I haven’t heard anything about them in quite a while. It’s like they were a hot-button topic of conversation, and then everyone just stopped talking about them. If they’re still around, what would be the reason they seemingly disappeared from the news?
It'd be genuinely moving, if it was about anything else. The last hold outs of a wilder Internet? I'd cry. A bunch of dipshits clinging desperately to a storm of nonsense? Only tears that'd come from that is if i laughed too hard.
There was a time when all the best stuff, the most enlightened, the most accurate, the best analysis of society as a whole, the memes all came from 4chan.
The problem was that it was full of pure shit too.
I'll live and die by the need for freedom of speech and anonymity in discourse at least in a lot of places. Because its far to valuable without it. But now people are too weak to even handle someone telling then to go kill themselves so they can't hand all the other shit.
The prime of the Internet is gone forever. We rapidly moving into corporate 1984.
Don’t forget the people with active unmanaged mental illness. They will 100% believe in their delusional thoughts and won’t have the insight to know that they’re ill.
Yes, but that subculture has always been there, looking to latch on to the next new obsession or more aptly for the obsession to latch on to them. In fact, in some ways it used to be kind of quaint to read some truly off the wall posts from the ancient days of r/conspiracy circa 2008 where the lines blurred and you didn't quite know if you were witnessing unadulterated, unchecked madness or the well rehearsed LARPing of some terminally online troglodyte.
Then all of a sudden it turned into this entirely different thing where it became clear to me at least that there was a loosely organized group of people with severely warped and nihilistic ambitions that were attempting to bridge the gap and conduct a social experiment where they wanted to see how far their weaponized autism could infect into the real world. The answer was all the way to the president of the United States. It was both strange and fascinating. Maybe we will all be so lucky that it will just be left as some obscure footnote of history, but I doubt it. The systemic realities that lead to Q are still there, and future versions of this kind of parasitic mind viruse will be much worse as technology continues to improve. What it will look like, I don't know, but I'm not eager to find out either.
Q would leave breadcrumbs, because he needed to be as vague as possible to sound like he knew what was going to happen, right? The people who would interpret those breadcrumbs were called bakers. Yes, I know breadcrumbs are from bread that's already been baked, but that's what they decided to call themselves to create an Us vs Them feel. So the "bread" in this image means there are things to be interpreted or reinterpreted yet.
kinda miss 4chan sometimes. btw if you're trying to censor the slurs, you missed one (the one for "newbie", though I'm enough of an oldfag to know that's just how 4chan talks)
These things always go this way. Society has seen them before and society will see them again. There's always some Doomsday Cult out there predicting the end, predicting upheaval, appealing to the viewer to make them feel special, sell them this idea that they and only they have seen the truth. The end of the world is July 14th, the end of the world was really September 22nd, come along, feel special, feel fear but exhilaration, and while you do, your money will soon be useless so you may as well give it to me!
And when the dates go by and nothing happens, when enough questions go unanswered, when enough predictions are unfulfilled... eventually the shorn sheep return to their pen, their field, and pretend it never happened. It would be too terrible for introspection, too painful to recognize you weren't special, just another rube. Every relationship you threw away was sacrificed in vain, every dollar you threw at the prophet was just his fee for how good you felt. Like a drug. And just like addiction, you don't ever have to come face-to-face with your victims and your failure, your pride doesn't have to take a hit. Ignore the people who hold you accountable, thrust your head in the sand, it was a misunderstanding, maybe the details were wrong, you never really believed it anyway...
And just like a drug, if you never stop to connect the dots, to come to grips with what it did to you and those you love, when the next hit is offered, you take it. Now, this is a new prophet. This time, it's for real. The world will end on May 8th. I always knew in my heart something was coming, I just listened to the wrong prophet... Got the year wrong. Got the cause wrong. This time it's for real. I want to be special. I've seen the secret truth. The message is for real this time! Last time it was just a test...
The internet amplifies these people, makes them brave, but they've always been there if you knew where to look. It's a fundamental flaw in our species. I don't know if it will ever go away.
It was a LARP that got jacked by Jim and Ron Watkins. Of course the Russians did everything they could to spread and benefit from QAnon, but, no, they didn't start it.
I still can't believe anyone fell for that, it was literally a joke on 4chan. Literally some random people on 4chan thought it would be funny and started making up the most unbelievable shit and people thought it was real. If you don't believe me just look up some of the conspiracy theories and tell me they didn't start as a joke made up by /pol/tards.
It even says on the website that everything posted is satire and only an idiot would think it's real. Pretty much in those words too, and that shit was all over the news and everything.
Alot of these conservative “movements” come and go pretty quickly, seemingly overnight, as soon as they’ve fulfilled whatever use they had. They’ll pop up to rant & rave and grab headlines for whatever idiotic/heartless/cruel thing. Then, after a few waves of outrage and meme counter-attacks, when the spotlight is starting to fade, it’s like whatever group originally funded them pulls the plug and they just sort of disappear.
They don't disappear, the people still exist. They just change the justification for their actions. They can't say out loud their real motivation: they desire a hierarchy where they are on top and others are below them.
Just remember that. It's not about democracy or freedom or even religion or the economy. Conservatives want to be on top. They want an authoritarian leader to put everyone in their place. Do not argue with them about policy details. They value hierarchy more than anything.
Most of what they were talking about had something to do with the Trump presidency. That is long over by now, it has now become clear to everyone that Biden isn't going to be replaced by Trump except through an election.
They became absorbed by the republican party who tempered the insanity (though still clearly insane) so that they could keep some semblance of normalcy to retain followers.
They’re still out there. People seem to think there needs to be a centralized platform or symbol for them to exist. Most of us, I’d guess, are ex-Reddit or have frequented enough social media platforms for us to have curated our feed to limit the noise, limiting comms to those we follow or friends. Or at least I have. That excludes the insanity that is the open-to-the-public postings of every stripe ever. Nextdoor. Facebook. The comments section on popular news sites. Heck, even here where we defederate stuff like hexbear. The comments immediately degrade into fear, hate, paranoia, racism, lib-bashing, conspiracy theories, JAQing off, and everything else we’ve seen before.
Just because we don’t hear the Q noise doesn’t mean they’re disappearing. They may not cling to the “Q” part, but they haven’t changed. They just make up new memes, but it’s the same old hateful insanity. They very much still exist.
Since my comment was removed, I'll just state objective facts: there was never any evidence to support the conspiracy posted by this 4Chan commentor. The hysteria around it eventually died out.
They "disappeared from the news" because idiots like you stopped giving them a mouthpiece.
Edit: I think I understand the confusion. I'm not saying that idiots believing in some 4Channer whose name I won't mention never existed. I'm saying they shouldn't have.
If someone posted an anonymous message to the internet tonight saying the sky is green, no one would care. We would just move on. But if the news gave them power by saying "People claim the sky is green?!? Is it a conspiracy?!?" over and over again? And gave them a cute little nickname like greenanon?
Eventually they might gain a following. Of idiots. And everyone who continued to give them power, by legitimizing them and saying things like "hey what happened to Greenanon?" are also idiots.
Of course. There was never any evidence to suggest that anything that random 4Channer said was true, but it sparked controversy and made for a good headline, so people who can't bother to think for themselves ate it up, until the more intelligent of them realized there wasn't actually anything to back it up, and presumably moved on to the next click bait headline that grabbed their attention.