Supplemental Post #5 - Andrea

Although I watched primarily out of my own curiosity and a desire to absolve myself of my own ignorance, I can't help but see connections between the new HBOMax Qanon documentary "Q: Into the Storm" and the readings this week. We've dabbled a bit into discussions of Qanon over the past few weeks, but I feel like getting the full backstory on 8chan and alt-right media (beyond the alt-right, white supremaxist content we see in the news repeatedly) connected deeply with Tara's own text, "Reload: Liveness, Mobility, and the Web." 

The documentary takes great pains to demonstrate the highly structured, bureaucratic online community called Q Research (the use of "research" here was funny to me initially, but the "investigations" the qanons embark on definitely takes "work" in a strange sense), and the network empires that spawned from the board. The board itself has dedicated mods and admins devoted to unpacking Q's "messages" and "codes," and the qtubers and q-influencers have the job of spreading those messages more broadly- hence why your weird older uncle is exposed to the same nazi memes as a 24 year old incel on 8chan. 

I related the fear mongering present throughout the documentary to Taras's idea of scanning-and-searching, or as she writes, "The scan-and-search is about a fear of missing the next experience or the next piece of data," continuing, "this fear of missing in the Web propels us elsewhere, on to the next chunk...into what feels like navigable space that responds to our desire" (204). In addition to the fear of missing out on a new message or prophecy from Q, there's an additional fear that failing to interpret Q's messages in time will lead to the collapse of the American empire by the hands of the "liberals" or the Kabal. At the end of the documentary (spoilers?), it's implied that an administrator of 8chan/8kun is actually Q, and his own nihilistic ambitions for power and infamy combine with the desire to market 8chan as the only place on the internet protecting "free speech." The intersections of media, community, hysteria, and marketing in the documentary speak to the political and economic aspects of this media convergence Tara discusses in the text as well.