Toward a Minor Tech:Wilson 500
Minor Tech, Major Problem: QAnon’s Scales
Jack Wilson
From its imaginary – that spans thousands of years and encompasses near-all contemporary and historical conspiracy theories – to the horde that overwhelmed the US Capitol on the 6th of January 2020, discourses on the topic of the far-right phenomenon known as ‘QAnon’ are characterised by an immensity of scale. Such an emphasis on the aggregate size of the phenomenon suggests that it is a commensurately massive product of what this publication terms ‘major tech.’
Although QAnon is implicated in enormous societal upheaval for which the techno-social infrastructures of major tech have had an undeniable role, the contemporary salience of QAnon cannot be understood as wholly a result of these forces. Rather, QAnon is best understood as an assemblage ‘minor techs’: small-scale and contrarian practices and infrastructures whose granularity produces the conditions for the aggregation that we know as ‘QAnon.’
Here, the term: ‘do your own research’ is instructive. Among the myriad and often opposed factions of QAnon the injunction to ‘do your own research’ is a shared refrain that characterises participation in QAnon as not simply a matter of belief, but as the (by implication, inevitable) result of the individual establishing the alleged veracity of the phenomenon’s imaginary for themselves.
Said ‘research’ is largely oriented around the interpretation of events in the world with reference to the cryptic dispatches of the anonymous figure ‘Q’ (called ‘Q Drops’) which form the ur-text of the phenomenon. Per Q (in Drop 4550):
You are being presented with the gift of vision.
Ability to see [clearly] what they've hid from you for so long [illumination].
Their deception [dark actions] on full display.
People are waking up in mass.
People are no longer blind.
Rather than being a prophet bearing a revealed truth (and therefore risk reproducing the hierarchies that are seen to characterise the hegemonic episteme), Q is characterised as training participants in a way of seeing. Namely, a way of seeing that takes the contingencies that produced the present and scales them down into a format that is compatible with QAnon's conspiratorial worldview. At the same time, the Q Drops themselves are mined by participants for signification at the increasingly molecular scales: of language, data, and meta-data (actual and esoteric) to the point of (but, notably, never reaching) exhaustion.
Given these materials being originally posted exclusively to the anarchic and unarchived image boards of 4chan and 8kun (née ‘8chan’), such efforts would be extremely difficult if not for the variety of Q drop aggregators that have emerged to allow ‘research’ to take place. QAnon.pub, QMap, QAgg – these QAnon participant-built and maintained infrastructures provide the conditions for the extremely granular analysis of Q Drops at the scale of countless individual ‘researchers.’ The confluence of these minor tech infrastructures (the archives) and strategies (‘do your own research’) create the conditions from which the aggregation understood to be ‘QAnon’ emerged. Addressing the problem of QAnon therefore requires grappling with its scales, and moreover: and awareness that minor is not necessarily always ‘good.’