SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2020, @03:23PM
It's the cumulative effect of things. People are generally willing to give the benefit of the doubt to people, even governments. But as incidents mount up, it becomes clear that malice is at play. Things like the fake WMD, NSA domestic surveillance, etc. were all quite bad but 2016 was a *major* inflection point. I think the issue is that that is the year that people began voting against establishment interests, probably at least in part because of the events of the past 20 years. And in response to that "problem", the establishment and the media responded in an incredibly hamfisted fashion that's likely only made things much worse and is driving far more people away from the establishment narrative:
- Weaponized identity politics [google.com]. I link to the Google Trends there since it's so incredibly overt when it entered the contemporary zeitgeist.
- The media going overt ad hominem. Support Trump? You're a racist. Not buying into the next great Red Scare? You're a Russian troll. Paying too much attention to irregularities in the 2020 election? You're a conspiracy theorist.
- A coordinated effort among various social media sites to engage in political censorship.
- Increasingly overt collusion among media sites to try to craft a unified narrative. When you look at the front page of 5 major media sites and they all are saying the same oddly specific thing in mostly the same way - it makes me feel like I'm living in the Soviet Union. It also takes me back to Irrefutable [washingtonpost.com] and Undeniable [nytimes.com]. If that's not the most overt propaganda you've ever seen, what is?
- Politicians themselves beginning to overtly call for violence and retaliation against political opponents. We've gone from things such as this [youtube.com] (Maxine Walters stuff) to more recently politicians like AOC calling for "lists" [jewishpress.com] to be made of Trump supporters. I reference that site since Jews tend to be somewhat more sensitive to such behaviors than most.
- The pushing of equity over equality. If you're not familiar with the political differences, that's by design. Equity is a dog whistle for equality of result. Equality itself is about equality of opportunity. Equality is a ideal that ought be strived for at all costs, equity gives you Brave New World.
Anyhow, I feel like I'm getting too "listy" here. I haven't gone full jmichaelhudson. ;-) I'm mostly just a normal person who's certainly been pushed away from any sort of mainstream political viewpoint largely because of the reasons I'm discussing here. That said I'm also not a QAnon type. But I find it very easy to see how people who are in a similar situation to myself (which I expect is probably quite a *lot* of people, and not just in the US) could be drawn to it. It's nice to try to imagine there's some insiders trying to do the right thing. But in reality I suspect our problems are endemic. Success in our modern political system practically has 'be a horrible person' as a prerequisite. We're only going to be able to correct things once we reach the climax of this all, and are able to reset things ourselves. But that's also certainly nothing to look forward to.