resist the propaganda and loyalty oaths, like Liberal Street Fighter
Many have worried over the years about some overt regime of information control. Hollywood visions of screens pumping out propaganda and newspeak. Nightmares of jackboots and overt government censorship. A powerful piece by Mike Whitney points out that they’ve done it much more quietly:
This may seem like a minor point, but in fact the conduct of the Bush administration cannot be seriously evaluated without understanding that deceit is the cornerstone of their class-based world view.
Evidence of this is everywhere, right down to the language that is painstakingly minted in right-wing think tanks to conceal the real meaning of administration policy. “The war on terror”, preemption”, and “enemy combatant” are just three expressions that are intentionally designed to mislead the public. The real purpose of this language is to elicit support for unpopular policies that serve the exclusive interests of elites.
They are the perfect reflection of the ruling class in this country, and they learned these tricks in the corporate world. Many of us spend our days awash in lies and carefully chosen language defined to produce … well … production. In the Bush Administration language is used to produce consent, support and power.
The line between private and public is being erased, but only in favor of one class of the public; the corporate class and the extremely wealthy who benefit most from Wall Street. The government has been taken down by a hostile takeover and the pieces are being sold off to the highest bidders, with the media, the one private endeavor enshrined in the US Constitution, hired as Gov’t Inc’s PR firm:
The “privately” owned media is only capable of producing a narrative that is compatible with the goals of ownership. Curtailing civil liberties (Patriot Act, National ID etc) and waging war are never in the public interest; they only serve the narrow objectives of the few who stand to gain from them directly. It is critical that the propaganda-system be progressively exposed so the public can see its destructiveness and work to create a different model.
The Democratic Party for quite some time has been on the corporate payroll as well. There are some genuine representatives in the party, but they are marginalized and sold out regularly by their supposed allies. Many hope that a growing sense of discontent amongst the populace will lead to change in Washington, but we can all bet that the corporate class, and their minions in the parties, will do everything they can to head attempts to organize:
Bush’s top lieutenants are entirely committed to creating their own storyline and calling it news. They are not restrained by the facts that emerge from the”reality-based” community. They are equally zealous about seeking out conflicting points-of-view and silencing them through their attack-dogs in right-wing radio. We should assume that they will do whatever it takes to eliminate the voices that compete with the one message they want to convey.
This means that the internet, which is perhaps the last outpost of democracy in America today, is undoubtedly part of the broader government strategy for controlling information. The internet is seen as “command and control” for the disparate leftist and liberal groups that foment resistance against the political establishment. There should be back-up plans to protect this vital resource. The Bush administration has already demonstrated its penchant for toppling regimes through “decapitation” or removal of the leadership. As the nexus for leftist organization, the internet is a logical target for this type of government disruption. Any attack on the system would be catastrophic for the antiwar and anti-imperial movements as well as a serious body-blow to personal freedom.
Mr. Whitney seems to be warning that the internet will be brought down, sites blocked, but as the success of the current regime has shown, there are other ways to remove leadership that might help focus resistance. Buy it off. As many supposedly liberal and leftist bigger blogs turn their backs on women’s health advocates (single issue voters) and antiwar activists (hippies) one has to wonder if the fundraising done through the blogs, overt advocacy for party structures and access to party leaders through conference calls isn’t corroding their independence.
It’s important that we on the left, those who resist the continued corrosion of our personal autonomy and freedoms, do everything we can to keep communicating, keep advocating, keep resisting. As Mr. Whitney concludes:
Both free speech and its antecedent the truth are much greater threats to the state than any bomb-wielding revolutionary. In the new world order only the managers are entitled to the truth, not the managed. That way, the public can be moved sheep-like in the direction of government policy. This means that hard news on any topic is the implicit enemy of the political establishment. It is only by providing a constant stream of diversions and fear engendering alarms that the public can be kept in a persistent fog and deprived of the right to choose. Information is freedom; and that freedom is destined to become the province of the ruling class alone if the public fails to organize resistance.
The administration is “privatizing” information in the same way they have privatized all of the other tangible forms of wealth. The rest of us are left with the lies and distortions that course through the government’s ideological-filter. This isn’t a battle that can be won without a struggle. We believe that the truth is the birthright of every human being who will pursue it with an open heart and an inquiring mind. And, we will fight to preserve that right.
INGSOC Soldier via EXPLORING DYSTOPIA
Marchers at sunrise from RiniArt dot org a library of the art of Rini Templeton
Interestingly, physics pretty much guarantees that the cost of preventing access to information will always be higher than the unit cost of distributing that information. In practice, regimes founded on censorship are pretty much guaranteed to collapse eventually, because of this disparity in cost. The problem is the sheer volume of misery they create before they do. The Bush administration and the RIAA/MPAA both fall into this category.
Unfortunately, there’s a problem for the no-censorship people too. Processing and sorting information also takes significantly more effort than propagating it – so finding and processing information that’s useful to you is a real pain in the ass.
(Disclaimer: I’m not a transhumanist. I just think information’s cool.)
all very true, yet the Corporate Class/Republicans have found a way to NOT censor it, but rather divert it into discredited channels, while pumping out tons and tons of disinformation. Psychic chaff, if you will.
Yeah, information spamming is an interesting problem for networks. But that leads us to another question – is it possible to generate “stealthy” disinformation (disinformation that can’t be easily filtered) faster and more cheaply than filters can adapt? I don’t think so. Random noise is really easy to spot, and anything else will have detectable patterns.
This looks like it’s actually a form of censorship, and the people maintaining that state are almost certainly spending a lot more energy than the people fighting against it.
I think they use the fundi churches and US Chamber of Commerce to do it. The work to undermine voices who might offer correcting information, offering seemingly unrelated propaganda that reinforces the overall project. You’re right that over time it will fail, but the damage in the meantime can be tremendous.
I think of it as like someone producing TV Guides w/ selected times and listings wrong. Yes, it will be found out, and cost a lot, but the targeted programs would likely already be gone before the misinformation is corrected.
I’m not saying it won’t cause damage. What I am saying is that, in the long term, it is ultimately futile. They’re fighting against a massive weight, and eventually, they will lose. Our job is to make sure they lose sooner rather than later.
Sure, censorship has its upfront costs, but self censorship is entirely free and far more effective.
Many say this administration learned nothing from Vietnam. I beg to differ. Conservatives learned a huge lesson from Vietnam, the great ownership society is that lesson and it’s a powerful one. Once upon a time, Americans were stakeholders in America, now we are all stakeholders in corporate America. And corporate America paid the upfront costs of censorship long ago. They’ve programmed a majority of American with the drip, drip, drip of consumer infotainment and product placement.
But again, censorship – even self-censorship – has higher costs than free access to information. In this case, the higher cost is in the form of self-delusion. You’re not operating in the real world, which puts you at a massive disadvantage when pitted against those who are. Take, for example, creationism. It has immediate practical disadvantages: your biological science (among other sciences!) is no longer based in the real world, but in some fantasy world where organisms can’t evolve. And we all saw how well that worked back when Soviet Russia tried to refute the laws of genetics.
We are hard wired with a certain degree of self-delusion, it’s a survival mechanism. And I don’t believe there is one “real world”, only perceptions of reality that vary from individual to individual across the board. Information is not pristine, or “free”, it is always filtered through human perception.
Self delusion, self censorship is a matter of degrees, so is the cost. But I believe your point was that it costs more in resources, money and time, to censor information. My point is that it does not. The infrastructure costs were paid long ago. The maintenance costs are low, and the profit margin is high. We see the widening wealth gap, the loss of the middle class, the control of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. All facts readily available in the great sea of free access information. So, why does America still believe in the ownership society, what’s good for corporate America is good for America?
I’m not sure how that’s relevant. Though if you deny that there can be accurate information, or that there is any measure of objectivity, I’m not sure why you’re participating in this discussion.
It can’t possibly cost less. The cost to me of sending a stream of information across an information network – like this post – is negligible. The cost of storing this post is negligible. The cost of retrieving this post is negligible. The cost of censoring this post is on the order of those costs plus the cost of determining that it contains inappropriate information and terminating the transmission. And the only way for it to cost the same is to simply terminate every exchange of information, which results in a total social and economic collapse. Or to terminate none, in which case you have no censorship. Or terminate random exchanges, which is provably ineffective.
In fact, one could argue that the concentration of wealth you identify – along with other, related phenomena – are part of the cost. In this case, the cost is to society as a whole. Concentration of wealth like that is unhealthy for adaptability and stability.
Um. So what? Really, you’re saying that because censorship is currently preventing access to information, it will continue to do so forever. Unfortunately, the very existence of this board, and of cultures outside of America that are slowly but surely defeating its technological, economic, and military supremacy proves you wrong. In this case, the “cost” is that the culture is sinking so much into maintaining the (self-)censorship that it is preventing it from developing in productive ways.
America will eventually determine that this is bad. Either directly, or when other, more advanced cultures out-develop it.
Censorship and self censorship are rampant in the blogosphere. Surely you’ve witnessed both.
Censorship can and is done through technology, NHI (no humans involved). And digital information is much easy to monitor, it requires fewer humans and no leg work. Self censorship can and is done for the purpose of access and acceptance. Like technology, human beings are quite susceptible to conditioning. It’s much, much easier than you think.
We live in a culture where whistleblowers are called traitors, teachers and lawyers are called terrorists. And the vast majority of the progressive community believes that any information that does not support their goals for democratic party victory is either a lie or irrelevant.
Yes, but the most popular and informative blogs don’t have it, unless you classify noise-stripping (deleting spam and other auto-generated messages) as censorship. If so, then your definition is so different as to make discussion pointless.
I’m a computer science master’s student. I think I know what technology is capable of. And my point still stands. The costs of censoring will always exceed the costs of information propagation.
Let’s look at it simply and mathematically. Both the censor and the two parties exchanging information have the same transmission and storage costs, so those can be ignored. The transmitter of the information has no additional costs. So the only additional costs are the censor deciding what to censor and the receiver deciding what to pay attention to and what to ignore. The only time censorship is cost-effective is when the censor can do this more cheaply than the receiver. However, I contend that this is impossible – at worst, they will be the same cost. And even then, the censor’s got a bad deal, because he’s got to run this computation for each exchange of information… Which means that, to keep up with the exchanges without impeding their rate (which would be a cost), he has to have as much hardware as all receivers.
I’ve got two PCs sitting on my desk right now, each with more than a gigahertz of processing power. There’s a few million people out there with one or two machines at least this powerful. Still think the censors can keep up? How about when it scales to a few billion?
And the obvious hardware – running the censorship software on the user’s machine – doesn’t work. Anything that’s in the hands of the user can be tampered with. Given a few days and sufficient (easy to assemble) hardware and software, I’d guarantee you that anyone with access to electrical engineering and computer science knowledge would be able to hack a workaround. Probably a software workaround that can also slip itself past the censorship systems.
And if you restrict access to that knowledge… Guess what? You’ve incurred a cost. Suddenly, your society’s falling behind its competitors in terms of electrical and information technology. Probably significantly behind.
Of course, the other possible solution is to increase the cost of storage or transmission of information. That’s how most medieval censorship regimes maintained their grip on power. But because the value of any “network” increases superlinearly with the number of participants, you’ve got… Another cost!
Historically, censorship regimes haven’t lasted, and their declines have been accelerating. Rome, the Catholic Church, Soviet Russia, Red China…
I know just how easy it is, and how easy it is to break. But again, self-censorship has costs to maintain – fairly high ones. Beyond a certain (fairly low) point, the individual reacts violently to information that contradicts their ideology instead of evaluating it on its merits. This reaction is, again, a cost – paid in the coin of flexibility and adaptability. And eventually, either the conditioning breaks, or the person is disconnected from the world around them.
I’d contend that it’s no coincidence that the areas of the planet with the highest rates of self-delusion and self-censorship are the poorest.
Yup, and it’s going to cost us. In terms of education quality (necessary for a competitive workforce), in terms of legal quality (necessary for a stable society), in lost political opportunities to reverse the trend. And all of these will either need to be compensated for by throwing money/resources at the problem, or will reduce the effectiveness of our culture. Thus, censorship – even self-censorship – has a high and obvious cost.
indeed.
One of the things that makes Mrs. Sheehan so important is she made it SAFE to speak out. That’s why they keep repeating “MoveOn” and “Michael Moore” in the same sentence as her name. They are trying to shame people by associating her w/ people/groups they’ve already demonized. As it fails to work, notice that “pro-Bush” brownshirts are starting to pair her name w/ Osama now.
The revolution will not be televised.
CNN is reporting that over 1,000 counter protestors were in Crawford. Oh reall? How’d they get that figure? Where’s the proof? If we all called and asked… would they care?
I liked how Dylan smacked a Times reporter back in the 60’s… he said reporters report what other reporters read from other reporters who got their report from reading another report by a reporter who wasn’t even on site. Or something to that effect.
🙁
The revolution won’t be televised because any meaningful revolution makes television obsolete.
Seriously, a one-way broadcast-only non-interactive media with high entrance cost? Talk about ill-suited for its role!
As many supposedly liberal and leftist bigger blogs turn their backs on women’s health advocates (single issue voters) and antiwar activists (hippies) one has to wonder if the fundraising done through the blogs, overt advocacy for party structures and access to party leaders through conference calls isn’t corroding their independence.
Doubtful. What has happened, at least in the liberal blogosphere, is that an influential few — do I need to name them? — have decided that power trumps principle. They have become so focused on winning elections that they are willing to do so in a way that will render any such electoral victories meaningless.
In some cases — and here I will specifically reference Markos Moulitsas and abortion — they never shared our values in the first place.
This would bother me more if I was sold on the idea that blogs are all that influential in the broader political arena. I would argue that given the sums of money and audience sizes involved, they are a drop in the bucket compared to the ocean of “old media”. On the other hand, as meeting places for activists to exchange ideas and learn from each other, they might be hugely influential in indirect ways, and the big blogs might not be where the real action is taking place. I have noticed ideas appear on relatively minor blogs like BooTrib — no offense intended, BTW — show up weeks later, almost verbatim, in the columns of old media pundits and sometimes out of the mouths of politicians.
In any event, so long as the blogs are raising funds rather than receiving them, I don’t believe that they are subject to undue influence from the Establishment. The problem is that there are a number of blogs, both left and right, whose chief purpose seems to be to suck up to the Establishment. Powerline would obviously be one on the right; there are a few on the left that readily come to mind as well. Such prestige blogs, I suspect, have a net zero effect on public discourse, being essentially echo chambers.
I think that’s the whole point of blogs, though, isn’t it? They simply aren’t going to be effective at propagating information to the masses… But no form of media ever has been. Anyone else remember all the talk about Opinion Leaders and stuff like that? Basically what you have there is a small network of people with a designated ‘gateway’ individual, who they trust to find information about news and such and relay it to them in a form they understand. So the focus of the network tends to follow the focus of the Opinion Leaders, and so does their opinion, as those with radically different beliefs tend to find new “gateways”.
That was a bit of a digression… But I think the point of blogs is to allow these “gateway” individuals to network and exchange ideas and organize more effectively.