Pulitzer
Prize-winning investigative journalist James Ball takes us into the depths of
the internet to trace the origins and rapid ascent of QAnon, the movement that
mutated from a niche online conspiracy theory into the world's first digital
pandemic.
Imagine a
deadly pathogen that, once created, could infect any person in any part of the
globe within seconds. No need to wait for travellers, trains, or air traffic to
spread it, all you need is an internet connection. In this gripping
investigation, Pulitzer Prize winner James Ball decodes the cryptic language of
the online right and with a surgeon's precision tracks the spread of QAnon, the
world's first digital pandemic.
QAnon began
as an internet community dedicated to supporting President Trump and intent on
outing a global cabal of human traffickers. A short, cryptic message posted by
an anonymous user to a niche internet forum in 2017 was the spark that ignited
a global movement. What started as a macabre game of virtual make-believe
quickly spiralled into the spread of virulently hateful, dangerous messaging -
which turned into tragic, violent actions.
Incoherent,
chaotic, free from agendas: QAnon is a one-size-fits all cult conspiracy. From
a standoff at the Hoover Dam, to the storming of the U.S. Capitol on 6 January
2021, to protesting COVID-19 lockdowns, this digital pandemic has spread
globally and shows no signs of stopping. In The Other Pandemic Ball takes us
into the niche pathways through which these digital pathogens spread, mutate
and infect people all across the globe - but he also argues that the prognosis
doesn't have to be dire. He shows us that it is possible to treat and cure this
virus in order to build up our digital immune systems, and be better prepared
to survive the next wave.
*A
Financial Times Book to Read in 2023*
Review
The Other Pandemic by James Ball review: QAnon as
post-truth pathogen
An insightful book about the conspiracy movement
compares it persuasively to a self-replicating disease
Rafael Behr
@rafaelbehr
Wed 19 Jul 2023
09.00 BST
Most people
made aware of a plot to kidnap and murder children on an industrial scale would
want to do something about it. It is hardly surprising that Edgar Maddison
Welch, learning of such a wicked scheme, and outraged that law enforcement
agencies were doing nothing, took matters into his own hands.
On 4
December 2016, Welch brought an assault rifle and handgun down to Comet Ping
Pong, a pizzeria in Washington DC, to liberate the children held captive there
in the basement. But he found no children and no basement.
That
setback didn’t put a stop to “Pizzagate”, a deranged fantasy among online
sleuths who had identified Comet Ping Pong as the hub for a satanic paedophile
ring based around Hillary Clinton’s presidential election campaign. As with so
many conspiracy theories, the absence of supporting evidence could be folded
back into the original narrative as proof of a cover-up.
That
self-replicating mechanism is deftly unpacked by James Ball in The Other
Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World. It is a disturbing study of the
origins and resilience of an exceptionally versatile and pernicious network of
paranoid digital malcontents.
Pizzagate
is just one subplot in the sprawling edifice of QAnon belief. Adherents are
lured into the faith down any number of channels – Donald Trump fandom; vaccine
hesitancy; self-pitying adolescent video-gamer virginity recast as militant
misogyny. Followers are then radicalised by cultish solidarity, the thrill of
belonging to a crusading gang, and by social media algorithms that reinforce
prejudice and exclude dissent.
In some
respects, QAnon is a rehash of old conspiracy theories, drawing on established
tropes from the analogue age: a vast secret world government; antisemitic
“blood libels” about ritual child murder that date back centuries. But the
21st-century version is also indigenous to the internet, emerging from a
roiling soup of nerdy chatrooms, then evolving to thrive across a range of
digital ecosystems.
Ball, a
former Guardian journalist, was once an habitué of 4chan, the platform where
the anonymous “Q” first posted tantalising clues about an unfolding plot at the
apex of power. That experience equips him well for the task of sequencing the
movement’s cultural and social DNA.
As with so
many conspiracy theories, the absence of supporting evidence could be folded
back into the original narrative as proof of a cover-up
He is
especially insightful on the influence of online role-playing games and the
cultivated ambiguity around what is meant to be taken seriously and what comes
draped in irony. The original trolling ethos was steeped in nihilistic
mischief, breaking taboos for the sake of it, transgressing for thrills.
That
slippery joking-not-joking idiom made it hard for mainstream politics to get a
purchase on QAnon before it found its real-life incarnation in Donald Trump.
The full scale of the cult, and the threat it posed to a democratic society,
only registered for many people when its digital fingerprints turned up all
over the capitol insurrection that tried to thwart Joe Biden’s inauguration as
Trump’s successor.
The
insurgents’ failure provoked premature forecasts of QAnon’s demise. Instead,
the virus mutated and spread. For Ball, that is not a biological metaphor. He
argues from Darwinian principles, via Richard Dawkins’s original coinage of the
word “meme” for a self-replicating unit of cultural evolution, that QAnon is
best understood as a literal pathogen. It is a pandemic ravaging democratic
discourse in the same way that Covid-19 assaulted respiratory tracts.
That raises
a teasing question, unanswered in the book, about the equivalent pathological
status of longer established irrational belief systems. Should the world’s
major religions, all of which have inspired crazed acts of violence throughout
history, also be treated as social diseases?
Ball can
hardly be blamed for swerving that digression when the task of charting one
multi-faceted digital cult is complex enough. No less tricky is the question of
a remedy. The most common treatments are factchecking and ridicule, which
succeed only in driving devotees deeper into social segregation. Old fashioned
refutation with evidence can’t achieve much without wider reform of the digital
infrastructure that creates nesting grounds for the malignant info-disease.
Besides,
mistrust in politics has been debilitating democratic immune systems since
before social media incubated this new strain of conspiracy theory. That, Ball
concludes, is a chronic condition for which there is no quick technological
fix.
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