A former InfoWars reporter and a right-wing filmmaker have joined forces to successfully raise nearly $US172,000 ($234,866) on crowdfunding site Indiegogo for a device named after cuckolding and that does… something indiscernible no one can figure out.
As flagged by the Daily Beast, the device, dubbed “Qux”, is the brainchild of former Infowars contributor Millie Weaver and Gavin Wince. It is some kind of thing that at first glance appears to be a kind of streaming box, but one that will liberate its God-fearing buyers from the eternal tyranny of Big Tech liberals. Beyond that, it all gets fuzzy.
Qux is pronounced “quix” in a promotional trailer, but its founders have embraced the pronunciation “cucks,” referring to the sexual fetish of cuckoldry, in which someone watches another individual have sex with their partner. This is deliberate. The term “cuckservative” caught on during the 2016 elections as an insult among Donald Trump supporters, white supremacists, and the far-right, who used it to describe other conservatives they viewed as insufficiently hard-line on issues like immigration. Oddly, the name appears to have been chosen to describe people who don’t buy the product. As the Daily Beast noticed, Wince recently tweeted: “Knowing you would pronounce ‘Qux’ as ‘cucks’ we went with the name — because it also serves as a ‘troll bait-n-switch.’”
Weaver and Wince have marketed Qux in the kind of tantalizingly vague way that might attract the kind of cash-flush customer who has absolutely no fucking idea what they’re buying. For example, check out the promotional video for the Indiegogo campaign, which says a whole lot while managing to answer practically nothing about what the product actually does:
A female narrator, accompanied by unduly dramatic music, explains that the current state of the web is a “corrupted unsecure network” rather than the “intergalactic computer network we were promised.” The solution? Qux, which in the first of many questionable decisions apparently stands for “Quantum User Experience”:
We have become dependent on a corrupted unsecure network, the so-called World Wide Web. This is not the intergalactic computer network we were promised. The web makes us vulnerable to hacking, tracking, any form of digital attack. It’s easily gamed, misused, and even abused. Censorship, cancel culture, and deplatforming are symptoms of a larger problem.
We’re stuck in technological cul-de-sacs controlled by Big Tech, whose interests take precedence over ours. Their technology is built around conditioning and addiction, control and domination. However, it doesn’t have to be this way. Our solution is the Quantum User Experience. Q-U-X, or Qux, is your portal to a new digital universe.
OK, so what’s it do? According to the promotional video, everything and nothing: users will have “unlimited access to whatever content you want,” as well as the ability to upload and share all kinds of content. The closest it comes to a hard explanation is that Qux is an “interface” where “anyone can publish and control their own digital creations,” and also make money somehow via affiliate advertising:
When you join Qux, you have unlimited access to whatever content you want. You can live stream, upload your own videos, audio, music, images, host and listen to podcasts. Qux even allows you to use Android apps and games. You deserve the online experience you want to have. Create collections or share new content with your family, community, or the world. You can pull content from other websites and platforms to Qux easily, or you can upload directly to Qux. Qux isn’t a publisher, it’s an interface where anyone can publish and everyone can control their own digital experience.
You can monetise your viral creations. Qux pays content creators double what other platforms offer with affiliate codes and other forms of monetisation. Or just lean back and enjoy Qux.
Beyond that, Qux’s YouTube page has only two other videos. One is simply 14 seconds of the company’s logo floating in space above the Earth. Another is a 23-second clip teasing a “test program,” which consists of a picture of a portal that transitions into a sci-fi panorama. The cyberpunk art in question appears to have been lifted wholesale from DeviantArt.
The actual Indiegogo page sheds slightly more light on what the cucks users of Qux can expect, but not much. There are mentions of a “Portal” system which looks basically identical to a combination YouTube channel, Flickr page, or Spotify playlist. Qux will enable users to access the content uploaded to other users’ portals:
Once you’ve create portals of original content or fair use you can turn on your television and watch it from there!
Everything you share publically is visible by everyone else that’s on the Qux® network. Test pilots will get first dibs on populating the Qux® network with content.
This might explain what one can do on Qux — bury themselves in a hellhole of D-list content uploaded by random MAGA fans and conspiracy theorists — but it doesn’t explain why it can’t just be a website and instead requires new hardware. But wait! According to Indiegogo the Qux “network” is somehow end-to-end encrypted, making it impregnable to Big Tech, and will give users access to both “mainstream” and “alternative” content:
Test pilots will be getting a first look at the Qux® end-to-end encrypted network, watching, controling [sic] and sharing content whether its mainstream or alternative media.
Promotional images uploaded to the Indiegogo page show examples of subscription portals like CNN, Fox Nation, Saturday Night Live, and Bravo TV, before segueing way off into weird shit like PewDiePie, Stanford University, a gold prospecting channel called Golden Beard Media, and something just called “Motorcycle.” Presumably, none of these entities have agreed to be on Qux, but they are on YouTube.
All this raises baffling questions. Is the “Qux end-to-end encrypted network” going to be filled with pirated content? Is the content hosted by Qux, or is it some kind of peer-to-peer thing? Does the portal system somehow plug directly into YouTube, or is Qux just using other companies’ logos to give the illusion it will be populated with anything worth watching?
That doesn’t even factor in the promise that Qux can run Android apps. Android functionality is presumably necessary to do anything on it but gawk at other users’ vacation videos from the Eagle’s Nest or rants about Crooked Hillary. But it totally negates the supposed disconnection from the “corrupted unsecure network” of Big Tech giants.
Elsewhere on the Indiegogo page, users who pay for “‘First Look’ trailblazer” status are promised “A Prototype experimental Qux® device (exclusive to the test program)” as well as early access to the Qux network, which includes the ability to “open one of the first stores.” Right, so in addition to being a streaming box, a social network, and a series of end-to-end encrypted portals, it’s a store now, too.
That’s not even getting into how the tiers on Indiegogo include a $US1,000 ($1,366) option for a contributor to have their “name… listed in the credits inside the Qux® operating system settings” and “memorialise your name, or the name of a loved one, as a contributor to the future of a free and secure internet.” Incredibly, 19 people chose this option.
Finally, there’s the Qux.tv website, which doesn’t shed much more light on anything — most of the links lead back to the Indiegogo page — but is full of jargon like “Competitive Fixed Advertisement Pricing,” “Access to QUX Centralised Electronic Store,” and being “part of a centralised commercial enterprise of online/brick&mortar businesses” with an “Equality relationship between user, creator, and advertiser as merchants.” Also, there will be “a Remote Control Activated ‘Buy’ Button featured on Advertisements,” because why not.
Again, we feel the need to remind you this whole thing is themed around cuckolding for some reason, as well as the fact that Indiegogo makes no promises backers will ever get their hands on a real product.
Weaver and Wince are mostly known for being arrested and claiming that they were targeted by the anti-Donald Trump “deep state,” before it was eventually revealed the since-dropped charges involved Weaver allegedly stealing a phone from her own mother. Wince runs a website called “existics” where he expounds upon theories of maths and physics that could, euphemistically, be called alternative. For example, Wince’s theory of three-dimensional time doesn’t appear to have won recognition in the physics community, but it has been referred to on Reddit as “TimeCube-grade gibberish” and “weapons-grade, highly enriched crackpottery.”
This is great. It rules. One wonders whether Qux may have even invented itself, with Weaver and Wince mere vessels for its consciousness to manifest from, a sort of amorphous living word cloud made of copy-pasted marketing gibberish and MAGA bingo cards. Perhaps Qux is the fetal blob that will grow into the Singularity, the machine brain that will eventually consume all things. Or maybe it is God itself, cleverly bringing his Word back into our homes under the facade of an overpriced black box.
It was unclear, as of press time, whether you can buy a Qux with MAGAcoin, the cryptocurrency for Trump lovers.
We contacted Wince to see if he could clear all this up for us but unfortunately, his response started with the claim that Qux is “like Signal but for entertainment and with a private marketplace,” and prattled on for several paragraphs of nonsense from there.