The Paranoid Style for Sale: Conspiracy Entrepreneurs, Marketplace Bots, and Surveillance Capitalism

If Richard Hofstadter's "paranoid style" is to have any purchase for thinking about contemporary America, we must recognize the ways in which it has been commodified and monetized. Hofstadter argues that this recurring political eccentricity has erupted at various points in history, often in order to alarm, persuade, and enlist others. Such rhetoric can secure advantage and power for the speaker and their cause. That is still true in certain renditions today—employing fearmongering conspiracism for political advantage is essential to figures like Trump, Bolsonaro, and Orbán. However, the paranoid style today is just as likely to be invoked and given form in the hope that it will yield a profit for conspiracy entrepreneurs. Indeed, ideological and commercial renditions combine as political actors themselves operate as conspiracy entrepreneurs. Rudy Giuliani, for example, regularly produced conspiracist infomercials, interspersing allegations about voter fraud with promotions of particular products and services (Harwell 2021). If the paranoid style has always been a part of the marketplace of ideas—simply one style of rhetoric and worldmaking from a suite of choices—it now animates commodities within the marketplace proper. In this article, I will consider not only what this intensified commodification means for how paranoid styles (in the plural) operate today, but also what role digital infrastructure has played in this process. I will begin by addressing this move from Hofstadter's initial idea to a proliferation of paranoid styles before charting the different ways in which the latter are commodified today.

Limits of the Paranoid Style

There are significant issues to acknowledge when engaging with Hofstadter's term. Michael Bütter's article in this issue offers a devastating critique of its historical accuracy and, therefore, of the erroneous assumptions it has led to in conspiracy theory studies. Other scholars have long pointed towards how the "paranoid style" pathologizes political opponents, despite Hofstadter's insistence on a difference between his own analogical usage and clinical invocations (see Knight 2000, 14; McKenzie-McHarg 2020). Such pathologization risks underestimating the appeal of a resurgent right (Olmsted 2018). Equally, it might tell us more about Hofstadter than those he is writing about, displaying, as Mark Fenster points out, a certain disdain for the masses. Fenster summarizes Hofstadter's stance: "Mass culture produced poor judgment, which in turn produced 'ugly art,' while the mass media produced an impoverished politics" (2008, 38). Moreover, in identifying a recurring tendency across history and fearing "the expansion of the paranoid style in the democratic order through the new mass man," we might be tempted to suggest that Hofstadter is himself somewhat paranoid about the occurrence and operation of the paranoid style, leading him to eschew historical specificity (Fenster 2008, 39). Peter Knight points out that while Hofstadter sets out to explain the prevalence of conspiracy theories, the essay fails to do so because it depends on a circular argument: "for what is paranoia if not a propensity to believe in conspiracy theories?" (2003, 19). Despite these serious issues with Hofstadter's argument, the "paranoid style" is useful as a marker for thinking about the commodification of conspiracy theory because it identifies a demonological "way of seeing the world and expressing oneself" (Hofstadter 1964, 4) that can be iterated again and again in new contexts, adapted for and by new audiences and markets.

Hofstadter locates several key features of the paranoid style: it is "Overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, apocalyptic" (1964, 4) and characterized by righteousness and moral indignation. "The central image is that of a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to undermine and destroy a way of life" (29). Crucially, "the distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a 'vast' or 'gigantic' conspiracy as the motive force in historical events" (29). Moreover, the paranoid stylist is not interested in compromise "in the manner of a working politician" (31), but rather sees the current situation as a Manichean fight between good and evil. Hofstadter notices that the...