While conspiracy theories have been studied extensively in semiotics, philosophy and in the social sciences (Butter, Knight, 2020; Ferrari et al, 2023), there remains an open question: can conspiracy theories be counter-hegemonic? For many the tendency is to say that although conspiracy theories constitute a danger for society, at the same time they can be an example of critical thinking, if aberrant (e.g. Bratich, 2008; Räikkä, Ritola, 2020; Silvestri, 2023). Cassam (2019) has argued that conspiracy theories cannot be useful, distinguishing between Conspiracy Theories (CT) and conspiracy theories (ct). Contrary to real theories of a conspiracy, CTs are “speculative, contrarian, esoteric, amateurish and premodern” (Cassam, 2019, 35). Is it possible to find semiotic traits to distinguish between CT and ct?The latter question is closely related to the semiotic problem of distinguishing between the ideological from the non-ideological discourse (Stano and Leone, 2023), metaphor from metonymy (Ventsel, Madisson, 2021; Danesi, 2023), or hermetic from non-hermetic style (Eco, 1990; Lorusso, 2023). Leone (2023) has recently proposed that the ideological discourse is best defined as reducing singularities to a single, always the same, interpretive schema. Drawing from Selg and Ventsel’s (2010) notion of semiotic hegemony and from the Lotmanian distinction between discrete and non-discrete texts, I will present a new pair of semiotic concepts, those of indifference and non-indifference toward reality. I will then argue that CTs cannot be counter-hegemonic. That is not only because they reduce singularities, but also because they show indifference toward reality.