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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: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Wednesday November 18 2020, @11:29AM (21 children)
In the first link, the author slides into the narrative that this is somehow controlled and channeled. My take is that QAnon is a bit of collaborative insanity. People like a good story better than they like the real world (which I guess is where the author and I agree). While there is some potential for control and channeling of propaganda, my take is that it's like herding cats. You might get most of the cats to go one way or another sometimes, but you're not going to get any sort of collective movement that does what you want it to do when you want it. As a tool, it just can't do that.
On the second:
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.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday November 18 2020, @12:47PM (11 children)
Sure, khallow, it may be many things. Like:
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
Who knows? It's not like we have the Occam's razor to decide which is the simplest explanation that accounts for their reaction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 18 2020, @05:41PM (10 children)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday November 18 2020, @10:59PM (9 children)
If the US Army is engaged in security theater, US is fucked:
1. any RW adversary won't play by the rules of the theater and yet the US Army spends on theater
2. with US Army as an enemy, I'm not betting on the population.
Of course, buy it or not, it's plausible that the US Army doesn't give a fuck about what part of the US population smokes to go crazy, as long as the crazed Americans don't start to terrorize others and the US Army is objectively assessing this kind of terrorism as real.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 19 2020, @01:20AM (8 children)
Indeed. Vietnam War is a good example of the sort of thing that happens. BTW, I was referring to the narrative spun by the author of the second piece. That's not the US military.
We have lots of security theater in the US over the past two decades. It doesn't become any more useful because it's QAnon rather than brown people, Antifa, Insane Clown Posse, or the many other grossly exaggerated dangers of the world.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday November 19 2020, @01:32AM (7 children)
No, it's the "Combating Terrorism Center" of the West Point Millitary Academy which published it as a study and not as an opinion piece.
I feel you're thinking "the progs infiltrated the Army too", yeah?
It matters not to you that they based their analysis on real life cases, because it contradicts your beliefs and you're not gonna drop those beliefs, reality be damn'd.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 19 2020, @02:03AM (6 children)
Opinion pieces published as studies are still opinion pieces. This isn't your first time you've made this mistake [soylentnews.org].
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday November 19 2020, @02:12AM (2 children)
I'll let you with your opinions of this was not a study, and it's not published by the US Army and QAnon is just a bunch of funny guys.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 19 2020, @03:55AM
Where's the evidence otherwise? Seriously, you'll get bad eggs in any grouping of people, much less a crazy one. For a bunch of crazy people, they're pretty peaceful.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 19 2020, @04:06PM
"Seems possible, even likely".
"should thus not be ruled out".
"may present".
There's all these dire predictions that "may" happen about things that "seem" bad possibly. What's missing is the null hypothesis - that QAnon might not have detrimental effects.
Here's my take. Crazy people will believe crazy things anyway - you're not talking about a group that would be healthy, productive members of society in the absence of QAnon. And while they're ranting about child-eating molesters on the internets (or whatever the present QAnon thing is), they're socializing and not breaking stuff or hurting people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 19 2020, @06:09AM (2 children)
khallow, he is just kind of pink and fluffy collateral damage. He has no idea how he is being played, and in this regard, he resembles closely the Runaway, with the potentional difference that khallow has read some books.
(Oh, and khallow, since you didn't get it the first, or second or third, times, remember when you wanted me to remind you when you did that thing we talked about, again? Well, you are doing it again, just to let you know. If you don't remember, I have to say that those abducting aliens are nothing if not thorough!!)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 19 2020, @03:15PM
By who?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 19 2020, @03:16PM
I no longer care. It's quite clear you're doing this in bad faith.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday November 18 2020, @04:01PM (3 children)
They are the same
The (not really)existence of trumpies, antifa, BLM, and QAnon prove it can be. The money decides how it is expressed on mass media to direct the public's reaction.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 18 2020, @05:42PM (2 children)
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday November 18 2020, @11:48PM (1 child)
The person presses the right lever lever, and he gets a treat. Press the wrong one and he gets a shock
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 19 2020, @06:13AM
Until we randomly cross the wires. You think you are above the experiment? You think we do not observe your nocturnal behaviors? You think kustrafrachnickov is not fully under our surveillance? We watch your operant conditioning. We plan it. Resistance is, well, you know the rest.
(Score: 5, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday November 18 2020, @05:13PM (3 children)
QAnon: a timeline of violence linked to the conspiracy theory [theguardian.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 19 2020, @04:07AM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 19 2020, @06:15AM (1 child)
Well, except to the dead people that were their victims. Very often fellow QAnons, in which case no great loss, but I have to agree with c0lo here, all human life, not matter how fucked in the head and batshit crazy, is valuable, and out not be killed by crazy conspiracy theorists. Khallow, you need to just go and die. Cook youself like a chicken in a hotpool?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 19 2020, @03:13PM
Note the phrase "at least one murder". So right there we have at best one victim not plural victims. What I find particularly interesting about this whole FUD blurb, is that one doesn't even know if the QAnon thing helps create more crime and hurting of people, or helps create less! Perhaps the time these people spent in QAnon participation reduced the time they spend committing crime! Because anyone who gets this deep into QAnon that they're doing this stuff, then they'd probably cause some degree of mayhem anyway, and it may have well been worse!
QAnon may well be a much better outlet for that negative action.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2020, @06:34PM
You mean, like Libertarian economic theory? Hmm, checks out!