Toward a Minor Tech:Wilson5000
Minor Tech and Counter-revolution: Tactics, Infrastructures, QAnon
Introduction
For the large part, the contributions to this issue have discussed instances of ‘minor tech’ that offer creative and necessary operationalisations of tactics and infrastructures that are–in their deployment by big tech–exploitative, exclusionary, and often environmentally catastrophic. As such, the impression of minor tech may well be that its ‘small’ or ‘human’ scale necessarily precludes such tactics and technologies’ use in the service of a reactionary political project. Nevertheless, this article argues that QAnon can be understood as an assemblage of ‘minor techs’: small-scale contrarian practices and infrastructures whose very granularity produces the conditions for the aggregation that is known as ‘QAnon’ to occur and mutate from the cryptic missives of one ‘anon’ among many on 4chan’s /pol/ board in late 2017; to–in 2023–a global phenomenon with ominous implications for the question of post-truth’s effects on contemporary cultural and political life (see Rothschild; Sommer, Trust the Plan).
Andersen and Cox open this issue quoting Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of ‘minor literature’ as characterised by “the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective arrangement of utterance.” They go on to suggest that minor tech’s politics of scale potentially offer an analogous operation with regard to the production of autonomous – potentially revolutionary – spaces for marginalised groups. It is in this sense that this article’s contention regarding QAnon’s being a minor tech arises. Specifically, it is in the injunction to ‘do your own research.’ Among QAnon’s myriad factions the statement is a veritable refrain that characterises involvement in the phenomenon as more than simply believing its conspiratorial worldview, but rather participating in its production by investigating its veracity for oneself and, by implication, arriving at similar conclusions. While there has been some scholarly research into various aspects of QAnon’s participatory culture (de Zeeuw and Gekker; Kir et al.; Marwick and Partin; See), how this is conceptualised and enabled within the phenomenon through minor tech tactics and infrastructures remains comparatively understudied.
This article, accordingly, seeks to unpack how ‘research’ is understood within QAnon, and how this understanding is operationalised in the production of particular tools. Drawing on exemplar literature internal to the phenomenon, it will first examine discourses surrounding the question of QAnon’s inverted epistemology with particular reference to the stated purpose of ‘research’ and its perceived difference to an allegedly hegemonic (or ‘mainstream’) episteme. Following this analysis of QAnon’s internal discourses on the matter of ‘research,’ the discussion will then turn how these discourses are reflected and enacted in the ‘Q Drop’ aggregators QAnon.pub and QAgg.news (‘QAgg’). Q Drops are QAnon subjects’ term for the ambiguous dispatches made by the eponymous, mysterious figure known as ‘Q’ which form the ur-text of the phenomenon. While there is a certain consistency to the Q Drops insofar as they are concerned with the actions of Donald Trump and his allies against the nefarious ‘Deep State’ or ‘Cabal’ who are alleged to have undermined the former party’s efforts to ‘Make America Great Again,’ they are also characterised by an extreme degree of vagueness which demands epistemic work on the part of the QAnon subject.
Since these materials have been posted exclusively to anarchic and unarchived image boards – first 4chan, then 8kun (formerly 8chan) – Q Drop aggregators scrape, archive, and afford users means do ‘research’ with the Q Drops. A notable feature of the Q Drop aggregators is their increasing complexity over time: where QAnon.pub (established March 2018) is effectively wholly concerned enabling the analysis of the content of Q Drops, QAgg (April 2019) mines Drops for actual and esoteric meta-data, supposedly encrypted additional information that pushes the Q Drops’ semiosis to the point of potential exhaustion. The increasing granularity of how Q Drops are interpreted and applied in the ‘research’ afforded by QAgg specifically reflects a broader tendency towards the molecular intensification of QAnon subjects and speaks to a broader argument regarding precisely the ‘minor’ quality of QAnon’s technical apparatuses that make its reactionary manifestation at scale possible.
‘Research’ at a Human Scale
Despite the centrality of Q to the worldview of QAnon, they do not present themselves as, nor are they taken to be, a prophet bearing a revealed truth. Instead, Q characterises themselves as instructing their followers in what might be understood as a degraded form of ideology critique wherein the asserted reality of the phenomenon’s worldview is rendered visible in the mediatic traces of the world:
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. (Q Drop 4550, square brackets in original)[1]
‘Research’ in QAnon is typically characterised by the mapping of contemporary events to the content or metadata of Q Drops by QAnon subjects, with Q occasionally intervening to correct or confirm QAnon subjects’ inferences and findings. Beyond the initial series of Drops where Q claimed that the arrest of Hillary Clinton was imminent – “between 7:45 AM - 8:30 AM EST on Monday - the morning on Oct 30, 2017” (1) – they very rarely make explicit claims as to the future. Instead, Q tends to vaguely intone on contemporary events or ‘correct’/‘verify’ the findings of QAnon subjects. Here, the failed prediction that was the basis of the very first Q Drop is illustrative. While Hillary Clinton was not arrested, the 2017-2019 Saudi Arabian purge began some days after the first Q Drop (namely, on the 4th of November 2017) with a wave of arrests across the Gulf State. In response, a user of 4chan’s /pol/ board posited that it was in fact this event that Q was in fact alluding to (fig. 1). Per Q in their reply to said user: “Very smart, Anon. Disinformation is real. Distractions are necessary” (72). In essence, the first Q Drops were framed as about the then-forthcoming purge, with the discussion of Hillary Clinton being misdirection to run cover for this operation.
[1] Hereafter Q Drops are referenced as ‘(Drop number).’ Drop numbers are digits that mark where a particular Drop is located in the chronological sequence of Q’s posts as they appear within the interface of a Q Drop aggregator. While there is some disagreement as to what is and is not an authentic Q Drop among Q Drop aggregators and therefore some disparities in the Drop numbers for specific Drops (Aliapoulios et al.), the numbering of Q Drops between this paper’s case studies is identical and therefore used herein.