A year after I posted this article, this perspective comes into even greater focus:
"Black Lives Matter protests are led by community organizers who actually participate in their own demonstrations, not by astroturfing groups or an anonymous riddler who will never issue a concrete plan. BLM members use social media for messaging, signal boosting, and strategizing, but the ARG element of decoding puzzles with collaborative detective work is absent, as serious organizing would be impeded by the kind of digital goose chases that typify QAnon. Unable to think beyond its own Wizard of Oz-like conception of power, QAnon invents or resurrects even more conspiracy theories to make sense of BLM: George Soros is imagined as the BLM puppet master, a regurgitation of the paid-protester meme, and to overcome the irrefutability of the George Floyd footage, Q followers have concocted a perverse fantasy that Floyd and Chauvin were actors in a staged event (much like the crisis actor theories that attempt to trivialize school shootings). BLM promotes affective engagement, too, but with the flow of history and social progress, not cultish apocalypticism. These differences align with the conceptions of reality behind each movement: urban legends and reinvented blood libel about globalist Satanists, cannibals, and pedophiles haunt the QAnon imagination, while historical analysis of the effects of slavery, segregation, mass incarceration, the school-to-prison pipeline, and police brutality inform the platform of BLM. Consequently, unlike the unfulfillable prophecies and millenarian obsessions of QAnon, BLM pursues achievable and concrete policy changes. Q, instead, offers boogeymen, victimhood, an unrealizable revenge fantasy, and science denialism. Despite all this, the aesthetics and solidarity-building aspects of ARGs can serve a beneficial role in protest movements and beyond, but only in the absence of the “corrupted play” dynamic that immerses players in impenetrable delusion as it has in QAnon. When conspiracy belief encourages such deep investment in a scripted cosmology, the non-gamed appears staged in its deviation from prophecy. In this regard, conspiracy theorists are not the red-pill takers of The Matrix that they aspire to be, but more like the cult of Realists in Cronenberg’s Existenz (1999). Those who hate the game are the most gamified of all." https://reallifemag.com/this-is-not-a-game/?fbclid=IwAR2ACR3Fbfge-R8x-JhGT8clzUw0MrbuEAy6f1BgUL1_rz0L5tuOzff47Og
"Black Lives Matter protests are led by community organizers who actually participate in their own demonstrations, not by astroturfing groups or an anonymous riddler who will never issue a concrete plan. BLM members use social media for messaging, signal boosting, and strategizing, but the ARG element of decoding puzzles with collaborative detective work is absent, as serious organizing would be impeded by the kind of digital goose chases that typify QAnon.
Unable to think beyond its own Wizard of Oz-like conception of power, QAnon invents or resurrects even more conspiracy theories to make sense of BLM: George Soros is imagined as the BLM puppet master, a regurgitation of the paid-protester meme, and to overcome the irrefutability of the George Floyd footage, Q followers have concocted a perverse fantasy that Floyd and Chauvin were actors in a staged event (much like the crisis actor theories that attempt to trivialize school shootings).
BLM promotes affective engagement, too, but with the flow of history and social progress, not cultish apocalypticism. These differences align with the conceptions of reality behind each movement: urban legends and reinvented blood libel about globalist Satanists, cannibals, and pedophiles haunt the QAnon imagination, while historical analysis of the effects of slavery, segregation, mass incarceration, the school-to-prison pipeline, and police brutality inform the platform of BLM. Consequently, unlike the unfulfillable prophecies and millenarian obsessions of QAnon, BLM pursues achievable and concrete policy changes. Q, instead, offers boogeymen, victimhood, an unrealizable revenge fantasy, and science denialism.
Despite all this, the aesthetics and solidarity-building aspects of ARGs can serve a beneficial role in protest movements and beyond, but only in the absence of the “corrupted play” dynamic that immerses players in impenetrable delusion as it has in QAnon. When conspiracy belief encourages such deep investment in a scripted cosmology, the non-gamed appears staged in its deviation from prophecy. In this regard, conspiracy theorists are not the red-pill takers of The Matrix that they aspire to be, but more like the cult of Realists in Cronenberg’s Existenz (1999). Those who hate the game are the most gamified of all."
https://reallifemag.com/this-is-not-a-game/?fbclid=IwAR2ACR3Fbfge-R8x-JhGT8clzUw0MrbuEAy6f1BgUL1_rz0L5tuOzff47Og
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