You've really summed up the state of the world right now: we're in a crisis of trust. We don't trust each other, we don't trust institutions and the result is anxiety, fear and anger.
I broadly agree, but I would frame it a bit differently: we have a severe lack of trustworthiness in our modern world; or, at least, the trustworthy voices are lost in the noise.
This is a big big part of why I primarily use FOSS as much as possible. Generally speaking, FOSS developers and distributors seem to act with the user's interests in mind more often than proprietary software vendors. (Certainly the distributions do, probably out of necessity - there's no shortage of competitive distro options, so a distro being shady is practically a death sentence. Individual developers still deserve more scrutiny.)
The advertisers certainly do not have my best interests in mind.
Agreed. The issue isn't that people don't blindly trust advertisers and VC-backed companies enough. The issue is that those entities are not trustworthy.
People who are choosing not to share data with those companies in their current form are making a smart choice.
I think you may be underestimating the problem with your framing. The real trouble is outside of software.
If you think about it, how come otherwise reasonable people become anti-vaxxers, or flat-earthers, or believers of any kind of (perhaps less obvious) nonsense? The arguments I've seen tend to boil down to lack of trust. They don't trust healthcare institutions ("it's all bought out by big pharma!"), scientists ("all bought out by big $something!"), government agencies ("they're incompetent"/"literally nazis"), etc.
To some degree, these institutions all violated our trust in one way or another, and media (both mainstream and social) is doing stellar job at amplifying the damage. To me, the problem with the people mistrusting institutions to the extreme isn't the facts - they often have good, if cherry-picked ones. It's the relative weight given to those facts (like, just because there was a screwup with the swine flu vaccine doesn't mean flu vaccines in general are evil dangerous pharma moneymakers). Fixing that requires teaching people some rational thinking, and I'm not sure how to do that; it's much more difficult than just throwing citations at them.
This is an idea that Cory Doctorow has also promoted at various points: that the increase in conspiracy theories are due to the increase in conspiracies, and people just don't know how to tell real conspiracies from fake one.
I agree that his/your position is worth considering, and I don't think it's that far off of the mark, but I also think it's kind of oversimplifying a tiny bit.
I think some people honestly get swept up in conspiracy theories out of pure mistake, but I've also seen people get pulled into conspiracy theories not out of some kind of rational mistake, but because those theories validate something that they want to be true, or because they offer a community that isn't otherwise available, or just because it feels good to think that every problem in the world is some specific person's fault. Jumping from general distrust of the world to full-on conspiracy is... well, it's a jump, not a simple step. I don't think everyone in QAnon is there just because they're not rational enough, I think there are multiple issues at play.
I suspect there is no single unified cause for conspiracy theories that we can point to, even though I do agree with people like Doctorow that actual rampant corruption in our institutions both isn't helping with the problem and is understated as a potential contributing factor.
Fair enough. I think that the community aspect is a competing theory here - or even a complementary one. I've personally (face-to-face) dealt with conspiracy believers that tend to be isolated in their beliefs, but I totally buy that for many, it's the shared belief that matters, almost regardless of what the belief is even about. This also has support of some sociological research I remember reading.
About the Doctorow's idea, I don't know. Do we have increased amount of conspiracies? Or perhaps just a perception of it? Or maybe we're constantly exposed to micro-conspiracies - namely all the businesses, big and small, scheming how to one up each other and screw up their customers - that make people prone to see conspiracies everywhere?
