There are conspiracies. They exist. But I'm mostly speaking to the mindset of a person who completely immerses themselves in conspiracy theory as a way of life.
What if conspiracy theory sites and groups are just part of a conspiracy that exists to monitor, marginalize, and distract conspiracy theorists? What if the only thing that gives the conspiracy any power at all is the weight of the conspiracy theories behind it?
And that's when I spackled over the cracks in my pot, stopped looking for evidence of malicious intent in everything, and washed my hands of all of it.
I still think that there is a massive international conspiracy of rich and powerful individuals, but I also believe that they don't have nearly as much control as anyone thinks they have, including themselves. They have the illusion of control.
For instance, they can propel lobbying efforts to pass trade deals which would "normalize" copyright in 20+ different countries, and then everyone just ignores it and torrents the latest episode of Game of Thrones anyway. They can buy up all the newspapers, and then everyone suddenly stops reading them, so they all have to merge or go bankrupt. They lobby for strict environmental controls, to preserve their huge tracts of land. People subtly cheat or blatantly and overtly break the law whenever the cops aren't watching. Or the vendors cheat on behalf of their customers, just to stay in business. They can manipulate currencies and equities and get even richer, but a hired cook will still piss in their morning coffee or feed them a slice of doodoo pie.
The conspiracy theorists may actually be supporting them, by ascribing to them powers and abilities that they do not actually possess. When the elites gather in Davos, they aren't plotting the future course of the world economy, like everyone thinks. They're patting themselves on the back, getting drunk, doing drugs, and cheating on their spouses in posh hotel rooms, all the while toasting the fact that the proles hadn't erected the guillotines since the last meeting. They remind themselves how important they are, and then return to the world that will briefly roll its eyes at them before getting back to the work it was already doing.
All the upvotes for this right here LOL. But seriously, your comment reads like it came out of my own head. The elites _try_ to control everything but their efforts are like sticking a rocket onto an asteroid: you can influence its direction but you can't make it do a u-turn. If people want to burn this shit down, they will and there's precious little all that money and power could do to stop it.
The world is scary and unpredictable so people have been comforting themselves with predictions and models since time immemorial; even if those predictions are of their own doom, at least _they_ saw it coming and that makes them feel better/safer.
* It's their job
* The software security industry is full of people who used to hack professionally for them
* There'd been a major news story roughly every other year since the 1990s Echelon thing about NSA dragnet surveillance
There are still things people say about NSA that have the tenor of conspiracy theories --- some of them being things Snowden actually said! --- and you might be able to make observations about the character of the people who believe those things (I don't know, that was the other commenter's point).
But the basic outline of what NSA is doing with the Internet is not a conspiracy theory.
I think one of the compelling aspects of conspiracy theory as an expression of faith, is that it's comforting to realize that even if the world is run by a dark and malevolent agenda, at least it has an agenda, and someone or something is in control.
One can see this expression of conspiracy as religion here on Hacker News. Whenever a skeptical statement is made about some conspiracy theory, someone will inevitably state that because Edward Snowden was proven right, conspiracy X should be considered true. Or, because people considered the things Edward Snowden described were once considered "conspiracy theory", one should accept that conspiracy theorists are enlightened about the true nature of the world.
Rationally, this argument makes little sense as one conspiracy theory being true doesn't validate the truth of another, but such statements are made in the context of religion all the time, as expressions of faith.
