Conspiracy theories will kill us all

A bleak rant for your Monday

Hello and welcome to the new subscribers who signed up to read about what it’s like being married to my husband (tldr, nice but weird). Many of you will have immediately unsubscribed after you read it, but for those who forgot to, I’m now going to bang on about online conspiracy theories so this is your sign to do it now! 

Do you remember your first time on the internet? If you’re around my age you probably connected using dial up, which was both painfully slow and horribly loud, then sought out a chatroom to chat to strangers (usually adult men pretending to be teenagers, boak). Maybe you began using it to help with homework or perhaps Facebook was your first taste of the World Wide Web. A place to poke friends (I did this to boys I fancied embarrassingly often) and to upload 100 blurry photos of your Saturday night. 

The internet is technically my age now, and really should be discovering a new love of gardening, but instead it seems to be having a mid-life crisis of sorts. Not a fun one, where you dye your hair green and take up karate, but the sort where you have an affair with someone half your age, leave your wife and kids and explode their world. The kind where you start wearing a fedora because the bored sales girl told you you looked cool (you thought she was charmed, she found you disgusting). 

I find most of the online world to be terrifying now. The Instagram ‘for you’ page offering up quack science and dangerous fitness plans that are definitely not for me at all. Twitter being a hellhole of wannabe Nazis - not just free but encouraged to spout the worst forms of hate imaginable. TikTok with its endless ads exhorting you to buy reams of plastic crap. AI summaries of whatever you’ve Googled, scraping basic info from websites and presenting it as fact. But by far the most terrifying part of the internet for me is how it’s been the main route for bad actors to spread conspiracy theories and disinformation around the world.