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Thoughty2 (Arran) is a British YouTuber and gatekeeper of useless facts. Thoughty2 creates mind-blowing factual videos about science, tech, history, opinion, and just about everything else.

This is Part II of our look at QAnon. Click here for Part I. As part of the NYU/StartEd New Media Accelerator, we are joining with faculty from the NYU Carter Journalism Institute to talk about QAnon Friday, Feb. 19 on Clubhouse. Join us!

Ever hear of Ong’s Hat? Not the charming little town in New Jersey that we all know and love, but the internet conspiracy. Actually, Ong’s Hat is most likely the first internet conspiracy, which is interesting because it started well before the internet was even in the hands of the average citizen. Today, many credit the sprawling, transmedia experiment — and its foundational documents known as The Incunabla Papers — as the first Alternative Reality Game (ARG), creating the template for massive experiential mysteries underwritten by sources as unlikely as Brigham Young University, Microsoft, and the rock band Twenty-One Pilots. Ong’s Hat was a much less coordinated affair, beginning as crude Xeroxed pamphlets, then skipping around on zines delivered in the mail, radio, bulletin boards, CD-ROM, and back to the internet. While the ghost town that gave the game its name is real, the science fiction tale that lurched around for years, involving Princeton scientists, quantum theory, multi-dimensional travel, and much more, is a work of collaborative fiction by a small group of outsiders and pranksters. But this long-forgotten experiment has become relevant again because it gives us clues into what’s going on with some of the most politically and socially radicalized people in the world.

The January 6 deadly siege on the U.S. Capitol was energized by many people who follow QAnon to varying degrees. Last month, we wrote that understanding the movement in religious or cultish terms was a seductive mistake, and that it’s best understood as an ARG that has a found purchase with huge swaths of alienated and postmodern Americans. While most games are harmless, Ong’s Hat turned quite dark before its chief storyteller shut it down, and we’d argue that the real-world violence coming from QAnon disciples is following that same arc. Hopefully, there are some lessons in previous experiments like Ong’s Hat that can help us blunt the destructive force of this movement, avoid more violence, and bring people back to a shared reality and basic set of facts. READ THE COMPLETE ARTICLE HERE: https://medium.com/caseworx/if-qanon-is-a-game-how-do-you-stop-playing-1489a388de75

Today the gang is diving into one of the OG internet conspiracy theories. The mystery of Ong’s Hat. But the real mystery is why did the gang decide to record this drunk? The world may never know.

https://jmatheny.files.wordpress.com/2020/12/ongshat_offthebooks.mp3?_=2

LINK TO SHOW: https://soundcloud.com/3vpodcast/the-mystery-of-ongs-hat-3v-off-the-books

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Thanks for listening! If you liked this episode be sure to leave us a five star (or not) review! Also if you have any feedback or ideas for future episodes be sure to hit us up! Thanks again and have a kickass day!paranormalPodcasttrue crime3v podcaongsinternet mysteryongmysteryComedydrunkconstheoryconspiracy theoryThe Mystery of Ong’s Hat – 3V Off The Books by 3V Podcast is licensed under a  Creative Commons License.

It’s refreshing to see someone make an attempt to understand what I was trying to do with Ong’s Hat and it’s encouraging to see them get it mostly right. Too many so-called journalists have focused on the more sensationalist aspects of my attempt, in the early days of the Internet, at an avant-garde art installation that was not constrained by space and time.

In this paper, I have brought together concepts from media studies and semiotics of interpretation in an attempt to analyze a complex media phenomenon and its unforeseen persuasive power. This analysis could be built upon to analyze similar phenomena such as conspiracy theories and fake news.

Link to the full paper: https://letreraria.com/2019/01/13/ongs-hat-and-the-construction-of-a-suspicious-model-reader/

https://youtu.be/brijcd-8oWE

 

In this fragment of SCHISM we interview the creator of ‘Ong’s Hat’, the first Alternate Reality Game, and ask what his experiences can teach us about the rise of QAnon. Is it possible that the ability to co-create and distribute our own narratives about reality could be altering its basic fabric? And has Noam Chomsky’s concept of ‘manufactured consent’ produced by centralized authority and corporate media now been outmoded by a new era of ‘manufactured dissent’, powered by networks, meme culture and supercharged shitposting?

LINK: https://youtu.be/brijcd-8oWE