Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: The Power and the Glory, QAnon’s Perverse Incentives Drives Conspiracy Community
October 5, 2020
By Bill Berkowitz
It is entertaining, challenging, and requires considerable research. It is participatory, creates community, and it is open-ended. It is not boring. Perhaps most of all, joining a QAnon conspiracy thread can be fun. And, for some, there’s money to be made with YouTube videos, and merchandize. On the dark side, QAnon can seduce and colonizes the mind with fictitious narratives, hijacking the brain toward delusional ends. QAnon abets the spread of rumors, innuendo, and vicious lies about the perceived targets of its investigations. It can, and has, led to real-world violent encounters. The FBI has identified QAnon as a domestic terrorist threat. Now that Donald Trump appears to be on board the Q train, it is no longer on the fringes of American life .
Some of you may be familiar with alternative reality games (ARG). Not being a gamer, I was only minimally aware of ARG’s until I read Clive Thompson’s piece in WIRED titled “QAnon Is Like a Game—a Most Dangerous Game.” Thompson, a WIRED contributing editor, centers his story on the work of game designer Adrian Hon, who has written about the addictive participatory aspect of Q’s posts.
According to Thompson, “Whenever Q posts about the conspiracy, he (or she or they) leaves clues—‘Q drops’—on image boards like 8kun that are cryptic and open-ended. … Since the clues are oblique, it's up to the followers of QAnon to interpret them. They instantly begin Googling the phrases, then energetically share their own exegeses online about What It All Means. …To belong to the QAnon pack is to be part of a massive crowdsourcing project that sees itself cracking a mystery.”
Thompson wrote about Q’s “game dynamics”: “First off, QAnon poses a mystery that feels so big it can only be solved by crowd-sourcing. It’s thrilling to be involved with other people in something bigger than yourself. Plus, it turns one’s armchair-warrior Goodling into a heroic quest for truth.”
In his early-August blog post titled “What ARGs Can Teach Us About QAnon,” Adrian Hon makes it clear that “QAnon is not an ARG. It’s a dangerous conspiracy theory, and there are lots of ways of understanding conspiracy theories without ARGs. But QAnon pushes the same buttons that ARGs do, whether by intention or by coincidence. In both cases, ‘do your research’ leads curious onlookers to a cornucopia of brain-tingling information.”
Hon wrote: “The far-right QAnon conspiracy theory is so sprawling, it’s hard to know where people join. Last week, it was 5G cell towers, this week it’s Wayfair; who knows what next week will bring? But QAnon’s followers always seem to begin their journey with the same refrain: ‘I’ve done my research.’” (Wayfair, the furniture dealer, was forced to issue a statement denying that it is involved in child trafficking. (You can trace the pedigree and evolution of the Wayfair kerfuffle, @ Snopes.
In the course of his blog post, Hon noted that he is “not a QAnon expert and … not a scholar of conspiracy theories.” And, he’s “not even the first to compare QAnon to LARPs and ARGs. But” he added, “my experience as lead designer of Perplex City, one of the world’s most popular and longest-running ARGs, gives me a special perspective on QAnon’s game-like nature. My background as a neuroscientist and experimental psychologist also gives me insight into what motivates people.”
According to Hon, QAnon is the ultimate ARG, only its outcomes can have real life dangerous consequences. Hon points out that the first-ever alternate reality game, “The Beast,” was developed by Microsoft to promote Stephen Spielberg’s 2001 movie, Artificial Intelligence (AI). Hon wrote:
Who wouldn’t be intrigued by a doorway into 2142 filled with websites and phone numbers and puzzles, with runaway robots who need your help and even live events around the world? But consider how much work it required to understand the story and it begins to sound less like ‘watching TV’ fun and more like ‘painstaking research’ fun. Along with tracking dozens of websites that updated in real time, you had to solve lute tablature puzzles, decode base 64 messages, reconstruct 3D models of island chains that spelt out messages, and gather clues from newspaper and TV adverts across the US.
…. What was new in The Beast and the ARGs that followed it was less the specific puzzles and stories they incorporated, but the sheer scale of the worlds they realized – so vast and fast-moving that no individual could hope to comprehend them. Instead, players were forced to co-operate, sharing discoveries and solutions, exchanging ideas, and creating resources for others to follow. I’d know: I wrote a novel-length walkthrough of The Beast when I was meant to be studying for my degree at Cambridge.
YouTube video creators have found that QAnon content is a lucrative content niche. There are active QAnon Facebook groups. And apps such as QDrops, banned from the Apple store but still available for Android, can deliver news of fresh Q pronouncements straight to a user’s phone. Q related content continues to spread on social media despite recent efforts by Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Tik Tok to remove content promoting violence and hate speech.
One aspect of Q’s allure is that allows for, indeed requires, deep diving into the Internet. Writing about QAnon last August, The Washington Post’s Alyssa Rosenberg noted that “the conspiracy theory assigns enormous significance to even relatively minor acts such as posting on message boards or sharing Facebook posts.”
“It is addictive in the same way that a game is,” Travis View, a researcher who studies QAnon, told Rosenberg. It is unlike real-life political participation in that “Q offers something a hell of a lot more. You can sit at your computer and search for information and then post about what you find, and Q basically promises that through this process, you are going to radically change the country, institute this incredible, almost bloodless revolution, and then be part of this historical movement that will be written about for generations.”
When Christian extremists predict the End-Times that fail to materialize, true believers are not deterred and diligently prepare for the next sure-fire date. Similarly with QAnon, predictive actions rarely materialize, but they are explained away as glitches and new stories readily take their place. There are new threads to follow and new research to be pursued. That’s why Aunt Minnie, Uncle Jack, your brother and sister-in-law are sticking to their stories. And they’re finding new comrades across the global conspiracy community.
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