On a model of escalating propaganda
Mar. 4th, 2022 10:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catsidheI'm not a student of political science, and I don't care how often Academia.com thinks that references to David Cameron are actually to me. (Also, there's a marine biologist who shares my name, go figure.)
So I don't know if I'm going over well-tilled ground with this.
It's just that as we're all watching the last few years on Twitter, mostly out of the US, and the last few weeks out of Russia, then we've seen lots and lots and lots of propaganda, and I've been noticing patterns. And other people have been reacting with various levels of "Lolwhut? that doesn't even make sense! Are they on drugs or are they really that dumb?"
Don't get me wrong, some of the people making those tweets may be that dumb. But still, that's not to say they're not serving a very specific purpose: they're not random stupidity, they're very deliberate and targeted stupidity.
So let's try and categorise the levels of propaganda as we're seeing it in the world around us.
AKA: It's true.
You're not being told anything that is false or misleading. There's going to be spin, but it's not actively lying. Everything that's said is verifiable and most reasonable people would agree that it's accurate. This isn't quite the same as a plain information campaign, but they often are forced to do double duty, and there's usually at least some overlap between the informative and the aggrandising.
AKA: It's plausible.
If you dig into it, or you know something about the subject, then you might see that it is wrong, or even a flat out lie. But if it's done properly then there's always some wriggle room for them to say that were mistaken in good faith, or that you've misinterpreted it, or that they misinterpreted it, or it's true according to some set of stupid assumptions or under some abstruse technicalities. But it's still a bald-faced lie, and when they say it's not a lie, that's another lie.
e.g., Mitch McConnell stating "We are negotiating in good faith", or "This anti-Abortion bill is about protecting life", or "This religious freedom bill has nothing to do with entrenching Christian supremacy".
Australian examples: "These grants for railway carparks are not porkbarrelling." "There is no leadership challenge being planned and the Prime Minister has my full support." "This religious freedom bill has nothing to do with entrenching Christian supremacy"
AKA: It's bewildering.
AKA: You can't tell what's true or not, or what "true" even is any more.
It doesn't make any sense, and it's not meant to make sense. It's word salad, intended to make you doubt your own ability to tell what is true or false, or what "truth" or "falsehood" mean, or even how language works in the face of statements like:
eg.: Trump's twitter feed, when he still had one. Or Q. Or pretty much the entirety of the GOP at this point.
Australian examples: Clive Palmer, Craig Kelly, and the One Australia Party. Or Pauline's One Nation Party. Or Bob Katter. Or Barnaby Joyce on his more deliberately obtuse days. (Barnaby is not nearly so stupid as he pretends to be.)
AKA: It's a joke, but nobody is laughing.
AKA: It doesn't matter what's true or not.
It's clips from a video game in 2011, in a tweet labelled "Our troops' glorious victory yesterday". It's declarations of victory released the day before the battle. It's statements that "Historically, Marseilles has always been an integral part of the territory of Ecuador."
There are two levels of message: the surface level is so obviously and clearly stupid and wrong that it's not fooling anyone (well... except see stage 4), but that's not the core message. The core message is in that the surface message is so transparently and ridiculously unconvincing, and the Core message is "you'll pretend you believe this if you know what's good for you, because you know we're watching, and we know where you live." It's a loyalty test. If it was convincing, it wouldn't be much of a test to make people act like they believe it, would it?
e.g., Russia or China, from outside those countries. Within those countries as well, but very quietly, in private, with the windows closed and the doors locked and among only people you trust, and discretely.
AKA: There are five lights.
AKA: "He loved Big Brother."
When people have been soaking in stage 3 propaganda for long enough, it has effects. Like brainwashing in a cult or an abusive prison "school": repeat a lie often enough, and people will believe it, even if only because they haven't got the physical or mental or spiritual resources left to hold on to the hard, lonely truth in the face of the relentless, incessant barrage of lies. And there are places where it's not enough to act like you believe the transparent lies. They demand that you actually believe it. And they can make you believe it. They've had practice. And they're motivated.
And if they don't have to make you believe stupid things, all so much the better. In that case it's working exactly like Nigerian Prince emails: that it's obviously a fraud is the point: that weeds out all the people with any critical thinking skills, and anyone left who falls for it can be milked for everything. And will be.
eg., North Korea. Increasingly, Russia or China if you're inside those countries.
So I don't know if I'm going over well-tilled ground with this.
It's just that as we're all watching the last few years on Twitter, mostly out of the US, and the last few weeks out of Russia, then we've seen lots and lots and lots of propaganda, and I've been noticing patterns. And other people have been reacting with various levels of "Lolwhut? that doesn't even make sense! Are they on drugs or are they really that dumb?"
Don't get me wrong, some of the people making those tweets may be that dumb. But still, that's not to say they're not serving a very specific purpose: they're not random stupidity, they're very deliberate and targeted stupidity.
So let's try and categorise the levels of propaganda as we're seeing it in the world around us.
Stage 0 Propaganda: It's not propaganda. It's just advertising.
AKA: It's true.
You're not being told anything that is false or misleading. There's going to be spin, but it's not actively lying. Everything that's said is verifiable and most reasonable people would agree that it's accurate. This isn't quite the same as a plain information campaign, but they often are forced to do double duty, and there's usually at least some overlap between the informative and the aggrandising.
Stage 1 Propaganda: You are meant to believe it.
AKA: It's plausible.
If you dig into it, or you know something about the subject, then you might see that it is wrong, or even a flat out lie. But if it's done properly then there's always some wriggle room for them to say that were mistaken in good faith, or that you've misinterpreted it, or that they misinterpreted it, or it's true according to some set of stupid assumptions or under some abstruse technicalities. But it's still a bald-faced lie, and when they say it's not a lie, that's another lie.
e.g., Mitch McConnell stating "We are negotiating in good faith", or "This anti-Abortion bill is about protecting life", or "This religious freedom bill has nothing to do with entrenching Christian supremacy".
Australian examples: "These grants for railway carparks are not porkbarrelling." "There is no leadership challenge being planned and the Prime Minister has my full support." "This religious freedom bill has nothing to do with entrenching Christian supremacy"
Stage 2 Propaganda: You are not meant to understand it.
AKA: It's bewildering.
AKA: You can't tell what's true or not, or what "true" even is any more.
It doesn't make any sense, and it's not meant to make sense. It's word salad, intended to make you doubt your own ability to tell what is true or false, or what "truth" or "falsehood" mean, or even how language works in the face of statements like:
"You millennial leftists who never lived one day under nuclear threat can now reflect upon your woke sky. You made quite a non-binary fuss to save the world from intercontinental ballistic tweets."You can't fact check it because it's like catching smoke with tongs. It consists entirely of dogwhistling and boo-words and gibbering squamous madness.
eg.: Trump's twitter feed, when he still had one. Or Q. Or pretty much the entirety of the GOP at this point.
Australian examples: Clive Palmer, Craig Kelly, and the One Australia Party. Or Pauline's One Nation Party. Or Bob Katter. Or Barnaby Joyce on his more deliberately obtuse days. (Barnaby is not nearly so stupid as he pretends to be.)
Stage 3 Propaganda: You are not meant to believe it.
AKA: It's a joke, but nobody is laughing.
AKA: It doesn't matter what's true or not.
It's clips from a video game in 2011, in a tweet labelled "Our troops' glorious victory yesterday". It's declarations of victory released the day before the battle. It's statements that "Historically, Marseilles has always been an integral part of the territory of Ecuador."
There are two levels of message: the surface level is so obviously and clearly stupid and wrong that it's not fooling anyone (well... except see stage 4), but that's not the core message. The core message is in that the surface message is so transparently and ridiculously unconvincing, and the Core message is "you'll pretend you believe this if you know what's good for you, because you know we're watching, and we know where you live." It's a loyalty test. If it was convincing, it wouldn't be much of a test to make people act like they believe it, would it?
e.g., Russia or China, from outside those countries. Within those countries as well, but very quietly, in private, with the windows closed and the doors locked and among only people you trust, and discretely.
Stage 4 Propaganda: You are meant to believe it.
AKA: There are five lights.
AKA: "He loved Big Brother."
When people have been soaking in stage 3 propaganda for long enough, it has effects. Like brainwashing in a cult or an abusive prison "school": repeat a lie often enough, and people will believe it, even if only because they haven't got the physical or mental or spiritual resources left to hold on to the hard, lonely truth in the face of the relentless, incessant barrage of lies. And there are places where it's not enough to act like you believe the transparent lies. They demand that you actually believe it. And they can make you believe it. They've had practice. And they're motivated.
And if they don't have to make you believe stupid things, all so much the better. In that case it's working exactly like Nigerian Prince emails: that it's obviously a fraud is the point: that weeds out all the people with any critical thinking skills, and anyone left who falls for it can be milked for everything. And will be.
eg., North Korea. Increasingly, Russia or China if you're inside those countries.
Catching Smoke With Tongs
Date: 2022-03-04 12:17 pm (UTC)We live in exciting times, but not in a good way :/
Falsehoods as subculture shibboleths.
Date: 2022-03-05 02:16 am (UTC)The system is a form of gossip, but with less pressure for truth, because conspiracy theorists have given up on source checking or verifiability of facts.
Re: Falsehoods as subculture shibboleths.
Date: 2022-03-05 05:52 am (UTC)- You are meant to believe this
- You are not meant to understand this
- You are not meant to believe this
, but extended to the obvious progression in either direction (which is why it starts at 0).It's also been pointed out to me elsewhere that there is the situation where people believe it because there is no other source of information to believe. I would have taken that as the desired end goal of Stage 5: you will believe this because we tell you to, only turned around to where it's almost stage 1 again: for all you know, this is plausible.
But I think you're right in that there's another orthogonal dimension, and that's the degree to which the propaganda is centrally directed, self-sustaining, or entirely social. That is, whether there is a central authority dictating what lies to tell, whether there's a central guide to which direction to push the narrative and let the machine take over, or whether it's an almost entirely social phenomenon as you describe, which actively lies to itself as an in-group marker.
This bears more thought and investigation, which is a bastard, because I really didn't need another Special Interest.
Re: Catching Smoke With Tongs
Date: 2022-03-05 06:24 am (UTC)Then there's people like Slavoj Žižek, who seem mostly interested in how terribly clever they are. (You can tell how clever they are, because they say things like "the Balkans is the unconscious of Europe" which, even though they don't make any sense at first, after thousands of pages of exhaustive explanation still don't make any sense.)
But it's a bit like theorists of economics, who go deep into supply/demand curves and intricate little models and game theory, and end up telling Pinochet how to run his fascist coup d'état. Or therapists who develop a powerful and useful model of cognition and rational/emotive triggers and rhetorical tricks to use talk therapy to heal dysfunctional cognitive patterns, and end up selling seminars to advertisers and pick-up artists. Or, indeed, of some physicists who start wondering what would happen if you banged those lumps of uranium together, and end up looking at a flash brighter than the sun over the New Mexico desert.
Re: Catching Smoke With Tongs
Date: 2022-03-06 02:27 am (UTC)I am glad you have no patience with Zizek. I picture him surrounded by adoring neophytes at some Californian campus, basking in the sun of his own self-righteousness.
I don't know if things have changed in what used to be academia, but I found their late 90s dismay and suspicion of Baudrillard both amusing and pitiable. No, this man is a logical Latin. He is capable of pursuing intellectual threads to a logical conclusion. He does not merely play with philosophy. He practises it :D
I still have not entirely gotten my head around the central conundrum you describe, but it is... probably crucial. And largely ignored by academia.
And so... I am going to delay my website until I think I've had some sort of clarity. Any further cerebral insights on this you have, I would be most gratified to hear.