‘Release the video’ is mostly a way to extend the conspiracy theory

There are at least two reasons that baseless claims about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) husband spread so quickly.

One is that the confessed attacker had espoused conspiracy theories that have broadly infected the political right, from claims about the 2020 election results to QAnon. That the federal government has been warning for years about the path from things like QAnon to political violence was ignored; instead, there was a rush to blame the violence on something less closely attached to standard right-wing rhetoric.

The other reason these conspiracy theories spread is the same reason that QAnon itself did: There are reward mechanisms for sowing doubt that don’t exist for sharing the less-exciting truth.

What makes conspiracy theories so powerful, though, is information. They aren’t simply invented out of thin air. They’re cobbled together piecemeal from people looking for patterns that don’t exist.

I frequently come back to Lawrence Lessig’s 2009 essay “Against Transparency” in which he warned that publishing information in the interests of governmental transparency would simply give people scads of material to generate their own narratives. That’s exactly what happened

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