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

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
Mar 29
Musk has been told—repeatedly—that this is a lie. The global population is rising and will continue to rise until 2100, then it’ll decline slightly. Many countries, JUST NOT MAJORITY WHITE ONES, have over-replacement birth rates. Musk focuses on a small number of white nations.
So no, there are NO experts in this field who agree humanity is dying. There are NO experts who have a longterm underpopulation concern. There are NO experts who agree with Musk. The ONLY people concerned are white supremacists who worry white nations may become SLIGHTLY smaller.
But his lie is worse than this. He KNOWS and has been TOLD that rich, developed, often—but certainly not exclusively—majority-white nations see a birth rate decline BECAUSE of their wealth. That’s normal. It does not mean those nations will collapse, just reduce slightly in size.
Read 6 tweets
Mar 29
(🧵1/3) Time to clear some things up.

1. Elon Musk has many biographers; none are “official.”
2. I’m a Musk biographer; I don’t use Musk as a source because he’s a known pathological liar.
3. My second Musk biography (first is below) arrives in 2026.

🔗: sethabramson.substack.com/p/proof-of-des…Image
Image
(🧵2/3)

4. Grok is aware I’m a Musk biographer, as is the world (see my bio excerpt below, from my website). But Grok, by Musk’s design, sometimes struggles to access Substack—which confuses it about my status.
5. I’m a multiple-time NYT-bestselling biographer of public figures. Image
(🧵3/3)

6. Elongelicals have a favorite Musk biographer—Isaacson—as Walt tells them what they want to hear. He just repeats what Elon says and is himself a fanboy. My methodology is different: I’m a curatorial journalist.
7. You want fan-fiction? Go with Walt. For the truth, me.
Read 6 tweets
Mar 27
We have due process for a reason.

ICE used to be a legal operation. Now—without it ever confirming for a judge it has the right person and has a reasonable basis to take irrevocable government action—this is a kidnapping.

If you see something like this, report it to the police.
What the police can do is contact ICE to confirm it conducted an operation that resulted in the seizure of a specific person.

If ICE refuses to confirm the seizure of that person at that time, the police have a Kidnapping on their hands.

They'll be required to act accordingly.
If ICE confirms the seizure of that person at that time, the police can ask when the court hearing for the seized person is so friends and/or family reporting a Kidnapping will be able to attend and speak on the seized person's behalf. If ICE refuses to provide the information...
Read 6 tweets
Mar 22
More than any two men in America, Trump and Musk target for vicious retribution anyone who crosses them.

And more than any two men in America, Trump and Musk complain about media using anonymous sources to report on them.

Just take a moment and sit with those two statements.
The question here is why Trump and Musk have such a penchant for *creating* the phenomena they'll later loudly claim to be victims of.

One answer is that they're both malignant narcissistic sociopaths who can't process empathy and therefore can't put themselves in others' shoes.
But the other answer I have found, as a biographer of both men, is that they desperately need public attention to be on them at all times. They need a piece of all our lives in a way that is actually *clinical*—narcissists literally don't know how to process being widely ignored.
Read 19 tweets
Mar 22
They’re destroying our government—and with it, America.

They’re coming for your Social Security. Your student loans. Your voting systems. Your personal data. Your Medicare. Your freedoms.

They want EVERYTHING. And they are coming for EVERYTHING.

From The Washington Post: Image
Never forget what these people did. They stormed OUR Capitol. They threatened OUR government. They tried to overthrow OUR democracy. They tried to block the presidency WE voted for in 2020.

And when 1,600+ of these lunatic criminals were finally rounded up, they PARDONED them.
Don’t let them rewrite history. THEY attacked our democracy with violence. THEY declared that they’d rather have Vladimir Putin as president than Joe Biden. THEY declared American democracy an outmoded form of government. THEY let billionaires buy our government.

THEY must lose.
Read 9 tweets

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