Conspiracy Zine

I started work on this booklet some time ago as an attempt to draw attention to the absurdity of some of the more mundane aspects of using the internet. When I first started collecting words and images for this project, it was a sort of concrete poetry made by various bots, scammers, crackpots, and wing nuts from around the world, but as I collected spam emails and early internet clipart, my attention and interest turned toward comments on various social media platforms discussing the flat earth conspiracy theory, and other such theories that I also found amusing. However, the more I collected, the more it began to feel frightening rather than funny. I subsequently took a break from collecting and forgot about the idea for this booklet for several years.
During a recent bout of spring cleaning, I found some of the text I had collected in a box. Upon rereading some of the more conspiratorial comments, I realized that what just a few years ago seemed so absurd and fringe had rapidly become nearly mainstream discourse. There are elements of this text that still feel funny, surreal, and silly, but others that feel genuinely terrifying.
The shadowy and corrupt nature of our political history in the USA and other powerful institutions like the Catholic Church leads one to question what elite members of our society are doing with their power and riches. What is actually true becomes difficult to decipher, even for intelligent, rational adults. Our imaginations begin to run wild. Theories about the illuminati become less ridiculous when one begins to see that the rich and powerful from all over the world do indeed meet in secret and spend untold fortunes influencing elections and controlling media narratives. When one learns about the CIA’s involvement in overthrowing democratically elected leaders all over the globe, one begins to wonder what else they might be capable of. The understanding and acknowledgment of corrupt politicians and CEOs to belief in reptilian overlords from other galaxies, or demonically possessed cultist leading our civilization towards global enslavement narrows from a leap to just a step.
Our culture is consumed with paranoia. The age of the internet is the age of confusion. The virtual world has become so blended with the physical world that the two now seem inseparable. The innocence of the first wave of internet culture has been replaced by a totalitarian fearscape. This booklet is merely an observation of the absurdity of internet life; it is certainly not an endorsement of any of the ideologies presented. There is no hidden thread or secret message here, but rather a simple collage of words and images taken out of their original context of the internet and printed on paper. These words and images are used without attribution, and any part of this booklet can be used and distributed however the reader would see fit. No copyright.

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Thank you for reading.

Ben Newman, 2020