Vague conspiracy theories benefit sellers more than specific testable ones.

Evidence

The Deep State and Russiagate shared one other important characteristic. They both speedily took on the nature of something of great benefit to conspiracy sellers: formless, vast, amorphous modes of suspicion. They cast shadows that could grow to encompass any event, any discovery, or shrink to reveal a sunny, bright nothing. Conspiracist politicians and pundits only profit from an environment in which nothing is certain, everything is clouded by suspicion, and no source of information can be trusted. — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 964

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of how uncertainty and distrust of institutions power the conspiracy-verse across chapters in this book. — connects to: Conspiracy symbols succeed by combining concrete specificity with vagueness
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that profitable conspiracy theories are deliberately formless and unfalsifiable — able to absorb any event or shrink to nothing — is a genuinely dense distilling of why conspiracy content thrives.