James Ball (Bloomsbury)
Nearly six years ago, a global conspiracy movement was born in real time. A post on the website 4chan鈥檚 /pol/ board ignited a series of conspiracies, which, when layered on top of each other, can be plausibly linked to everything from the attack on the US Capitol building on 6 January 2021 to the ongoing protests against so-called 15-minute cities in the UK.
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That conspiracy movement is QAnon. It is an outlandish and nonsensical conspiracy theory, alleging that there is a global cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles who are trafficking children. It is put forward by a supposed deep state insider called Q.
For a phenomenon that has gripped the world and grown, knotweed-like, into all the crevices of the brains of the naturally suspicious and questioning, QAnon is poorly understood outside a few journalists and researchers who study conspiracies and the stranger fringes of the internet.
James Ball鈥檚 book The Other Pandemic is an attempt to bring that understanding to the public so we can better get to grips with what we are fighting and understand how to deal with some of its most outlandish thinking. This is important because QAnon and a cadre of similar conspiracies beliefs have inspired a number of murders across the world, as well as odd occasions such as the day that a QAnon adherent stormed a Washington DC pizza restaurant, firing shots into the air and demanding to see a basement the building didn鈥檛 have 鈥� all because he believed, thanks to this conspiracy, that it was the centre of a global child-trafficking ring.
It is important because the oddball theories of QAnon are seeping worryingly deep into mainstream thinking. 鈥淛ust asking questions鈥� has become a synonym for diving headlong into increasingly conspiratorial collusion. And it is often driven by YouTubers looking to ride the latest viral wave, who unwittingly spread the ideas to a wider audience.
Indeed, that is the premise of Ball鈥檚 book: QAnon is 鈥�the other pandemic鈥�, spreading similarly to covid-19 and with equally damaging short and long-term effects.
The idea of being unwittingly inculcated into the world of QAnon and its legion of spin-off conspiracy theories is a neat one, and Ball鈥檚 method of drawing parallels between covid-19 and QAnon as twinned pernicious problems that blight our society works, for the most part.
However, it isn鈥檛 always clear that the framing of the book 鈥� that QAnon is a virus that spreads when let loose and can be stopped with judicious use of firebreaks and stopgaps 鈥� stands up to close scrutiny. At times, it isn鈥檛 clear what the equivalent of a non-pharmaceutical intervention would be, and the jury is out on whether we can stop the spread of harmful disinformation simply by educating people on how to improve their media literacy.
Likewise, the book sometimes havers between offering an accessible, generalist view of what is, even to its most ardent adherents, a confusing mess of a conspiracy theory, and delving deep into the thicket of weeds that makes up the darker corners of the internet within which QAnon festered and grew.
Even as an extremely online reviewer, I sometimes struggled to keep up with the cast of pseudonymous characters and the links that Ball draws, then disavows, between the idea of QAnon being a giant live-action roleplaying session.
Still, this is a worthwhile, pacy and well-written book. It is an important one, too. We need to understand why people are hoodwinked by and have faith in conspiracy theories because it Is happening with increasing frequency. by the US Public Religion Research Institute.
If not exactly mainstream, QAnon is closer to the centre ground than most would find comfortable. Ball鈥檚 recommendation 鈥� of a 鈥渄igital public-health programme鈥� 鈥� is a worthy one. Whether it can stop a deep-rooted belief in a global cabal controlling minds is another question.
