Where there’s smoke, there’s fire: delusion, immobility and hiperinclusion in conspirations online

Abstract

In this article, written under the perspective of pecheutian discourse analysis (Orlandi, 2013, 2017), we aim to analyze conspiracy theories as practiced by subjects in the virtual world. We mobilize the concept of “paranoid style” by Hofstadter (1964) to base our discussion about conspiracy theories. Afterwards, we stablish a relationship between the paranoid conspiracy and the inner workings of delusion as debated by Freud (2020) and Remo Bodei (2003). Delusions and conspiracy are linked by the concept of hyperinclusion proposed by Bodei (2003), which is discursively interpreted in this work as a mark of a immovability of meaning. In other words, as an extreme level of meaning saturation, that foments the illusion of individuality, autonomy and literacy in the subject. We conclude, after an analysis of a corpus related to fires in 2019, that the web can foment conspiracy theories by incentivizing hyperinclusion, which is harmful for public debate.