CODED

—Suddenly Everybody’s a Conspiracy Theorist

Mason Freeman — BUNK’D! / Council Occulture Desk

For years I’ve been told not to see secret messages everywhere.

Yes, as we like to say here at the council, fair enough. Then suddenly everything became coded.

Queer-coded. Boomer-coded. Millennial-coded. Working-class-coded. Gay-coded. Elite-coded. Right-coded. Left-coded. Trad-coded. Lesbian-coded. Masculine-coded. Feminine-coded. Rural-coded. Urban-coded.

Clothes are coded. Haircuts are coded. Cars are coded. Movies are coded. Music is coded.

And I’m the conspiracy theorist?!

We recently ran a piece built around Burt Bacharach’s “Alfie.” Bacharach wrote good music. He also wrote songs for musicals. And musical theater, I’m informed, can be “gay-coded.”

So let me get this straight. A man likes Bacharach’s music. Perhaps he even likes a musical or two. Somebody detects the pattern, consults the cultural cipher, and announces what it is coded for.

I used to get criticized for thinking like this.

With everything now being coded, I have another concern. The conspiracy may finally have come out into the open. Not that coded necessarily means anybody is conspiring. But it does suggest an in-group: people who recognize the signs, understand what they mean, and see something the uninitiated don’t. It may even be they are conspiring.

That used to be my line of work.

If hidden meanings have gone mainstream, I may have to start worrying about job security.

A code once required somebody doing the coding. A message was concealed; somebody possessed the key; somebody else wasn’t supposed to understand it.

Now coded can apparently mean:

“I associate this with that.”

The association has moved out of the observer’s head and into the evidence.

For years conspiracy theorists were accused of finding hidden meanings, connections and affiliations everywhere. Now everybody does it.

Apparently we weren’t paranoid.

We were early adopters.

— Mason Freeman
BUNK’D! / Council Occulture Desk