A conspiratorial world view has crept into all spheres of contemporary life. Public health, democratic institutions, scientific rationalism, and assumptions of merit-based expertise have all been overtaken, to a certain degree, by paranoid forms of sense-making. With this, the distinction between conspiracy theories widely deemed delusional or dangerous, and techniques of critical inquiry that reveal systems of power and exploitation becomes blurred. In this talk, Robert Gerard Pietrusko explores the “Dark Optimism” of conspiracy theories, and the ways in which they might reimagine configurations of politics, institutions, finance, and technology. Following what Paul Ricœur has called a “hermeneutics of suspicion”, Pietrusko explores the imaginative potential of conspiratorial styles of reasoning, to propose “Dark Optimism” as a new and necessary episteme for living with global uncertainty.