Re: <nettime> THE Q IN QONSPIRACY: QAnon as a Paradigm for Future Social-media-driven Conspiracism

[d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk]

Very much looking forward to this discussion...

The approach of Q's followers (along with myriad other conspiracy 
theorists) reflects
the Ninth lesson from historian Timothy Snyder’s text ‘On Tyranny: 
Twenty Lessons for the 20th Century’
which begins with the sentence: ‘Investigate. Figure things out for 
yourself.’ Worryingly that is precisely
what Q's followers feel they are doing.

The epistemology of these movements could be characterised as a 
hermeneutics of un-quenchable suspicion in
which “every official narrative and mainstream institution is suspect 
[…] and in which real knowledge is
produced by like-minded strangers working together on the internet “to 
do their own research”.”

These are potent grass roots research orientated sub-cultures who 
experience the sheer excitement of feeling that they are unmasking a 
world of lies and revealing through their own research efforts a network 
of hidden causes. This fact that makes it particularly hard terrain 
those on the left to contest.

Although not exactly an activist I find it useful to recall Roland 
Barthes's evolution thinker from the early days as an unmasker of 
'mythologies' to a later understanding that you can’t get rid of a 
mythology by telling or demonstrating that it’s a 'myth'. It can only 
ever be replaced it with a better myth. Faith in evidence and exposure 
is not enough.
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