I was searching for something online earlier – site security related, of course, because that’s all I ever do anymore – when my search somehow pulled up a page that was not only completely unrelated, it was also completely unrelated to anything else anywhere I’d ever seen: I had stumbled onto a social-media outpost inhabited by the tinfoil-hat wearing conspiracy-theory brigade. Not going to link to it because I don’t want anyone else falling down the rabbit hole (or any of the rabbits coming to visit me here), but take my word for it, the subject matter was…strange. Which coming from me? Is really saying something.
They were discussing a topic I’d never heard of before and which is not referenced in Wikipedia. Or on Snopes. Googling it just takes you further down into the rabbit hole, showing more sites and posts and pages where they’re all basically quoting the same sources and referring back to each other. Visiting any of those pages opens up the rest of the warren, more topics branching down into the paranoid darkness, more arguments coiled in endless spirals of repetitive madness, more metal-hatted rabbits chittering to each other in their own coded language. Here and there something recognizable will emerge – unemployment, current events, the election – but will almost immediately be twisted around to reveal terrible unseen meanings you know aren’t really there but which are being accepted as obvious, even tiresome. And that’s when you start wondering, is this real?
It got frightening after three or four link hops, at least two of which I probably shouldn’t have taken, so I backed out of everything, abandoned my quest to find out why some bot in St. Petersburg was generating an error by crawling my site, and fled the computer to make dinner. But the chitters from the looking-glass world of the rabbits still lingered, whispering doubts about perception and the true nature of reality. Is the lack of evidence really a kind of evidence all in itself? Or is the madness of rabbits simply contagious?
Or are we all rabbits, and some are just more mad than others? 