But I'm Not Paranoid!

The above Tamil adage roughly translates to “Every shadow is a ghost to the eyes that hold fear!” To dismiss someone’s fear as paranoia is a contention for power about what can be admitted as “reasonable” while persuading others. Therefore, an ethical consideration of paranoia behooves us to ask who benefits from dismissing others’ fears and how such reasoning is enmeshed within design discourses. Expanding beyond a pathologizing conceptualization, I explore paranoia as a sociotechnical episteme—a way of knowing and making sense—that can offer a multitude of competing explanations and speculative expressions that arise out of suspicion. John Farrell offers a genealogy of suspicion in modern Western thought and characterizes paranoia as “a psychological tendency in which the intellectual powers of the sufferer are neither entirely undermined nor completely cut off from reality, but rather deployed with a particular distortion” [2]. Paranoid thinking deserves careful consideration because it cannot be readily dismissed as persecutory delusions of an individual. Farrell argues that “modern people identify with the paranoid character [because they] feel the need to account for their individual and collective failures, to set their own lives meaningfully in the context of their moral relations with others” [2]. Paranoia then can be characterized as an Other-oriented episteme that is inherently relational. Made manifest and mediated through a sociotechnical matrix of interactions, paranoid thinking becomes a form of “group thinking” that involves an orienting belief about “possessing a special insight into the epistemologies of enmity” [1]. Ieva Jusionyte and Daniel M. Goldstein illustrate “the multiple and shifting intersections of in/visibility and in/ security in today’s security-minded world” [3]. They assert that “paranoid concealment and creative camouflage are the modi operandi of contemporary security regimes, and the ability to manipulate visibility and to penetrate the opaque are key techno-discursive components of ongoing state projects of security” [3]. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun provocatively states, “To be paranoid is to think like a machine” [4]. Thus, to leave no stone unturned is a machine-logic response to perceived threat. We use digital vaccine passports that determine how human bodies can move across human-made borders and There was no place for him to go. No place he could hide. No place where his enemy didn’t exist. No escape from unconscious wakefulness. There was no rest. And so he just lay there with the nauseous pain of exhaustion.... Yet it was this constant and all-pervading pain that seemed to allow him to survive for without it the overwhelming anguish and terror of his mind would have destroyed him. — Hubert Selby Jr. (The Room, 1971)