The deeper argument that YouTube is making is that conspiracy videos on the platform are just a kind of mistake. But the conspiratorial mind-set is threaded through the social fabric of YouTube. In fact, it’s intrinsic to the production economy of the site.

YouTube offers infinite opportunities to create, a closed ecosystem, an opaque algorithm, and the chance for a very small number of people to make a very large amount of money. While these conditions of production—which incentivize content creation at a very low cost to YouTube—exist on other modern social platforms, YouTube’s particular constellation of them is special. It’s why conspiracy videos get purchase on the site, and why they will be very hard to uproot.

Inside each content creator on the late-capitalist internet, a tiny flame of conspiracy burns.

The internet was supposed to set media free, which, for the content creator, should have removed all barriers to fame. But it did this for everyone, and suddenly every corner of the internet was a barrel of crabs, a hurly-burly of dumb, fierce competition from which only a select few scrabble out. They are plucked from above by the recommendation algorithm, which bestows the local currency (views) for reasons that no one can quite explain. This, then, is the central question of the failing YouTuber: Is my content being suppressed?

I’m not above this thinking. No one who has posted on the internet is. Watch your story sink while another similar one rises to the top of Google News, and you, too, will wonder. Watch some stories explode across Facebook while better, worthier ones get sent to the bottom of the feed, and you, too, will wonder: Is some content being suppressed?

The media scholar Taina Bucher calls the folk understanding that people have of these systems the “algorithmic imaginary.” And Bucher found that even random social-media users, let alone would-be YouTube stars, were “redesigning their expressions so as to be better recognised and distributed by Facebook’s news feed algorithm.” Some go to the next logical step and feel like they’ve been targeted by the algorithm, or that “something weird” is going on when their posts don’t get seen.

It’s probably just random flux or luck, but that doesn’t make it feel less weird. As the psychologist Rob Brotherton argues in Suspicious Minds, “Our ancestors’ legacy to us is a brain programmed to see coincidence and infer cause.” And what that means, Brotherton says, is that “sometimes, it would seem, buying into a conspiracy is the cognitive equivalent of seeing meaning in randomness.”

And what place introduces us to a more random distribution of viewlessness and extreme popularity than YouTube?

Google and Twitter spawned verbs, but YouTube created a noun: YouTuber. YouTube mints personalities engaged in great dramas among networks of other YouTubers. It is a George R. R. Martin–level, quasi-fantastical universe, in which there are teams and drama, strategies and tactics, winners (views) and losers (less views). Popular YouTubers appear in one another’s videos. They feud. They ride political positions and news to views. They copy one another’s video tricks and types. They fought outside media, purporting to take down the old celebrity establishment; to support a YouTuber in his or her battle for fame was to oppose the powerful forces of Hollywood.