Thread by @doctorow

Yesterday, I wrote about the idea that Qanon is an alternate reality game, recapping the arguments that leading ARG designer @adrianhon had published:

pluralistic.net/2020/08/05/beh…

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The ARG company that Adrian Hon helped found, @SixToStart, once also included his brother, @hondanhon, who also knows an awful lot about ARGs and has also been thinking about the relationship between Qanon and ARGs.

danhon.substack.com/p/qanon-looks-…

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Dan Hon's analysis recaps @richard_bartle's taxonomy of gamers: "killers, achievers, socializers and explorers" and shows how Q cultists fit into (and render toxic) these archetypes.

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In Q, socializers are meme-makers: "their success creates achievement and community standing."

Achievers are connection finders: "They play for local fame: to be the first to find the connection"

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Explorers are connection finders who "get to create new evidence"

Killers are griefers, punishing cult members for doing Q wrong and trolling nonbelievers. Horrifyingly, they're also non-metaphorical killers - cultists have already murdered for the cult and will again.

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Conspiracies share ARG-like characteristics: as with ARGs, conspiracists get to make their own canon. If you come up with a cool idea in an ARG, the GM ("puppetmaster") will add it to the story. In conspiracies the coolest theories get promulgated by other "players."

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If you squint hard at Q, it looks like an obsessive fandom, and there are elements of Q that are scratching the same itch that fanac does: community, recognition, the satisfaction of creativity and shared storytelling and the joy of feeling significant.

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On The Beast, the seminal game that was the Hon brothers' entree into ARGs, players were so excited by their puzzle-solving achievements that reacted to the 9/11 attacks by announcing that they'd solve those, too.

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Hon cites the work of @oddletters, one of my absolute favorite internet theorists, in a piece called "The Apophenic Machine," which explores the relationship of the internet to conspiracism more generally.

reallifemag.com/the-apophenic-…

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The internet is incredibly rewarding to the conspiratorial impulse: (quoting Kathleen Stewart) "the internet was made for conspiracy theory: it is a conspiracy theory: one thing leads to another, always another link leading you deeper into no thing and no place."

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The dispersed, complex, networked world invites complex, dispersed explanations: "the illusion of the world as graspable, strung together with links even as the socially contingent markers of importance, trust, and validity are increasingly on the fritz."

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The "paranoid-realist" mode of thought is coming to dominance in our age, epitomized by conspiracies like Pizzagate. As Michael Fortun says, "paranoiacs do not look, they find...[They] do not simply weigh and measure [evidence], but they create it with their instruments."

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ARGs are about the pleasure of "making meaning," while conspiracism is "an overabundance of meaning-making."

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But conspiracies are also "attempts to wrestle the complexities of the modern world down to a level of simplicity that can be grasped by an individual... manifestations of the reactive attempt to reassert individual control over systemic forms of power that defy narrative. "

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Above all, conspiracism is correlated with conspiracies: "One only has to look at the fracking industry, the pharmaceutical industry’s R&D policies, or the Catholic Church scandals to see that our world weeps conspiracies. They come out of the walls."

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Sauter imagines "two separate reality streams: the human politics stream, full of reactive paranoia intent on creating graspable narratives for human consumption..."

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"...And the overarching networks of networks, the financialized global capital streams and automated algorithmic diktats that operate and adhere without being wholly grasped, without anyone understanding them in their entirety."

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(Aside: if you like this kind of thing, make sure to check out Sauter on machine learning)

reallifemag.com/instant-recall/

eof/