The Fluid Frontiers of Conspiracism

 

I used to think that conspiratorial thinking was, at bottom, a failure to understand emergence.

This did not mean that I thought powerful people never plotted, coordinated, manipulated, lied, or pursued common interests. Of course they did. My objection was causal. Conspiracy theories seemed to take an undesirable social outcome and work backward toward an author: if something this consequential happened, somebody must have wanted it to happen.

Complex systems offered a much better explanation.

Millions of people and institutions act simultaneously, each responding to incentives, constraints, incomplete information, technology and one another. Feedback loops develop. Small advantages compound. Solutions to one problem generate another. Nobody has to decide that housing should become unaffordable for housing to become unaffordable. Nobody needs to organize the destruction of a particular industry for individually rational decisions to destroy it. A coherent outcome does not require coherent intention.

For years, I considered that distinction one of the strongest intellectual defenses against conspiracism.

I still do.

What I have begun to question is something I had quietly assumed underneath it: how dispersed the power inside that complex system actually is.

That shift came into focus for me in a surprisingly mundane way.

In September 2025, I watched footage from a WhiteHouse dinner attended by some of the most powerful people in American technology: Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella and others. The occasion was public, not clandestine. The executives talked about investment, artificial intelligence, infrastructure and manufacturing. They also took turns praising President Trump. Axios described them as “lavishing praise” on him; WIRED called the scene a display of “fealty.” Zuckerberg sat beside Trump; Gates praised his leadership; Cook thanked him for creating conditions for investment; Altman thanked him for being a pro-business and pro-innovation president.

What struck me was not simply their deference, but how seemingly obsequious they became.

That reaction surprised me, particularly in the case of Zuckerberg. I had thought of him, perhaps too simplistically, as belonging to a different cultural and political center of gravity. Meta had collided repeatedly with Trump and the political right over content moderation, fact-checking and other issues. Silicon Valley itself had often seemed less like one coherent political force than a collection of extremely powerful actors whose interests, ideologies and rivalries would prevent them from moving too neatly in the same direction.

Watching that dinner, I did not suddenly think: Here is the conspiracy.

I thought something more unsettling:

These are some of the nodes I assumed would counterbalance one another.

And they seemed remarkably capable of bending in the same direction.

That mattered to me because my faith in emergence had never really depended on powerful actors being virtuous. It depended on them being sufficiently independent.

If governments, corporations, courts, media organizations, investors, universities and political movements all possess some power, but their interests collide, then no single intention easily survives the journey through the system. One group acts; another obstructs it. One company gains power; a competitor resists. Governments regulate corporations; corporations lobby governments. Journalists expose political actors; politicians attack journalists. Courts block executives. Bureaucracies frustrate presidents. Wealthy people disagree violently with other wealthy people.

Plans enter the system and come out mangled.

Under those conditions, emergence dominates not because nobody is planning anything, but because nobody has enough power to make the plan survive everyone else's plans.

The dinner did not come out of nowhere.

Eight months earlier, at Trump's January 2025 inauguration, some of the most economically and technologically powerful people in the world had occupied extraordinarily prominent positions. Forbes calculated that the billionaires attending were collectively worth about $1.35 trillion. Among them were Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Zuckerberg, then the three richest people in the world, along with Sergey Brin, Sam Altman, Tim Cook, Miriam Adelson, Rupert Murdoch and others. Bezos and Zuckerberg had both previously clashed with Trump; both had moved toward a much more accommodating relationship after his election.

It was, in one sense, a small news story: rich and powerful people attending the inauguration of a president.

But it affected the balance of my thinking more than I expected.

Not because sharing a room establishes shared purpose. It obviously does not. Nor does praise prove ideological agreement. Corporations cultivate governments for perfectly intelligible reasons: regulation, antitrust enforcement, taxation, contracts, energy policy, access, artificial intelligence rules and dozens of other interests.

But this explanation does not necessarily make the phenomenon less consequential.

It may make it more so.

A conspiracy requires people to agree on a hidden plan. Convergence does not.

Actors can move in the same direction because their incentives increasingly point in the same direction. They can accommodate political power without sharing its ideology. They can coordinate selectively while competing ruthlessly elsewhere. They can preserve their institutional separateness while ceasing, in important respects, to function as counterweights.

I may have confused the existence of multiple powerful institutions with an actual dispersion of power.

They are not necessarily the same thing.

Project 2025 pushed me further in this direction.

Again, the interesting thing about Project 2025 is that it was not a conspiracy. It was remarkably public. The Heritage Foundation described a coalition organized around four pillars: a policy agenda, personnel recruitment, training and a 180-day implementation playbook. It built a personnel database, established a Presidential Administration Academy and explicitly sought to have vetted and trained people ready to enter government on Day One. Heritage described the project as an effort to prepare policy and personnel systematically for the next conservative administration.

Nothing about this proves omnipotence. Political programs fail. Administrations encounter courts, Congress, bureaucracies, elections, public opinion, markets, rival factions and events that nobody predicted.

But it does prove intentionality.

And intentionality matters.

This is where my old opposition between conspiracy and complexity now seems too clean.

A complex system does not consist of equally weighted particles. It consists of actors. Some of those actors possess extraordinary amounts of money, institutional authority, technological infrastructure, access to information, control over communications platforms, political influence and the ability to shape the rules under which everyone else operates.

They do not need to control the system completely in order to alter its trajectory.

A useful metaphor may be gravity rather than puppetry.

A massive object does not dictate the exact trajectory of everything around it. Other forces continue to operate. Collisions happen. Objects resist. Some escape entirely.

But mass bends trajectories.

The greater the concentration of mass, the greater the bending.

And that produces the question I find increasingly difficult to avoid:

How much concentration of power can a complex system tolerate before its outcomes cease to be predominantly emergent and begin to become directed?

I do not know the answer. I am not even sure there is a threshold at which one state cleanly becomes the other.

But the question has changed the way I think about conspiracism.

A recent VICE article crystallized the problem for me from another direction. It covered a psychological study of conspiracy mentality that found, among other things, that people with lower tolerance for ambiguity were more likely to endorse conspiratorial explanations. A sense that the world is fundamentally unjust was also associated with greater conspiracy belief. The basic psychological explanation is persuasive: people uncomfortable with uncertainty may prefer an intentional story to the messiness of emergence. Someone is behind it. Someone is responsible. Chaos becomes plot.

I agree with that.

In fact, it describes precisely one of the reasons I spent so many years opposed to conspiratorial thinking.

The world is ambiguous. Causality is distributed. Outcomes are frequently nobody's intention. Our brains are extraordinarily eager to detect agency, even where no agency exists. Conspiracy theories simplify what should remain complicated.

But this leaves another question unanswered.

What happens to people who are not especially uncomfortable with ambiguity when the situation itself begins to look less ambiguous?

What happens when people who were standing firmly on the other side of the field, insisting on complexity, emergence and distributed causality, begin to see evidence of increasingly concentrated agency?

My concern is not that I have suddenly developed a psychological need for somebody to be in control.

It is that I may have been so accustomed to guarding against one epistemic error that I became vulnerable to its opposite.

The conspiracist over-updates from weak evidence.

A coincidence becomes coordination. Coordination becomes conspiracy. Influence becomes control. The lack of evidence itself becomes evidence of how successfully the plot has been concealed.

But an anti-conspiracist can also under-update.

We can become so intellectually invested in complexity that no amount of coordination looks significant enough. We can move too quickly from “nobody can completely control a complex society” to “therefore nobody can substantially direct one.”

Those propositions are not equivalent.

Tolerance for ambiguity is an intellectual virtue when reality is genuinely ambiguous. But there is no particular virtue in preserving ambiguity artificially as evidence begins to converge.

At some point, it could be many things can become as intellectually lazy as somebody must be behind this.

This is the uncomfortable territory in which I now find myself.

My view has become, in a limited sense, more conspiratorial.

I do not mean that I now believe in secret committees directing history. Complexity has not disappeared. Rivalries remain. The technology executives sitting politely around the same table will fight one another for markets worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Political coalitions fracture. Billionaires have competing interests. Institutions retain some autonomy. People resist. Plans fail. Unintended consequences remain among the most powerful forces in history.

But I assign more causal weight to concentrated agency than I once did.

Perhaps what I mistook for a permanent property of complex societies was partly a contingent feature of a more dispersed distribution of power.

If so, then the frontier between legitimate suspicion and conspiratorial thinking cannot be defined solely by telling people to accept complexity.

Complexity itself changes when power changes.

The task is therefore harder than either the conspiracist or the reflexive anti-conspiracist makes it.

We have to distinguish common interests from coordination; coordination from conspiracy; intention from capacity; influence from control. We have to demand evidence for each step rather than casually sliding from one to the next.

But we also have to be willing to move in the other direction when the evidence warrants it.

A psychological predisposition to see conspiracies tells us something important about the observer. It does not, by itself, tell us how concentrated power actually is in the world being observed.

And perhaps this is why the frontiers of conspiracism feel more fluid to me now.

Not because facts have become fluid. Not because standards of evidence should fall. If anything, they need to become more exacting.

The frontier is fluid because the world on either side of it can change.

There are periods in which power is sufficiently fragmented that grand intentional explanations of social outcomes are inherently implausible. There may also be periods in which political, economic, technological and informational power become concentrated enough that dismissing purposeful coordination becomes its own kind of failure to see.

Complexity should protect us from imaginary puppet masters.

It should not prevent us from noticing when the strings are becoming easier for a smaller number of hands to reach.