The erratic digital totalitarianism

Or how to rickroll the Matrix

I reposted a paraphrase of a work by a famous author the other day.

It got censored by one of these garbage bots whose output is dictated by the utterly stellar work of corporate “fact-checkers” on the grounds that it was a misattribution.

So a legitimate and pertinent paraphrase got chucked out of the space of acceptable discourse (and I got a social credit hit, since these kinds of things will downrank my posts in other people’s feeds), because… It could be interpreted as a misattribution.

And just yesterday, a friend of mine had a similar, yet rather more disturbing experience, where an image macro of his was shot down not due to any actual propositional content or signified meaning, but because it POSSIBLY could be associated, indirectly, with an unorthodox perspective on an influential scientific hypothesis.

I mean, read that again. Say you’re on vacation in Spain. You’re calling your grandmother to tell her about, let’s say, the unusual migration patterns of birds this year.

And a robot voice then intercepts the conversation, breaks you off, and adds a disclaimer to your observation for both of you to hear, since what you’ve just said could POTENTIALLY be used as indirect support for a currently politically charged hypothesis for which bird migration patterns is incidental. A message is also sent to your friends and acquaintances to let them know you’re a purveyor of disinformation.

Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct a propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event. Access to the real environment must be limited, before anyone can create a pseudo-environment that he thinks wise or desirable.

For while people who have direct access can misconceive what they see, no one else can decide. For weeks prior to the American attack at St. Mihiel and in the Argonne-Meuse, everybody in France told everybody else the deep secret. how they shall misconceive it, unless he can decide where they shall look, and at what.

The military censorship is the simplest form of barrier, but by no means the most important, because it is known to exist, and is therefore in certain measure agreed to and discounted.

Lippman, Public Opinion

Keep in mind that we’re dealing with a perfectly valid statement of fact here. In isolation. Without even any potentially problematic theoretical context (which of course does not legtimize censorship either, but at least would make it comprehensible).

It’s just like you’d be actively prevented from talking about the tensile strength of nylon because North Korea is currently doing a campaign on the excellence of their glorious Juche fiber.

And you don’t want to play into their hands, do you?

No. You don’t wanna reproduce NK propaganda, you fucking conspiracy theorist.

These are obviously just a couple of notable examples of a deeply entrenched structural phenomenon. What happens here in the greater whole is really a form of supercharged Orwellian control of the discourse, which differs significantly from historical examples of authoritarian attempts at control of speech and thought.

The key distinctive features are 1) the arbitrariness and 2) the suppression of innocuous facts due to merely tangential associations.

In our model, Popieluszko, murdered in an enemy state, will be a worthy victim, whereas priests murdered in our client states in Latin America will be unworthy. The former may be expected to elicit a propaganda outburst by the mass media; the latter will not generate sustained coverage.

…

By comparing rows 1 and 6 of table 2–1, we can see that for every media category the coverage of the worthy victim, Popieluszko, exceeded that of the entire set of one hundred unworthy victims taken together. We suspect that the coverage of Popieluszko may have exceeded that of all the many hundreds of religious victims murdered in Latin America since World War II, as the most prominent are included in our hundred. From the table we can also calculate the relative worthiness of the world’s victims, as measured by the weight given them by the U.S. mass media. The worth of the victim Popieluszko is valued at somewhere between 137 and 179 times that of a victim in the U.S. client states; 3 or, looking at the matter in reverse, a priest murdered in Latin America is worth less than a hundredth of a priest murdered in Poland.

Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent

In the past, suppression of discourse was always in relation to statements of fact and value in contravention of a stable and more or less clearly defined theory or set of theories.

So in Catholic Europe during the medieval era, you didn’t go around formally denying the Holy Trinity or the Virgin Birth, just like how one knew to refrain from bad-mouthing the Shogunate in Japan during the Edo period.

The point is that such suppressions of speech and the dissemination of ideas was not really unpredictable and capricious. They were codified in relation to a set of theories and descriptions of reality which you didn’t just accidentally contradict.

They also didn’t exclude innocuous or ambiguous statements of fact if they didn’t immediately negate aspects of the dominant orthodoxy, the Galileo trials being a case in point rather than a counter-example.

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So what does this inherently unpredictable discursive environment do to people?

I mean, we don’t really know. Nothing like this has actually been attempted before. But one obvious effect is that you must now police your thoughts and the ideas you express in a capricious context, where statements of non-contentious facts may be suppressed and lead to your persecution because they may possibly be used in a critique of the orthodoxy.

This gives us a sort of backward operant conditioning, a digital Skinner box where you get intermittently punished and rewarded (dopamine hits from likes, social affirmation and attention) anchored in nothing but raw obedience.

So we’re not really conditioned towards a worldview or a set of definitive behaviours or practices - only the pure and empty submission under authority, which can then be filled with just about anything, absent a firm conceptual framework of theories, facts and values.

The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.

Orwell, 1984

What Orwell describes here is a reasonably likely outcome of this type of conditioning. One must also keep in mind the entrenced aspect of social shaming when all of this plays out in digital media. It’s not merely the suppression of undesirable speech in the public forum, it’s also the dishonoring and shaming of the perpetrators of wrongthink, which in us socially sensitive human beings will breed a strong awareness of even fluctuating boundaries of acceptable discourse.

I don’t think his example goes far enough, however. For in our case, there’s no normative theoretical foundation by which we can really gauge what would be “inimical to Ingsoc” other than a set of rapidly shifting trending viewpoints.

The unpredictable discursive environment will probably also push many of us towards the thought police role, since there’s really no safety in a given orthodoxy apart from the active participation in the apparatus of repression.

In other words, with this conditioning towards obedience rather than the adherence to specific points of view, more people than usual will likely seek solace and safety in the bullying of anything and anyone with an association to dissent.

It’s obvious what something like this does for the health of democracy, the culture, of actual scientific research &c. We mentioned how the mere suppression of alternative positions is anathema to any possible self-correcting processes and the discovery of new facts and theories.

But a capricious suppression of innocuous facts and theories due to the mere possibility that they can serve a subversive function?

I fear that this environment will actively condition people to not actually think rationally at all, with this capacity eroding towards the sub-rational repetition of talking points and disjointed sound bites. We’re already seeing this.

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So what do we do? I don’t know.

But we can always rickroll the fuckers.

We can mount a semiotic guerilla war and promote symbols and signifiers with equally capricious, vague and shifting associations too nimble to be meaningfully suppressed.

If we anchor these in a living dialogue between dissidents, all we really need to do is to reinvent political discourse for an era of memeotics, where the image macro and a rapidly fluctuating negotiation of symbols become the prime mediatic gates to political and philosophical discourse - rather than the printed paragraph, the newscast or even the tweet.

The aspect of derision, satire, humor and irony inherent to this approach is also essential. It serves to undermine the facade of immutable power upon which these structures of social control depend, and so helps re-center the subject’s perception of reality away from identification with the power structure.

If we support this type of realist take on Dadaist methodology by a face-to-face solidarity rooted in a revived spirituality and a hands-on resurgence of arts, crafts and culture, it just might be possible to maintain a fluid and nimble form of top-level communication, resilient in regard to censorship efforts, which effectively can disseminate the theory and practices developed in the resurgent foundation.

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Auden, September 1, 1939