They say that ad-driven companies such as Google and Facebook threw so much R&D at using data-mining to persuade people to buy refrigerators, subprime loans and fidget-spinners that they accidentally figured out how to rob us of our free will. The people panicking over these developments have an explanation for the newfound vigour of conspiracy theories: They say the Big Tech platforms have developed the equivalent of mind-control rays that beam even mediocre ideas past our rational defences. Look up the 19th-century skeptics who decried the smallpox vaccine and you’ll find that anti-vax arguments have progressed very little in more than a century. The arguments for “alternative medicine” or against accepted climate science are no better than those that have lurked in the fringes for generations. Either ideas are convincingly argued and/or they are delivered to people whose circumstances make them susceptible to those ideas.Ĭonspiracies aren’t on the rise because the arguments for them got better. Ideas spread because of some mix of ideology and material circumstances. From climate denial to anti-vax to a resurgent eugenics movement, we are in a golden age of terrible conspiratorial thinking, with real consequences for our species’ continued survival on our (decidedly round) planet.
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