By Richard Seymour
QAnon is more than a global phenomenon of recreational conspiracism.
It has not only recruited millions of believers, but utterly upended their lives, alienated them from their families and induced dreams of gory civil war. As a recanting QAnoner put it, from the inside it looked as if ‘everyone else was living in a dream world’.
QAnon is a conversion-machine designed by no single hand, turning agnostic thrill-seekers into devotees of the apocalypse, transforming the ideological debris of conspiracism into a cohesive authoritarian subculture and translating the attentional surges thereby generated into profit for far-right entrepreneurs.
As QAnon expanded, it drew the attention of an emerging ‘alt-tech’ scene, eager to secede from the tech giants that had capitulated to the ‘woke’ and capitalise on the demand for a stigmatised form of right-wing socialising.
Launched in September 2018 with investment from the billionaire Mercer family and the millionaire YouTuber and media personality Dan Bongino, Parler initially tried to soften its rightist edge to appease Amazon Web Services, which hosted it, and Apple, which permitted its app to be downloaded from the App Store.
Nor were minor grifters and alt-tech platforms the main profiteers from QAnon’s politics of apocalyptic revenge. In addition to the profits flowing to the companies owning the infrastructure, the big tech platforms were if anything more important than 8chan and Parler. In 2020, it was found that Facebook had over 3 million QAnon users. And in addition to the advertising revenue generated from those users, it also accepted hundreds of ads posted on behalf of or praising QAnon.
Both Facebook and Twitter (ante Musk) have, since the summer of 2020, reluctantly begun to remove QAnon content, and in so doing have exposed the extent to which they were implicated in its growth… Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and PayPal all benefited for years from a highly profitable relationship with far-right celebrities like Tommy Robinson, Alex Jones, Stefan Molyneux, Gavin MacInnes and Richard Spencer and a broad network of white nationalists, neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, men’s rights activists and violent Islamophobes. The more they drew fascinated attention, the more the platforms profited. The more the platforms profited, the more incentive they had to enable these groups to grow. Only when the political cost of maintaining the relationship exceeded the costs of ending it did they change course.
The decisive constituent in all of this is the users. They were the active drivers of the ferment. They have not only hung on, but doubled down, every time their prophesy ‘failed’.
Dreams, after all, have an alarming propensity to come true, if rarely in the way the dreamer intended. A dream is but the formation of an intention, and intention is the formation of action: the spiritual becomes material. QAnoners’ belief in the prophesy contributed to the movement to keep Trump in power despite his election defeat in November 2020, and ultimately their belief was a tributary of the January 2021 ‘insurrection’.
By hijacking a campaign to raise funds for the Save the Children charity and linking it to their claims of a global child trafficking network linked to Hollywood and the Democrats, they recruited well beyond their core demographic of angry, male Boomers, even attracting some survivors of childhood sexual abuse, and increasing membership of their groups by an estimated 3,000 per cent.
The participatory nature of the machine is distinctive enough to be enlivening, where mainstream politics usually works to alienate and exclude most people. [my italics, N.M.]
Freud’s essay on The Uncanny describes how harmless and familiar items, doubled or repeated, can suddenly appear chilling, forcing us ‘to entertain the idea of the fateful and the inescapable’. Such apophenic resonances are a typical feature of conspiracist subcultures, working both as entertainment and critical theory.
QAnon acolytes appeared to have suddenly transmogrified into irrationally hostile, paranoid strangers, but something in them must have needed this apocalyptic stand-off. Something in them must have been waiting for it. That something, I’m suggesting, is the existential void concomitant upon the countless calamities of recent decades, their assault on the fabric of trust and meaning, and their legacy in a subterranean, unspoken depression and anxiety to which disaster nationalism offers a unique and highly addictive remedy. One wants the disaster to assume the contours of a concrete and personal foe, an enemy who, unlike the abstract forces that actually rule us, can be killed in combat.
This is a lethal misprision. In reality the supposedly concrete foe is almost always an abstraction (‘the Jew’, ‘the immigrant’, ‘the social justice warrior’) whose dimensions are filled in by being cathected to unconscious fantasy. The fantasy may be that I am persecuted and hunted by that in the world which I, in fact, hate and wish to destroy. I project my hostility onto the world. Or, the fantasy is that someone in the world, like the sibling at the mother’s breast described by St Augustine, illicitly steals my enjoyment (which is essentially what incels accuse women of doing), whereas in fact the whole economy of resentment and revenge is the real source of my enjoyment.
As China Miéville puts it, we live in an enervating, ‘hateful epoch that pathologises radical hate and encourages outrage fatigue’.
The problem is hate and resentment turned toxic, in the sense of intoxicating. As the psychoanalyst Alan Bass puts it in his essay on the racist lone wolf Dylann Roof, the ability to think depends in essence on the ability to tolerate the tensions aroused in us by frustration and difference. To think clearly about the disasters afflicting us, is to extricate real political enmity – and it can hardly be denied that those blighted by poverty, infrastructural decay, the opioid plague and runaway wildfires have some real enemies – from primordial projections.
In seeking a personal enemy with whom to duel, one finds only that part of oneself that one has walled off and projected onto an Other, or that part of one’s enjoyment that is illicit and alien. One finds that intimate whom Naomi Klein has recognised as the doppelgänger. One finds the true horror lying in one’s closest neighbour, oneself: ‘this heart within’, as Lacan put it, ‘which is that of my jouissance’. One has embarked on a course to suicide.
Richard Seymour, Disaster Nationalism, Verso, October 2024
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