Conspiracy movements like QAnon are a kind of cultural virus that spreads rapidly and widely in the new global media environment. Like invasive species, they spread into diverse cultural ecosystems, colonizing them even as they take on new forms that mimic each environment’s original inhabitants.
To understand how they do this, we need to understand the global media ecology, which is itself so new and rapidly evolving that few understand it well, even if we all participate in it in different ways and to different degrees. And we need to understand conspiracy theory as practice and not only as theory. This post will focus on the role of a specific practice, called “research,” within the spread of the “cultural virus” of the QAnon movement, and on the ways that the “virus” spreads tentacularly, that is, along multiple lines of infection into multiple host bodies. In the process, I will address the question of what QAnon is (referring to its relationship to science, to art, and to religion) and how it fits into the larger “ecology” or “economy” of knowledge, trust, and meaning that some describe as the “post-truth condition.”
Caveats, terms, and a clarification
Caveat 1. By using terms like “virus,” “invasive species,” “tentacular,” and “ecology,” I do not mean to conflate culture with biology. All of these are complex cultural phenomena; they are not reducible to biology. Their spread from one milieu to another is in some ways analogous to the spread of viruses, but my use of these terms is metaphorical and should be taken with caution and with awareness of its limits.
Caveat 2. Nothing that I say should be taken to deny that conspiracy theories can be true. There have certainly been conspiracies throughout history, and there may be some significant ones out there today. There is a crucial difference between valid or at least plausible conspiracy theories and those that are largely or entirely lacking in veracity. However, to the extent that we are in a “post-truth” condition where “consensus reality” is no longer a given, plausibility itself has become an issue that requires deeper consideration. I use the term “post-truth” while recognizing its limitations, in order to suggest that the epistemological conditions for social consensus have disappeared. Whether those conditions were ever very deep or widely shared is another matter. But that they appeared to be stable — due to the nature of broadcast media (before the rise of digital social media), the relative self-containment of national media discourses, and, in the U.S., regulations around media fairness — is less easy to dispute. As Alex Hern puts it, the “artificial world” may not be “the one the internet and lockdown have created, but the temporary ‘blip’ in time when broadcast media was able to forge one shared reality for a nation.” That time is gone.
Terminology 1. By calling QAnon a conspiracy movement rather than a conspiracy theory, I intend to accentuate the relational and performative dimension of QAnon. It is, or involves, theory (or a theory) in the sense that there are a set of working beliefs and assumptions that get cobbled together continually, as occurs with any productive theory, scientific or otherwise. This makes it, technically, a conspiracy theory movement and not merely a conspiratorial movement (though it may be that as well). A conspiracy (theory) movement is something social and collective that grows and acts on the terrain of culture, politics, and potentially (as I will argue) religion. It involves multiple players and groups responding to events occurring in the world.
Terminology 2. In speaking of the “global media environment” and “global media ecology,” I am referring to communication media in all their forms as they have been incorporated into a digital media system undergirded by computer electronics, undersea transmission cables, data centers, satellite networks, and screens of many kinds. When I speak of “cultural ecosystems” or “cultural environments,” I mean more specific and localized things. They are not necessarily geographically localized (though they could be), but they speak different languages and take different things to be true. There is, for instance, the cultural ecosystem of right-wing populism, the cultural ecosystem of yoga and wellness studios, teachers, and practitioners, and the cultural ecosystem of Catholic churches. Calling them “ecosystems” accentuates their distinctiveness and autonomy, but like “real” ecosystems of the biological kind, they are necessarily overlapping, intermeshed with others, and internally heterogeneous.
Clarification. I mention the above three examples (right-wing populism, wellness culture, Catholicism) because all have been infiltrated by the QAnon “virus,” or by variations of the cultural virus connected to the phenomenon of “Q,” with its “Q drops” and its conspiratorial narratives about good and evil forces at large in the world, about the specific manifestations of each, and about the “coming storm” and “the Great Awakening” that will follow. These are all examples of a single movement, but QAnon is hardly unified. The role of the person or persons known as “Q” and of the “Q drops” they produce has been central to the evolution of QAnon, but it’s not necessarily central to what the movement is becoming or will become.
“Do Your Own Research”: QAnon as Science, as Art, and as Religion
As I’ve suggested before, QAnon is best thought of as a participatory, quasi-religious political movement that draws followers into a tentacular network of beliefs and practices, with each feeding the other and moving the whole forward. The beliefs have been written about a lot; less has been written about the practices. Here I want to focus on one key practice, the one that QAnons call “research.” This practice is poorly understood by outsiders because many can barely imagine the intellectual component of following “Q.”
QAnon as science? Research, within QAnon, consists largely of the kinds of things textual researchers do: pursuing one’s curiosity about certain driving questions by looking things up, reading everything you can readily find about them, and connecting them to what you already know about it and about related topics. With QAnon, it turns out, research is the connect-the-dots activity that keeps followers engaged in the movement. (Conspiracist discourse, James Meek writes, “is an endless tease, always promising a new layer of revelation, or a new angle.”) It is for this reason that “Do your own research” is one of the movement’s mottos. As Marwick and Partin, among others (like Sarah Hartman-Caverly, with greater sympathy and/or less incredulity), have noted, QAnon has created a homegrown, if widely spread, network of “populist expertise” that includes many of the hallmarks of scholarly research: this includes the inductive gathering of evidence, hypothesis generation, citationality, “peer review,” and fact-checking. The result is a research community we might call “para-scientific.” But let’s examine this more closely.
Where QAnon research differs from the research practiced by scholars and scientists (both social and natural scientists) is, first and foremost, in the accessibility and acknowledgment of sources. This is a crucial difference, and it is reflected in the fact that where QAnons suggest we should “do (y)our own research,” scholarly researchers understand it is never possible to merely do one’s own research. All good research is communal, relying on the research of many others. The best research is both cognizant and upfront about its sources, and knows where those sources fit into the larger “ecology” of research, knowledge, and theory. It starts out (in what is commonly called a “literature review”) by laying out that broader ecology, situating its own approach among the others, and contemplating alternatives as well as its own limitations. The worst research fails on all those counts. It starts with a random selection of materials — like the internet, for instance (or the Bible, which is a bit like a small, early internet) — and follows a path that knows little about the other paths that have been tried and where they have gotten their followers.
From the point of view of scholarly research, when QAnons say “Do your own research,” what they are really saying is, “Do your research building on our research. Follow the clues we have laid out for you.” In other words, take us as your community of peer researchers. Trust us. Ask the questions we ask, and follow us in answering them. By implication, they are saying: Do not rely on those others whom we distrust—a group that happens to include the entire international community of scientific and scholarly researchers, the “elite” world of scholars, as well as the mainstream media (or “MSM”) who disseminate their “false” truths. The first of these is less commonly recognized by QAnons (and for good reason, since so much of their research is paywalled, but that’s another issue). The last of them—the “MSM”—is a much needed enemy. Conspiracy theories thrive on identifiable enemies, and Trumpism and all its relatives (with their epithets about the “fake news media”) have made those enemies so much easier to identify.
In this, QAnon is very much like another alternative “ecosystem” that has emerged to great strength in recent years: the right-wing media ecosystem that stretches from Fox News at its near-mainstream “left” to Breitbart, Newsmax, One America News Network (OANN), The Gateway Pundit, and others at the far-right deep end of the off-reality spectrum. QAnon may be aware of its own informational (or “research”) ecosystem, but its relationship with the great mass of scholarship on the topics of its interest – from politics to media studies to vaccines and other technologies – is one of near total antagonism. If its reality claims were true – that the world really is controlled by a Satanic Cabal – then its suspicion of all forms of knowledge-gathering other than its own would be perfectly sensible. If they aren’t, and if they are as far from reality as most objective observers think, then they are a rabbithole into an alternative, socially constructed universe that is unhinged from this one. We might call it “rabbithole science” or, at best, para-science.
QAnon as art? QAnon is, at least on the part of the “Q droppers” themselves, a creative community — a kind of quasi-performance art (or “para-art”) that sets up and continually tweaks the conditions for audience interaction with a continuously generated narrative. If it were understood by its participants to be creative fiction, its “gamified ecosystem” (p. 5) would be a hugely successful performance art work, an interactive, live-action, augmented-reality game that has grown to encompass millions. Its being taken by most of its participants (at this point) as non-fiction is what gives it its power and the sense of threat to “normies” who don’t follow it. But that is also what disqualifies it from being art in the conventional sense of the term. No matter if its beginnings were in the world of live-action role play, today it has taken on a life much more serious than that.
QAnon as religion? If it is not quite art and not quite science, then how does it stack up against religion? To answer that, we have to have a working definition of religion. There are many such definitions, and I have proposed a few of my own in reference to some of the others (e.g., here, here, here, here, here, and here).
Here I would like to define religion in a way that may seem unusual within the Protestant dominated North American milieu (where belief is often considered central), but which is more congruent with religious practice around the world today and in the past. Religion, by this definition, consists of the practices by which self and/or community assertion are balanced (or negotiated) against the presence and potency of larger, cosmic forces on which people are understood to be dependent. While this definition requires more clarification (which I will do in a future post), the important point here is the focus on the practical — that is, the practices by which religious obligations and relationships are performed — rather than the theoretical, or the beliefs that undergird those practices.
In this sense, religion can be considered to be made up largely of two kinds of practices: (1) practices of relational maintenance, by which people maintain good standing with super- or extra-human forces (i.e., gods, spirits, Nature, et al.) believed to be powerful and efficacious in human lives, and (2) practices of divination, by which people determine, through consultative methods of one kind or another (divination, prayer, “prophecy,” et al.) how to maximize their own positioning within those relations.
In other words, religious people understand that they depend on forces larger than themselves, forces which they hold in some measure of fear, awe, reverence, or some other mixture of strong emotions. Religious practice consists in part of the maintenance of relationship with those forces: the performance of appropriate rituals by which they remember, recognize, compensate, remunerate, and otherwise engage with them. But there is a certain measure of freedom within which people can act for their own welfare. Prayer, prophecy, divination, and related methods involve the consultation with those forces and/or the reading of appropriate signs to determine what that measure is and how it could be navigated and negotiated.
If modern science has attempted to eliminate any sense of obligation to larger cosmic forces, it has never entirely succeeded in this. Religion, for one thing, has hardly gone away. But even in circumstances where it has been replaced by secularity, there are things that emerge to remind us that we do in fact depend on forces we hardly understand and that it is best we treat them with respect, if not reverence, if we wish to survive over the long term. Today’s ecological predicament is such a thing (which is why “nature” and “natural theology” have become issues again). But not all today subscribe to the ecological religion (which the practice of the reverence of “nature” amounts to), so any widespread new religious movement may find itself appealing to other extra-human reference points, such as God or gods, spirits, angels, extraterrestrials, and others.
If science has succeeded in diminishing the sense of moral or social obligation to larger cosmic forces, it has never even attempted to eradicate the second feature of religion — divination. If anything, science is a secularized practice of divination: a reading of the signs of “nature” so as to understand what they mean. Science has perfected the art of divination in ways that would make most religious diviners envious.
QAnon’s devotees may not be scientists, but they are also not unaware of the practices of science. They attempt to do them as best they can and as best they know. Where traditional divination may have involved consulting oracles of many kinds — humans, books, stars, animal entrails, thrown yarrow stalks, tea leaves, antler bones, and so on — today’s medium of choice is the internet. QAnon and movements like it could hardly exist without it. And the way to read and “divine” the internet is, first, to watch for and follow the clues offered by those who are “in the know” (which, in the case of QAnon, starts with “Q crumbs” or “bread crumbs” and moves on to the “bakers” who work with them) and then to seek and find (“bake”) the connections that are woven into the interpretive networks (“breads”) that constitute the ever-evolving universe of Q.
“Doing one’s research,” for QAnons, is reading the internet in this way: seeking clues (often in corners of the internet that are unknown to most), making interpretive connections between these clues, conversing about these connections, and sharing and disseminating the findings. And if this is akin to the divinatory dimension of religious activity, the “Do your own research” motto has effectively become a call to proselytize — that is, to replicate virally, “baking” new breads from existing “crumbs” and spreading thereby into new territories. QAnon is in this sense a proselytizing religion that makes use of its quasi-scientific, divinatory practices to disseminate and spread its influence.
Over time, an additional step has become more important for QAnons: that of actually going out into the world of political rallies, street protests, and the like, to gather, protest, and evangelize directly. (On the eve of what may be the largest public gathering of the QAnon affiliated public in Washington D.C. tomorrow, this form of “missionary protest” may be especially relevant.) But this “street activism” is still secondary to the primary activity of QAnons, which takes place on the internet.
QAnon’s Tentacular Spread
The “tentacular” part is one thing about QAnon which makes it most interesting today, and most troubling, for external observers. QAnon has grown far beyond its original roots in certain corners of the internet (4Chan and 8chan/8kun). Over time, it has spread tentacularly, via multiple pipelines (including YouTube, Parler, Gab, Telegram, Reddit, WhatsApp, the now defunct Voat, and others), into numerous pre-existing cultural environments.
These environments include the Donald Trump support movement known as “MAGA,” the Christian Evangelicals that constitute a large part of Trump’s political base, the white-nationalist far right (including violent extremists), the anti-vaccination movement, the Instagram wellness community, yoga and natural parenting subcultures, sexual abuse survivors, parents worried about threats to their children, pandemic skeptics, TikTok using teens, traditionalist Catholics, and “adjacent” conspiracy cults like Falun Gong and others. It has spread far beyond USA, with strong contingents in Germany, the UK, Canada, and numerous other countries.
Each of these cultural environments has presented openings for this viral infiltration to occur. Consider the Catholic Church. Following Pope Francis’s environmental encyclical, Laudato Si’, I and others tried to assess both where it stood on the spectrum of environmental thought and how it might affect the Catholic Church. Little did most of us anticipate the backlash Pope Francis would get from a growing subset of the Catholic world. Radical conservatives have organized most recently behind the figure of archbishop and former Apostolic Nuncio to the U.S. Carlo Maria Viganò, who in two public letters to Donald Trump, has embraced QAnon to the point that his own missives have begun to be described as “V drops.”
In recent months, far-right Catholicism has become virtually indistinguishable from QAnon Catholicism, and its growth has led to some observers treating it as a kind of official or unofficial opposition to the papal-led hierarchy within the Catholic Church. The Church has become divided between “Pope Francis Catholics” and “Vigano Catholics,” with the latter having their own media ecosystem (LifeSite News, et al.), and with bishops and archbishops steering between the two in the same way that Republican Senators and Congressional reps have steered between Donald Trump’s claims of “election fraud” and the electoral reality accepted by the media-led majority. The same divisions are evident in other “cultural environments”: among Evangelicals, yoga and wellness practitioners, and so on.
The tentacular nature of QAnon makes it feasible for us to name this thing called QAnon by the term that has become popularized by one of its most prominent prongs — the Sidney Powell led Trumpist “election hoax” movement. When Powell talks about “releasing the Kraken,” what she means is the multi-tentacled beast made up of evidence of electoral falsity. But really we could take it to mean something larger: the Kraken is QAnon. “Releasing the Kraken” would be to unleash this hydra-headed beast of a quasi-religious, political movement that has spread into all kinds of corners of the universe, infecting and effectively taking control of some of its limbs and body parts, and that, if directed centrally, could overtake the world as we know it.
Fortunately, it isn’t centrally directed. It’s both too participatory for that and too dedicated to competing goals. Some, for instance, would no doubt want to bring the “Cabal” to justice, though, with such flimsy reality tethers, they aren’t likely to agree on what that means. Others seem to want havoc, confusion, and an end to global liberalism. Many no doubt want little beyond fame and fortune, while the majority seem to want answers of some kind to questions that seem both existential and global — questions about good and evil, grotesque inequality, and “who runs the world?”
For the rest of us, QAnon provides a useful lesson in how culture, politics, and religion are likely to unfold in increasingly crazy times, with a digital media sphere (a technological “mindprint“) that has gone global before the vast majority of humanity has reached the emotional capacity to accept responsibility for its global (sociopolitical and ecological) “footprint.”
The genie is out of the bag. Now it’s time to provide some real answers to those very questions. Why is there such inequality? What is good and what is evil? Who runs the world?
Some of us may have some of those answers. The challenge is communicating it to the others.
Further reading
Daniël de Zeeuw, Sal Hagen, Stijn Peeters, and Emilija Jokubauskaite, Tracing Normiefication: A Cross-Platform Analysis of the QAnon COnspiracy Theory, First Monday 25. 11 (Nov. 2, 2020).
Tish Durkin, The Catholics Who Hate Joe Biden–And Pope Francis, The Atlantic, Oct. 21, 2020.
David Freedman, As QAnon Conspiracy Theories Draw New Believers, Scientists Take Aim at Misinformation Pandemic, Newsweek 175.11 (Oct. 23, 2020).
GoViral!, https://www.goviralgame.com/en/play.
Sarah Hartman-Caverly, “Truth Always Wins”: Dispatches from the Information War, in Libraries Promoting Reflective Dialogue in a Time of Plitical Polarization, ed. by A. aer, E. S. Cahoy, and R. Schroeder (ALA Editions, 2019).
Alex Hern, Facebook, QAnon and the world’s slackening grip on reality, The Guardian, Nov. 11, 2020.
Kathryn Joyce, Deep State, Deep Church: How QAnon and Trumpism Have Infected the Catholic Church, Vanity Fair, Oct. 20, 2020.
Adrienne LaFrance, The Prophecies of Q, The Atlantic, June, 2020.
James Meek, Red Pill, Blue Pill, London Review of Books 42.20 (Oct. 22, 2020).
Network Contagion Research Institute, The QAnon Conspiracy: Destroying Families, Dividing Communities, Undermining Democracy, Dec. 15, 2020.
Abbie Richards, The Conspiracy Chart.
Aja Romano, Conspiracy Theories Explained, Vox, Nov. 18, 2020.
Editor’s note: The “Further Reading” section was fixed up at 9:15 a.m. on January 6, 2021.
