Thread by @smdiehl

Let's talk about the similarities between QAnon and #Bitcoin. (1/) 🧵

Both movements fall into the category of "conspiracy cults". Their pattern of enticement is similar to religious cults in the illusory pretense of leading acolytes deeper and deeper into the group's secrets while isolating followers from friends and family outside the cult. (2/)

The bizarre cult-like antics of the Bitcoin faithful were on full display in Miami last week in which thousands of faithful descended on Miami to worship Bitcoin in Trump-style rallies which turned into a superspreader event. (3/)
nytimes.com/2021/06/05/tec…

Both movements are fringe right-wing ideologies, effectively intellectual pandemics that have incubated in the dark corners of the internet and are now starting to spread into daily life. They are variations on the same theme, that concern different domains. (3/)

QAnon is effectively an internet-mutated variation of the blood libel conspiracy from the Middle Ages, except wrapped around the cult of personality of Donald Trump and cast in the bizarre meme language of internet troll culture. (4/)

Both movements have sacred doctrine that allegedly originates with an anonymous progenitor of the cult (Q or Satoshi). They believe the writings are sacred and contain sacred truths and prophecies concerning the future. (5/)

Both ideologies have an indoctrination pipeline that takes contemporary issues (income inequality, political corruption, etc) and posits a worldview in which the entirety of vast societal phenomena can be described by simplistic easily-digestible root cause explanations. (6/)

QAnon believes in some deep state conspiracy involving the US Democratic party, while the Bitcoin cult posits some deep state conspiracy involving central banks and monetary policy. (7/)
salon.com/2018/06/08/how…

The Bitcoin cult hijacks many existing right wing clichés of "all taxation is theft", "the state is violence", "gold is the only hard money" and reinterprets them in which a sacred technology is the single path to redemption through disruption. (8/)

Bitcoin is centred around the notion that the financial system is a corrupt intermediary and government's true agenda is to control the money supply for insiders own empowerment. The state is an irredeemable corrupt institution destined to be annihilated through technology. (9/)

Both ideologies contains eschatological myths of some future apocalyptic "Storm" or a "Mooning" event. Where the unbelievers in the ideology will be purged in a violent uprising. Bitcoin is particularly centred around the overthrow of democratic states. (10/)

The root of all of these conspiracy cults is the simple fact that the internet has eroded trust in institutions significantly and a flood of low-quality hyperpolarized information is contaminating society's epistemological hygiene. (11/)

In many ways these phenomenon aren't new, conspiracy cults have always existed all the way back to the beginning of civilization. What has changed is the virility and transmission rate that these intellectual contagions spread. (12/)

An unexpected result of social media and algorithmic amplification is that negative sentiment and crackpottery spread more virulently than they did even ten years ago. Movements that would have been relegated to fringes of society have now found their path to the mainstream.(13/)

I don't have any answers for how to deal with root of this problem, but I do know that we will have to deal with the symptoms of these conspiracy cults as if they are a public health crisis. (14/)

Cults like #Bitcoin are an intellectual pandemic and just like physical viruses we all need a healthy dose of mental vaccine — solid grounding in basic economics, common sense about financial fraud, and reaffirmations of faith in democracy in order for herd immunity to work.
/fin