BIRTHING DEATH; 365 Impressions of a Dying World vol.5

I think it's important to keep on top of conspiracy theories so that you're better equiped to deflect them from legitimate discourse. In that spirit I've been reading David Icke for a few years now and while his theories of lizard-people and multi-dimensional energy prisons around the planet are fun, they're also telling of certain beliefs about the world that flat-earthers and anti-vaccers and anti-maskers all share in their respective crusades against the tyranny of empirical fact. Obviously this common element is the belief in secret societies influencing events, operating clandestinely while a veneer of fictitious democracy is maintained. Belief in secret societies is perhaps the founding gesture of all conspiracy theory, in as much as a conspiracy is defined as secret coordination behind the scenes. An orchestrated undermining of a mainstream narrative. A movement of synchronised insubordination. In this vein conspiracy isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm sure the authoritarian regimes of the Arab Spring felt conspired against when thousands of pro-democracy. protesters used social media to organise themselves effectively (though sadly the dictator they ousted was merely replaced by another). But David Icke is special in that he characterises governments who may or may not be inadequately executing their promise of democratic rule while merely performing democracy, meanwhile making any decision they please behind closed doors for which they're very rarely held to account; yes, Icke is special because he characterises the failings of a democratic system being incrementally undermined by deregulated market forces and burgeoning corporate super-entities, as reptilian otherworldly overlords. Creating a mythic, a fantastic narrative of vampiric powers versus the mired every-man, a sort of corporate surrealism which Grimes herself has pitched as her aesthetic of the moment (towards which Miss Anthropocene is a kind of thesis). In this way, seeing as it's the aesthetic synthesis of a myriad of timely variables and factors into a coherent (if conspicuously ridiculous) thread, Icke's meta-stories of alien espionage and dimensional saviours are on a par with Art with a Capital A; for me, anyway.