Companion essay / 3 pages / August 2026
Stephen Fry, Vladislav Surkov, white-hat hackers and the organisation that may not technically exist.
I have discovered that there is a vast international conspiracy of celebrities plotting to take down the establishment from the inside. It has no headquarters, no manifesto and, crucially, no minutes. That is because it is a joke. More or less.
The Celebrity Conspiracy begins as a deliberately ridiculous proposition, then follows the underlying question: what happens when people who have acquired a degree of cultural power use it independently, and sometimes unexpectedly, to make the world a little less obedient?
Where the joke leads
The piece moves from Adam Curtis and Surkov towards culture jamming, the Situationists and white-hat hackers: people who understand that systems can be challenged by changing the stories, signals and rules through which they maintain themselves. Not a theory of secret command, but a question about distributed agency.