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...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51