The internet made us all crappy, unpaid detectives

And we’re not even working the right cases.

A guy I know is crawling through the Epstein files night and day and posting his discoveries on social media. It’s worth noting the dude hasn’t had a real job in a while. I keep wanting to tell him: “Maybe you should work on solving The Case of the Expiring Unemployment Benefits instead, y’know?”

He’s not the only one, though. We’re all sleuths nowadays.

• That cold case? There’s an army of podcast listeners tracking down clues.

• That conspiracy theory? Well, this podcaster says there’s a book by a guy who used to work for the Mossad and…

• Is that video AI? Look! Right there, you can see the guy has seven fingers. Or does he???

• Did ChatGPT write what you’re reading? Look for phrases like “not just X, but Y.” Or genericisms like “leverage a holistic framework in a meaningful way.” Also: em dash—overdose.

• Are there microchips in the vaccines? Are those supplements legit? Get on social media, the perfect place to get lectured about science by high school dropouts.

We’ve all become P.I.s. False flag! Psy op! Deep state! Rigged election! Black pilled! Crisis actor! The Rothschilds! “Why isn’t the mainstream media talking about…”

🙄🙄🙄

It’s got me feeling like that SNL sketch where William Shatner yells at Trekkies:

Maybe they were right?

To be clear: it’s good that this Epstein Files is exposing predators and corrupt elites. Plenty of journalists are doing good work and sunlight matters. (A good example: The Infrastructure of Jeffrey Epstein’s Power.)

But an unpleasant side effect of all this is how much the craziest people among us now believe they’ve been spot on all along. You hear stuff like “There are a lot of mentions of pizza in the files so it looks like QAnon was kinda right.” Ummmm…QAnon thought Hillary Clinton was running a sex trafficking ring out of the basement of a pizza parlor in DC. Not the same. I understand both these things mention pizza, but so does every Mike Birbiglia special and…wait, he went to college in DC and his wife’s poetry seems like it’s filled with secret codes so maybe he is Mossad!?

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QAnon set the trap as a template for engagement. It hooked people by working like a video game. “Players” followed a trail of clues to unravel a sinister conspiracy. The genius part: The players didn’t know it was a game. Instead, they thought they were righteous warriors fighting for justice. You don’t play this video game, it plays you. (It’s like some warped Yakov Smirnoff joke.)

That’s a wildly effective hook. So more and more of us entered “do your research” mode.

This research is, basically, typing things into Google but when they do, they go down the rabbit hole. They open a fascinating fantasy world of secret wars and cabals and Hillary Clinton controlling things, and it offers convenient explanations for things that feel inexplicable or wrong about the world. It reminded me specifically of how people get to alternate reality games. Through these research rabbit holes.

In too deep

It’s not that I don’t think there are any conspiracies. I spend way too much time wondering if I’m being conned. For example:

Am I arguing with a bot or a real human?

Is the Winter Olympics a scam?

Are these longevity experts selling snake oil?

Is United actually trying to get me to pay $22 extra to ensure I get a *middle seat* in *the very last row* of the plane? The chutzpah!

I’m right, aren’t I? Or am I just another guy with a corkboard and red string? Hmm.

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The real conspiracies

The problem with focusing so much on titillating, connect-the-dot conspiracies is we wind up ignoring the ones hiding in plain sight. Douglas Rushkoff gets at this feeling in “You Are Not Crazy.”

The whole premise of a sovereign wealth fund sounds like a conspiracy. In fact, all finance sounds like conspiracy if you try to explain it out loud: Remember the mortgage crisis? Goldman Sachs sold baskets of mortgages to investors, while simultaneously betting against their solvency. They were selling investments they hoped would tank. That’s how they would cash in.

Sovereign wealth funds. Privatizing public assets. Billionaires working in collusion with government to deregulate AI and build Project Stargate, a global genomic surveillance apparatus.

I heard the words coming out of my mouth. and I could tell I sounded crazy.

Too often, we’re wasting our skepticism on the wrong things. We’re all trying to solve the exotic stuff while we ignore the boring-but-consequential corruption that surrounds us.

Take the Trump-UAE crypto story that barely registered in our collective doomscroll. Background: Days before the inauguration, a powerful member of the United Arab Emirates’ ruling family quietly paid $500 million for a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture co-founded by members of the Trump family. Months later, the administration reversed AI export limits to the UAE. What a coinkydink!

Yet I’ve barely heard a peep about it. It just ain’t as exciting as UFO chemtrails that prove dinosaurs never existed (or, y’know, whatever). There’s no game to play in vanilla “the federal government is up for sale” deceit. We need that sweet dopamine hit so we choose to continually cosplay Columbo cracking a creep-filled cold case instead.