Most people made aware of a plot to kidnap and murder children on an industrial scale would want to do something about it. It is hardly surprising that Edgar Maddison Welch, learning of such a wicked scheme, and outraged that law enforcement agencies were doing nothing, took matters into his own hands.
On 4 December 2016, Welch brought an assault rifle and handgun down to Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria in Washington DC, to liberate the children held captive there in the basement. But he found no children and no basement.
That setback didn’t put a stop to “Pizzagate”, a deranged fantasy among online sleuths who had identified Comet Ping Pong as the hub for a satanic paedophile ring based around Hillary Clinton’s presidential election campaign. As with so many conspiracy theories, the absence of supporting evidence could be folded back into the original narrative as proof of a cover-up.
That self-replicating mechanism is deftly unpacked by James Ball in The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World. It is a disturbing study of the origins and resilience of an exceptionally versatile and pernicious network of paranoid digital malcontents.
Pizzagate is just one subplot in the sprawling edifice of QAnon belief. Adherents are lured into the faith down any number of channels – Donald Trump fandom; vaccine hesitancy; self-pitying adolescent video-gamer virginity recast as militant misogyny. Followers are then radicalised by cultish solidarity, the thrill of belonging to a crusading gang, and by social media algorithms that reinforce prejudice and exclude dissent.
In some respects, QAnon is a rehash of old conspiracy theories, drawing on established tropes from the analogue age: a vast secret world government; antisemitic “blood libels” about ritual child murder that date back centuries. But the 21st-century version is also indigenous to the internet, emerging from a roiling soup of nerdy chatrooms, then evolving to thrive across a range of digital ecosystems.
Ball, a former Guardian journalist, was once an habitué of 4chan, the platform where the anonymous “Q” first posted tantalising clues about an unfolding plot at the apex of power. That experience equips him well for the task of sequencing the movement’s cultural and social DNA.
He is especially insightful on the influence of online role-playing games and the cultivated ambiguity around what is meant to be taken seriously and what comes draped in irony. The original trolling ethos was steeped in nihilistic mischief, breaking taboos for the sake of it, transgressing for thrills.
That slippery joking-not-joking idiom made it hard for mainstream politics to get a purchase on QAnon before it found its real-life incarnation in Donald Trump. The full scale of the cult, and the threat it posed to a democratic society, only registered for many people when its digital fingerprints turned up all over the capitol insurrection that tried to thwart Joe Biden’s inauguration as Trump’s successor.
The insurgents’ failure provoked premature forecasts of QAnon’s demise. Instead, the virus mutated and spread. For Ball, that is not a biological metaphor. He argues from Darwinian principles, via Richard Dawkins’s original coinage of the word “meme” for a self-replicating unit of cultural evolution, that QAnon is best understood as a literal pathogen. It is a pandemic ravaging democratic discourse in the same way that Covid-19 assaulted respiratory tracts.
That raises a teasing question, unanswered in the book, about the equivalent pathological status of longer established irrational belief systems. Should the world’s major religions, all of which have inspired crazed acts of violence throughout history, also be treated as social diseases?
Ball can hardly be blamed for swerving that digression when the task of charting one multi-faceted digital cult is complex enough. No less tricky is the question of a remedy. The most common treatments are factchecking and ridicule, which succeed only in driving devotees deeper into social segregation. Old fashioned refutation with evidence can’t achieve much without wider reform of the digital infrastructure that creates nesting grounds for the malignant info-disease.
Besides, mistrust in politics has been debilitating democratic immune systems since before social media incubated this new strain of conspiracy theory. That, Ball concludes, is a chronic condition for which there is no quick technological fix.
• The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World is published by Bloomsbury (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
