A conspiracy is an agreement by a group of people to coordinate their actions secretly in order to achieve a goal known to them in advance—and, as a rule, secret as well. To understand what will follow in this note, the simplest way to put it is this: the author does not consider conspiracy theories to be conspiracies.
To begin with, these are analyses and hypotheses. Conspirology and hypotheses differ in that a methodologically sound hypothesis—or analysis—starts from the question “how did this happen,” while conspirology starts from the question “who benefits from this.” The line between analytics, hypotheses, and conspirology is often very thin, and in the case of Ukraine, most analytical products are simply ordinary conspiracy theories.
Deception and manipulation are not conspiracies—for example, “Google,” which tracks all of us, is not a conspiracy, but a banal attempt to shove some unwanted trash at you. Conspiracies (as understood by their exposers) are distinguished by the fact that it is practically impossible to resist them.
And finally, actually existing collusions—such as OPEC or the numerous conspiracies of large corporations and states, whether secret or open—are not conspiracies in this sense. They pursue short-term goals, and in most cases are at most “two-move” schemes, not the mind-boggling constructs that conspiracy theorists expose.