Episodios
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My friend loaded about a yearâs worth of our text history into Googleâs AI (privacy, what privacy?) â and instructed the AI to create a podcast about me based on those texts. Thatâs what todayâs podcast is â just a couple of AI people talking to each other about me, based on nothing but a text thread between me and my friend. Itâs truly awful and I told Aaron as much. On top of this Joshua Drummond shares his latest big of art around New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon.
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A conversation with someone I find endlessly fascinating to talk to â one of my favourite authors, Jason Pargin. Heâs perhaps most well known for writing John Dies At The End, or a host of other books that all have amazing titles including This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Donât Touch It, What the Hell Did I Just Read, and If This Book Exists, Youâre in the Wrong Universe. His latest comes out this week, and is called â in true Jason style â I Am Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom. I was reading his stuff way before I knew I was reading his stuff, later finding out he was the guy who started Pointless Waste of Time which ended up being Cracked.com. If you donât know his writing, you might know him as âthe geriatric TikTok personalityâ (his words, not mine) who stumbled upon Tickled recently, before moving onto Mister Organ. After watching that reaction video, I got in touch with him and fawned a little, before discovering that we have a lot of interests in common â from the chaos of social media and AI, to cults and religion, to all the stuff Tickled and Mister Organ touched on. I loved talking to Jason â and so hereâs our conversation. It goes all over the place, and I hope you enjoy what he has to say. BOOK LINK: https://static.macmillan.com/static/smp/starting-to-worry-about-9781250285959/
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¿Faltan episodios?
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Todayâs Webworm is a podcast episode which tells the story of Barry. More specifically, itâs a story about Barry as told by my neighbor and friend Noah. Noah lived with Barry for six years, first as a housemate and then as a friend. This all seems pretty normal, until you realise that Barry was about 50 years older than Noah. I guess you could say itâs more a story of friendship, but one based on a fairly big secret. As usual, I will be in the comments all week at www.webworm.co if you listen and have any questions.
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Iâve been trying to have this conversation for about seven years now, but it was impossible due to ongoing litigation in various United States' courts, including the New York State Supreme Court.
David DâAmato (the âbig badâ in Tickled) died from a heart attack back on March 13, 2017. He left behind a legacy of tickling videos and online harassment, along with a couple of cats and tens of millions of dollars.
I noticed that one of the key people named in DâAmatoâs will (as youâll know from the film, we had a trove of documents from DâAmatoâs computer) was Robert Maher. So back then, out of sheer curiosity, I dropped him an email.
To my surprise, he replied.
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Iâve been thinking a lot about Corey Harris, the 44-year old man who went viral after Zooming into his court appearance while driving. The headlines generated were basically all the same: âMan With Suspended Driver's License Dials Into Court Hearing While Drivingâ. The video of Coreyâs confused expressions went viral on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok â no-one really stopping to think why he looked so confused. He looked confused because a judge ordered his driving suspension be lifted over two years ago. 7News Detroit reported this fact, pointing out it was the courtâs fault because theyâd never passed those orders on.
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Calvin is seven, and is the son of my producer over on Flightless Bird, Rob â aka âWobby Wobâ. In today's podcast, Calvin watches and then immediately reviews Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. I hope you enjoy it. Itâs Calvin, being interviewed by his dad Rob.
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The internet isnât just full of bad ideas: Itâs dying. The idea of a dead internet isnât new, and full disclosure â it started life as its own conspiracy theory. Dead Internet Theory posits that most of the internet is just bots â and that these bots are being used to manipulate the human population. While I donât see some grand scheme playing out online to infect the internet with garbage, I think itâs happening organically and itâs happening fast.
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This is a conversation between Webworm's David Farrier, and his friend Liv Tennet, talking about her time as a child actor in Lord of the Rings. Itâs a conversation with a lot of giggles as she talks about falling off a horse, and becoming a meme.
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Webworm regular Hayden Donnell with an essay about the incompetent executive class.
Much has been written about the structural factors accelerating the mediaâs demise. Tech giants have hoovered up its ad revenue like the sandworms from Dune. Its audiences have migrated to TikTok, or worse, X, where they routinely mistake the deranged inner monologue of @MAGAJackie28743781 for objective journalism.
Less has been written about the incompetence of the mediaâs executives. Vice was home to some of the worldâs most principled and talented journalists, but it was also run by cartoonish charlatans who blew half the op-ex on jobs for their friends, cocaine and general horndoggery.
Mostly though, media bosses have demonstrated more mundane strategic ineptitude.
Enjoy the episode, and see you in the comments over at https://www.webworm.co/p/buffoons
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Episode 14: In this episode, David Farrier reads some feedback from Webworm readers, before Hayden Donnell witnesses the "comeback" of Arise's John Cameron, as John attempts to speak in tongues. This is a look at how Pentecostal Christians tend to be a tight club - and how staging a comeback is part and parcel of anyone's fall.
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Episode 13: "I talk to the guy behind Paul T Goldman, 2023's best documentary". David chats with Jason Woliner, creator and director of Peacock's PAUL T GOLDMAN. Visit www.webworm.co for more, and to join journalist David Farrier's Webworm community.
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Episode 11: "The Life and Death of P22". A mountain lion walked the streets outside my house, and now it's dead. I'm curious what this fact says about us, and our relationship to nature. This includes an interview with journalist Rob Chaney, author of The Grizzly in the Driveway. For more details see https://www.webworm.co/p/episode11
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Episode 10: "I was shot with two arrows â first in my stomach, second in my chest â by a man in the depths of the jungle." In this episode I read an essay by New Zealander Matt Scheurich, who back in 2011 found himself face to face with death after being shot by two arrows. He writes about the experience, and how it changed his ideas about death. See www.webworm.co for more details. Note: this podcast contains coarse language â if youâre listening with the kids in the car, maybe drop the audio down for a few seconds at the 7â28â mark.
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.webworm.co/subscribe -
Episode 8: Arise & Me: Not a Love Story. Itâs been a while since we talked about Arise megachurch. I figured it was time for an update. I also became curious what Arise leaders, and the board, thought of me since I started writing about them in April of last year. I am not a mindreader, so I decided to do the next best thing: I made a Privacy Act request, asking for all Arise emails, texts and electronic correspondence mentioning âWebwormâ or âDavid Farrier.â All Webworm and reporting about Arise can be found here: https://www.webworm.co/p/megachurch. Please sign up for the Webworm newsletter for my reporting direct to your inbox: https://www.webworm.co
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Hi,
Hope the weekend went well. I had a blast reading your stories under my secret societies newsletter. Especially loved this from Steff:
âIn university I won a âFreemasonâs Scholarshipâ, which is hilarious because I had to go to an interview with 10 masons â and Iâd just seen the movie From Hell, and all I wanted to talk about was conspiracy theories.
I won, and I got invited to attend a dinner at their Auckland lodge with my mum and my best friend. So we go off to find the bathroom, and she goes âlook at thisâ and pulls me behind a curtain and through a door and into their secret meeting chamber.
And it looks like a movie set! I just couldnât get over how simultaneously cool and silly it was. Like, all those lovely old men I met at dinner really hang out in here? Why don't they just go bowling?â
I loved chatting to you in the comments over the weekend, and after that I chatted to New Zealand journalist Kim Hill about what the hell is going on with New Zealandâs conspiracy scene â you can listen to our conversation here.
As for today â itâs time for a Webworm podcast. I wanted to try something every now and then where I share a piece of my writing from earlier in my career. I have stuff scattered in a variety of places â old laptops and computers, USB sticks (remember them?) and of course Google Docs.
Todayâs piece was originally published on the 3News website, back when I was a journalist in New Zealand.
The website no longer exists, so neither does this piece â except, I found it in my Google Docs folder. I enjoyed revisiting it, so â like when Stephen King releases a new edition of The Stand â I decided to clean it up a little, add a few paragraphs, and re-release it into the world.
I just compared myself to one of Americaâs greatest writers. Not arrogant at all.
This one is a medical mystery; a rabbit hole I never expected to go down.
Trigger warning: if youâre squeamish, this might make you a bit squeamish. Nonetheless â I hope you enjoy it. Letâs travel back to 2015.
David.
Pulling on a Mysterious Thread
UFOs, chemtrails, shadowy government agents. The phone-calls usually start around 9pm. People call the newsroom with information they desperately want to tell you; information they canât give to anyone else.
Their stories are similar and familiar â and always filled with paranoia and conspiracy. One man insists the government has put an implant in his brain, using it to track his every move. A woman calls up insisting sheâs been systematically abducted by aliens for the last 15 years.
People call the newsroom â often me specifically â because they see it as their last opportunity to be understood. Or at least be heard. The police are no help. Doctors and medical professionals have turned them away. Most of them donât even want to consider writing to the government, because the governmentâs in on it. They want to talk to the open-minded reporter.
None of these callers are looking for answers, because they already have the answers. Their problem is that no one will listen to them.
These far-flung stories donât always come over the phone. Increasingly, people direct their story to my Facebook inbox or my Twitter DMs. People like Andy:
And Andy started telling his story. It was involved and complex, full of names, dates and allegations.
The messages arrived in my inbox in a steady stream. 10⊠20⊠86 messages by the end of the day. It was unrelenting and I didnât know where to start. He claimed many troubling things, but there was no way to verify any of his claims.
And then he started talking about the threads.
I paused when reading this, and then I re-read it, just to clarify. I didnât quite get it. Threads? I donât know what he is talking about. I canât picture it. Andy is very candid about it: âItâs not normal to be able to pull threads out of your chest. Iâve got wounds everywhereâ.
Andy tells me he didnât used to have wounds everywhere. He sent me a âbeforeâ photo, from January 2014: A topless, pasty white guy. Now the paste has turned to a blotchy mess. He sends me a more recent photo.
These splotches cover his arms, his chest, his back. He blames the splotches on the threads. It always comes back to the threads. Then he sent me a photo of what he was talking about:
There are more photos, and they all show the same thing: Andy appears to be pulling threads out of himself, just like he said he was. Itâs a strange thing to look at â as Iâm still not quite sure what I am seeing.
He says heâs approached various hospitals, and seen various doctors. But no answers. He sends me a report from a Diagnostic Medlab:
It report ends with âThe origin of the foreign material is not apparentâ.
Andyâs narrative veers back into things I canât confirm âallegations, conspiracy and paranoia. I donât know how founded or unfounded any of it is. âI been on the run since January 2014. I try and keep myself a moving targetâ he types.
Heâs sleeping rough somewhere in the North Island of New Zealand. He needs to keep off the grid. Heâs been contacting me when he gets Wi-Fi on his phone. âI been trying hard at great risk to my own life. I expect to die from my injuriesâ he sends.
Itâs easy to write him off as another conspiracy theorist. But I keep on thinking about the threads. Iâve been staring at this confronting photo for a few days now, trying to figure out what exactly Iâm looking at:
I feel a bit ill. I am not good with body stuff, and I am definitely not good with âbits-of-bloody-matter-pulled-out-of-the-skinâ body stuff.
In saying that, Iâm part of a Facebook chat group with five friends that I like to surprise, so I send the photo to them. Rachel, a speech therapist, sends an immediate reply: âOh my gosh, heâs got Morgellons Diseaseâ.
Devilâs Bait
Rachel had just picked up a book called The Empathy Exams, a New York Times bestseller written by Leslie Jamison. The book is about being empathetic toward people you didnât fully understand. One of the chapterâs was called âDevilâs Baitâ:
âFor me, Morgellons disease started as a novelty: people said they had a strange disease, and no one â or hardly anyone â believed them.
There there were a lot of them, almost 12 thousand of them â and their numbers were growing.
Their illness manifested in lots of ways: Sores, itching, fatigue, pain, and something called formication, the sensation of crawling insects.
But its defining symptom was always the same: Strange fibres emerging from underneath the skinâ.
This sounded exactly like Andy.
I immediately went on a Googling rampage, finding examples of Morgellons all over the world, from the United States to Japan.
The diagnosis started with Mary Leitao, who in 2001 took her two-year-old to the doctor to examine a crusty sore on his lip. The kid was complaining about some bugs crawling around under his skin. Doctors found nothing wrong, prescribing some vaseline.
But the sore didnât go away, the fibres arrived, and Leitao came up with the term âMorgellonsâ â referencing something written by a 17th Century doctor about some âharsh hairâ heâd found emerging on a patientâs back.
Ms. Leitao collects a sample of the strands from Drewâs skin. They glide right off, like filaments from a dandelion.
She places them onto slides, examining them under an $8 RadioShack microscope. Sheâs looked thousands of times into microscopes, fancier ones, first as a biology student at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and later for five years as a medical researcher at two Boston hospitals.
Sheâs seen nothing like this before. She shakes her head and thinks, âThese things cannot be coming out of my sonâs body.â
Once the condition had a name, people started coming out of the woodwork. Patients would collect the threads theyâd pulled out of themselves and bring it to their GP in little containers or matchboxes.
Dermatologists even coined a term for it: âThe matchbox signâ. The consensus was that the fibres or âalien bodiesâ werenât from within the body, but were just bits of cotton and wool people found on their skin.
I thought of my guy, Andy, and his collection of bloody, fleshy fibres laid out on a paper towel. Then I thought of that photo of him pulling them out of his body. They werenât bits of wool from his fucking sweater. What was going on?
A Disease You Catch Online
The Centre for Disease Control launched a full scale investigation in 2006 to get to the bottom of Morgellons. They didnât get to the bottom of it.
The report was called Clinical, Epidemiologic, Histopathologic and Molecular Features of an Unexplained Illness and concluded:
âWe were not able to conclude based on this study whether this unexplained dermopathy represents a new condition, or a wider recognition of an existing condition such as delusional infestationâ.
That delusional infestation thing is important.
Body horror â think David Cronenbergâs The Fly and Eraserhead â isnât just a movie genre, but has long been a phenomenon dealt with by psychologists the world over.
An idea seeds itself in a patientâs mind: something is crawling under their skin and they have to get it out. Sometimes itâs called delusional parasitosis or Ekbomâs syndrome. Delusory cleptoparsitosis is another one, closely related to a paranoia of bed bugs.
In one extreme case several years ago a woman scratched through her scalp and her skull using household implements until she was scratching at her own brain:
Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night â and all the way into her brain.
Iâm not quite sure how you scratch through your skull â maybe some artistic licence there. But you get the idea: Itâs an itch you canât scratch, and it drives you crazy.
I mention these other conditions because they lead to another theory about Morgellons: that itâs passed on through the Internet. The Empathy Exams labels the process âTransmission by Internet.â
Morgellons disease wasnât termed until 2001: itâs grown up on the web â through message boards, group chats, Facebook and Twitter. Itâs an idea. An idea that becomes so powerful itâs utterly invasive. The meme to end all memes. A meme exploding out of your own body.
Doctors generally agree the wounds you see on Morgellons patients are self-inflicted. A patient believes there is something under the skin, and they attempt to dig it out. Itâs based around a whole lot of paranoia, and it can spread.
Patients are often described as delusional. Google âMorgellonsâ, and pretty soon youâll find fringe literature fraught with government conspiracies, the New World Order, and chemtrails.
I think back to Andy and the stories he canât verify and the fact heâs been on the run for a year. Sounds pretty Level 5 to me.
But hereâs the thing: not all scientists believe Morgellons is a delusion.
Belief v Science
About 15 years ago, molecular scientist Randy Wymore from Oklahoma State University got patients to send their fibres to him â and he noticed the threads all looked pretty similar: most were either blue or red.
He sent them to a forensics lab for analysis. They didnât match any of the 900 textiles on the Tulsa Police Departmentâs forensic labâs database. Next the threads were heated to 371 degrees Celsius. Nothing happened: no fire, no disintegration, no nothing. This meant they werenât one of the at least 85,000 different organic compounds that would catch fire.
With all this in mind, you go to Oklahoma State Universityâs website today and you find this paragraph:
Morgellons is a multi-symptom disease that is currently being researched at the OSU Center for Health Sciences. Morgellons Disease is frequently misdiagnosed as delusional parasitosis or obsessive picking disorder.
Theyâre not treating it like woo. Theyâre treating it like science. And for thousands of sufferers all over the world, this comes as a huge relief. Because theyâre accustomed to being laughed out of the door.
The Charles E Holman Foundation started an annual conference in Austin, Texas for Morgellons patients and researchers to gather and share their knowledge. Itâs mostly attended by women because 70% of Morgellons sufferers are female, and white. No-one knows why.
The organisation was started by Charles Holman, whose wife suffered from the disease. He died. She lived on and still runs the conference. Sheâs still pulling fibres out of her skin.
Photos from their events show them taking place in churches and school halls with makeshift tables and signs. It has the air of a pedigree cat show â people united by their passion for something extraordinary. Their motto last year was âSearching for the common threadâ. Someoneâs scribbled on the sign so it says âuncommonâ.
Theyâre not devoid of a sense of humor.
The author of The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison, ended up attending a conference. She experienced some of the paranoia around Morgellons first hand:
âDoubting Morgellons hasnât stopped me being afraid Iâll get it [...] Now that I am here, I wash my hands a lot. I am conscious of other peopleâs bodies. Then it starts happening: And I knew it would. After a shower, I notice small blue strands curled up like tiny worms across my clavicle.
Iâve got these fleeting moments of catching sight, catching panic. Itâs in these moments of fear that I come closest to experiencing Morgellons in the way its patients do: its symptoms physical and sinister, its tactics utterly invasive.â
I email the organiser to see what the plan is for next year. âThey are definitely planning a conference for next year, but we donât have any dates yet,â she tells me.
I make a note that Iâll check back in. I want to go. In the meantime I order a calendar from last yearâs event. Each month has a different image of Morgellons.
I browse the foundationâs website and find a forum called âThe Pets of Morgellonsâ. I spot a kitten, a dog and a bright orange parrot.
Itâs a lot to grasp where the science ends and the delusion begins.
Freaking Out
Morgellons has its celebrity backers. 71-year-old Canadian singer Joni Mitchell is plagued by threads bursting from her pores, as the Daily Mail pointed out:
âJoni Mitchellâs mystery ailment revealed: Morgellonâs Disease sufferers claim they feel parasites crawling and biting under their skin before colorful fibers grow from the sores â but experts say it is a mental illnessâ
That last bit of the headline is what really ruffles the feathers of Morgellons sufferers: âMental illness.â Itâs a refrain that keep coming up again and again. âThe matchbox signâ from earlier.
There are 12,000 people who claim to be suffering from Morgellons. Are they all a victim to the same mass delusion? Thatâs what most doctors say. Randy Wymore from Oklahoma State University would disagree.
As I look back at Andyâs photos, I wonder. Most sufferers seem to think theyâre pulling out biological material thatâs been growing inside them. Thatâs what makes Morgellons different to delusional parasitosis or delusory cleptoparsitosis. In those cases, people think outside bodies have gotten in: bugs, parasites and creepy crawlies.
The horror that Morgellons patients find themselves in is their own body turning against them. Itâs like finding an extra tooth that didnât used to be there, or some other kind of biological surprise.
The last thing Andy types to me is: âYou can guess it freaks me out, as it is my bodyâ.
Things bursting from his skin, and no-one can explain why. Fear seems like an incredibly sane reaction to me.
David Farrier, 2015.
Hi, me again â here in 2021.
I edited the story a little, as I wrote a little differently back in 2015 â and wanted to change some phrasing.
It did have me wanting to know how Andyâs doing these days. Iâve been back through my Facebook messages, and heâs deleted his account. I never got his email or phone number â he was too paranoid.
I hope heâs doing okay. I hope heâs found some peace.
I was actually reminded of this piece because of something that happened recently â back in June. The paranoia seen with Morgellons is sometimes compared to the phenomenon of âTargeted Individualsâ and âGang Stalkingâ â in which victims think they are being followed and monitored in some way.
While Morgellons has Joni Mitchell, âGang Stalkingâ has Modest Mouseâs Isaac Brock:
âI started doing all this videotaping, and found multiple people were following me. The same car, the same place.
Itâs been a year and a half since Iâve actually had solid gang stalking [âŠ]
At the point when I was writing, the physical gang-stalking had stopped, but it did feel like I was what is called a targeted individual. Itâs basically just a bunch of tinfoil hat shit, but time will tell.â
That interview was from June this year, and it got me thinking of poor Andy. Tinfoil hat shit. Time will tell.
Iâm curious what you make of all this. Have you had anyone in your life thatâs descended down this particular psychological rabbit hole? I canât help but draw comparisons to the illogical, conspiracy-fuelled world so many seem to occupy in 2021. Whatâs going on with our brains? Whatâs going on with the way we perceive reality?
David.
PS: Share this particular newsletter, if you like: itâs www.webworm.co/p/ontherun or â
I appreciate you getting the word out about Webworm!
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Hi,
I had my first surfing lesson this month. I wasnât very good.
It started off okay: I was pretty good at paddling, and smashing through some (tiny) waves to get out. I managed to keep by surf board straight, and I could up sit up and turn around pretty quickly. I could even paddle and catch a wave.
The problem was standing up. How in Godâs name are you meant to stand up? What, youâre meant to go from this wonderful lying down position to magically standing and balancing while a wave threatens to smash down around you?
In other news I had a great time and got a very chafed pink belly. It was some escapism from a month that seemed doomed. The Delta variant has been making its presence known. US hospitals are stretched. Nine Inch Nails cancelled all their shows that I was looking forward to seeing (wise), and New Zealand has gone into a nationwide lockdown (also wise).
And in the midst of this, the UNâs âIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Changeâ released a new report that felt like a swift punch to the face. Their reports are usually sobering reading, but this one was horrifying. A âcode red for humanityâ is how UN Secretary-General AntĂłnio Guterres put it.
The climate right now is warmer than it has been in about 125,000 years. And itâs just going to keep getting worse with more droughts, wildfires and floods. We arenât on target to stop something that now seems all but inevitable.
All this was running through my head as I walked to the beach, preparing to be pummelled on my board. The sun was unrelenting, and the literal cliff to my left was a fitting metaphor for humanityâs approach to the crisis we all face.
And the question running through all of our heads? âWhat the fuck can we do about it?â
When it comes to talk of the environment, many of us are trying to do out bit. We throw our recycling in the right bin, we use those re-usable bags at the supermarkets, and maybe we try and walk to the shops instead of drive.
All the things weâve being told will help save the planet. But weâre not making a lick of difference. Itâs futile, apart from making us feel good about ourselves. We are â as todayâs guest Joshua Drummond writes â being denied climate agency. Because weâre trapped in a system that makes it utterly impossible to make a difference.
Josh has written for Webworm before, about what QAnon has in common with Evangelical Christianity. That piece seems relevant again this week, as City Impact Church held a âspecial meetingâ for the pastor to spread anti-vaxx messaging in New Zealand.
But today, Josh writes about our total lack climate agency and how that makes us feel utterly unhinged. He also offers some ideas about what we can do. Itâs a great essay, and Iâm so glad to leave it with you for weekend reading. Or listening, in its podcast form.
David.
If you want more Webworm and to support the work I do here, you can become a monthly or yearly paying member. Only consider doing this if it doesnât cause you any financial hardship!
Imprisoned in a System That Wonât Let Us Act Sanely.
an essay by Joshua Drummond
I jumped off a cliff once. Everyone else was doing it.
It was at Northland waterfall, and I was about 17. The place was a popular swimming hole and there were quite a few spots my mates and I would jump off and do bombs, but thereâs one particular bit where â if you get enough of a run-up â you can clear the cliffside and plummet a height even greater than the falls.
My mates and I worked up to it. I didnât go first; Iâve never been great with heights, but I wanted to prove myself. Plus, I have an innate practical streak that wants to see if someone else is going to get impaled before I jump into murky water myself.
They jumped, they didnât die, it was my turn. I jumped too.
I didnât regret it immediately; that came about a tenth of a second in, when gravity grabbed my guts in an unclenching fist and squeezed and twisted and pulled down. It was a visceral lesson; the laws of physics are a pantheon of terrible gods. Theyâre the authority by which cause and effect abide, and they donât care about you.
Iâd fucked with the great god gravity, and this was the âfinding outâ phase.
This month started with a similar set of sensations. A lurch in my stomach, a sudden, dizzying rush of anxiety. The same sense of inevitability, of being at the mercy of a caused effect. I know the feeling well, now. I get it every time a new major climate change report is released.
The IPCC has just released their Sixth Assessment Report, which draws a conclusion that will leave few surprised; climate change is real, itâs happening now, itâs getting worse, and it will get much worse if itâs not stopped.
Importantly, the report takes pains to underscore the fact that there is much we can and should do to stop warming, but that ray of hope is not what brings the feeling of falling off a cliff, the sensation as inevitability sets in and gravity grabs at your guts, pulling and twisting.
The problem isnât the fall: itâs that weâre currently doing very little to break it.
Itâs as if (to work the cliff-jump metaphor some more) weâre in free fall and the poolâs dry, but if weâre really quick we can fill it so the fall wonât kill us or even hurt too much â but the controls for the emergency sluice-gates are kept by a very small and very rich group of people who are all saying ânah, saving you would cost us too much. Weâre opting for splat.â
We know exactly whatâs wrong with the climate: thereâs an excess of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and itâs causing the planet to heat up. Weâre clear on the cause: human activity has done nearly all of it.
We know the solution: swap out carbon-emitting technology, and work to draw down the excess carbon weâve emitted.
So, with the problems and solutions clear for decades, whatâs being done by the engines of the economy, the leaders, and the gatekeepers: business and the government? Not nearly enough.
This isnât a sane response to an emergency. Itâs inhuman. Humans are, for the most part, practical and altruistic. We are brilliant, astonishing creatures. We might be bound by gravity, but we can still fly. The essence of humanity is bound up in working together to solve problems.
Thatâs what makes climate change so maddening. When I say to myself, as any sane person would, âwhat are we doing?â and âhow can I help?â the answers keep coming back, ânot enoughâ and âyou canât.â Thatâs not how humans work. Being shown a problem and not being able to fix it drives us mad.
Anyone who understands the reality of climate change â of the necessity of action â is burning to act. Everyone wants to help, to work, to do. But weâre imprisoned in a system that wonât let us act sanely. We are being denied climate agency.
Weâre stuck in a system we didnât opt for, a system built for us without due care by those that benefit from pillaging the future, a system that we are frequently told is âtoo expensiveâ to change. In the media, articles about climate change mitigation measures frequently come â absurdly â with a cost-benefit analysis. âNot contributing to cooking an entire planetâ is seldom listed as a benefit.
Often, taking the individual actions we are told will help ease the crisis is too expensive. Unless youâre rich, in the global scheme of things â you canât afford an EV. Unless youâre wealthy, in terms of either time or money, you canât afford to go waste-free, or turn your backyard into a garden, or even buy food thatâs free of exploitative farming practices. Ethical behaviour has been monetised: if you want a clear conscience, youâll have to pay for it. Even the term âcarbon footprint,â now ubiquitous and synonymous with taking individual action on climate change, is compromised: it was created and propagated by (wait for it) BP, in one of the most cynical (and effective) marketing campaigns of all time.
Unable even to take the drop-in-a-bucket actions that might soothe our consciences â if not actually make a meaningful contribution â the vast majority of us have to live madly, amongst madness. To drive madness, to eat and drink madness.
Many simple acts of daily life are poisoned with guilt over the knowledge that not only are you not helping, you are making things worse. An omnipresent, invisible chorus of judgement screams at you for decisions you canât help making, because our systems donât allow any other choice.
Driving? Guilty! Eating meat? Guilty! Got milk? Guilty! Got plant milk in a plastic bottle? Guilty! No wonder people embrace climate change denial, clutching it like a lifesaver. Theyâre just trying to stay sane.
In a sane world, weâd be pivoting hard â or have pivoted long ago â having never debated whether having a liveable biosphere is good for business. Government and business alike would have switched priorities, poured their all into doing the needful. There would be jobs, endless jobs, available to do work that matters.
But itâs not a sane system, and there are few such jobs available. Searching on a hellsite like LinkedIn for âclimate changeâ or âsustainabilityâ is an exercise in futility. Many of the jobs available are in niche positions, or start-ups, or donât pay well enough for someone without independent means to take them.
Tellingly, many climate jobs are at insurance companies â insurance being one of the few sectors that does not have the luxury of choosing not to include climate change in its business model. What weâve ended up with is a crisis everyone knows about but is powerless to work on fixing, because itâs hard to make rent or pay the mortgage with jobs that should exist but donât. And the great Invisible Hand of the market isnât interested in helping out, because saving the world for future generations doesnât pay now. The Hand would rather sell stuff. Everyone loves stuff.
Absent of the ability to live sanely and purposefully in a world thatâs on fire, many of us privileged enough to live out of the danger zones live muted, blunted lives.
Videogames are a welcome retreat, an opportunity to save the world, albeit a virtual one. Even doomscrolling is a balm on the open sore of âwhat can we do?â It feels like taking action. But itâs not.
This forced nihilism poisons living. Faced with making choices about the future, a lot of my peers throw up their hands. Whatâs the point in trying to own a house when the housing marketâs been cornered and whipped into a frenzy and the government has just kind of given up on doing anything meaningful about it? Why have kids, when theyâll likely have difficult, impoverished lives? Why risk saving for a future when the financial markets are rigged casinos and you can watch your future disappearing, live-streaming, one climate-change-fuelled fire/flood/storm/heatwave at a time?
Looking around, itâs hard to avoid the conclusion that the future is being stolen from us. Governments and businesses should be creating ways to create good futures, to live within planetary boundaries, to live sanely. But we have been deliberately, systematically conned: by fossil-fuel and fossil-fuelled businesses who have worked tirelessly to promote the status quo and remove barriers to reaping the planet for endless profit, and by governments who have eagerly acquiesced to their demands in order to promote the fairy-tale of endless economic growth.
There are a few hundred companies responsible for the majority of climate change, aided and abetted by either actively denialist or intactivist governments. The people who did this knew exactly what the effects would be, and they did it anyway.
Stop feeling guilty. They did this. It is their fault. Not yours. Theirs. The actions of fossil fuel companies and their enablers have murdered tens of thousands of people in the present and hundreds of thousands â perhaps millions, perhaps many more â in the future; those not yet born will bear the brunt. So will those just born, like my baby boy.
And this is just the human cost; the cost to the rest of nature is literally incalculable. But itâs easy to list some of the impacts. Under business-as-usual, millions of species face endangerment or extinction. Coral reefs will die. Forests will burn and become savannah. Sea level rise will inundate cities and shorelines.
Maybe this one will hit home for you, because it does for me: in the business-as-usual future, climate change will kill the beaches.
âAlmost half of the worldâs sandy beaches will have retreated significantly by the end of the century as a result of climate-driven coastal flooding and human interference, according to new research,â writes The Guardian.
Usually, when humanity faces murder and destruction on this sort of scale, we react in disgust and fury. Tribunals are formed and justice is meted out. And yet, nothing. It seems we simply donât have laws for those that kill with commerce. When will the climate criminals and their enablers, their paid shills and useful idiots, face justice? Will they ever?
Like many, I am angry about this â very angry â but itâs hard to know what to do with this fury. It runs too deep, like a hidden current in a river. Occasionally, it rises, and itâs terrible to see. To feel.
And being angry, like being earnest, is not cool. Itâs not done. The correct attitude is a sort of supercilious, post-ironic detachment, an âoh well, weâre all fucked, so letâs just enjoy the ride, lmao.â
Iâm tired of even trying to be cool about all this. The effort it takes to sustain protective detachment isnât worth it. I am desperate to channel my fury at a stolen, broken world into something useful, something that helps, something that isnât shouting at the wind, or just being testy on Twitter.
And I worry that, deprived of justice, the collective anger and dispossession of millions will spill over into something vengeful and terrible. A quote from one of those goofy Marvel films comes to mind: âIf we can't protect the earth, you can be damn sure we'll avenge it.â Such great escapism, to watch the world being saved by powerful people who, in a marked break with reality, actually do the right thing. You can see why the films make so much money for one of the largest corporations on the planet.
I donât want violence. Most people donât, or thereâd be a lot more dead fossil fuel executives. But Iâm not prepared to watch business-as-usual turn our only home into hell. Because there is still time â to blunt climate changeâs worst impacts, to save what can be saved, to make a better world. Denied agency, activism is the last sane position left.
Leading climate scientist Michael Mann writes about the futility of âdoomismâ in his book, The New Climate War. He warns that the supercilious âweâre all fucked, who caresâ attitude plays directly into the hands of warmist interests, those who are desperate for business-as-usual to continue so they can make and keep their billions.
âThis is the greatest threat and greatest challenge weâve ever faced as a civilization,â Mann says. âIf youâre not out there fighting for climate action, youâre giving up on the human race.â
To disrupt business-as-usual, climate scientist and activist Peter Kalmus says âwe need a billion climate activists.â And the work of activism begins with imagining a better world. Itâs not even that hard; others have already done this work, and there are many good futures to choose from.
Some of it is table stakes. Commonsense, good ideas. Cities would be made walkable, accessible to active transport. Public transport would be fast and free, and special accommodation would be made for those less able. Electricity would be generated renewably â weâve got plenty of wind, ocean, and sunshine. Distributed grids and batteries would create resilient infrastructure. Farming would be made much more sustainable, becoming a carbon sink instead of a net polluter.
My own personal good future has some specifics. In the near term â ideally today â the media would pledge not to run climate change denial in either news or opinion, and would refuse to take advertising or sponsorship money from fossil fuel interests. Theyâd abandon the senseless culture war theyâre encouraging for clicks, stirring up audiences against fundamentally benign concepts like cycleways. Theyâd treat climate change as the epoch-defining issue it is, and cover it widely and fairly, instead of sporadically and half-heartedly.
Theyâd stop platforming politicians and other people that lie and prevaricate about the climate crisis.
The media also need to stop stirring up fear about how much this stuff costs, because the cost of not doing it is almost too much to comprehend: one estimate puts global GDP losses at $610 trillion in cumulative damages to 2100, the equivalent of at least one Covid-sized economic shock per year.
This stupendous figure doubles once you factor in sea-level rise. Instead of asking âhow much will this cost?â we need to ask âhow much work will this be?â
To paraphrase Kim Stanley Robinson in his cli-fi book The Ministry For The Future: Money isnât real. Work is real. People are real. Governments need to assess what needs to be done in terms of climate change mitigation, and then just pay people to do it. Sure, itâs hard work, but when work is meaningful, people actually want to do it.
But thereâs no need to dispense with the collective fiction of money as long as we can make it work for all of us, instead of a vanishingly small minority of fixers and gate-keepers. For instance, we can take the money back from the fossil fuel companies whoâve stolen it from our future. We can set a hard limit on wealth, so the value of everything the world does can stop being hoarded by 0.1 percent of the population. The billionaire-stans may screech, but itâs the best form of justice fossil-fuel executives and their shills can hope for.
And I can hear the economists stirring already, so letâs upset them some more. We need to stop treating free-market, orthodox economics like itâs the immutable law of nature. In fact, by ignoring the biosphere, by treating the environment as just an externality, orthodox economics has done more damage than perhaps any other ideology.
A new economics is needed, and a new popular understanding. One that doesnât treat economics like itâs a capricious god beyond human control. âThe economyâ is just a representation of humans at work, economists are fundamentally useless at predicting the future, and itâs time we stopped pretending they can.
Physics, on the other hand, can predict the future. We know whatâs coming, but we can do something about it. Jumping off the climate cliff wasnât a good idea, but we can still break the fall.
âThere is no simple formula, no fact sheet or checklist, for figuring out our roles in the vital work to forge a just, liveable future,â says All We Can Save author Dr Katharine Wilkinson. âBut I have found a series of reflections can help us arrive at some clarity and uncover ways to be of use.â
When it comes to reflections, I like this one very much:
So: Stop worrying and speak up. Talk about climate change with everyone you can. Join the school climate strikes. Join the general strikes that are coming. Be an activist. Organize. Become unignorable. Itâs the only thing that will force the powers that be into action, that will help break the dissonance of living the way we do now, and allow us to live sanely.
Words and illustrations by Joshua Drummond, August 2021.
If you want to listen to this essay, check Spotify or Apple podcasts â itâll pop up there soon. And if you havenât already, sign up for Webworm so that any new podcast episodes get delivered direct to your inbox before they appear anywhere else.
David here again.
Maybe technically I was wrong: as individuals, we can do something. Something bigger than emptying the recycling bin. We can come together, and we can speak up. We can force those giant entities to create change. We can apply pressure.
I donât know what that looks like, exactly. I am not an activist. I write this newsletter to you. I feel utterly useless looking over the cliff. I feel utterly trapped in this catastrophe, forced to do things I know are wrong to kill an environment I know is wrecked. I drive a car, I drink from plastic bottles.
Itâs impossibly hard for people to look beyond their own timeline: their own 85 years or so. But we have the data, we have the science, and something has to give. It has to.
Iâm throwing this back over to Josh again. He has some thoughts on what to do.
What can we do? Some more thoughts from Josh
Iâm aware I still havenât entirely addressed the âhowâ of all this, and for that, Iâll point to others who can probably answer better than I can.
If we want to play a useful role in this crisis, we should find out where our existing skills are applicable. As a writer, one of the areas I feel less uncomfortable talking about is the news media, and Iâm pretty bloody angry at still seeing climate change denial being given a consistent platform in our media with the excuse of âbut itâs just opinion!â
The first thing Iâm personally keen to do is see if with a bit of collective action we can have the news media (starting with New Zealand, and hopefully elsewhere) adopt a climate change reporting pledge, in which theyâd promise not to air or print climate change denial, or give climate change deniers and fossil fuel lobbyists a platform.
Perhaps weâd even see an admission of responsibility or an apology about the mediaâs hefty role about promulgating climate change information to date.
I donât pitch this idea with high hopes of all New Zealand media happily signing on, but I think even choosing not to take a pledge would be telling.
To those thatâd start banging on about freedom of speech, Iâd say: âNo.â This is about the media choosing to act ethically and responsibly, not about governments choosing what you can and canât say. Most media donât give a lot of space to praising fascism anymore, and itâs time the lying liars of climate change denial got the same treatment. Letâs see what we can do about it.
Iâm particularly keen to hear from climate activists, climate scientists, and media people. I would love to get media peopleâs true feelings on what itâs like to see their publications, editors and owners continually giving climate change denial a platform. I'm happy to keep correspondence anonymous or off-the-record where necessary.
Hit me up at [email protected] if you want to talk, or letâs have a yarn in the comments below.
David here again. What a ping pong match this newsletter has been!
I find Josh pretty incredible in the various creative ways he finds to help. During Australiaâs raging bushfires, he painted a kookaburra to raise money in the firefighting efforts.
I think Josh is bang on about the mediaâs role in platforming misinformation (and sometimes blatant disinformation) about the climate crisis.
In New Zealand, climate change denier Peter Williams has been given a platform by Mediaworks (the same company caught up in allegations of sexual harassment, racism and bullying from its top dogs) to, well, spread his bullshit. I wonât link to it, but he wrote this in June about the last climate change report:
Peter Williams: Why you should be sceptical about the Climate Change Commission Report
OPINION: So now we know what the Climate Change Commission is recommending what the government does to stop the planet warming. It is gross interference in the way we are expected to live our lives, the way we will travel around, the way we will keep ourselves warm and the way we will earn our living as an exporter of food.
To me â this kind of rhetoric is just so fucking dumb. Our future generations are literally destined to doom. This has to stop.
Sound off in the comment below. Letâs talk this out. I hope you enjoyed Joshâs essay â I loved it and glad heâs here. If you listened to it instead on the podcast, I hope my droning voice didnât put you to sleep.
Talk below. Try and have a safe weekend.
David.
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.webworm.co/subscribe -
Hi,
Iâve decided to launch a Webworm podcast, and I wanted you to be the first to know about it.
God, how many times that phrase been uttered: âIâve decided to launch a podcast.â Good Lord.
Okay â so let me explain the âEpisode 5â thing.
When Webworm started, I experimented with four podcast episodes last year. Iâll list those at the end, as theyâre all available along with todayâs episode.
But as of today I formally, officially and excitedly launch the audio component to Webworm! Iâm going to use it to complement the written content here when it feels appropriate. When it feels exciting. When it feels â not to get too pretentious â worthy.
And so I did a long read of Jez Brownâs heartfelt, horrifying and somehow hilarious essay on having Long Covid. I wanted to see how it would be in audio form. I want Jezâs story to have fresh legs, so people can listen in their cars or while they clean the house. Itâs an experiment, and I want to see how you feel about it.
You can listen to this episode in this email â itâs embedded in this newsletter â or you should be able to find it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Iâve been enjoying Armchaired and Dangerous so much with Dax and Monica (see below for details of our upcoming live show), so I figure Webworm can have a little podcast life, too.
As a subscriber you will always get it in your inbox first.
An extra thanks to paying subscribers (seriously, dear God, thank you!) who give me the resources and time to build this thing.
Iâd love to take your feedback in the comments below. Webworm will always be a written thing â I want you to be able to read it on your phone while youâre in bed or on the bus or at the beach â but I figure audio will be fun to play with. Some stories and interviews may even work better in audio form.
Here are the previous episodes from last year:
Episode #1: a week of conspiratorial madnessEpisode #2: The Sloppy Nonsense of conspiracy theoriesEpisode #3: âMake up something fucking new, so that I can actually give a shit!âEpisode #4: I love The Boys because it features a psychopath with strong hints of Trump
So welcome to the Webworm podcast. Big thanks to Aaron Short for doing the theme music. Youâre great and your love of dogs is eternal and awesome.
Armchaired and Dangerous: Live
While weâre talking podcasts â weâre doing a live Armchaired and Dangerous in Salt Lake City on Thursday September 16th.
Tickets go on sale tomorrow. Youâll be able to get them here.
Dax, Monica and I will see you then, Utah!
And if youâre in LA on Sunday August 22nd, Iâll be making a brief appearance on stage with Chuck Tingle at his show. You can find details here. Itâs sort of a secret that I am popping up, but I am telling you because I want to. If youâre in LA come say hi! Keep it a secret, okay!
An update on Dr Dan - and some some reader feedback
Earlier this week I wrote about Dr Dan, a medical professional who since January has been talking a lot about hydrogen peroxide, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as potential Covid treatments on his Facebook and Instagram pages.
He also looked nearly identical to Jason Schwartzman which is kinda cool.
After that piece â his Facebook account already disabled â he shut down his Instagram account as well:
As I mentioned in my piece, I wrote to the New Zealand Medical Council enquiring about the statements and studies heâd posted on his social media.
They sent back this comment, attributed to Dr Curtis Walker, Chair, Medical Council of New Zealand:
Council takes it very seriously when it becomes aware of any doctor who spreads medical misinformation, which includes anti-vaccination messages. Council notes that the information is no longer publicly available on Dr Quistorffâs social media platforms.
The Medical Council recognises that the expert medical advice and scientific evidence strongly support that the COVID-19 vaccination is safe, effective, and necessary to overcome the global pandemic.
Our role is to protect public safety and for that reason we have released a joint statement alongside the Dental and Paramedic Councils expectations of doctors, dentists and paramedics. As regulators we respect an individualâs right to have their own opinions, but it is our view that there is no place for anti-vaccination messages in professional health practice, nor any promotion of anti-vaccination claims including on social media and advertising by health practitioners: Expectations for COVID-19 vaccination released for doctors and dentists.
Iâd note that at no time did I observe this doctor spreading specific anti-vaccination messages. For all I know, heâs very pro-vaxx in personâ and some of his patients wrote to me telling me as much. I choose to trust them.
I would note however that talking at length about alternate Covid treatments on social media can act as muddying the water in regards to the very clear message to âget vaccinatedâ.
In simply sharing âfresh researchâ (thatâs a favourable take) of alternative Covid treatments willy nilly, Dr Dan may well have been unwittingly aiding the anti-vaxx movement:
And reading comments online about my piece, you can sort of see the ripple effect Dr Danâs posts can have:
Iâd argue âlooking outside the square of vaccinesâ isnât a great train of thought during a pandemic, when we are trying to get people vaccinated. The square is a very good place to be.
Insults kept flying in on my social media. Some of my favourites:
This âexposeâ is a cheap shot smear piecePerhaps you should stick to actingWhat are your credentials in investigative reporting anyway?
With that in mind, Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz has just written a really great piece summing up the issues with ivermectin. Gideonâs an epidemiologist working in chronic disease in Sydney, Australia â and he talks about ivermectin at length on his Twitter.
Ivermectin was the latest alternate Covid treatment Dr Dan was posting about, before he took his accounts offline. After I mentioned it in my newsletter, and on social media, I got plenty of comments endlessly going on about how itâs a valid treatment and to leave the poor doctor alone.
Which is why I wanted to share Gideonâs piece:
Ivermectin for Covid-19 â An Update
Ivermectin is a horse dewormer and anti-parasitic medication that has been promoted across the world for the treatment of Covid-19. It has been in the news a lot recently, because a large portion of the evidence-base for the drug appears to have been based on fraudulent research, which as scientific rigor goes is usually considered to be a bit of an issue.
But weâve held out hope that the drug works for Covid-19, because despite the foundations of the research being cracked, there were still a number of positive trials and some of them were really well-done. Yes, fraud is bad, but we canât throw the baby out with the bathwater just because one study may never have happened at all.
Until today. The results from a very large new study were just released, showing absolutely no benefit for ivermectin when compared to a placebo pill. It now seems depressingly likely that ivermectin is probably not useful for treating Covid-19.
You can read his whole piece here, but basically:
This trial has already demonstrated that hydroxychloroquine and lopinavir/ritonavir are unlikely to be beneficial treatments for people with Covid-19 in outpatient settings, and because of the hype around ivermectin had included the drug in a treatment arm to see if it worked. The results from this part of the trial, including over 1,300 patients, were released in summary form late this afternoon.
They showed no benefit for ivermectin in the treatment of Covid-19.
None whatsoever.
Itâs a bit like when Dr Dan posted about hydroxychloroquine in June. Despite clinical trials confirming hydroxychloroquine didnât prevent illness or death from Covid 19 â his post remained up. As did his posts about hydrogen peroxide and ivermectin.
Until he took all his accounts offline this week after my piece.
And that, in my opinion, is a good thing. Because people trust doctors, and some of those visiting his page would trust the (not defunct) information heâd posted.
Some reader feedback:
Thanks to all of you for reading the piece, and thanks for the doctor and medical student who also got in touch.
They agreed to let me publish their emails as long as I didnât identify them. For that reason, Iâve changed their names.
E-mail #1: Dr. âSarahâ
âI am a doctor. I just started my specialist training in palliative care, but up until now have spent a lot of time rotating around various medical specialties in the hospital.
Reading your newsletter made me say âoh no no no no no noâ. The ivermectin thing has been bizarre. I suggest you look into Brett Weinstein â a smart but flawed guy who is using a big podcast platform to promote very inaccurate and skewed statistics around the same topic. He is very vaccine hesitant.
I just want to say after listening to the Armchaired and Dangerous episode about medicine and reading this, that I feel a bit sad about your distrust of our profession.
I can understand it though â your experiences have been bizarre.
But just know that the Dr Dans are such a small proportion of us. Actually there are so many thousands or millions of us just constantly trying to make an assessment of recent data and interpret its value while balancing it against the patientsâ expectations, and everyone I know in this job is just motivated to help people.
This guy is definitely misrepresenting his profession, but being an âIntegrative and Functional Medicine Specialistâ is already a red flag.
Itâs worth also noting that everyone I know who is a doctor is anxiety-ridden.
Ultimately, we are just a bunch of humans so we get things wrong a lot, and sometimes when I donât think things through properly or carefully enough, my patients can have bad things happen to them or can die. Thatâs an insane amount of pressure. But everyone Iâve met has just been a good person trying their best to get their patients to feel better while the healthcare system falls apart around us.
Absolutely love your work. For whatever reason just felt compelled today to add my thoughts. It would be great if this guy could face some consequences of his idiotic views.â
âItâs worth also noting that everyone I know who is a doctor is anxiety-ridden.â
E-mail #2: Medical student âAdamâ
âIâm a medical student and over the past few years Iâve been placed in various medical specialities to learn about them. Unfortunately, Iâm not surprised to learn about Dr Dan because there are lots of Dr Dans around.
Most of them are just arenât on social media.
On one of my placements I had two separate doctors tell me and the other students that we should take ivermectin instead of getting the vaccine. One of them would regularly bring alternative articles/guidelines into the hospital to try and convince us.
He actually had one of the other students really worried about the vaccine for a while, but once she learned more she did get the jab.
I was also warned off getting the vaccine by both a surgeon and an oncologist. Both for alternative conspiracy type reasons.
The number of conspiracy believing, anti-vaxx doctors is pretty scary. If the average member of the public was warned by multiple doctors not to get vaccinated I donât think they would. And these were just the ones bold enough to push their views on the med students.
To be clear â Iâve met a huge number of doctors and these ones are still a small minority among them. But enough that itâs concerning.
It just goes to show that doctors arenât immune to misinformation. We have the same mental circuitry as everyone else and we fall prey to the same tricks and mental traps.
That said â I never heard any of them express these views to their patients, itâs just been talk among the other medical professionals and students. The fact that Dr Dan is publicly putting all of this out there on social media makes it a different situation.
Heâs not only influencing the people around him, but also anyone who stumbles across his instagram.â
âIt just goes to show that doctors arenât immune to misinformation. We have the same mental circuitry as everyone else and we fall prey to the same tricks and mental traps.â
Okay, David here again.
I really appreciated hearing from those two â and hearing from all of you, too. A lot of you came forward with other stories and tips about this story, and others.
Please know I have them all on file and hope to follow them up. You can always reach me in the comments, or if itâs something more confidential you can get me at [email protected]. You can contact me there with any information you have about any story, for that matter.
A bunch of non-Webworm readers also found my social media and wrote to tell me off for âcancellingâ a doctor. To those people: I havenât cancelled a doctor. A doctor very publicly posted a bunch of stuff, and I wrote some context around that stuff.
Iâm okay with that.
And with all that in mind â let me know what you think of the podcast and what sorts of things youâd like to hear in the comments below. Iâll most likely just chase my gut, but Iâd really like your input.
Yours,
David.
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.webworm.co/subscribe -
These are the words of Joseph Uscinski, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami.
I spoke to Joe for Webworm, and our conversation made me wonder if things arenât quite as fucked up as they seem.
So I guess todayâs newsletter is⊠hopeful, somehow?
Joe Uscinski wrote American Conspiracy Theories (an excellent book) and as you probably gathered from the title, heâs very passionate about conspiracy theories.
Heâs a member of the University of Miami U-LINK team, which combats online extremist conspiracy theories, and also does a fuckload of survey work for the likes of the Pew Research Centre.
In short, he really has his finger on the pulse about what Americans believe.
And as debate raged about the possible identity of Q this week, I wanted to talk to Joe about how widespread the believe in QAnon actually is, and how worried we should be.
I wanted to know the scale of the problem.
I really like Joe. Heâs well educated and opinionated â and heâs also a great speaker. Right now, heâs in hot demand. I accidentally Skyped him on the wrong day, and he sounded upbeat but also kinda exhausted. Heâd just done six American press interviews in a row, most of them about QAnon.
When I reconnected, I really loved our conversation. I think my kiwi accent threw him a little, and there were a lot of laughs as we talked. The podcast version of this newsletter is really fun. He swears quite a bit.
In short â we kinda disagree on some things â but I knew we would.
He thinks the problem of people disappearing down conspiratorial rabbit holes is no worse than itâs ever been.
That itâs exactly the same.
Joe told me social media isnât to blame. I struggle with this, but heâs smart and I wanted to hear him out.
We also agreed on a lot of things, including the bit where he yelled at me:
âThis is a plea to the conspiracy theorists - make up something fucking new, so that I can actually give a shit at this point! Because it is so boring, oh my God!â
I found this conversation fascinating, and at times confronting. I hope you enjoy it.
Like all the content here on Webworm, this edition is possible thanks to subscribers. They fund the work here, and also get access to bonus newsletters and podcasts. If it doesnât cause you financial hardship, you can sign up here to stay across future episodes:
You can consume our conversation in two ways: a podcast you can listen to (above), or a written version you can read (below).
Take your pick.
David.
Joe - you are a polls expert. Take it away!
Just to give you a rundown of the polls in this country, I will tell you the brief history of why I started polling QAnon, because it wasnât even something I was paying attention to in mid-2018.
It got brought to my attention, largely from a little bit of online harassment that I got from these Q people! They went through all my pictures on Twitter and decided to make a collage suggesting I was a satanic sex trafficker.
It was the dumbest pictures they picked â and of course they found one of me wearing red socks, and the red socks mean you are a sex trafficker, or eat babies, or something like that.
At that point I thought, âOK, letâs see whatâs happening here.â
And what happened very quickly in late July of 2018 was that some people wore QAnon tee shirts to a Trump rally in Tampa, Florida â my home state.
And because of that, QAnon got a tonne of media coverage, in all the major newspapers. So I decided I was going to run a poll in Florida. And I thought âwhy donât I throw QAnon on here, and just see what happens?â
And a lot of people didnât know what it was, and it was not rated very highly.
So we said âhow would you rate the QAnon movement on a scale from zero to 100, where 100 is âyou really like itâ and zero is âyou really hate it.â
It came out with about an average of 22. And to put that in perspective, it was about a point higher than where Floridians rated Fidel Castro! And if you know anything about Florida, itâs that we donât like Castro here! So it was not liked.
But what was even more telling was that the average rating from Democrats and from Republicans were not different. So they both disliked it about equally.
And what predicted belief in QAnon was not being Republican or Conservative, but just having a conspiratorial world view. So this idea that QAnon is a far right conspiracy theory does just not hold water at all.
There is nothing conservative about it, except for positing Trump as a hero â but he is not a hero because he is Republican, but because he is an outsider.
I have repeated this poll in Florida just in June, and several other polls nationwide, and have found no growth [in QAnon belief] whatsoever.
So most people donât know what this is, the vast majority of people donât like it, and itâs not gaining in popularity.
However the headlines in all the newspapers are the exact opposite. They say âit is huge and getting bigger, itâs gone mainstream, itâs taking over American life, itâs far rightâŠâ
Of course, they never tell you what that means.
I mean I am reading a piece in the New York Times right now, and the headline says âThe republican embrace of QAnon goes far beyond Trumpâ, thatâs the kind of headline we see everywhere.
But it really doesnât.
I mean maybe it goes a little bit beyond Trump, but it doesnât go far beyond Trump.
So what is happening here? Are we seeing a huge disconnect between the reporting and the perception of what your polling numbers are actually saying?
Well the data is out there, I published my initial poll in the Washington Post, I followed up with my polls in the Washington Post, the Emerson poll is out there for anyone to see, the Pew poll is out there â and that made headlines!
So there is no excuse at this point for journalists to get this wrong. So they are doing it purposefully.
And I think some of them are starting to see, and to change their language, just enough to get away with the crap: âOh, well, there are millions of QAnon accounts - and thatâs growingâŠâ
Right? And if you are not reading carefully⊠accounts arenât people. Accounts are accounts, who knows if they are sincere, or real people, or if one person has 1000 accounts.
So some of this is, frankly, dishonest at this point. I would have forgiven them before, but they should know better.
And I donât want to speculate on peopleâs motives â it may be that they are chasing clicks, by inciting this moral panic. It could be that the mainstream news legacy outlets have it in for social media, and are more than happy to attack them saying they are turning everyone into a nutcase, when in fact they are not.
It could be that there is some political bias here, maybe it is easy for them to say âRepublicans are a bunch of QAnon nutcasesâ and then ignore stuff like ANTIFA and stuff like that.
I think there is this thing at the moment where people are coming across the idea of a conspiracy theory for the first time, and they are panicking about it. I feel that in America, itâs been a part of its culture to have this way of thinking about things! That what you are told is not necessarily the truth. I mean, right back to the foundations of the country, itâs always been there. It just feels like perhaps there is this knee-jerk reaction to what we are seeing now.
I mean itâs true itâs always been there, but itâs also a media myth that the US is exceptional in this way. I would say Americans are exceptional in many ways, but conspiracy theories is just not one of them!
Polling, when you do it across countries⊠we are middling, at best.
If you read the news headlines, whenever a major newspaper will talk about conspiracy theories in whatever country, itâs always the people of that country who are the most conspiratorial!
All these claims are based on nothing, itâs all baloney.
And also when you read about âwhen is the time of conspiracy theories?â - journalists say itâs always ânow, now. Now is the time.â And you can find headlines almost every year saying âthis is the golden age, this is the time!â
But it canât always be true.
I am just observing from New Zealand, but say we focus on COVID, there seems to be a lot of disinformation and misinformation that is fuelled by social media sending you along on an algorithm. Look at something like Plandemic, that documentary that was shared around so widely: how do you feel about the positioning of something like that as being âoh holy shit everyone is doing down the rabbit holeâ â do you think that has been blown out of proportion?
Yes. Absolutely. This is the funny thing, having been polling on COVID conspiracy theories. I ran a poll in March, and another in June, and Plandemic placed in the middle of that, and was shared supposedly millions of times.
Yet â no difference in the conspiracy beliefs.
No difference.
And so itâs like we known a lot about how media affects people. We have been studying this for a very long time. For hundreds of years. And we have strong theories to explain this, and we have decided to throw this all out and just decide that everyone is a lemming, when it comes to internet conspiracy theories.
It is not the case that conspiracy theorising has gone up at all. It is not clear that conspiracy theorising has gone up due to social media. We may find in effect we may have people who already have strong conspiratorial world-views and they are going to search out what they want to find anyway.
And they are writing about it on their Facebooks wallsâŠ
Yeah. So the view is already there, right? Even when we look at polls of specific conspiracy theories over time, it is not the case that pre and post internet more people are believing conspiracy theories.
There may be less.
Essentially what you are saying is that during a pandemic, people that are already predisposed â
Well not even during a pandemic! Just put the pandemic aside for now, just in the age of the internet people will find what they are looking for.
And when this pandemic first started, I was thinking to myself âif I were to take people into a lab and to turn them into conspiracy theorists, and jack every input up to 11⊠the pandemic would be it!â
The economic uncertainty, the fear that comes from disease, an election, all sorts of stuff going on, social media, political elites engaging in conspiracy theories â everything is jacked up to 11.
And I havenât really seen any major increase! I mean, there could be one and I just havenât found it yet, but I am just not finding this!
What it tells me is just more evidence of what I have been seeing for a long time, is that this is largely a stable phenomenon.
COVID conspiracy theories are new, but only because COVID is new.
And if you remove âBill Gatesâ from the conspiracy theories about him, you go back in time and just plug in âSorosâ, âRockefellersâ, âRothschildsâ, âFreemasonsâ, whatever you want!
So you know, this is a plea to the conspiracy theorists: make up something fucking new, so that I can actually give a shit at this point!
Because it is so boring, oh my God.
Itâs like âSoros all over again, are we still having this conversation?!â
Yeah â Soros, or some rich person trying to take over the world and they are going to put chips in our neck⊠Iâve fucking heard it, dude.
So look, we have this celebrity chef over in this part of the world â Chef Pete Evans â and he went and started with lots of posts about food, and over the last three months his Instagram is now your classic conspiratorial mess, with a lot of memes and crazy photoshopped images. If everyone has this baseline in the world of being susceptible to conspiracy theories, it does feel to me amplified by peopleâs presence on social media, and people seem to be going down that rabbit hole a lot easier.
Itâs hard to know. And this is the thing: I think what we are doing a lot is confusing our ability to see and measure something, with the idea that that something is happening more often.
And confusing anecdotes with data.
And so youâd go back 30 years and there would be no social media, so you could not track peopleâs conversations. So you could not see what people were saying next to the water-cooler. But now you can.
There is this view like âhow did people talk before Twitter?â and itâs like âthey fucking talked!â
Rumours were going around long before social media, believe it or not.
Only a few months after the Kennedy assassination, 50% of Americans believed it was a conspiracy. By the mid 70s it was 80%. Itâs only come down 35 points during the internet era.
So itâs sort of strange to say âthey can travel further and faster than ever beforeâ when technically, yes, in that I can put things online and they can be accessed in Thailand right now â but it doesnât mean that anyone is accessing it and caring about it, or adopting it as a belief.
Do you think the fact somebody who has an idea that is a bit out there â say, âCOVID isnât realâ â that before, they would say that to their friends around the water-cooler and be shot down straight away, whereas now there can jump on Facebook and have access to a lot of other people who will back them up?
No, I think itâs the exact opposite!
Okay, talk me through this. This is interesting.
I read tonnes of articles all the time that are like âhow do I talk to friends who believe in conspiracy theoriesâ as if no-one knows how to do this.
So the assumption of your question is that everyone was always shooting down peopleâs conspiracy theories, and no-one does that on social media.
I mean it gets done on social media quite a bit. And it may be the case that social media is less hospitable to conspiracy theories than other forms of communication.
Just to bring up the mainstream media, it kills me they blame social media for this. Because they are some of the biggest players.
It also kills me that political elites start mounting a campaign against Facebook and Twitter, saying these spread conspiracy theories. Itâs like âno, itâs the politicians who spread conspiracy theories!â They have the bigger bully puppet! I mean why does everyone think COVIDâs exaggerated? âGee, I dunno, maybe itâs because the president said it was?â
Maybe because radio personalities with massive syndicated audiences said it was?
Maybe because Fox news keeps saying it?
I was reading stories from the Washington Post about QAnon, meanwhile the other side of their mouth they are publishing all this UFO nonsense!
We all love a good Area 51 story! Look, there is no doubt a Facebook algorithm will push you down further down into a direction you are already looking in, like if I am watching a lot of Alex Jones, I will get pushed further into that zone.
But youâre already there! No-one is going to Alex Jones unless they are already there.
Well, say something softer â you are watching a Jordan Peterson video, a softer in, and then you are jumping in. I mean when you are talking about algorithms not pushing them in this direction, and not affecting them I struggle with that.
I think you would have a hard time convincing a person who does not have an Alex Jones worldview to accidentally fall into his website, and they go âoh yeah, the frogs are all turning gay!â
I am not saying it canât happen â I imagine someone who is a blank slate who is willing to believe anything â but in that case, they will flip from Alex Jones to some other thing and believe that.
I donât know how many of those people exist.
Do you sometimes feel like you are screaming into the void with your ideas?
I am always screaming into the void!
Look, you are very calm, but I know you are constantly talking to the press and come back to the same points.
Well itâs the same thing over and over. And the media, the journalists always get upset with me because I fuck their stories right away.
Because the only thing they have read is from the same media bubble they are in, right? So every interview I have done this week is on QAnon, and they will say âplease explain to me why it is getting so hugeâ and Iâm like âwell no, itâs notâ and theyâre like âfuck!â
So, in a way this is a very heartening conversation because you are saying we are seeing the exact same number of people in the population are going to dive into this stuff as they ever did. Where do you see the problem lying, then?
I donât think social media is turning people into conspiracy theorists. That view needs to stop. I donât think that people are becoming more conspiratorial.
However even if this is stable, it is still a problem and we have to be honest about it being stable, and we have to be honest about where itâs coming from.
And itâs coming from people who have stable world-views, and that probably comes out of their socialisation, and itâs going to take a little more work. We canât just give someone a link and it will change their worldview. Itâs a tougher problem than we imagine.
And if we are going to start throwing blame, then there is a lot of blame that should be going around. There are members of Congress who should be blamed for spreading conspiracy theories.
Many members of Congress should be blamed for the advertising they put out which borders on that sort of stuff, and engages in misinformation. The speeches of our leaders involve misinformation, and sometimes conspiracy theories. If we are going to be even handed about it there is a lot of guilt to go around.
Yes, Trump engages in a lot of conspiracy theories. That is bad. But so did Bernie Sanders. Saying the one percent controls everything, I am sorry but that is a conspiracy theory. And if you were to replace the words âone percentâ with anything else, you would get it.
So â it is easy to pick on a few sources for this, but once you open to your eyes you start seeing it everywhere. I mean the channel Animal Planet, itâs supposed to be about real animals. Thatâs what I thought. What is the biggest production they ever did? It was âwe found a mermaid, and it washed up on the shore because the Navy is killing the mermaidsâŠâ
And the History Channel has Ancient Aliens...
Yes, also on Animal Channel, Finding Bigfoot. Guess what? They havenât found him yet.
You go the mainstream news and there is often playing with conspiracy theories, going beyond the evidence. Whether itâs the Washington Post and the UFO stories, or â and I will say this â I am glad there was Trump Russia investigation, but a lot of the coverage went way beyond what the available evidence was saying, and there were a lot of theories getting popped up that were way beyond that was appropriate at the time.
And when the Mueller Report came out, it fell flat on its face.
And so itâs everywhere.
And a lot of the things that are problems now, like anti-vax theories â well, some of the big starts for the anti-vax movement is because one of the biggest journals in the world, The Lancet, decided to publish a terrible paper that was fraudulent, should never have been published, and it took them 10 years to take it down!
Maybe Oprah Winfrey, who brought Jennifer McCarthy on her show and gave her a mainstream voice to this nonsense. And Bobby Kennedy Jr who continues to push it, and Robert De Niro, and Jim Carrey. So you know, this is out there.
And you could take social media away tomorrow and it would not make one iota of difference.
Itâs a big call, and an important call, and I find it confrontational when you say it, and itâs fucking fascinating.
Yeah, a lot of blame to go around.
Itâs a much more complex topic than we think, and we canât just point at Mark Zuckerberg and say âyour algorithms are turning us into zombiesâ - itâs a much more nuanced situation we are in.
Please tell me that day that occurred in the past where we werenât believing in conspiracy theories. Come on! When did that happen?
Point taken.
And this is the thing, I show people the data and then they have to pull this bullshit, and they do the exact same manoeuvring conspiracy theorists do: they want to hold onto their belief.
So when I tell people âwe have been running polls on QAnon and itâs not getting biggerâ they go âmaybe polls arenât appropriate in this instance!â
Fuck off!
And we donât have any evidence the internet is driving people to this, or people have beliefs they didnât have in the past.
âOh, but itâs because itâs so easy to get now and itâs the groups!â
Itâs like âno, screw off!â
Look, I donât want to come across too dogmatic about it â
Oh you are!
Hereâs the thing: new theories will be adopted over time and social media will have something to do with it, but it is largely convincing people who are already prone to being convinced of that particular theory.
I think that people would be a little slower in adopting some of these beliefs from not being on social. In New Zealand we have the Public Party and its lead by Billy TK, and he is into all the stuff: 5G is evil, COVID isnât real, the UN has a big worldwide plan to depopulate the planet.
And heâs getting big town hall meetings that I would argue wouldnât happen if there werenât 20,000 people (which is big numbers for New Zealand by the way!) who had found each other on Facebook.
But they would have done it another way. And third parties have always existed, and people have found each other far before the internet.
So we have lots of evidence of political parties, and cults, and religions forming long before there was Facebook for them to find each other
Yeah, Scientology kicked off pretty well pre-Twitter right?
Yeah, everything kicked off! Christianity kicked off before it had a Facebook page! Billions of followers. So you donât need any of this [social media] stuff for this to happen.
And any insinuation they do: were you born yesterday? Do you have amnesia?
Do you realise all these things we have in the world are long standing institutions that formed long before Facebook?
Well look, I appreciate this conversation. And I think itâs a point of view that is not represented in the media at the same level as the opposing view.
Thatâs true!
And I think you are going to be continuing to shout, and I respect you for that.
Yeah and continue to shout and be ignored, yeah!
If I am sitting over here in New Zealand and I am petrified of these theories flung around on my Facebook feed and how damaging that can be, what are you freaked out by? What should I be worried about?
What should you be worried about? I mean here is what worries me in general right now: I prefer beliefs to be tied more to the truth.
So I think we all have a job to do when it comes to fighting against these beliefs.
And while I will disagree with a lot of people about the origin of these theories and how and why they spread, I will agree that they are a problem. And I am fully invested in solving that problem.
And I think we will do a better job if we have an understanding of the origin of these beliefs instead of just blaming Facebook for it.
But most certainly I am on board with anyone who will take reasonable measures in pushing back.
So in that case, banning Facebook pages, putting restrictions on social, those may end up being counterproductive.
I am not in favour of government censorship of this stuff, I donât think it helps in any meaningful way, because largely these things are going to be constrained to those people already disposed to it anyway. And all you are doing is proving to them that the government is out to get them!
So there is something for all of us to do.
We need to find ways to change beliefs, to change world-views. Maybe that comes in the way of critical thinking courses earlier on in the educational process.
Instead of shovelling facts down peopleâs throats out of textbooks, teach them how those facts come to be accepted as knowledge and how they did they get into the textbook? How do we generate knowledge?
Those things need to be front-loaded into education earlier on.
Thanks, Joe. Itâs a lot. Itâs a lot to think about!
Phew. Itâs a lot to digest, I know. I hope you enjoyed this newsletter â whether you read it, or listened to it.
David.
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In this Webworm episode, I talk to science fiction writer Sonny Whitelaw â who after writing some Stargate books, discovered some fans thought Stargate was very, very real. We discuss what this says about conspiracy theory culture in 2020.
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.webworm.co/subscribe -
This was not planned; it was not expected. But I turned my mic on, and just decided to reflect back on this unhinged week of conspiratorial madness.
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.webworm.co/subscribe
