BAMN

This guy after 7 minutes of thinking about it:

not everything bad that happens in the world is because of an oppressive conspiracy actually

also it doesn’t NEED to be a conspiracy for you to make your point. you can still say the 40 hour work week keeps people exhausted and makes political participation harder, and that corporate interests like it that way!

Sometime back in the middle of the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, I was picking the brains of a friend of mine, the activist scholar Cindy Patton, about the probable natural history of HIV. This was at a time when speculation was ubiquitous about whether the virus had been deliberately engineered, or spread; whether HIV represented a plot or experiment by the U. S. military that had gotten out of control, or perhaps that was behaving exactly as it was meant to. After hearing a lot from her about the geography and economics of the global traffic in blood products, I finally, with some eagerness, asked Patton what she thought of these sinister rumors about the virus’s origin. “Any of the early steps in its spread could have been either accidental or deliberate,” she said. “But I just have trouble getting interested in that. I mean, even suppose we were sure of every element of a conspiracy: that the lives of Africans and African Americans are worthless in the eyes ofthe United States; that gay men and drug users are held cheap where they aren’t actively hated; that the military deliberately researches ways to kill noncombatants whom it sees as enemies; that people in power look calmly on the likelihood of catastrophic environmental and population changes. Supposing we were ever so sure of all those things—what would we know then that we don’t already know?”

One of the key differences between conspiracy-theory bullshit and "talking about things the government actually did" is that conspiracy-theorist mindset treats political engagement as an ARG. The idea that an average American citizen can engage with intelligence kerfuffles and backroom financial dealing if they're sufficiently perceptive because the powers that be can't help but leave "hints" in odd places everyone can see.

There’s an Italian anarchist group who coined the term “conspiracy fantasy” for this, because a bunch of non-English languages translate “conspiracy theory” with a neutral connotation and they needed a way to say “conspiracy theory (derogatory)”.

One of my own conspiracy theories:

That wouldn’t surprise me at all.  Disinformation and psyops are some of the few things US intelligence is actually almost good at, for example [gestures vaguely at the last 100 years of Latin American history] or [gestures vaguely at the last 100 years of Middle Eastern history] or [gestures vaguely at the last 100 years of the American labor movement], and it’s extremely advantageous to have the public consciousness associate “critically examining the things the government does on account of the government being objectively evil” with weird Facebook dads posting whatever the fuck this is:

The other thing with conspiracy thought is that it gives the conspiracy theorist a feeling of agency over their life. They can insert themselves into the narrative in a way that gives them power, but also doesnt involve gay ass communist things like working together with other people. Conspiracy theory is fantasy, but it's specifically a power fantasy.