Category File
Internet Culture
2 documented theories filed under this subject.
- 11B-X-1371An unmarked DVD postmarked Warsaw reached a Swedish tech blogger in 2015. Hidden inside a two-minute film of a masked figure were White House coordinates, Latin, morse code and photographs of mutilated women — and for a fortnight it read as either a confession or a threat. Every element traced back to found material, and a man in Poland later claimed it as an art project.
- The Dead Internet TheoryImperva’s 2023 Bad Bot Report found that 47.4% of internet traffic in 2022 was automated. The theory built on that number goes considerably further: that since around 2016 the social web has been so saturated with bots and machine-generated content that most of the people on it are not people, kept that way by states and platforms to steer opinion.
- FrazzledripA claim that surfaced in April 2018 holding that a video recovered from Anthony Weiner's seized laptop showed Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin assaulting a child.
- TartariaTartaria, more commonly rendered in English-language history as Tartary, was an early modern European geographic label used for a broad and shifting expanse of Inner Asia, Siberia, and neighboring regions. In modern conspiracy culture, the same name has been reinterpreted as referring to a lost global empire said to have possessed advanced architecture, technology, and knowledge before being erased from history. The modern Tartaria theory combines historical map terminology, architecture-focused hidden-history claims, mud-flood narratives, and ideas of documentary suppression into one of the most prominent internet-era alternative-history systems.
- Microsoft Wingdings CodeA software-era conspiracy theory claiming that Microsoft’s Wingdings font concealed intentional ideological messages, most famously when the letters “NYC” were said to produce a skull-and-crossbones, a Star of David, and a thumbs-up symbol. In its strongest form, the theory argued that this was not a random glyph mapping but a deliberate anti-Semitic or coded internal message left by developers during the 1992 release period.
- The Bottle Cap Challenge (2019)The Bottle Cap Challenge theory claims that the 2019 viral kick-and-spin social media trend was not just a martial arts stunt challenge, but a distributed training exercise that helped improve AI motion tracking, pose estimation, and action-recognition systems. In this framework, millions of short videos functioned as labeled movement data collected in public view.
- The Harambe Sacrifice (2016)The Harambe Sacrifice theory claims that the May 2016 killing of Harambe at the Cincinnati Zoo was more than a zoo emergency or viral media event. In this theory, the gorilla’s death was a symbolic blood ritual intended to trigger disorder, collapse an existing timeline, or usher in a period of accelerated social chaos later remembered online as the “darkest timeline.”