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) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2020, @04:13PM
I think much of what I mentioned above could easily be attributable to pushing people towards it, though certainly not intentionally. For instance the media losing all credibility and then claiming Q was a giant conspiracy theory likely ended up giving far more credibility to it then it could have ever gained on its own. Similarly, as various American social media sites work to turn their political discussion into echo chambers it drives people who do not share those views elsewhere. These new destinations, in turn, end up becoming echo chambers of opposite ideological inclination. It's precisely in these (both the new and old destination) sort of environments with minimal diversity of thought where rather extreme ideas can foment since there's little in the way of people saying 'Hey man, this sounds like bullshit.'