Introduction

Conspiracy theorists are highly suspicious of modern media. Was the moon landing in 1969 actually filmed in a Hollywood Studio by the famous director Stanley Kubrick? Do video clips of celebrities like Rihanna, Beyoncé or Justin Bieber contain hidden messages to sell the New World Order to an ignorant audience? Should we trust our perception of reality when, in fact, our senses are increasingly dependent on media images? Indeed, media is everywhere and, according to Couldry and Hepp (2017), media participation is no longer an individual choice: Particularly with the Internet, social media and interconnected smartphones, they argue, we are entering a new phase of ‘deep mediatisation’ that overarches every domain of life. In a similar vein, Mark Deuze comments, ‘we do not live with, but in media’ (2012: xiii). This immersion in our media environment motivates ‘agency panic’ – the core assumption underlying conspiracy theories that social systems are controlling our minds (Melley 2000). The popularity that the Matrix metaphor enjoys in the conspiracy milieu is then not surprising (Harambam 2017): The world is considered by conspiracy theorists to be staged, mediatised, manipulated and hyper-real to conceal the real truth. Are we, like Neo in the movie The Matrix (1999), already living in a virtual reality produced by evil alien powers? Conspiracy theorists suggest that we are.