Down the rabbit hole: Disinformation, conspiracy and enjoyment

Research on disinformation, spanning academic and civil-society sectors, has already been subject to several critiques of its utility, purpose and epistemology, discussed and categorised here. The current paper utilises a review of literature, including from psychology, critical theory and the humanities, to introduce an approach that acknowledges and addresses the largely neglected dimensions of positive affect, aesthetics and creativity that characterise individual and group engagement with false and conspiratorial information – the enjoyment that such engagement brings. Addressing the bias towards positivism in disinformation studies, it proposes that an understanding of such narrative pleasures offers potentially fruitful means of combatting falsehoods. ‘Down the rabbit hole’ is thus understood not simply as (in its most common usage today) a metaphor for grim obsession; but rather, as Lewis Carroll first depicted it in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, as a place of imaginative encounter, connection, and revelation, a place to become ‘curiouser and curiouser’.