Anonymous declares war on Qanon

Life imitating Foucault’s Pendulum imitating life?

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\begin{monotone sarcasm}
This will end well.
\end{monotone sarcasm}

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What do you mean by this? Do you mean that there are no people that hack, prank and socially engineer under the auspices of ‘Anonymous’? Because if your objection is just that the ensemble is not organized or cohesive, then that (and the explication of “Anonymous declares war” as a figure of speech for “some members urge a collective action”) is explained in Mr. Doctorow’s article.

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Anonymous declares war on Qanon

Where or where have they been hiding these past 2 years?

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That’s all the people running that twitter account do, run a twitter account on which they make ridiculous pronouncements and once in a while create a video with distorted voice over audio and lots of neat video game inspired motion graphics. Anonymous, this mythical distributed collective of hackers who allegedly expose injustice blah blah blah doesn’t exist. It’s just a made up image. “They” whoever “they” are, are completely ineffective. Remember that time when they vowed to expose all the law enforcement and elected officials with ties to the KKK and other white supremacy groups? LOL, yeah, get back to me on that.

Here are some examples, from this very site, of what a stupid waste of time it is to cover “Anonymous”:

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What I mean by that is that around every six to twelve months or so, some gullible journos write a headline such as the above, “Anonymous declares war on…” or “Anonymous vows to expose …” and exactly nothing happens. “Anonymous” promised to expose all the KKK and other white supremacists in police forces as well as in government after the Michael Brown shooting. Zilch. Bupkis. Anonymous was supposed to get their hands on Trump’s tax returns and release them, ahahahahaa, yeah, ok. Remember when Anonymous told ISIS to disband? Anonymous is just bunch of trollies on the internet making neat videos with cool sound effects, who issue sternly worded twitter threats and accomplish exactly nothing. So, Anonymous as we are led to believe they are, the powerful shadowy decentralized collective of hackers, doesn’t exist. Anonymous, the bullshit twitter based group of trollies, does.

Here are some examples, from this very site, of what a stupid waste of time it is to cover “Anonymous”:

im-in-anonymous-i-think

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Theism is at its root, an attempt to explain natural processes through empathy: (thing) happend because (God/Gods/Bavarian Illuminati) wanted it to happen, and the reason they wanted it is (some version of a human desire: jealousy, love, anger etc)

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It doesn’t make the trolls smarter, it makes them the same trolls as always pretending to always be smarter no matter what dumb stuff they said in the past. I mean on election night it was flooded with people bashing Trump and talking about how stupid MAGA was, because it’s more important to be on the latest trend and anonymity and lack of community means you can pretend it was never you on the wrong side.

And the “leftist” portion of /pol/ are just as myopic and cool with white nationalism as everything else. Even if it was a prank at first by someone knowingly choosing the novel Q instead of knowing the security clearance, the torch was carried far beyond that initial post and became a real thing keeping the pizzagate stuff alive since it was all the same people involved basically.

And the 30 year old boomer meme itself hasn’t spread very far, because it is extremely dumb. I mean, below the normal low bar.

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What website is that from, just so I never accidentally end up there?

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When you see something that looks like that it’s probably from 4chan. That’s what image boards look like. The green background is because it’s from one of the websites that automatically archive posts from 4chan that hit the bump limit. Orange is from a NSFW board, and blue is from a SFW board.

The crappy drawn image is a variation of several memes that the green text represents, originally starting as a myopic self-reflection and winding up as standard bullying.

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Ah, that’s why it’s so unfamiliar… I’ve never once been on 4Chan; the site already had a toxic rep when I first heard of it.

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Yes. 4Chan. And no, you don’t ever want to end up there. I am still haunted by the shit from 10 years ago!

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Well, that and the simple fact that the right tends to accuse the left of what the right is doing.

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I mean it’s the source of this QAnon crap (a retread of pizzagate), pizzagate (a retread of gamergate), and gamergate along with many of the other toxic trends in politics.

The problem is 4chan became this way because is didn’t moderate heavily, and had places where it really didn’t moderate at all. Twitter’s current state is basically the same as 4chan a long time ago, then it got worse, got slightly better, and then gamergate and the 2016 election happened. Now they have fairly heavy human moderation to keep the different boards on topic and the creator abandoned ship.

It’s still one of the best places to go for tabletop pdfs, but how far /pol/ reaches makes posting basically impossible.

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If I’ve avoided it all these years, I think I can easily continue to do so.

Even if it were not a digital cesspool, which it most certainly is, that user interface looks utterly atrocious.

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The Qanon thing has been going on for a long while now, and has only been growing. If anything, the spotlight seems to be making it wilt.

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You do know that you don’t need to post info twice here, yeah?

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There isn’t so much a rise in conspiracy theories, but a rise in the visibility of conspiracy theories. I’d recommend Jesse Walker’s The United States of Paranoia. (I disagree with his main thesis, a refutation of Hofstader’s claim that conspiracy and paranoia are limited to the fringes except in times crisis and increased stress, because his taxonomy of paranoia is organized exclusively in regards to its direction, not its severity). Whether it’s a red under every bed, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Anti-Masons, etc. etc., this goes back as long as civilization.

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Qanon told the world that “John Podesta is going to be arrested on Nov. 4th 2017 and riots will start in several major cities as the military takes control”, and it didn’t happen, BUT they still keep believing Qanon is real, so how can anyone stop Qanon? It’s like arguing the logistics of Noah’s Ark with a Creationist.

Even if the person/persons behind Qanon comes out and admits it was just trolling, there will still be dumb-ass Trumplidites saying “it’s all part of the plan.”

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