What Lies Below: Part 1
Exploring the Depths of the infamous “Conspiracy Iceberg”
Hello! Welcome to Part One of what will be a very long series. A while back, I bumped into something floating around the odd corners of the internet. It was an image called the “Conspiracy Iceberg”, or at least one of many images so described. The idea is that the deeper you go, the more obscure and weird the topics get. These icebergs are made for everything from music genres to television show trivia, but the conspiracy iceberg(or at least this version of it) is notoriously dense. There’s over 1,100 items, and I’m not sure if anyone has ever tackled the entire thing.
I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it day by day, breaking it down by thirteen or so items every day until it’s done. Please understand that this won’t be the place for expansive, detailed coverage; I’ll try to give everything due justice but will keep things brief. Topics needing a bit more explanation may get their own complete articles down the road. Be cautioned that while I’m not going to go into gruesome details, all sorts of unpleasant and sensitive topics are going to be occasionally touched on. If I get something wrong, reach out and yell at me. If there’s something I can’t find anything about, reach out and share.
Alright, that’s enough of that. Let’s GOOOOOOOOOOO!
MOMO — The Iceberg starts us off with an item that could refer to one of two things: a lesser known cryptid, or a more modern bit of internet folklore. Given the overall flavor of this thing, it seems likely they mean the latter.
The “Momo Challenge” was a blend of scary story and urban legend in which an anonymous person(sometimes known as Momo, depending on the source) would contact someone via social media. It seems things first started in 2018 and WhatsApp was an original vector. The contactee would allegedly be told do various tasks of escalating risk, up to and including suicide. Failure to comply resulted in anything from online harassment to various spooky consequences, depending on the source. “Momo” was portrayed with a telltale image of a weird birdlike human with huge eyes, which appears to be an image of an otherwise unrelated sculpture
While there’s no evidence the challenge was ever ‘completed’, this was one of the first big social media “challenge” hoaxes to induce widespread panic. It had authorities and well-intentioned Facebook users in a tizzy until well into 2019.
The other possible meaning for “Momo”, meanwhile, is a cryptid also known as the ‘Missouri Monster’: a local flavor of Bigfoot without much else to be said.
VAMPIRES — This is an early example of what will likely happen often with the Iceberg: a topic so broad as to defy any real specific run-down. I’m going to guess that the placement on a conspiracy iceberg means we’re talking about “Real Vampires”, though, of which there are a few varieties.
First, some conspiracy theorists tend to think high level elites subsist off either blood or flesh(or other things) from victims, often children. These alleged elites aren’t really what we imagine when we think ‘vampires’, but you’ll still see the word tossed around — it’s very popular in contemporary Qanon-aligned circles.
Second, there are the ‘Sanguinarians’ and ‘Psychic/Pranic’ Vampires, or people who consider themselves actual vampires while generally being otherwise “normal” humans. You don’t see much of this subculture now, but they had quite a presence in earlier days of the Internet. ‘Sanguinarians’ needed blood(which they were careful to say always came from willing donors!) to stay healthy, whereas Psychic Vampires had a more vague diet of energy/life force/whatever. The goth scene was enjoying a bit of a resurgence in the late 90s/early 2000’s, and the ‘Real Life Vampire’ subculture rode that wave very successfully. There was even a large, now-defunct, organization called the “Sanguinarium” that operated as a sort of International hierarchy with all sorts of special rules and titles(often copped directly from the Vampire: The Masquerade role-playing game rulebook). As you might expect, it was a scene rife with what we’d now call LARPers. There are still a scattering of splinter ‘households’ and ‘clans’ here and there that trace back to or duplicate the old Sanguinarium style.
Third, there are various organizations who consider themselves, to some extent, to be vampires. The “Temple of the Vampire” is one such group, as are the “Asetian Vampires”. Usually these groups have a sort of pseudo-religious format, including their own special texts or membership requirements.
Finally, every once in a while, a “Real Vampire” appears on some corner of the internet claiming to be the real deal, immortal and all. To date, none have accepted my standing invitation to have a chat. But if one is reading this: I’m not getting any younger.
BIG PHARMA — I’m guessing this is on the very tip of the iceberg because it can hardly be called a conspiracy. “Big Pharma” is a term for the collective pool of major pharmaceutical companies. There is no specific members list, though obviously the big names like Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Novartis, Merck, etc are always considered part of it. Big Pharma is less a conspiracy unto itself and more a support beam in the structure of conspiracies large and small.
The exact way Big Pharma works into a conspiracy is usually based on the political leanings of the conspiracist. Sometimes they are purposefully withholding cures because treatment makes more money, sometimes they are purposefully making us ill in the first place, sometimes they are involved in chemtrails and vaccine-microchipping. The COVID pandemic locked Big Pharma into place as a keystone of most modern conspiracy theories. They’re almost always in cahoots with other corporations and governments(or the parts of the government a given conspiracy theorist doesn’t like, at least).
SLENDERMAN — Slenderman, like a startlingly high amount of other modern internet phenomenon, traces its origins back to the Something Awful forums. Born of a thread in which users were creating supernatural photoshops, the character took off almost immediately. Slenderman is generally depicted as a tall, thin humanoid figure with a blank white face. Usually it is wearing some kind of black suit and sometimes is sprouting shadowy black tendrils. What began as creepy photomanipulations soon ballooned into a popular YouTube series called “Marble Hornets”, into video games, and into all sorts of other internet lore.
The Slenderman mythos was very decentralized, leading to all sorts of variations on the theme that helped maintain a nebulous origin. Slenderman is arguably the biggest of the internet urban legends, and almost assuredly the one most embraced by the mainstream. The phenomenon also led to a grisly stabbing incident in which two preteen girls stabbed a friend 19 times to become ‘proxies’ of Slenderman, something one could do in some of the creeypasta(widely shared online scary stories) centered on the character.
GMOs — “Genetically Modified Organisms”. This is usually referring to plants but can refer to animals as well, and in conspiracy circles is almost always considered a bad thing. Much like Big Pharma above, GMOs are less a specific conspiracy these days and more just an ingredient of others. Corporations like Monsanto are using GMOs to dumb us down, or to make us infertile, or to infuse us with alien DNA, or to make men less masculine, or any other thing a sinister government or corporation is interested in doing.
There are also less nebulous things, like the way GMO crops will sometimes mysteriously wind up in the fields of other farmers who didn’t plant them there. These crops are then “discovered” by the megacorporations who created the GMO. This will often lead to lawsuits that the corporation inevitably wins, either outright or by slowly bankrupting their much weaker opposition.
CLIMATE DENIAL — Some people don’t think climate change is real at all, or think it is only changing in natural ways that have nothing to do with people. This isn’t as much a conspiracy as the sort of science-denial conjecture that orbits other conspiracies. Some climate deniers believe Climate Change itself is the conspiracy, meant to usher in the usual range of things from one world government to depopulation.
A pretty common example of Climate Denial in conspiracy circles is how it plays into the discourse surrounding wildfires. If you poke around a little on social media posts about these, you’ll find people “just asking questions” about how trees didn’t burn or how certain areas were missed. Some will come right out and say they believe it’s some sort of satellite-based heat weapon, others leave the specific cause vague but focus on the intent: the government using climate change as a scare tactic in order to assert control.
In my experience, climate-denial is less the core conspiracy and more the product of other core conspiracies: you can’t really believe in most of the juicy theories out there if you have much faith in scientists, and so you necessarily have to dismiss the sorts of things like climate change that most scientists agree on.
THE SECRET — This seems to just be referring to the book written by Rhonda Byrne in 2006(and also a film that same year). It’s a bland metaphysical self-help guide that isn’t particularly different from a great many others, but it caught on on at the time. The book uses flowery text to cover techniques like visualization and manifestation via the laws of attraction. Byrne focused on a “ask, believe, receive” tactic that people could easily dovetail into whatever their pre-existing philosophies or beliefs were. It’s still fairly popular in the fluffier realms of New Age thinking and spawned about a billion sequels and knock-offs. You can achieve the same effect by stapling one thousand fortune cookie fortunes together like a giant flip-book.
FAKE NEWS — A staple of conspiratorial thought for as long as it has existed by heavily popularized by Donald Trump, it’s exactly what it sounds like. Media outlets create Fake News either through outright lies, obfuscation, or misrepresentation. This is generally perpetrated by the MSM/Main-Stream Media, but is often applied to basically anyone with any audience. While it’s not much of a conspiracy theory to suggest that the media has a habit of being iffy on their facts, the “Fake News” label tends to be a more highly politicized phrase aimed at any media company that is or appears to be ideologically opposed to your own political standpoints. It was overused to such an extent that it became a meme, but has correlated with a continuing dip in how people view the credibility of news organizations.
VACCINES — A staple of contemporary conspiracy theories is that vaccines are in some way nefarious. This was always the case, but the topic was a fairly marginalized one until the COVID pandemic. Incubated for years by a mix of crunchy hippy-minded liberals and hard-line libertarians, it is now essentially an expected belief for anyone claiming to be a Conservative.
Sometimes vaccines are a population control tactic, sometimes they’re implanting us with nano-particles(this was once RFID chips, but technology marches on), sometimes they’re meant to make us sicker, sometimes they’re meant to make us more docile, sometimes they have no effect whatsoever and are purely a moneymaking scheme. Big Pharma is obviously always tied in here, as well as whatever government is enacting them.
People like Bill Gates are also drawn into this, as figureheads of whatever scheme suits the specific conspiracy. The COVID pandemic escalated this to include virtually anyone with some level of renown or celebrity. Those who speak for the vaccines are part of the plot, and anyone who dies in unexpected circumstances(i.e. a young athlete’s heart giving out) will quickly be labeled as a victim of “the jab”. This wound up so widespread that it became a meme of its own.
As will sometimes be the case, this is one with a lot more meat to it than a quick paragraph here can detail. You are on the internet so you have already encountered plenty of Anti-Vaxx conspiracies. They come in all political flavors and are sometimes otherwise reasonable or uninterested in conspiratorial thought. This may be the most mainstream of conspiracy theories, and the mountain of articles and videos and books debunking their claims is probably worth at least glancing at sometime so you can try to talk that old high school friend back from the edge of a slippery slope.
LUCID DREAMING — Lucid Dreaming is a technique in which the dreamer can become aware they are dreaming and even control the dream. It’s said to be achieved through a variety of means from drug use to meditation to just keeping a detailed dream journal, and can be used for anything from a fun dream-time to a means of divination or religious experience. Some also claim it’s how best to contact spirits, aliens, other-dimensional beings, etc. Not very conspiratorial or even weird, to be honest!
BIGFOOT — I doubt you need me to tell you what Bigfoot is. But, for the sake of completion: Bigfoot is among the most enduring cryptids, a large shaggy-furred humanoid generally occupying dense wooded areas in North America. Sightings go back as long as we have records of these things, and there are countless Bigfoot sightings since. There are a great number of variations of Bigfoot based on locale, though the general traits don’t vary much. Bigfoot has more ‘evidence’ than any other cryptid, including all sorts of photos and videos and alleged large footprints — all of varying veracity. Bigfoot has a massive following, and moreso than most cryptids enjoys a large number of true believers. While most seem to think these creatures are some sort of undiscovered animal species, you’ll occasionally hear it suggested that they’re tied to aliens or other things somehow.
DAJOOS — This is, as far as I am aware, just a ‘clever’ way for people to say “The Jews” when a conspiracy theory wind up blaming them for something or other, sometimes less subtly than other times. It’s basically a meme, and has come around to often be used by some theorists to mock others. As you’ll see throughout the Iceberg, a lot of conspiracy theories either run right up to this line and wink at it, or just jump right over it with both feet. Not great!
SACRED GEOMETRY — In essence, certain geometric patterns and shapes hold hidden or even sacred meanings. Sometimes these are attributed to an existing God or Gods, sometimes they are a manifestation of a more natural divinity, sometimes a sort of combo. Versions of this find their way into a lot of major religions and other belief systems. There’s a lot of Sacred Geometry in New Age thinking, but it does exist in the more spiritually-minded fringes of contemporary Conspiracy Theories.
Sometimes the way things were designed(i.e. the streets of Washington D.C.) are suggested to be an attempt to create these powerful geometric patterns for various nefarious purposes.
There we have it. Thirteen down, over a thousand to go! I imagine we’ll have a number of articles covering these fairly mainstream ideas, but I’ve skimmed ahead and things get murky in a hurry. It’s gonna get weird, folks.