Shani Claire Spivak

The Many Tendrils of the Octopus Map

Conspiratorial thinking can connect many distinct or distant ills to a central cause. This belief has visual form in the octopus map: a map where a central force (for instance a nation, an ideology, or an ethnicity) is depicted as a literal or figurative octopus, with extending tendrils. In this paper, we explore how…