Feelings Over Facts: Conspiracy Theories and the Internet Novel
You’ve seen this image before: a man in rumpled office clothing, gesticulating wildly at a wall of papers with red yarn slashing across them. It comes from an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, where Charlie starts working in an office mailroom and develops a conspiracy theory: that someone named Pepe Silvia, whose mail is regularly delivered to the office, doesn’t actually exist.
The meme depicts the zealous energy of an internet conspiracy theorist, desperate to present his evidence. Its verbal equivalent is the phrase “taking the red pill.” In the 1999 film The Matrix, the hero must choose between taking the blue pill, which would keep his existing, anesthetized view of reality intact or the red pill—which would reveal that his world is a deliberately engineered simulation created to exploit humanity. Since then, redpilling has become “extremely online” shorthand for various forms of radicalization. In the manosphere, the “red pill” is the realization that feminism is destroying men, society, and Western democracy. But there are more frivolous uses of the phrase: you can be fish oil–pilled for the omega-3s, zone 2 cardio–pilled for your cardiovascular health, and journaling–pilled after reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.
The redpill metaphor is used, as the writer Geoff Shullenberg writes , to describe the creeping suspicion that the “official version” of the facts, the “consensus reality,” is wrong:
