This story is adapted from You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All, by Adrian Hon.QAnon is so sprawling, it’s hard to know where people join. One week, it’s the false rumor that 5G cell towers spread disease, another week it’s Wayfair.com trafficking children inside unusually expensive furniture; who knows what next week will bring? But QAnon’s millions of followers often seem to begin their journey with the same refrain: “I’ve done my research.”
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I’d heard that line before. In early 2001, the marketing for Steven Spielberg’s new movie, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, had just begun. Soon after, Ain’t It Cool News (AICN) posted a tip from a reader:
Type her name in the Google.com search engine, and see what sites pop up … pretty cool stuff! Keep up the good work, Harry!! –ClaviusBase5
(Yes, Google was so new you had to spell out its web address.)
The Google results began with Jeanine Salla’s homepage but led to a whole network of fictional sites. Some were futuristic versions of police websites and lifestyle magazines, like the Sentient Property Crime Bureau and Metropolitan Living Homes, a picture-perfect copy of Metropolitan Home magazine that profiled AI-powered houses. Others were inscrutable online stores and hacked blogs. A couple were in German and Japanese. In all, there were over 20 sites and phone numbers to investigate.
By the end of the day, the websites racked up 25 million hits, all from a single AICN article suggesting readers “do their research.” It later emerged that they were part of the first-ever ARG, nicknamed The Beast, developed by Microsoft to promote Spielberg’s movie.
