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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(🧵) This thread offers extensive analysis of the historic decision by President Joe Biden—ranked the 14th-best U.S. president ever by nonpartisan historians—not to seek a second term. I approach this analysis as an attorney, political journalist, and Trump biographer. Please RT.
1/ Here is the announcement from President Biden.
2/ He says he will address the nation further on this matter in a few days.
(1 of 3) Sixteen years ago, at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, another experimental writer and I—he a novelist, me a poet—concocted a plan to one day write a personal history that would satisfy two conditions at once: (1) be 100% accurate; (2) cause disbelief and possibly even anger.
(2 of 3) After Iowa, I added a third requirement: I wanted to write a personal bio that *made a point*: that no matter how much we tell others about ourselves in the digital age, we are always incomprehensible to (and in many ways not even human to) strangers on the internet.
(3 of 3) A few years ago, I quietly dropped the fruition of this plan from the 2000s onto my personal website—not knowing when or if anyone would find it. I expected people who hate me would find it first. They did.
Their reaction is exactly as we hoped it would be back in 2008.
(NOTE) I have now updated this report to include information on the possible illegality of the fraudulent Jackson Memo.
(MORE) In Atlanta, Trump told 602 lies in 40 minutes and 12 seconds.
In Milwaukee, the fact that the whole world saw what happened in Butler—and so could call out Trump's lies—cut his rate: it would've been 362 lies in 40 minutes and 12 seconds.
Nine years into the Trump era and Donald Trump is still getting on TV and lying to our faces about every facet of American life knowing idiots and wishcasters will believe him, his words will be aired live by corporate media, and any factchecking will come after people go to bed.
Major media had nine years to figure out how to deny media coverage to people who spread disinformation. It could ban them from its air. It could refuse to carry their words live. It could give 5x the live rebuttal time to those who tell the truth.
And what did it do? *Nothing*.
This sociopath was created by media and media is responsible for him. Every claim he made tonight was false. He knew they were false because he had been told so repeatedly. He *also* knows corporate media needs him for profits—so it'll never do with him as real journalists would.
BREAKING NEWS: Physicians Suggest Trump Could Have Undisclosed Brain Trauma in Wake of His Team's Bizarre Refusal to Release Any Information About His Injury or Its Treatment; Doctors Say Even Getting Grazed By a Bullet Can Have Catastrophic Unseen Effects statnews.com/2024/07/17/tru…
I cannot imagine voting for someone who might have an undisclosed traumatic brain injury, especially when the person has a decades-long history of doctoring, lying about and hiding their medical records. This is an issue that major media should be expending significant energy on.
After the attack, Trump sounded addled—and we've no idea if he has PTSD. Doctors say he would have had multiple brain scans to determine if there were unseen effects from an object traveling at that speed hitting his head. And now all of this is being hidden from American voters?
MAGAs falsely claim the Secret Service wants Trump dead, which is plainly untrue. It's also a *bizarre* claim for MAGAs to embrace, as what do these conspiracy theorists think it would say about what Trump says and does in private—that only the USSS knows of—if it wants him dead?
MAGA is such a deranged cult that you have Trump fans insisting that the one group of people who know what he says and does in private—and what sort of danger those words/actions pose to all of us—thinks he needs to be eliminated. And that does *not* give them any pause. Why not?
Fortunately, there is an answer to this. All MAGAs now hold one of three views: they hate all law enforcement, or they love the idea that Trump plans to destroy our democracy, or they do not believe there was any plot against Trump but wax orgasmic at the idea of him as a martyr.