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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(🚨) EXCLUSIVE: This report is epic, crossing years, continents, and scandals some readers won’t have encountered before—from golf to crypto, intel to international law. Everything comes back to why the Iran War happened, and why it’ll likely restart.
1/ I’ve been thinking about what else I want to say on this subject since I first posted this report a few hours ago. The report is of course extremely long, detailed, and well-sourced, so there’s much that I could write that would simply be redundant.
2/ I do have thoughts I want to expand on, though.
Stunning how media turned passage of the Abominable Bill into a will they/won't they romcom with a July 4 deadline for Cinderella to kiss the prince, rather than a situation in which members of Congress say they're terrified they or their family will be killed if they cross Trump
The only journalistically responsible way to cover what's happening in DC is to report that the Dear Leader of a cult set an arbitrary deadline for his cult to dance for him on penalty of sinister punishments, and now we're watching a gruesome public whipping unfold in real time
The grotesque mummery playing out at the Capitol is not just joyless and borderline violent but without any suspense whatsoever, as in an authoritarian regime—which is what the GOP is—the outcome isn't in doubt, only whether 1-2 rebels choose to sacrifice themselves to the flames
Agents of Trump business and political partners MBS, MBZ and el-Sisi were secretly in the White House as Trump agreed to go to war with their enemy Iran?
How is this not the big news right now? How is this not bigger than every other story media is covering?
This is beyond journalistic malpractice.
We're talking about matters of war and peace—historic lies told by a POTUS to push America to war—and CNN is burying the lede that the attack was a byproduct of secret negotiations with those who support Trump financially and politically?
And should it not also be noted that the man representing Trump in these hours of secret negotiations inside the White House—assuming Trump wasn't there himself, which I suspect he was for part of the time—is a man (Witkoff) with financial ties to parties he was negotiating with?
(🚨) BREAKING: Exactly as happened in 2020 after Trump illegally assassinated the second-most-popular Iranian—and therefore as Trump could easily have predicted, and as media should already have forecast for Americans—Iran has just launched missiles at multiple US military bases.
CNN:
It is certainly possible that, as in 2020, this response is gestural rather than serious. But it might not be, and Trump might deliberately pretend that it is not, and either way there could still be some Americans injured, so who knows what is going to happen now.
2018: Gen. Kurilla—“Israel’s favorite general”—is made CENTCOM Chief of Staff
2018: CENTCOM urges Trump to add Israel to CENTCOM’s Area of Responsibility
2021: 4 days before leaving office, Trump adds Israel to CENTCOM AOR
2021: Process making Kurilla CENTCOM commander begins
(🚨) MAJOR BREAKING NEWS: Trump Tells America He Planned His Iran Policy—Including Unprovoked Major Military Strikes—“A Long Time Ago” and As a “Team” With Israeli War Criminal Netanyahu, Confirming the Entirety of the Proof Trilogy and Proof Project in Stunning Public Confession
(PS) Am watching CNN and there is no acknowledgment whatsoever that Trump said this. It was far and away the only significant thing he said in his two-minute, somewhat mumbling declaration.
(PS2) Jake Tapper is now on-air telling America that this war is not inconsistent with Trump’s pledge of peace.
He then indicated that he trusts Israeli intelligence over American intelligence.