Episodes
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My friend loaded about a year’s worth of our text history into Google’s AI (privacy, what privacy?) — and instructed the AI to create a podcast about me based on those texts. That’s what today’s podcast is — just a couple of AI people talking to each other about me, based on nothing but a text thread between me and my friend. It’s 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 — one of my favourite authors, Jason Pargin. He’s 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, Don’t Touch It, What the Hell Did I Just Read, and If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe. His latest comes out this week, and is called — in true Jason style — 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 don’t know his writing, you might know him as “the geriatric TikTok personality” (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 — 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 — and so here’s 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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Missing episodes?
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Today’s Webworm is a podcast episode which tells the story of Barry. More specifically, it’s 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 it’s 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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I’ve 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 D’Amato (the “big bad” 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 D’Amato’s will (as you’ll know from the film, we had a trove of documents from D’Amato’s 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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I’ve 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: “Man With Suspended Driver's License Dials Into Court Hearing While Driving”. The video of Corey’s confused expressions went viral on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok — 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 court’s fault because they’d never passed those orders on.
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Calvin is seven, and is the son of my producer over on Flightless Bird, Rob — aka “Wobby Wob”. In today's podcast, Calvin watches and then immediately reviews Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. I hope you enjoy it. It’s Calvin, being interviewed by his dad Rob.
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The internet isn’t just full of bad ideas: It’s dying. The idea of a dead internet isn’t new, and full disclosure — it started life as its own conspiracy theory. Dead Internet Theory posits that most of the internet is just bots — and that these bots are being used to manipulate the human population. While I don’t see some grand scheme playing out online to infect the internet with garbage, I think it’s happening organically and it’s 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. It’s 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 media’s 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 media’s executives. Vice was home to some of the world’s 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 — first in my stomach, second in my chest — 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 — if you’re listening with the kids in the car, maybe drop the audio down for a few seconds at the 7’28” mark.
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Episode 8: Arise & Me: Not a Love Story. It’s 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 “Webworm” or “David Farrier.” 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:
“In university I won a ‘Freemason’s Scholarship’, which is hilarious because I had to go to an interview with 10 masons — and I’d 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 “look at this” 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 couldn’t 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?”
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 Zealand’s conspiracy scene — you can listen to our conversation here.
As for today — it’s 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 — old laptops and computers, USB sticks (remember them?) and of course Google Docs.
Today’s 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 — except, I found it in my Google Docs folder. I enjoyed revisiting it, so — like when Stephen King releases a new edition of The Stand — 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 America’s greatest writers. Not arrogant at all.
This one is a medical mystery; a rabbit hole I never expected to go down.
Trigger warning: if you’re squeamish, this might make you a bit squeamish. Nonetheless — I hope you enjoy it. Let’s 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 can’t give to anyone else.
Their stories are similar and familiar — 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 she’s been systematically abducted by aliens for the last 15 years.
People call the newsroom — often me specifically — 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 don’t even want to consider writing to the government, because the government’s 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 don’t 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 didn’t 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 didn’t quite get it. Threads? I don’t know what he is talking about. I can’t picture it. Andy is very candid about it: “It’s not normal to be able to pull threads out of your chest. I’ve got wounds everywhere”.
Andy tells me he didn’t used to have wounds everywhere. He sent me a “before” 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. It’s a strange thing to look at — as I’m still not quite sure what I am seeing.
He says he’s approached various hospitals, and seen various doctors. But no answers. He sends me a report from a Diagnostic Medlab:
It report ends with “The origin of the foreign material is not apparent”.
Andy’s narrative veers back into things I can’t confirm —allegations, conspiracy and paranoia. I don’t know how founded or unfounded any of it is. “I been on the run since January 2014. I try and keep myself a moving target” he types.
He’s sleeping rough somewhere in the North Island of New Zealand. He needs to keep off the grid. He’s been contacting me when he gets Wi-Fi on his phone. “I been trying hard at great risk to my own life. I expect to die from my injuries” he sends.
It’s easy to write him off as another conspiracy theorist. But I keep on thinking about the threads. I’ve been staring at this confronting photo for a few days now, trying to figure out what exactly I’m looking at:
I feel a bit ill. I am not good with body stuff, and I am definitely not good with “bits-of-bloody-matter-pulled-out-of-the-skin” body stuff.
In saying that, I’m 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: “Oh my gosh, he’s got Morgellons Disease”.
Devil’s 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 didn’t fully understand. One of the chapter’s was called “Devil’s Bait”:
“For me, Morgellons disease started as a novelty: people said they had a strange disease, and no one — or hardly anyone — believed them.
There there were a lot of them, almost 12 thousand of them — 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 skin”.
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 didn’t go away, the fibres arrived, and Leitao came up with the term “Morgellons” — referencing something written by a 17th Century doctor about some “harsh hair” he’d found emerging on a patient’s back.
Ms. Leitao collects a sample of the strands from Drew’s skin. They glide right off, like filaments from a dandelion.
She places them onto slides, examining them under an $8 RadioShack microscope. She’s 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.
She’s seen nothing like this before. She shakes her head and thinks, “These things cannot be coming out of my son’s body.”
Once the condition had a name, people started coming out of the woodwork. Patients would collect the threads they’d pulled out of themselves and bring it to their GP in little containers or matchboxes.
Dermatologists even coined a term for it: “The matchbox sign”. The consensus was that the fibres or “alien bodies” weren’t 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 weren’t 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 didn’t get to the bottom of it.
The report was called Clinical, Epidemiologic, Histopathologic and Molecular Features of an Unexplained Illness and concluded:
“We 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 infestation”.
That delusional infestation thing is important.
Body horror — think David Cronenberg’s The Fly and Eraserhead — isn’t just a movie genre, but has long been a phenomenon dealt with by psychologists the world over.
An idea seeds itself in a patient’s mind: something is crawling under their skin and they have to get it out. Sometimes it’s called delusional parasitosis or Ekbom’s 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 — and all the way into her brain.
I’m not quite sure how you scratch through your skull — maybe some artistic licence there. But you get the idea: It’s an itch you can’t scratch, and it drives you crazy.
I mention these other conditions because they lead to another theory about Morgellons: that it’s passed on through the Internet. The Empathy Exams labels the process “Transmission by Internet.”
Morgellons disease wasn’t termed until 2001: it’s grown up on the web — through message boards, group chats, Facebook and Twitter. It’s an idea. An idea that becomes so powerful it’s 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. It’s based around a whole lot of paranoia, and it can spread.
Patients are often described as delusional. Google “Morgellons”, and pretty soon you’ll find fringe literature fraught with government conspiracies, the New World Order, and chemtrails.
I think back to Andy and the stories he can’t verify and the fact he’s been on the run for a year. Sounds pretty Level 5 to me.
But here’s 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 — 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 didn’t match any of the 900 textiles on the Tulsa Police Department’s forensic lab’s database. Next the threads were heated to 371 degrees Celsius. Nothing happened: no fire, no disintegration, no nothing. This meant they weren’t one of the at least 85,000 different organic compounds that would catch fire.
With all this in mind, you go to Oklahoma State University’s 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.
They’re not treating it like woo. They’re treating it like science. And for thousands of sufferers all over the world, this comes as a huge relief. Because they’re 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. It’s 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. She’s 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 — people united by their passion for something extraordinary. Their motto last year was “Searching for the common thread”. Someone’s scribbled on the sign so it says “uncommon”.
They’re 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:
“Doubting Morgellons hasn’t stopped me being afraid I’ll get it [...] Now that I am here, I wash my hands a lot. I am conscious of other people’s 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.
I’ve got these fleeting moments of catching sight, catching panic. It’s 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.”
I email the organiser to see what the plan is for next year. “They are definitely planning a conference for next year, but we don’t have any dates yet,” she tells me.
I make a note that I’ll check back in. I want to go. In the meantime I order a calendar from last year’s event. Each month has a different image of Morgellons.
I browse the foundation’s website and find a forum called “The Pets of Morgellons”. I spot a kitten, a dog and a bright orange parrot.
It’s 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:
“Joni Mitchell’s mystery ailment revealed: Morgellon’s Disease sufferers claim they feel parasites crawling and biting under their skin before colorful fibers grow from the sores – but experts say it is a mental illness”
That last bit of the headline is what really ruffles the feathers of Morgellons sufferers: “Mental illness.” It’s a refrain that keep coming up again and again. “The matchbox sign” from earlier.
There are 12,000 people who claim to be suffering from Morgellons. Are they all a victim to the same mass delusion? That’s what most doctors say. Randy Wymore from Oklahoma State University would disagree.
As I look back at Andy’s photos, I wonder. Most sufferers seem to think they’re pulling out biological material that’s been growing inside them. That’s 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. It’s like finding an extra tooth that didn’t used to be there, or some other kind of biological surprise.
The last thing Andy types to me is: “You can guess it freaks me out, as it is my body”.
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 — here in 2021.
I edited the story a little, as I wrote a little differently back in 2015 — and wanted to change some phrasing.
It did have me wanting to know how Andy’s doing these days. I’ve been back through my Facebook messages, and he’s deleted his account. I never got his email or phone number — he was too paranoid.
I hope he’s doing okay. I hope he’s found some peace.
I was actually reminded of this piece because of something that happened recently — back in June. The paranoia seen with Morgellons is sometimes compared to the phenomenon of “Targeted Individuals” and “Gang Stalking” — in which victims think they are being followed and monitored in some way.
While Morgellons has Joni Mitchell, “Gang Stalking” has Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock:
“I started doing all this videotaping, and found multiple people were following me. The same car, the same place.
It’s been a year and a half since I’ve actually had solid gang stalking […]
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. It’s basically just a bunch of tinfoil hat shit, but time will tell.”
That interview was from June this year, and it got me thinking of poor Andy. Tinfoil hat shit. Time will tell.
I’m curious what you make of all this. Have you had anyone in your life that’s descended down this particular psychological rabbit hole? I can’t help but draw comparisons to the illogical, conspiracy-fuelled world so many seem to occupy in 2021. What’s going on with our brains? What’s going on with the way we perceive reality?
David.
PS: Share this particular newsletter, if you like: it’s www.webworm.co/p/ontherun or —
I appreciate you getting the word out about Webworm!
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Hi,
I had my first surfing lesson this month. I wasn’t 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 God’s name are you meant to stand up? What, you’re 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 UN’s “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” 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 “code red for humanity” is how UN Secretary-General António Guterres put it.
The climate right now is warmer than it has been in about 125,000 years. And it’s just going to keep getting worse with more droughts, wildfires and floods. We aren’t 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 humanity’s approach to the crisis we all face.
And the question running through all of our heads? “What the fuck can we do about it?”
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 we’ve being told will help save the planet. But we’re not making a lick of difference. It’s futile, apart from making us feel good about ourselves. We are — as today’s guest Joshua Drummond writes — being denied climate agency. Because we’re 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 “special meeting” 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. It’s a great essay, and I’m 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 doesn’t cause you any financial hardship!
Imprisoned in a System That Won’t 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 there’s one particular bit where — if you get enough of a run-up — you can clear the cliffside and plummet a height even greater than the falls.
My mates and I worked up to it. I didn’t go first; I’ve 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 didn’t die, it was my turn. I jumped too.
I didn’t 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. They’re the authority by which cause and effect abide, and they don’t care about you.
I’d fucked with the great god gravity, and this was the “finding out” 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, it’s happening now, it’s getting worse, and it will get much worse if it’s 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 isn’t the fall: it’s that we’re currently doing very little to break it.
It’s as if (to work the cliff-jump metaphor some more) we’re in free fall and the pool’s dry, but if we’re really quick we can fill it so the fall won’t kill us or even hurt too much — but the controls for the emergency sluice-gates are kept by a very small and very rich group of people who are all saying “nah, saving you would cost us too much. We’re opting for splat.”
We know exactly what’s wrong with the climate: there’s an excess of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and it’s causing the planet to heat up. We’re 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 we’ve emitted.
So, with the problems and solutions clear for decades, what’s being done by the engines of the economy, the leaders, and the gatekeepers: business and the government? Not nearly enough.
This isn’t a sane response to an emergency. It’s 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.
That’s what makes climate change so maddening. When I say to myself, as any sane person would, “what are we doing?” and “how can I help?” the answers keep coming back, “not enough” and “you can’t.” That’s 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 — of the necessity of action — is burning to act. Everyone wants to help, to work, to do. But we’re imprisoned in a system that won’t let us act sanely. We are being denied climate agency.
We’re stuck in a system we didn’t 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 “too expensive” to change. In the media, articles about climate change mitigation measures frequently come — absurdly — with a cost-benefit analysis. “Not contributing to cooking an entire planet” is seldom listed as a benefit.
Often, taking the individual actions we are told will help ease the crisis is too expensive. Unless you’re rich, in the global scheme of things — you can’t afford an EV. Unless you’re wealthy, in terms of either time or money, you can’t afford to go waste-free, or turn your backyard into a garden, or even buy food that’s free of exploitative farming practices. Ethical behaviour has been monetised: if you want a clear conscience, you’ll have to pay for it. Even the term “carbon footprint,” 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 — if not actually make a meaningful contribution — 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 can’t help making, because our systems don’t 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. They’re just trying to stay sane.
In a sane world, we’d be pivoting hard — or have pivoted long ago — 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 it’s not a sane system, and there are few such jobs available. Searching on a hellsite like LinkedIn for “climate change” or “sustainability” is an exercise in futility. Many of the jobs available are in niche positions, or start-ups, or don’t pay well enough for someone without independent means to take them.
Tellingly, many climate jobs are at insurance companies — 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 we’ve ended up with is a crisis everyone knows about but is powerless to work on fixing, because it’s hard to make rent or pay the mortgage with jobs that should exist but don’t. And the great Invisible Hand of the market isn’t interested in helping out, because saving the world for future generations doesn’t pay now. The Hand would rather sell stuff. Everyone loves stuff.
Absent of the ability to live sanely and purposefully in a world that’s 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 “what can we do?” It feels like taking action. But it’s not.
This forced nihilism poisons living. Faced with making choices about the future, a lot of my peers throw up their hands. What’s the point in trying to own a house when the housing market’s 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 they’ll 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, it’s 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 — perhaps millions, perhaps many more — 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 it’s 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.
“Almost half of the world’s 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,” 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 don’t 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 — very angry — but it’s hard to know what to do with this fury. It runs too deep, like a hidden current in a river. Occasionally, it rises, and it’s terrible to see. To feel.
And being angry, like being earnest, is not cool. It’s not done. The correct attitude is a sort of supercilious, post-ironic detachment, an “oh well, we’re all fucked, so let’s just enjoy the ride, lmao.”
I’m tired of even trying to be cool about all this. The effort it takes to sustain protective detachment isn’t worth it. I am desperate to channel my fury at a stolen, broken world into something useful, something that helps, something that isn’t 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: “If we can't protect the earth, you can be damn sure we'll avenge it.” 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 don’t want violence. Most people don’t, or there’d be a lot more dead fossil fuel executives. But I’m not prepared to watch business-as-usual turn our only home into hell. Because there is still time — to blunt climate change’s 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 “doomism” in his book, The New Climate War. He warns that the supercilious “we’re all fucked, who cares” 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.
“This is the greatest threat and greatest challenge we’ve ever faced as a civilization,” Mann says. “If you’re not out there fighting for climate action, you’re giving up on the human race.”
To disrupt business-as-usual, climate scientist and activist Peter Kalmus says “we need a billion climate activists.” And the work of activism begins with imagining a better world. It’s 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 — we’ve 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 — ideally today — 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. They’d abandon the senseless culture war they’re encouraging for clicks, stirring up audiences against fundamentally benign concepts like cycleways. They’d treat climate change as the epoch-defining issue it is, and cover it widely and fairly, instead of sporadically and half-heartedly.
They’d 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 “how much will this cost?” we need to ask “how much work will this be?”
To paraphrase Kim Stanley Robinson in his cli-fi book The Ministry For The Future: Money isn’t 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, it’s hard work, but when work is meaningful, people actually want to do it.
But there’s 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 who’ve 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 it’s the best form of justice fossil-fuel executives and their shills can hope for.
And I can hear the economists stirring already, so let’s upset them some more. We need to stop treating free-market, orthodox economics like it’s 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 doesn’t treat economics like it’s a capricious god beyond human control. “The economy” is just a representation of humans at work, economists are fundamentally useless at predicting the future, and it’s time we stopped pretending they can.
Physics, on the other hand, can predict the future. We know what’s coming, but we can do something about it. Jumping off the climate cliff wasn’t a good idea, but we can still break the fall.
“There is no simple formula, no fact sheet or checklist, for figuring out our roles in the vital work to forge a just, liveable future,” says All We Can Save author Dr Katharine Wilkinson. “But I have found a series of reflections can help us arrive at some clarity and uncover ways to be of use.”
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. It’s 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 — it’ll pop up there soon. And if you haven’t 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 don’t 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.
It’s 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.
I’m throwing this back over to Josh again. He has some thoughts on what to do.
What can we do? Some more thoughts from Josh
I’m aware I still haven’t entirely addressed the “how” of all this, and for that, I’ll 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 I’m pretty bloody angry at still seeing climate change denial being given a consistent platform in our media with the excuse of “but it’s just opinion!”
The first thing I’m 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 they’d promise not to air or print climate change denial, or give climate change deniers and fossil fuel lobbyists a platform.
Perhaps we’d even see an admission of responsibility or an apology about the media’s hefty role about promulgating climate change information to date.
I don’t 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 that’d start banging on about freedom of speech, I’d say: “No.” This is about the media choosing to act ethically and responsibly, not about governments choosing what you can and can’t say. Most media don’t give a lot of space to praising fascism anymore, and it’s time the lying liars of climate change denial got the same treatment. Let’s see what we can do about it.
I’m particularly keen to hear from climate activists, climate scientists, and media people. I would love to get media people’s true feelings on what it’s 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 let’s 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 Australia’s raging bushfires, he painted a kookaburra to raise money in the firefighting efforts.
I think Josh is bang on about the media’s 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 won’t 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 — 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. Let’s talk this out. I hope you enjoyed Josh’s essay — I loved it and glad he’s here. If you listened to it instead on the podcast, I hope my droning voice didn’t put you to sleep.
Talk below. Try and have a safe weekend.
David.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.webworm.co/subscribe -
Hi,
I’ve 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: “I’ve decided to launch a podcast.” Good Lord.
Okay — so let me explain the “Episode 5” thing.
When Webworm started, I experimented with four podcast episodes last year. I’ll list those at the end, as they’re all available along with today’s episode.
But as of today I formally, officially and excitedly launch the audio component to Webworm! I’m going to use it to complement the written content here when it feels appropriate. When it feels exciting. When it feels — not to get too pretentious — worthy.
And so I did a long read of Jez Brown’s heartfelt, horrifying and somehow hilarious essay on having Long Covid. I wanted to see how it would be in audio form. I want Jez’s story to have fresh legs, so people can listen in their cars or while they clean the house. It’s an experiment, and I want to see how you feel about it.
You can listen to this episode in this email — it’s embedded in this newsletter — or you should be able to find it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
I’ve 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.
I’d love to take your feedback in the comments below. Webworm will always be a written thing — I want you to be able to read it on your phone while you’re in bed or on the bus or at the beach — 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: “Make up something fucking new, so that I can actually give a shit!”Episode #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. You’re great and your love of dogs is eternal and awesome.
Armchaired and Dangerous: Live
While we’re talking podcasts — we’re doing a live Armchaired and Dangerous in Salt Lake City on Thursday September 16th.
Tickets go on sale tomorrow. You’ll be able to get them here.
Dax, Monica and I will see you then, Utah!
And if you’re in LA on Sunday August 22nd, I’ll be making a brief appearance on stage with Chuck Tingle at his show. You can find details here. It’s sort of a secret that I am popping up, but I am telling you because I want to. If you’re 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 — his Facebook account already disabled — 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 he’d 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 Quistorff’s 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 individual’s 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.
I’d note that at no time did I observe this doctor spreading specific anti-vaccination messages. For all I know, he’s very pro-vaxx in person— 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 “get vaccinated”.
In simply sharing “fresh research” (that’s 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 Dan’s posts can have:
I’d argue “looking outside the square of vaccines” isn’t 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 “expose” 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. Gideon’s an epidemiologist working in chronic disease in Sydney, Australia — 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 it’s a valid treatment and to leave the poor doctor alone.
Which is why I wanted to share Gideon’s piece:
Ivermectin for Covid-19 — 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 we’ve 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 can’t 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.
It’s a bit like when Dr Dan posted about hydroxychloroquine in June. Despite clinical trials confirming hydroxychloroquine didn’t prevent illness or death from Covid 19 — 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 he’d 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 didn’t identify them. For that reason, I’ve changed their names.
E-mail #1: Dr. “Sarah”
“I 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 “oh no no no no no no”. The ivermectin thing has been bizarre. I suggest you look into Brett Weinstein — 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 — 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 patients’ expectations, and everyone I know in this job is just motivated to help people.
This guy is definitely misrepresenting his profession, but being an “Integrative and Functional Medicine Specialist” is already a red flag.
It’s 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 don’t think things through properly or carefully enough, my patients can have bad things happen to them or can die. That’s an insane amount of pressure. But everyone I’ve 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.”
“It’s worth also noting that everyone I know who is a doctor is anxiety-ridden.”
E-mail #2: Medical student “Adam”
“I’m a medical student and over the past few years I’ve been placed in various medical specialities to learn about them. Unfortunately, I’m not surprised to learn about Dr Dan because there are lots of Dr Dans around.
Most of them are just aren’t 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 don’t think they would. And these were just the ones bold enough to push their views on the med students.
To be clear — I’ve met a huge number of doctors and these ones are still a small minority among them. But enough that it’s concerning.
It just goes to show that doctors aren’t 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 — I never heard any of them express these views to their patients, it’s 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.
He’s not only influencing the people around him, but also anyone who stumbles across his instagram.”
“It just goes to show that doctors aren’t immune to misinformation. We have the same mental circuitry as everyone else and we fall prey to the same tricks and mental traps.”
Okay, David here again.
I really appreciated hearing from those two — 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 it’s 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 “cancelling” a doctor. To those people: I haven’t cancelled a doctor. A doctor very publicly posted a bunch of stuff, and I wrote some context around that stuff.
I’m okay with that.
And with all that in mind — let me know what you think of the podcast and what sorts of things you’d like to hear in the comments below. I’ll most likely just chase my gut, but I’d really like your input.
Yours,
David.
This is a public episode. If you’d 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 aren’t quite as fucked up as they seem.
So I guess today’s newsletter is… hopeful, somehow?
Joe Uscinski wrote American Conspiracy Theories (an excellent book) and as you probably gathered from the title, he’s very passionate about conspiracy theories.
He’s 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. He’s well educated and opinionated — and he’s also a great speaker. Right now, he’s in hot demand. I accidentally Skyped him on the wrong day, and he sounded upbeat but also kinda exhausted. He’d 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 — we kinda disagree on some things — but I knew we would.
He thinks the problem of people disappearing down conspiratorial rabbit holes is no worse than it’s ever been.
That it’s exactly the same.
Joe told me social media isn’t to blame. I struggle with this, but he’s smart and I wanted to hear him out.
We also agreed on a lot of things, including the bit where he yelled at me:
“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!”
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 doesn’t 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 wasn’t 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 — 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, “OK, let’s see what’s happening here.”
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 — 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 “why don’t I throw QAnon on here, and just see what happens?”
And a lot of people didn’t know what it was, and it was not rated very highly.
So we said “how would you rate the QAnon movement on a scale from zero to 100, where 100 is “you really like it” and zero is “you really hate it.”
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, it’s that we don’t 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 — 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 don’t know what this is, the vast majority of people don’t like it, and it’s not gaining in popularity.
However the headlines in all the newspapers are the exact opposite. They say “it is huge and getting bigger, it’s gone mainstream, it’s taking over American life, it’s far right…”
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 “The republican embrace of QAnon goes far beyond Trump”, that’s the kind of headline we see everywhere.
But it really doesn’t.
I mean maybe it goes a little bit beyond Trump, but it doesn’t 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 — 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: “Oh, well, there are millions of QAnon accounts - and that’s growing…”
Right? And if you are not reading carefully… accounts aren’t 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 don’t want to speculate on people’s motives — 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 “Republicans are a bunch of QAnon nutcases” 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, it’s 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, it’s always been there. It just feels like perhaps there is this knee-jerk reaction to what we are seeing now.
I mean it’s true it’s always been there, but it’s 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, it’s always the people of that country who are the most conspiratorial!
All these claims are based on nothing, it’s all baloney.
And also when you read about “when is the time of conspiracy theories?” - journalists say it’s always “now, now. Now is the time.” And you can find headlines almost every year saying “this is the golden age, this is the time!”
But it can’t 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 “oh holy shit everyone is doing down the rabbit hole” — 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 — no difference in the conspiracy beliefs.
No difference.
And so it’s 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 walls…
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 —
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 “if 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!”
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 — everything is jacked up to 11.
And I haven’t really seen any major increase! I mean, there could be one and I just haven’t 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 “Bill Gates” from the conspiracy theories about him, you go back in time and just plug in “Soros”, “Rockefellers”, “Rothschilds”, “Freemasons”, 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.
It’s like “Soros all over again, are we still having this conversation?!”
Yeah — Soros, or some rich person trying to take over the world and they are going to put chips in our neck… I’ve fucking heard it, dude.
So look, we have this celebrity chef over in this part of the world — Chef Pete Evans — 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 people’s presence on social media, and people seem to be going down that rabbit hole a lot easier.
It’s 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 you’d go back 30 years and there would be no social media, so you could not track people’s conversations. So you could not see what people were saying next to the water-cooler. But now you can.
There is this view like “how did people talk before Twitter?” and it’s like “they fucking talked!”
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%. It’s only come down 35 points during the internet era.
So it’s sort of strange to say “they can travel further and faster than ever before” when technically, yes, in that I can put things online and they can be accessed in Thailand right now — but it doesn’t 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 — say, “COVID isn’t real” — 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 it’s the exact opposite!
Okay, talk me through this. This is interesting.
I read tonnes of articles all the time that are like “how do I talk to friends who believe in conspiracy theories” as if no-one knows how to do this.
So the assumption of your question is that everyone was always shooting down people’s 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. It’s like “no, it’s the politicians who spread conspiracy theories!” They have the bigger bully puppet! I mean why does everyone think COVID’s exaggerated? “Gee, I dunno, maybe it’s because the president said it was?”
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 you’re already there! No-one is going to Alex Jones unless they are already there.
Well, say something softer — 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 “oh yeah, the frogs are all turning gay!”
I am not saying it can’t happen — I imagine someone who is a blank slate who is willing to believe anything — but in that case, they will flip from Alex Jones to some other thing and believe that.
I don’t 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 it’s 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 “please explain to me why it is getting so huge” and I’m like “well no, it’s not” and they’re like “fuck!”
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 don’t think social media is turning people into conspiracy theorists. That view needs to stop. I don’t 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 it’s coming from.
And it’s coming from people who have stable world-views, and that probably comes out of their socialisation, and it’s going to take a little more work. We can’t just give someone a link and it will change their worldview. It’s 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 “one percent” with anything else, you would get it.
So — 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, it’s supposed to be about real animals. That’s what I thought. What is the biggest production they ever did? It was “we found a mermaid, and it washed up on the shore because the Navy is killing the mermaids…”
And the History Channel has Ancient Aliens...
Yes, also on Animal Channel, Finding Bigfoot. Guess what? They haven’t found him yet.
You go the mainstream news and there is often playing with conspiracy theories, going beyond the evidence. Whether it’s the Washington Post and the UFO stories, or — and I will say this — 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 it’s everywhere.
And a lot of the things that are problems now, like anti-vax theories — 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.
It’s a big call, and an important call, and I find it confrontational when you say it, and it’s fucking fascinating.
Yeah, a lot of blame to go around.
It’s a much more complex topic than we think, and we can’t just point at Mark Zuckerberg and say “your algorithms are turning us into zombies” - it’s a much more nuanced situation we are in.
Please tell me that day that occurred in the past where we weren’t 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 “we have been running polls on QAnon and it’s not getting bigger” they go “maybe polls aren’t appropriate in this instance!”
Fuck off!
And we don’t have any evidence the internet is driving people to this, or people have beliefs they didn’t have in the past.
“Oh, but it’s because it’s so easy to get now and it’s the groups!”
It’s like “no, screw off!”
Look, I don’t want to come across too dogmatic about it —
Oh you are!
Here’s 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 isn’t real, the UN has a big worldwide plan to depopulate the planet.
And he’s getting big town hall meetings that I would argue wouldn’t happen if there weren’t 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 don’t 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 it’s a point of view that is not represented in the media at the same level as the opposing view.
That’s 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 don’t 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 people’s 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. It’s a lot. It’s a lot to think about!
Phew. It’s a lot to digest, I know. I hope you enjoyed this newsletter — 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 — 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 you’d 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 you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.webworm.co/subscribe
