ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that much of what we recognize today as conspiracy theory involves a technical dimension stemming from its material embedding in new cybernetic media. It does so by bringing anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s ecology of mind approach to bear on a mixed-methods analysis of far-right publics in Brazil. Drawing on James Gibson’s ecology of perception, it proposes the notion of conspiratorial affordances in order to make sense of how the logic of algorithmic architectures feeds into conspiracy semiotics, and vice versa. It champions the ecological approach as a promising generative path toward bridging some of the “great divides” in conspiracy theory studies between conjunctural/historical/socio-cultural and structural/psychological/statistic analyses.
