Playing with misinformation, lying with truth: satirical conspiracy theories and sacred seriousness of play in online imageboard cultures

ABSTRACT

Knowingly re-circulated misinformation online is a widespread phenomenon that is increasingly met with suspicion or even condemnation in spite of the sharer’s intent. The article recasts misinformation sharing into cultural play practice questioning this sensibility. Drawing on Huizinga’s concept of play and the Lacanian notion of belief-through-other, it claims that fascination with fakes owes not simply to misrepresentation of reality but the symbolic truth it conveys in staging its distortion. Satirical conspiracy theories such as SwitzerlandIsFake solicit commentary on media effects in simulating reality without mistaking them for facts. This and similar media sub-genres exploit context collapse prone online environments and thereby challenge clear-cut distinctions between misinformation and satire, truth-claims and mere entertainment of illusions. A closer comparative analysis of SwitzerlandIsFake with cases of irony used as a coverup for outrageous or conspiratorial rhetoric prominent on 4chan imageboard sites lends an insight into the demise of play communities who increasingly adopt faithful attitude to conspiratorial or ideological beliefs. Conversely, the sacredness of play that bonds communities and thereby anticipates trust calls for a shift in perspective from moral condemnation to acculturation regarding deeper causes of the post-truth condition, such as general distrust and cynicism, which cannot be eradicated by debunking.

KEYWORDS:

• Misinformation
• satirical conspiracy theories
• counterfactuals
• play
• media literacy
• debunking

Introduction

[T]he lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion. The lie, once a liberal means of communication, has today become one of the techniques of insolence enabling each individual to spread around him the glacial atmosphere in whose shelter he can thrive.

(Adorno and Jephcott 2005, 30)

The dominant responses to the spread of misinformation and conspiracies online perpetuates individualistic ethos premised on personal accountability and critical literacy skills such as individual fact-checking and source criticism. As argued by danah boyd, this ethos shares uncannily a lot with a sceptical attitude harbouring a conspiratorial mindset and has therefore backfired (boyd 2018). Others have noted that much of the academic literature on misinformation fails to appreciate the role of counter-narratives (White 2022), subversive cultural practices, and broader media ecologies through which misinformation circulates online (Marwick 2018). In contrast to deliberate spread of false information or disinformation, the concept of misinformation leaves intentionality of the sender indeterminate, making it difficult to interpret it outside cultural contexts in which misinformation sharing takes place. This calls for interpretative analysis based on specific cases that could speak to the moral panics surrounding the post-truth condition. Following White’s invitation to broaden disciplinary purview, this article sets off with a basic hypothetical: What if re-circulated or remediated misinformation is consumed more like artworks that aim to affectively seduce users and not epistemically convince them? This calls into question the key premise of misinformation – the idea that claims circulated on digital media share truth-aptness on par with journalistic news stories. Misinformation is not to be confused with art, even if the two might be interwoven in media environments where different genres, trivial and serious content, mesh and blur, fleetingly calling for our attention. The analogy to art by deviation from fake news, as this article hopes to demonstrate, can lend a more adequate perspective for misinformation-sharing practices in online environments that are inherently prone to context collapse (Marwick and danah 2011).

As alluded in the opening Adorno quote, the guiding impulse of this paper is to attend to the lie, which often passes as merely devoid of truth and thus undeserving of scholarly interest in its own right.¹ On the contrary, the dominant framing of misinformation fails to appreciate the subversive, comic role of counterfactuals (Waisanen 2018) undergirding the digital economy of content sharing, with both positive and adverse consequences this entails. Drawing an analogy between play as a cultural practice and counterfactuality of artworks, I argue that a crucial condition for fake content to qualify as a true counterfactual – or symbolic fiction which nevertheless structures social reality (Friedlander 2018, 101) – is that participants are not confused about its factuality, or truth-aptness, in a given communicative context. As we shall see, this ability to recognize the play-frame through which putative misinformation becomes the point of play is endangered by the ambivalence and context collapse inherent to online environments. This is attested by the famous Poe’s law – an adage of Internet culture claiming the utter impossibility of distinguishing between genuine expression online and deeply ironic one (Phillips and Milner 2021, 51). Participatory online cultures defined by ‘discover-click-share’ dynamics (Linden 2017, 23) have made the reception of satire and irony more difficult as some deem ‘things are increasingly being taken literally’ online (Nichols 2023; also Young 2018).² If we consider misinformation as operative on the side of the audience rather than the sender (Young 2018, 130), the understanding of satire and irony becomes crucial for tackling misinformation. This is not to deny the truth-value of information itself but to consider communicative contexts on which the truth-aptness of mediated content at least partly depends. Since audience appeal remains a crucial factor of viral content trending for its believability (Drolsbach and Pröllochs 2023) or faketuality (Pilipets 2019), an alternative approach to misinformation I suggest in this article is to take ‘conspiracy fictioning’ (Zeeuw and de Alex 2023) to its logical conclusions and insist on better fictioning. The underlying idea is not to encourage gullibility on the audience’s part but to counter scepticism which in its disbelief in all but literal statements of fact leaves no place for the possibility of the truth of the fiction.

The article is structured as follows. First, I outline a conceptual framework drawing from psychoanalytically and anthropologically informed theories of belief and play. In the second section, I employ this framework for comparing three examples of counterfactual or satirical conspiratorial content drawn from online imageboard sites. In the concluding discussion, I consider social and civil value of the capacity for entertaining illusion and pretence, which are threatened by the premise of debunking and the general sceptical attitude it engenders. An ability to derive pleasure from shared illusions through play, I argue referring back to psychoanalytical theory, might serve as an antidote to the risk of cynicism harboured by the imperative of debunking.

Theoretical framework: belief, knowledge, and illusion

This article applies insights drawn from psychoanalytical and social anthropological theory that can help us think afresh about tendencies and shifts in mediated culture. As such, it aims to contribute to theoretical discussion by drawing fine-grained distinctions backed up by curious examples that do not aim at generalization, even if it remains unavoidable. Social anthropologist Robert Pfaller’s seminal account of the pleasure principle in culture (2014), despite its limited reception in media studies, is instructive to this end. Building on psychoanalytical and anthropological theories, Pfaller recasts belief, knowledge, and illusion as constitutive parts of play among other common practices and rituals in culture. Simultaneously, his account sheds light on ambivalence and, relatedly, decontextualization or context collapse characteristic of online environments and anonymous internet spaces in particular (Phillips and Milner 2017).

The following disclaimer found on a 4chan imageboard site illustrates such ambivalence, stating without a hint of ambiguity that ‘[t]he stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact’ (Phillips and Milner 2017, 158). As rightly observed by Phillips and Milner, this disclaimer ‘is itself a convenient lie. Nothing on/b/is ever true; that is, until it is. Good luck’ (158). The deceptive inversion of the falsity premise at hand resembling trolling tactics inaugurates a play-frame which makes 4chan both a fun and notorious anonymous online space fraught with truthful and misleading, mostly visual memetic content (Milner 2013, 68). While 4chan and other chan boards host fringe communities which generate relatively little traffic, they have served as incubators for large-scale conspiracies such as QAnon which then quickly spread to mainstream platforms such as YouTube and Reddit (Zeeuw et al. 2020). As noted by Wildt and Aupers in their study of ‘participatory conspiracy culture’ on Reddit (2024, 15), future research might benefit from platform-comparative perspective, which is, at least partially my aim in this article, even if I digress from a strict definition of conspiracy and veer into the realm of irony and satire. Notably, playful irony and vitriol typical of imageboards sites such as 4chan remain poorly understood aspects of daily social media practices that bind online communities and, no less importantly, splinter them apart by justifying expressions verging on the offensive, vulgar, discriminatory or racist (Udupa 2019). Who is included and who is excluded from the play is defined by the specific brand of political right-wing humour which grants deniability to offensive claims by exploiting the ambivalence inherent in algorithmic online architecture.

To grasp this dynamic, we shall consult Lacan-inspired notions of belief and illusion that Pfaller brings to bear on Huizinga’s theory of play. Belief for Lacan, contrary to common understanding, is reflective as it operates indirectly or at a distance with presupposed other believers, while the first subject need not consciously identify with its belief (Friedlander 2013, 386–387). A commonplace ‘I know perfectly well, but still’ (Mannoni in Pfaller 2014) is a typical expression indicating such an exteriorized belief in practice, which remains impervious to knowledge contradicting it in so far as there is other subject conferring the disavowed belief its relevance. Consider, the use of belief in I believe in you, or I believe you can make it, which does not profess a truth claim the way justified true beliefs – in the epistemic vein – do, but presupposes an intersubjective investment which, conversely, remains superfluous if belief is simply equated with knowledge. This is how Adorno’s concern for the demise of belief in the opening quote should be understood, namely, as impeded by one’s knowledge and creating ‘glacial atmosphere’ in the social fabric at large (2005, 30).

A clarifying distinction between falsifiable truth claims and counterfactuals that defy falsification might help to see how this notion of belief may apply in mediated contexts. The proper domain of counterfactuals is fiction – literature and arts – which require the suspension of disbelief to explore contingencies through which actual events might occur. Simply put, instead of asserting factual claims, arts aim to invoke reflection or admiration. Much of viral content trending on social media might similarly be thought of as counterfactual. Elena Pilipets’ coined notion of faketuality refers to content that ‘[feels] true even if it is known to be misleading’ (2019, 4). Yet, even if such knowledge is available, it cannot ascertain the fictional status of faketualities for it is neither affirmed nor denied by the actual events counterfactuals might be taken to refer to. Faketualities and counterfactuals here stand in the same flimsy relationship as false beliefs do to real or true illusions. In analogy to the fictional domain of arts, we might say that the fascination with the fake owes not simply to mis-representation of reality, but the symbolic truth it conveys in staging its distortion, think Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreal or hyperstitions (Zeeuw and de Alex 2023, 3).

My reliance on otherwise dense and obscure Lacanian theory serves to further refine the underlying distinction between epistemically false beliefs and true illusions, for what remains crucial to the study of conspiracy theories and misinformation spread more broadly is the mistaking of playful entertainment of illusions with actual truth commitments. Put otherwise, by shifting our focus from the Cartesian subject, or the individual self, onto the other, we can begin to understand how believing constitutes a broader array of social practices including superstition, myth, and humour all of which underlie conspiracy subcultures online. Zeeuw and de Alex define a tendency of realising or rendering fiction real through collective playful engagement within QAnon circles as ‘conspiracy fictioning’ (2023). Although descriptively adequate, the concerning aspects of QAnon and the general rise of conspiratorial beliefs leave us wanting of a normative insight. As Zeeuw and de Alex themselves recognize, ‘QAnon clearly partakes in this weaponization of ludic online subcultures, where play is instrumentalized within non-play contexts, often to troubling effect’ (2023, 2). Along the same lines, Wildt and Aupers obseerve three distinct, but evolving users’ sensibilities on the r/conspiracy subreddit (2023). A playful, ludic approach to conspiracies is giving way to relentless contestation of others’ beliefs which in some cases even leads to a ‘complete embrace of doubt’ regarding the very possibility of belief (2023, 12). Seen through the Lacanian lens, such scepticism is nevertheless driven by belief-through-other, albeit unacknowledged, since it takes a form of doubt, namely, belief in doubt (see Friedlander 2013, 386). The longing for the playful attitude among some users in Wildt and Aupers’ study may then be read in line with my prior distinction as expressing a preference for the entertainment of true illusions rather than the embrace of doubt. The apparent turn away from ‘ludic conspiracies’ (Wildt and Aupers 2023, 12) aligns with Alasdair Duncan’s Lacanian reading of alt-right online subcultures as ‘post-ironic’ – caught in a double bind of irony whereby ‘what is said in a seemingly ironic manner is simply what is believed, and its absurdity enjoyed too’ (2018). Such ‘post-ironic’ stance is antithetical to humour ‘inscribed in the perspective of the Other’ (Duncan 2018), which, as I argue in reference to Huizinga’s play theory, may be better understood as a case of profane or spoiled play lamented by some of the r/conspiracy participants (Wildt and Aupers 2023, 12).

The hold of illusions through play

Before I turn to three different cases of humour aimed at disclaiming or satirizing conspiratorial beliefs, let me outline Robert Pfaller’s work, which updates Johan Huizinga’s theory of play and brings it to bear on the psychoanalytical notion of belief. For Pfaller, the social structure of belief mirrors the pleasure principle in culture with the potential of binding communities and maintaining social ties. Play, as its archetypal example, instantiates such cultural practice with a caveat of others’ beliefs turning into others’ illusions as we enter the psychic state of play. Evidently, we fail to register illusions as simply false because our awareness of the game being ‘just a game’ suspends them against our better judgement (Pfaller 2014, 83). Precisely through this suspension, various forms of play in culture acquire what Johan Huizinga calls sacred as opposed to profane seriousness (83). Put otherwise, subjects of play cannot be confused about the play being ‘just a play’, which preserves their better knowledge that might otherwise override an illusion contained in play as merely trivial and thereby impede its potential to take hold (91). This awareness of the psychic state of play serves as its crucial condition taking different cultural forms, be they theatre plays, sports games, televised events, or computer games. Pfaller broadens the scope of analysis beyond these instances, singling out the suspended illusion, better knowledge, and the boundary or ‘threshold’ (144) demarcating the playfield as the key elements found in all forms of play. The last aspect deserves our special attention, for as I argue in the following, it concerns the ambivalence that so often corrupts or, following Huizinga, profanes satirical or irony plays in online environments.

The threshold that demarcates the playfield is of a symbolic sort, whereby objects of the real world are symbolized in the play through the process of displacement or negation (127). This process, also conceived as ‘cognitive shift’ (Billig 2005), operates by signs of negation (Pfaller 2014, 104) meant to reduce ambivalence in the absence of explicit rules, rites and expectations associated with established forms of play. We can trace the symbolic negation to the first clause of the 4chan disclaimer addressed earlier: ‘[t]he stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood’. It signals: This is fiction! and thereby inaugurates the conditions of play. The second clause, however, – ‘only a fool would take anything posted here as fact’ – contradicts a necessary condition of play, which is not to dismiss illusions as simply false: ‘Embracing the illusion as an illusion (without mistaking it for reality nor dismissing it as false) is required to activate the “psychic state” of “play,” in which the subject becomes gripped with fascination’ (Friedlander 2018, 98). By conflating fiction and falsehood, and pitting it against facts, the disclaimer disqualifies proper fiction bypassing the suspension required for the illusion to take hold and thrives on the very confusion that in retrospect generates context collapse. In other words, the role of fiction here is not adhered to as a shared illusion, but as a lie ambiguated by truth. Paradoxically, the limitation of the disclaimer stems from its failure to acknowledge illusions with appropriate fidelity.

This case exemplifies a more general cultural trend of increasing difficulty of satirizing sociopolitical realities on the internet, which according to literature scholar Adam James Smith, is being deprived of nuance (in Nichols 2023) or as attested by cases of clearly marked satirical news being discredited as fake (‘It’s No Joke’ 2022), risky and often unappreciated (Obasi 2023). It seems that the sweeping category of misinformation tends to curb on satire and other fictional genres, leaving them prone to being dismissed as false. On our part, this calls for closer scrutiny of the workings of symbolic negation as a distinguishing condition of play that can help contextualize forms of satire and irony on the internet and imageboard sites in particular. Consider a paradoxical case noted in the classical James Sully’s study of childhood where two sisters one day decide to play being sisters (in Billig 2005, 182).³ Pfaller’s thought experiment of Elvis lookalike competitions, similarly, exemplifies the transition from real to play world by means of a negating symbol or threshold:

Let us assume that Elvis Presley were still alive today, as some of his fans claim, he would have numerous ways of living an anonymous life. He could change his appearance and lifestyle. He could, however, also retain all of this and appear in Elvis lookalike competitions. The framework of the Elvis lookalike would then provide him with the threshold – the symbol of negation – by means of which even Elvis himself could appear as a non-Elvis (a look-alike), and be accepted as such.

(2014, 150)

We can now more clearly see why this threshold falls short in the case of the 4chan disclaimer, failing to truly adhere to fakes as illusions and dismissing them as fool’s knowledge. The hunt for gullible others becomes the driving force behind the playful irony and vitriol typical of political far right-wing subcultures, as surveyed by digital ethnographer Sahana Udupa (2019). Following original Huizinga’s thesis, such cases may be classified as false or profane play marked by increasing difficulty ‘to tell where play ends and non-play begins’ (1949, 206). False play robs it of its illusion or counterfactual and thereby corrupts it:

By withdrawing from the game [spoil-sport] reveals the relativity and fragility of the play-world in which he had temporarily shut himself with others. He robs play of its illusion-a pregnant word which means literally “in-plai’ (from inlusio, illudere or inludere). Therefore he must be cast out, for he threatens the existence of the play-community

(Huizinga 1949, 11; see also Waisanen 2018, 83–85)

Entering the playfield through symbolic negation: SwitzerlandIsFake case

The etymological link of play with illusion and inclusion is instructive for the following comparison between the 4chan disclaimer and the subreddit channel titled ‘SwitzerlandIsFake’, a ‘community of people dedicated to proving that Switzerland does not exist’ (‘SwitzerlandIsFake 2024). A variation on the theme of satirical conspiracy theories such as Bielefeld, it features authentic pictures and videos of Switzerland re-posted from other Reddit boards with a shared aim of ‘debunking’ these photos as manipulated in a large-scale deception about Switzerland’s existence. This common goal inscribed in the first rule of the community guidelines: ‘[n]o insinuating that Switzerland is a real place’ (2024), serves as a negating symbol which is reaffirmed in satirical posts and comments, all of which form important aspects of the play.

A notable formal difference of this disclaimer compared with 4chan’s is that it does not simply state that everything here is false as a truth claim, but readily denies or prohibits breaking the rule of the play by reference to ‘no insinuation’. By doubling-down on the premise of the play – simulated reality calls for no insinuation – it reasserts the play frame, which according to Billig, can itself be a point of humour (Billig 2005, 184). Unlike the 4chan disclaimer, the negating symbol here is a counterfactual or itself a lie, although the visual content and the many facts that corroborate the claim of Switzerland as unreal remain authentic and true. Its various idiosyncrasies – lack of its own language, surreal natural landscape, oddly unique architecture and curious historical circumstances, become well-warranted discussion points that lend the claim its credence. Flirting with the truth, in this case, makes the play more enjoyable but only insofar as it remains just a play. We might say that players’ better knowledge in this case does not override the illusion – the counterfactual – and thus preserves, rather than profaning, its seriousness. Despite its opening disclaimer titled ‘The Seriousness of the Swiss Lie’, there seems to be less confusion among users than is typical of imageboards such as b/on 4chan. Although the disclaimer reaffirms the sincerity of its claim, it does so in a satirical enough fashion not to further perplex users who might be already confused, albeit presuming their capacity for satire: ‘To anyone doubting our seriousness, please read this response: There has never been anything more serious than this subreddit’ (tacticalBOVINE 2021). The use of seriousness is telling in this case, as the adherence to the founding claim remains serious indeed in users’ displayed commitment to it, while the message is cast back into the play-frame and thus remains purely satirical, if not sarcastic. As noted by Billig, ‘[t]he boundary-markers between humour and seriousness are not absolute and they, too, can be used for the purposes of humour (Billig 2005, 184). Hence, such disclaimers can too be approached as ‘meta-discourse of humour’ (183).

Despite their semblance, the 4chan b/board and the SwitzerlandIsFake disclaimers embody opposing assumptions that might be phrased as follows: whereas the former overtly negates truth while users disavow the negation in practice, the latter, conversely, affirms the lie in order to demonstrate how elements of truth can be deployed to corroborate it. It is by not taking play seriously that the negating symbol is itself disavowed (noted also by Zeeuw and de Alex 2023, 3). The affirmation of a lie, on the other hand, resembles belief-turned-illusion in the Lacanian sense since SwitzerlandIsFake participants do not dismiss this fiction against their better knowledge but appreciate the socialization and curious discussions it solicits. If fiction, unlike faketuality, remains indeterminate since factual knowledge can neither affirm nor deny it, the affirmation of fiction helps to sabotage false beliefs by creating certainty about the content of a belief rather than the reality it contradicts (Friedlander 2013, 387). The play might be interpreted in the form of a thought experiment about media’s capacity for simulating imaginary, symbolic identifications, indirectly alluding to socially constructed, contingent ways nation-states as imagined communities come about without succumbing to preposterous claims taken at a face value.

On a charitable interpretation of SwitzerlandIsFake, we might understand it as claiming that Switzerland is incoherent. The game of exposing Switzerland as fake is really about unravelling and appreciating its contingencies and oddities that upset the coherence of a colloquial understanding of a nation-state as a place in the world. Yet, by maintaining a relative seriousness of play, it preserves the counterfactuality of its claims and thus better knowledge.

Whose illusions? Bird aren’t real case

As with any piece of re-mediated satire, there remains a risk of it backsliding into a real conspiratorial trope. To probe the fault lines in satire becoming a source of actual conspiracy belief, let us compare SwitzerlandIsFake with another satirical conspiracy theory Birds aren’t real. Described by its founder as an ‘experiment in misinformation’, it claims that all birds have been replaced by surveillance drones by the US government (Lorenz 2021). It aims to satirize and shame conspiracy believers by taking it to their own terrain – hence the absurdity of the claim serving as a threshold beneath which they are held in contempt: ‘If anyone believes birds aren’t real, we’re the last of their concerns, because then there’s probably no conspiracy they don’t believe’ (2021). Birds aren’t real inadvertently addresses the real gullible other, the true conspiracy believer, in contrast to merely presumed or hypothetical one. This brings us back to the figure of the other in Lacanian framework – the imaginary believer which turns on Pfaller’s distinction between illusions of ‘real members of society’ and ‘illusions without owners’ (2014, 90, 141). It is a crucial distinction that Pfaller wrestles by vindicating the latter category which for him typifies ‘open secret of play’ (90) and which can even be traced to the civil art of politeness. Just as play, polite behaviour trades in illusions by involving a minimal pretence resembling play-acts which unlike debunking of truth claims are not levelled against one’s better knowledge but co-exist on the same plane. Politeness seen in reference to Kant’s writings as ‘[…] a deception by which no one is deceived’ (89), echoes Mannoni’s insistence that the belief through the other – ‘Verleugnung’ – ‘stretches to take in the whole world’ (Mannoni 2003). Accordingly, what implicates Birds aren’t real into the conspiracy genre, rendering it ultimately unfit as its inoculation strategy, is the shared conspiratorial trope identifying a real conspiring entity, the US government, and thus inadvertently turning against real conspiracy believers. We might say that the illusion of Birds aren’t real fails to adhere to the rules of play and remains a reactionary effort, ill-fit to traverse the power dynamics mirrored by conspiratorial myths so pervasive in the internet sub-cultures and social reality they aim to represent.

If Birds aren’t real tends to reactionism, the conspiring they in SwitzerlandIsFake, by contrast, remains an unspecified abstract entity, which universalizes the play premise inviting even alleged Swiss nationals themselves to participate in the pretence of living the colossal lie, which they amiably do, as observed from the comment section. It is impossible to ascertain this, of course, as other users might simply pretend to be Swiss. Nevertheless, this affirms the other as a locus of enunciation peculiar to humour (Duncan 2018) and calls into question identification with the other as opposed to oneself. The idea of Swiss citizens themselves participating in the play bespeaks an element of self-contempt at the heart of Pfaller’s theory. Pfaller juxtaposes a cultivated ability to derive pleasure from self-contempt with the contempt felt for real members of society (Pfaller 2014). Illusions that are preserved as one’s own, on the contrary, tend to sediment into faith which in psychoanalytical terms function as one’s own ideal- or superego. This prospect of belief, however trivial, transforming into faith, for Pfaller just as for Žižek, marks the current cultural moment characterized by deep-seated cynicism.⁴ Apparently, accepting illusions as illusions and not mistaking them for reality nor exalting them into one’s own ideal serves as a cultural pre-condition for civil participation in shared enjoyment through various play practices. Contrary to the common (mis)understanding of contemporary post-truth condition, Pfaller reminds us that

[l]ies and illusions enjoyed great popularity in former times, and apparently formed a means of well-cultivated sociability among people who knew perfectly well what was and was not true. It seems that, with a wink of the eye, those ‘in the know’ presented to each other paradoxes, logical misconceptions, polite sayings, and artfully prepared objects and instruments of illusion. They were capable of enjoying these types of things and sophisticated enough not to infer naivety in others who likewise found pleasure in them. This epoch apparently viewed culture as an exercise in the skill of observing illusions, seeing through them, and – despite knowing of their presence – accepting them benevolently, not aggressively.

(2014, 136–137)

Concluding discussion: when play ceases to be just a play

Pfaller’s insistence on benevolent adherence to shared illusions and the fictional status of the real believer thus point to the flip-side of the misinformation predicament whereby indifference to the truth is matched by indifference to the sacredness of play. The key insight of the disclaimers’ analysis points to what we might call debunking in reverse: debunking alleged falsehoods for truths as part of vitriolic truth-seeking that relies on a false presumption of play. This dynamic presents a challenge to the ethic of truth-telling. Debunking turned into an ostensibly innocuous play practice exploits ambiguity inherent in online environments through false negating symbols or disclaimers, which in turn grant deniability to derogatory or extreme claims made by hyper-partisan groups online (Udupa 2019). The contempt for those who get confused–read: lack faith – can fuel incivility and stir vitriol fully in service of the premise of fake news and by extension – debunking to the detriment of democratic civil sensibilities. As noted by Feil and Olteanu, ’[c]laims to the truth or falsity of works of art are generally only established at the level of their interpretation, otherwise, according to convention, every element of a work of art should be treated as ‘true’ in general’ (Feil and Olteanu 2018, 310). The premise of debunking engenders an opposite, sceptical attitude by which everything on the internet must be treated as false. This difference might appear trivial, but it designates a distinctive role of the symbolic realm, for Lacan, or the crucial role of appearances, for Arendt. To adhere to the reality of the symbolic realm of appearance should not be read as an open invitation for gullibility. Much like the Anti-Defamation League’s advice to heed whether ‘the meme itself is racist or anti-Semitic in nature’ in our encounter with Pepe the Frog (Anti-Defamation League 2016), the ability to partake in the symbolic realm calls for cultural competence which cannot be cultivated solely by specialized kind of problem-solving literacy skills.

Two implications for cultural media theory follow from my attempt to bring psychoanalytical and social-anthropological insights to bear on satirical play practices online. On a methodological note, media scholars would do well to consider the play aspect of seemingly trivial aspects of internet cultures in their study of grave problems such as misinformation (also suggested by Wildt and Aupers 2023, 14). The sacred seriousness of Huizinga’s theory ‘communicates one of play’s fundamental operations in establishing spatial and temporal borders – between the playing field and its environment, between the length of the game and the time beyond it’ (Pfaller 2014, 76). As deemed confusion or ambivalence arises precisely because spatial and temporal bounds blur in online environments, the emerging cultural genres that seek to reinstate these bounds or exploit their absence should be of considerable interest to media anthropologists.

Secondly, the deeper cause of the post-truth condition – distrust and cynicism – calls for a shift in perspective, boldly phrased, from moral condemnation to acculturation. Clearly marking satire may have become a justified expectation, yet it takes away the joy of recognizing satire by users themselves and casts a shadow of distrust onto platform owners or responsible governing bodies while moving the discussions further into pseudonymous platforms and fringe communities. However important, governance by disclaiming comes at odds with the inherent spontaneity and creativity of cultural participatory practices that are required for preserving common reality and by extension, common sense itself increasingly contested by the rise of conspiratorial mindset. If misinformation pertains not only to information or even sender’s intentions but also reception (Young 2018, 133; also Waisanen 2018, 83), the problem cannot be solved solely in the top-down fashion by clear demarcation, for however important, such markers still presuppose reasonable interpretation (133), which is at stake under the conditions of the ever-present risk of context collapse.

The predominant individual critical literacy approach faces an even more formidable challenge in convincing late modern subjects to know for themselves. Even if it succeeds, there remains at least a hypothetical possibility of inadvertently incentivizing the circulation of fakes for the self-esteem-driven satisfaction in witnessing others fall for them. Securing knowledge through debunking warrants a disavowal of other’s belief, since knowledge preserved for one’s group makes belief in others’ belief – or illusion – redundant. The further, inverse logic of this scenario resembles trolling tactics whereby the false pretence of play aids in fun as vitriolic metapractice for those in the know at the exclusion of the gullible other (Udupa 2019). Hence, individualistic approaches risk losing sight of the socially constitutive role of symbolic identities that are not simply ruled out by better knowledge, but underpin social interactions instigated by representational potentials of media for playing ourselves.

Psychoanalytical theory is well placed to shed light on subjects’ relationship with their fantasies and desires, while social anthropology can offer a timely reminder of how scientific gaze of early European explorers too misconceived superstitions of the oriental as their science rather than their playful rituals. Modern day rituals surrounding increasingly professionalized sport or video games reveals how susceptible we remain to symbolic attachments and fantasies, e.g. how easily benevolent acceptance of illusions within this symbolic realm can turn to aggression (Pfaller 2014, 137). By recasting the play principle as the origin of culture, Huizinga’s thesis may assume renewed importance, presenting a new twist to the post-truth trope: the demise or profanation of play in gamified media environments. In dialogue with cultural and media studies, this offers an explanatory framework for probing the transformation of make-believe plays that merely entertain an illusion into communities of faith-like adherence to ideological precepts (122).

It must be noted that other, no less important concerns come to the fore once we ask who can afford to play and who is forced to by their circumstance, how gamification of media platforms come to bear on the civility of public discussions, and how certain hegemonic forms of humour come to prevail over others. All of which remain to be explored in future studies taking social power dynamics and cultural logics into account (tacticalBOVINE).

Acknowledgments

I want to thank the convenors and participants of the 4th Lisbon Winter School for the Study of Communication, ‘Media and Ambivalence’, who helped me bring this article to fruition with their insightful comments and advice, Professor Sarah Banet-Weiser in particular, and not least the reviewers of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Oslo Metropolitan University.

Notes

1. Pilipets notion of faketuality is a notable exception (2019).

2. Dannagal G. Young makes a compelling point that the apparent context collapse on the internet makes codifying and comprehending satire difficult (2018, 133–136). The presumption of a reasonable observer and clear markers of irony remain more contentious points that may benefit from further anthropological inquiry.

3. Sully’s anecdotal case from his seminal 1896 study was later referenced by Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka who invoked the case to underscore the vivid reality of playing, rather than simply being, sisters, a point which helps to appreciate rather than trivialize the distinction (Billig 2005, 182).

4. Boyd’s point that Cartesian enlightenment epistemology tends to fall back on the faith in epistemic authority (boyd 2018) tellingly parallels Pfaller’s wariness of faith as opposed to belief in illusion, even if his analysis operates in a very different discursive space.