Wrap it up, boys.
There’s no conspiracy more impressive than a grand conspiracy – the kind involving hundreds or thousands of willing participants, all working in concert toward some nefarious goal. Such a conspiracy requires perfect coordination and perfect loyalty among its members, usually enforced on pain of death or dismemberment. They project a blanket of fear over those areas which they dominate, and astound onlookers with their swift, decisive action. At the top of it all is the puppetmasters – a shadowy boardroom of white men in black suits, steepling their fingers as they ponder whom to exterminate next.
If that boardroom ever existed in any context besides moral panics and paranoid schizophrenia, it’s now dead. Obsolete. It’s a rotary telephone, a horse-drawn carriage, a copy of Windows 3.1. It’s a car whose horn is an actual horn that you have to squeeze in order to make a sort of comical AROOOGA sound. And the final blow to its plausibility was, disgustingly enough, Twitter.