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

Sep 12
I just woke up from a long nap, can someone tell me if Trump has already apologized to the nation for falsely blaming the Kirk assassination on the left when—as with both his assassination attempts and 85% of political violence this century per the data—it was a far-right nutjob?
He is a Groyper. The Groypers are a far-right, neo-Nazi cult made up of young far-right males who thought Kirk was insufficiently far-right. thedailybeast.com/charlie-kirk-s…
Read 15 tweets
Sep 12
Bomb threats against the Maryland General Assembly. Bomb threats against the Michigan lieutenant governor and his family. Bomb threats against 5 HBCUs. Two arrests for violent assaults in Idaho.

In 24 hours.

All Democratic/left-leaning victims.

All suspected MAGA perpetrators.
And that wasn't a full list—not even close.

Bomb threat against the Rhode Island Senate President. Bomb threat against the Rhode Island Majority Leader. Bomb threat against the New Mexico Senate Majority Leader. Once again all Democratic victims, all suspected MAGA perpetrators.
There's no reason to have a conversation about political violence based in rhetoric rather than data.

I don't need to note that every bomb threat on Election Day in 2024 was a MAGA bomb threat.

I don't need to mention January 6, Paul Pelosi, or the two dead Minnesota Democrats. Image
Read 13 tweets
Sep 11
There was significantly less political violence in America before the 2016 presidential campaign. We all know why.

That doesn’t change that what happened today—in both Utah and Colorado—were tragedies.

It just underscores that revisionist history won’t solve America's problems.
Donald Trump transformed politics into an ultraviolent Thunderdome.

He did it for his own advancement, and he didn’t care what the consequences would be.

It’s *also* true that since Trump poisoned our politics there’s been violence from both Left and Right, though mostly Right.
Both Trump assassination plots I condemned immediately and unreservedly. Both would-be assassins were Republicans. The assassin who killed Minnesota’s Speaker was also Republican. So was the man who plotted to kill Pelosi. But there have been leftist assassins too. I condemn all.
Read 10 tweets
Sep 8
There's no lie Elon Musk and his racist friends won't tell to try to hurt nonwhites—or even, I fear, to try to get deranged others to *literally* hurt nonwhites.

And we know these racists want to cause pain because a two-second Grok search would destroy every one of their lies. Image
Image
If you read the comments on Musk's racist post, it's person after person after person absolutely convinced that Muslims never migrate to other Muslim countries but only come to Europe or America and only do so as part of some sort of invasion. These folks are touched in the head.
The history of human migration, by whatever group—of whatever race or ethnicity or religion—is that sometimes migrants are looking for a very similar place, sometimes a slightly different place, sometimes a very different place.

That has been human nature for thousands of years.
Read 8 tweets
Aug 28
(🧵) Major media should be ashamed.

The manifesto of the Minnesota shooter has been translated—and it's all about his hatred of Jews, Blacks, Mexicans, illegal immigrants, Somalis... none of this had to do with him being trans and major media *knows* it.

So why won't it say so?
1/ The manifesto uses the most vile slurs imaginable to describe Jews and Blacks, groups MAGA is hostile to.

The manifesto uses the most vile rhetoric imaginable to speak of illegal immigrants, another group Maga is hostile to.

And it uses 4chan-speak. 4chan is a MAGA hotbed.
2/ Everyone in America knows at this point that MAGA is a fascist movement and that the first group it wants to start treating like the Nazis did Jews are transgender persons. So the second the possibility the shooter was trans arose, all of us should have apprehended the danger.
Read 13 tweets
Aug 17
(🚨) The seventh book in the NYT-bestselling Proof Series is PROOF OF DEVILRY: THE CRIMES OF DONALD TRUMP, GHISLAINE MAXWELL, AND JEFFREY EPSTEIN.

It’s so large—a 600-page epic—that it’s being released in three parts (on 8/17, 8/24, and 8/31).

Book One: sethabramson.substack.com/p/part-1-proof…Image
1/ I recognize that I often say this when I am speaking of extremely deep-dive curatorial research into Trump and two discrete topics—Jeffrey Epstein and January 6—but it is true: what is in this book will shock you even if you believe you cannot be shocked on these topics.
2/ I want to issue a warning to those with sensitivities surrounding the subject of sex crimes and pedophilia. It is almost certain that this epic work will be triggering for you so, do read with caution or decide whether it even makes sense for you to read this at all.
Read 21 tweets

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