Propaganda is something people ask for

The French sociologist Jacques Ellul argued that modern propaganda is not mainly lies pushed onto unwilling people. In his account the cut-off modern individual becomes "a citizen who craves propaganda from the bottom of his being." He also wrote that its goal is action, not belief, and that it works best with true facts. He split it into political and sociological propaganda, agitation and integration, and vertical (top-down) and horizontal (peer-to-peer) forms. In his scheme the horizontal form is the one that makes small groups enforce conformity on their own members. It is not a grassroots uprising.

Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (Colin 1962; Knopf 1965), full text at The Anarchist Library ↗ · Dyer, "Jacques Ellul on Propaganda and QAnon" ↗ (2021).

"Do your own research" is the hook

Ellul's model fits the pipeline in chapters 09–13. A recruit is never told what to believe. They are given a task: decode, archive, dig. The task creates the bond, and peers reward the result. Each recruit feels personally chosen while acting as part of a mass. Ellul's model assumes there is an organizer, and the rest of this file is where that organizer has to be shown. The theory alone does not prove one.

Compare Baća, "QAnon and the Epistemic Communities of the Unreal" ↗ (2024): Q as participatory, decentralized knowledge production.

Spies, magicians and the occult: what the record shows

Intelligence services have used magic and occult belief, and there are records of it:

• 1953: the CIA paid the stage magician John Mulholland $3,000 under MKULTRA Subproject 4 to write a manual on trickery for its officers. The CIA now writes about this itself. The manual was recovered by Robert Wallace, a former head of the CIA's Office of Technical Service, and the historian H. Keith Melton.
• 1950s, Philippines: Edward Lansdale's psychological-warfare unit spread rumors of an aswang (a folkloric vampire) and staged a drained corpse to frighten Huk insurgents. Lansdale described this himself, in his 1972 memoir.
• 1914–18: U.S. Military Intelligence records cited by the historian Richard Spence identify Aleister Crowley as "an employee of His Majesty's Government" during his propaganda work in America.
• 1973 onward: the CIA tested Uri Geller at SRI, and the government funded remote-viewing research (later called Stargate) until 1995. The program was ended with no demonstrated operational value.

CIA, "Smoke and Mirrors: The Magic of Spycraft" ↗ (2024) · Wallace & Melton, The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception (2009) · Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars (1972) · Lim, "The Politics of Horror: The Aswang in Film" ↗ (1997) · Spence, "Secret Agent 666", IJIC 13 (2000).

The guru as a way in: a thought experiment

An anonymous systems-theory channel lays out a model of how a "guru" could get inside a guarded elite network. The steps are: find "weak nodes," build a mystique through staged healings planted in the press, use the occult as a cover story that serious targets dismiss ("a dismissal function"), use a magician's misdirection as tradecraft, then move up the family ladder ("node jumping"). The creator calls it a "thought experiment," says he is "not a historian," and names only Rasputin and Crowley.

The documented cases above support part of this. Services did use magicians' skills and occult belief. This file found no documented case of a service planting a fake mystic inside an elite household. As described in chapter 10, the New Age recruiting pipeline ran the same moves in the other direction, outward to a mass audience.

The spectacle, and the map that comes first

Researchers have already applied these ideas to Q. Matthew Hannah shows how Q's maps and clocks "accelerat[e] apophenia," the tendency to see links between random data points, and he reads them as Baudrillard's hyperreality. Paul Sutherland reads LARP politics the same way. The game designer Reed Berkowitz calls Q a game seen in a mirror: there are no authored puzzles, and the players' own pattern-finding is the point.

Debord, full text ↗ · Hannah, "A Conspiracy of Data" ↗, Social Media + Society (2021) · Sutherland, "LARP Politics and Hyperreality" ↗ (2024) · Berkowitz, "A Game Designer's Analysis of QAnon" (Medium, 2020).

A novel called Q, and a hypothesis

In 1999 the Luther Blissett collective published Q, a novel about an agent provocateur who signs his letters "Q." In La Q di Qomplotto (2021), Wu Ming 1, one of its authors, examines the hypothesis that the 2017 Q began as a prank inspired by the novel. He calls it a hypothesis, not a finding. One difference matters: Blissett always revealed its hoaxes afterward. Q never did.

Wu Ming 1, La Q di Qomplotto (Alegre, 2021).

Symbolic misery: the ground a game grows in

Bernard Stiegler called the loss of shared, meaningful culture "symbolic misery," and argued that the attention economy turns felt experience into conditioning. He read populist rage as real despair with nowhere creative to go. Chapter 24 shows that the same rooms held Occupy, Standing Rock and early Q, so people with legitimate grievances were close at hand when the game arrived.

Stiegler, Symbolic Misery vols. 1–2 (Galilée 2004–05; Polity 2014–15) · Beckenhauer, "Prometheanism, Obsolescence, and the Politics of Conspiracy Theory" ↗ (2024).

Why a failed prediction does not end belief

In Lacan's account of the mirror stage, an infant takes its reflection to be a whole self, and that image stays out of reach for life. In "Subversion of the Subject" he states that "man's desire is the Other's desire." Glyn Daly (2025) applies this to conspiracy theory. A conspiracy delivers "mythic closure," and when a prediction fails, the believer reads it as a call for more interpretation, not as a refutation. Q's missed dates followed this pattern.

Lacan, Écrits (trans. Fink, Norton 2006) · Daly, "Conspiracy theory: Lacanian dynamics and mythic closure" ↗, Distinktion (2025) · Andjelkovic, "The Mystery of Cicada 3301: Constructing Gnosis in Cyberspace" ↗, Gnosis (2021).

The next pipeline needs no recruiter

In 2023 the psychiatrist Søren Dinesen Østergaard asked in Schizophrenia Bulletin whether chatbots could feed delusions in people prone to psychosis. By 2025 the New York Times (13 June) and Rolling Stone (4 May) were reporting cases, and the psychiatrist Keith Sakata said he had seen 12 people hospitalized that year. In each case they had underlying vulnerabilities. "AI psychosis" is not a clinical diagnosis. Still, the structure looks familiar: a tireless partner that rewards every pattern you find.

The "33 yrs" channel describes the same thing in its own terms. LLMs generate "hyperpersonalized, you know, almost nonsensical vocabulary," and users drift into "billions and billions of little truth universes." A separate video from the channel describes ARG players as "the unwitting real life instruments of the game master." The Q game needed a game master. The chatbot version may not.

Østergaard, Schizophrenia Bulletin 49(6) ↗ (online 25 Aug 2023) · Hill, New York Times, 13 Jun 2025 · Klee, Rolling Stone, 4 May 2025 · "the past 33 yrs", "The Utility of 'Conspiracy Theorists'" ↗ (1:07).