The computer programmer Fredrick Brennan, an oddly imposing figure despite his diminutive stature and wheelchair due to brittle bone disease, created 8chan in the first place as a monument to unfettered, uncensored content-sharing. The aforementioned men emerge as the key players in the cockeyed tragedy Hoback traces with his series, exposing what appears to be a sea change in the climate of the internet as the result of infighting between a small handful of weirdoes. He’s named by his username, but he himself was virtually unknown.” Jim and Ron Watkins were unknown quantities at the time, Ron a little more so, even though he’s the only one mentioned in Q-drops. I reached out to Fred Brennan, who was a little more public facing than everyone else. The only way to reach them directly was Twitter. “But when it came to getting in touch with the major guys, it was tricky. “At first, I was trying to lay a foundation of vernacular so my audience can play investigator along the way as well,” Hoback says. He wanted to find the people behind these developments and discern their motivations, in the knowledge that the controllers of these controversial sites could bring him closer than anyone to comprehending and hopefully ensnaring the slippery fish of Q. Murky real-world drama compelled Q to migrate from one site to the next, from 4chan to rival site 8chan to its later rebranded form 8kun. Though bigotry-fueled posting had gotten the Q community booted from Reddit, they still had a welcome home on the anything-goes free-speech-absolutist haven 4chan, which Q himself had been using as the primary channel for his cryptic announcements. “Was that a good idea, to ban them, and could it have the opposite of its desired effect? And of course, I was just curious about who Q is.”Īn even briefer summing-up of the six-episode series’ brief primer on this complicated subject: “Q” is the username of the shadowy mastermind behind the whole enterprise, stoking the paranoid fires with regular “drops” of vague hints to be decoded by those “patriots” in the know. “It was another testament to how the Streisand effect works, but I became curious about what this pernicious, possibly dangerous thing was that could’ve merited a banning,” he says. Like a goodly slice of the public, Hoback first became aware of QAnon when megasite Reddit banned the chat boards being used to exchange swastika art, memes about slavery and other pseudo-ironic hate material popular among residents of Planet Q. I realized quickly this couldn’t be researched online alone, and required some in-person work. I threw myself completely into this world. “I’m an on-off switch, and when I’m on, I’m really on. “The first time I reached out to McKay’s team, one of the things I said was, ‘My mind hasn’t melted too much from working on this,’” Hoback tells the Guardian over a Zoom call. His dogged mission to get to the bottom of things acquainted him with elusive cyber-legends, risked his safety, and plopped him in the middle of a bizarre identity crisis for the whole internet. He gets closer to the truth than anyone who’s come before, finding answers in a culture defined by deception through back-to-basics shoe-leather investigation. He’s the director of the new HBO docuseries Q: Into the Storm, an effort to make sense of the massive, nasty jumble that is QAnon and the following this uniquely toxic conspiracy theory has inspired. For some, that battle brings them to places like the Comet Ping-Pong pizza parlor or the steps of the US Capitol for shocking displays of violence.įor documentarian Cullen Hoback, his rabbit-hole moment launched a journey that’s taken him from the States to Japan to a secluded Philippine pig farm miles outside Manila.
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For many of its adherents, their engagement won’t extend beyond the laptop they use to track the never-ending series of updates, cluesand theories pertaining to their clandestine war waged against an imagined global cabal of infant-eating satanists in the highest halls of authority.
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