"it's easy to forget how fleshed out the concept of "conspiracy theorist" used to be. it used to be a real "type of guy": a whole subset of person - and, on the flip side, it used to be a pejorative that carried real weight.

9/11 really appeared to be a coalescing point for this. prior to 9/11, "conspiracy theories" for the average person seemed to fall into two categories: fun, bizarre, and generally paranormal (example: the X-files), or hyper-political, sweeping, and so complex as to only be the domain of someone with time to be totally obsessed (example: JFK, freemasons).

it seems that the average person imagined that if they were to poke into conspiracy theories, there wouldn't be anything valid there - and at best, they'd be straining at grainy blurry photos (the X-files), or building one of those huge webs connecting every influential person in the world in nebulous ways (freemasons).

9/11 appears to have really changed all that. suddenly, both of those worlds met, with all the fuzz stripped away. regardless of if any of these theories had any validity, the footage wasn't grainy or indistinct: everyone saw it, and the players weren't connected via red lines of tape in a recluse's basement - they were characters everyone knew: george bush, osama bin laden, and so on.

it also just happened to be a huge, emotional, political, social turning point for basically everything. about as high stakes as it gets.

i would say this starts the "melting" of the conspiracy theorist archetype: it's still there at the start of 9/11. the guy into this is still "that guy", it's still very political, it's on the fringes - no normal politician would discuss this - yet, at the same time, it's still there on the landscape: many people know someone into 9/11 conspiracy theories, there's a concept of "9/11 docs on youtube", you can even see references to films such as 'loose change' - as a punchline, in some major media, the way that previously JFK assassination theories would be used as a similar punchline or meta-framing for a joke (example: seinfeld, magic bullet).

i believe that from 9/11, you can draw a line to "flat earth" breaking into public awareness, and map this line as the assumption of conspiracy theories into the popular consciousness, and thus the melting of the conspiracy theorist as a type of character in the popular landscape.

it's unlikely netflix would make a documentary about 9/11 conspiracy theories - maybe that happened, but something about that feels off. however, they did make a doc about flat earth theories. it's a completely defanged purely fun and absurd manifestation of the conspiracy theory.

after this point, the archetype is basically gone, and is replaced by various politicized sub-archetypes. the average "red pill manosphere" type person is technically a conspiracy theorist: they have a theory about how gender dynamics are run and shaped in society that involves lots of isolated actors systematically and incidentally working together towards a common goal. "red pill" is even in the name - yet, you would never call this guy a conspiracy theorist.

most alt-health type people, skeptical of mainstream medicine, i'm sure you can infer what i'm talking about here, not wanting to undergo certain routine procedures, there's even a special word for it now, is in some sense a literal conspiracy theorist. they may rarely get this term, but it's not the main thrust of the critique, and they're not lumped in with all the other "conspiracy theorists".

then there's all the various political topics: much of trump's first term was characterized by accusations and theories and posits that were literally conspiracy theories about him. but, this aspect was never a major focus and was never the thrust of any serious critique (i.e. "you sound like a conspiracy theorist", this previously would have been a solid angle).

you can run down the list of blackmarked views and positions we have now - where are the true conspiracy theorists?

in "society of the spectacle" by guy debord (1960s), he describes society as... a spectacle. people are watching it. this spectacle has the ability to subsume anything that presents itself as outside of it, and then re-present it as part of the spectacle.

an extremely cringe but basic tangible example would be something like punk. whatever merit punk ever had as something "anti-society", eventually it moves from dirty drug filled basements to a store like hot topic at the mall. debord would say the spectacle took that thing, punk, and just made it part of itself, to then sell back to the people. in his time, he would probably apply this to various forms of previously radical politics.

another cringe term, due to its overuse and general context, is consumption. baudrillard used this in a very specific sense - consumption isn't just "consuming something" - it's consuming something in order to be consuming it, for the social effect.

example: if you buy a $3,000 watch because it's a great watch and you think it's actually worth that, and it keeps time underwater, and you often go underwater, whatever: that isn't consumption. if you buy a $3,000 watch so people look at you and say, "he's the kind of guy that buys a $3,000 watch", that's consumption, according to baudrillard.

the whole epstein thing is a case study for where conspiracy theories ended up. now, they're not the domain of schizophrenic weirdos only. so, how does "the spectacle" address this? it just represents (literlly re-presents) it as something to consume, in the sense we just described.

there was a brief fad of people saying, "epstein didn't kill himself", as a meme. why were they doing this? i don't believe they were doing it to actually inform people - their contention was that it was so obvious that anyone could see it. so, they were doing it in the sense of consumption that we just described. to signal that, "i am the type of person that thinks and says this".

there's nothing inherently wrong with saying something in order to signal something like that, it's just interesting in terms of what we're talking about. to make it full circle, this is the opposite of people who attempted to bring 9/11 skepticism to the forefront at the time - they went to great lengths, unsuccessfully, to appear normal and not as a "certain type of person".

in this way, it feels cliche, but actually walking through it is worthwhile - we've reached the conspiracy theory as consumable. people may engage with it because it's funny, deadly serious, it may make them actually angry, i'm not critiquing them - but the end stage of it is conspiracy theories that aren't qualitatively different from other things you see on your phone and other news or, really, anything else at all.

the thing about the modernity theories is that people often get caught in whether things should be that way, or why they are that way, but that's not really how i see them. they're often just posits about how things are, almost like laws in physics. the spectacle subsumes everything and makes everything a part of itself. this is just a law at this time, the way things sink in water.

rocks always sink in water. you couldn't navigate water or have any understanding of water at all without knowing this. you can use it to your advantage, but only if you know it. likewise, the spectacle always wins. it never takes actual damage. it subsumes all things. there is nothing it cannot integrate. in a way, it's impressive. it just does it, like a cat always landing on its feet."

https://xcancel.com/owenbroadcast/status/2002758636662063215