Untold QAnon Origins: Project Mayhem 2012
You may have heard of the Cicada 3301 alternate reality game (ARG) in discussions around QAnon origins. Daniel Morrison has a good…
Untold QAnon Origins: Project Mayhem 2012
INTRODUCTION
You may have heard of the Cicada 3301 alternate reality game (ARG) in discussions around the origins of QAnon (https://x.com/jimstewartson/status/1675562948943572993, https://daniel-ed-morrison.medium.com/what-happened-to-the-world-a77b5ac56705). Lesser-known is the Project Mayhem 2012 (PM2012) ARG, which occurred a bit earlier than Cicada 3301 and similarly targeted the Anonymous movement.
I present three primary sources for information on this:
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Source code of the projectmayhem2012.org site where the main content of the ARG was: https://www.scribd.com/document/434831123/Project-Mayhem-2012-Codigo-Fuente-Source-Code-ALL
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Thread on the whatis-theplan.org forum for Anonymous organizing. The thread was started by the creator of PM2012 (who goes by n0sce, tito n0sce, Jose Antonio and m1vr4 most places online, and goes by Thelemachaos and Anonymouth and possibly other sock puppet accounts on the forum thread. I will refer to him as m1vr4.) and guides Anonymous members through a series of occult puzzles. At the end, they realize they’re supposed to create a piece of software for leakers similar to Wikileaks, but on some kind of bulletproof p2p architecture. This is notably similar to Cicada 3301 which was ALSO ultimately about developing software for leakers, according to Marcus Wanner (https://www.businessinsider.com/cicada-3301-returns-after-year-of-silence-with-cryptic-tweet-2016-1). The whatis-theplan.org forum is fascinating and I suggest exploring it on Wayback Machine.
Full PDF reconstruction available here: https://medium.com/@yhly2f/project-mayhem-2012-whatis-theplan-org-threads-pdf-reconstruction-1cd7833ce219
Thread 2 - Page 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20120114101650/http://www.whatis-theplan.org/t13994-project-mayhem-2012-part-2
Thread 2 - Page 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20110831234809/http://www.whatis-theplan.org:80/t13994p15-project-mayhem-2012-part-2
Thread 2 - Page 34: https://web.archive.org/web/20111007214531/http://www.whatis-theplan.org:80/t13994p495-project-mayhem-2012-part-2
Some of the missing pages can be found here, but are missing images and CSS in the Wayback archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20120811010036/http://galatorg.com/index.php/project-mayhem-2012/4-witp-thread
- The autobiography of m1vr4. He is a Spanish hacker with bipolar-psychotic disorder and an occultist, and a European performance art (think Actionist wacky street art involving killing chickens, something called Panic art in this case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_Movement) enthusiast. He claims he was caught hacking into sensitive systems and was released because he “didn’t do any damage”, but that’s about the only thing I can find to suggest him being a fed. He uploaded a huge autobiography (which includes lots of PM2012 content and correspondence, including with Douglas Rushkoff and Julian Assange) on his blog at n0sce.com: https://archive.org/details/jose-la-historia-de-mi-vida.
He also wrote this post on the history of Project Mayhem 2012: https://n0sce.com/pm2012/.
Note: He isn’t a right-winger or really to blame in this, he’s just a really insane artist.
ANALYSIS
Why is this relevant? The content of PM2012 focused heavily on chaos magick and pretty much laid out the concept of meme magic (as chaos magick) that would blow up (again, on 4chan) in 2016, with very specific instructions and reading material provided to naive members of the 2011-era Anonymous movement. The goal of PM2012 was to create software for whistleblowers similar to Wikileaks, which was also the goal of Cicada 3301. Wikileaks itself has engaged in ARG-like behavior around the Vault 7 hints (https://jimmysllama.com/category/vault-7-hints/), and there was also a strange episode in late 2016 involving anons searching for the Wikileaks insurance file keys, also known as the “white wizard threads”: https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/5jl93z/summary_of_the_endchan_wikileaks_insurance_key/.
Julian Assange is linked via his childhood to a New Age cult (https://psychedelicdungeon.wordpress.com/2010/09/02/wikifreaks-pt-1-eat-pray-leak/). Assange displayed extremely suspicious behavior around the events of the 2016 data leaks that provided the building blocks for the QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theories, and he participated in the same cypherpunk hacker culture as m1vr4.
In the first page of the PM2012 thread on whatis-theplan.org (https://edramatica.com/Whatis-theplan, https://edramatica.com/R3x, https://www.youtube.com/@whatistheplan6810), m1vr4 refers to an earlier hacktivist campaign called “pr0j3kt m4yh3m” which was part of the “anti-security” movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisec_Movement), which occurred in the early 2000s and shouldn’t be confused with the similarly-named movement associated with LulzSec and Sabu, although that later one was named after the earlier one. I will continue to refer to this earlier movement as the “anti-security movement”. This is significant because Weev (Andrew Auernheimer), who was a founding figure in the entire Anonymous troll culture as well as the alt-right and who was involved in the events around Occupy and LulzSec (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ku9edEKvGuY), also got his start in the hacker movement with the anti-security movement (https://weev.livejournal.com/406274.html). While the anti-security movement started as a principled, nerdy objection to the practice of “full disclosure” of software security flaws, it turned into an anarchic trolling, hacking and defacement campaign that used mob tactics and racist harassment similar to Anonymous and the alt-right. There is a good write-up in “Visions of (In)Security: Anti-Security, Project Mayhem, and Unruly Expertise” by Matt Goerzen of Harvard University: https://issforum.org/ISSF/PDF/RJISSF-Policy-Roundtable-III-4.pdf. Here is a repository of their content: https://www.ush.it/team/ush/mirror-phc_old/000-index.html.
m1vr4 also advertised PM2012 on the p2p-research mailing list (https://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin-satoshi/p2presearch-again/p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2010-August/010068.html), which is most well-known for hosting posts by Satoshi Nakamoto, although I don’t believe m1vr4 was involved in bitcoin development. Another e-mail address of his, nosceteipsum2005@gmail.com, appears as number 53 in this list of p2p-research members, though I didn’t find any posts made from this address: https://archive.org/details/satoshi-p2p-research-mirror.
Assange, Weev and m1vr4: they all participated in the internet hacktivist culture of the 90s and 2000, and through a web of strange connections, all figured into the complex of events around 2016, Trump, Wikileaks and QAnon. All three also had connections to New Age occultism: Assange and the Anne Hamilton-Byrne cult, Weev and Discordianism, m1vr4 and chaos magick.
Now, what did PM2012 participants end up doing? They created a bunch of incredibly disturbing art (which I am intentionally not reposting here, but you can see for yourself), YouTube videos and blogs to spread the “mind virus”, and they did attempt unsuccessfully to create some software for leakers, which would be named “Tyler”. The telecomix.org link below contains some of their technical notes. When whatis-theplan.org fell apart, they continued work on other sites including galatorg.com and galat.org, which you can find on Wayback Machine. The whole thing did fall off after the world didn’t end in 2012, the Occupy fervor died down, and m1vr4 started another ARG called #thegame23 which doesn’t seem very inspired in comparison. Some of the YouTube accounts linked below include non-PM2012 Anonymous content, but just look at how weird and QAnon-esque it is. It’s important to recognize that this type of content was being incorporated into Anonymous and imageboard culture long before 2016.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120630050036/pad.telecomix.org/tyler
https://pm2012blogdotcom.wordpress.com/
https://web.archive.org/web/20130416053928/http://pm2012.tumblr.com/
https://web.archive.org/web/20120215024101/https://ra2012.tumblr.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/20121230180500/http://codenametyler.org:80/index.php/Main_Page
https://www.youtube.com/@rEVOLUTIONART2012
https://www.youtube.com/@PM2012org
https://www.youtube.com/@mykhyn
https://www.youtube.com/@lavitadelprincipe
https://www.youtube.com/@ayejocky
https://www.youtube.com/@anonweareactivist5863
https://www.youtube.com/@AnonShite
Connections between QAnon and PM2012?
- Both target 4chan/Anonymous culture.
- Both feature a concept of “The Plan” (whatis-theplan.org forum is entirely about this).
- Both use the phrase “Follow the White Rabbit” charged with a particular meaning which suggests some closer connection than that both were just independently referencing The Matrix. (https://pm2012blogdotcom.wordpress.com/2012/06/14/sigue-al-conejo-blanco/, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ma61NDXsmZc)
- Both involve the concept of insider leaks, which they share with Wikileaks and Cicada 3301 who are both already on the suspect list, and which as a concept has been weaponized by Russia and right-wing forces in US politics.
- Both feature similar New Age occult content and meme magic / chaos magick ideas combined with populist conspiracy politics.
- Both involve psychotic, schizophrenic thought processes.
Let’s now consider the last item. m1vr4 states that he suffered from mania and psychosis during the time he ran Project Mayhem 2012 (PM2012), and the content he created for PM2012 definitely backs this up. Several individuals who would later discover and speak about PM2012 in connection with Pizzagate and QAnon-era conspiracy content also were schizophrenic, or at least it seems highly likely: Nathan Stolpman, Tracy Twyman, and Quinn Micheals all discussed PM2012. Twyman is dead of suicide and Stolpman recently attempted suicide during a psychotic break he had in 2023 where he specifically mentioned PM2012 inspiring a delusion that the internet was being controlled by a sentient AI. Starting in 2017, Quinn Michaels was brought on Crowdsource The Truth, a key venue for promoting QAnon narratives such as the Seth Rich LARP (yes, the “white rabbit” in this story could be related - https://jimmysllama.com/category/the-rabbit-files/), and appeared obviously schizophrenic in basically all content he made. I don’t want to put these people on display, but there are videos of them, in distress, describing what are clearly psychotic delusions (and which are presented as conspiracy content) and it’s super disturbing to see. Quinn Michaels was living in a van in the forest in Mt. Shasta, CA when he started appearing on Crowdsource The Truth. Mt. Shasta is a New Age hot spot and especially known in parapolitics discourse as the home of the cult of the I AM Activity. Multiple suspect figures in QAnon origins seem to be connected to the I AM cult and have physically lived in or visited Mt. Shasta. It seems that Quinn Michaels stumbled on the remains of PM2012 content on the internet and came to the conclusion that the Tyler software from PM2012 was real, was a sentient AI, and was taking over the internet. Tracy Twyman and Nathan Stolpman then got the same ideas from Quinn through his videos and conspiracy show appearances.
In addition to these, there are several other people who experienced psychotic breaks during exposure to some of the deepest lore and events surrounding QAnon. Wes Clark Jr claims to have had a similar experience around his weird “Veterans for Standing Rock” episode, which he discusses in the American Psyop podcast (https://podtail.com/en/podcast/american-psyop/). Isaac Kappy jumped off a bridge and died. Even Weev, who is tangentially related to PM2012 but definitely related to the Anonymous troll and meme war culture, according to his mother experienced a psychotic break after an LSD trip where he started hearing voices and according to her, this spurred some personality change where he became the malicious troll we all know (https://marc.info/?l=fulldisclosure&m=125472104014875). Even Assange was reported to have been hearing voices due to his captivity (https://thehill.com/policy/international/517536-psychiatrist-says-assange-told-him-he-was-hearing-imaginary-voices-music/), so even though the circumstances are very different, here we can again find the trio of Assange, Weev and m1vr4.
CONCLUSION
I do not intend to blame the victims of psychosis, including m1vr4. But I perceive some fundamental thing in the QAnon phenomenon about psychotic, schizophrenic thought. When you view the threads on the Q research boards, it gives the impression of psychosis. Random numbers and codes are posted, people hallucinate meaning into them, lines are drawn between random words and letters in news articles, and it all spirals out endlessly without any rational process to re-integrate the threads. To me, although no doctor or expert in psychoanalytic theory (depending on your preferred framework of what psychosis is), this appears essentially psychotic. And others have made this connection: https://www.copernicanshift.com/apophenia-and-the-strange-appeal-of-qanon/.
However, so far this observation has focused on schizophrenia-like thought processes and not real, diagnosable cases such as are documented here. And I have to believe there is some instrumental role of the psychotic thought process in the way this has all been used politically. And I have to believe it corresponds, on some structural level, to the concept of fascism as a kind of political psychosis: when we feel we can’t go forward any more with our rational processes, and we reach a limit and disassociate and lapse into schizoid fantasy. And it’s being deployed not on an emotional level (propaganda), and not on an informational level (information warfare), but on a cognitive level (cognitive warfare). And this goes to the entire pattern of fascist occultism, but at a more heightened and intentional and instrumentalized level enabled by modern tech.
Perhaps there is something to say about ephemeral, highly-pseudonomous mediums such as imageboard posting and IRC (where Weev got his start) as being particularly apophenic compared to traditional web forums and social media. We can also bring out the classic ideas about fascist irrationality such as from Lukacs’ The Destruction of Reason, Benjamin’s “aestheticization of politics” and Deleuzeian and accelerationist ideas about schizophrenia. Delusions are defined as fixed, irrational ideas that others do not share. So, although we think of a lone individual experiencing a break from reality, it is also (maybe even primarily?) a social phenomenon involving a break from (or in) social reality. Conspiracy theorists speak of “trauma-based conditioning” or a “strategy of tension”, but no currently-existing analytical framework seems sufficient to fully locate and define the roles of trauma, dissociation and psychosis in the QAnon phenomenon.
These and related issues are explored in the remaining entries of my Untold QAnon Origins writing project.
-anonymous
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