Pluralistic: Conspiratorialism's causal chain (17 Sep 2025)

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Originally published at: Pluralistic: Conspiratorialism’s causal chain (17 Sep 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow



Today's links


A four-doll matrioshke, unpacked and arranged 2x2. In order, the dolls' faces have been replaced with: the Qanon logo; an Oxycontin pill, the face of Robert Bork, and Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar.

Conspiratorialism's causal chain (permalink)

Conspiratorialism is downstream of the trauma of institutional failures.

Insitutional failures are downstream of regulatory capture.

Regulatory capture is downstream of monopolization.

Monopolization is downstream of the failure to enforce antitrust law.

Start with conspiratorialism and trauma. I am staunchly pro-vaccine. I have had so many covid jabs that I glow in the dark and can get impeccable 5g reception at the bottom of a coal-mine.

Nevertheless.

If you tell me that you are anti-vax because you:

a) believe that the pharma companies are rapacious murderers who'd kill you for a nickel; and

b) believe that their regulators are so captured that every FDA official should probably be wearing a gimpsuit;

I'd be hard pressed to argue with you.

After all, the Sackler family flagrantly lied about the safety of their opioids. They bribed doctors to over-prescribe their drugs. They paid pharmacists bonuses for not asking nosy questions about people filling endless, gigantic refills. They reaped billions. They hired FDA officials and paid them to lobby their ex-colleagues to turn a blind eye, even as the country's morgues filled with the corpses of their victims. They made more billions, and they abused the justice system and got to stay disgustingly, dynastically rich, even as more than one million Americans died in the overdose epidemic they started:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/11/justice-delayed/#justice-redeemed

The hucksters and grifters peddling anti-vax conspiracies are pushing on an open door. The existence of real, high-stakes, mass-casualty conspiracies, right there in the open, make traumatized people easy marks for con artists selling horse-paste and taint-tanning.

(Obviously, this is also the Epstein story: the reason it was possible to convince vulnerable people that elite pedos were hiding kids in a DC pizza-parlor's nonexistent basement was that elite pedos were hiding kids on an entirely real island that Donald Trump and other rich and powerful people liked to visit and everyone knew about.)

So that's part one: conspiratorialism is downstream of institutional failures.

Institutional failures are downstream of regulatory capture:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Why do our institutions fail? Because they have been neutered, deliberately made weaker than the processes and companies they are meant to oversee. Starve the FAA of resources and eventually it's going to run out of money to inspect airplane factories. When that happened, Boeing got to hire its own inspectors. The FAA let Boeing mark its own homework, and then planes started falling out of the sky. Hundreds of people were murdered this way (so far – there's a reasonable chance that many more of us are boeing to die):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/01/boeing-boeing/#mrsa

When Trump's old FCC chair Ajit Pai decided to kill Net Neutrality, he was able to cheat like hell. He accepted over one million identical anti-Net Neutrality comments from "@pornhub.com" email addresses. He accepted millions of obviously fraudulent, identical anti-Net Neutrality comments whose reply addresses corresponded to darknet identity-theft dumps. These included the email addresses of dead people and of sitting US Senators who supported Net Neutrality:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/06/boogeration/#pais-lies

Americans have no federal privacy protections to speak of. The last time Congress updated consumer privacy law was with 1988's Video Privacy Protection Act, which bans video-store clerks from disclosing your VHS rentals. All other technological invasions of privacy are fair game. That's how it came to pass that when staffing agencies offer a nurse a shift, they are able to secure that nurse's credit report, discover how much credit-card debt the nurse is carrying, and offer a lower wage to nurses who are economically desperate:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

Regulators are captured out there, right in the open. The revolving door between government service and industry lobby groups spins and spins. Give a Maga influencer a million bucks and he'll get the DoJ to call off its case blocking your $14 billion merger:

https://www.vox.com/politics/458685/trump-doj-antitrust-roger-alford-mizelle-hewlett-packard

Institutional failures are downstream of regulatory capture, and regulatory capture is downstream of monopolization.

We live in monopolized times. Virtually every industry you interact with has collapsed into a bare handful of global companies:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

Whether you're buying a glass bottle, sending something by sea-freight, taking vitamin C, getting an IV drip, watching pro wrestling, lacing up your athletic shoes, shopping for a mattress, seeing a movie, using social media, listening to music, reading a book, getting fitted for eyeglasses, or choosing a browser, you are trapped in a market totally dominated by five or fewer corporations – often just one corporation.

Monopolies raise prices. They lower wages. They reduce quality. The reason Google – which has a 90% market share in Search – sucks so bad is that they decided to make their product worse so that you would have to repeatedly search to get the information you're seeking, which creates more opportunities to show you ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

The reason your glasses are so expensive is that one company, a French-Italian consortium called Essilor-Luxotica, bought and merged all the retailers, manufacturers, optical labs and insurers and then raised the price of glasses by 1,000%:

https://www.business-standard.com/companies/news/ray-ban-maker-essilorluxottica-accused-in-lawsuit-of-inflating-prices-1000-123072200122_1.html

Companies argue that their mergers create "efficiencies." That's tech's story, for sure. Google last created a successful consumer product in 1998, when it fielded a revolutionary new search engine. Since then, virtually every in-house product it's created has tanked, but the company has managed to grow to a world-girding kraken by buying other people's companies: ad-tech, videos, maps, docs, mobile, and more.

The true efficiency of mergers isn't in companies getting better at making things that make you happy. The real purpose of boiling down a big, vibrant industry into a handful of sclerotic, inbred giants is so that they can agree on a common lobbying position, and stick to it.

Hundreds of companies are a rabble, a mob. They compete. They poach each others' best customers and best workers. They hate each other. They can't agree on anything, especially what lie they should be telling their regulators. Forced into "wasteful competition" (-P. Thiel), they must lower prices and raise wages, which leaves them with less money to spend lobbying. They can't capture their regulators.

But: stage an orgy of incestuous mergers, shrink the industry to five companies whose C-suites have all known each other all their lives, who are executors of one another's estates and godparents to one another's children, and the collective action problem vanishes. Nominal competitors suddenly start singing with one voice, demanding a unified set of privileges and exemptions from their regulators:

https://locusmag.com/2022/03/cory-doctorow-vertically-challenged/

Without monopolization, regulatory capture would be much harder to accomplish, and much easier to halt. Regulatory capture is downstream of monopolization.

And monopolization is downstream of the decision not to enforce antitrust laws.

The purpose of antitrust laws is, and always has been, to prevent monopolies. The first antitrust law was 1890's Sherman Act, and its author, Senator John Sherman, made the case for it thus:

If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

For 80-some years, antitrust law did exactly that. But in the 1970s, the fringe theories of a conspiratorialist named Robert Bork came to prominence, at first hesitantly under Jimmy Carter, and then with undisguised ardor and glee under Reagan:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

Robert Bork claimed that monopolies were "efficient." He said that monopolies in the wild were almost never the result of cheating – rather, if a company managed to get all of us to buy its products, that was evidence that its products were the best. Bork insisted that it would be perverse to enlist the government to punish companies for making the most pleasing and successful products.

Bork was many things: a virulent racist who defended racial discrimination against Black people and a criminal who served as Richard Nixon's hatchet-man, illegally firing "disloyal" DoJ lawyers after every other Reagan official refused.

But above all, Robert Bork was a conspiracy-peddler. He didn't just disagree with the idea of the government going after monopolies – he claimed that a close reading of the country's antimonopoly laws revealed that these laws were never intended to fight monopolies. This, despite the fact that the laws plainly and clearly stated that their purpose was to fight monopolies. This, despite the fact that the bills' authors climbed to their hind legs in Congress and the Senate and gave long speeches about how their laws would fight monopolies.

Bork's theories about the beneficence and efficiency of monopolies were profoundly stupid. But Bork's theories about the meaning of America's antitrust laws were profoundly nuts. Bork insisted that up was down, water was not wet, and black was white‡.

‡ Well, maybe not that last one.

But Bork – like so many conspiracy peddlers – was pushing on an open door. America's wealthy, would-be aristocrats loved the idea of securing monopolies and becoming "autocrats of trade." They funded Bork's theories, endowed economics chairs, sponsored conferences, and, above all, funded all-expenses-paid luxury junkets for judges to teach them about Bork's ideas. 40% of the US Federal judiciary attended one of these "Manne Seminars" and afterwards, their rulings changed to embrace Bork's pro-monopoly posture:

https://academic.oup.com/qje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/qje/qjaf042/8241352

And here we come full circle:

  • Conspiratorialism is downstream of traumatic institutional failures; and

  • Institutional failures are downstream of regulatory capture; and

  • Regulatory capture is downstream of monopolization; and

  • Monopolization is downstream of the decision not to enforce antitrust laws; and

  • The decision not to enforce antitrust laws was the result of a conspiracy.

The campaigns to fight "disinformation" are concerned with effects, not causes. The reason people are vulnerable to conspiratorial accounts of current affairs is that they have direct, undeniable experience of many actual conspiracies that inflicted deep harm and lasting trauma. If we want to armor the people we love against conspiratorial cults, it's not enough to argue over the implausibility of their belief that elite cabals are abusing the rest of us for fun and profit – we have to actually address the real elite cabals that really do abuse us for fun and profit.

(Image: Vicent Ibáñez, CC BY-SA 3.0; RootOfAllLight; CC BY-SA 4.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Intel threatens lawsuits against HDCP jailbreakers https://web.archive.org/web/20100920183314/https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/09/intel-threatens-consumers/

#10yrsago America’s spooks abandon crypto-backdoors, plan shock-doctrine revival https://www.techdirt.com/2015/09/17/having-lost-debate-backdooring-encryption-intelligence-community-plans-to-wait-until-next-terrorist-attack/

#10yrsago Do you really trade your privacy for service on Facebook? https://theintercept.com/2015/09/17/facebook/

#10yrsago 3D print your own TSA Travel Sentry keys and open anyone’s luggage https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/09/video-3d-printed-tsa-travel-sentry-keys-really-do-open-tsa-locks/

#10yrsago Campus cops: all the powers of real cops, none of the accountability https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/sep/15/public-safety-private-colleges-massachusetts/

#10yrsago Ex-mayor of Bismark, ND trademarks alternatives to “Fighting Sioux” in bid to prevent UND team from switching to non-racist name https://web.archive.org/web/20160103050027/https://www.grandforksherald.com/news/region/3838901-former-bismarck-mayor-registers-trade-names-state-3-5-und-nickname-options

#5yrsago Private equity's new debt-and-loot bonanza https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/17/divi-recaps/#graebers-ghost

#1yrago Christopher Brown's 'A Natural History of Empty Lots' https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/17/cyberpunk-pastoralism/#time-to-mow-the-roof

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

  • "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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1 Like
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“…who served as Richard Nixon’s hatchet-man, illegally firing “disloyal” DoJ lawyers after every other Reagan official refused.” Typo there?

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Well, there’s a simple follow-on to this: if monopolistic behaviour improves efficiency, but they fight over who’s on top, let’s resolve it: all national industries where there are five or less companies that have > 75% of the market… nationalize them.