On January 6, 2021, an unusual event occurred in the history of the United States. Within the framework of the ratification of the presidential votes and with a delirious Trump alleging irregularities in the count, a group of demonstrators managed to jump the security barriers and invade the Capitol (a sort of democratic bastion for the American civic culture). In the midst of a media noise, photographs and videos circulated in social networks of the looting at the hands of a mob of fanatics with kitsch imagery that resembled a delirious episode of the Simpsons. For the world, I believe that for the first time, the strength of the Trumpist "grassroots", formed by years of fake news construction and degradation of the public scene, became apparent.
How had it come to this situation? Who was behind it? And, above all, who made up the masses that stormed this place? Although the documentary series recently released on HBO does not directly address the event, it does take it as a starting point to reconstruct the "Qanon movement" and its role behind it all. Seen in this light, the seizure of the Capitol seems to be just the tip of the iceberg of a much more complex phenomenon that the series seeks to unravel.
From the angle of the "investigative journalist on the scene" over the course of six episodes, director Cullen Hoback (with production by Adam Mckay) dives headfirst into a story involving internet forums, incel culture, bot accounts, conspiracy theories and white supremacism, from the voice of three indelible and bizarre characters: Jim Watkins, Ron Watkins and Fredrick Brennan. Who are they? They are the people behind the massive site 8Chan, formed by users "expelled" or "self-expelled" from 4Chan (where it all originated), both Internet forums dedicated to all kinds of topics, but whose controversy arises when users begin to traffic pornography and, above all, to generate hate speech and supremacism using the defense of the "first amendment" as an excuse.
To understand a little of all this culture, the series goes back to the "gamergate", a "coming out" of the incel culture that harassed female video game creators, causing a stir in 2014. A viral funa that two years later would take the form of a plot to accuse a Democratic Party politician of pedophilia and child trafficking, which was supposed to occur behind a pizzeria (the so-called "pizzagate"). This is the beginning of the era of fake news, but also of the ideological consolidation of a strategy, at the center of which is "Q", an anonymous figure who emerges from the background of these forums and sends cryptic messages with supposed secret information about political operations against Trump.
Hoback takes two chapters to get us into all this context to then begin to delve into the relationship between the Watkins (Jim and Ron: father and son) and Fredrick Brennan (founder of 8Chan) as a result of the conflicts that arise when the Q phenomenon begins to take off. This takes force when Q posts a series of cryptic messages with very elaborate codes that made mention of a plot against Trump ("Deep state", they call it), which feeds a sort of state of paranoia thanks to which groups of very diverse people -evangelicals, incels, retired military, rednecks, etc.- begin to take this theory seriously. are beginning to take this theory seriously: a sort of general distrust of the media and political institutions, which has as its background an elaborate media campaign that allowed legitimizing the accusation of cheating in the vote count during the vote for Trump's reelection (and which led to the seizure of the Capitol).
Now who is Q really? Part of the "mystery" of the series is based on this search, one that elaborates theses such as that it is part of Trump's cabinet, Trump himself, or the Watkins themselves. The latter is quite curious, because Q would have "chosen" their forums to speak to his followers in that way, while it is not clear the boundary between the programmers of the forums and Q's posts (the series bets its own theory here). This is registered with Watkins' evasive statements, while Brennan realizes the limit to where his own creation has reached, when psychopaths who shoot migrants or African Americans in cold blood post in the forum and are celebrated with festive memes, motivating new attacks, a matter that leads him to retract and ally with another hacker, now against Jim Watkins.
The characters of Jim and Ron, sort of degraded pirates from the catacombs, are part of the spice of the series. Jim, who finances the site, is a businessman based in the Philippines who takes advantage of the legal loopholes of freedom of expression in each country to finance XXX sites or forums with supremacist ideologies, feeding the incel niche. Ron is a gamer programmer allied to his father, who clearly knows more than he lets on, but plays with leaving clues feeding his narcissism. The two end up in a legal confrontation against Brennan, ruining him financially and expelling him from the Philippines. Anyway, the plot between the power of social networks, the digital algorithm and the construction of an esoteric crypticism to exalt mistrust and hatred towards the other are brutally exposed in the seizure of the Capitol, and tells us that what is or was at stake in the Trump era overflows the simplism of a recognizable fascist form, typical of the twentieth century.
This new mutation takes shape from the background of the junk culture of the internet, but also of Hacker culture, of Anonymous, to reconvert it into dystopia and savage individualism, a sort of reactionary and anti-political counterculture at the service of the thirst for power and social chaos. A force that corrodes the social bases from within, sustained in an epochal climate of resentment and need for self-affirmation of communities that (self-)imagine themselves segregated and removed from elitism, and that discourses such as Q and Trump seek to convey.
The series does not end up clarifying which came first, Qanon or Trump, but it is undeniable that both phenomena are linked, generating a cult of Trump's personality. It also makes it clear that the moment he begins to lose legitimate presence in the institutional field, the former president begins to openly play with Q's keys for his followers, feeding fake news and even going so far as to deny the existence of the Coronavirus, all this accompanied by bots and "alternative media". The age of the algorithm has produced new monsters, followers and social networks take the lead in a world where everyone is connected to the matrix. So it seems to be understood by Brennan's new partner, a former Anonymous willing to play against Q and Watkins' group by feeding fake news in the opposite direction.
In any case, the series is about, as the Tiqqun collective has long been saying, the "ongoing cyberwar", a process that forces us to rethink political strategies in the age of algorithms and information, a new "governmentality" based on neural networks, feedbacks and flow captors, which behind the feeding of individual freedom replicates a new type of voluntary servitude. Qanon thus personifies this particular submission through the capture of cybernetic codes to realize a new type of crypto-fascism.
