Internet's first conspiracy theory comes roaring back!

I have no idea, but it says "Long before there were Ed Snowden Truthers, there were TWA Flight 800 theorists, way back in 1996" Wikipedia says "July 17, 1996"! I saw all sort of conspiracy theories, like nostradamus, and the "luminati" YEARS before that, on the internet! SO, TWA 800 wasn't the first.

Steve

I know it was around. I remember belonging to something called The Well, which was connected with the people who put out The Whole Earth Catalogs. I think that was the early 90s or thereabouts. There were BBS boards and such. But it was all very slow and decentralized, so you didn't have ideas spreading virally as they do with the modern internet.

Ah. Just thought of a couple that were much earlier than 1996. They were, of course, propagated largely on Usenet and some BBSs.

The most common that I saw was the claim that spamfighters (called 'antis' back then) were part of a plot by the big Internet service companies to control advertising online and keep the 'little guy' out. That had been around for years before I got online. I quickly became one of the targets for that particular crowd.

That mysterious assemblage was later jokingly called "the Lumber Cartel" by spamfighters. And even a few of the more attentive spammers of the time.

The claim that the "Powers That Be" online were allied in a plot to push anti-religious views was always big, even going back to the FidoNet daze.

The old standards were well-represented, too. The Kennedy assassination, the Clinton "murderer" theories, and all the rest.

I wasn't online for the really early days of the pre-commercial Internet, but one of my friends with college access used to laugh at the conspiracy theorists in Usenet. Mostly "alien cover-up" stuff.

Gossip springs eternal.


Paul

I guess I was lucky. I spent most of my early time with the OLD standard cell(aka TEXT) BBS type communications. I even RAN a couple for a time. LITTLE SPAMMING! I spent a relatively brief time with AOL, PRODIGY, and even earthlink, and got little spamming. THEN I went to a full standard internet. OOOOH, it would have been a spammers PARADISE! Most companies enabled a feature that THEN was on nearly all machines. Want all of AOLs subscribers email addresses? *****SIMPLE*****! BUT, alas, it seems by the time most spammers figured it out, the admins disabled it! AGAIN, I had little spamming.

Anyway, I would have had little exposure to such a thing. Still, the threads I saw were very eclectic. Some tied to backend feeds over the internet, and covered lots of weird theories.

But my original point stands in that the internet has been around SO long that it is ludicrous to claim that a theory about an event that happened in 1995 is the first theory. Such theories, like the internet, predate that event, HTML, WWW, and even generally available EMAIL. They even predate M/S windows and ,possibly, xwindows. HECK, AOL and prodigy probably had plugin ecommerce so THAT may predate the WWW(http(s) servers/browsers).

Steve