Implicit conspiracies and unreadable maps

This week: how the big London Overground naming exercise shows it’s time for a new tube map. But first: why do we go looking for conspiracies?

When Tom Phillips and I were planning the conspiracies book, one of the topics we knew we had to cover was aliens. Extraterrestrial life has been a mainstay of conspiracy theories going back decades, ever since what was probably the remains of a high-tech USAAF spy balloon hit the ground somewhere near Roswell, New Mexico, back in 1947. In the 1990s, the age of The X-Files and Men in Black, when both Tom and I were young and conspiracism was briefly cool, the idea that we were not alone in the universe was absolutely central to the trend.

The odd thing about this – a thing which, I’m embarrassed to admit, I required Tom to point out – is there’s no inherent connection between aliens and conspiracy theories at all. They’re entirely separate phenomena, and you can believe in life on other worlds without requiring a conspiracist mindset to justify the fact. 

Where you do require that mindset, though, is to justify the apparent lack of evidence that aliens have visited the Earth. If you believe not only that aliens exist, but that they’ve been popping by for coffee, then logically there would be signs of them, whether in the form of suspiciously regular space signals or actual alien spacecraft. So far as we tell though, though, there’s nothing. If aliens do exist, then logically we are being kept in the dark – either by the neighbours, who don’t want to talk to us, or by the governments or corporations who are hiding what they know for their own sinister reasons. The mountain of conspiracy theories relating to Roswell and Area 51 and mysterious lights in the sky and so on are there, primarily, not to explain evidence but its complete and total absence.

We called this “implicit conspiracism”: the use of a conspiracy theory to explain away the clash between a belief and the facts that contradict it, to avoid the psychological pain required to admit you believed something that simply wasn’t true. Once you start looking for it, the impulse to create ever more complicated narratives to justify such clashes is everywhere:

• “I am a rational, moderate man, so my beliefs must be rational and moderate. So evidence that those beliefs are not perceived as such by the media/academia/Twitter just goes to show those groups have fallen to extremists.”

• “This politician I like is good, therefore any evidence they have done something bad must be a lie. Those who spread it are either dupes or in on the conspiracy.”

• “This person I am attracted to has failed to text me back – perhaps they have been in an accident, or their phone ran out of battery and their charger broke three days ago and they've not been able to get into their email account, or…”

• “People who share my belief system have been in power for over a decade, yet the paradise I predicted has failed to result. Perhaps they didn't really share my belief system at all – or perhaps government is not where power truly resides, and instead they have been stymied by some kind of ‘deep state’...”

And so on, and so on.

I’m not sure all of those examples can be termed “implicit conspiracism”, for the simple reason that not all of the resulting narratives require conspiracies. The phenomenon I’m describing is a response to cognitive dissonance, and overlaps with various theories like “hold come what may”, assimilation bias, and confirmation bias; but I’ve not been able to find a single umbrella term for the willingness to build increasingly outlandish theories simply to avoid revising a prior. It seems to be a sort of inversion of Occam’s Razor, so I’m going to propose “Ripley’s Beard”, after the village on the other side of the A3 from Ockham, but I’m not particularly expecting it to catch on.

The reason I’ve been thinking about all of this is because of something that leapt out at me about the Post Office scandal, which dominated the British press in the early weeks of this year and seems, thanks to business secretary Kemi Badenoch’s world-beating abilities to make enemies in an empty room, to be back. The extremely short version is that, in the late 1990s, the Post Office introduced a new accounting system, Horizon, that was prone to error. This resulted, over a period of just over 15 years, in literally hundreds of subpostmasters being wrongly charged with fraud. Given the scale and suddenness of this increase, something had obviously gone wrong with the accounting software.

But the Post Office couldn’t admit that. So instead, it came up with an ever complicating theory, in which ever more subpostmasters had stolen from it, just so that it didn’t have to throw out its ideological prior that its software worked fine.

Another point made in Conspiracy – another, come to that, I should credit to Tom – is that conspiracism is not just something the masses engage in, but something often propagated by elites trying to explain away inconvenient facts. The Horizon scandal is a reminder that this applies to implicit conspiracism – the Ripley’s Beard phenomenon – just as much, and that it can afflict institutions as well as individuals. We really should give it a name. 

Hey, talking of books…

My friend has a book out! 

Ha, didn’t see that one coming, did you? Thought I’d promote someone else for a change. Deterring Armageddon: A Biography of NATO is the result of several years’ hard work by one of my oldest friends, Reuters’ global affairs correspondent Peter Apps, a man I have known long enough that just trying to think of ways to describe it short-circuits my brain.¹ I have only had a chance to flick through the early chapters, but now my own new book is finally, finally done, I am looking forward to a chance to kick back, relax and learn about how the world has not thus far dissolved into nuclear fire.

Please do feel free to pre-order my book A History of the World in 47 Borders too, though. More than one of my early readers has told me they immediately passed it onto a family member, so I’m starting to suspect it might actually be… good?

Anyway. One of the most popular genres of columns, with those who write them if not those who have to read the bloody things, can concisely be summed up thus: “This latest news just confirms the need to do the thing I’ve always thought we should do anyway.” I mention this here, just so you understand that there is at least a modicum of self-awareness in everything that follows.

Transport for London’s decision to split the London Overground into six shows why we need a new tube map

Four years ago, in a shameless bid for viral nerd content, I started a Twitter thread about why the London Overground network should have names and what they would be if it did. That turned into an article, and a few months later I persuaded Rory Stewart, of all people, to take an interest in the plan during his brief and bizarre period of walking the streets of London asking strangers if they might offer him a place to sleep and also if they’d like him to be mayor. A year after that, a promise to create individual line identities found its way into Sadiq Khan’s 2021 manifesto, and while the only evidence I have that this was anything to do with me is a half-remembered conversation with a policy advisor at the next year’s Labour Conference, I’ll take it. 

All of which means that last Thursday, when Transport for London unveiled the names of the new lines, and the whole city spent hours furiously debating them, was a pretty big day for me personally. I wrote about the new names for the Guardian. I talked about it on the BBC World Service’s Newshour (from minute 49). I got a pretty big kick out of imagining listeners in Toronto or Tehran listening, baffled, while I debated the finer points of London transport nomenclature.² 

But I, very much the Mick Jagger of transport commentary, am not satisfied. There is more to be done. As I told the audibly shocked BBC World Service presenter, Tim Franks, when he praised the clarity of London’s tube map, the map lost its way a very long time ago. The rebranding of the Overground provides a great moment to rethink things from first principles.