Confessions of a Professional Conspiracy Theorist by Will Camden

As regular readers of the blog will know, I’ve long had an occasional creative interest in conspiracy theories. Although mine are generally focused on the overlapping explorations of Flat Earth, nudity and poetry, I am aware of other ones.

In my capacity (a decade ago) as the indie press book reviewer for the sometimes-not-dormant London literary magazine Open Pen, I once had a bit of back and forth email communication with whichever one of David Icke’s children had either the overload of familial love or the scarcity of familial shame to work as their father’s publicist.

They wanted Open Pen to review Icke’s then latest book, a tome from the TV sports personality¹ turned [insert adjective of choice] “alternative thinker”, expounding his theories on the 2001 terrorist attack generally referred to as “9/11”. The book ran to about 1,000 pages, so it did not get read.

I have, though, at other moments, skimmed through enough related Wikipedia pages to understand the significance of the phrase “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” and the various other ideas claiming to evidence that the destruction of the World Trade Centre was more complex than the narratives espoused by the – as they say – “mainstream media”.

When you read a little about conspiracy theories, they can be quite engaging! Some of them – the Apollo 11 Moon Landing being fake, in particular – are near-persuasive and compelling because there is something that – even to a non-gullible cynic like me – feels a little “no smoke without fire”.

Other conspiracy theories are compelling for their sheer absurdity, for the fact that it’s inconceivable that anyone could even pretend to genuinely believe them: i.e. the idea that global elites are shape-shifting lizards (they’re not); the idea that the world is flat, not round (it’s round, no matter what you may have heard at my naked poetry show).

Will Camden (not the author’s real name) knows that conspiracy theories are compelling too, and in this enjoyable novel, which is framed as a fictional confessional memoir, our protagonist-narrator seeks to flood the world with conspiracy theories on behalf of a sinister international organisation who want the world to be loosened up before the coming technological revolution.

Will Camden (the character) is a young PR professional who is plucked from his job by a very well connected aristo who he did a placement with a couple of years back, to join a shadowy group of people who regularly meet up in-and-near Frankfurt, then travel back home to all try to spread misinformation, information, and the idea that all information could be misinformation and all misinformation could be information.

With the backing of serious and successful PR professionals and their many media connections, ideas fly and are flown in a serious and unrelenting way. Will and his colleagues also spend a lot of time in online chat forums, joining in and stroking “debates”.

There is a David Icke-type figure (though this time a former comedian rather than a former sports person) whose pronouncements about lizard people seem to be much more sympathetically received in this fictional world than in our real one, and throughout the novel there are plenty of engaging asides about the theories and practices of 21st century public relations.

The novel discusses various conspiracy theories as Will Camden’s people recommend and advocate for the right timings of certain ideas to be spread, and alongside this we also see the non-conspiracy theory related work that the character’s agency does, and there is often thematic overlap, with the nudge theory and astroturfing (fake “grass routes” campaigns) techniques used in pursuit of ideological and economical ends always being identical.

What becomes a little difficult to know by the end is whether this book is meant to be seen as critique or celebration of PR techniques (and if merely a neutral commentary then that, of course, is not a critique), and the novel’s decision towards its end to have Will Camden decide to step away from being a professional conspiracy theorist without meaningfully doing so is ambiguous… Camden (the character) kinda behaves as if he believes he has moved on, but does this mean he has succumbed to the comfort of sheepling about without questioning the currents that move him, or is he now knowingly settling into what he is without any further ethical scruples?

The novel never looks closely at who Will is working for – who controls him, who funds him, and how similar this group of international figures are to the fictionalised Illuminati he spreads so many rumours about online, and though a dramatic twist ending where Will Camden becomes a victim of the forces he previously worked with when he decides to quit might have been a little more obvious, but without this, it does feel like the novel stops rather than ends. And although this could be a device to give the author creative space for a sequel, it also absolutely could be an intentional statement on the way in which people who, professionally, do sinister things (or facilitate sinister things) do mostly face no personal consequences for doing so!

That said, the novel absolutely is engaging throughout and playful and fun, and the only less tentatively critical comment I would suggest re: Confessions of a Professional Conspiracy Theorist, is that it could do with a little bit of an edit to clarify narrative timelines: the story here covers approximately 20 years (maybe more?), but it’s often unclear when and how time passes, and other than the occasional blunt statements of (e.g.) “9/11 just happened” there is a disregard to clarity of chronological setting that could easily be fixed with an extra sentence or two (or even subheadings!) at some point in most sections. Introductions of new technologies that are paramount in understandings of contemporary media are often not signposted as they happen, but rather become things that are already in play: we go from slow dial up in one scene to bad broadband in the next, with no clarification as to whether or not this is brand new broadband (in which case it would be good, right, if compared to dial up!) or if years have passed and speedy wired internet has now become the norm?

The last novel I read before this was Emily St John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel, which leaps backward and forward in time from the 1960s through to the 2020s, and in every single passage of that novel, it is always exactly clear when the characters are, unless the ambiguity is being held for a later narrative twist. So it’s definitely fixable, and it can be a bit distracting as a reader when you’re genuinely uncertain if six years or six days or six minutes have passed between chapters…

This said, though, Will Camden’s narrative does periodically get anchored in time, and this doesn’t invalidate the overall enjoyment and many pleasures of Confessions of a Professional Conspiracy Theorist.

It is, yes, a fun and playful text, and though it’s not without flaws (but what is???²), it’s an playful and sometimes provocative read encouraging consideration about what ones thinks and believe and why – and to whose benefit – we hold our opinions and beliefs.

In a recent TEN WORDS OR FEWER INTERVIEW conducted with the author, the writer known as Will Camden mentioned he was working on non-fiction essays about the themes raised in the novel. I’ll see if I can find any of these and see what the conclusions are [if] there about the ethics of the narrative. Does the real man behind Will Camden see him as a hero? A villain? Or something in-between? And does that even matter? I don’t know. And maybe I never will…

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1. Please do correct me if there was no public personality gap between professional footballer and conspiracy theorist – I’m not doing any David Icke biographical research. Not now. ↩︎
2. My 2yo child, Whamathan, imo, though he is resistant to the toilet training timetable I’d like to apply to him, so that probably does count as a [minor, for now] flaw. ↩︎