Was Kobe Bryant Holding the Fabric of the Universe Together?

Things have been going from bad to worse since Kobe Bryant left us.

Photo by Freddy Kearney on Unsplash.

The internet is full to bursting with conspiracy theories, which anyone who has spent more than three seconds with a search engine already knows.

The Information Age in general, and social media in particular, seem predestined to play host to a sort of speculative online version of telephone, a real-time, large-scale experiment in human crowd psychology and abnormal social behavior.

Conspiracy theories have flourished in this era; it is their ideal growing medium.

Some of these theories are merely odd- like the one about Paul McCartney and Avril Lavigne being replaced with doppelgängers by their respective media companies after an untimely overdose.

Other conspiracy theories are virtual masterpieces of creative and historical fiction. Who hasn’t marveled at the speculations of ancient alien theorists or the intricacies of meticulously-researched tomes about the JFK assassination?

Even those who don’t believe- and unlike Fox Mulder, don’t really care if they believe or not- can appreciate such a body of scientific work and research, however jaundiced or wild the conclusions.

Some conspiracy theories seem to be a sort of fan fiction, written by people who may, at some point, have lost touch with reality. Some are traditional, as old as written history itself.

There are things no one believes, which later turn out to be true- like the finding of the lost city of Troy, previously thought to be an invention of Homer.

Then there are things which many people believe, in spite of knowing them to be untrue. Some are silly and downright hilarious, like the one about the world getting sucked into a black hole in 2012; others might be a bit dangerous.

Some conspiracy theories are widely known, like Area 51; some no one has ever heard of because someone made them up on the spot, like the theory that Sex and the City was really about a single woman with multiple personalities living in New York or that Dumbledore was taking Felix Felicis. (Giddiness, recklessness, dangerous overconfidence; check.)