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QAnon again - fascinating

Journal by c0lo

A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon - Playing with reality (20min+ read. A bit lengthy, but it worth)

In brief - apophenia. Just a tad more elaborated - induced/guided aphonenia.

What's fascinating is the buttons of human psyche that are pushed to sink people deep into the rabbit holes:
- Follow The Breadcrumbs - don't tell, just select the dots that are to be connected
- The Eureka Effect - the rush of the Aha! moments and the feeling of being rewarded
- Lamestream Media - passivate against the reality that's not supportive to the agenda
- Community - sense of belonging, behavior reinforcement; a population large and motivated enough to adopt an evolutionary strategy in selecting the best CT-es

All the above are exemplified - and these examples is how I got to get WTF Beyoncé has to do with QAnon.

So, if all it's an Alternate Reality Game, there's no harm, right? Not so fast, the US Military Academy ran the The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making? article in its "Combating Terrorism Center" journal, stating

QAnon represents a public security threat with the potential in the future to become a more impactful domestic terror threat. This is true especially given that conspiracy theories have a track record of propelling terrorist violence elsewhere in the West as well as QAnon’s more recent influence on mainstream political discourse.

 

Reply to: Re:falls in the same trap

    (Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday November 18 2020, @12:47PM

    by c0lo (156) on Wednesday November 18 2020, @12:47PM (#1078758)

    QAnon is classified here as a "threat to public safety", based on very slim pretext. I wonder if narratives that result in calls for censorship are similarly threats to public safety? Seems possible, even likely, amirite?

    I guess my beef here comes from the latter "threat to public safety" stuff. QAnon is less of a risk to public safety than narratives that exaggerate it as a threat and then on that basis propose substantial harm on society. But that's the same sort of games that QAnon plays in the first place. Surely, our discourse and strategoes for dealing with QAnon should be better than the processes that created QAnon

    Sure, khallow, it may be many things. Like:

    • it may be that the CTCSentinel is part of the lamestream media, just a bunch of stupid sheeple regurgitating SJW lefty propaganda and in reality QAnons are just sane people having a bit of fun in an ARG (that's Alternate Reality Game). So we can safely discard 's narrative, that's nothing more than a narrative, bedtime stories as it were.
      And the proper reaction when they go low is for you to jump over the high moral horse, a jump about deep-into-stratosphere-high would be good
    • or it may be that the US Army is indeed part of the swamp conspiracy, just waiting to come after you and everybody else and make you pay your speech by each word, so that your speech will no longer be free but paid for
    • it may be a lot of more other things, including they are objectively assessing the reality and the associated risks

    Who knows? It's not like we have the Occam's razor to decide which is the simplest explanation that accounts for their reaction.

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