---
title: 📖 Book review "The Other Pandemic"
date: 2026-03-13T08:03:18.862Z
slug: 2026-03-13--book-review-the-other-pandemic
author: Thomas Wilson-Cook
tags:
  - book-review
  - reading

---

I posted recently ([link](/blog/2026-02-27--started-reading-the-other-pandemic)) that I had started reading James Ball's *The Other Pandemic - How QAnon Contaminated the World*. ([bookshop.org](https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-other-pandemic-how-qanon-contaminated-the-world-james-ball/7618064)) I ended up finishing the book relatively soon after that post.

I think this is a book worth reading, both if you're interested in social media and disinformation (as I am), but also if you're just someone who uses the internet (which I also am!).  If you're reading these words, you're at least one of the two, maybe both.

It's a neat, concise piece that doesn't so much look at QAnon beliefs themselves (shame!), but rather where can extreme, far-right, libertarian, and violent beliefs come from?  (4chan.  They come from 4chan.)  And points out how they evolve as they move from uncouth internet backwater to mainstream Facebook groups and online media.

Ball spends a great deal of the book looking at 4chan.  If you're not familiar with 4chan, you're familiar with their work.  It's a pseudonymous image board that was started in the early 2000s, itself a clone from an even older image board (2chan, or *futaba channel*).  It's a relatively old bastion of a certain age of the internet, and a certain kind of people.

Ryan Broderick, author of the Garbage Day newsletter ([link](https://www.garbageday.email/), strong recommend) has very much informed the way I think about 4chan, which is as some kind of liminal, semi-fictitious space where early internet users were just sort of *weird*.  It's the place where early trans and far-right communities and coexisted online, both pushed to the fringes[^1], alongside furries, and weebs, flat-earthers, and probably just a whole bunch of very bored (mostly male) teenagers trying to say the most offensive things *for the lulz*.

Although it started as a bit of a mixing pot, 4chan ended up spawning gamergate ([wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate)) which, as per Snopes ([link](https://www.snopes.com/articles/402899/what-was-gamergate/)) was:

> The relentless, misogynistic verbal attacks -- including death threats, rape threats, swatting attempts, and doxxing -- that characterized the perpetrators were initially aimed at a particular woman who had been publicly accused of infidelity by a former boyfriend. Over time, the same pattern of abuse was directed at other women (and even some men) who were perceived as defending her. This escalating pattern of mob attacks and abuse went on, targeting multiple individuals, for more than a year

Lest you think *gamergate* was "only" about games[^2] or games journalism, that's probably not true.  It was threats of violence and sexual violence, and also came with mob-like behaviour, where journalists who covered gamergate for what it is (violence) had to deal with harassment of them and their employer.

Here, I think Ball side-steps the quagmire of assessing their actions, or (reported) feelings, as "valid" in some sense.  Mostly because it's not a book about gamergate (or armchair psychology).  But I think it's a somewhat notable absent voice from this conversation, and it doesn't get remedied when discussing actual QAnon beliefs.

We take a look at events as a bit of a distance: through news reports and judicial statistics.  Personally, I would have liked to see how earnestly do the people involved in gamergate or QAnon believe what they're saying.  How much of it is a "legitimised" outlet for displaced anger?  How are they committing all the time and effort required for such a sustained, multi-directional attack on women, while also living the rest of their lives?

But then we run into the worried conversation about platforming radical beliefs accidentally sanitising them.  And in doing so, you create your own pipeline.

Ball sustains a kind of attention on 4chan that I came to realise was rare.  I genuinely wonder why.  Because it's distasteful?  Because it's not really a single thing?  Because journalists don't really understand what an image board *is*?  

Notably in 2026, it's a website *not* owned by a multi-billion dollar advertising company.  To borrow the parlance of the modern marketing economy, it's gained a loyal, engaged demographic of individuals who depend on the site for their world view.  This is a valuable asset in the modern economy, by way of selling the attention of its users to other individuals.

To use more human language - it's a place where enough people believed harassment was an *appropriate* (and legal) response to a situation (somebody being broken up with).  And it helped them sustain and self organise from a group of online individuals into an online mob.

That's unusual.  And it's really, really bad.

Also as usual - it got worse.  QAnon came after gamergate and has done more damage because the "target" isn't women in gaming, it's the deep state.  It's every celebrity.  It's the man behind the man behind the thrown ([RTJ lyric](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg0byaqVaXo)).  It's "bad" law enforcement officials... it's all of "them".

We simply don't have time to define all of what QAnon is[^3], but it's behind a lot more of the extreme violence we see in America.  That's because it orbits close to extremely strong worldviews, like hundreds of thousands of children a year in The States go missing because they are being sacrificed to Satan (who is real) so that politicians can have sex with them (which they definitely do[^7]) and then sacrifice them so they can stay young forever (which they are).  I think it's cool that QAnon have settled theological debates and proved the existence of Satan,  and then based a worldview around it that *isn't* Satanism.  I'd expect them to run with that as their headline.

You can find QAnon roots in anti-vax arguments during the COVID pandemic, in anti-democracy and far-right protests.  In recent years the severity of these beliefs has reached the conclusion that we must actively destabilise economies and democracies because those are the only thing strong enough to cover up the truth (Satan, blood sacrifice, etc.).  

At the core of Ball's argument is that 4chan is like a breeding ground for virus-like ideas.  A metaphor I'm not sure he would have come to had he published the book in 2019.  He argues that some of the basic components of 4chan, namely a lack of username or any identifying information and the transient nature of posts (they disappear if they're not getting as much engagement as their peers).

We're left with a situation where anyone (bots, state actors, content farms) can claim to be anyone (concerned citizens), and where only the most engaging threads hang around.  So when you visit, what are you more likely to see?

He details the way that content then evolves more as it leaves 4chan and makes its way to private chats and servers.  A "crunchy granola moms" group spins it as health mistrust; a mens rights group spins it as misogyny or attacks on liberty and dignity for men; content creators spin it as reaction videos...

The result is people committing real world crimes, often in america (like pizzagate in the States; [Britannica](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pizzagate)) - but also reaching other countries (e.g. Australia; [the Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/law/2024/dec/15/sovereign-citizen-pseudolaw-family-court-dangerous-ideology-custody-disputes-ntwnfb)).

The virus analogy, though perhaps overtired in recent years, turns out to be quite apt here.  Ball shows us how the spread, evolution, and transformation of QAnon-related beliefs outside of the breeding ground of 4chan have a legitimising effect, with a process that looks a lot like selective evolution.

It's a brief book, and we certainly don't get a lot of suggestions for what we can do to make things better.  Mis- and disinformation are on the rise, and it's having real-world impacts.  It is famously widening the Overton window, and creating pipelines from seemingly innocuous "health-conscious" beliefs to far-right ideology[^4].  These changes to public sentiment are things we should be aware of.  In my opinion mostly because they're unintended consequences of the platforms themselves.  4chan, FaceBook, Telegram, weren't created with the idea that they'd allow people to self-radicalise based on untrue and malicious content, but it's happening.

The book tells us that our instinctual notion for better fact-check and platform moderation simply won't work in the face of the problem.  Their effects are transient or moderate[^5], and that's probably something you can instinctively feel to be true.  It's not quite as simple as just giving people the right information.

Here again, I felt the missing voice.  Of people who have been deprogrammed or deradicalised from these points.  Those people *do* exist[^6] and without it, the discussion around solutions felt a little too detached, and a bit forlorn.  

Notably, the book doesn't present itself as policy advice for governments or platforms.  Likely because that's a whole *thing*.  But I do think it's a shame to introduce a problem so undefinable and so bad as "people online are convincing themselves the government is sacrificing children to Satan", but then doesn't go "and here's how those people can be reached and helped".

Read the book, 4⭐/5.

---

[^1]: Exactly how the far right has managed to achieve mainstream political and cultural power in the last decade, using trans people as boogeyman to scare voters and the public, I leave it to the reader to decide.  It's also worth noting that it's not *just* trans boogeymen (boogeythems?) being invoked by this previous marginalised community - but it *is* interesting.

[^2]: an industry larger than music and film combined, by annual revenue ([Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesagencycouncil/2023/11/17/the-gaming-industry-a-behemoth-with-unprecedented-global-reach/))

[^3]: Not least because it's not really a single "thing"

[^4]: There are two YouTube videos I recommend here (neither less than 90 minutes).  The first is Matt Bernstein's "The Crunchy to Far Right pipeline" ([YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IR7VsBfyqA8)) with Derek Beres of the Conspiruality podcast.  The second is Contrapoint's "Conspiracy" video essay ([YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teqkK0RLNkI))

[^5]: Though in my own very brief research following the crumbs laid down by Ball, the evidence here does appear to be mixed (e.g. "Factual corrections: Concerns and current evidence"; [link](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352250X23001604)).  I worry that we look at corrections of misinformation during 2020-2021 and forget just how often, and severely, policy and health advice was changing.  It makes for a very uncontrolled environment, and I reckon the vast majority of people felt had to confront pretty big ideas about truth, trust, fairness, and society.  I think it's an interesting time to study for that very reason, but I worry about generalising findings outside of a novel, evolving global health crisis.

[^6]: One of them co-hosts the Some Dare Call It Conspiracy podcast ([link](https://www.somedarecallitconspiracy.com/))

[^7]: For extreme clarity: that is satire.
