List: 'Top-10 Internet-Fueled conspiracies'

Today’s ‘List Friday’. The internet’s an amazing thing (if it’s a thing at all). No doubt my life’d be diminished if it didn’t exist. But it has its dark side. Some comments on some websites sicken me. They run the gamut of prejudice, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and just about every imaginable rubric of intolerance and hate. While I no longer bother to read such tripe, I’m inclined to overlook it in the interest of free speech. (Not that I could do much about it anyway, even if I wanted to.) But I wonder about the lowlifes who write it, how they expressed themselves pre-internet, and whether their internet bottom-feeding makes them happy. It’s only a short hop from there to internet-fuelled conspiracy theories. I imagine such theories have abounded since time immemorial. But it seems the internet’s the ideal medium for nourishing them. Like agar agar for microbes. I guess that pre-internet these theories died a natural death. But the internet provides them with a kind of vitamin boost. Today’s list, from salon.com last Monday, is ‘Top 10 Internet-fueled conspiracies’. The blurb [1] suggests that the more shocking the event, the more elaborate and expansive the resultant conspiracy. I reckon that’s so. The ‘Top 10’ slideshow [2] includes forecasts of each conspiracy’s likely future course. It’s interesting in a morbid kind of way. I’ll bet the internet conspiracists include a fair number of internet bottom-feeders, too.