We’ve seen an unprecedented number of conspiracy theories mutate into viral hits, moving from ideas on the fringes to ones you hear about on the nightly news. But they seem less focused on illuminating how the world works and more like little totems of personality you can wear around your neck or put on your jacket. QAnon, Pizzagate, Sandy Hook deniers, Flat Earthers, “Stop the Steal” promoters, and those precious souls who don’t believe in the existence of birds are all reminiscent of social clubs or chat rooms. They’re a way of signaling to allies in a larger culture war. And conspiratorial thinking has also bled into more mainstream liberal spaces: A third of Joe Biden supporters thought that the attempted assassination of Donald Trump last summer was staged, and social media was awash in election fraud accusations this past November. Some of this is stoked by users looking for engagement and eyeballs, but at an individual level, many are simply looking for alternative explanations to confirm their sense that the world is not as it seems.
People are desperate for an explanation of their unhappiness, but as Baudrilliard wrote, “television and the media are increasingly unable to give an account of the world’s (unbearable) events.” This is where social media, I think, has changed the way we process information: On TikTok and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, paranoia circulates freely because it seems easier to indulge in a smaller, more private version of reality with fellow travelers than to come to a shared consensus on why everyday life feels so awful. There is a banal truth in what conspiracy theories offer to their adherents on these platforms: They arise from the powerlessness to enact change in life on a collective or individual level, and what emerges, then, is a feverish hunt for explanations. That may be why the recent release of National Archives materials related to the assassinations of JFK, Robert F. Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was met with a collective shrug. Their murders were national tragedies but I’d argue that people are less interested in the cold facts of what happened than the surrounding conspiracies that muffle the truth about how power is cultivated and used in this country.