Toward a Minor Tech:Wilson 500

It’s Minor Tech, Just Not How We Want It

Jack Wilson

From an 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 which, in turn, suggests that QAnon itself is a commensurately massive product of what this publication terms ‘major tech.’

Certainly, QAnon’s myriad articulations across the web represents a major problem for the future of a politics based on mutual intelligibility and was – for a time – exasperated by the scale and reach of the major social media platforms, the contemporary salience of QAnon cannot be understood as a function of major tech. Rather, QAnon is best understood as an assemblage ‘minor techs’: small-scale 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 QAnon participants in a way of seeing – where, of course, the result is the deterritorialization of the world in terms of the QAnon’s conspiratorial worldview. Towards this end, Q Drops are mined by participants for signification at the level 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. Called 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 that we understand as ‘QAnon’ to emerge. Addressing the problem of QAnon therefore requires grappling with its scales, and moreover: and awareness that minor is not necessarily ‘good.’