[D66] This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality

[A.OUT]

Censorship Through Noise
By
Scott McLemee
insidehighered.com
4 min
View Original

Only one thing is certain at this point about the outcome of the 
presidential election cycle now underway: whoever wins will have done 
so, in the eyes of some sizable portion of the American public, through 
fundamentally illegitimate means. With more than nine months of 
campaigning ahead, it's impossible to be specific about the accusations 
that will accumulate along the way. But they are sure to come from a 
menu that has grown familiar.

The options include voter fraud, voter suppression or some combination 
thereof; the hacking of voting rolls or machines; threats of (or 
provocations to) violence at polling stations; digitally manipulated or 
fabricated material injurious to the candidates, their families and/or 
their campaigns; and social media operations of all kinds, conducted by 
both intelligence agencies and private companies, domestic and 
otherwise, and carried out by human trolls and botnet armies. (Besides 
all the high tech involved, we must not underestimate that rickety old 
Rube Goldberg device known as the Electoral College, which could well 
overturn the popular vote for a third time in 20 years.)

A number of the charges may prove well-founded, and no candidate will be 
untouched by them. I make these statements not with confidence, but out 
of finding no way to imagine the reversal of a momentum that has been 
building for a while. Thinking of it in terms of a polarization within 
American society or politics is blinkered, though. One thing a reader 
takes away from Peter Pomerantsev's This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures 
in the War Against Reality (published by PublicAffairs, an imprint of 
Perseus Books) is that one variety of globalization is perfectly 
compatible with economic protectionism, cultural isolationism and an 
obsession with national sovereignty: the globalization of weaponized 
communications.

The author, a visiting senior fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs 
at the London School of Economics, is the child of Soviet dissidents who 
left toward the end of the Brezhnev era. One layer of his text is 
memoir, drawing on a family legacy of stories about living with 
well-established systems of public manipulation and deception. "During 
Glasnost," Pomerantsev writes, "it seemed that the truth would set 
everybody free. Facts seemed possessed of power, dictators seemed so 
afraid of facts that they suppressed them. But something has gone 
drastically wrong: we have access to more information and evidence than 
ever, but facts seem to have lost their power."

Sheer inundation is part of it, as is the reality that the tools we use 
for storing and disseminating facts are equally suited to handling 
untruths. The effect is "censorship through noise," leading parts of the 
population to a skepticism tinged with indifference, or into reliance on 
particular channels of information. Our preferred tools and channels are 
simultaneously monitoring us and relaying the information to systems 
where they are, as Pomerantsev puts it, "added and stacked in different 
patterns according to various short-term purposes -- little writhing 
squiggles of impulses and habits that can be impelled to vibrate for a 
few seconds to get me to buy something or vote for someone. Social 
media, that little narcissism machine, the easiest way we have ever had 
to place ourselves on a pedestal of vanity, also is the mechanism that 
most efficiently breaks you up."

But atomization is not the end. The fragments are raw material for 
network maps, "which look like fields of pin-mold or telescope 
photographs of distant galaxies," extracting "a key word, a message, 
[or] a narrative" from "the ever-expanding pool of the world’s data" and 
"revealing unexpected constellations where anyone from anywhere can 
influence everyone everywhere." Or they are at least trying to exercise 
such influence, with geographical borders largely irrelevant.

People shape their culture, and vice versa. Pomerantsev writes after 
several rounds of mutual transformation between mass populations and 
information technology, and he can draw on a considerable body of 
published research as well as his own discussions with activists, 
technologists and former troll-farm employees. But there's one passage 
from early in the book that stands out as a cri de coeur:

"I see people I have known my whole life slip away from me on social 
media," he writes, "reposting conspiracies from sources I have never 
heard of, some sort of internet undercurrent pulling whole families 
apart, as if we never really knew each other, as if the algorithms know 
more about us than we do, as if we are becoming subsets of our own data, 
which is rearranging our relations and identities with its own logic, or 
in the cause of someone else’s interests we can’t even see. The grand 
vessels of old media -- books, television, newspapers and radio -- that 
had contained and controlled identity and meaning, who we were and how 
we talked with one another, how we explained the world to our children, 
talked about our past, defined war and peace, news and opinion, satire 
and seriousness, right and left, right and wrong, true, false, real, 
unreal -- these vessels have cracked and burst, breaking up the old 
architecture of what relates to whom, who speaks to whom and how, 
magnifying, shrinking, distorting all proportions, sending us in 
disorientating spirals where words lose shared meanings."

I hesitate to call this a common or universal experience, but many 
readers will recognize what it describes.