immanence

As I’ve been preparing to cover QAnon in my media course (and trying to keep up with it, since it’s really been ramping up ahead of the election), I’ve seriously begun to think of it is a work of evil genius. Let me explain why.

For starters, it’s worth reminding ourselves that QAnon was designated as a domestic terrorism threat by the FBI last year, that dozens of U.S. congressional candidates (and a few representatives) have voiced support for it, and that President Trump’s Twitter feed is its most influential “superspreading” node. At last week’s nationally televised “town hall,” Trump refused to renounce the movement and instead nodded positively in its direction. Meanwhile, it is spreading rapidly in various forms not only in the U.S. but in Europe and around the world.

At heart, QAnon is an addictively interactive, video-game like, pyramid-schemey blob of a conspiracy theory, the ultimate in “conspirituality,” that has all the hallmarks of a new religious movement but with multiple entry points for different kinds of people. (As a new religious movement, it reminds me of the politically potent kinds of religious movements that China has seen a lot of, from the late medieval “redemptive societies” to Falun Gong.)

QAnon’s general subtext — that Donald Trump is taking on an elite global cabal of satanic and cannibalistic pedophiles, a group that includes everyone you most want to hate, especially if they are wealthy, liberal “globalists” of any stripe (but preferably Democrats) — is patently absurd. But that subtext is presented in a dizzyingly obfuscatory and beguilingly baroque, smoke-and-mirrors concoction that seeps into its followers’ psyches by engaging their hopes and fears in the most sinuously (and deviously) compelling ways.

So in addition to the “raw” QAnon that has spread widely through socially and politically conservative communities over the last couple of years, we now have the “QAnon 2.0” that has sometimes been called “pastel QAnon” or “wellness QAnon” — a form of QAnon spreading rapidly through communities of yoga practitioners, wellness coaches, “mommy bloggers,” and Instagram lifestyle “influencers.” (See Kaitlyn Tiffany’s “The Women Making Conspiracy Theories Beautiful“, Marc-André Argentino’s Twitter series on the topic, and On the Media’s “Spheres of Influence” episode, which you can listen to or read here.)

It has become, as Travis View calls it, a “cafeteria conspiracy theory” that allows followers to pick and choose what appeals to them and “do their own research” to confirm it with whatever mysterious shards of data they find in an infinitely multiplying infosphere. If, as Atlantic writer Renée DiResta puts it, “The supply of disinformation will soon be infinite,” doing one’s own research can easily become a method for verifying anything. As Izabella Kaminska puts it in a video that sometimes runs away with its own speculations,

In a world of unlimited data, anyone can take a kernel of suspicion and run with it to confirm their own biases with a view to amplifying them further. Add to that the easily weaponized nature of social media, from tweets and blogs to YouTube videos, and you can see how a bad actor can generate chaos and friction to sow discontent. Who’s pushing the buttons doesn’t necessarily matter. What matters are the techniques they are using. Anyone who plays live action role-playing games known as LARPs will recognize the gaming elements of QAnon.

The gaming elements are what make this interactive, decentralized alternate universe particularly compelling. Add spirituality, a global pandemic, and a crazy political atmosphere, and you have a potent mix.

With just a few weeks left before the U.S. presidential election, one might think QAnon’s influence may be peaking. But there have been spikes of QAnon activity that can be correlated with a multitude of topics trending in U.S. political culture — from Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest and death to Covid-19 and the George Floyd protests — and even if Trump loses the election and crawls under a rock, QAnon is not likely to disappear anytime soon. The “save the children” meme is only the latest innovation, one that seems to be utterly disconnected from anything real-world, yet which craftily initiated a spread into entirely new cultural milieus.

It’s safer to think of QAnon as the kind of multi-headed hydra that will continue to transmogrify into new forms. As Blackbird.ai analyst Roberta Duffield puts it, “at its heart QAnon is about empty political discourse, alienation from the democratic process, capitalist exploitation and unanswered global challenges.” None of those things is slated to disappear anytime soon.

Instead, I would propose that we consider QAnon to be the first of the truly new forms of religious movement — twenty-first century crypto-religions that will set off waves of algorithmically driven, machine-intelligence boosted collective hysteria.

I realize that “hysteria” is a loaded concept and one that should be avoided if possible. Debates over previous “hysterical epidemics,” such as the ones chronicled a couple of decades ago by skeptics like Elaine Showalter (not to mention the “skeptical” establishment of CSI, Skeptical Inquirer, and Michael Shermer’s Skeptic magazine) — epidemics that, in Showalter’s reading included alien abduction, chronic fatigue syndrome, satanic ritual abuse, recovered memory, Gulf War syndrome, and multiple personality disorder — were largely unproductive both because they bundled too many things together, and because they refused to explore the gaps between phenomenology and interpretation not only in the experiences of the experiencers, but in the science and social science of what these things were about.

“Emotional contagions” is a more fruitful construct (though of course these are both emotional and cognitive contagions). QAnon is certainly spreading by contagion, and social media have enabled that spread to work through larger populations quicker than ever. More importantly, the big data driven tools of surveillance capitalism have enabled a weird algorithmic dynamic to shape its spread to the point where one could argue that algorithms themselves (not anyone who programs those algorithms) are coming to control the entire process.

One could imagine this as a situation where someone is sitting in a control room and ramping up the dose of its wafty narcotic, sending it along particular channels in different forms as we speak (rather like hippies once dreamed of releasing LSD into urban water systems). Except that this someone may not be a someone at all (unless it is… say, someone like Jim Watkins, though I rather doubt it).

That leaves a few big questions unanswered: Who dreamed it up? Who, if anyone, is behind it today? What is (and was) their intent? And how can people get “inoculated” against its deeply psychoactive narcotic?

The latter point (inoculation) brings my thinking a little too close for comfort to the models of media influence that saw media as a kind of hypodermic needle. Conspiracy theories, in the end, are just theories — frameworks for connecting dots to make meaning, which is something we all do.

As for who dreamed it up: this isn’t necessarily a simple plot point either. There are theories and data points connecting QAnon’s beginnings to incels on 4chan and/or 8chan and/or the Japanese imageboard 2channel, the Italian radical arts collective Wu Ming, Discordian magic, and the online gaming world. But whoever came up with the original concept has hardly controlled its evolution since then. (And yes, there are plausible speculations that Russian intelligence is involved, though one could also theorize about China, Iran, and “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.”)

I’m tempted to think of QAnon today (as in some Philip K. Dick novel thought through actor-network theory) as a kind of multi-agent intelligence that is larger than the sum of its human parts. By adding that word “human,” I mean to suggest that if big-data machine intelligence could develop a way to rapidly modify the behavior of the human species, wouldn’t it be testing out methods like these?

More seriously, if one is to speak of the goals of QAnon — not necessarily the conscious intentions of the people who are, in some ultimate sense, behind it, but the immanent goals of the complex, nonlinear, emergent actor-network that is currently QAnon — what would best describe these? Sowing distrust, cynicism, and confusion? Shaking things up? Triggering an amorphous “great awakening”? (And Trump is somehow supposed to do that?) Creating “an environment rich for abuse by opportunistic demagogues“? Wreaking general havoc?

Surely the 2020 re-election of Donald Trump would be a step on the way to doing most of those things (just not that great awakening), with the havoc being not only to the liberal-global international system that the U.S. has been hegemonic leader of for the past seven decades, but havoc on the planet, havoc to humanity — the scrambling of all capacity to address climate change, the extinction crisis, global inequality, and everything else, and the unleashing of unstoppable wars and chaos all around. Havoc on the grand scale.

There you have it: that’s my conspiracy theory about the currently most rapidly spreading conspiracy theory. QAnon is a work of evil genius. It is something that may have been started by X, Y, or Z, but that got out of their control and has evolved its own emergent properties and goals. In this, it’s a little bit like a Ouija board for those who believe that Ouija boards engage entities who speak to the group consciousness of those playing the game. Calling QAnon “satanic” is just a short step from there, one that requires taking on a certain Christian metaphoric lens and acknowledging that the conspiratorial logic inherent in Christian (Book of Revelation) eschatology — one that sees Satan appearing as his own opposite — might have a point. (Q after all claims to be on the side of the forces taking down the satanic cabal, but such claims always ought to be considered suspect.)

I don’t think QAnon will sway the election in Trump’s favor. But then I don’t think it cares much about such an immediate and short-term goal. “It,” or whatever has emerged out of it and taken control of it (making it immanent, emergent, and transcendent all at once), is in it for the long haul. And it — this hybrid of machine intelligence, transhuman agency (add a divine or demonic element to that descriptor if you wish), and the messy basement of the human psyche (with its fears, desires, and wacky paranoias) that it entangles into itself — may be something we will need to learn to live with as we move forward into the ever more bizarre future of a globally networked world.

Good luck with that, I say.

Further reading

The Atlantic has been doing a great job trying to cover QAnon amidst other forms of conspiracy culture; see their “Shadowland” project series for links to relevant articles.

The London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue published a report earlier this year called “Genesis of a Conspiracy Theory” in which QAnon activity spikes are dissected and analyzed.

Writing in Newsweek recently, David Freedman looks at some of the scholars and “infodemiologists” using network analysis and other methods to study QAnon, its followers, and the dopamine hits they get from connecting the dots in an infinite array of connectible dots.

Some interesting analysis is being done at Reddit’s Qult_Headquarters site, which is “dedicated to documenting, critiquing, and debunking” Q and his followers (see, for instance, the analysis of Q drops dedicated to “saving the children” as opposed to those dedicated to the FBI, Clinton, Obama, Hillary, the election, et al.).

A bit of Q’s international dimension is hinted at in The Economist’s 1843 glossary.

I’ve posted previously about QAnon-related conspiratology here and here.

And Renée DiResta’s Atlantic piece “The Supply of Disinformation Will Soon Be Infinite” deserves the final word. Or, rather, the GPT-3 machine-intelligence article generator tool she consulted while writing that article deserves that word. The AI writes:

“In this future [meaning this one], AI-generated content will continue to become more sophisticated, and it will be increasingly difficult to differentiate it from the content that is created by humans … In the meantime, we’ll need to keep our guard up as we take in information, and learn to evaluate the trustworthiness of the sources we’re using. We will continue to have to figure out how to believe, and what to believe.