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

May 3
I wonder how many Americans realize that Bribery is one of just two impeachable offenses specifically enumerated in the U.S. Constitution and the case that Donald Trump has now committed that crime dozens of times in his second term is a legal slam dunk.

So shall we get started?
To be very clear, I'm not saying that there is a single federal elected official within the Republican Party who believes in this country or cares about this country or honors our rule of law and would vote to impeach.

I am saying that fact must be the national conversation now.
The case for impeachment is not academic, hypothetical, partisan, opaque, obscure, confusing, highly technical, or any other adjective denoting a distance from the lived reality of every American.

President Donald Trump has openly committed Bribery, and we all watched him do it.
Read 13 tweets
May 1
(📢) BREAKING NEWS: Donald Trump and Elon Musk Friend/Ally Vladimir Putin Has Eyes, Brain, and Larynx Ripped Out of Captured and Tortured Ukrainian Journalist; MAGA Hero Putin Returns Journalist's Body in Condition Almost Impossible to Identify As Female theguardian.com/world/2025/apr…
Journalists must stop playing games with American fascism.

The Trump Administration is a congregation of monsters, and it seeks to appeal to a voting base that is either already wholly monstrous or getting there.

If you cannot see what's happening in America, *quit journalism*.
Putin is the closest thing Earth has to a demon. The fact that Donald Trump and all of his aides, allies, agents, associates, attorneys and advisors, including and perhaps most especially Elon Musk, have tried to suck up to him despite knowing what he is tells us what *they* are.
Read 10 tweets
Apr 29
(📢) COMMUNITY NOTE: The human population is growing—rapidly. It's projected to keep growing for many decades, until at least 2100. Then it will decline slightly, per experts, but to a level still far beyond now. What Musk MEANS but refuses to SAY is WHITE fertility is declining. Image
Let me be much clearer: anyone who says they are worried about the human population declining is a white supremacist.

The only basis anyone could have for being worried about birth rates would be a bigoted fear of non-white persons significantly outnumbering whites.

Full stop.
But even if we just look at the population of Europe, it's absolutely *exploded* since 1950—despite the fact that at two points in the last 75 years it declined.

This suggests that even if or as it declines significantly between now and 2100, it's just returning to those levels.
Read 6 tweets
Apr 27
Hi, I speak Trump Administration fluently and am here to help.

What Steven is saying is that Trump has recently lost weight because he's suffering from a major medical event and ongoing serious medical condition he's hiding from voters.

Just invert the words and you've got it. Image
The other thing to remember about speaking Trump Administration is that the angrier they are, the more important the truth they're speaking by shouting the opposite of it is. So apparently this medical condition is really really bad, and the White House is really scared about it.
Some may ask, Seth, as a journalist, how did you learn Trump Administration? And why can so few in media speak it?

The answer is simple: I spent years reading messaging from Trump's political ops, and observed that the truth is always exactly the opposite of what they say it is.
Read 5 tweets
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

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