https://medium.com/deep-code/making-sense-of-qanon-220966667e8d

Part 4. Knock, Knock, Neo.

This brings us to the importance and fascination of Q.

I know for certain that I can’t make any sense of the thing at ground level. Is it a LARP? A sophisticated operation by some intelligence agency? A weaponized autist? The Donald himself? There are many rabbit holes here — and a lot of folks have been diving into them head first. Care to have an opinion? Knock yourself out.

But if I pull up to 40,000 feet, I can start to make sense of what kind of thing this is and what it means in the context of the larger changes discussed above: Q is the most recent and most important example of a widely distributed self-organizing collective intelligence.

We’ve actually seen many precursors. Cicada 3301 is a famous example. Even the I Love Bees ARG for Halo 2. Perhaps Bitcoin is the most important precursor to Q.

These “self-organizing collective intelligences” (SOCI), are a new kind of socio-cultural phenomenon that is beginning to emerge in the niche created by the Internet. They involve attractive generator functions dropped into the hive mind that gather attention, use that attention to build more capacity and then grow into something progressively real and self-sustaining.

The Q SOCI is, for the most part, about sensemaking. It is combing through the billions of threads of “what might be real” and “what might be true” that have been gathered into the Internet and it is slowly trying to weave them into a consistent, coherent and congruent fabric. In the transition from Wonderland, sensemaking is so obviously needed that millions of people are viscerally attracted to the SOCI. The shared desire to wake up from Wonderland and have some firm notion of what is real and true is proving a powerful attractor.

This is how it seems to work: People come to Q with a desire to know “the truth”. They bring with them a whole pile of pre-conceived notions of what is true and real and, more importantly, pre-conceived constructs for how these all fit together into a consistent world-model.

This collection of curious seekers and their collection of experiences, notions and frameworks is the beginning of the collective mind of Q. At first, this mind shows up as a completely incoherent bramble of truth, falsity, clarity and dysfunctional nonsense.

But then the collective intelligence gets to work. Slowly, fitfully, the attention of the SOCI begins to orient towards the most complete and inclusive world-models and weeds-out those that fail to maintain consistency with either other world-models or large chunks of “facts” (e.g., flat-earth models got more or less weeded out early).

In the meantime, new facts are constantly surfaced — with various levels of provenance (i.e., some are well founded, others are pure conjecture, still others are lies). Some are “hinted” by Q drops and questions. These invariably stir up a frenzy of “digging” and more or less wild speculation. Others are brought in by the distributed members of the SOCI — posted to the chans, in myriad forums, in YouTube videos.

All of this is collectively processed by the “Q community.” Models and hypotheses are proposed (often willy nilly) that try to make sense of some set of information. The most compelling are shared through the distributed network of the SOCI where they are integrated, modified and brought into further consistency with the larger set of meta-models…