Seth Abramson Profile picture
Dec 16, 2020 15 tweets 3 min read Read on X
QAnon is an ARG (Alternate Reality Game). It was set up that way and is managed that way. QAnoners are playing an ARG and refuse to stop for the very reason transreality gaming can be hazardous: you can forget what's game and what's reality. QAnoners are lost in a dangerous game.
The reason this matters is that Trump and his agents aim to expand the gamification of reality beyond the confines of QAnon's ARG mythology. Now they're turning the finding of evidence of "election fraud" into a transreality game with its own mythology. All of this is dangerous.
When we think of the far right as a space of "fake news" rather than the gamification of reality, we falsely accept the notion that Trumpists are interested in news. They're not. They're interested in tailored escapism, and in redefining reality as a mythology they can live with.
When you misdefine someone as simply an indiscriminate "news consumer" rather than deeming them a LARPer—Live-Action Roleplayer—you erroneously analyze their characteristics and erroneously model their behavior.

Trump himself is an ARG—and people enjoy the game too much to stop.
Trump and his agents are deliberately creating a new intelligence theater, in which intelligence agents must "enter the game"—yes, a bit akin to entering a Matrix—to combat the seditious ends Trump, Flynn and others intend to direct their ARG to. It's all weird digital-age stuff.
By this same logic, QAnoners cannot be reached by *real* news presented to them in *conventional* terms.

Instead, intelligence agents will end up infiltrating the Trumpist QAnon ARG with the "real" using scenarios in which the "real" *momentarily* seems to be part of the "game."
This is why I described the Trump era as the First Reality War, and urged folks in intel to treat reality as an active combat theater. Government will need many more digital-age cultural theorists than it anticipated. Not cyber folks—I mean world-builders and their interlocutors.
The good news: the generation coming up gets transmedia, transreality, XR, ARGs, pervasive gaming, immersive theater, reality mining, gamification, collaborative OSINT and the like far more than their elders. Which is key, as much of the Trumpist threat will come in such spheres.
For instance, "Communism" exists in Trumpist mythology the same way Shinra did in Final Fantasy VII: as an in-game construction defined by narrative utility and seamless integration with a UX. Trumpists have no idea how the term connects to anything actually happening in America.
So Trumpists can't be deprogrammed from their sense of what Communism—or for that matter socialism—means in meat space, as their (false) consciousness of these terms is the product of an in-game "economy." You either change their game or get them to stop playing. Both are *hard*.
But put aside intelligence and counterintelligence.

What this means for the average American is that you may have members of your family or certain acquaintances who you can no longer speak to because *even when they are talking to your face* they are playing a transreality ARG.
My advice to those with Trumpists or QAnoners they still want to interact with: you have to find ways to get them to *put the ARG aside* momentarily. Which is hard, because Trump and his team are daily expanding the size of the ARG to try to make it *roughly the size of reality*.
The best many of us can do right now is to try to draw these LARPers into non-game spaces in which they have non-game interactions with non-game participants—and to try to make such spaces and interactions of such high entertainment value that the game begins to seem unnecessary.
But you don't address the situation by trying to introduce "real news" (qua news) directly into the situation, as you are dealing with someone whose interest is in entertainment rather than news—and whose fundamental complaint is with reality itself, not with information streams.
I teach digital-age cultural theory, XR literacy, mass communications, post-postmodernism, digital journalism and transmedia worldbuilding at the university level—while my recent books are classified as being on the subject of intelligence and espionage—so these are my interests.

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More from @SethAbramson

Apr 21
Hey, @PeteHegseth, just because you were born a shitheel doesn't mean you have to spend your life as one. Accept that you have a problem with drinking and women and that the job you now hold is way beyond you. Accept also that it's on *you* for taking the job, not on anyone else.
Pete needs family and therapy, not one of the highest-stress jobs on Earth. He doesn't engage in self-care because he's such a narcissist that he can't accept his flaws. His anger is self-loathing, his accusations are projection, and he doesn't have the heart of a public servant.
Humanity has thousands of years of data on what makes a good leader: someone who performs best under stress, who has great empathy and self-knowledge, and has both respect for process and temperance. Hegseth has none of these...but may not be smart or courageous enough to see it.
Read 8 tweets
Apr 19
(🚨) COMMUNITY NOTE: All of this is a lie being told by a would-be dictator to obscure the fact that he is kidnapping and exiling US residents without due process. This image is crudely doctored, and no court has ever found Garcia to be an MS-13 member or that he harmed his wife.
1/ Garcia *fled* from gang violence in El Salvador when he was a minor, with a federal court finding in 2019 that he was non-removable to El Salvador on the grounds that he is a *victim* of gang violence likely to be killed if returned El Salvador.

He is a permanent US resident.
2/ Years ago, the US citizen Garcia is happily married to filed for a temporary restraining order, i.e. a court order granted "ex parte"—without both parties present—and without due process. She never pursued it further, so Trump is lying about a court finding he harmed his wife.
Read 5 tweets
Apr 11
This was a potential outcome discussed at length in my pinned report.

The Court demands signs of effort but not a result—a win for the Trump administration, as it appears to confirm its theory that Bukele has control over anyone on his soil.

This is bad. cnn.com/2025/04/10/pol…
Do be careful in reading analysis of this case. Casual observers who aren't familiar with it will tell you this was a win for Garcia—and it certainly will be if Trump and his pal in El Salvador decide to save his life. But as a matter of the law going forward, this is a disaster.
The legal question was whether a human body comes under the control of a foreign dictator the moment that body is put on a plane to that country and the plane leaves the ground.

The implication of this decision is that the answer is yes. Which means the disappearances can start.
Read 7 tweets
Apr 4
OMG... it was all AI.

They didn't even care enough about the American economy to do any of the work themselves.

It almost feels... impeachable?

How could sloppily using AI to create domestic policy, then hiding it, be consistent with the Oath of Office? theverge.com/news/642620/tr…
This explains everything. The bad tariff math, placing tariffs on uninhabited islands, the odd errors that keep popping up in administration texts, the fact that Musk has said he wants to replace the humans in our government with AI, the fact that he *runs an AI company*.... JFC!
So much makes sense now. The website deletions that seem based on the most imbecilic reading of search results, the bizarrely high number of EOs, the obsession with the idea that people don't matter because AI can do everything in government... few if any humans are at the wheel!
Read 4 tweets
Apr 2
Musk is now a bigger fount for toxic, self-aggrandizing bullshit than P.T. Barnum ever was.

He’s an utter 🤡—and that’s both a historical and provable fact. There’s nothing non-journalistic about observing when a man has become infamous for his rank nonsense and foolish gambits. Image
But that’s only the start of the story.

PROOF has outlined—with full sourcing—how Musk for years avoided politics on the advice of his father, and for years avoided revealing his far-right ideologies for fear they would destroy his business empire.

He was right. It’s happening.
In other words, he *knew* his far-right ideologies would be grotesque to consumers.

He *knew* that if he entered politics in America, those ideologies would cause him to become an instant target for hate from a majority of patriotic Americans—who unlike him believe in democracy.
Read 5 tweets
Mar 30
(🧵) A GROK THREAD on ELON MUSK AND MENTAL HEALTH.

This thread is limited to information provided by Elon Musk’s own commercial products.

Please RETWEET. Image
2/ Image
3/ Image
Read 6 tweets

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