Stephen McDermott
I WAS AT the freezer in my local newsagent this week when I considered two of modern life’s big questions: what hidden force is pushing Biscoff on society, and why?
I’m not against Biscoff (a small caramelised biscuit whose natural habitat is beside a cup of restaurant coffee), but when I saw that Biscoff ice cream had joined Biscoff chocolate, Biscoff cookies and Biscoff spread as spin-offs in the Biscoff range, I started to think we were all pawns in a game being played by the Treat Industrial Complex.
For a couple of days, I distracted myself from the hot weather with this new low-stakes conspiracy theory.
A lot of people have their own version of this. It’s a form of apophenia where people formulate a big idea about how society secretly works; the theories are a bit wild and entirely lacking in evidence, but are also ultimately harmless.
They’re not the same as the type of theories that lead people down rabbit holes and warp their entire view of the world, radicalising them against minorities and pitting them against the people they love.
There’s a subreddit – a community within the social media site Reddit – that provides an outlet for people to share their own low-stakes conspiracy theories.
It captures the essence of the concept of low-stakes conspiracies: overthought, a bit deranged, and self-aware enough to know that the joke only works if nobody starts taking it too seriously.
Examples posted in the forum this week include theories that all toothpaste is actually the same, that shops in the UK are locking up chocolate to convince customers it’s worth more, and that the claim that tea cools you down in hot weather was an invention of tea companies to counteract poor summer sales.
These kinds of conspiracies are not hills people will die on, but they’re appealing because they are so palliative, offering reasons for things that don’t add up on the surface or that are annoyingly inconvenient, but are not worth complaining to the manager about.
Like higher-stakes conspiracy theories, they offer the pleasure of pattern-making and a feeling of superiority that comes from thinking critically to make the chaos of everyday existence make sense.
This was a more embarrassing part of my Biscoff theory, where the world briefly felt more intriguing because I wanted to believe an evil force was behind something much bigger, when the reality was that it was probably just market research.
It helps, of course, when you have a receptive community willing to entertain your wacky explanations (though my own friends might not agree).
The difference is that low-stakes conspiracies are knowingly silly: those who come up with them intentionally subvert the earnest but overdetermined reasoning of more famous conspiracy theories to imbue the whole endeavour with a sense of irony.
The joke brings a sense of joie de vivre to online paranoia, which these days tends to be packaged on social media as frothing-at-the-mouth outrage or misinformation.
Rather than having to join an anti-vax network or see everything through the lens of the Great Replacement theory, people can use low-stakes conspiracies to air their suspicions in a harmless register and without isolating themselves because of their beliefs.
The key difference between low-stakes and more dangerous conspiracies is also that the sense of irony keeps the belief contained – the joke works because everyone understands the boundary and that there are limits on how far to take it.
But beneath the humour, low-stakes conspiracy theories reflect the legitimate grievances people have about the way modern consumer capitalism functions.
The theories themselves are wilfully absurd, yet they exaggerate feelings about how people are less trusting about the systems that run society and how day-to-day life has become a bit more frustrating.
To take an example from the subreddit forum this week, everyone knows that chocolate is being locked up in UK supermarkets as a security measure; but that also makes the experience of buying it less seamless and reminds us that we live in a world where Dairy Milk has become so expensive that people choose to steal it.
I’m fully aware that there’s no shady global cabal pushing Biscoff into every available dessert format, but my theory also reflects what I see as companies forcing certain products on us by endlessly extending and repackaging them, so that it feels like other choices are being nudged out.
The low-stakes nature and irony that comes with these conspiracies prevents them from becoming full-on misinformation; instead, they’re more like simple stories that people tell themselves to make the world feel more satisfying.
Those stories find their groove in the space between conscious paranoia and frustration, and give us made-up villains who can stand in for the more boring truths about why modern life is rubbish.
When I belatedly decided to look up the reason behind the recent surge in Biscoff products, I found plenty of mundane explanations as to why they seemed to be everywhere.
Apparently it’s because of a series of viral trends, partly accelerated by the home-baking boom that began during Covid lockdowns.
That seems like a perfectly normal reason for the glut of treats made from a previously obscure Belgian biscuit. But where’s the fun in that?