Am I A Spy? And Other Conspiracies

Why we look for conspiracies that aren't there, while we miss the ones that are.

“When in Doubt, Inject Fear” by Robin White

Alright, boys and girls. It’s time to talk.

Last week (and I can’t believe I’m about to write this), I published a piece in the Irish Times that was satirical, absurdist, and not remotely serious — on what to do if you detect a spy in your presence. Now, I’ve written a lot in the mainstream. A lot. But this piece? For reasons I never quite understand when some things I write resonate and others don’t, this one made people lose their minds.

Because, they asked en masse:

Is Sinéad a spy?

Now, call me crazy, but I suspect that spies, as a matter of professional conduct, do not write columns in the national paper to explain how to catch spies. It’s not, as far as I understand the tradecraft, a core part of the job. Espionage is generally understood to go better when fewer people are thinking about it, not when a woman is publishing a how-to guide with her own name and photograph attached, above the fold.

But — and I did hear this, many times, over the past week — that’s exactly what a spy would say.

Which got me really thinking about what people believe and why. Specifically about how a person can be so utterly, cinematically convinced of something that is absurdly, provably not true, while the real and alarming stuff plays out in broad daylight, and unremarkably so.

So today, I want to write about conspiracies.

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Here is a short quiz: which are real and which are crazily fake? No cheating.

The Irish government, in cahoots with the Catholic Church, ran institutions in which thousands of women were imprisoned as work-horses for most of the twentieth century, and everybody knew about it. A researcher in Tuam who claimed there were hundreds of dead children in unmarked graves was treated as a local lunatic. The moon landings happened inside a West Hollywood film set. The 9/11 attacks were secretly carried out by the American government against American people to justify a war against a country to remove their weapons, but in which there were no weapons and only oil. In the mid-twentieth century the American government made a plan to carry out a fake terrorist attack against its own people to justify a war against a country in which Americans wanted regime change. A Washington DC pizza joint was hiding the trafficking and blood-drinking of children for senior political figures. Senior political figures and celebrities coordinated a trafficking and sex-slave ring of children for decades – many of whom went through an eerie number of dental procedures on a tiny Caribbean island. A tiny élite fund a vast network of think tanks that shape the laws that you live under; the same élites that control the technology that ensures you adhere to such laws. The earth is flat and it is in the interest of Big Aeroplane if we never discussed it. These same aeroplanes are spraying chemicals amidst the clouds in an attempt to control the population. A cabal has, for decades now, convinced you to vaccinate yourself with a medicine that is spreading a deadly virus through the global blood supply.

So…

Some of those are true. And some are insane. But most crazily of all, it can be hard to decipher between the statements that are fever dreams and those which legitimately happened; they don’t necessarily look any different from the outside.

Which should probably bother you more than it does. Because we tend to use that word – conspiracy – as if we all agree on what it means. But we don’t! In fact, the term is usually used to end a conversation, not to start one. To make it known where you stand on a particular issue. To induce the term “conspiracy theory” is to tell someone, in two words, your politics, your class, your media indulgences, and your opinion of the human being across from you.

But the quiz you just failed (and you probably did fail it, at least a little) suggests we don’t actually know what the word means. Half of those sentences are conspiracies that actually happened. Calling them “conspiracy theories” would be insane. The other half are conspiracies that didn’t, and believing them is what’s insane.

What about the conspiracy theory that the government secretly reads all of our text messages? Or that a food company knew its product was killing people, and tried to hide the science? Or that a plastics company knew its plastics were killing people, which also tried to hide the science? That it is a nutjob’s obsession when discussing tobacco, but an award-winning Netflix documentary when it is about opioids. What about the fact that Boeing tried to actually kill its engineers who knew its engineering was sub-standard? Is any of this really crazy? Or indeed that QAnon derangement syndrome turned out to be verifiably true about another culprit by the name of Epstein, under whose accurate court documents show him to be equally monstrously evil.

So my point is, what even is a “conspiracy theory”? An unbelieved truth? An untruthed belief? Maybe?

The Anatomy of Conspiracies

The conspiracy theories that people often talk about are more than just beliefs that some people find galling (even if I can’t recall a nice conspiracy). Regardless of the official meaning of a conspiracy, I have spent long enough working in the world adjacent to these topics to have come up with my own, which has three parts.

The first is an observation about something real that doesn’t quite seem right; something doesn’t make sense with how you think the world should work. How does a country that is drowning in corporate tax receipt money remain perpetually unable to build a hospital? How does an institution fail that many times over, always exactly in the same way, far beyond the point of where incompetence can seem to explain such a mess? This part of a conspiracy is almost always legitimate. In fact, this key observation is the niggling feeling of truth against a backdrop that doesn’t support it, and it is why conspiracy theorists so often feel (correctly!) that they have noticed something that the people around them have not.

The second is a premise that nothing is happening without a powerful actor making it so; an assumption that is usually never actually said aloud. This can be because not even the person believing a conspiracy is aware of this implicit idea that every outcome is fully intended by someone. That there are no such things as accidents.

The third part is the existence of an “agent”, and I don’t necessarily mean a spy. If the second part refers to the fact that coordination is in fact happening, the third part refers to who may be doing that coordination. A billionaire funder, the cabal, an intelligence handler, George Soros, Taylor Swift.

So, structurally:

A conspiracy theory is a true observation, which seems inexplicable compared to its context, and so is explained by an invented and powerful agent, whose existence is required by an often subconscious and unexamined premise that everything must be the result of strings being pulled, somewhere.

And that’s one kind of explanation, but… it isn’t the only one.

Because underneath this definition there is an infinitely bigger issue, which is that: Conspiracy theories? Yeah, they’re not really a theory about conspiracies! It is actually a theory about something else entirely – coordination and power.

And in fact the hard part about deciphering between “real” and “fake” conspiracies is that coordination itself is not a binary mechanism. Think about the different types of entities that coordinate, each of them differently: governments; companies; culture; militaries; political movements; technologies. So the question then is not: does coordination exist? [If yes, then conspiracy; if not, then none].

Instead, it becomes:

What kind of coordination is there? And what can this tell us about power?

Coordination is one of the most foundational technologies of civilization; it is the entity that allows institutions, markets, governments, religions, politics to exist in the first place. To understand how humans coordinate with each other, therefore, is to understand the very idea of power itself.

My frustration with all of these endless discussions of conspiracy theories isn’t that they take conspiracies too seriously, as the mainstream endlessly laments, but that we have become incredibly bad at figuring out the difference between the types of coordination that feels like a conspiracy, while the actually “nefarious” coordination that we should care about are happening in plain sight.

Gah! Let’s continue.

Coordination Type One: Emergence

This is the explanation that conspiracy lunatics really despise, mostly because it’s the one that leaves nobody to be angry at.

So let’s look at this type as seen through the eyes of one of the world’s most favorite conspiracy theories: the World Economic Forum. Every January the powerful elites round themselves up by jetting into the Swiss mountainous village of Davos, where they sit on stages babbling harmoniously in management-consultant tongue, possessed and convulsing by the spirits of capitalism, lamenting the woes that only the very rich can resolve; that we must “reimagine capitalism” and “build back better” and “harness the fourth industrial revolution”. A thousand people worth 99% of the world’s wealth, all somehow regurgitating the tiny vocabulary, as if it were being exorcised out of them, while dressed like a flock of starlings in their identical Patagonia vests.

So yes, people look at that synchrony and conclude the most obvious thing possible: this has been heavily coordinated, and that this is the outcome of somebody’s evil plan. Somewhere, very far away from Davos, there is a room where it was all decided. And the tragic by-products of capitalism are the heavily-pursued outcomes of such a decision.

Well, let me say this. The pattern that people notice is very real — which is the part the tinfoil hatters get right. Thousands of the world’s most powerful people are very much screwing over the same people, in the same ways, at the same time. The reason for this, however, is where the conspiracy breaks down. Because there was no meeting where “this” (i.e. fucking over the little man; inducing globalism to very specifically eradicate Main Street and to create a two-tier system run by Wall Street) was decided.

Why am I so sure about this? Simply because there didn’t need to be a plan! What if all of these global executives are reading the same financial statements, facing the same interest rates, and chasing the same technology, such that they arrive at the same conclusions without exchanging a word. So yes, the seeming mirroring of what you’re seeing is real; but the puppeteer pulling the strings doesn’t exist. What looks like “A Big Plan” is just a whole lot of people responding to the same incentives at the same time. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, and been in the meetings where these “same” outcomes have been reached, despite always being done through the process of an independent executive or leader making an independent decision.

To give you an idea of just how quickly conformity of an idea can happen without any specific plan, here’s a slightly less conspiratorial way to see it visually – the fact that all cars now look the same. Why? Is it because Big Car wanted it so? No; it’s because incentives (financial returns, manufacturing capabilities, consumer preference, and the general ways of the world) have made it as such.

Another Big Car Conspiracy

And here’s the tell-tale characteristic of the first kind of conspiracy: people here are confusing convergence for intended coordination.

In other words, the pattern is very explainable, it’s just not explainable by anything you can see. And that unseen device is known famously in the world of business and economics as: “incentives”, which are invisible, structural, and… dare I say it, boring! Davos is not the meeting where the world is run. But it is the visible layer of an alignment of interests that has already happened, across ten thousand separate offices globally, over long amounts of time.

Davos, in other words, doesn’t cause this synchronicity. In fact, that reasoning is backwards. It is the synchronicity that causes Davos!

Coordination Type Two: Organization

This second type is nearly exactly the opposite, in that sometimes people really are coordinating. However, they are not secret about it! This is where my professional life comes into play, because this is done through mundane activities like companies creating strategies, and governments writing industrial policies. Trade lobbies… well, they lobby. And parties whip up votes. Editors coordinate marketing with bookstores to create a bestselling book, and record labels coordinate with Spotify to ensure chart places.

This isn’t mysterious and it’s certainly not random; it takes deliberate effort to move humans across different incentive structures to work together to achieve outcomes. How to do this is, in effect, most of the study and research that happens at business and management school – at which I have spent half my career thus far.

That’s not to say that these strategies can’t also be nefarious, because they absolutely can!

Consider Leonard Leo, a name that you likely haven’t come across before. If ever you want to create a character to base a conspiracy around, this is the guy! His name is rarely mentioned, he never does interviews, he is described in the media as “the maestro of a network of interlocking non-profits” and an extremely shadow-y fixer who has shaped the extreme American political right, with enormous success. He’s the most powerful person in the world — that you’ve never heard of.

He should, in theory, be the world’s best villain, with his hidden and evil network, who has for at least two decades controlled America’s highest court, and thus controlled America itself.

Ok, so how did he accumulate so much power and control, all without you ever having heard of him? Hate to tell you, but it was through decades of telling everybody he was doing this. In advance. By building pipelines of support, promoting young lawyers who cared about the Constitution, by registering a non-profit that even had a website, and holding annual conventions. I mean, the openly discussed tactics and strategies were not secret! Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett? Where do you think these Supreme Court judges came from? Yup. Leonard.

He published a plan outlining exactly what he was doing, and yet… nobody read it. Or at least the few people who did read it, couldn’t get the attention of everybody else for long enough to warn them, because they were too busy focusing on Pizzagate.

As Joe Haslam, a friend of mine, put it to me recently: there’s no better way to hide a top secret, than to write about it publicly in a policy document!

Coordination Type Three: Conspiracies

And finally, the real shit. The coordination that is done conspiratorially by those who conspire – secretly – for a specific outcome against a specific goal. Guys, it’s the smoking gun that appears once in a decade that makes us all wonder about whether we are, in fact, tethered to reality that makes sense at all.

In 1962, the US government planned to fake a terrorist attack on American citizens, with the goal of sinking boats, staging a hijacking and bombing a few assets in Miami – before blaming it on the Cubans, so that a war between the United States and Castro became inevitable. How do I know this? Because the Top Secret proposal outlining this plan, called Operation Northwoods, was eventually released into the public domain, upon which people learned of the involvement of the Secretary of Defense and the most senior military official in the country, whose signature trailed the paper.

Ok so to mention briefly something slightly less spook-y - read up on the diesel engine Volkswagen scandal, a conspiracy that was literally engineered into the design of a car, which was found out accidentally by a bunch of academic researchers. Volkswagen eventually admitted to it, but not before lying about it amidst an industrial-sized concealment for many years first.

You see, conspiracies are, sometimes, real. And they involve governments and corporations and sports teams and individuals and Presidents and good-guys-before-they-become-bad-guys. But what all conspiracies need in order to remain a conspiracy (as opposed to an illegal plan or a case of eloquent fraud) is secrecy and to remain hidden. Northwood was a thirty-five year conspiracy until it was revealed to be true.

But if a conspiracy dies when it is no longer secret, a conspiracy that is not secret cannot die in this same way, because there is no exposure that could weaken it.

Which means that paradoxically, the most resilient forms of nefarious coordination are the ones that don’t rely on anything being hidden at all. Further meaning that they are really, really hard to stop. Again: it is the in-plain-sight coordination that we should be most wary of!

KONSPIRA-SEA

“The Lights Are On But No One’s Home” by Nataliia Taranukha

Which brings me back to the question with which I started this essay. Am I a spy?

When my Mind the Gap substack went viral, I became panicked by the sudden and unwanted attention I got from, well, frankly weird places. So I phoned the aforementioned Joe Haslam, who is otherwise known as a somewhat mysterious consigliere to a bunch of weird people who would otherwise have nothing else in common. I remember him telling me:

“If you’re worried about what Irish people will think about working for the Pentagon and the DoD and NASA and three-lettered agencies, just wait until they discover that you write all of this stuff for no other reason than you’re interested in doing it, for free.”

I wouldn’t know it for another three months, but Joe had essentially just one-shotted (eerily!) what happened to me last week.

During the online discourse pertaining to whether or not I was a spy, an academic researcher from an Irish university asked whether or not The Irish Times should disclose the fact that I am a Director of a think tank called Security Ireland, since my satirical column brought to light Ireland’s lack of mechanisms for dealing with the (numerous) cases of espionage in the country.

There was no conflict, I responded, as the think tank does non-partisan policy research, is unfunded, and receives no revenue.

I’ll let you read the conversation here, which got some interest from passers-by at the time. For what it’s worth, I have no idea who this person is, we have never met, and I am not posting it here to be mean! (Even if he has no probably with being impolite about me). In it, you’ll notice that his endless asking of the same question of “where do you get your money from”, over and over again, each time in a different way, is reminiscent of dealing with a five-year-old child in the back seat of a car, impatiently asking “are we nearly there yet”, as they kick the driver’s seat aggressively. Who funds it? Me. Who is doing the work? Me. Who is paying for it? Me. Who is really behind it? ME.

Look, being a spy isn’t the only thing people have said about me recently. According to some, I have come out of nowhere. I have been platformed overnight by the mainstream media. I am only here because of my credentials. I am an agent of Fine Gael and Fine Fail who placed me carefully to let some societal steam out. I write against The Establishment, but I am The Establishment. In a bid to become a political frontrunner, I am trying to win over both sides. I am a warmonger, a capitalist, a far-right operative, a far-left Marxist, all while being on Patrick Collison’s payroll. How dare I be from Northern Ireland, and not the North of Ireland. How dare I be from anywhere! Who is funding you to pay for your research? Nobody? Why are you not paying for your research! I have an annoying accent (see: how dare she be from anywhere). I am trying to be a less charismatic David McWilliams. I am a plant, an asset, a shill, a fraud, a stooge, a deepfake, an LLM. I am platformed because of my good looks, yet I look like an ugly Mr. Bean. I am, I am, I am…

Argh.

Allow me now to reiterate what I said earlier: “that we have become incredibly bad at figuring out the difference between the types of coordination that feels like a conspiracy, while the “nefarious” that we should care about are happening in plain sight.”

So when faced with an unusual pattern (i.e. me), people have three ways of trying to figure it out:

1. Emergence: did I arise from the interaction of the incentives, opportunities and circumstances around me?

2. Organization: am I here because the media/ government/ lobbies openly coordinated it as such?

3. Conspiracy: has somebody secretly coordinated my existence in the public sphere, and am I trying to achieve secretly-held outcomes?

What I thought would have been rather obvious to most people is that I arrived where I am today, with people reading what I write, because of a mix of Emergence and Organization, and the interaction between those two types of coordination.

Alas the Twitter warrior continued, saying he still had… “questions of access and authority”. Who gave me access and authority? If it’s still not clear, ME. I did! His questioning assumes the third type of coordination, that someone has secretly placed me where I am. This couldn’t be more offensively wrong:

My curiosity led to me “just doing things”, which led to expertise. My expertise created opportunities. These opportunities turned into institutional invitations, which deepened my expertise, and so forth. My career hasn’t been linear, it’s been incredibly recursive. The smorgasbord of things I do today is an emergence of prioritizing, for my entire career, solving specific types of problems instead of “having job X”. Access and authority further emerged as a consequence of this, not as in input to it!

But this isn’t really about me, so let’s get back to conspiracies. Rather, it’s about how we explain power, and why Ireland finds it particularly hard to understand this.

The problem, you see, is that the first two of these explanations are, for a vast number of people all over the world (and not just Ireland), not comprehensible.

What does emergence ask you to believe? Essentially, that some outcome can come to exist without anybody being in charge of it; that things happen for no visible reason, and that our lives and our failures are the mere residues of millions of decisions that are arbitrary, boring and mostly answering the same set of questions, over and over until we die. This is not dissimilar from what I have written about the Irish state itself; that we are a country ruled by Nobody, whilst being accountable to nothing, and in which decisions are so dispersed and heavily diffused amongst thousands of organizations and people.

This is an incredibly difficult emotional truth to hold onto, because it removes any comfort we may find in trusting that things won’t go wrong, or that if they do, there will be somebody held responsible. If hospitals weren’t built because of emergence, then who do we blame when sick children die? There is no evil person to lock up and no single organization to protest. There is only… us. Therefore there is nothing that can be done, since we are not doing it; and in the doing-nothing, we would rather have no belief at all. If we want to see ourselves as the hero of our own story – which we nearly always do – then we need a villain. Any villain!

And now look at what the organization element of coordination requires you to believe. That an ordinary person can just decide to… do a thing. To publish a paper, to do some research, to put together a meeting, to build an institution, to move country, to coordinate with people around aligned goals, and moreover to achieve these goals without requiring the “authority” or “access” from anybody. To have agency.

Indeed, as I have mentioned, organization leaves visible traces; as has most of my career. If people wanted to clarify any of the above-mentioned criticisms put against me, they could do something very simple: read the hundreds of articles, columns, interviews, papers, books and more that I’ve put into the world, not-very-secretly, over the last fifteen years, about exactly those topics. I have explained, through far-too-many essays going to the thousands of words each, about my core beliefs around all of the things that remain mysterious to people who cannot be bothered to read it because… isn’t the open truth much less exciting than whatever the alternative might be?

So, are people waiting for the formal investigation? As with everything in Ireland, nothing can be done until a task force – the Sinéad Spy Task Force – which must be commissioned to figure out my agenda, in lieu of someone just reading it online themselves, in these very pages. Which I sadly fear is a time-consuming and intellectual cost that is simply too high for many to bear.

It is this deeply held belief in Ireland that kills me the most; this insistence that ordinary people cannot direct their own lives. We are a country that has spent most of our history seeking permission: from the British who controlled our food, farms, livelihoods; and later from the institution of the Catholic Church that controlled our bodies, our marriages, our education, our children. Today, we see this inability to believe in our own agency in the clientelism of Irish politics, as we get medical cards from knowing a man who knows a man, just as we expedite our passport printing for the cousin of a friend who knows the local TD. A perpetual reliance on the other, because we are too scared to look inwards for long even to see if there even is a self.

And so, in a society where legitimacy must be created from an established line of authority so that nothing happens until it is sanctioned, “she just decided to do it” is an extraordinarily dangerous concept. It is unthinkable! Because if things can just… get done… then the next obvious question is: why haven’t I done the same?

No. Better to not think this dangerous thought at all! Our strange relationship with success only confirms this oddity: after hundreds of years, if we still cannot figure out how to build the country and the version of ourselves that we want, conspiracies become unusually good excuses for not having built any agency at all. We are a nation that lives and dies, after all, by the single phrase of “ah, sure look it”.

And the phrase is often laughed at; shrugged off as a harmless quirk. But perhaps we should start to take the phrase, and ourselves, more seriously. Outside of Craggy Island, the world is in the midst of a violent restructuring of where power sits and how it moves; out of institutions we have come to rely on, and into emergent and organizational forms of manipulation - all of which is largely invisible to us. So a country that refuses to understand the two most prominent forms of coordination and power is also a country that has disqualified itself from the emerging world order.

In other words, we risk being left behind, because while the world throws down its new path, we'll be left here, looking outwards from the inside, wondering whether the monsters are still under the bed.

Which is how we’ve ended up in a world which is both way-too-suspicious, while simultaneously nowhere-near-suspicious-enough. And in which a “spy” is conjured up, fronted by a $20 website (because if she wasn’t sent by “them”, then how else is she here?), while some of the most consequential re-shaping of the Irish state is happening to us, but not by us, in plain sight.