I would not be surprised to learn that flat earth theories started as satire online, but it slowly turned into a theory for people who didn't know any better. I would also not be surprised to learn that QANON simply started out as trolling and morphed into the weird following it now has.
> Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company.
Since then, this has always been one of the most overused 4chan memes, with more than 100 variants of cute image macros. I always assumed it was a 4chan meme, and it was a huge surprise for me when I realized it actually came from Hacker News... Top 4chan meme from Hacker News?! It was beyond my imagination, I obviously underestimated the richness of cultural exchanges online.
And it was from a well-known x264/ffmpeg developer...
There is also an old 4chan truism from the 2010s for that, "It's Still Shitposting Even If You Are Being Ironic", also one of the most overused 4chan meme of all time, with hundreds of cute image macros [0].
Speaking of 4chan, I found its trolling and politics are extremely objectionable, yet there's a lot of psychology and sociology to be learned here, especially the mechanisms commonly found in an online community. QAnon is an excellent case study on how a self-organized online community can create an influential meme that eventually affected mass psychology.
In the case of q-anon, that is exactly what happened. 4chan trolls were throwing spaghetti at the wall, seeing what would stick. Q-anon happened to stick, and off the rails it went.
There's been a bunch of people who have had "control" over Q in the past few years. The current Q, Jim Watkins, is thankfully the laziest and most boring of them, and hopefully the entire thing fades away after the election.
> 4chan trolls were throwing spaghetti at the wall, seeing what would stick. Q-anon happened to stick, and off the rails it went.
It's just like how 100% of the memes are created on 4chan, the mechanism is the same, applicable from cat pictures to political propaganda. Since 2016 or so, there has been much talk about "weaponized memes" on 4chan that was mostly a meme by itself initally (I was a witness there in 2016), but based on the situation by now it's unfortunately surely a real thing, and even MIT Technology Review has an article [0]. It feels surreal. What an interesting time to be alive! A bunch of random grassroot web dwellers can create something out of nothing by natural selection and genetic exchanges, and by attracting conspiracy zealots in this process, it will eventually become big enough to make an impact on national politics.
20 years ago, it was a Sci-Fi plot. Although Usenet already foreshadowed many social aspects of online communities (I could find conspiracy materials even from the early ARPA archives), but nowhere influential.
One comment mentioned the changed perception of free speech before and after the 2010s, and this is an important contributing factor. Perhaps the society will learn to better adapt the new meme order in another decade.
