Conspiratorial Design
Information Design for the Bigger Picture
Carlo Bramanti is a designer and writer based in The Netherlands.
The following text is an excerpt from my book “Conspiratorial Design - Information Design for the Bigger Picture”, slightly adapted to work as a standalone article. In the book, I try to articulate a series of formal and theoretical intersections between the world of design and that of conspiracy theories, using diagrams as an access point to the topic.
Looking for Patterns: Conspiratorial Design
Conspiratorial design: a disposition towards information that uses design methods and tools of representation to achieve a hypertrophic synthesis. The conspiratorial designer assumes that there is a hidden and emergent knowledge they can disclose because they have a privileged total perspective to see the bigger picture. Through conspiratorial design, one can see and make others see the invisible connections between the dots that form the greater whole. Let’s now try to expand this synthetic definition further.
Style and Roles
In the essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics, historian Richard Hofstadter describes conspiracy theories not simply as a belief or a mentality but as a style. He calls it “paranoid style”. The framework of the style allows for a more nuanced understanding of the issue that goes beyond a simple set of beliefs, including the psychological disposition and the particular rhetorical flourish. For this reason, I think it can be useful to think of conspiratorial design as a style: I consider it an expression of the paranoid style in the world of design and art. Hofstadter compared the paranoid style to an artistic current. Following his comparison, let’s consider conspiratorial design as a new current in the design field, and let’s look at the aesthetic and rhetorical features that can help us identify it.
OBSCURED KNOWLEDGE → Conspiratorial design is recognizable by a taste for displayed complexity, where a central goal of an artifact is to exhibit extreme convolution, multiplicity, and interconnectedness, without necessarily trying to disclose it. Something similar is described by Manuel Lima in his book Visual Complexityas “networkism”, the recent infatuation of artists with complex network structures. Some examples of networkism can be seen in works such as Archie Moore’s Kith and Kin or the work of Thomas Saraceno. When in front of such works, the audience often feels like they are in the presence of a sort of sacred geometry, a work that conceals a well-engineered mystery like an esoteric artifact. Anyone interested in contemporary design might have noticed how a vague taste for esoterism permeates the field. Many young designers seem to be echoing the invitations to re-enchantment present in the philosophical discourse (derived from Max Weber’s theories), by repurposing myths, magic traditions, and more or less ancient symbols to represent contemporary issues. I see these kinds of works as part of a broader phenomenon: the diffusion of what I’d call an “aesthetic of obscured knowledge”, where a work gestures toward a hidden system, a contemporary condition, or a power structure, yet never fully reveals it—as if veiled by the very complexity it attempts to represent. The subject is there, but it remains slightly blurry, as if it were the viewer’s task to complete the image and recognize the shape within the shadow. This “shadow” becomes the aesthetic object itself. There are cases of graphic artists and designers who integrate esoteric symbolism in their works, like Paul Laffoely, Jonathan Barnbrook and the previously mentioned Suzanne Treister, and in some cases even historicized design figures like Victor Papanek. Yet beyond direct references, I believe a more generalized esoteric tone permeates many design practices, partly due to how design is perceived. A design exhibition may appear mysterious to outsiders, not just because they’re unfamiliar with the field, but also because of curatorial intention. Designers who think of their work as magical also want it to look magical.
INVESTIGATIONS → A frequent trope that design shares with conspiracy theories is the theme of the investigation. It became a standard to define what a design project does (supposedly) rather than what it is, and typically, among the actions that designers say their projects do, they often “investigate”. In some cases this rhetorical choice comes from an ambition to do what, for example, Forensic Architecture does, namely working for a collective good and fighting injustice (in their case by conducting actual forensic investigations) using the tools of design. But in the case of many design projects, the idea of the investigation and the term “investigate” itself is adopted metaphorically, often in, to express what the research that inspired the project was about. The theme of the investigation is then evoked in exhibitions by displaying unintelligible sketches, fragmented atlases of images, and piles of books with bookmarks, to suggest to the spectator that the project itself is just the tip of an abyssal iceberg. By describing this practice I don’t mean to dismiss the value of some important research and inquiries that can be made by designers. Rather I want to suggest that adopting this kind of rhetorical tool can be a way to delude ourselves into the fact that a project is truly capable of achieving what it claims, misleading us from other possible means to really achieve those goals.
RPG → As I said, I think the conspiratorial style resides in the visuality as much as in the rhetorics. For example, an important feature of conspiratorial design resides in the rhetorics of the roles. The way designers think and present their role in society, as well as the way they treat and present the information they’re asked to process, underlies again an esoteric approach. To explain what I mean by this, let’s first take a look at how esoterism is embedded in conspiracy theories. As the amount of knowledge necessary to understand contemporary society increases and becomes more specific (especially the technical/ scientific), access to it becomes a privilege reserved for a few initiates: those who have the time and the resources to engage with the specificity. As a consequence, some people will perceive that information as occult (more or less literally) and treat it as such. And occult information needs a figure who can access the “higher”, hidden knowledge and disclose it. This happened with QAnon, where an anonymous user (most probably more than one), signed as Q, convinced many people on 4chan that they were in possession of pieces of information about the secret world order and started to disseminate them with vague hints—the so-called “crumbles” or “Q drops”. But conspiracy theories are fundamentally a collective, bottom-up phenomenon: the anonymous user Q may disseminate the crumbles “vertically”, but others are free to embody its role and propose new versions of the theory, as it happens all the time. It is the case of Dylan Louis Monroe, an obscure graphic artist whom I consider a prime example of conspiratorial design and the person who designed the diagrams that started my research (as well as one that was pastiched for Do Not Research). Monroe is a follower of many conspiracy theories stemming from QAnon, with a background in graphic and fashion design, who in 2017 started producing variations on QAnon theories and formalizing them in huge diagrams (the “deep state mapping project”) that went extremely viral—interestingly enough, using an epitome that we could otherwise associate with a designer: “the map-maker”. In one of his diagrams (The Cult of Baal), Monroe repurposed the “Tree of Life” of Kabalah, an ancient diagram belonging to Jewish mysticism, to illustrate his theories. It’s interesting to notice that to illustrate his political ideas he chose a cosmogram. The implicit message was clear: just as the purpose of the Tree of Life was to synthesize esoteric knowledge (the manifestations of God), so his diagram can encompass and evoke a godlike knowledge. Monroe’s work was also later exhibited at the Met. The embodiment of the prophetic role is also evident in the archetypes used in the conspiracy discourse. Nobody would like to think of themselves as a conspiracy theorist; it is way more comforting to identify as a heretic, someone who dares to cross the boundaries of the limited conventional knowledge to imagine new worlds. Now, coming back to design, let’s consider again this archetype I just described: the revolutionary agitator, who mediates between the people and a higher truth, and that, thanks to the capacity to create new connections, can create a new awareness. It doesn’t deviate too much from the archetypal role that many designers and artists identify with and want for themselves. Designers yearn to be wizards: creators of great and abrupt change and innovation, capable of peeking into the future and able to inspire great stupor. As I will try to explain in the section called “Esoteric traditions”, I think this conception has its roots in the origins of design.
RIDDLES AND PROPHECIES → Talking about prophetic figures, I find it meaningful to talk briefly about language and the way I see it used in conspiratorial design. Let’s get into the matter of prophecies and riddles. As many design practices and contemporary art become intertwined to the point that it becomes hard to tell them apart, we can witness how many design projects follow contemporary art in its progressive dependency on language. In his Art School Report Brad Troemel describes the widespread use of what he calls “artspeak” inside art schools. By “artspeak” he means roughly what Alix Rule and David Levine already defined as “International Art English”, namely a mode of expression typical of the art world, whose prime purpose is displaying the belonging to the cultural elite of art (and we can extend that to design as well) and the knowledge of its etiquette, even at the expenses of clear communication. Nonetheless, having a jargon that sounds obscure outside of its field may be partially problematic, but it’s also typical of almost every professional field. As Troemel points out, the issue is not that artspeak is not universally comprehensible, but rather that it’s not comprehensible by the same people who adopt it. And this happens because clear comprehension is not its goal. The artspeak works by creating a dense cloud of highly sophisticated terms (buzzwords, one may say) whose connections are hard to grasp, inviting in this way the readers to combine them, taking part in a process of collaborative creation of the meaning of the text. Language becomes programmatically ambiguous and open-ended, but at the same time exclusive to those who have just enough deciphering tools to participate in the game. This sort of collective game based on allusive riddles is not a social dynamic exclusive to art and design, and I mention it because, once again, I think its peak case study comes from conspiracy theories. QAnon’s community engagement was based on collective investigatory games based on the previously mentioned “crumbles”. Since the main object of study of this text is information design, here’s a quick selection of the most “information-design-core” ones: “Information is knowledge, Knowledge is power, Information is power”- “Research for yourself ”-“Focus on the content”- “Trust the plan”-“Do you see a pattern?”-“Learn to read the map”. QAnon adepts were invited to “learn to read the map”, suggesting not to escape from the mysteries but to delve into them to figure them out—or at least have the sensation of having done so. The idea is that the truth is concealed in riddles to keep the profanes out, but the revelation is right around the corner: you just have to learn the language. At the same time, as Troemel describes, with the rise of conceptual art, art and design schools started implementing assignments for students in the form of riddles—vague and intentionally ambiguous demands that are no longer just a task for the student to perform but a mystery to solve in order to understand what cannot be explained. The assignments are designed with the hope that, in the deciphering process, the students will find the truth within themselves and rise as new members of the riddlers. One crucial problem that Troemel points out is that by adopting the artspeak, the art community ends up giving up any form of self and reciprocal criticism (in this sense, designers adopt the label of “critical” in the same way conspiracy theorists adopt the one of “skeptical”). Esoteric language, both in the case of the artspeak and the “conspiracy-speak” is useful because it’s innocuous and can always defuse conflict by shifting the meaning of what everyone means. In this way, every conspiracy theory and every design project that promises to offer an outlook on possible futures maintains an optimal level of ambiguity and malleability, becoming an always self-fulfilling prophecy, because the prophet never gave a key to it anyway.
A Taxonomy
After proposing some of the aesthetic and rhetorical features of conspiratorial design, I wish to specify that identifying it is a matter of threshold, and deciding where the threshold sits is again a matter of ambiguity and intentions. We could think of a sort of taxonomy based on this. We would have three categories: “conspiracy by design”, “design by conspiracy” and “conspiratorial design”.
“Conspiracy by design” would be a very restricted category of works that intentionally recreate or parody conspiracy theories. Some examples could be the installation Meme Manifesto by the collective Clusterduck, which recreates the typical conspiracy meme of the ‘crazy wall’. Luther Blisset’s hoaxes, that in the 1990s were diffusing fake news to then expose bad journalistic practices. The parody religion of Discordianism, that proposes a cult that professes and worships anti-religious concepts like chaos and absurdity. An interesting aspect of this category is connected to the concepts expressed previously about parody mixing with reality. A fascinating case is Birds aren’t real, a conspiracy theory suggesting that all birds are actually governmental surveillance drones. It was born as a parody of the absurd claims of Trump supporters that ended up being incorporated in conspiratorial narratives: thousands of people started believing it, and others who understood its parody nature accused it of being a PSYOP (Psychological Operation, i.e., secret governmental acts of mass psychological manipulation) designed to dismiss the value of other valuable conspiracy theories. Even more unsettling is the story of the collective Wu Ming/Luther Blisset, who suggests that there are some clues pointing to the fact that whoever started QAnon may have drawn inspiration from their 1999 novel Q and from the acts of culture jamming they were operating in that period. In a quote, once again from Foucault’s Pendulum, that has by now become a kind of modern adage, Umberto Eco captures his concerns about parody with an ironic remark: “Beware of faking: everyone will believe you”. I’m not mentioning these cases as a paternalistic warning to “not play with fire,” but rather because I find it meaningful to acknowledge that such episodes do exist.
“Design by conspiracy” would be the actual conspiracy theories illustrated with design tools. An example is the work of visual artist David Dees, who creates grotesque images depicting conspiracy theories. But here the prime example would be the works of Dylan Louis Monroe and his “Deep State Mapping Project”, even if just as an apex of all the countless vernacular conspiracy diagrams and infographics that you can find online. “design by conspiracy” are works of people who, from outside the world of design, spontaneously understood the rethorics of information design as well its synthesizing and persuasive power, and used it for their purposes.
Lastly, “conspiratorial design” are projects mainly recognized as art or design but that, in their investigative or speculative intentions and in their intricate style, display a conspiratorial aspect. Some examples could be the large-scale infographics of Vladan Joler and Kate Crawford, such as Calculating Empires or Anatomy of an AI System, where they examine the relations between global networks of power and technological systems. Metahaven’s Sunshine Unfinished—an infographic in the shape of a board game tracing the history of the concept of “transparency” in politics, philosophy, architecture, and other fields. The Cloud Cosmogram by Selena Savic, Johannes Bruder, and Maya Indira Ganesh—a speculative diagram about the transformation of human labor within data centers. The Narrative Structures of Mark Lombardi— huge diagrams that try to visualize the structures of financial and political power, corruption, and affairs among capitalists, politicians, corporations, and governments. The even more immense diagrams by Bureau d’études, like the ones contained in Atlas of Agendas, that with their own style pursue grossly the same attempt as Lombardi. Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, an institutional critique artwork that investigates the exploitative real estate practices in New York City with photographs and diagrams. These are all examples of graphic investigations that, while being all inspiring in their own kind, do not exhaust my definition of conspiratorial design and are not sufficient to express how much I think this style extends. We can perceive the conspiratorial in a lot of contemporary graphic design, for example in some of the work of Boot Boyz Biz, like the publication Now-Time Issue 1. Also what I want to argue is that we can find a conspiratorial aspect even in mainstream information design, the one meant for the broad audience, perceived as neutral and informative. With the definition given initially of conspiratorial design, I tried to highlight the tension between the aspiration to encompass a universal scope on a unitary consistent system and at the same time funnel that vision into a persuading synthesis. This same tension can at times appear evidently also in unexpected contexts. An example is We will be here – Map of the future, an infographic by Density Design that visualizes the results of a multiplayer online game developed by the Institute for the Future to try to forecast future challenges. Even the data visualizations of Francesco Franchi for Il Sole 24 Ore (the main Italian financial newspaper) display that same “opaqueness” described by Joanna Drucker when she says:
Most information visualizations are acts of interpretation masquerading as presentation. In other words, they are images that act as if they are just showing us what is, but in actuality, they are arguments made in graphical form. But paradoxically, the primary effect of visual forms of knowledge production in any medium […] is to mask the very fact of their visuality, to render invisible the very means through which they function as argument.
Data visualizations can create the perception of seeing the world from the control room. Under our eyes in the shape of numbers and graphs, everything in the world falls into place in the same, interconnected, coherent system. Conspiratorial design is ultimately the category of works that try to obtain an illusion of control.
Clearly, since this taxonomy is based also on intentions, that are ultimately unknowable, it is destined to remain open. Do some of the mentioned artifacts appear paranoid because their authors are unconsciously paranoid? Hard to tell. Let’s take the case of Mark Lombardi as an especially significant one. His work became so compelling in conspiratorial environments also because of some obscure aspects of his personal history. He was found dead in his house hanged by a rope, which was reported as a suicide even if some close to him found it hard to believe he would take his own life. There are some testimonies about some of his works being tampered after his death, which considering the nature of the works can raise the suspicion that someone tried to obfuscate a hypothetical big discovery. Lastly, some of his diagrams were consulted by some FBI agents soon after 9/11 for no specified reason. It’s unnecessary to say how much all of these elements fit into a perfect conspiracy theory. However, how we classify Mark Lombardi depends on the lens that we use to see his work. Was he a pioneering critical information designer, an ante litteram schizo-poster, or a saboteur of the state? I think this is open to debate. After this open-ended attempt to recognize conspiratorial design, I wish to analyze the essential ideas behind it, but only after a quick speculation on how the origins of these ideas can be related to design history.
Esoteric Traditions
In the attempt to trace back some of the seeds of contemporary conspiracism, it could be tempting to identify conspiratorial design just as a recent tendency, a deviation of design from its original noble tension for modernity and rationality. And if on the one hand, I think that the contemporary devaluation of the figure of the designer plays a role, on the other I think it’s more relevant to first look back in time and reconsider the idea that rationality is at the core of the discipline of design. In her Haunted Bauhaus,Elizabeth Otto documents how Bauhaus was far from the image that many have of it as an institution centered around functionality, rationality, and progress. Instead, it was rooted in the ethos of ‘Lebensreform’, a socio-cultural movement, very widespread in Germany at the time, that criticized the modern industrialized society and advocated for a return to a state of nature through different holistic and spiritualistic practices that included vegetarianism, naturopathy, and gymnastics. It’s not too implausible to think that even the notion of ‘Gestalt’ was so influential inside Bauhaus because it represented a theory of wholeness, very in line with its endeavor for mystic holism. Bauhaus molded an idea of the designer as a syncretic figure, a mediator, not simply between the industry and the arts, but somehow also between spirit and technique. This theoretical framework is probably what put the basis to the conception of the designer as someone who deals with everythingness, meaning that they can and want to manage every component of a system as well as the system in its entirety. Someone who can see how the parts sum up in a bigger whole. Some of these same ideas that inspired Bauhaus were very influential in the countercultures of the 1960s. Their diffusion was a necessary condition for the birth of ecological ideas that conceive Earth as one big interconnected system. This is also at the base of ideas like Buckminster Fullers’ ‘Spaceship Earth’ and the Whole Earth Catalog by Stewart Brand. In the catalogue of the exhibition Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, curator Andrew Blauvelt and the other contributors document the influences of figures like Fuller and Papanek in hippie countercultures, who were preoccupied with achieving global social justice and ecological awareness:
The hippies had a sense of purpose, of making the world anew. Modernism implied that human actions can create a better world, and this demanded an understanding of the whole in which actions take place—better, a critical understanding, which reconsidered the world-changing impact of Industrial capitalism.
Fuller was an interesting example of design’s optimistic view towards planetary-scale systems. He was not only convinced that such systems could exist but was actively putting forward the idea that it was the role of designers to take care of it. There is a quote in La speranza progettuale by Tomás Maldonado that captures Fuller’s optimism. There Maldonado writes about the widespread architectural infatuation for megastructures and quotes Fuller as the best example of what he addresses as the “old utopists”:
There can be enough energy and enough organizing capacity so that all men can possess the whole earth.
This idea of a sort of “mega-design” for a “megautopia” is the same represented recently in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis,where the main character, probably inspired by figures such as Robert Moses, is an almost godly architect who wants to turn New Rome (an alternate version of New York) in a utopia thanks to his ability to innovate and to his genius futuristic vision. With Papanek the idea that design has a responsibility towards society to act ecologically also shows in some of his diagrams, which are all-encompassing descriptions of how society functions as a whole. Much of the appeal of these diagrams comes precisely from the totalizing approach they display. Given the right context, they can appear either as the scribbles of a madman or as the unfolding reflections of an intellectual about society and its almost magical balance (sometimes actually referencing mystical symbols, like the Taijitu). The rise of ecological awareness was also the necessary ground for projects like The Limits to Growth,a report commissioned by the Club of Rome about exponential growth in a world with finite resources, which in recent times became an obsession of many conspiracy theories that see it as the perfect embodiment of the dreadful globalist elites pursuing a demonic anti-sovereigntism agenda. Some other examples of visual artifacts from that period that anticipated conspiratorial design are Dow Shalt Not Kill! U.S.A. - Union of Stoned Anarchists by Sture Johannesson, I Gerald Ford am the 38th Puppet of the United States by Emory Douglas and the project of the Knowledge Box by Ken Isaacs. The hippie countercultures of the 1960s were also the cultural humus of alternative epistemologies from which New Age movements emerged, and of which contemporary conspiracy theories are entrenched. The expression ‘hippie modernism’, coined by Blauvelt suggests a duality that sounds contradictory like the one that I propose with ‘conspiratorial design’. A good synthesis of the reason why I find such duality meaningful is expressed in an article by author Tommaso Guariento:
If we hold fast to the two teachings of the Corpus Hermeticum: that there is a Truth in the world, but it is concealed and that man aspires to liberation from his political, social and bodily shackles, we understand how, from the same Hermetic root, identity theories, victimhood, and racism, and emancipatory revolutionary forces can branch out.
I’m convinced that many aspects of contemporary culture are permeated by this spiritualist esoteric heritage. Not just design, as I briefly tried to suggest, but also many other enviroments, including of course conspiracy theories. We can notice this by observing how conspiracy theories embed various forms of mysticism and occultism, predicating the myth of an ancient epoch of greatness, in contrast to the pursuit, in contemporary society, of control through technology that suppresses our connection with the truth of the universe. We can observe it in the (just apparently) contradictory composition of QAnon followers, who adapted different spiritualist beliefs in a sort of magic conservatism. For example, it’s common in these contexts to find people who make traditionalist Christianity coexist with what we can consider as a sort of contemporary Lebensreform. The American alt-right is full of people who are, at the same time, promoting the importance of traditional Christian values to fight the alleged new wave of satanism and explaining how the healing power of crystals is a better alternative to the dangers of modern medicine. The contemporary chaotic cultural wars can be at least partially understood through some core ideas that have recurred throughout history and that were also key passages in the history of design. In other words, I think that, if 1960s utopist countercultures were the heirs of the ideas that inspired Bauhaus, contemporary conspiracy theorists are their deviated grandchildren.
