I’m working on a lengthyish post about conspiracy theory (specifically, QAnon) and the “post-truth condition,” but in the meantime I want to post a few tidbits from something I’ve been enjoying reading related to that topic. A Reddit conversation with QAnon researcher Marc-André Argentino includes some smart observations about QAnon, but also useful insights into the life of a young, underemployed scholar that are worth sharing (grad students, take note!).
Argentino is a Ph.D. candidate whose work has taken a high-profile turn in part because of circumstance (QAnon becoming as big as it is, mediatically speaking) and in part because he’s a good public communicator who has taken advantage of that circumstance to get his musings out into the public. This is something any academic worth their salt today has to be prepared to do. Success in academe (and Argentino has yet to achieve that, if success is defined materially) requires at least the following three ingredients:
- Choosing your topic well (and finding an appropriate methodology for it; note Argentino’s description of how he carries out his research);
- Taking advantage of situations that arise around it to communicate publicly about it, and to do that well; and
- Being prepared to manage life’s complexities and exigencies without much remuneration as you do it all.
Argentino writes:
Well my day is usually split with driving my tiny human to daycare, then I work my non-academic day job (which pays the bills). After work and family time I will either read, analyze social media data that was collected while I was at work, or I log onto my QAnon sockpuppets and see what has happened in the community. For Facebook and Instagram I use Crowdtangle for my collection and analysis, for Twitter I use the python library Twint, for telegram I use a burner phone and sim. To stay protected online I run all my research through burner phones and VMs that run PFsense and VPNs. Mental health wise, I game, went to the gym before COVID and spend time with my family.
My own day is a little like Argentino’s, except that my day job (which pays the bills) is academic (teaching, advising, editing, committee work, etc.) and since I’ve been doing it much longer, it pays the bills to a higher and more secure degree than a Ph.D. student’s or young postdoc’s life could possibly allow. I also spread myself out more widely (and therefore thinly), since the topics I write on are more diverse and more “tentacular” (which is how I’ll be describing QAnon in my upcoming post).
Part of the point of that upcoming post is that when QAnons says “Do your own research,” they are on to something, even if their idea of doing research is very different from what most scholars mean by that. I’ll clarify those differences there.
Being upfront about what research involves is important these days, and Argentino is doing that quite nicely here, which I admire. More importantly, he is taking a lot of time to communicate with a wide audience, an audience that includes amateur researchers whose reach may itself be significant. There’s clearly some cutting and pasting in what he’s presenting (from his own published and unpublished writings) and a lot of speculation, but it’s his interaction — here and on Twitter — that’s very generative and that positions him to be a public expert on the topic. For a Ph.D. student, that’s quite impressive, though it’s really that only to those who remain convinced by the academic ranking system. (That’s the system that says that Ph.D. students aren’t experts at anything yet, while professors may be, associate professors are more so, and full professors definitely are. Outside of academe, that system is pretty irrelevant.)
Among the other insightful snippets from Argentino’s conversation is this one, which speculates on the future of QAnon post-Biden inauguration. Argentino describes “four possible paths for QAnon adherents in 2021″:
- Keyboard warriors: A part of QAnon will stay, remain and harden into a strong core of dedicated believers who will think the deep state is in control and they need to double their efforts in the information war creating, therefore creating a continuous pool of propaganda and conspiracy theories;
- Ideological Motivated Violent Extremists: small and very unlikely minority may see that the information war is los[t], and QAnon’s efforts were not enough and something ideological will lead them to believe that there is no political solution and violence is the only option;
- Recruitment: In this category QAnon believers who are disenfranchised with the movement and the lack of results from ‘Q’, will create a potential pool to recruit from for more extreme movements and groups;
- New Religious Movement: With an existing group of QAnon home congregations at Omega Kingdom Ministries as a possible example, there is a chance that a segment[…] of QAnon adherents may form/continue to grow as new religious movements.
All of these sound reasonable to me, though my definition of “new religious movement” may be a little looser than Argentino’s. More on all these topics soon.
