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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.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2020, @01:03PM
I think this is rather missing the forest for all those trees.
Why have things like this become so appealing to so many people? The answer is really simple. Our government has shown its full of people doing really shady shit, perhaps most exemplified by Snowden's revelations, and the media itself has thrown any notion of credibility whatsoever out the window for the sake of partisan click-baiting. So you have a government you can't trust and a media that's simply out of their mind. And this is all happening at the time when perceive the nation to be trending towards fascism - likely the same reason polls have become completely meaningless: "Hi, this is [pollster] - I'd like to ask you about your political views." "Oh err yes, I uh.. like what I'm supposed to like... I promise. Please don't hurt me or try to destroy my life."
In this context, 'secretive anonymous insiders' start to gain dramatically in credibility, if only because you know for a fact that everybody else is untrustworthy. And I suppose there's also the hope factor. At times it seems the *entire* government has become just so corrupt and dysfunctional. That there's somebody or some in group in there who's working to fight against the rot within this country is probably not true, but something people are going to want to believe.