On doing your own research: conspiracy theory, distributed intelligence, and the ethics of knowing

The models used to analyse conspiracy theory have often been individualistic; conspiracy theorists have been seen to embody either faulty epistemology (believing things neither true nor justified) or to suffer from psychopathology. In this article, I will argue that the conception of the (disordered) mind common to both is inadequate to the task, and instead that conspiracy theory is better conceived along lines supplied by what colleagues and I call “distributed intelligence”—the way in which human judgement circulates through various technologically mediated networks, subject to forms of contagion and reinforcement. At stake ultimately is not simply a set of epistemic issues, but a consideration of the ways in which certain forms and distributions of judgement entail ethical and political costs, ones which we need to be mindful of if we are to see conspiracy theory in terms more adequate to the phenomenon itself.