Since conspiracy theories are all the rage these days, I'll admit that there's a single conspiracy theory that I subscribe to. Now, like other conspiracy theories, I have no evidence whatsoever. No data. No evidence. Not a single reference. Nothing. But that's not going to stop me from believing it (after all, that's what a conspiracy theory is).
That all said, here goes:
I believe there's a loose collection of people, connected via the Internet, that bet each other, in a sort of competition of the absurd who can create, and then spread, the wackiest, most absurd, most obviously-not-true conspiracy theory to the largest possible audience. And if/when they succeed, they're rewarded with cryptocurrency, a few hundred botnet-ready servers, a dozen aged reddit accounts with massive comment karma, and most importantly: bragging rights.
I think the current king-maker of this group is the person who launched "Flat Earth Theory (FET)". When the FET creator was just hatching his/her scheme, the other members of the group were like "No friggin way!", "Not a chance in hell", "Gosh there's no way anyone is stupid enough to believe that", and "Go ahead idiot, this one will totally fail". Fast forward a few years and you have 10s of thousands of adherents to Flat Earth Theory (whereupon the FET creator likely got some bitcoin, a bottle of single-malt scotch, some high fives, and the undying admiration of everyone in the group).
Recently, someone made a run in an attempt to dethrone the king-maker: the new conspiracy theory introduced was that the snow that fell in the southern states last week isn't real snow .. it's some sort of chemical soup cooked up by the US government (and you should stay away from it because it's dangerous). One might think this idea wouldn't pass the laugh test ("HowTF are you going to convince people that `snow` was dispensed through some massive device, or millions of drones, or chemically fabricated in the sky all across the S/SW united states ... and that is real to the people who live in all of the places where snow normally falls?!?") ... but I think that's part of the game: the more absurd the idea, the more "points" you get if you can pull it off.
Somewhere, a completely insane theory is being cooked up. One that will fly in the face of evidence. One that will leave you scratching your head wondering Why in the hell would even one person believe this?. And soon, millions of people will believe it.
