Crowdsourcing propaganda

On propaganda, pt. 2

Someone stated that Western liberal democracies are really governed through “consent farming”. I thought that was a brilliant way of putting it.

Our societies are obviously not democratic in any sense akin to the self-governing Athenian ἐκκλησία of 450 BC. But that’s generally not how we see the world. We tend to believe that we’re as free as can be. We feel we live in that city on the hill, painstakingly erected high above the dark millennia of tyranny and arbitrary authority through the blood and toil of the heroes of the Enlightenment, sacrificed on the altar of liberty.

Yeah, it’s very much a myth. We’re still ruled, yet in quite rational and technically efficient ways. Industrial societies are under the dominion of massive administrative bureaucracies, disciplinary institutions and media apparatuses that by various means generate the public’s consent for, and collaboration in, policies which ultimately reflect the interests of the ruling hierarchies.

It’s not a conspiracy or anything. It’s just the way complex, hierarchical societies tend to get organized over time.

Collaborative propaganda

Obviously, any sort of social organization will not only strive towards the consent of the governed, but their active participation. This is as true in egalitarian hunter-gather societies as it was in Nazi Germany. And the phenomenon of horizontal propaganda where people simply instruct each other in the dominant narratives and mandated modes of behaviour, can, speaking generally, be seen in myriad situations all over social reality.

But today, the consent farming game is at another level entirely. The contemporary mediatic situation has important qualitative differences from any conceivable study circle, teambuilding hike or discussion group, and which affords it forms of leverage that I think are entirely novel to any human society.

Essentially, I would argue that the social media universe is such a fundamental game-changer that traditional forms of propaganda have become almost irrelevant other than as auxiliaries to the former.

To begin with, we now have a situation where almost all information we have is somehow filtered through social media. Either it’s transmitted to us via those networks, directly or indirectly, or it’s tailored and shaped to maximize dissemination and interaction in such channels.

But the really important factor is how social media basically presses all of us into service as unpaid propagandists. Not only our re-sharing of news articles or explicit comments, but every single “like” and interaction actually factors into all of this, generating data for refining the impact of the information transmitted. One aspect of this relates to the radical flattening out of social relationships and communication. In the social media context of our day, we are basically reduced to our personas. We don’t really interact with other human individuals, but rather with their brand, with the constructed identity that is used to represent them, and which emerges due the structure of the social media setting.

The algos basically generate your average encounter with the people in your feed, i.e. the ways in which they tend to be presented to you, the sort of information generated by them which will be emphasized on your end &c. This partially relates to how your respective personae are structured, and the sorts of interaction data you both feed into the system.

In turn, your relational interactions tend to become artificial. They are now to some extent immediately constituted by the system’s inherent priorities, while the actual agency and organic interaction of the people behind the personae is minimized.

There’s violence already at this level.

And it’s obvious how this factors into the structural reproduction of sanctioned narratives. You and your grandmother generate these digital simulacra of people, which are then used to draw attention to whatever happens to be marketable in the digital ecosystem. And through the simple prioritizing of the system’s filters, a certain set of posts (or other units of digital information) will float to the surface, which then generates further interactions, re-shares, and thereby a tendency towards uniformity of opinion in practice. This also tends to effectively refine content with regard to impact through something akin to an evolutionary process. Of the millions of memes hacked together one afternoon, a handful will go viral for a couple of weeks. This successful set will then tend to influence the subsequent generation, and this iterative process will hammer out maximally “impactful” content (or at least effectively support a tendency in that direction).

You yourself will, in turn, tend to actively engage with captivating and influential narratives and content, and will be pressured to affirm them by the negative conditioning of conformism and the dopamine rewards of “likes”. In essence, this makes you an unpaid propagandist for whatever narratives happen to be systemically affirmed.

Conclusions

All of this amounts to an extremely potent force multiplier for any sort of marketing and propaganda - especially in a situation where more and more social interactions are being pushed out into the digital spaces. Just something like this deceptively simple filter effect I described above will generate quite powerful results. Add to that a bit more sophisticated tools for “nudging” users and promoting certain perspectives and modes of behaviour, and one can appreciate something of the immense structural influence of the “new media”.

An additional and particularly devious effect of this system is how effectively it polarizes the discourse and makes effective use of dissenters to affirm the dominant narratives. Through the filters’ prioritization, an ostensible consensus emerges, and divergent opinions are suppressed. But proponents of the latter are also tagged with negative responses and are contextually associated with various forms of social transgression. Thus, most exposure of their content, responses and posts effectively frames the dissenters out as foils in a morality play (dissenters are antivaxxers are conspiracists are nazis), rather than allowing anything like an unbiased interaction with their points of view. There’s very little neutral ground left for a reasoned debate here.

In a culture almost exclusively characterized by these types of mediated interactions, whatever’s left of liberty and actual, deliberate human agency will evaporate faster than you blink. The good thing is the admittedly addictive digital simulacra that now forcibly displace actual human contact and real interaction with the world are so incredibly poor and unsatisfying that a five-minute walk in the woods smashes the illusion and all its pretences to bits.

And when all is said and done, that’s really the only sensible way to interact with smartphones. Get outside and play. Talk with your neighbours.

Fuck all of this ersatz reality.

Go look a real person in the eyes and tell them you love them.