorists, even, if not especially, those who deny the realities of man-made climate change. We are all looking at the same sky and seeing radically different things.

Acts of human violence have been recorded in the climate on numerous occasions. In the thirteenth century, the Mongol invasions of Eurasia caused such devastation to agriculture that forests significantly regrew, causing a measurable 0.1 per cent dip in atmospheric carbon levels.²⁶ The ‘little ice age’ that reached its climax in the Year Without a Summer of 1816 began in 1600, but it was the result of a century of global turmoil, which began with the Colombian catastrophe of 1492. In the 150 years following the arrival of Europeans in America, 80 to 95 per cent of the indigenous population was wiped out, reaching 100 per cent in some regions, many by warfare, most by diseases introduced from the Old World. A population of 50 to 60 million was reduced to around 6 million. In the aftermath, 50 million hectares of previously cultivated land was left devoid of humans. Subsequently, more than 12 million Africans were enslaved and displaced to the Americas, with millions more dying en route. Once again, agriculture collapsed, this time on both sides of the Atlantic, and the regrowth of forests coupled with the reduction in wood burning resulted in an atmospheric decline in carbon dioxide of seven to ten parts per million between 1570 and 1620.²⁷ It has never fallen in such a way since.

It is perhaps this event that should be considered the beginning of the anthropocene, rather than some marvellous human invention belatedly recognised as suicidal. Not the invention of the coal-fired steam engine that kick-started the industrial age in the eighteenth century; not the fixation of nitrogen beginning with the invention of the Haber-Bosch process; not the release of billions of particles of radioactive contamination from the detonation of hundreds of nuclear bombs: the anthropocene starts with mass genocide, with planetary violence on such a scale that it registers in ice cores and the pollination of crops. It is the hallmark of the anthropocene that, unlike those epochs that started with a meteor strike or sustained volcanic eruptions, its origins are cloudy and uncertain. And its effects, which are happening right now, are even more so. What we can say of it is that, as the first truly human epoch – the one that we are closest to and most entangled with – it is also the hardest to see and think.

At 9:08 on the morning of September 11, 2001, five minutes after the second plane crashed into the World Trade Centre towers, the US Federal Aviation Authority shut down New York’s airspace and closed its airports. At 9:26 it issued a nationwide ground stop, preventing any planes taking off anywhere in the country. And at 9:45, the national airspace was completely closed: no civilian aircraft were allowed to take off, and all aircraft in flight were ordered to land at the nearest airport as soon as possible. Canada’s transport agency followed suit. By 12:15 p.m., the airspace over the continental United States was clear of civilian and commercial aircraft. Apart from military aircraft and prisoner transports, nothing flew over North America for three days.

During those three days between September 11 and 14, the difference between day and night temperatures, known as the average diurnal temperature range (DTR), showed a marked increase. Across the whole continent, the DTR increased by more than one degree Celsius, while for regions in the Midwest, Northeast and Northwest, where contrail coverage was usually the greatest, it more than doubled the seasonal average.²⁸ An act of violence, like so many before it, was recorded in the weather itself.

Over the course of the day on September 11, scrolling tickers started to appear on the bottom of news broadcasts, first on Fox News, then on CNN and MSNBC. Tickers had been used in breaking news situations before, as producers struggled to communicate the maximum amount of information and allow new viewers to quickly get up to speed. But after 9/11, the tickers never went away. The crisis became a daily, ongoing event, merging seamlessly into the war on terror, fears of dirty bombs, stock market collapses and occupations. In the news tickers, the discrete, empirical approach of bulletins was swept away in a constant stream of information: a precursor to the flowing walls of Facebook and Twitter feeds. The endless circulation of undated, unattributed information in news tickers and digital streams shredded our ability to tell coherent stories about the world. 9/11 – not the specific event itself, but the media environment it occurred in and accelerated – heralded the arrival of a new age of paranoia, best exemplified in the conspiracies of government complicity in the event, but mirrored at every level of society.

Richard Hofstadter, writing in 1964, created the term ‘paranoid style’ to characterise American politics. Citing examples ranging from Masonic and anti-Catholic panics in the 1800s to Senator Joe McCarthy’s assertions of high-level government conspiracy in the 1950s, Hofstadter outlined a history of othering: the casting of an invisible enemy as ‘a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman – sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving’.²⁹ The most common attribute of this enemy is their extraordinary power: ‘Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way.’ In short, the enemy is the other who rises above the convolutions and complexities of the present, who grasps the totality of the situation and is capable of manipulating it in ways the rest of us are not. Conspiracy theories are the extreme resort of the powerless, imagining what it would be to be powerful.

This theme was taken up by Fredric Jameson, when he wrote that conspiracy ‘is the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age; it is the degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter’s system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer theme and content’.³⁰ Surrounded by evidence of complexity – which for the Marxist historian is emblematic of the generalised alienation produced by capitalism – the individual, however outraged, resorts to ever more simplistic narratives in order to regain some control over the situation. As the technologically augmented and accelerated world trends toward the opposite of simplicity, as it becomes more – and more visibly – complex, conspiracy must of necessity become more bizarre, intricate, and violent to accommodate it.

Hofstadter identified another key aspect of the paranoid style: its mirroring of the subject’s own desires. ‘It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him.’³¹ The chemtrails stick to the body, becoming unconscious, yet persistent, manifestations of wider environmental ruin. Just as a friend told me about flying to their summer holidays on one of the same jets I watched performing midnight deportations, so chemtrail believers film ‘black smokers’ from the windows of their own polluting pleasure flights. There’s no outside to the complexity we find ourselves enmeshed in, no exterior point of view that we can all share on the situation. The network that brings us knowledge wraps around us, refracting our perspective into a million points of view, simultaneously illuminating and disorientating us.

In the last few years, the paranoid style has gone mainstream. It’s easy to dismiss the chemtrailers and 9/11 truthers as the lunatic fringe, until they start to take over governments and bring down countries. Donald Trump may not have tweeted that he was going to put an end to chemtrails, but he has tweeted on multiple occasions that global warming is a conspiracy against American business, and probably some kind of Chinese plot.³² His political rise came on the back of the ‘Birther’ movement, which claimed that Barack Obama was not a US citizen and was thus ineligible for the presidency. The Birther movement ignited Republican radicalisation, becoming the dominant issue at Tea Party rallies and town hall meetings. In 2011, Trump embarked on a national press tour questioning the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate, and claimed on Twitter that he was in fact a Kenyan-born impostor named ‘Barry Soweto’. He offered to donate money to the president’s favourite charity if he would release his passport application. As a result of his pursuit of the issue, his support among likely Republican voters doubled, and politicians, including his later opponent for the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney, sought his endorsement. When he finally renounced the conspiracy in 2016 – long after Obama’s long-form birth certificate was actually released – he claimed that Hillary Clinton had started it.³³

After he entered the race for the presidency, Trump continued to take his lines from some of the most extreme and most prominent online conspiracy theorists. His call for a border wall to prevent Mexican ‘murderers and rapists’ entering the United States was justified by reference to a video produced by Alex Jones’s Infowars.com, a conspiracy theory website and media empire. His campaign’s frequently repeated calls for the jailing of Hillary Clinton also originated with Infowars.com. Trump’s willingness to repeat what he read on the internet, or was fed by advisors with close links to right-wing conspiracy networks, surprised even Jones: ‘It is surreal to talk about issues here on air, and then word-for-word hear Trump say it two days later,’ he said.³⁴ The fringes of the internet had returned to the centre.

In ‘Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025’, the US Air Force report that kick-started the chemtrails conspiracy, the writers noted that

In this case, it’s not necessary to change the actual weather, but merely to disrupt the tools with which the target perceives the weather. Man-made clouds don’t need to be seeded in the stratosphere; they can be inserted as code into the networks of information that have come to replace our direct perception of the world. As one version of the chemtrail conspiracy might go: it’s the virtual weather that is harming us.

The virtual weather disrupts our ability to tell coherent stories about the world because it challenges previously held models of consensus reality – and of consensus as a whole. In analyses of the most extreme conspiracy theories online, traditional psychological models start to fail. According to the textbook definition – in this case, that of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association and widely used by clinicians, researchers, and the legal system – a belief is not a delusion when it is held by a person’s ‘culture or subculture’. But the network has changed how we establish and shape cultures: people in distant locales can gather online to share their experiences and beliefs and form cultures all their own.

On December 30, 1796, James Tilly Matthews, a London tea broker, interrupted a session of the House of Commons by shouting, ‘Treason!’ from the public gallery. He was immediately arrested and shortly after committed to Bethlem Royal Hospital – better known as Bedlam. Under examination, Matthews claimed to have been involved in secret affairs of state, which were being concealed by the government of William Pitt. He also detailed the operation of a machine called the ‘air loom’, which used a system of hydraulic pumps and magnetic emanations to control his body and mind.³⁶ Matthews has gone down in history as the first documented case of paranoid schizophrenia. His detailed descriptions of the air loom have also passed into the literature, as they provide the first example of paranoid delusions tracking the scientific discoveries of the day.

In 1796, Britain and Europe were abuzz with revolutions scientific and political: Joseph Priestley had separated the air into its constituent elements, while in Paris Antoine Lavoisier had just published his Elements of Chemistry, which created a new understanding of the physical world. Coming just a few years after the French Revolution, these discoveries had a political edge. Priestley was a staunch republican, and he published pamphlets promoting his belief that science and reason would dispel tyrannical error and superstition. In turn, conservative opponents of the new science and societal reforms compared the political turbulence to Priestley’s ‘wild gas’: unnatural and uncontrollable.³⁷ Matthews’s air loom entangled pneumatic and political machineries to produce a conspiracy.

The process has been repeated for every subsequent technology, from radio to television, from the phonograph to the internet. They are the results of the attempts by laymen to integrate strange and poorly understood new technologies into their model of the world; but the world bears some responsibility for the way it admits and fosters such beliefs. Matthews – an intelligent and gentle man, who later helped design Bedlam’s successor to better cater to the needs of its inmates – acknowledged his disease, but continued to insist upon political malfeasance. He was probably right: later historians found evidence that he had been employed on secret missions by the state, and had been disavowed.

Matthews’s closest equivalents today, outside the realm of clinical paranoia, are those who claim to be the subject of ‘gang stalking’ and ‘mind control experiments’, the most common search terms for a set of symptoms that include surveillance and persecution of individuals by persons unknown (through street harassment and coercion), electronic bugging, and telepathic suggestion. Subjects of gang stalking and mind control call themselves Targeted Individuals and gather on websites with names like Fight ‘Gang Stalking’, and Freedom from Covert Harassment and Surveillance. The communities that collect around such sites vastly outnumber those who receive treatment for mental illnesses; indeed, resistance to treatment, and the embrace of those who share their beliefs, is one of the core components of such groups. Targeted Individuals tell much the same story as Matthews: unknown actors, using the latest technology, are at work to influence and control them. But unlike Matthews, they have a community around them – a culture – that justifies and upholds their beliefs.

This is what troubles the clinical definition of a delusion, which makes an exemption for beliefs ‘accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture’.³⁸ Those that the psychiatric establishment would have classified as delusional can ‘cure’ themselves of their delusions by seeking out and joining an online community of like minds. Any opposition to this worldview can be dismissed as a cover-up of the truth of their experience, supported by fellow Targeted Individuals. Moreover, there is the possibility that confirmation of their beliefs provides better care for individuals than the stark opposition, disgust and fear emanating from the rest of society. A group characterised by its distrust of others has co-opted network technology to create its own dynamic, complex, and informative community that is mutually supportive and self-sustaining. It has separated itself from the medical and social mainstream in order to build a world in which its own understanding is validated and valued.

The same pattern recurs across different, but related groups. Morgellons is the name of a self-diagnosed medical condition that has troubled the medical profession for years. Its sufferers report persistently itchy skin with fibres poking out of their body. Multiple studies have concluded that Morgellons is a psychological rather than physical condition, but sufferers, through the internet, organise conferences and lobbying groups.³⁹ Others claim that the electromagnetic waves produced by mobile phones, Wi-Fi hotspots, and power lines are making them ill. Electromagnetic hypersensitivity, some claim, afflicts 5 per cent of the US population, causing untold misery. Victims build themselves rooms lined with foil, known as Faraday cages, to keep out the waves; or they move to the National Radio Quiet Zone in West Virginia, a scientific preserve devoid of radio signals.⁴⁰

Self-confirming groups, from Targeted Individuals to Morgellons sufferers, and 9/11 truthers to Tea Partiers, seem to be a hallmark of the new dark age. What they reveal is what the chemtrailers show directly: that our ability to describe the world is a product of the tools at our disposal. We’re all looking at the same world and seeing radically different things. And we have built ourselves a system that reinforces that effect, an automated populism that gives people what they want, all of the time.

If you log onto social media and start searching for information about vaccines, you’ll quickly find your way to anti-vaccination opinions. And once exposed to those sources of information, other conspiracies – chemtrailers, flat earthers, 9/11 truthers – are promoted into the feed. Quickly, these opinions start to feel like the majority: an endless echo chamber of supportive opinion, no matter what the subject matter. What happens when our desire to know more and more about the world collides with a system that will continue to match its answers to any possible question, without resolution?

If you’re searching for support for your views online, you will find it. And moreover, you will be fed a constant stream of validation: more and more information, of a more and more extreme and polarising nature. This is how men’s rights activists graduate to white nationalism, and how disaffected Muslim youths fall towards violent jihadism. This is algorithmic radicalisation, and it works in the service of the extremists themselves, who know that polarisation of society ultimately serves their aims.

A month after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris in January 2015, Dabiq, the online magazine of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, published its seventh issue, containing an editorial outlining the group’s strategy. It built upon ISIL’s previous declarations, promoting sectarianism while condemning coexistence and collaboration between different religions.⁴¹ In 2006, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the precursor to ISIL, attacked and destroyed the Al-Askari Mosque in Samarra, among the holiest sites in Shia Islam – one of many acts of deliberate provocation that triggered the still-ongoing civil war in the country. Since its emergence in 2014, ISIL has expanded this approach to the entire planet: by claiming responsibility for terrorist attacks around the globe, the group hopes to trigger a backlash against Muslim communities in the West, polarising societies and creating a violent spiral of alienation and retribution.⁴²

ISIL calls the space of coexistence and cooperation between Muslims and other communities ‘the gray zone’, and has vowed to destroy it. By pitting Muslim traditions against one another, and non-Muslim majorities against their fellow citizens, they seek to portray themselves as the only protectors of true Islam, and the Caliphate as the only place where Muslims can be truly safe. For this strategy to succeed, it requires the majority of people to abandon the gray zone under the relentless pressure of violence and paranoia, and to submit to a black-and-white vision of the world that admits no doubt and uncertainty.

On the other side of the territory, the term ‘gray zone’ has been deployed to describe the most contemporary form of warfare, which exists just below the threshold of conventional armed conflict. Gray zone warfare is characterised by unconventional tactics, including cyberattacks, propaganda and political warfare, economic coercion and sabotage, and sponsorship of armed proxy fighters, all shrouded in a cloud of misinformation and deception.⁴³ Russia’s use of ‘little green men’ in the invasion of eastern Ukraine and Crimea, China’s expansion in the South China Sea, and Iran and Saudi Arabia’s proxy war in Syria all point to an evolution of warfare defined by ambiguity and uncertainty. Nobody is clear as to who is fighting who; everything is deniable. Just as the US military is one of the most advanced planners for the realities of climate change, so the military planners at West Point and the General Staff Academy are at the forefront of recognising the cloudy realities of the new dark age.

What if we choose to appropriate the gray zone for ourselves? Somewhere between the jihadis and the military strategists, between war and peace, between black and white, the gray zone is where most of us live today. The gray zone is the best descriptor for a landscape inundated with unprovable facts and provable falsehoods that nevertheless stalk, zombielike, through conversations, cajoling and persuading. The gray zone is the slippery, almost ungraspable terrain we now find ourselves in as a result of our vastly extended technological tools for knowledge making. It is a world of limited knowability and existential doubt, horrifying to the extremist and the conspiracy theorist alike. In this world we are forced to acknowledge the narrow extent of empirical reckoning and the poor returns on overwhelming flows of information.

The gray zone cannot be defeated. It cannot be drained or overrun – it is already overflowing. The conspiracy theory is the dominant narrative and the lingua franca of the times: properly read, it really does explain everything. In the gray zone, the contrails are both chemtrails and the early warning signs of global warming: they can be each of these things at the same time. In the gray zone, the exhaust fumes of industrial chimneys mingle with the free molecules of the upper atmosphere, animating the natural and unnatural in Brownian motions of uncertain provenance. The fibrous strands that poke through the skin of Morgellons sufferers are trace elements of fibre-optic cables, and the electromagnetic vibrations of cellphone towers transmitting high-frequency financial data. In the gray zone, the setting sun refracts through the haze of airborne particulates, and the earth really is out of kilter: we’re just prepared to admit it now.

Living consciously in the gray zone, if we should choose to do so, allows us to sample from the myriad of explanations that our limited cognition stretches like a mask over the vibrating half-truths of the world. It is a better approximation of reality than any rigid binary encoding can ever hope to be – an acknowledgement that all our apprehensions are approximations, and all the more powerful for being so. The gray zone allows us to make peace with the otherwise-irreconcilable, conflicting worldviews that prevent us from taking meaningful action in the present.