Pre-Millennium Tension: How 90’s Paranoia Paved the Way for QAnon
It was a theory so on-its-face absurd that it read like the midnight ramblings of a bored teenager (which it probably was): In the halls of American power, the story went, an internecine struggle was raging against opposing forces, good and evil. On one side were those who secretly ruled the world: a dark cabal of devil-worshipping pederasts responsible for all manner of notorious diablerie — from covering up the truth about UFOs to assassinating JFK. They ran human trafficking rings out of pizza parlors. They kidnapped, raped, and murdered children. They ate babies — a gruesome feat which they believed would make them immortal.
Worse still, these monsters occupied the upper echelons of American society — from Fortune 500 companies to the Democratic Party to Hollywood — and used their status and wealth to evade justice and conceal their appalling crimes. Their membership consisted not just of shadowy, behind-the-scenes puppet-masters, but of high-profile, ostensibly respectable, luminaries — people like George Soros, the Pope, and (of course) Tom Hanks.
Our only hope against these demons was that great defender of truth and freedom: Donald Trump. Recruited from reality-show obscurity by American military generals, Trump was charged with taking up the mantle of President (a title which he was to hold for life) so that he might save the world from these left-leaning baby-eaters. He would root them out, imprison them, and publicly execute them. Having thus exposed and thrown down the enemies of humankind, the lumpy-spray-tan-who-would-be-King would then usher in a gilded age of peace and plenty.
Although the story continues to metastasize, mostly in an attempt to retcon many of its now provably false predictions, the above constitutes the central doctrine of QAnon, the bizarre conspiracy theory that transformed, almost overnight, from a joke post on 4chan into a Right-wing crusade.
In a different time, one might have enjoyed the luxury of dismissing such nonsense as just another peculiar, if harmless, example of the public’s credulity. But no more. As inane as it is, the QAnon mythos has burrowed deep into the American psyche, and its widespread adoption has had far-reaching, real-world consequences. For this, people have killed. For this, people have died. For this, American democracy may yet be undone.
Let that sink in.
How could such a crude fantasy — so insane that it borders on comedy — be held as rock-solid truth by so many? How could it be so fervently believed that many of its adherents are willing to sacrifice their families, their careers — even their lives — in its name?
And in a world where even the most popular conspiracy theories are largely the preoccupation of a devoted fringe, just what is the outsize lure of this conspiracy theory? What about it has attracted so many “average” people into the fold?
To even begin to answer these questions, we have to more closely examine QAnon’s roots, which are deep and wide. And while it’s true that the QAnon myth shares a common ancestor with many American conspiracy theories — namely that toxic bouillabaisse of deep mistrust of authority, ingrained racism, and anti-intellectualism that traces its origins back to the founding of the Republic — QAnon is also a peculiarly modern phenomenon.
Ready to blame the internet? Hold that thought. Social Media may have given QAnon the air it needed to burn out of control, but the spark was lit well before; in the placid heyday of America’s not-so-distant past.
Paranoid Android
The 1990’s — at least in the West — were a decade largely characterized by optimism. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 brought an end to the Cold War, and with it the sudden shattering of a calcified geopolitical order that had held sway for nearly half a century. Perhaps a little too excited by these developments, intellectuals began to speculate unironically about the “end of history” — a new age in which liberal democracy, carried forward by the seemingly unbreakable wave of American hegemony, would reign forever.
Such a worldview may sound naïve now, but at the time there were plenty of reasons to be hopeful. After a slow start in the early years of the decade, the American economy boomed, enjoying its longest expansion in history. The widespread adoption of the Web in the mid to late 90’s signaled the arrival of a genuine sea change in communication — a digital democratization that appeared poised to further uplift society (and forge new paths to wealth). The fast-approaching year 2000 represented for many people not just the flipping of a page on the calendar, but the arrival of a long hoped for break with an ugly past; a new era of human prosperity.
The future, at long last, was here.
But there were dark undercurrents. Belying the upbeat tone of the era, “mainstream” music seemed to grow gloomier, more complex, almost despairing. The “Alternative” movement, though it encompassed (and was quickly replaced by) cloying pop, was really just a series of footnotes to Nirvana, a Seattle trio that eschewed commercial viability in favor of a raucous contemptus mundi — one that gleefully derided the strictures of fame, even if it was never able to fully reject its temptations.
Nirvana’s disaffection owed much to the hard Right turn of America in the 80’s: Reagan’s faithless dismantling of the social contract, a world paralyzed by the Cold War, and a homegrown capitalism that promised only the plastic lure of material comforts, while delivering only an increasingly stratified society. But front-man Kurt Cobain’s estrangement from the world gradually morphed into an estrangement from life itself, a kind of “is that all there is?” malaise that spoke to a generation discovering that the “end of history” brought with it nothing more than the trading in of one form of existential dread — atomic annihilation — for another: a consumerist wasteland, a boring 9–5, a life without direction or meaning.
Nirvana’s music perfectly captured the weird schizophrenia of this new age: beautiful, Beatles-esque harmonies were buried deep under angular guitar riffs or piles of discordant sludge. Cobain’s serrated, desperate voice — less a teenage rebellion than an evisceration of the self, was a raging, multi-layered yawp of contempt, vulnerability, and fear. Even the band’s fashion sense — a pointed rejection of capitalist excess — was immediately (and predictably) co-opted by the market, just one of the many affronts that started the “Grunge” sound on its decade-long decline from vital cultural moment to flannel-clad parody.
Nirvana, in person and on record, didn’t embody a cohesive position so much as they channeled a mood — fans came for Nevermind’s frenetic, punk-rock-with-production-value fun, they stayed for Cobain’s vicious melancholy. It was this longing, this sarcasm bored with itself, this craving for truth in a nation where truth was often a danger to the bottom line, that resonated with a (mostly affluent) generation that had no wars to fight, no nations to hate, no hills to die on. Nirvana, for all its convulsive roar, was bedroom music: self-reflection masquerading as stadium spectacle.
Six years after Nirvana forever altered the cultural landscape, 90’s Alternative would reach its desolate apotheosis with Radiohead’s OK Computer, in many ways a bookend to Nirvana’s Nevermind. Arriving in 1997, it was a puzzling, labyrinthine musical statement, one that signaled a final break with the radio-friendly bombast of the band’s early 90’s work, and the beginning of their descent into an unsteady, tempestuous relationship with the mainstream.
OK Computer was seemingly custom-built for critical adulation: it was sonically adventurous, beautiful, frightening, mysterious. Thom Yorke’s detached vocals — an ethereal human voice trapped within the album’s synthetic aural landscapes, was by turns angry, wise, and acerbic, but also utterly defeated — Kurt Cobain’s animal pain anesthetized into crystalline oblivion.
Dissecting the album remains a pastime even today, but whatever other messages OK Computer might be hiding, one seems plain: namely, that the modern world is becoming increasingly hostile to human needs, a dismal state of affairs that the coming millennium — far from offering a utopian reprieve — will only make worse.
OK Computer, with its repudiation of the rote machinations of capitalism, its suspicion of technology, and its free-floating anxiety about what’s to come, might be the decade’s most prescient artistic declaration, a nightmare vision into a near-future where one does not rage against the machine so much as one is blindly subsumed within it.
But Radiohead’s magnum opus was by no means alone in its unsettling conclusions. Elsewhere, 80’s icons like N.W.A. and Public Enemy set the stage for Hip Hop’s brutal, vital interrogation of America’s racist past (and present). Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails went whole hog, embracing a callow nihilism. Nas’ legendary Illmatic burst on the scene in 1994, perhaps the most gorgeous evocation of urban decay ever committed to wax, and so-called “gangsta rap” — though it too would soon crumble to the level of satire — concealed within its glorification of violence and crime uncomfortable truths about a nation that cheerily brutalized its most vulnerable citizens, even at the supposed height of its prosperity.
All of this music deals, in one way or another, in the human condition, but it’s also something more: a testament to an age of anxiety. At a time when positivity appeared to rule the day, when it seemed “we” had won the war of ideals and utopia had at last arrived, these artists were grappling with a new world that didn’t seem all that new at all. The victorious capitalist empire, no longer able to call upon the Soviet boogeyman to justify its excesses and failures, found the spotlight turned on itself, and not everyone liked what they saw.
Its chief enemy suddenly deposed, America moved quickly to find a new one. The most dynamic music of the era, searching for a way forward in a fractured, complex world, pointed toward one: Us.
The Truth is Out There
This torch was quickly taken up by the pop-culture mainstream, who absorbed the decade’s prevailing air of unease while often ignoring, or misinterpreting, its root causes. Chris Carter’s The X-Files, one of the most popular shows of the 90’s, was a brilliant, if sometimes overwrought, synthesis of American paranoia. In its “monster of the week” episodes, it posited a world where nearly every horror, myth, or urban legend just might be real, from ghosts to UFOs to the Jersey Devil.
But the true leitmotif of The X-Files was its idea of a vast conspiracy; of elder, nondescript men in dark suits hiding in the shadows or meeting in dimly lit, smoke-filled board rooms, formulating lies within lies to fool — and even endanger — the public. All of this was done in the name of concealing monstrous, harrowing truths — truths that would rock the world, or even end it.
Pitted against these high-muck-a-mucks were crusading FBI agents Mulder and Scully (David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson), who ostensibly operated as a sort of fifth column within the Bureau, both a part of the government and deeply antagonistic towards it (more so for Duchovny’s Mulder, who one imagines would have been delighted by Q’s 4chan posts). The duo, relegated to the X-Files — a nowhere assignment within the FBI where weird tales of the paranormal go to die — was forced to wage a two-person war to uncover the great, hidden meaning of it all (spoiler alert: it was aliens).
What’s interesting about The X-Files is its grand design, its drive to encompass so many varied, seemingly incompatible, conspiracies under one, overarching mythos. This is partly done for reasons of simple novelty, of course (why focus on one monster when you can have them all?) but there’s also something searching, almost desperate, about the show’s need to create a new ur-myth, one that would consolidate the sprawling bramble of 20th century conspiracy and re-conceptualize it as a streamlined, logical whole — a trait that it shares with QAnon, which in some flavors simply lists every major event from history and asserts that they’re directly connected.
Naturally, “the government” served as the central fixture in this grand unified theory. In the show’s universe, as in so many modern conspiracies, the government is an entity unto itself, the dynamic all-father at the center of American life. It is both feared and revered, an unknowable black box with the money, reach, and power to protect, punish, and conceal. Every mystery, it seems, begins and ends behind the sealed doors of its tortuous bureaucracy — a convenient narrative terminator, both for the show and the myths it mined for content.
In casting big government as its antagonist, The X-Files cannily tapped into a deep, paradoxical part of the American psyche, one that worships power even as it professes to despise it. While many Americans are perfectly content— even proud — to see the lumbering strength of the State used to punish their supposed “enemies” (whether foreign or domestic) that animus comes with a price: they must live with the uncomfortable knowledge that this same power could be turned on them, too. Hence the perennial fear — even among those who imagine that they sit at the top of the capitalist hierarchy — that “they” are behind some nefarious scheme or trick, that “they” are merely biding their time, waiting to one day strip the entire populace of their fundamental freedoms, that “they” are hiding “something.” It is this contorted worldview, too, that forms the core philosophy of QAnon followers, who cast themselves as both the obedient servant of American power and the righteous resister of it — which side shows its face all depends, of course, on who is presumed to wield that power at the present moment.
The X-Files didn’t invent the idea of nefarious government plots or high-level cover-ups, of course. The government did that. And this is an important point to remember: One reason why conspiracies about the government enjoy such a hold on the popular imagination is because real conspiracies do, in fact, exist.
Given that reality, cynicism — even distrust — is wholly warranted, but it can also lead us astray. Those who proffer “deep-state” conspiracies are on the right track — they are suspicious of power structures, of their monopolies on information and violence, and of the elites who inhabit them. But from these admirable misgivings they too often draw the wrong conclusions. Possessing only the individual’s power of investigation, dismissive of their own prejudices, and often lacking in critical thinking skills, believers quickly give up attempting to follow the complicated, banal threads of the truth (when they try at all). Instead, they gravitate towards a sexier, more readily comprehended worldview — one filled with specious, easy-to-follow narratives or regurgitated Hollywood nonsense.
That isn’t to say that The X-Files is to blame for QAnon, obviously; noting America’s paranoia about big government was hardly an original observation, even in the early 90’s. But what the show did put out into the world, what it was both informed by and then amplified, was the idea that the State was in and of itself a broken, dangerous thing, a notion that had had its most recent historical antecedents in the Red Scare of previous decades, and has been held as gospel truth by American politicians ever since. This, too, is an unfortunate half-truth but, as mentioned above, such half-truths form the core of conspiracy theories — they are all the push that is needed for many people to dive headlong into the abyss of uncritical fantasy.
Potentially more damaging is the fact that, in its meta-narrative conspiracy theory about conspiracies, The X-Files set the stage for that most Republican of pastimes: incorporating inconsistency into the truth. Indeed, logical inconsistency was not a bug of the show, but a feature. Every innocuous occurrence was indicative of a grander design, every apparent misstep was part of a complex waltz, every truth concealed a lie, every lie concealed a bigger lie. It was a bottomless pit of paranoia that QAnon (with a helpful assist from Russian state actors) would take up with aplomb, fostering confusion and illogic as an end unto itself, turning the explanatory power of the grand conspiracy on its head in order to protect it from any and all explication. It was an approach that transmuted winking art into a semi-serious, real world narrative that only seemed to be clueless, formless, brainless. Instead, everything was connected. Everything mattered.
The truth, you see, was out there, you just weren’t looking hard enough.
Wake Up, Neo
Film, too, reflected the split personality of the decade. Alongside the usual big-budget fluff like Forrest Gump and Titanic, there arose similar trends of self-reflection, paranoia, and uncertainty that slowly crept up from the underground and into the multiplex.
The first hints of these trends were located in the burgeoning independent scene — made possible by advances in technology that lowered the barrier of entry for low-budget, non-studio affiliated filmmakers — which began to make waves in the early years of the 90’s. Less concerned with appealing to a broad audience, these movies edged closer to the core of everyday life, and importantly, everyday people actually watched them. Cult films like Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1990), which explored the pleasures of rejecting convention, and Kevin Smith’s surprise hit Clerks (1994), which ruminated on the sometimes painful consequences of doing so, captured the prevailing spirit of youthful rootlessness on screen. Early-in-the-decade films like My Own Private Idaho (1991) and The Crying Game (1992) presented fully-realized, sympathetic LGBT characters to mainstream audiences, the beginning of a pop-culture flowering that would challenge status quo views of sexuality throughout the decade (and unsettle many conservatives in the process). Elsewhere, Quentin Tarantino, who rose to fame with 1994’s Pulp Fiction, achieved wide success by remixing American cinema itself — both reducing it to pastiche and elevating it in the process.
Major Hollywood studios soon caught on. Two of the biggest hits of 1999, David Fincher’s Fight Club and the Wachowskis’ The Matrix, explored themes of social isolation in a world increasingly devoid of authentic experience or genuine human connection; one that seemed to be composed of nothing but vapor — signs, symbols, commodities, machine code.
Fight Club, at its core, was a parable of capitalist alienation without the courage of its convictions. The film dressed up its disgust with American society in a somewhat pedestrian tale of white victimization and emasculation, a hot take that would resonate deeply with many right-wing movements, then and now. In common with conspiracists, people in these movements felt the same nebulous discontent as everyone else, but they were unable, or unwilling, to seek out its locus. As such, they were forced to plug this mental gap with their own prejudices, fears, and desires, blaming “out” groups for their miseries. This was a dissociative view — born of trauma and guilt — and one that never found the courage to address the systemic failures of capitalism, primarily because it was these failures that, while stripping such people of their agency, also enabled their dominance.
The Matrix was a more interesting film. Despite being a (very effective) action blockbuster, replete with arresting CGI and thrilling “wire fu” fight sequences, the movie was also a near-perfect summing up of the decade’s shifting influences. The story, about a dispossessed office worker named Thomas Anderson (AKA Neo) who discovers that the “real” world he inhabits is actually a computer simulation run by vengeful machines, mixes elements of early 90’s “drop-out” culture (society is not worth your time) with late 90’s cyberpunk dystopia (society will be undone by technology).
Both of these viewpoints see the world as unreal, a place that the average person is utterly and irretrievably separated from. This is because the world is lacking in genuineness — that great obsession of Generation X — and is interested not in human needs but in the products of its culture: largely bland, mind-numbing entertainments, advertisements, or propagandistic sentiments that subtly (and not-so-subtly) reinforce the status quo.
In The Matrix, of course, the world is literally unreal, but it is also the world of capitalism at its late 90’s apex — dull, outwardly anodyne, apparently welcoming — yet imbued with a vague sense of bondage, of violence, of deceit. Neo is the Jesus-figure who pulls down this veil, exposing this seductive lie for the horror that it truly is. But the film ends with only a partial victory — Neo does not destroy the machines or their illusory world, he only promises to reveal the truth of it to those ready to listen. He is thus Jesus resurrected and Jesus the itinerant preacher rolled into one: a voice in the wilderness speaking truth to power, gathering disciples for the coming apocalypse.
The Matrix, like The X-Files before it, does not innovate so much as it harmonizes. Creating a patchwork myth from disparate sources old and new, it slyly incorporates ancient archetypes and modern fears into a slick package of black leather and dark sunglasses, one accessible to a modern audience who may be only dimly aware of its influences, or their own, deeply-embedded cultural ethos. It puts a spin on the (by then tried-and-true) fear of “big brother” by making its government “agents” literal ghosts in the machine, intangible entities who can kidnap and kill with impunity, who can see you everywhere, and find you anywhere. It was a new level of paranoia, one informed by the burgeoning information age, a warning of the dangers of technology in the hands of a military-corporate complex who seemed to lack in nothing except morality.
The Age of Anxiety
The above examples are necessarily limited, and by no means representative of the full scope of 90’s culture (this was also the decade of Saved by the Bell and Friends, after all). But it’s precisely this odd dichotomy, coupled with their mainstream appeal, that makes these examples so instructive. What was all of this searching, all of this paranoia, all of this anxiety doing in a period of relative calm?
Perhaps it’s true that, in the words of Nietzsche, “under peaceful conditions a warlike man sets upon himself,” and that there is something deep within human nature, something terrible, which will simply not let us rest. This something invents horrors where none exist — it abhors the unknown darkness so much that it would rather populate it with monsters than accept the banality of human motives, the mystifying silence of the universe.
But it’s also true that the America of the 90’s, although it could escape the Cold War, could not escape the damage to the national psyche that it had caused. For nearly fifty years Americans had heard the drum beats of war, they had known only the concrete dread of a far away enemy, awesomely powerful, and out there, and maybe even here, too, in our own towns and cities.
And then suddenly, almost overnight, it was gone.
In the 90’s — with the war won and prosperity rising — America turned inward, and found within itself not joy, but fear. It was a peculiarly American nightmare, one that took on the appearance of popular art, but it would prove instructive — and a real danger — if ever the dreamers awoke. And in time, they did.
