JFK and the Love Bug: The “As If” Solution

In May of this year the ILOVEYOU (“Love Bug”) computer virus hit computer networks across the globe. Almost as speedy as the chain reaction of the e-plague itself, conspiracy theories about the episode ricocheted around the Internet (Net). Although I didn’t receive the Love Bug itself (and yes, I felt aggrieved like other Netizens that somehow I was out of the loop), I did receive several multi-forwarded “explanations” of the event. All agreed that Onel de Guzman, the Filipino computer student charged with the crime, was only a fall guy. Some argued that the music industry had created a virus which infected MP3 music files as a clandestine way of destroying the freebie music-sharing Napster community—something the industry had failed to do through the courts. Noting that the virus also attacked image files, others insisted that the porn industry would have most to gain from a virus which would require users to download all their illicit images again. Some pundits speculated that the antivirus software industry are the ones who are most likely to benefit from such a virus: nothing like creating a little paranoia in order to drum up business. Finally, some pointed the finger at Microsoft, suggesting that it had unique access to the source code of the e-mail program involved in the case, as well as a mammoth grudge in the wake of court rulings against its monopoly position.

As conspiracy theories go, these were not very impressive. For one thing, it turned out that the virus didn’t destroy either music or image files. What’s more, de Guzman’s digital fingerprints were all over the viral software, and he even admitted to creating it (though he never intended to cause such wide scale chaos, he said). Unlike the traditional kind of right-wing extremist “paranoid style” described by Richard Hofstadter, conspiracy theories about the Love Bug didn’t seem the products of a rigid demonological outlook which seeks to blame current woes on often blameless minority scapegoats. These were idle, not ideological, speculations. Neither did these theories fit the familiar pattern of a post-1960s counter-cultural suspiciousness about the authorities and the intelligence agencies. Casual talk of a “patsy” in this case was a far cry from the detailed investigations into Lee Harvey Oswald’s role in the Kennedy assassination. Rather, the conspiracy rumors that circulated around the Net in the wake of the epidemic were on-the-fly reactions to a calamity in the making; they were the gossip of the global village, part joke and part anxious commentary.

Now, it might be tempting to dismiss this kind of ad hoc cyberparanoia as an insignificant example of conspiracy thinking, small fry compared to the deep sea catches of political assassinations, anti-Semitism, or the militias. I would suggest, however, that these sorts of everyday, take-it-or-leave-it rumors are precisely what makes conspiracy talk so prevalent—and also so hard to pin down. These stories, it must be admitted, were not without a certain resonance and wit. Pinning the blame on Microsoft or the anti-Napster campaign, for example, cut to the chase of many current debates about the future of the Internet, that symbolic product of atomic age paranoia that was hijacked

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once by the utopian but aging boomer generation, and then hijacked once more by commerce.

Although these conspiratorial e-mails might originally have been written with paranoid conviction, by the time they reached my inbox in a convoluted passage through cyberspace they had taken on barnacled layers of irony. Did the person who forwarded them to me believe in them? Well, I suspect not, but at some stage down the line someone might have, of a fashion. Did I believe in them? Not really. Or rather, not totally. Even though I knew that they were (probably) false, nevertheless I felt a momentary attraction to them. What if they were true? But then again, what if they weren’t—could a college boy’s prank accidentally bring the Western world to its knees?

I suspect that I am not alone in my half-ironic, half-serious engagement with such conspiracy-minded rumors. Although the Kennedy assassination inspires both passionate endorsement and dismissals of clandestine explanations, like many other people I find myself caught somewhere between the two poles. Some of the conspiracy research strikes me as compelling in its discovery of discrepancies in the official record, or of evidence of various possible plots. On the other hand, I suspect that, given infinite time and patience, I could knock holes in most of these theories. But the case all too quickly enters an infinite regress of faith and doubt, sucking the amateur inquirer into its labyrinthine complexity. Each seemingly definitive revelation in the end contributes only to a sense that the truth will be endlessly postponed, leaving most investigators in perpetual hermeneutic limbo. I find myself thus suspended between not really believing that there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, and not really disbelieving it either. Even if it turns out to have been the lone gunman all along (even though, as a card-carrying cultural studies scholar, I would claim that the source and meaning of any action is never purely “lone”), the alternative theories retain some plausibility. Adapting Freud’s term, we might say that the event is overdetermined: even if one particular explanation turns out to be true (though how would we ever know for certain?), in many cases the rival theories might as well be true. Even when we know (or should know better) that there isn’t a conspiratorial explanation to current events, we might still sometimes believe in the stories as if they were true.

This form of provisional, self-undermining belief is hard to pick up on the radar screens of the two traditional explanations for conspiracy thinking. The first insists that talk of conspiracy is the symptom of deluded scaremongering—a spontaneous but ultimately rigid product of something akin to mass paranoia, in short. But diagnosing talk of conspiracy as the outpourings of a troubled (collective) mind only works if people actually fully believe in the allegations—if the theories are unconscious symptoms, in effect. The other standard theory of conspiracy theory argues that demonological rumors are often cynically promoted by the powers that be in order to legitimate their own sinister policies. But this view also requires that the gullible masses are still totally taken in by the scaremongering stories they’ve had forced up on them—hardly true in the case of the typical take-it-or-leave-it toying with conspiracy theories in the case of the JFK assassination or the Love Bug.

If I am right that many people don’t really believe or fully disbelieve in the conspiracy stories they circulate and consume, then much of the current earnest alarm about the gullibility of the masses is misplaced—as is the equally earnest celebration of a savvy popular scepticism towards authority. Admittedly, there are many examples of delusional and dangerous conspiracy-mongering, but not everyone who tunes into the culture of conspiracy is a gun-toting militiaman or a dope-addled counterculture rebel. Quite possibly many people are, like me, partly a half-ironic participant and partly an armchair sociologist searching for signs of popular paranoia. It’s always other people who are the really paranoid ones, we comfort ourselves, as we watch an episode of The X-Files.

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