'We Could Be Heroes': The Participatory Performance of QAnon

This paper draws on research into Internet theatre (Scott 2022; Lavender 2017) to examine how the digital world turns citizens into data subjects who participate in democracy through the dissemination of political (dis)information. QAnon is a far-right political movement that started as a series of cryptic posts - ‘Q drops' - written by a secretive US ‘government insider’ who revealed the supposed existence of a satanic cabal at the heart of Western politics. QAnon morphed into a global sub-culture through the adaptation of extant conspiratorial tropes of secret societies and forbidden knowledge controlled by unseen powers into an interactive story that allowed online users to participate in creating an intricate tapestry of conspiratorial narratives. In this sense, the followers of Q understand participating in a conspiracy theory as a method of controlling reality. Understanding QAnon as an alternative reality game (ARG) (Berkowitz 2020), treats it as symptomatic of the post-millennial desire to gain control over truth claims in a political reality that they have little agency within. The power of participatory storytelling in QAnon rests in each individual participant being able to do ‘the research’ and find ‘the truth’ themselves – whilst also working as part of a collective identity who are preparing for a civilizational war. This recentering of both individual and collective power over the chaos of contemporary reality fabricates a ‘main-character’ sensibility that ‘further blurs the lines between lived and constructed realities’ (Ceriello 2018: 108). The online performance Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy (The Civilians 2020) and the hybrid performance R△bbit Hole (Feral Theatre 2021) act as case studies to argue that audience participation within the far-right digital world embodies the metamodern (Drayton 2024) desire for centrality of narrative and, therefore, the re-imagining of participants' selves as the main characters – or part of the hero's team – in apocalyptic role-play.