Online Conspiracy Theories: The WIRED Guide

It's how we've always made sense of the world: Our ancestors wouldn't have survived if they hadn't realized that plants tend to flourish after rainfall or that sabertooth tigers tended to eat them. But sometimes we're just a little too good at finding meaning in the noise, occasionally unable to separate real patterns from those of our own imagining. These days, your pattern matching skills will help you find Waldo, but they are also why celebrities' faces keep popping up on tortillas. At their most paranoid and byzantine, these pattern-matching misfires are called conspiracy theories: unfounded, deeply held alternative explanations for how things are--often invoking some shadowy, malevolent force masterminding the coverup. It's an unfounded, deeply held alternative explanations for how things are--often invoking some shadowy, malevolent force masterminding the coverup. Conspiracy theories thrive on the internet, but that's certainly not where they were born. The Flat Earth Society has existed since the 1800s, and people have been speculating about which people are secretly living or dead at least since 68 AD, when Romans weren't convinced their arsonist emperor Nero had actually committed suicide. But conspiracies and the digital world do mesh well, probably because they scratch similar itches in our not-quite-domesticated psyches.