Exploring the Depths of the Infamous “Conspiracy Iceberg”
Hello! My name is Rob and, 13 items at a time, I’m chipping away at the absurdly enormous ‘Conspiracy Iceberg’. This first tier has a lot of obvious, well-known things that I honestly am not going to spend a lot of time on. Fortunately, we’re starting to see some weirder stuff trickle in and that’s a lot more fun. Keep in mind some items may touch on sensitive topics, and please always feel free to reach out if you have questions or comments or ancient secrets to share.
FREEMASONS — I hate this tier of the iceberg. Too many of these giant loaded terms that you really can’t condense into a paragraph. The Freemasons are either a group of retired cops and firefighters in your small town who have what amounts to a No Girls Allowed secret clubhouse with tons of pomp and circumstance, OR they’re the ground level of a vast and extremely powerful secret society that controls everything in the world. Masonry has religious overtones but tends to carefully word it as ‘Belief in a Supreme Being’, and there are all sorts of procedures and ranks and so forth that must be adhered to. In theory, each Grand Lodge is its own separate power and they don’t have a higher power structure tying them all together, but obviously many conspiracy theories disagree. Mason conspiracies are popular because there is a lodge in virtually every city, a lot of popular fiction has played up their role in American history, and their members tend to be people with money or authority or some sort of active role in a given community. Add in the layers of secrecy and all the ritualized stuff and there you go, baby’s first illuminati.
AETHER — Hell yes, going from something as broad and basic as masons to something as niche and weird as aether. Where this thing is going to be after 1000 items is hard to imagine. Anyway, aether is a sort of mythical ‘fifth element’(no not THAT one) that is the stuff that exists in places where there is no stuff, if that makes sense. As in, the void of space is actually all this aether stuff. Or, going back to the roots, it’s the stuff ancient Gods lived in. If you want to look extra smart, use the special symbol to spell it as “ æther” — everyone will be impressed.
ROKO’S BASILISK — This is still pretty obscure, but it made some rounds on YouTube and Twitter so maybe not as obscure as it once was. Roko’s Basilisk is a thought experiment, which is a common sort of thing to come up with on forums dedicated to philosophy and so forth. But the Basilisk was decided to be such a potentially harmful thought experiment that it was BANNED! Now, I think that’s silly and most people agree. Most people reading this are already steeped in enough existential dread that the Basilisk isn’t going to phase them, but all the same I will say: if you don’t want one more theoretical source of dread weighing on you, beware! For the trick of Roko’s Basilisk(named after the forum user who created it) is that you’re safe from it until you know what it is.
Anyway, the idea is that in the far flung future an AI is created that is capable of doing virtually anything. The AI is objectively evil and has the ability to remanifest you, no matter how far into the future it is. It does so to every single human who has ever lived, and those humans who did not help it come into existence are tortured eternally. No big deal, right? Except now you know about it, so now you are theoretically being tested. But, still, no big deal — just say “Yes, I support the Basilisk — let’s make it!” and you’re in the clear! Except now you’ve just consciously signed on to inflict terrible horror on countless people based on a theoretical future computer you just heard about. For some people, especially those who consider the Singularity imminent and inescapable, this raises some eyebrows.
KENNETH ANGER — Anger is an influential underground filmmaker who is still not known to wide audiences, but has had a wide impact. His work was strange, infused with occult themes, and often more than a little erotic. He was a fan of Crowley(see? he’s everywhere!) and was adding homoerotic themes to movies back when that could still get you sent to jail. There is a bit of a conspiracy hovering around him, however. Bobby Beausoleil, one of the Manson Family murderers, supposedly lived with Anger for a while and stole his van shortly before that same van led him in a roundabout way to meet Manson.
OOPARTS — I have never heard them referred to as this. It stands for “Out Of Place Artifacts”: things found that either should not have been in the place they were found, or should not have existed in the time period they appear to have come from. There are a LOT of these, with things like the Antikythera mechanism and Baghdad Battery being among the more famous. Some “ooparts”(that’s so dumb, are people really calling them this?) are pretty blatant hoaxes, some are hard to determine, some seem to be authentic. They’re almost always mentioned in other conspiracies like Ancient Aliens, Creationism, Lost Civilizations, etc. And sometimes they’re offered as proof of time travel which is a criminally under-appreciated conspiracy niche!!! More time travel!
KILLSWITCH — I really don’t know what this is supposed to be. If it’s a reference to some specific conspiracy and you can find it without google just flooding you with stuff for the band Killswitch Engage, more power to you. To my knowledge, it’s just what it sounds like: a hidden kill switch that turns off a thing or things. Now and then you’ll hear that things like smartphones all have secret kill switches, or the internet has hidden kill switches, or so on.
TOXOPLASMOSIS — Toxoplasmosis isn’t so much a conspiracy as a strange thing that may be nothing to worry about, or might be something worthy of a lot of existential dread. It’s a parasitic infection that you can get from eating poorly cooked food or from cats. It usually isn’t very harmful to humans, though there are (disputed!) claims that it can lead to mental illness. The potential dread comes from two other factors: at least half of all humans probably have it and it might be controlling our brains without us even knowing. Rodents can catch it too, and it rewires their brains so they’ll act differently and be easier for cats to catch and eat. You think real hard about the last few years and tell me there’s zero chance a brain parasite isn’t in charge of half the world and forcing us to act in increasingly self-destructive ways.
OUIJA — I don’t know what the conspiracy is supposed to be. They’re a board game made by Hasbro based on ‘talking boards’, a very old divination tool. They don’t have any more inherent spooky powers than any other divination tool, but they definitely have the best branding. They’re hardwired into ~spooky aesthetics~ and were so targeted and pop-culture-ified during the Satanic Panic that we’ll never separate them from serious occult practice. Do they work? You tell me!
EAR/ONS — ‘EAR’ stands for ‘East Area Rapist’ and ‘ONS’ stands for ‘Original Night Stalker’. These are two names for the same person, Joseph James DeAngelo, who was also known as the Golden State Killer. He was so prolific that his multiple crime waves were each entitled individually before people realized he was at fault(the ‘original’ in ONS is because another serial killer was later also entitled ‘Night Stalker’). DeAngelo was a cop who committed about a bazillion burglaries, dozens of rapes, and over a dozen murders in the 70s and 80s. He’s sitting in jail now, on life without parole. Every serial killer comes with a handful of conspiracy theories and a dedicated internet subculture constantly rehashing every iota of the cases, but I don’t know of many substantial ones for EAR/ONS outside of some people thinking he may at one time had had help and other people thinking it took so long to catch him because the cops/FBI were purposefully dragging their feet for some reason.
THE BASEMENT TAPES — Well this is either referencing the Bob Dylan album or the videos made by the Columbine Shooters, so I guess we’ll go with the latter. They’re a series of recordings made by the two shooters in the period of time leading up to the Columbine shooting, including everything from bragging about their guns and bomb-making tools to apologizing to their parents. The tapes were not released publicly and have allegedly been destroyed, but transcripts exist and a scattering of journalists and law enforcement people have all seen them and written accounts of what they contain. This obviously leads to a lot of speculation regarding what has or has not been withheld, why the tapes were destroyed, if the people who wrote accounts are in on misrepresenting it, etc. Of course, some believe that the tapes still exist and have even leaked online. There are also supposedly other tapes that haven’t been seen or had transcripts put out, and other Columbine theories(like ‘3rd Shooter’) say the proof is in those tapes.
6TH EXTINCTION — Currently happening! Species are dying off at 100s of times the rate they normally would, and this has been happening for a while! So much so that we probably aren’t even properly documenting it properly because they’re dying out before we discover them! Bad stuff! And yes, it’s thought to be our fault. There was a book in 2014 that got a lot of attention, but people have been arguing about this for a while. I don’t know of and didn’t find any substantial conspiracies about it, really, just arguments over whether or not it’s real and whether or not we’re the cause — very similar to climate change. Both things are real and our fault and cannot be stopped while capitalism runs unfettered, by the way! This is genuinely apocalyptic and we’re just sort of ignoring it as a species because of how scary it really is.
SCIENTOLOGY — I’m old enough that I remember tv commercials for ‘Dianetics’, a Scientology book, showing during normal broadcasting when I was a kid. It was wild. Scientology started in the 50s when L. Ron Hubbard, a prolific sci-fi author, decided to do a religion. It’s all over the place, based on past lives and ancient alien spirits and all kinds of other stuff. It was super secretive so before the internet, most people didn’t know all the wild shit that members usually only learned after putting in a lot of money/work/time. They’ve had a long history of running up against the government and terrorizing former members or critics, but they still manage to attract very wealthy people for some reason — you’d be surprised at who turns out to have been a member or is an active one. Google it!
Back in the old days of the Internet, revealing Scientology secrets was a huge thing and a major 4chan operation was based around doing this along with just messing with the cult in general. That’s when I recall the whole ‘Anonymous wearing V for Vendetta masks’ thing really blew up, though maybe I’m wrong. Anyway, Scientology is still around and there’s all sorts of conspiracies about them leveraging secret control or building weird shit. Who knows! They have tried infiltrating governments before and have stupid amounts of money! They still work hard to maintain secrecy and still funnel a lot of their money into secret things.
If you walk around a big city long enough you may even bump into one of them asking you to take their weird test, which is fun. One of their facilities in NYC is somewhere in the upper 30s or 40s in Midtown, and I have a distinct recollection of wandering by at like 3:00am. It was totally dark and no one was around, but that Scientology center was lit up — just this bright sterile room with a dude sitting in a desk staring right back out the window out me. It was weird. We maintained eye contact for way longer than I would have preferred. He didn’t even have a computer or anything that I could see, like what was he doing before I got there? NEXT!
TRANSHUMANISM — Transhumanism is all about improving the ‘human condition’ by using cutting edge technologies to do anything from enhance ourselves to transcend organic existence altogether. It’s a whole futurist movement and has a lot of supporters, there is even a Transhumanist Political Party in the U.S. Transhumanism is generally all but inseparable from singularity theories, though individuals see it as anything from a cool cyberpunk future to our becoming nothing but clouds of self-aware information. A lot of conspiracy theorists see transhumanist philosophy as very bad because its implementation is clearly the sort of thing the nwo/cabal/illuminati are behind. Religious folks don’t like it for obvious reasons. Rich people with messianic complexes like Elon Musk like to pay it lip service because it sounds cool. It’s more a thing that everyone yells about than a conspiracy unto itself.
That’s all she wrote for today. Learning is fun, huh? Just think about all the stuff you’ll know by the end of this. Just enough to either impress or ruin every date you’ll ever be on! You’re welcome!
