This, which ought to be the crucial question about QAnon, seems to me strangely enough the least important one, both for proponents and for those of us trying to make sense of it. QAnon is lived rather than consumed. It cannot be falsified because it provides the basic conceptual technology by means of which its adherents experience reality. In this sense, QAnon is the answer not to David Icke but to the combination of dumbed-down academic postmodernism, MBA-speak, and therapeutic moralism that make up the worldview of our professional managerial class. It is not a theory or a set of beliefs but an entire social ontology.

This is why I think that QAnon is unlikely to disappear. It offers a complete picture of the world and a built-in response to the slow but inexorable financialization and digitalization of the economy, the collapse of the American industrial base, the decline in morality (however understood), the eclipse of religious, national, and other forms of tangible authority — above all, the total decentralization of power, which is not concentrated in the hands of a cabal or in the office of the presidency but dispersed among billions of individual participants in the globalized economic order.