Rick McGinnis:

I’m old enough to remember when the internet – at that point still described as an “information superhighway” – held the promise of data and knowledge at our fingertips, every day, anywhere. What we’ve ended up with is a torrent of unwanted opinion, non-curated trivia. and, lately, endless AI slop. But running underneath is another toxic stream that has been flowing since the internet was still evolving from the bulletin boards and private forums of its nerd genesis: conspiracy theories.

“Conspiracy theory” is a catch-all term that can be used for everything from venerable, cockroach-like tales of powerful networks that control government and business (Freemasons, and the antisemitic libel that inevitably runs back to its source with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion) to medicine (fluoride in water; suppression of cancer cures) and science (the flat earth and the moon landing hoax). And like pornography, conspiracy theories were one of the earliest things to thrive online.

A century ago, it was reasonable to assert that a Roman Catholic couldn’t be president of the United States because he would always have “divided loyalties” and be subject to papal influence – a “tunnel to the Vatican” idea that had people talking about a literal tunnel stretching from the Papal States to Washington DC. John F. Kennedy was able to joke about this by the time of his 1960 presidential campaign, but the tunnel emerged again when QAnon-inspired rumours of gold-filled Vatican tunnels raided by U.S. troops on the orders of Donald Trump were making the rounds.

There are so many conspiracy theories, covering nearly every subject and in every size and shape, that it’s likely you have fallen for one, at some point, for at least a little while. I know someone, a perfectly intelligent man, who is fond of arguing that the earth is flat, and I’ve had to talk several sane, reasonable people down from the 9/11 “Truther” theory of a “controlled demolition” of the World Trade Center towers.

A couple of years ago the algorithm running YouTube dropped a video about “the Mud flood” on my feed; it told a story about a conspiracy to cover up the existence of an older, more advanced civilization in whose ruins we live. Clicking on it started more videos dropping, many of which talked about that civilization – Tartaria – and the traces it has left all over the world.

It was so outlandish that I couldn’t stop clicking and the algorithm not only started serving more conspiracies but quite a few videos debunking the Tartarian conspiracy. I’ll try to sum it up for you but keep one thing in mind – people believe this, perhaps even someone you know.

Tartaria was a vast Eurasian empire that spanned the globe at its height, building cities of phenomenal scale and beauty, powered by technology we can only dream about today, which included metal-topped domes to collect “free energy” and stone chambers that acted as “sonic baths.” The scale of the buildings meant that Tartarians were giants, at least seven or eight feet tall.

We know this because we live with those buildings today – domed capitals built of white stone, cathedrals and grand banking temples that still inspire awe in our cities. But the Tartarian empire was wiped away by a massive global mud flood that buried all but the ornate top floors of their buildings, into which our current, lesser civilization moved like barbarians stabling their cattle in the ruins of the Colosseum.

Tartarian technology was a wonder, so much that we haven’t been able to duplicate it, and when we’re not demolishing what’s left of Tartarian glory we’re building uglier, cheaper tower blocks and glass skyscrapers that won’t last a century, never mind millennia or withstand another mud flood.

If you believe this – and I hope that nobody reading this does (though, once again, you might know someone who does) – you have to swallow the key fact of the story, which is that the mud flood was only about two hundred years ago. Which is why so many Tartarian edifices remain today, in plain sight, and why many of them have only been excavated down to just below modern street level, to what we’re told is a “basement,” while many more floors sit below that, buried in the mud.

Erasing the evidence of the Tartarians is a major priority for the lesser men who led us to occupy their ruins and lied to us that we built them. But they have tried – mud flood believers point to the magnificent “white cities” of World Fairs like the ones held in Chicago in 1893, St. Louis in 1904, or San Francisco in 1915, demolished not long after they closed with barely a trace. And so more drastic measures were needed – two world wars that flattened cities all over Europe and erased Tartarian legacies wholesale.

As far as one can tell, the Tartarian conspiracy got its start online just a decade ago, with YouTube videos about the mud flood, but it languished for a few years until it spread to Reddit and exploded in popularity during the enforced idleness of COVID lockdowns and found its perfect home on TikTok. But its roots, like many conspiracy theories, can be traced to Russia, and the “new chronology” of Anatoly Fomenko, which had a Slavic racial component overlaid by occultist Nikolai Levashov.

Like any good conspiracy, it defies rational debunking. You can point out that “Tartaria” was a term that map-makers once used to describe uncharted and distant land, after they stopped inscribing them with “there be dragons.” You can point to construction records, archival photos, blueprints, and legal and government documentation, and will be told that they’re all forgeries. Not even the weight of historical literature – 200 years ago is hardly the dark ages or prehistory – is enough to break the dam of true belief. The conspiracy theorist actually regards debunking as tacit confirmation, and proof that you, not they, are the dupe.

The Tartarian conspiracy itself isn’t very interesting. What fascinates me, though, is how appealing it is to people who aren’t uneducated (though the poor quality of historical education plays a big part) but who see it as an answer to a question that nobody has answered. Which boils down, essentially, to “Why is the modern world so ugly?”

In Tom Wolfe’s 1981 polemic against the state of modern architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House, he wrote about the companies who either paid for or leased floors in new, glass skyscrapers all over America and Europe and spent a fortune trying to make their interiors look like the Old World:

I have seen the carpenters and cabinetmakers and search-and-acquire girls hauling in more cornices, covings, pilasters, carved moldings, and recessed domes, more linenfold paneling, more (fireless) fireplaces with festoons of fruit carved in mahogany on the mantels, more chandeliers, sconces, girandoles, chestnut leather sofas, and chiming clocks than Wren, Inigo Jones, the brothers Adam, Lord Burlington, and the Dilettanti, working in concert, could have dreamed of.”
“Without a peep they move in! – even though the glass box appalls them all.

I can understand why someone would look at the Alwyn Court apartments near Carnegie Hall, built in 1907 and covered in floor after floor of terracotta ornament – pilasters, canopies, crowned salamanders, cameos, escutcheons, and fleurs-de-lys – and wonder why we don’t do this today. The Tartarian conspiracy theory tells them it’s because we can’t, that the skills and technology to do so have been lost. (Which is apparently more appealing than knowing that we simply won’t, because of architectural fashion, regulation, and, even more depressing, cost.)

The Tartarian conspiracy is incoherent and implausible and its followers badly informed, but it’s also a down vote against the shabby, cheap, ugly, and uninspiring streets we live in despite being arguably the wealthiest civilization that’s ever existed. It’s an inchoate protest against the myth of progress, and the idea that we are becoming inexorably wiser, better, more enlightened and more just.

Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements