“The last thing I want to do is sit on a recorded video and say to you, ‘In our day, conspiracy theories were kinder and gentler,’” said Ruffin Prevost, an editor at ParaScope, a now-defunct site set up in 1996 that covered U.F.O.s, secret societies, and mind control, among other subjects. “But there is definitely a different tenor to how people go about this stuff now,” he said. “It’s almost like you’ve got to be strident and hard-core about whatever your thing is to have enough bona fides to capture that audience.”
The belief that the incentives of social media had shorn conspiracy research of its serious, scholarly edge was a common theme. “The things that we’re describing are not really the same thing,” Mr. Green declared to me flatly, comparing the archival work and conferences that he had been involved with to the salacious videos of QAnon influencers. The scholarly work “is never going to have that commercial appeal,” he said. “You know, just like if I try to get somebody to watch a film by Ingmar Bergman, it’s much more difficult than to get them to watch a film by Michael Bay. It’s almost not even the same thing, right?”
In the minds of many conspiracy theorists, Mr. Jones and his imitators don’t deserve the title. In his 2017 book, “Trumpocalypse Now!: The Triumph of the Conspiracy Spectacle,” Kenn Thomas, a towering figure in the world of 1990s conspiracy, termed the recent crop of opportunists looking to profit from the hard work of researchers “conspiracy celebrities.” And the conspiracy celebrity in chief, Mr. Thomas said, was Donald Trump, who referred to conspiracy theories he hadn’t researched and didn’t understand. To the world at large, it might seem as if we’re living in a time in which conspiratorial thinking is ascendant. But in his foreword to Mr. Thomas’s book, Robert Sterling, editor of a 1990s and 2000s countercultural conspiracy blog called The Konformist, argued otherwise: “If this moment is a victory for the conspiracy culture,” he wrote, “it is a Pyrrhic victory at best.”
“There’s a few different stories we can tell about what happened,” Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist and author, told me. Conspiracy culture up through the ’90s was dominated by what could be called a “radio sensibility.” Fringe topics were mostly discussed on late-night talk shows. There were guest experts, and listeners could call in, but the host still functioned as a (lenient) gatekeeper, and the theories themselves conformed to a narrative format. They were, for the most part, complete stories, with beginnings, middles and ends.
In the digital age, he said, sense-making had become a fragmented, nonlinear and crowdsourced affair that as a result could never reach a conclusion and lacked internal logic. There were always potential new connections to be spotted — in the case of the 2020 election, for instance, two imprisoned Italian hackers, or a voting machine company founded by Venezuelans. This lack of satisfying resolution meant the new theories had no natural stopping point, he said, and their perpetual motion eventually brought them to a place that was “much more strident” — “even amongst the left.”