You Are Here 1. The Devil’s in the Deep Frames Published on: Apr 28, 2020 License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0) You Are Here 1. The Devil’s in the Deep Frames The story was shocking, breaking just days before the 2016 US presidential election. As revealed in a cache of emails stolen by the Russian government and published by WikiLeaks, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta had ingested breast milk, semen, menstrual blood, and urine during a bizarre occult ritual known as a “spirit dinner.” A shadowy cabal of high-profile figures had attended the satanic smorgasbord. As if anyone needed any more proof, the Clinton campaign was, dramatic pause, in league with the devil. So the story went, anyway. The reality of the spirit dinner is much more banal (save for the fact that the emails were procured through a coordinated effort by a hostile foreign power to subvert American democracy, but that’s just details). John Podesta had received a message from his brother Tony, an art collector. Tony told John that performance artist Marina Abramović—a friend of Tony’s—had invited him and John to a “spirit cooking” dinner. “Spirit cooking” was a reference to Abramović’s 1997 art installation of the same name, which featured, among other jarring imagery, recipes written on gallery walls in what appeared to be blood. John never responded to the invitation. A later exchange between Tony and John revealed that John hadn’t attended the dinner, but that didn’t matter. The story was out: John Podesta was a devil worshipper. This was news to Abramović, who later explained that the dinner, which again, John Podesta did not attend, featured “just a normal menu. … We just call things funny names, that’s all.”1 That particular fact check is only the tip of the iceberg; spirit cooking wasn’t a one-off conspiracy theory specific to the 2016 election. Clinton and her associates had been accused of various degrees of devil worship for decades.2 Months before the spirit dinner story broke, for example, Ben Carson—the brain surgeon turned Trump booster later turned Housing and Urban Development Secretary— asserted that Clinton was an agent of Lucifer himself.3 That Carson’s statement was forgotten almost as quickly as he said it shows how normalized the Clinton-is-a-devil trope had become. The satanic conspiracy narrative is much older and broader than Clinton’s career, of course. Its existence within the contemporary political landscape stems from a centuries-old belief that embedded within every rung of society are demonic elements whose sole, nefarious purpose is to undermine Christianity and, indeed, Western Civilization itself. Online, the narrative remains doggedly resonant within far-right circles. This chapter traces the historical origins of the narrative and shows how modern media have ensured its continued circulation. In particular, we focus on the Satanic Panics, which began fulminating in the United States in the 1960s and reached their peak (or, perhaps more appropriately, their nadir) in the late 1980s and early 1990s.4 Drawing from decades, even centuries, of cultural precedent, these panics reflected growing concerns about Satan’s influence on secular society and on impressionable youths in particular. The panics included efforts to exorcise 2 You Are Here 1. The Devil’s in the Deep Frames the demonic forces believed to be lurking in a range of media, including television, books, rock music, and role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. The panics also focused on exorcising the demonic forces believed to be embedded in local communities. Some of these efforts centered on actual violent crimes that had, or were publicized as having, occult elements. Others centered on accusations of satanic abuse based on “recovered memories,” resulting in dozens of criminal trials. A networked combination of Evangelical church leaders, clinical psychologists, law enforcement officers, and concerned parents worried about the spirit dinners of their day all played critical catalyzing roles. Besides contextualizing reactions to Abramović’s party plans, the Satanic Panics illustrate two concepts at the heart of this book. First, the panics emerged from a deep memetic frame at the core of Evangelical Christian theology. Deep memetic frames grow forth from what we’re taught, what we experience, and how we’re conditioned to interpret information. They shape our realities, and by extension our actions, so thoroughly and so seamlessly that the people peering out from behind them likely have no idea the frames even exist. This is just how the world is; the epistemological equivalent of breathing. Second, the Satanic Panics thrived because of network climate change, which was brought on by a series of shifts within the media environment. These include the emergence of easily recordable, remixable, and shareable read/write media beginning in the 1960s. Read/write media allowed more people from more walks of life to shape their networks to more ambivalent ends. A formidable far- right broadcast media ecosystem also emerged in the 1960s, and was energized by the political rise of the so-called New Right in the 1970s. Fundamentalist media and right-wing political networks were further boosted by industry deregulation and the advent of cable television in the 1980s. Polluted information certainly existed before these shifts. However, it had never been able to flow at anywhere close to the speed and scale afforded by the changing network climate. The Satanic Panics didn’t just epitomize these changes; they emerged from them. The panics therefore provide a crucial, if unexpected, window into the full-blown network crisis we face today. Only by studying these origins can we fully appreciate the mess we’re in. And only by fully appreciating the mess we’re in can we hope to begin cleaning it up. Deep Memetic Frames Understanding the tenacity of the Satanic Panics requires an understanding of deep memetic frames. The meaning of the term, and the influences informing it, can be broken down word by word. First is the notion of frames. Sociologist Erving Goffman, folklorists Jeffrey Victor and Bill Ellis, and linguist George Lakoff writing with philosopher Mark Johnson all describe frames as sensemaking 3 You Are Here 1. The Devil’s in the Deep Frames mechanisms that allow people to tell coherent stories about the world.5 Lakoff and Johnson go so far as to call frames the “metaphors we live by”; they’re so integral to human cognition that they shape what a person can see.6 Philosopher Sandra Harding’s work on feminist standpoint theory adds a crucial contour to this discussion. As Harding asserts, a person’s relationship to power—the result of their race, gender, class, ability, the list goes on—establishes where they’re positioned in the world. This standpoint, in turn, directly influences what’s visible to that person, which in turn directly influences what they know.7 These frames reflect fundamental ideals and can cohere an entire lifetime of choices, beliefs, and experiences. In short, they run deep, to a person’s very core. We borrow this term from sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild’s account of the “deep stories” that animate the political ideologies of Louisiana conservatives.8 As Hochschild explains, the deep story these conservatives tell is one of “traditional” American values—hard work, independence, Christian faith—being trampled by “line cutters” who take what these conservatives believe to be theirs. In this case and others, deep stories are the paradigms through which we viscerally experience everyday life. We feel our way into deep stories; those same feelings form the core of deep memetic frames. Finally, our inclusion of the term memetic signals the reciprocal social sharing that allows deep frames to spread. They’re memes in Milner’s articulation of the term, a modification of the concept introduced by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins: ideas moving back and forth between collective norms and individual actions, evolving as they travel.9 From this view, deep memetic frames aren’t bestowed from on high, a way of seeing that somebody assigns to you. Instead, they’re maintained through what we do and say, and what others do and say, within our networks—as well as the cultural cross-pollination that occurs between networks. All that social participation—some direct, some indirect—spreads deep frames between this person and that person, between this group and that group. Memetic spread is further propelled by the persistent churn of catalyzing and stabilizing cultural forces. Stabilizing forces are institutional and mainstream. They codify norms and maintain the status quo within a particular cultural tradition. Catalyzing forces, on the other hand, are vernacular and grassroots. They respond to, play with, and often subvert stabilizing forces using alternative communication channels. Sometimes these communication channels exist wholly outside mainstream reach. Sometimes they’re repurposed by institutions. No matter how they’re communicated, deep memetic frames circulate through a blend of both. The deep memetic frames at the heart of the Satanic Panics did exactly what present-day deep memetic frames do: they established ethical and ideological ways of being in the world. In the process, they didn’t just direct what people saw (or thought they saw); they shaped what people believed should be done in response. 4 You Are Here 1. The Devil’s in the Deep Frames “For We Wrestle Not against Flesh and Blood …” Fears about a Satanist lurking under every bed are not unique to the United States nor to the 1980s. Instead, the Satanic Panics trace back centuries to a cluster of deep stories that Jeffrey Victor calls subversion myths, also known as secret conspiracy myths.10 Subversion myths, Victor explains, boil down to the fear of an evil internal enemy.