From Crumbs to Conspiracy: Qanon as a community of hermeneutic practice Rose See April 30, 2019 Senior Thesis, Department of Sociology and Anthropology Swarthmore College Adviser: Maya Nadkarni Second reader: Christopher Fraga See 1 Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................................... 2 What is Qanon? ......................................................................................................................................... 7 Chapter 1: Literature review ....................................................................................................................... 15 Anthropology of conspiracy theories ...................................................................................................... 15 Anthropology of digital communities ..................................................................................................... 21 Political extremism and the Alt Right. .................................................................................................... 26 Right-wing worldview ........................................................................................................................ 31 Chapter 2: Methodology and informational ecology .................................................................................. 35 4Chan and 8Chan .................................................................................................................................... 35 Methodology ........................................................................................................................................... 39 Informational ecology ............................................................................................................................. 41 Chapter 3: Formation of a community ofherrneneutic practice ................................................................. 50 Ethnography ............................................................................................................................................ 51 Qanon's analytical style .......................................................................................................................... 53 Textual analysis of post 14 ..................................................................................................................... 60 Social biographies ................................................................................................................................... 74 The production of knowing subjects ....................................................................................................... 78 Cultural constitution ................................................................................................................................ 83 Archival impulses ................................................................................................................................... 85 Chapter 4: Epistemology ............................................................................................................................. 90 The Mainstream Media ........................................................................................................................... 90 Unification .............................................................................................................................................. 94 Existential battle or a game? ................................................................................................................... 99 Individual autonomy ............................................................................................................................. 103 Hope and despair ................................................................................................................................... 105 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................ 110 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................................. 113 Appendix ................................................................................................................................................... 118 Figure 1 ................................................................................................................................................. 118 Figure 2 ................................................................................................................................................. 119 See 2 Introduction I grew up around various conspiracy theories - one of my close family members became a staunch subscriber to the anti-vaccination agenda when I was in high school, and has always entertained conservative conspiratorial ideas, including the theory that Obama's birth certificate is falsified. Growing up in this context has fed into my interest as to why such extreme claims, which seem entirely baseless and disconnected from reality, become compelling to so many individuals. It is easy to dismiss conspiratorial claims as merely the result of human irrationality and fearmongering. However, I think this is an oversimplification. It is a way of dismissing, rather than addressing, the factors that contribute to conspiracy. "Irrationality" is an explanation we use to avoid actually engaging with the issue at hand, and is a label fundamentally lacking in nuance. This is not to say that we should try to normalize or justify the factual inexactitude of conspiracy, but rather, that we must look at why conspiracy, regardless of its truth value, can become such a central and compelling aspect of some worldviews. With this background in mind, my interest was piqued when I stumbled upon the Pizzagate conspiracy. This theory began in 2016 and was based upon emails hacked from John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, and distributed through WikiLeaks. These emails were combed through by right-wing groups on digital media sites and formed the basis of the Pizzagate theory. "In the span of a few weeks, a false rumor that Hillary Clinton and her top aides were involved in various crimes snowballed into a wild conspiracy theory that they were See 3 running a child-trafficking ring out of a Washington pizza parlor" (Aisch et ai, 2016). As internet actors decoded these releases, they concluded that Comet Ping Pong, a Pizzeria in Washington, DC, was the center of a child sex trafficking ring associated with the Clintons and other prominent Democrats. This theory had such salience that on December 4, 2016, Edgar M. Welch, a 28-year-old from North Carolina, stormed the restaurant with a handgun and assault rifle in search of the sex trafficking ring, supposedly hidden in a nonexistent basement (Aisch et ai, 2016). This series of events was the motivation for my thesis, making me wonder how leaked emails could be taken up and decoded in such a compelling way as to gain a massive online following and result in a physical assault. I was especially interested in how conspiracy and digital media worked together to produce this series of events. These two factors-familial connections with conspiratorial thought and intrigue over Pizzagate-Ied me to center my thesis around alt-right conspiracies in online communities. While Pizzagate was the first target of my interest, I ended up focusing on Qanon, a conspiracy theory built around a series of cryptic, anonymous posts, which posit that Trump is engaged in a war against the Deep State!. In formulating my thesis, I was concerned with the role and nature of conspiracy, as well as its intersections with digital media and the US social and political environment. What makes conspiracy so compelling? How does conspiracy operate as a mode of understanding, and what truths does it reflect about those who invest it with meaning? How are these forms of understanding tied to social and political realities? What forms of community and subjectivity are enacted by conspiracy, especially in conjunction with digital media? Because I evaluate these questions in the context of Qanon, thorough background on this conspiracy and its 1 According to Dictionary.com, "The Deep State is believed to be a clandestine network entrenched inside the govermnent, bureaucracy, intelligence agencies, and other govermnental entities. The Deep State supposedly controls state policy behind the scenes, while the democratically-elected process and elected officials are merely figureheads. " See 4 community is necessary for an in-depth discussion of these questions, which I address later in this introduction. But first, I will offer a preliminary outline of my research and its implications. Three areas of study shaped my research. In the first, I focused on the discursive elements of conspiracy within Qanon. I was concerned with how conspiracy operates as a specific analytical process and mode of understanding. This included evaluating both the processes and products of conspiratorial analysis. In the second, I studied the forms of community constituted through conspiracy, as well as the processes of subjectification involved. This allowed for a consideration of how conspiracy produces identification, and what kinds of belonging and subjectivity are fostered by it. In the third, I evaluated the epistemology formed through conspiracy.