The changing digital government: the political adaptation of interactive virtuality in QAnon code

Abstract

The QAnon phenomenon, and its correlates in European countries, are part of the social and epistemological conflicts that characterize our polarized sociopolitical board. Conspiracy theories are no longer all minority eccentricities. They already form our social identity. This process has been reinforced by partisan media and social polarization, but, How did we get here? What are the technological foundations and logic that shape and propagate the far-right boom on a global scale? The conditions of possibility for these movements are not limited, as Zuboff suggests, to the language of survival that enables and drives large social media companies and their allies (Interweb). Its spread is mainly due to the political ambiguity that surveillance capitalism in its current digital turn brings with it, where we do not know if social order and government is in the hands of legitimate government or in the hands of capital, if the forces of order in the Capitol on January 6 they obeyed the denialist Trump, ultra-liberal, tycoon or the outgoing Trump president. It is also largely due to the mobilization possibilities offered by the Interweb. In other words, the Interweb has overflowed to the point of extending its logics and associations to reality, now irremediably augmented. At first, we pointed out the importance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, their centrality in the management of added value or supervalue associated with our preferences, tastes, in short, of everything susceptible to dataification, digitization. We then proceed to consider how the circulation of all kinds of communications and content that circulate on the Interweb, and the possibilities of mobilization and action that its design and operation predispose, give rise to the compendium of post-truths, denialism and atavistic behavior (and supremacist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, misogynistic...) that make up the far-right populist phenomenon known as QAnon. Our main intention here is to repair the relationships between the "destructive populism" represented by QAnon (on a global scale, with different names) and the reciprocal influences between digital expressive media and ideologies (Sampedro, 2021, personal comment).