Tuters, M. (2026). The Memeplex: Platform grammars and conspiratorial alignment around the Great Reset. New Media & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448261446931
Summary
Tuters investigates how digital platform infrastructures reorganize institutional policy language into networked environments of suspicion, taking the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” initiative as his central case. His core argument is that contemporary conspiracism is best understood as an infrastructural phenomenon — shaped by patterns of platform circulation — rather than as a matter of belief, misinformation, or coherent narrative. Conspiratorial alignment, he contends, precedes narrative coherence: platform grammars organize symbolic proximity at scale before fully articulated stories stabilize. Through co-hashtag network analysis of 3.7 million tweets plus cross-platform triangulation, the paper develops three analytic concepts (conspiricization, modular conspiracism, and the Memeplex) and extends Hofstadter’s “paranoid style” into a “high-tech paranoid style” in which patterned platform visibility is misread as intentional elite coordination.
Key Contributions
- Introduces three analytic concepts: conspiricization (reframing institutional outputs as evidence of hidden control), modular conspiracism (recombination of fragments into flexible, travelling templates of distrust), and the Memeplex (the overarching media ecology binding grievances through repetition and adjacency).
- Proposes the “high-tech paranoid style” as an update to Hofstadter’s paranoid style, adapted to platform-mediated scale, opacity, and abstraction (also drawing on Jameson’s “high-tech paranoia” and cognitive mapping).
- Advances a platform-native analytic framework and the “world-in-a-word” heuristic for empirically tracing conspiratorial alignment through co-hashtag networks.
- Reframes conspiracy as an ongoing process (paralleling platformization, datafication) rather than a bounded object of belief.
- Links conspiracism to a broader crisis of institutional legibility, arguing democratic mediation requires reckoning with platform grammars rather than merely correcting false beliefs.
Methods
Tuters assembled a corpus of 3.7 million tweets (2015–2022) containing #TheGreatReset, #Agenda2030, or #DigitalID via the Twitter Academic API v2. Co-hashtag networks were laid out with ForceAtlas2 in Gephi and read as interpretive spatializations, with temporal comparison between pre-pandemic (2018) and post-pandemic (2022) issue spaces. This was triangulated across platforms: 1,614 anti-WEF TikTok posts, 9,165 YouTube comments under a Russell Brand video, and hyperlink/issue-network analysis of the Wide Awake Media site. Qualitative close reading of the slogan “You’ll own nothing and be happy,” infographics, and vernacular counter-mapping diagrams rounds out the mixed-method design.
Findings
- The slogan “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” — derived from Ida Auken’s 2016 WEF article — was decontextualized and recoded into a portable antagonistic object spanning placards, books, influencer content, and electoral rhetoric.
- YouTube comment threads show repetition-with-variation: alignment is produced by iteratively remixing the slogan, not elaborating shared explanations.
- The 2022 networks reveal dense convergence around #Agenda2030, #WEF, #BuildBackBetter, #CBDC, and #NWO, linking surveillance, finance, and biometric control into a modular narrative of dispossession.
- In 2018 the #DigitalID space was organized around fintech/blockchain discourse; by 2022 those clusters became peripheral residues as control-oriented frames moved to the center.
- A small 2018 conspiracist enclave (#NWO, #Agenda21, #depopulation, #BillGates) migrated to the center during the pandemic — conspiracy drew on pre-existing symbolic material rather than pure misinterpretation.
- Alignment consolidated before coherent narratives stabilized, confirming the claim that patterned adjacency precedes storytelling.
- Unlike QAnon, Great Reset conspiracism emerges from recoding elite institutions’ own self-descriptive language; institutional transparency generated mistrust rather than trust.
- Vernacular artifacts (hashtag-chaining tweets, “Control Apparatus” diagrams, infographics) translate co-occurrence into visual heuristics of coordinated elite design — the “globalist” figure personifies abstract systemic forces as intentional agents.
Connections
This paper’s infrastructural, circulation-centered account of conspiracism complements narrative- and community-focused work on conspiracy cultures such as Grusauskaite2026-po and Marwick2025-ov, offering an alternative to belief-centered framings. Its argument that patterned platform adjacency gets misread as intentional coordination speaks directly to the coordinated-inauthentic-behavior literature — notably accounts of how observers and researchers infer coordination from co-occurrence patterns, as in Starbird2019-qv and Giglietto2020-9d8acdd7. The hashtag-network and cross-platform tracing methodology also resonates with network-analytic studies of coordinated amplification like Nizzoli2020-cf.
Podcast
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