I recently stumbled across a real weirdo on TikTok: Filip Zieba. He covers a wide range of almost-but-not-exclusively pseudoarchaeological conspiracy theories, ranging from ancient giants and Atlantis to the Tartarian mud flood and Egyptian pyramids as prehistoric wireless power plants – and anything else that someone, somewhere, could imagine. His head seems empty enough that the whole world falls through. These videos regularly attract tens of millions of views, giving him a reach that dwarfs any legitimate archaeologist or historian that I can think of. The interesting thing, though, isn’t the conspiracies themselves. They’re standard and interchangeable, a distillation of a century of tinfoil hattery. What stands out is that he doesn’t seem to be a grifter. Most people in this space are selling something: a Patreon, pseudoscientific supplements, or a podcast designed to push both. Zieba doesn’t appear to be doing any of that. He has a little-noticed Ko-fi, and despite his enormous view count I suspect that he makes very little money from TikTok. No, he seems to be in it purely for the love of the game, genuinely convinced that he is uncovering hidden truths that mainstream experts have dismissed or ignored. I began by calling him a weirdo – and he is – but he is also a representative of a much broader genus of contemporary anti-intellectualism that reflects an increasingly influential epistemology across much of the Anglophone world.

So what does Zieba actually believe? There is little point in cataloguing or debunking individual conspiracies. I admit that I find them fun, much in the same way that I loved reading At the Mountains of Madness as a child. None of them have any reasonable evidence or validity, and they can be dismissed trivially even without doing specific research. They are interchangeable, united not by their subject matter but by a common understanding of how truth is established. If “mainstream” archaeologists reject an idea, that alone gives reason to take it seriously. When people point out the enormous holes in his conspiracies, he simply references the hours of research he puts into every video and claims – incredibly, given that his audience dwarfs that of “mainstream” professionals – that he is being silenced by big Archaeology. With Zieba, there is no comforting explanation that he is lying for money; he appears to be a genuinely curious man who has fallen into an unfortunate epistemological framework in which opposition to authority becomes a source of legitimacy.

Zieba is fond of describing himself as an autodidact which, by itself, is entirely laudable. There is nothing inherently suspect about learning outside of formal education, especially in a world where access to that education is often gated behind layers of privilege. The problem is not the principle itself, but what it has come to mean in the internet age: mistaking the consumption of information for expertise, and research¹ for knowing how to conduct research. Zieba adopts all the aesthetics of scholarship – evidence, research, open-mindedness, scientific curiosity – whilst rejecting the methods that give those words meaning. In this, there is nothing unusual in Filip Zieba. I see it constantly in my own niche. There exists a strange ecosystem of X-née-Twitter “classicists” convinced that professional classicists are concealing the hyper-masculine truth about Greece and Rome from them; this despite being unable to read a word of Greek or Latin themselves. This is a familiar pipeline that begins with genuinely curious young men and ends in fascist neo-paganism. The expert becomes the enemy not because they lack persuasive evidence, but because they constrain our fantasies of what we want the world to be – and the conspiracy theorist then casts themself as the expert.

But this isn’t really about Filip Zieba, conspiracy theorists, or Twitter faux-classicists. This is just one expression of an intellectual archetype that has become a feature of mainstream political and cultural life – they are symptoms, not the disease. Across the Anglophone world, expertise is increasingly regarded as suspect. Doctors became villains during the pandemic. Vaccines are rejected at increasing rates. Universities are caricatured as the ivory towers of detached elites. Climate change is derided even as Europe enters its third major heatwave of a summer that only just began. We see court cases where just the presence of books is used as a cultural signifier of hostile otherness.² In its ultimate expression, we see the elevation of near-illiterate political figures to the highest offices atop a wave of populist anti-elite sentiment.

None of this has a single cause. The internet has flattened expertise and made credentials invisible. Social media rewards confidence and certainty over nuance. Institutions have squandered public trust through genuine failures. Universities, not entirely unfairly, have become associated with class and cultural distance. Most dangerously, populist movements have learned that resentment of intellectual authority is an effective political tool. These forces bolster one another, creating an environment in which ten thousand Filip Ziebas can bloom. It would be naïve to suggest that there isn’t some legitimacy to this distrust. For the underclass of society – people who never had the opportunity to go to university, who are required to work horrific hours at “low-skill” jobs just to make rent, who have seen their living standards consistently decline for decades³ – trusting elites has not brought them happiness. Many people experience a growing disconnect between narratives of technological progress and the reality of declining living standards and falling life expectancy. They are talked down to, mocked, and ultimately despised when their frustration challenges the status quo. The Ziebas of the world offer an attractive alternative; not just hidden knowledge but a flattering perception of yourself as one of the few who have taken the red pill and seen through the lies. In doing so, you reclaim a sense of agency in a life that had previously been subject to alienating capitalist processes beyond any of our individual understandings. This is an intoxicating feeling,⁴ and far more emotionally satisfying than the slow and uncertain process by which real knowledge is produced.

It is customary in leftist circles to end with a call to action. What do we do about this problem? I don’t know! There is no simple solution. It’s easy to say “fix peoples’ lives,” but that is most certainly not something that is within my control.⁵ If there is a lesson to be learned, it is not that we should blindly defer to experts. Experts get things wrong all the time. The solution isn’t more people with deep knowledge of history, or archaeology, or any other discipline in the humanities.⁶ What I would argue for is the recentring of the humanities as a discipline. We have seen a massive expansion of technical education and (S)TEM degrees whilst the humanities have been socially marginalised. Educational culture has increasingly valued technical skills and degrees primarily as pathways into employment, whilst epistemic skills are neglected.

The explosion of scientific illiteracy, misinformation, and conspiracy demonstrates exactly why this approach was misguided. More than anything else, the humanities teach how knowledge is produced. Expertise is not knowing trivia; it is participation within a community that has rigorous standards for testing claims against evidence. The humanities give people an understanding of bias, of how to conduct research and construct an argument, of how to engage with criticism and revise opinions based on new evidence. They instil a respect for the process itself, not just the outcome. Perhaps most importantly, they teach intellectual humility and an understanding that uncertainty is a natural consequence of scholarship. The system is not perfect, but it works an awful lot better than rejecting authority as a matter of course – and people like Zieba borrow its language whilst rejecting the methods that give those words meaning. They present themselves as enemies of orthodoxy whilst inhabiting a new orthodoxy of their own creation; every institution is corrupt, every mainstream academic compromised, and every outsider claim worthy of attention.

Conspiracy culture presents itself as radically sceptical, but in practice it demands greater credulity than the institutions it opposes. It asks you to believe that entire fields of archaeologists, historians, scientists, and journalists across the globe are engaged in a campaign of coordinated deception. It asks you to place your faith instead in an online stranger with a ring light and an internet connection. This is the inversion of trust, not scepticism; expert authority is displaced rather than dismissed. Filip Zieba is not the cause of this problem. He is instead one of its most visible symptoms: a curious man with a fundamentally flawed method for evaluating knowledge. There are millions more like him, and there will be millions more after him unless we become better at teaching not just facts, but the process by which knowledge is established.