Why Conspiracy Theories Are Getting Lazier and Dumber

Seven reasons, plus some general remarks on the phenomenon

Detail from a contemporary engraving of the Gunpowder Conspirators (from Wikimedia commons)

You’re reading Steam Calliope Scherzos, a blog that screws around with media ecology and non-structuralist semiotics.

I.

Back in 2019, a book came out called A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy by Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead. It argues that the political climate has been permeated by a tendency toward conspiratorial thinking that differs from the earlier kinds of conspiracy theories, like the ones about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, or the claims about the moon landing being fake. This new kind of “conspiracism,” the authors contend, represents conspiracy theory without the theory. It operates as a kind of fallback disposition of reflexive skepticism rather than a genuine striving for truth with a clear epistemological framework, a developed account of how the conspiracy in question actually works, or any potential for organized and collective resistance. Now, that’s certainly an interesting premise, but for those who might be interested, I’ve got some bad news: this book was underdeveloped, lazy, and dumb. In essence, it was a work of advanced DNC propaganda designed to explain, among other things, why the “Russiagate” conspiracy theory about Donald Trump being a Manchurian candidate for Vladimir Putin was perfectly legitimate and truth-oriented, while Donald Trump’s characterization of the Russiagate conspiracy theory as a “witch hunt” was poisonous for Democracy. Never mind that the former amounted to an attempt to overturn the outcome of a legitimate election via a drawn-out FBI investigation — one which ran on literally no credible evidence whatsoever — and the latter did not affect the outcome of any known elections or impede the operations of any elected official. You can sense that the authors are running on a rather exceptional definition of “Democracy,” one which they never bother to explain.

But besides such astonishing displays of argumentative chutzpah, most of the book’s basic distinctions between the old “conspiracism” and the new “conspiracism” don’t hold up under scrutiny. Some are inconsistent with how the authors classify individual examples of conspiracy theories, while others just simply don’t make any sense; this critical review by Oliver Traldi explains the book’s problems well. For a work that complains about how today’s conspiracy theories lack theory, it is itself void of convincing theoretical reasoning, the kind that’s necessary for the argument it’s trying to make. So, rather than being a serious sociological analysis on how conspiracy theorists/theories have changed over time, or a contribution to a broader theory on conspiracy theories, or anything that would have had lasting value, the book is simply a partisan work of political hackery and should probably be understood as yet another attempt to cash in on anti-Trump mania of the time.¹

There is, however, one thing that the book gets right: conspiracy theories are getting dumber and lazier. Trying to explain the situation with the pretentious phrase “new conspiracism,” and then including every statement of mistrust (no matter how minor) toward the media or the government as part of this phenomenon, convolutes the issue far more than one can forgive. But there’s no question that conspiracy theories are now typically expressed in a different way than before, often coming from a different psychological sensibility. I remember back when I was young, only a few unusual people would latch onto conspiracy theories, and they’d take them pretty far. They wanted to “go down the rabbit hole.” Believing in conspiracy theories was generally a sign of eccentricity, and conspiracy guys would knowingly take on the role of the eccentric. The late-1990s cartoon show King of the Hill, at least in its earlier seasons, actually does a decent job of portraying such conspiracy theorists in the character of Dale Gribble. He’s self-consciously strange, his actual political views are often incoherently expressed (but closest to civil libertarianism), he’s not exactly perceptive about what’s immediately going on around him, and above all, he’s genuine in his reflexive mistrust of big, complex organizations and institutions. Dale is a unique character for various reasons, but I can say that his conspiratorial disposition resembles that of various people I’ve known in real life.

Today, however, there is nothing eccentric about embracing a conspiracy theory. It is, in fact, the default “normie” position. Normal, everyday people watch conspiracy theory videos on TikTok, they listen to conspiracy theories explained in their favorite podcasts, they circulate conspiracy theories with each other on Facebook and other social media platforms, and crucially, such theorizing is totally bipartisan. Everyone does this; left, right, and center. If a shooting or terrorist attack happens, it’s a false flag. If an assassination attempt takes place, it was staged. If a bad candidate wins an election, it was rigged. If some inconvenient news comes out, it has been manufactured. Of course, some events will invite more suspicion within one political corner than the other depending on their character, but pretty much everyone seems to agree that nothing is at it seems. The bipartisan nature of conspiracy theorizing was already pretty obvious back in 2019 when A Lot of People Are Saying was published (and anyone even slightly disinterested could have realized this), but the sheer laziness of it all wasn’t as apparent. Not to me, anyway.

The beginning of the 2026 War in Iran was when I really started to figure it out. It began when I talked to someone about the war, expressed my annoyance, and she murmured somewhat vacantly, “Yep… just a cover-up over the Epstein files…” as if this were common knowledge, so common that it was boring to even say it. But the statement, far from boring, was a real-world expression of things I had only been reading online up to that point. Now, did she believe in all of the most fantastic and lurid claims about Epstein? Probably not. But after a few more incidental conversations with random people over time, I realized that this viewpoint in its most stripped-down version was totally normal. You yourself might actually believe some version of it right now! Of course, the Epstein files have not led to a single arrest, nor will they because they do not contain anything legally actionable, and moreover all of the redacted files were redacted because of the alleged victims’ requests, not the potentially accused… but then again, as the Pizzagate theory made it clear, the fantasy of a pedophilic cabal doing everything in its power to create distractions from the muckraking research of our intrepid citizen journalists is just too tempting to resist. Hey, why should the 4channers and QAnon faithful get to have all the fun?

Not long afterward, Cole Tomas Allen (himself an Epstein pedophile conspiracy theorist) attempted to assassinate Donald Trump, and I made a passing reference about it to an acquaintance: a fairly normal, average baby boomer. She said to me immediately, “Oh, come on, you know that was staged.” I said to her, “But it’s true that there’s a lot of gun violence in this country. You don’t think that at least one guy who would commit it might turn his attention to a high-profile politician?” She then asked me in response, “Well, then why didn’t he seem to hurt anyone? He practically shot no one when rushing towards Trump.” I told her, “He released a manifesto where he specifically said he didn’t want to hurt any guards — something about not wanting to hurt low-level employees, only the top guys.”

She then contorted her face into an expression that could only have meant, “Oh dear, this poor fuckin’ rube… he’ll believe anything.”

II.

One reason that so many attempts to essentialize the mind of the conspiracy theorist end in failure is that there isn’t one type of conspiracy theory, and there isn’t one type of conspiracy theorist. The more enthusiastic and motivated theorists still exist, there’s no doubt about it, and they often exert influence upon the less motivated. But conspiracy thinking is very much an opt-in affair, and you get to choose the extent to which you engage that realm of suspicion. Accordingly, there are specific types of conspiracy theories that are more compatible with lazy speculation, while other types are less inviting. I can’t put together an exhaustive account of how all conspiracy theories work here, but it’s important to have at least some framework for understanding them, since such a framework can explain why they often get jumbled around in people’s minds nowadays, creating a vague cloud of suspicion among the general populace. So for this discussion, I’ll divide conspiracy theories into three basic types using scale as the delineating factor.

#1 - Suspicion of criminal conspiracy or collusion

This is a conspiracy theory in its most conservative, bare-bones form. Criminal conspiracy happens all the time, and federal prosecutors nearly always slap a conspiracy charge onto any crime in which two or more people were involved. Sometimes these accusations are correct, sometimes they’re not; such is the nature of the justice system. But they are conspiracy theories, even though they are rarely labeled as such, and when we hear the phrase “conspiracy theory,” we almost never think of these situations. Many of the more adventurous conspiracy theorists always bring up this point to defend some of their more controversial views. For instance, you’ve probably heard this one: all explanations of the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks are conspiracy theories, including the official story about the terrorists hijacking the planes. So, no matter what, 9/11 has to be explained by a conspiracy theory of some kind. This claim, strictly speaking, is correct.

That being said, this kind of conspiracy theorizing can get pretty damn wacky and even downright frightening, not despite but because of its specificity. If you consider the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, it would fall under this category, since it involved mostly specific people: John Podesta, Hillary Clinton, Marina Abramović, James Alefantis, and more, and it had a specific location: Comet Pizza in Washington, D.C. Although the theory presumed the involvement of anonymous participants, it was mainly directed at distinct people who had sent actual emails to one another, and it assumed that various and sometimes (admittedly) strange references to “pizza” in these emails were in fact references to trafficked children. It also proposed a motive that was specific to everyone involved: they all were perverts who wanted to use children for sexual gratification. These claims had no evidence behind them whatsoever, and they threatened to destroy peoples’ lives — particularly Alefantis, a small business owner whose shop was eventually targeted by a vigilante gunman. Although some have tried to argue that Pizzagate lacked specifics and didn’t have a “theory,” this is not true at all: it was a remarkably clear-cut and highly detailed accusation of criminal wrongdoing and was thankfully met with some skepticism. No authorities investigated Alefantis because there was no evidence that merited an investigation, and the mainstream media overwhelmingly disapproved of the theory.

It is unfortunate, then, that other evidence-free conspiracy theories belonging to this category have not always been met with similar skepticism. For example, when Rolling Stone magazine published “A Rape on Campus,” a defamatory article accusing the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity of criminal conspiracy to commit gang rape, the university immediately suspended all fraternities, and mobs of outraged students vandalized the accused fraternity’s house. And, as I mentioned before, the accusation of criminal collusion between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin resulted in a major criminal investigation — one that hindered the administration’s ability to engage in foreign policy, and which has justifiably damaged the public’s trust in both law enforcement agencies and the mainstream news media.

#2 - Suspicion of a specific plot orchestrated by a complex, abstract entity (like a government or a corporation) with a specific outcome in mind

Whereas the previous category concerns individual people, this one moves up a step in abstraction. Here is your standard conspiracy theory, the kind we typically think of when we hear the phrase. It includes false flag theories (a very big category that includes all orchestrated terrorist attacks and high-profile assassinations, as long as there’s a claim of a designated patsy, scapegoat, or falsely accused group), voter fraud or election manipulation theories, financial conspiracies about price-fixing and deliberately engineered economic crashes, and pretty much all other theories of orchestrated deception, even minor deceptions, with a coherent motive. Some include, but are certainly not limited to, the Obama “birther” conspiracy theory, theories about the moon landing being faked, theories of UFO cover-ups, theories about rigged matches or games in sports, theories of dark/hidden money being supplied by wealthy elites for various projects, cover-up theories involving disturbing new weapons or technological innovations designed to oppress people (“chemtrails”), theories about government agencies conducting experiments on people without their consent (“MK-Ultra”), accusations of entrapment by criminal justice organizations, and even most theories about scams, false advertising, and undisclosed invasions of privacy (“your cell phone is spying on you”). The key to these theories is that although they might involve one or more particular individuals, they almost always include nameless, faceless people doing at least some assistance work, if not all of the work.

What makes these conspiracy theories so frustrating is that they aren’t as easy to dismiss as we would like to hope. They sometimes have a grain of truth to them, and some are just simply true, straight-up. These theories almost always have a motive that one can explain,² and the reason they focus on corporate entities like government and big business is that the methods through which these entities operate are often inscrutable. Americans learn about how their government works in a civics or social studies class, but ever since FDR’s presidency, the government has been filled with unelected bureaucrats who are not accountable by voters. Although educated coastal elites will scoff at the phrase “deep state” and roundly deny that such a thing even exists, they themselves will gladly use the phrase “intelligence community,” sometimes in the same breath, and not realize the hypocrisy of what they are doing. But however you want to label it, whether it’s a deep state or intelligence community, it is a real thing, and it invites suspicion.

In order to understand these conspiracy theories and why they have been common for decades now, some basic concessions must be made among America’s most faithful institution-trusters, and one of them is this: we have very little idea as to how our government actually works, we have very little idea as to how corporations actually work, we have very little understanding about the interrelation between the two, and there is virtually no reliable, easily-accessible way to get good information about such matters, even with such attempts to provide transparency as the Freedom of Information Act.

#3 - Suspicion of a massive, overwhelming, longstanding plot in which our basic understanding of reality itself is at stake

Here is where conspiracy theory gets interesting. This type acts as a kind of big, recursive meta-theory that can absorb as well as generate smaller theories. It can sometimes form additively from these smaller suspicions as it gradually subsumes them over time. In other cases, it can start from a grand theory and then gradually incorporate various incidents and situations into its lore, both by waiting for new ones to arrive and ret-conning old ones. Whatever the case, in this sort of theory, a grand narrative is presented that can explain an incredible amount of things. Just pull a string, and you can unravel the entire universe. Such a theory might constantly occupy the adherent’s thoughts all day, every day, and enough engagement with it can have an almost hallucinatory effect. Because of how wide-ranging the theory is, it requires a certain level of discipline from the committed adherent: one must slowly reorient one’s own perceptions to fit the theory, or perhaps change around one’s own everyday vocabulary to stay consistent with its doctrine. And because such theories directly concern the fabric of reality, they will often veer toward the metaphysical, the theological, and/or the eschatological dimensions of human understanding.

Almost always, these theories come from genuine paranoia³, though minor adherents might get involved in them for other reasons. In some cases, the theory can take on a cult-like structure, and people will join simply because they want to be in a group of some sort. In other cases, the theory can resemble a sort of antinomian rejection of mainstream society and attract followers for that reason. But it would be a mistake to say that such theories are merely performative or symbolic. The people who believe in them, with few exceptions, really do believe.

Some examples of these conspiracy theories would include flat earth, QAnon (which absorbed both Pizzagate and the various Jeffrey Epstein theories and slowly grew to resemble a millenarian Christian denomination), various theories about extraterrestrials interacting with humans at one or more early periods of human development (and the attempts from the government to cover this up), and theories about reality being a simulation of some kind. Nobody seems to take the phantom time hypothesis seriously these days, but if they did, it would count. These theories also include grand unifying metanarratives about history being controlled, or at least routinely impacted, by mysterious and shadowy groups including, but not limited to, Freemasons, the Illuminati, the New World Order, the Jews, and the Reptilians.

What makes this tier of conspiracy theory so fascinating to me is that it in some cases, it can become simply a “theory” without the conspiracy even being necessary. For instance, the New World Order acts as the conceptual linchpin to explain why globalization is happening (an undeniable situation), but one will rarely encounter specific claims about a New World Order with official, self-identifying members — it instead acts as an abstract unifying concept that includes the Bilderberg Group, the Skull & Bones Society, and others. It can include plenty of far-fetched conspiracy theories belonging to the second type, but it doesn’t really require any. In this way, it is hard to find much meaningful difference between the New World Order theory and University-approved theories such as “structural racism,” “patriarchy,” or “capitalist superstructure,” all of which I would place in this third category.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this kind of overarching theory eventually dispenses with identifiable groups altogether and becomes a pure condemnation of abstract forces, whichever kind the adherents dislike. In the Italian esotericist Julius Evola’s Men Among the Ruins (first published 1953), Evola discusses the concept of the “occult war,” first postulated by Emmanuel Malynski and Leon de Poncins in 1936 as a Judeo-Masonic plot against traditional Christianity. Evola, however, sees the occult war as a spiritual struggle taking place at the most subtle level of metaphysics. On the same theme, he had written an approving introduction to the infamous forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (1903) in which he acknowledged that it is probably indeed a fraudulent document, but then further contended that this doesn’t matter, because the book’s description of what is happening sociopolitically is true regardless of who is causing it to happen. In Men Among the Ruins, Evola thus warned readers not to invest too much energy in blaming one particular group such as the Jews or Freemasons, for these groups might themselves be unwitting pawns of the forces of subversion driving this occult war and bringing traditional civilization to complete dissolution. So, in other words, there is an occult war taking place, and it does seem to cause the Jews and Freemasons to do terrible things, but the actual driving force behind it is abstract and impersonal.

The manner in which Evola describes the forces of subversion isn’t too conceptually dissimilar to how the French poststructuralist Michel Foucault describes power. In Foucault’s theory, power seems to act in a similarly free-floating way with no identifiable targets. You get to have all the paranoia of a conspiracy theorist without any of the fun of picking a scapegoat (although this hasn’t stopped some of Foucault’s more dull-witted fans within the university system). In any case, these are fairly advanced and unusual examples of how conspiratorial thought can unravel itself when pushed far enough.

III.

Now that we’ve gotten our taxonomy out of the way, we can look at the dumber and lazier conspiracy theories that we find expressed in daily life. Typically, these conspiracy theories fall under the second category. The first and third categories require too much thought and/or personal commitment to be attractive for the average person, but the second category of theory tends to demand a pretty low level of commitment. All you really need to do is state that something isn’t the way it seems, figure out a party responsible, identify a motive, and voila, you’ve got your theory. However, the first and third types of theory lend an air of credence to conspiracy theories of the second type by dint of their mere existence. Theories of the first type, which can become “canon” simply by being repeated enough, sometimes form the building blocks of a lazy and stupid theory of the second type.

We still need to figure out why exactly the second kind of theory has gotten so low-quality on the whole, though, at least compared to how such theories were articulated prior to the 2010s. And unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be just one reason. So, rather than providing everyone with one superimposing meta-reason under which every other reason can be placed, I’ve come up with seven small ones, and I’ll end this post by providing them. Here they are:

1. Greater popularity of something usually means dumber people are getting involved

This should be pretty self-explanatory. If conspiracy theories can be disseminated at an unprecedented rate through the internet, then those that appeal to the lowest common denominator will win, and the most successful presentations of these theories will not be particularly ambitious or demanding.

Conspiracy theories also seem to operate now through a bottom-up process of transmission. An intelligent and rational person might be a reliable source of truth if she subsists in a community predominately filled with other intelligent and rational people, but individually, the intelligent and rational are quite powerless. Such people are often emotionally vulnerable and easy to sway through appeals to pathos, moral grandstanding, and peer pressure (and note: on the internet, everyone is a peer, no matter how superior one person might be to the other by every measurable standard). Therefore, when a conspiracy theory gains traction, those who once would have helped nullify it in an environment with greater barriers to entry will instead find themselves engaging in apologia, saying things like, “Well, surely, something is going on here,” or, “Well, even if it isn’t literally true, it sure does reflect a deeper underlying reality,” and so on.

Thus, the environment is set for typical people to go around vacantly believing in a conspiracy theory, even if they aren’t particularly committed to it or don’t feel obligated to work out its underlying mechanics. With little pushback from above, there is little incentive for them to do so.

2. American life is increasingly filled with scams and deceptions

I remember being roughly eight or nine years old and seeing one of those “You May Have Already Won 10 Million Dollars!” letters that the Publishers Clearing House would send to everyone. After being overwhelmed with excitement, my old man came home and presented me with a hard truth on that day: there are all sorts of people in this society who just make up nonsense and then try to scam you with it. In America in particular, these kinds of deceptions are remarkably common, and one must get used to them early on. The ad in the classifieds that seems too good to be true is probably fake. The massive sale at the clothing store on the strip mall is only giving you a discount from a prior mark-up. The medicine that the doctor is prescribing you might actually make things worse. The new nutrition study that just came out probably doesn’t mean anything because it hasn’t been replicated (even though the news seems quite confident in its legitimacy). The new cryptocurrency is probably designed to take your money. The insurance company denying your claim probably will accept it despite their assurances to the contrary, but you’ve got to lawyer up first.

Under such conditions, assuming that something is fake or misleading is often a reasonable starting position, and it is simply naive to expect that the average person who maintains this disposition so often in day-to-day life should carve out an exception for “official channels of information” like a respected newspaper or a government organization. In the book A Lot of People Are Saying, the authors claim that all usages of the term “fake news” constitute “the new conspiracism” because “fake” implies malicious intent. But looking at a news article that seems wrong and labeling it fake is, cognitively speaking, only a stone’s throw away from looking at a deceptive advertisement and calling it fake. I don’t believe that everyone who uses the word “fake” is implying malicious intent. But if someone calls something “fake news” and then concocts an impromptu conspiracy theory to explain why it’s fake, again, we’re not too far from the man who says, “The reason that hot dog buns are sold in eight-packs while hot dogs are sold in six-packs is because the hot dog company got together with the bun company, and they decided to scam the people by forcing them keep buying more of both until they reach a common multiple!”

The bottom line is, when people live in a society in which a skeptical disposition has become something of a day-to-day requirement, they will lose trust in just about everything and come up with their own way of explaining the world.

3. There is an epistemological crisis in the west

The epistemological crisis has been defined as a major breakdown in the shared societal framework for determining truth, and this pattern has been acknowledged countless times. It is often Democrat voters who seem most alarmed by it, though various philosophers across the political spectrum have been discussing the matter for decades. What’s amusing, though, is that the awareness of an epistemological crisis has actually broadened the epistemological crisis. The university system has discussed philosophers who have commented upon this crisis from Heidegger to Arendt to Lyotard to Baudrillard, and it has accordingly taught students — correctly, I might add — that pure objectivity in the reporting of facts and stories is an impossibility. In the same way that there is no “object” without a “subject,” there is no way to present information without some kind of vantage point. This idea is not mere postmodern nihilism; thinkers like Goethe and Herder showed awareness of it when discussing the concept of history.

But with lower barriers to university entry, many dumb students have taken dumb lessons from such ideas, and they’ve concluded that objectivity should not even be attempted. Moreover, they’ve encouraged the smarter students to agree with them. These students, both dumb and smart, have then gone onto occupy elite spaces in the information-circulating sector of American society. The concept of “the view from nowhere” has been altogether dismissed as a bourgeois prejudice, and consequently, many academics, journalists, and info-tainers have no problem at all seasoning their work with ideological bias, citing the (again, true) teaching that bias is unavoidable. Because, hey, if it’s unavoidable, why not crank it up to 100?

This is just one of the many reasons that our elite institutions have discredited themselves and broadened the epistemological crisis, but there are economic and media-ecological reasons as well. Mainstream news has had a difficult time transitioning from print to the online world, and it often relies on hysterical “clickbait” articles to attract attention as well as deceptive and “sexy” reporting, even among the most respected papers. Additionally, 24/7 cable news networks have struggled to maintain television ratings, and they have been financially incentivized to pursue titillating nonsense to keep the viewers hooked. Although I believe that the decline in reliable journalistic analysis and academic integrity is more ideologically driven than economic in nature, the economic situation has provided support for the downturn by providing immediate short-term gain.

4. Decline in literacy

Here’s another media-ecological reason for not just the widespread epistemological crisis affecting the west but also the uniquely dumb and lazy status of so many of today’s conspiracy theories. Without diving headlong into the thought of Marshall McLuhan, I will just briefly sum up how he and his colleagues like Walter Ong distinguished between the mentality of those in print cultures vs. oral ones. McLuhan believed that the printing press trained people to possess linear reasoning, emotional detachment, a knack for sequence and causality, and analytical distance. Oral cultures, by contrast, emphasize immersion, simultaneity, collective identity, pattern recognition, group participation, and mythic thinking. Lest we assume that he considered the former superior to the latter, he actually spent quite a bit of time articulating the flaws within the print mentality, since it created the feeling of rupture between the mind and body, which has led to the preponderance of desiccated intellectualism (recall my point that the intelligent are often easily dominated by the foolish in a direct interpersonal setting, allowing for the bottom-up transmission of ideas). Oral cultures, by contrast, possess a more unified, holistic perspective.

That being said, the electronic environment seems to have taken on more attributes of oral epistemology with less of a literate counterbalance. Highly literate people, for instance, tend to prefer interpreting troubling news in structural terms, using a theory as a sort of lens. Internet-based people seem somewhat prone to person-oriented if not mythic thinking, which strengthens the tendency to engage in conspiracy theory. For a good while before the widespread dissemination of high-speed internet and smart phones, a conspiracy theory could live alongside a structural analysis, even within one person negotiating between both. Now, conspiracy theories seem to be supplanting structural analysis altogether. This may mean that the third type of conspiracy theory will grow increasingly mythopoeic and less intellectually sophisticated over time.

5. Boredom and the need for entertainment

One of my favorite new conspiracy theories popular among Generation Z is the one that Helen Keller didn’t actually do anything particularly impressive, and her “handler” Anne Sullivan largely faked her accomplishments for personal gain through various tactics of deception and subterfuge. It’s a pretty good example of how conspiracy theories have an “opt-in” quality to them. Some people have put a great deal of effort into the theory, while others have caught whiff of it from a cursory glance at Tik-Tok and came away with the impression that Helen Keller never actually existed. There’s a range. But one of the reasons the theory has proliferated is partly because it’s a whole lotta fun. It’s just simply amusing to talk about how Helen Keller didn’t really do anything and your fifth grade teacher was being a gullible buffoon.

Fun is certainly a reason for the growth of conspiracy theories in the internet age, and fun conspiracy theories are often interchangeable with urban legends. When I was a kid, there was an internet-based rumor about how Kevin’s brother from the TV show The Wonder Years grew up to be Marilyn Manson. This isn’t exactly a conspiracy theory, but it’s thematically similar to another internet-based theory that Barbara Bush was the secret daughter of British occultist Aleister Crowley, which has more conspiratorial undertones, even though it started as an April Fool’s joke.

The need for fun does not necessarily make a theory dumb or lazy, however, as long as there’s a genuine element of paranoia accompanying it. Pizzagate actually started off on 4chan as a joke, or at least a half-joke. Although I can’t find the quote at the moment, I recall seeing a poster on 4chan when the theory was in the midst of being concocted saying something to the effect of, “It doesn’t matter if all this is nonsense, this is just too funny not to run with.” Something like that, anyway. I should also point out that there’s a satirical computer game about Jeffrey Epstein popular among 10-year-olds. Again, paranoia about Epstein is real, but this particular thing is fun, and it contributes to what the journalist Michael Tracey has called the “ambient folklore” surrounding Epstein.

6. Increased political partisanship

Here’s a pretty obvious one: you’re more likely to go along with a conspiracy theory belonging to the second type if you’re a true believer in your political tribe and cannot emotionally process inconvenient information that compromises your loyalty. I have no idea how far the folks on BlueSky have gone in trying to prove that every Donald Trump assassination attempt has been a hoax (though they have indulged in such conspiracy theories), but their motivations are pretty obvious. There’s no need to dwell on this one, because it’s quite straightforward, but it is worth mentioning that agonism is a persistent condition of the oral world identified by Walter Ong in his Orality and Literacy (1983). And as Marshall McLuhan said repeatedly, the world is becoming a global village… but it’s a tribal village.

7. Conspiracy theories as a counterintuitive way to escape from politics

I’ll end with a more interesting point here than the previous one. Lazy conspiracy theorizing is growing across pretty much all age groups, but Generation Z is definitely leading the pack. As many have noted, Gen-Z has an interesting relationship with politics. On the one hand, they absorb an incredible amount of political content online… but on the other hand, their actual political engagement (as measured by voting, volunteering, organizing, etc.) is historically low.

Although it is too early to say, it seems possible that lazy conspiracy theorizing might be a sign of political fatigue rather than enthusiastic engagement. Dismissing a news story by saying, “It’s all fake, it was staged, it was a false flag,” etc. acts as a shield from the obligation to engage with it, and such shielding might become increasingly common in a society that expects the average person to form opinions on virtually every topic that dominates the headlines. Additionally, Generation Z is scrutinized to an astounding degree: just about every time I log onto Twitter, I find someone attacking them for some perceived inadequacy, and many of these attacks are political in nature. Just about everyone seems to place all of their hopes and expectations onto Generation Z and accordingly demands great things from them, as if they’re supposed to function collectively as a kind of deus ex machina that will swoop in and save civilization from driving itself off of a cliff. But as Generation Z continues to age, they will probably not deliver on being such a redemptive force, and Generation Alpha (or whatever they’re called) will likely encounter the same if not more excessive scrutiny. For that reason, it seems that the conspiracy theory acts as a stress-relieving way to feign engagement with politics while actually abstaining from politics altogether. And if I’m being honest, it’s easy for me to understand the situation from that perspective.

Alright, that’s it. We’ll end the discussion here.

1. For full disclosure, I only finished the first two chapters in which the book’s theoretical underpinnings are presented. About halfway through the third chapter, “Presidential Conspiracism,” which was dedicated to how Trump is bad, I decided to tap out. Life is short, OK?

2. Seriously, if you can’t think of one, try looking it up. While composing this piece, I had a hard time thinking of a motive for why the moon landing would be faked. Then I looked it up and found several, all of which at least seem reasonable on the surface.

3. When I say “paranoia,” I really mean this in the more colloquial, non-clinical sense of the term meaning something like “chronically suspicious and distrusting.” I have no desire to diagnose anybody with anything or analyze the extent to which these theories affect anyone’s health.