- TL has been interested in conspiracy in media for a while, harkening back to an almost playful time about UFOs and Bigfoot and JFK assassination; now those subreddits are dominated by conspiracy theory (now there's conspiracy-no-pol, internal debates). QAnon is building on a long history of media use in conspiracy: radio, zines, podcasts
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QAnon popular intro videos: 1) origins, 2) how it propels offline activities and politics
- Awaiting mass arrest and great awakening
- Disenfranchised, appealing story, the world is about to change in a big way, they get to take part
- 1833: conspiracy theory that Freemasons were controlling the world; traction: 10% of Congress
- "Do you see a point where this goes away?" "No, absolutely not... will be with us for at least a generation"
- Racism, anti-Semitism infused (blood libel, "save the children")
- Q rides the tail of long-standing anti-immigrant, right-wing sentiment
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TL: What I love about CMS is that we try to think about historically.. not much of the Q stuff is historically novel
- Situate things in a broader frame
- Visualization linking Q knowledge, forms of conspiracy epistemology
- Interesting redeployment of academic talk about how to read
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"It's all Dan Brown's fault"
- Pre-Dan Brown: Evangelical Christianity, textual apocalyptic analysis of Revelations
- Idea: Everything that's old about QAnon
- "Q is people fact-checking" "there's a lot of 'I don't know' out there until it's confirmed" "decide for yourself, which is what America is" "Q has empowered the average individual"
- These videos were actually really good! like generative for critical thinking
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Leaderless vs leaderful
- Microcelebrity
- How technical objects come to take on a role, e.g. YouTube recommendations
- Top fan: technology designating leaders in a community
- What you pick as a search term is always hugely structuring, in academia and in conspiracy theories
- Empathetic listening: if you take people on their own terms and just keep asking questions, the dissonance will become clear; rather than keep challenging them
Ali's presentation