Is QAnon a ‘pandemic’ – and do we need a digital WHO?

It seems like a tidy premise: what if a direct comparison could be made between sickness and bad ideas? We are, more than ever, used to thinking in terms of viruses – those that attempt to control our computers, and those that cause governments to close down entire countries, compelling half their populations to stay at home while compelling the other half to drive around bringing the others things. A popular video “goes viral”; a rumour “spreads”.

James Ball’s The Other Pandemic takes these metaphors of infection and contamination to an extreme, mapping them onto the QAnon phenomenon, in which millions of Americans – and not exclusively Americans – believed that messages posted online, via the anarchic message-board 4Chan, by a mysterious insider pseudonymously known as “Q”, were clues to an elite conspiracy involving paedophilic and Satanic activity. In this world-picture, Donald Trump was a hero with quasi-messianic properties, and would soon set the world on a better course, bringing the perverted elite down in a spate of mass arrests. (Unfortunately, Trump’s loss in the “stolen” 2020 election, and the events of January 6 2021, brought the story to a different end; “Q” has barely posted since.)

Ball’s contention, however, is that QAnon – “our first digital pandemic” – has continued to evolve with “the anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown movements”. He wants to push the idea that the internet is akin to a swamp in which viruses and bacteria grow and mutate. In the context of computers and Covid-19, this makes a certain superficial sense: you might agree that ideas are a bit like infections, only virtual, or that memes are visual and textual objects that spread more or less successfully, like colds or flu. The Other Pandemic thus encourages us to imagine QAnon and similar movements as “biological entities that evolve in dark corners of the internet and then spread across the mainstream”.

Yet there are serious problems with these kinds of metaphorical games. The moment we start comparing ideas to viruses, we run the strong risk of dehumanising those whom we imagine to be “infected”. Pathological and animalistic descriptions have historically been central to the creation of out-groups who can be treated poorly by those who know better. Ball claims that a “biological approach” is essential for thinking about “how we survive the online era”, but we saw how those who chose, for whatever reason, not to be vaccinated against Covid-19 were accused of criminality and murder, and we know that authoritarian regimes often claim that dissidents are mentally ill.

Ball is an Oxford-educated journalist, and clearly regards his role as something between a researcher and a gatekeeper. At one point, he proposes that we need the digital equivalent of the World Health Organisation to keep the internet well. He naturally assumes that the claims he makes about Covid-19 are correct, and that anyone who disagrees is subject to a “digital pathogen”; he also assumes that while he could handle misinformation online and not be incurably “infected”, others are more susceptible, and must be protected from their own desire to believe in things that aren’t true. 

This is despite the fact that, at the time of writing, some of his own claims remain debatable. People have very good reason to wonder whether masks actually work against Covid-19 (as he says they do: “If someone catches the virus due to being unvaccinated, they risk giving it to other vulnerable people, especially if they don’t mask”), or where the virus came from (he claims it was likely of animal origin, whereas US agencies, for instance, have mixed views).