Well, "conspiracy theory" becomes pejorative when its logic is cheaply associative and when it flies in the face of critical thinking in lots of other ways. For instance, this kind of conspiracy theorist doesn't credit scientific consensus.

In this article, I'm only comparing societies to Ponzi schemes. I'm saying there's a fraudulent aspect of big societies, but I don't go on to link all kinds of dubious conspiracies about the alien nature of the elites, and so on.

But it's true that this analogy or hypothesis entails a conspiracy in that one of the similarities posits a split between insiders and outsiders (as there's such a split in a Ponzi fraud). Some conspiracies are real, though, so we should distinguish between the neutral, objective talk of conspiracies, and the pejorative kind of kneejerk, fallacious conspiratorial thinking.