This week we are joined by Dr. Olivier Jutel, a lecturer in the Department of Media, Film & Communication at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. His scholarly focus is in communication studies and media theory, particularly around populism, digital media, political economy, and critical theory.
Travis and Julian chat with Olivier about his iconoclastic take on the paradigms that have dominated U.S. technology and communications policy since 2016.
Olivier argues that fear of foreign influence has been leveraged by a coalition of Silicon Valley firms, national‑security agencies and allied think‑tanks to deflect structural reform of platforms. Drawing on Cold‑War communication theory, this coalition frames all online conflict as “information warfare,” treating citizens as passive targets for behavioral manipulation while ignoring deeper political‑economic drivers of democratic decay. Jutel retraces the military origins of mass‑communication research, critiques Shoshana Zuboff’s “surveillance capitalism” thesis, and dissects the role of high‑profile disinfo professionals whose methods, he contends, don’t question the core assumptions of tech industry platforms and national‑security priorities.
Olivier concludes that while this disinformation framework is past its heyday, its war‑like view of social life persists, empowering actors such as Palantir while sidelining antitrust and public‑interest remedies. The solution? A shift toward true democratic governance of digital infrastructure.
Dr Olivier Jutel at University of Otago
https://www.otago.ac.nz/mfco/staff/olivier-jutel
Thanks for subscribing to QAA on patreon.
Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com)
https://qaapodcast.com
QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
///
We’ve launched a new podcast miniseries network: Cursed Media. The very first Cursed Media miniseries is Science in Transition.
Science in Transition is an investigation into the intellectual origins of the contemporary right wing backlash against transgender acceptance. Through six deeply-researched episodes, hosts Liv Agar and Spencer Barrows unearth a bizarre coalition of well-meaning clinicians, aristocratic sexologists, militant feminists, right-wing culture warriors, headline-chasing journalists, and conservative politicians.
Listen to the first five episodes of Science In Transition right now and all episodes after the sixth one is released by subscribing through this link.
www.cursedmedia.net/
Subscribers to Cursed Media get access to three new podcast series per year, plus every episode of QAA’s existing mini-series (properly organized!)
Welcome to the QAA podcast, episode 334, The Problem of Disinformation.
As always, we are your hosts, Julian Field and Travis View.
This week, we are joined by a very special guest writer, Olivier Jutel, a lecturer in communication studies at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.
Welcome to the podcast, Olivier.
How are you doing?
Merci Junien, Travis.
There's no really a nice French way to say Travis, is there?
No, Travis is not a very good name in French.
No, listen, I'm really stoked to be here.
Thanks, guys.
Pleasure to have you.
It's our pleasure.
This episode is obviously sponsored by Jubilee, and this week we have 20 Travis views surrounding Olivier, and we'll see if he makes his way out.
Can I be honest, guys?
I'm really bummed that I never made it onto the list of naughty academics that do a disinfo.
Oh, yeah, you would like to work your way there?
I mean, like, there are like lists, and look, whatever.
I don't have any Syria takes or any of that stuff, so I'm not trying to, like, but, you know, like some of, you know, some of the big giants in my field, like, like Oliver Boyd Barrett, like, he's on the naughty lists of doing a disinfo, of doing a violence.
Oh, yeah, he did a big bad.
Well, I mean, I guess Travis kind of is on some list.
I mean, you know, the Washington Post like it took his ass out, like it hung his ass out to dry.
Well, yeah, yeah.
Just because I embarrass a journalist who didn't do the due diligence necessary to know whether or not the person you're speaking to uses a pseudonym.
Right.
So we're going back to like Travis Avatargate.
Yeah.
Deep in the lore.
Yeah.
Long time ago.
Have you met that guy or anything?
Have you done any kind of like OSINT to figure out?
We've recorded an episode with him.
Oh, shoot.
I missed that one.
Yeah.
No, it's okay.
It's, you know, he posed for a friend's stock photography company in Ukraine.
So, and that was before everything kicked off.
So really fun and another fun thing to bring up.
What do we got so far?
We've got Syria.
We've brought up Ukraine.
Oh, yeah.
No, let's bring up Israel.
Israel's a criminal state.
All right, check this out.
Honestly, all the disinfo people kind of were sent scurrying by like Israel, Gaza stuff.
Oh, yeah.
No, it's crazy.
It's so funny how everyone's just shutting the fuck up now.
It really is beautiful.
Yeah.
No, literally, in New Zealand, they were like, put your phone down.
Don't expose yourself to harm.
Yeah.
Like, these are like the, you know, the good detoxing from the internet tips.
And it's like, oh, so, so now you are like, you're part of the Hezbollah.
No, now it's log off.
Yeah, now it's log off time.
I've seen some good analysis of like Halliwood conspiracy theories from very mainstream outlets that illustrate how Israel, like they simply call some of these videos of atrocities fake as if they're staged.
And that's a worthy sort of conspiracy theory to like break down.
Can you at least admit that if Russia was doing this to Ukraine, we would be reading like front page news every single day, calling it a genocide, naming who is killing the people and stuff like that.
Sure, it would be treated differently, but I'm saying I disagree with the idea that sort of like conspiracy theories from Israel are not being addressed at all.
That's not what I was talking about at all.
But we definitely should continue fighting.
This is going to be a good dogging episode.
I should also shout out like things like forensic architecture, which like do the OSINT stuff, but like with a politics of like understanding like, you know, what's happening in the region.
And many of them are, yes, Israeli journalists and they're doing really good work.
So it's not that like, let's just say open source intelligence or some of the behavioral psych stuff that comes into how disinfo people look at the internet is like categorically wrong.
Like these can be like useful approaches and methods.
It's just that they've largely been in service of empire, I guess would be my like grand thesis.
Well, since we're entering grand thesis mode, let's get this thing kicked off.
The problem of disinformation.
All right, so it's become cliché to say we live in PERMA 2016.
Trump is looming over global politics, energizing the populist right the world over.
Our radical centrists are uniquely incapable of rising up to the challenge and saving any sort of institutional legitimacy.
What do you mean?
They've proposed abundance.
Don't you like having a lot of stuff?
We're going to get abundance.
Oh, man.
Oh, the abundance guys.
I do love them.
I'm going to shout them out.
It's in the script.
It's in the script.
Great, great.
One of the structural elements of this PERMA 2016 has been thinking about this through the lens of disinformation.
Foreign influence, algorithmic propaganda, and the malicious use of digital networks have become the defining questions of communication and tech policy.
It's taken as a given that national cohesion is under attack.
Our political rivals are proxies for Russia, Iran, Ukraine, Qatar.
You know, it's a smorgasbord of who we don't like.
Everybody's a bot except you.
And remember, if you see it, report it.
That's the kind of mode of being online.
You know, for me, as an academic, it didn't have to be this way, right?
The 2016 moment was part of a tech lash, an opening up that might have been used for some kind of antitrust industry regulation based on communication as some sort of public or democratic good.
But these policy concerns have been totally eclipsed by the new field of disinformation research and an army of technocrats that are going to tell you where the bad posts are lurking.
These, frankly, are what I'd call policy entrepreneurs backed by Silicon Valley NGOs and the national security bureaucracy.
Many of them flyby nighters that worked to keep the tech lash within very narrow confines.
So these disinfo-technocrats, as researchers, they depended upon the tech companies playing nice and giving them access to things like Twitter's API, for example, while reinforcing overall how platforms view social behavior as like the Defining way of understanding human behavior in the 21st century.
They also reheat Cold War theories of communication as a struggle between our way of life and a subversive, eternal Soviet menace.
Again, I'm here in Utsi Puti Dinedin, and our local city councilor decries the Palestinian solidarity movement as like puppets of communist Putin.
Like, so everyone's got like the Cold War brain bug.
Yeah, this is something that I addressed as well in Jacobin talking about QNON, how, you know, the digital soldier is no longer some sort of like right-wing identity.
Lots of people think they're waging war online with their posts, and lots of people think that they can expose these deep, dark magic pits.
You know, I mean, we definitely covered that in the Cambridge Analytica episodes.
Man, I'm laughing my ass off thinking about 15 years ago, actually longer, maybe 20 years ago, where like alternative citizen journalism was like this new indie collaborative thing that was going to fundamentally redefine everything.
No, we're all digital soldiers.
So these disinfo researchers, they lend a technocratic sheen and credibility to some elements of Blue Anon.
And Travis, I appreciate that, you know, the Blue Anon gets thrown around a little bit here, but it's the idea that essentially for me, whether it's blue or Q, there is this fundamental belief in America's transcendent greatness.
And yes, that's been popularized and we're all digital soldiers now.
And it also reinforces some of the stupefying effects here, which is to say that it's a total glorification of social relations.
Like you couldn't think of your neighbor as like sharing some kind of public stake and social compact around, you know, like whatever, local municipal government.
No, they are, again, as we've been denounced in Dunedin, right?
We're like puppets of like Putin's communism or some such thing.
The cults of the American Technological Sublime.
America's mass media delusions are inextricably linked to empire in the frontier.
The ideas of connectivity, globalization, and technology have been foundational American myths, like going back to like the telegraph and the railroad, right?
You'll see Armand Matlar has written a great history of the different eras of globalization.
And this language, a very sort of Christian language, keeps getting repeated with every era.
So these myths have advanced a kind of pseudo-religious view of America, the frontier, and technology is all intertwined.
That technological breakthroughs, and this is the language they use like in the era of Web 2.0, that these breakthroughs open up new vistas and profound revelations.
Like can you imagine like the oil painting of the frontier here, right?
Just standing.
I don't know, somehow I'm thinking of Tom Waits and Buster Scruggs.
That's not quite the right one.
So this is what Eric Davis, historian of tech and woo-woo spirituality, has called the American cult of the technological sublime.
He's riffing on Harold Bloom's idea that American Christianity is its like own thing.
And then so therefore American techno-Christianity is this other sort of weird frontier mythology in which technology sets the bootstrapping individual on a divine mission.
And this pioneering spirit is something uniquely American.
And in the internet, it's become like our gift to the world, that the internet helps unlock this spirit the world over.
Thank you, DOD.
Yes, for real, though.
Yeah.
But I think of abundance in much of the same way, right?
The guys that are basically, you know, the meme, our world if, you know, and it's like metropolis or some such thing.
Like, this is all part of the same sort of always pushing westward.
And when you crash up, and this is Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, they wrote the famous Californian ideology.
Once you crash up against the Pacific Ocean, you got to think about free-floating islands in outer space to expand man's divine light throughout the universe.
Yeah, I mean, this is very funny because I recently have been reading Imerwar's How to Hide an Empire, and it's really a direct line from like, we got to get the Guano Islands, and actually we should maybe just let the Philippines be independent so that we can just kind of control them through a variety of other mechanisms.
And that's like a direct line straight through to like what you're talking about.
Absolutely.
Alfred McCoy's written the great book on how a lot of this is happening, yes, in the Philippines in the very early 20th century.
So I got a little mashup of quotes here that I think track this divine American notion of technology throughout the different epochs.
We start with James Buchanan, former U.S. president, who said of the telegraph in 1858 that, quote, the nations of the world are now bound through the electric current, palpitating with human thoughts and emotions such that old prejudices and hostilities will be eradicated.
Nice.
Talk about calling it early.
Dude, it's like, it's like, how many years before the Civil War?
My God.
This is five.
Yeah.
There you go.
I didn't go to high school in America.
He means that the prejudices and hostilities between the North and South will be eradicated.
That's all, though.
Once we get rid of all those pesky Mormons.
Actually, shout out to the Mormons, though, for like, I think, channeling this kind of spirit as well as any sort of like, I mean, they are the most American Americans in my view.
But anyway, I digress.
Check us out.
Air horn.
Werner von Braun.
You know that guy?
Yeah.
Love that guy.
He's kind of like, I don't know, in the Q sort of universe.
But he had similar kinds of ideas of this, that ballistic missiles and rocketry would end, quote, fratricidal war once we become this space-faring civilization, once we have this overview effect.
Y'all remember that famous photo of the Earth from the moon?
Yeah, there you go.
That's the kind of like, oh, right, once we understand the collective through technology will transcend into some sort of higher plane.
And thank you, Space Nazi, for ending fratricidal war.
As he was saying that, they were just strapping the biggest warhead possible to his little fucking rocket.
Okay, buddy, sure.
And again, I got to shout out the Devin O'Shea pension episode y'all did.
I'll come back to that in a second.
We got Al Gore, the original Atari Democrat in 1994.
This is kind of cliche now, but yes, the internet will usher in a new Athenian age through the global conversation of the internet.
Oh, he just meant that it was going to facilitate pedophiles.
We're bringing back ancient Greece, folks.
Dude, I mean, we need to, like Praxis Nation, the Dryden-Brown network state, we need to restore beauty again on Greenland.
They're actually going to, yeah, they're going to restore beauty and Western civilization on Greenland.
Anyway, check out my work on crypto and dumb bullshit like that for more pedophilia.
Sorry.
Okay, and then fast forward.
Fast forward to one of the key stars of our 2016 malaise.
Yeah, in 2010, Chilery, YasQueen, Tim Kaine, and the memrain Clinton herself launched the Freedom to Connect doctrine as Secretary of State, promising an internet that would, quote, lift people out of poverty, give them freedom, and unite us all with a common body of language.
And again, this is very Christian, this idea of univocality through the internet.
She copy-pasted this from an Arrowwood review of MDMA.
Have y'all covered Eric Davis on the show before?
I don't think so, no.
He's a great historian of Terrence McKenna.
But yeah, I mean, I remember this attitude like in the internet about the internet in the 90s.
You know, I remember when like my, you know, my science teacher showed us how you could play chess with someone from Brazil, you know, like live.
It was like an incredible experience.
And like there is, there was this general optimism that these communication networks, because they're being faster and easier and more accessible, are all of a sudden just going to bring down barriers and create a more peaceful understanding world.
How can you hate someone when you see them on the internet?
Well, it turns out, apparently, it's very easy.
It's very easy to see someone on the internet, know who they are, and hate them intensely.
No, actually, I think peer-to-peer stablecoin transactions fixes that.
Okay.
Go fuck yourself.
When Chilery dropped her Freedom to Connect doctrine, you know Douglas Rushkoff, the sort of media theorist and academic, again, whose work I appreciate, he was writing pamphlets, publications for the Secretary of State or the State Department talking about how Facebook would do the magic.
So, you know, a lot of our faves did sort of start out in this techno-optimist mode.
You know, there's sort of generations of sort of unlearning, like a political economy approach and a kind of, you know, the military histories of the internet that's part of how we, you know, got to this frothy moment of 2016 where it all came crashing down.
I do have respect for Rushkoff, but I remember doing the Discordian episode and seeing like his take on that.
So it wasn't just buying into kind of this techno-optimism.
It was also buying into this techno-disruption.
But what if, what if, you know, it could change people's minds and it could hack into their minds and mind fuck them.
And, you know, a lot of this bullshit we're dealing with today is just like a kind of cleaned, a cleaned up version of the Discordian idea.
Yeah.
And actually, I got to say that, and again, Rushkoff is very open about like being a kind of hip theorist of that milieu of the time, but it's sort of like the accelerationists and the dark Deleuzians one, you know, not the sort of more like hopeful sort of neo-anarchist stuff.
But anyway, man, am I digressing?
Check it out.
So this is all not come to fruition.
What happened?
Well, Cyber 9-11, that's what.
That was Hillary's terms.
So some of y'all, maybe you've put this behind you and I wouldn't fault you for doing that.
But like we're talking DNC emails, Guccifer, some Russian Facebook ads, the piss tape op.
And I know y'all haven't forgotten Comrade Tom Arnold, Buff Bernie, all that stuff.
I don't really want to talk about it anymore, but just sort of just, that was, that was the froth of the time.
But essentially, the narrative that began to sort of take shape amongst the chaos was that we left the back door of our society open through the internet.
And like a babe in the woods, our internet beneficence was used against us.
We were simply too good.
It's time to get real, folks.
And it's always sort of interesting.
These people love to talk about the centralized control of Xi or Putin.
And they sound very jealous of that.
I'm just putting that out there.
I mean, Trump certainly is.
Add some gold.
But it also, it's a way of constructing in the sort of Cold War view of the political here that like our enemy is this like chess playing, you know, centralized power that is just pulling all the strings in our society.
And because of the weakness of our democracy and et cetera, et cetera, that it's time to get really real.
So, I mean, basically, we could just call this like a miasma, a malaise that swept over the media and political class because they didn't really want to deal with the events of 2016 as like material and political in nature.
And so we get things like the New York Times' Operation Infection.
The thing about a virus is it doesn't destroy you head on.
Instead, it brings you down from the inside, turning your own cells into enemies.
This story is about a virus.
A virus created five decades ago by a government to slowly and methodically poison its enemies.
But it's not a biological virus, it's more like a political one.
And chances are, you've already been infected.
If you feel like you don't know who to trust anymore, this might be the thing that's making you feel that way.
If you feel exhausted by the news, this could be why.
And if you're sick of it all and you just want to stop caring, then we really need to talk.
Ready?
I just love that the answer to that is not capitalism.
It's actually the swarthy Russians.
They're devious, man.
They are the perfidious Asiatic Slav.
That's right.
They're on the steps.
They're at the door.
Well, there's a, of course, there's that great quote from Adorno and Horkheimer that those that refuse to talk about capitalism should shut the fuck up about fascism.
It goes something like that.
Famously, that's how they put it, yeah.
I mean, yeah, this is obviously very highly dramatic deliberately.
I mean, but, you know, it's pointing to it in like an attempt to make people believe that there's no connection between HIV and AIDS.
And I'm not saying that this particular campaign, like Operation Infection, also called Operation Denver, was responsible for this, but this belief has, you know, killed people because they don't take the anti-retrovirals that can help suppress the HIV and it leads to deadlier diseases.
Again, I'm not saying that there's like causal connection between those two things, but it's bad to encourage beliefs that lead to people not taking medicine that saves them.
But this is actually about Operation Infection, how Russia perfected the art of war, Travis.
Are you mixing this up?
No, no.
This one is specifically about a real campaign called Operation Infection, also called Operation Denver, that was done in the 80s that attempted to encourage people to believe that there's no connection between HIV and AIDS or that AIDS was some sort of disease sort of cooked up by Fort Dietrich.
No, no, listen, that's definitely a tangible piece of deadly misinformation, if you will.
But it is the whole narrative of the documentary is it's kind of interesting in the sense that it is saying that...
This is from the New York Times.
Russia's meddling in the United States election is not a hoax.
It's the culmination of Moscow's decades-long campaign to tear the West apart.
Operation Infection reveals the ways in which one of the Soviet central tactics, the promulgation of lies about America, continues today.
From Pizzagate to George Soros' conspiracy theories.
Yeah, that's obviously an incredible overstatement.
Well, so this is great because they've got a tangible piece of something that works as the perfect metaphor that then allows the New York Times to describe this in terms of like, did you get a bad little piece of information that like this isohedrin virus has penetrated your bloodstream and is now transmitted by the blink of your blood infected eye?
Like, so it really allows them to like go to town with all the kind of like fun techno horror sort of like Ringu stuff.
It is.
The rhetoric is similar to like something you hear about like being infected by the rage virus or something.
Totally.
Yeah, the idea that like, you know, you have this, like they have this information that works its way into your mind and sort of hijacks your agency.
This is, yeah, that's, that is, I think, charitably described as hyperbolic.
Well, and the thing that it does here is it says, it sustains a few myths about us because they say, look, well, sure, doesn't America also engage in some form of propaganda?
And they'll say, no, but we have oversight and judicial processes.
And the example that they use in the documentary is like the Iran-Contra hearings, as if this was like a great glass-nosed period, like in American history.
Like, what?
It's so fucking insulting.
Yeah.
After that, we put the president in jail.
There were truth and reconciliation.
Also, let's go back to the church.
You know, let's just go back to the last time we made anybody fucking accountable for anything, even just aesthetically.
Yeah, the other thing, too, is that the argument here is, well, what we've discovered from our allies in places like Ukraine and in Eastern Europe is that they are aggressively taking this head on by developing the disinformation field and nightly news broadcasts that rebut every Putin-Kremlin talking point.
So in a certain sense here, you're seeing how like the voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and think tank world that is, you know, deeply invested in this kind of information warfare as a matter of like, yes, NATO and American geopolitical interests, we're trying to bring that home as the model for how we think about our lack of social cohesion and that little feeling in your tummy that, I don't know, maybe some news made you feel a little bit icky.
So yeah, so this is, you know, we're back in the grips of a Cold War panic.
We've reanimated the ghosts of history in this moment of imperial decline as a way to make meaning of it all.
And of course, this doesn't really make sense.
It's a simulacra.
There's no grand ideological competition between superpowers.
And it's a red menace politics that helps create a domestic constituency for NATO.
And again, hey, well, look, Biden, hey, man, we brought Finland into NATO.
And it also made the national security bureaucracy effectively the resistance.
So, you know, this is basically the Democratic Party now.
It's a criticism of tech companies around national loyalty rather than as oligarchs trashing the public trust.
And I don't simply mean like, you know, media and election laws, but like, you know, the whole, the panoply of things, right, around copyright and labor and all the stuff around Uber and anti-competitive behavior.
You know, it's the oligarchs that are trashing this.
But the kind of disinformation narrative that takes shape here is nicely captured by a 2021 Atlantic article called Facebook, the Largest Autocracy on Earth.
Subhead, Facebook is acting like a foreign power.
And Chilery herself is quoted in this, comparing Zuckerberg to like an authoritarian foreign leader.
That's so awesome.
It cannot be us.
It has to be someone else.
Facebook is suddenly acting like our enemies.
Weird.
It's not that some kid from Harvard was, I'm sorry, can I do life log, Travis?
Can I do life log conspiracy theory?
Sure, I would encourage it.
All right.
Well, I mean, look, it's not that this guy, this Harvard kid, becomes like the perfect foil for DARPA's total information awareness program called Life Log that was controversial, that did much of the same things that Facebook now does.
We couldn't ever think of like Zuck as like part of this elite, deeply connected through institutions like Harvard to, you know, the DARPA stuff.
No, no, no, no, no.
He's like Kim Jong-un.
That's how we should think about Zuckerberg.
Exactly.
Anyway.
So this kind of liberal reaction has all the structures of Cold War anti-communism, including the idea that left radicals and African Americans are cat's paws for the enemy.
And, you know, I got to call back here to the original Manchurian candidate book and film, which is a liberal Cold War text, right?
It's proof of how they could just as much channel this as like the Birchers, right?
Like liberals are just as good as an anti-communist freak out as anybody.
And again, what I like about the infection clip is that the sober disinformation technocrat relies completely on the tropes of techno-horror, right?
They're the ones, though, that can really appraise the threats, such as cursed memes and sonic weapons and people that are, you know, programmed to post like Manchurian candidates.
So yeah.
And the other thing, too, about these horror tropes is they're an inversion of the American techno-religious idealism.
Hugh and Blue Anon both think of this moment in terms of spiritual and civilizational warfare, and they bring into focus In a roundabout way, the struggles to control the world that are at the heart of our communication infrastructure.
History of communication.
All right, so this is where I do some history and also share my sectarian gripes as an academic.
It's very, listen, kids, if you're out there, it's very important to have sectarian gripes in academia.
You know, it gives you stuff to like argue about in the humanities lounge.
And as you mentioned, Julian, we're increasingly more aware of the military origins of communication technology.
That this post-war era, and again, before all the way to the Philippines back in the 20s and 30s.
But in the post-World War II era, we're seeing this convergence of corporate, military, and academic interests around massive defense spending through National Science Foundation, DARPA, that sort of thing.
And we're also in the ballistic missile age.
Space travel, ARPANET, counterinsurgency warfare, consumer capitalism are all sort of seemingly brought together under the kinds of theories of communication that would shape the internet, right?
This is a kind of moment of Cold War techno-rationality that Adorno and Horkheimer famously remarked that America was held together by automobiles, movies, and bombs, that they're seamlessly integrated as this sort of new project.
I got to call back to Devon O'Shea's pynchin episode, right?
For me, I mean, I love Gravity's Rainbow because it's charting this emerging post-war era, but also it's thinking about America as this pulsating member, horny for ballistic missiles and information as a means to control the world.
The protagonist in Gravity's Rainbow, Tyron Slothrop, he's like an information machine and sexual automaton, and he's America.
And I think for me, I can't help but think about this when like Elon Musk says something like, my neural nets instructed me to buy Twitter.
Or Lex Friedman says dumb bullshit like, Earth is a computer built to evolve increasingly intelligent neural networks.
Like these guys have, you know, sublimated all of their Freudian stuff into like information as this grand theory of the universe, as the thing that undergirds all other matters.
So there we go.
We're just going to have to park Elon there for now.
So the field of mass communication is developing in this time through the Pentagon's Office of War and Information, the Psychological Warfare Division, and our good friends at the RAND Corporation.
And what comes out of this are theories that say essentially that communication's essence is as an instrument for imposing one's will on the other in a zero-sum civilizational game.
This is something that Christopher Simpson documents in his great history, Science of Coercion.
Yeah, I mean, something that really frustrates me is that like, I almost feel like it used to be that like partisan media outlets used to compete for, I guess, like mind share, the idea that they're supporting a particular agenda.
But now everyone's a publisher.
So everyone feels the idea to assert their own personal propaganda online all the time and counter any other propaganda.
So everyone online like consequently just feels like this digital soldier who constantly feels the need to engage in like digital combat by asserting their worldview and then negating others in this like just eternal online struggle.
Yeah, I mean, like every post is like, here's how our editorial committee arrived at our position.
You know, something that used to take whatever aggregation of a certain amount of like journalistic acumen and talent.
And again, I don't want to opine too much for a long gone golden era or something.
But yes, this is now everyone is involved in this zero sum total like warification of social relations.
And part of, and we'll have a look at this in a minute, but what the disinfo researchers do is they say, you know, they play like an associational game of like this account, this following network, these positions allow us to completely flatten any sort of like policy question or debate into these like cutouts that we do war with.
So that's how we view each other online.
It's a horrible thing.
But it's also like how the sort of overall, you know, sort of disinfo paradigm thinks about what's happening socially in the online world.
So essentially here, this research then is like, you know, how do we win this civilizational warfare?
And there's this idea that a techno-elite can apply techno-scientific methods to guide the masses towards the proper notions of freedom and liberty.
And, you know, this is interesting.
You brought this up in some emails, Travis.
Like there's a lot of, you know, like Leo Lowenthal was sort of like an erstwhile member of the Frankfurt School, which is this bunch of German Jewish sort of Marxist intellectuals.
And, you know, Herbert Marcuse worked for the OSS.
Like a lot of stuff's happening in the anti-fascist sort of United Front cause.
So I don't want to make them completely one-dimensional, but a guy like Leo Lowenthal, who should be from a more critical tradition, is head of research at Voice of America.
And he's claiming that they are close to developing, quote, the ultimate miracle in communication technology, a quote, push-button millennium in psychological warfare.
He describes it thusly.
The Cold Warrior will be able to tell the research technician the elements of content, audience, medium, and effect desired.
The researcher would simply work out the math and solve the algebraic formula, and the war would be won.
I mean, yeah, I really resent this treatment of people as like programmable automatons.
I feel like there's a big distinction between acknowledging the power of like, you know, influential media and thinking that like, oh, once you've cracked this code, once you've solved the sort of like the problem of like, yeah, push-button messaging or whatever, you can sort of like guide people in whatever direction you want because they are just mindless vessels for your, I guess, for your technology and your ideas.
I mean, this is the bewildered herd thesis that's, you know, Walter Lippmann, the guy who coined the manufacturing of consent idea through public relations.
There's long been, this is the funny thing, is that liberal technocrats are the ones that are the most cynical regarding the masses.
And then funnily enough, it's like the socialists and the Marxists that maybe are more sort of liberal pluralistic in their view of like how Media and democracy should work.
And again, this is boring 101 stuff, but the Thomas Dewey, Walter Lippmann debates are sort of very foundational in this period.
And maybe there could have been a different way that this science of coercion could have been challenged with something.
You know, there's lots of stuff happening in and around this era, but ultimately this model wins.
Thomas Dewey famously said, well, about the everyday person's capacity for democracy, like we've never really given it a chance.
So how can we really say?
And I guess some of my work is, you know, it's axiomatic to still believe in something humanistic and democratic, because otherwise we're just black pilled as fuck.
Yeah.
The other thing too to some of our conspiracy parapolitics friends is like, look, just because they're doing like the MKUltra telepathy dissociation stuff, and just because like our elites think of that shit as like the way to like create programmable people doesn't mean it actually like scientifically works.
No, that's it.
Yeah.
The idea that we could program people through like LSD or these different like insane torture mechanisms and the idea that we can like manipulate people through like Facebook ads like to this degree is a fantasy at the end of the day.
And that's not to say they're not doing awful shit.
It's just to say that like you said, they basically are, they're doing it in defense of something that is scientifically just not going to happen.
Yeah, they can torture us.
They can hurt people, but it's not, you know, programmed to post.
Anyway, but listen, to get us back on the train here, Ethiel DeSola Poole, who's a very influential sort of, I guess, one of the intellectual godfathers of the internet, he's an ARPANET counterinsurgency technocrat of this time.
And he views this idea as a utopian idea of a way of overcoming strife and of overcoming communism and preventing like the Curtis LeMay or the General Westmoreland view of how we fight communism, that there was like a better way through communication.
So again, this is the kind of the liberal cold warrior.
And again, you know, Travis, you've touched on how this views has this deeply pessimistic view of the masses and democracy.
And just to bring it back to like academic research, I'm a bit older.
I'm a cusp ex-millennial.
And I've always resisted this idea because there is a lot of research that looks at like kids in video games or like this sort of behavioral science view that then manifests itself culturally that like, hey, kids set their hair on fire because Beavis and Budhead do it on their cartoon, right?
Like this was always like cringe for me and unhip, but it's also like undemocratic.
But this is definitely like a big branch of scholarship.
But what we would say in the cultural studies side is this notion of polysemi, which is obviously you can't determine how people will interpret a particular message, whatever the intent of the author.
And for people that want to believe this, it's a nice convenient way of foregoing sort of like structural questions and public interest policy for like fixes like media literacy, which fine, be media literate, teach that to high school kids.
But like, you know, ultimately their real heat and their real passion are for things like, you know, China and TikTok, right?
Where the fire really burns for this approach is in this kind of geopolitical thing.
The Frankfurt School would criticize this view of communication as what they call the administrative paradigm.
That is a technocratic view of using communication to manage the market, the state, and people as existing in like a stable system.
That political strife and antagonism is proof that something is not working in the system, that there's some sort of distortion, but it's not like a deep material social antagonism.
It's kind of like how the Democrats are totally fixated on this idea that there's a messaging problem and we just need Jamie Harrison to host a podcast, you know?
It produces that kind of like galaxy brain bullshit.
So these technocrats cannot grapple with the crisis of democracy and the neoliberal destruction of the public trust.
And that's why they're so bad at like rebuilding that public trust.
Anyway, so I've mentioned the Frankfurt School.
They're very important.
But what they do and where this is useful is rather than the Cold War behavioral psych stuff, they bring Freud and Marx into the kind of questions of America's like unresolved antagonisms and cultural malaise, right?
What are the problems of American modernity?
And again, they looked at how culture industries are connected to war, to desire, and a kind of social atomization.
And of course, they're the guys that the John Birch Society got very worked up about as the quote, you know, they're the OG cultural Marxists, if you know that trope, that like basically these Marxist Jews are opening up questions of, yes, culture and sexuality and the cultural revolution to sort of undermine our society.
One of my favorite pieces of writing from Theodore Adorno's Corpus is a manuscript he wrote on the horoscopes in Los Angeles newspapers in the 1950s.
It's called The Stars Down to Earth, and he claimed that there was a latent delusional and potentially psychotic structure in American media and the horoscope, which put the individual at the center of the universe, able to read the stars and control their destiny, right?
And Jean Baudrillard picks this up in his work, The Ecstasy of Communication, in which again, our media fantasies put us at the controls of a satellite, isolated in a position of perfect and remote sovereignty.
And look, these guys are just talking about the newspaper and television, you know?
Yeah, they had no idea.
Well, they're good progenitors.
This is also why I love Videodrome because Videodrome, I mean, five stars.
You don't need any particular reason to love Videodrome, but among the many, many, many reasons.
Like you've got Brian Oblivion, who's kind of like a Marshall McLuhan techno-philiac, you know, the television is the sublime ecstatic realm.
And then the dark secret is, is like, we've always been desiring the storm or some kind of SNM red room through spectacles of media.
Like this is the kind of like libidinal Freudian stuff that I think Videodrome does, you know, beautifully, right?
And I think this perverse media enjoyment is a much more useful way to think about Trump and other far-right figures than disinformation.
And I think this hyper-reality effect is key.
This is structural to capitalism, right?
From the horoscope Page to Web 2.0.
War, desire, and advertising have always commingled.
And it's what Jeffrey Skonce, who is author of this great book, Haunted Media, it's what he called, quote, a vast metatextual realm in which distinctions between real and unreal, true and false, cease to matter.
The entire medium is equally real or fake.
A world where the tidy bull man and the president of the U.S. are equally real and enfranchised citizens.
That's the year 2000.
Yeah, that's so it's so much more real now than ever.
Like just that scene of fucking President Trump reading off like a piece of paper that just listed the selling points of different Teslas, only to then like fuck it all up.
I can see Trump saluting the tidy bullman.
Yeah, absolutely.
We thank you for your service, sir.
Tidy Bullman always knew that Epstein was a hoax.
A Democrat hoax.
He was circling on his little boat around the Virgin Islands, keeping an eye on everything.
Political economy tradition.
So I'm back on my political hobby horse here, academic hobby horse.
And the thing that frustrates me about disinfo research is they look at these platforms that are products of low interest rates, anti-competitive behavior, and regulatory carve-outs.
And they throw up their hands and are like, yep, this is how it's always been and always will be.
Like we can totally reimagine self-publishing in the internet if we wanted to, right?
Like there are ways of thinking about this, but I digress.
The political economy tradition for me is very important in thinking about these questions.
And I'm talking about Herb Schiller, Edward Herman, Noam Chomsky, Janet Wasko, Bob McChesney, RIP.
And they've long studied this question of how media industries are imburcated in war, propaganda, and hyper-financial capital.
And that these are the things that are making us crazy, right?
And they're foundational to how the state and capital work.
So Facebook is allowed to flourish through regulatory carve-outs like CDA 230, right?
This sort of, they are no longer under the same publishing obligations of traditional media.
And Hillary Clinton has gone out and said that self-publishing is analogous to this great project of freedom that America has been expanding to the world.
And it's the same, that Google and OpenAI, their business models are made sustainable through the political struggle that emerges at the site of the state, right?
So whether we're talking about stablecoins or the other AI act that they're looking to roll out, like this is all by state fiat that we have the media system that's doing harm to us that we do.
And it can be really hard to think about media as a public trust.
You know, it used to be in the old days, you used to have an FCC license to broadcast and you had to oblige, you know, you're under obligations to devote a certain amount of public interest programming.
I know that this does not work in our current context, but we could still think about this stuff.
Like I know it's harder.
I have to convince myself that we can.
But damn it, if China, if they can kill the AI supply during exam season, I'm here to say nothing is impossible.
That's really important for me.
I do not expect that to happen in the United States in my lifetime.
I'll say that.
Oh, man.
I've got a big red button.
Can we just give Trump a big red button?
Yeah, just don't tell him it's not for Diet Coke.
All right, which brings me to Shoshana Zuboff, the very distinguished Harvard professor, Obama booklister, who's been central to diagnosing the current maladies of the internet.
And essentially, she's part of the new administrative research paradigm and sort of managing the problems of the system not working.
She's a regular on the New York Times opinion page.
She's a star of the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma.
And I think there's something very disempowering and paranoid about her work that is sort of embodied at the heart of disinformation research.
So this is an op-ed she wrote for the New York Times entitled, quote, You Are Now Under Remote Control.
She writes, People have become targets for remote control.
We are learning how to write the music, one scientist said.
And then we let the music make them dance.
This new power, quote, to make them dance, does not employ soldiers to threaten terror and murder.
It arrives carrying a cappuccino, not a gun.
It is a new instrumentarian power that works its will through the medium of ubiquitous digital instrumentation to manipulate subliminal cues, psychologically target communications, impose default choice architectures, trigger social comparison dynamics, and levy rewards and punishments.
All of it aimed at remotely tuning, hurting, and modifying human behavior in the direction of profitable outcomes and always engineered to preserve users' ignorance.
Yeah, it really is a kind of conspiracy theory.
And that's not to say that these companies don't do it, but it's a lot simpler when you just pay attention to the profit motive here and also the fact that they just want people to keep fucking using their system.
They just want people to keep scrolling.
They don't need to fuck their minds.
They just need to keep their fucking attention never-endingly.
Yeah, it's like he's like, yeah, again, my whole problem with like this kind of rhetoric isn't because it's not, you know, gesturing towards a real phenomenon, just because it's so overstated and acting as if like, you know, these kinds of like, I guess, technological sort of like funnels and sort of like messaging methods are like the ultimate dominant power and that are totally unlimited and irresistible.
And I mean, it's like in my previous life, you know, I worked in marketing and, you know, there's lots of talk about like, you know, how to refine the funnel.
You learn things about like how changing the color of a button or changing the copy or something could modify someone's behavior a little bit if your goal was fairly modest, like convincing someone that's in their best interest to get out their credit card and purchase a product.
But yeah, yeah, I don't like this sort of this idea that our techno overlords are so fucking brilliant that they can get anyone to do anything and believe anything if they just have the, you know, the right amount of control and the right audience.
Yeah, so I think, you know, a lot rides on capitalism as a whole in sustaining this myth.
And, you know, you can see how this is perhaps the most powerful marketing machinery and apparatus that capitalism has yet devised.
But we have to sort of, she's doing the work of the surveillance capitalist by basically saying they peel back your scalp and like insert the little chip that makes you, you know, do the thing, and you are, you don't even know it, man, and you're absolutely powerless, right?
The other thing, too, is, I mean, look, as a piece of pros, my god, like, I don't know if I'm like terrified when my cappuccino comes, but this is trying to induce that feeling, right?
This feels very spiritual warfare realm.
It's also the idea that basically like, okay, maybe you're not scared because literally there's no attack on the mainland other than like the big terrorist attack that happened basically on 9-11.
But since then, not really anything.
So, but they are, these people are enemies.
They are actually trying to harm us.
It's just that they're doing it in a way more subtle way.
Like, yeah, you're looking down at your little cappuccino that you paid money for and you're very safe and there's no problem and there's no war at home.
But can I make you a little more scared?
Like, could you be terrified of something?
And I think in a way, it is kind of religious writing.
I think you mentioned this earlier.
You know, it is writing that, yeah, that very much attempts to make subliminal or to make sublime and to make kind of spiritual, like something beyond our understanding, something lurking in the darkness, the trappings of our extremely secular, profit-driven capitalist society, instead of promulgating any kind of actual religious doctrine.
If we've created this idea that like information computed is the, and that everything's a computer and everything's sort of like cybernetically looped, and that is the matter of all things undergirding the universe, you're either going to be, you know, ecstatically religious about that, or you're going to see demons everywhere.
And again, everybody calm down.
Let's start talking about capitalism.
You know, once we name it, we can feel a lot better about, you know, what are the actual forces and what can be materially done about that.
And I think the other thing you guys have done, those great episodes with Anthony Monsoy on Cambridge Analytica, was like, look, this is the kind of like, I am the Dark Lord and I can, you know, I can do this magic.
And of course, this is this is a sales pitch.
Honestly, I feel like a lot of Palantir probably works on the same sort of way.
Like they go into whatever, they go into the Pentagon and they sell their wares in much the same way.
I mean, Palantir is powerful.
They now have been doged all the data that they could ever want.
But there is an element of this that absolutely relies upon fantasy, right?
And again, yeah, so Christopher Wiley, it was psychographics.
And we know that that was bluster.
But this is kind of reassuring for Shoshana Zuboff, who is like a, she's a jilted techno-optimist.
You know, she was all about this in 2009, 2010, in that sort of optimistic mode.
And now it's sort of easier to think about the dark magic as opposed to this material stuff, right?
And I got to say this, I'm griping again.
I'm being petty and sectarian, but I've seen this a million times in banal academic papers in which they simply reference Zuboff and something like, as the Cambridge Analytica scandal shows, you know, you are now all being remotely controlled.
Like it's this, this is the kind of the way this has worked into the academy and overemphasizing, yes, design, behavioral psych, and the media literacy stuff, which again, perversely is a way of saying that everything Facebook says they do, it works.
It's really powerful, y'all.
This is really great what we've created.
It's just we've dialed it up a little bit too high.
So the other thing too about Zuboff, her grand thesis, surveillance capitalism, doesn't really have like a materialist critique.
It's more akin to like micro-targeting and pop-up ads are a unique evil that have corrupted the mission of American tech.
And guess what?
This is kind of like what Peter Thiel and Alex Karp say about Silicon Valley.
You know, we were supposed to have flying cars.
You've brought us mere baubles and whimsies.
We are going to defend Western civilization.
You know what I mean?
So like at a structural level, like Zuvoff does not have a critique for, yes, Amazon, Palantir, and that whole military history thing.
And honestly, she doesn't even credit the original academics, John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney, who coined the term surveillance capitalism by doing this great overview of the post-war way in which military and academic research culminated in ARPANET.
So honestly, if she's a student of mine, I'm asking her for that citation at a minimum.
Yes.
Again, being real petty, y'all.
This is what professors are actually like, you know?
We do be like this.
The disinfo and hybrid war industrial complex.
All right.
So let's go back to 2016 and how fake news and disinfo and creminology became the chief concerns of our media and political class in the West.
The role of American empire and the tech economy historically has vacillated between this free market governance ideal that Hillary pushed out as Secretary of State.
And I've mentioned, you know, the sort of Facebook self-publishing ontology as synonymous with freedom, but also crucially, American interests.
Now, when this model of governance goes awry, there is a national security apparatus that helps steer the governance of the internet.
And it's not a brute command and control system for the surveillance state.
It's more mediated by national security contractors, defense think tanks, NGOs, academia, and cybersecurity consultants.
It's what Mark Gagliazzi calls the hybrid war industrial complex.
We're talking about Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Labs, Bellingcat, Oxford Internet Observatory, among many others, which I'll detail in a minute.
These are the technocrats, hybrid war, and OSINT specialists that have been welded onto platforms to deal with the problem of disinfo.
And of course, they're funded by many military-industrial players and are chocked full of spooks.
And honestly, these are not the people that I want driving the policy discussions about social media harm and the public trust.
It's kind of the equivalent of the Pete Buttigig AR-15 tweet in which he says, these are weapons that involve in theaters of war, not in your teens phone.
Yeah, there's definitely like an FEC guy, you know, on the trading floor vibe where it's just like, just, I'm sitting off in this little room over here and I'm, hey, I'm here.
I'm paid by the company.
It's actually, it's like a weird, some of these guys have done better than others.
Some of them have been tossed to the wolves on Twitter by Elon Musk, and we'll talk about that a little bit.
And some of these guys are still kicking around like Ben Nimmo.
But anyway, this is the thing is once we get to like the Twitter files, this is, you know, there's, there's tension between these two models of how we might govern, like, you know, full free market.
There's rhetoric of kind of digital openness or full kind of like technocratic mediation of how this gets sorted out.
But ultimately, this is a squabble between powerful national security elites.
They all understand communication as warfare, as key to America's geopolitical interests.
And frankly, if that includes doing hybrid war to our own side, they're happy with that as well.
Modern Russia Institute.
All right, I'm going to run this down real quick.
Here are a few key players that has shaped the PERMA 2016 disinfo miasma.
For me, looking at this in the academic literature and looking at early media reporting, one of the key documents out of the gate in 2016 emerged from the modern Russian Institute in a white paper called The Menace of Unreality, How Russia Weaponizes Information, Culture, and Money.
So guess what?
Russia, you know, in the hands of a Russian, this pen is a weapon, this phone is a weapon, my earbuds are a weapon, everything's a weapon.
Russians are really crafty at making weapons.
And also like the document itself is like, it's amazing because it's like very lovecraftian.
It's very vibes.
And, you know, there is something of the postmodern dissolution of like, you know, 90s Russia that does explain some very weird vibes that then are channeled by, yes, oligarchs and the state and political interests.
But what you get is this idea that there is this unique weapon, that Russia is this perfect laboratory for unleashing this weapon upon the rest of us.
So this report was written by the Russian dissident Peter Pomerentsev and neocon creminologist Michael Weiss.
And the pair describe, yes, this sort of laboratory of manipulation and communication warfare that Putin understood how to rule through political technologists.
I mean, again, for American liberal technocrats, this idea that things are a science and, you know, that we are programmable is just an appealing idea for them.
It is very funny that it's like, well, you know, the free market is the best at coming up with ideas like, you know, technology and even like medicine oftentimes will come out of like these, you know, deep-pocketed private institutions.
But somehow our system fails when it comes to this.
Somehow, no matter how many billions we pour into these tech companies and how smart all of these guys are and how much they hire foreign talent, we just can't come up with just one guy's mind.
We cannot match the great Vladislav Serkov, even through free market competition.
Man, the Sarkovian manipulation machine.
I mean, we had an early episode about him, like, like, that, right, that I think does fall a little bit into this trap in retrospect.
I forgive you.
Thank you.
I think about this much like the Otaku episode or the lesson of Russia in the 90s is what happens when you destroy civil society and any sort of social protection, you know, or the Japanese lost generation and people becoming shut-ins, right?
Like they are like warning signs to what happens to the kind of capitalism run amok, if you will.
And I mean, even to this idea that we're so invested in the free market and technology that like, you know, AI is like our last shot at like turning the big pool of money into something that might work.
And we're going to like just brute force it and like make the government like decree by fiat that we all have to use AI because we can't actually even come up with anything decent and good anymore.
So I think there is something materially important to how Serkov is operating in Russia or how, you know, kind of 4chan culture emerges out of like, yes, that kind of particular social malaise of Japan, right?
But it's not that there's this one weapon or that there's like the Havana syndrome sonic ray that does the thing.
So yes, you mentioned Serkov and his innovation as they saw it was like he was the guy that would wrap the far left and the far right around Putin in this elaborate postmodern simulacra of politics.
And this is the model that Putin has made global through, quote, his non-linear internationale to muddle minds, turn the West against itself, and manipulate societies from the inside.
I do love that it's still, they're still communists somehow.
Yes.
It's like these guys, these guys that are like the very opposite of communists, literally the descendants, like the direct lineage of people who kicked out the Soviets, I mean, as organizations from the Congress, like the direct lineage of the coup, you know, and still we're like, no, you're still communist.
You can't win.
If you're Russian, you just can't win.
And again, it speaks to the problem of like fantasy, like in, yes, in the Freudian or Lacanian sense of like, well, we, America needs this fantasy.
You just need to be communist.
That's just, it's the load-bearing, you know, structure to our whole ideological edifice.
Why am I even complaining?
Joe Biden's a communist.
Kamala Harris is a communist in this rationale.
So why am I even complaining?
One of the things that drives me crazy about, there's so many things that drive me crazy, but this report in particular is the illiterate use of Baudrillardian language, who again is the theorist of simulation and simulacra, who famously was the inspiration for the matrix.
Now, again, for Weiss and Pomerantsov, it's like, no, Putin's built a matrix and it works.
He's built a disinfo matrix.
And the thing about hyper-reality and postmodernity for theorists like Baudrillard or Frederick Jameson is that, yes, postmodernity has a material basis.
It's a product of like finance capitalism and technologies of high velocity, which create sort of like a schizophrenic detachment from reality, right?
So that's a material set of like problems instigating this.
But no, these guys are like, no, postmodernity is actually, it's still like woke French bullshit, you know, that Putin has used because the French communists and the Russian communists, it's like this precision weapon of disinformation that produces the eternal communist plot.
It's very Jordan Peterson, right?
Like totally illiterate.
New knowledge.
Oh man, if that's the new knowledge, I sure could use some old knowledge.
So true.
Return.
That's right.
This is this.
Hey, this is the old knowledge of political economy on the pod.
I mean, this is aging Travis.
So that's the most important part is that we're slowly wearing him down.
Honestly, old knowledge sounds like a Wu-Tang affiliate.
What's the knowledge?
What's the science, mathematics, God?
All right.
So this kind of, so we talked about the Sercovian magic.
This analysis worked its way into the American media and popular consciousness in 2016 as obviously a way to explain away culture war, social disharmony, the DNC hacks, anything you don't like, anything that gives you that tummy bug that the New York Times was talking about.
Man, it's the Sarkovian machine, seriously.
So the disinfo experts created this national security template for thinking about domestic issues, right?
Russia wants you to think that the DNC rat fucked Bernie in the primary.
And do you really want to be the useful idiot here, right?
What would Putin say to this?
It does also remind me of this, like, the Hunter Biden laptop has the hallmarks of a Russian disinfo campaign, which was like the most mealy-mouthed version of this bullshit.
Yeah, they couldn't even muster up the playbook.
Yeah, one of the things that like, I always hate this, this kind of argument, that if a claim is in fact used or if a sort of like a proposition is used in some sort of like information operation, it's necessarily false and discredited.
And to even entertain it is to sort of like undermine yourself or like sort of like help the enemy in some sort of crazy way.
And it's just when you look at like actual kind of like the psychological operations, the message in them, they're actually very frequently, you know, accurate.
And like one of my favorite examples is that during World War II, one of the SIAP products that the Nazis produced was directed at black American soldiers, which essentially argued that they were risking life and limb for a country that treated them and their family as second-class citizens.
And that was not false.
And there's like the fact that black Americans were treated like second-class citizens is literal Nazi propaganda and part of a Nazi psyop does not render that false.
Yeah, but do you really want to spread the disinfo kudis?
Because that truth has the cooties on it.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah, exactly.
That's really what we're talking about here.
And so this is a way of second guessing and undermining any sort of information.
And very famously, when Corbyn ran and was, was it 2019, the second time, he had a hacked dossier of the plans of the Tories to sell off the national health care system to the Americans.
And The Guardian and the British press ran with, yeah, but this is the Russian playbook to make, you know, the Tories look bad.
And it's sort of like, you know, again, there's an expression, you know, play the ball, not the man.
Maybe this is a ball or a rugby expression, but it was sort of, this is a great way to deflect from any sort of substantive issue, whether it is the DNC or anything that's like deeply structurally wrong with our democratic system.
So the other thing that's happening here is because of these sort of like parallel treks of like rationale and the information war, we should view all sort of information through the larger prism of the information war.
It helps set the stage for a bunch of charlatans to bake for Bluenon, basically, right?
And any populist threat, even, you know, that was a threat vector for Russia.
Even Susan Rice very famously went on in the early stages of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and said, quote, to Wolf Blitzer, this is right out of the Russian playbook, where they take any divisive, painful issue, play both sides, and I wouldn't be surprised to know that they were funding it or shaping it in some way.
Yeah.
Or Kamala famously went on the wake-up show to talk about Kaepernick.
Do you guys remember the 2017 Director of National Intelligence report that basically said Abby Martin was on RT and covered Occupy Wall Street?
Respect for Abby Martin.
For real.
For real?
No, this was like one of the early, they were like scrambling.
It was, I think, like February 2017.
They needed something.
They needed something to talk about the Russian disinfo campaign, and they came up with Abby Martin.
Ludicrous.
Anyway, but there's another moment.
This starts to be a little bit more working its way into official policy channels.
It's a little bit more credible.
And this is where our buddy's new knowledge come in.
In 2018, they were selected to create a report for the Senate Select Intelligence Committee.
And the report was titled, The Tactics and Tropes of the Internet Research Agency.
And very specifically, they looked at this topic of meme warfare as a way to study what they said, quote, was the Russian playbook.
And again, you know, lots of people said a lot of stuff about the Internet Research Agency and Progoshin, and they sort of memed themselves into popular consciousness.
You know, Adrian Chen's original article is great.
You know, he stands by it, but he has said that like, look, this is not the way this has assumed this central role in the question of American democracy is definitely not how he thought of this story.
But anyway, this brings to our sort of popular consciousness, though, very stupid stuff like Buff Bernie.
We all remember Buff Bernie, right?
And again, they were presenting these Facebook page ads as, I'm quoting from the report, that they revealed a nuanced and deep knowledge of American culture to target black left-leaning and right-leaning groups.
And their evidence of this was just total engagement bait slop, right?
This is like slop before AI slop.
The whole like for team Jesus MAGA, ignore for team Satan Clinton, you know, as kind of like ephemera of that time.
Like I like to look at it and chuckle, like it's funny.
But the most risable claim was the idea that Russia was grooming assets through sexual blackmail.
And the evidence presented was a series of Jesus no fap memes.
Who would like to read these?
I think Travis should read them.
Yeah, so there's, yeah, there's a meme that features Pence and Trump and it says, like for Jesus team.
Below them is Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine.
And Tim Kaine has, of course, a pentagram on his head.
Hillary has a bass of devil horns.
She is in flames.
And it says, ignore for Satan team.
Yeah.
Some real magic right there.
Well, so no, read the masturbation ones.
Well, that's all right.
Not to say it's not.
The best instructions ever given to Travis on the podcast.
All right.
There's a, yeah, so those ones that we see here, we have we have Jesus comforting a man who is weeping or ashamed because he has his head in his hand and it says, struggling with addiction to masturbation, reach out to me and we will be it together.
Jesus, I don't think Jesus actually said that in the Gospels.
And then below that, it says, you can't hold hands with God when you are masturbating.
Use our hotline if you need help.
Now, forgive me, is beating it, is that a, is that an Anglo thing or does that work in American English too?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
I'm just checking.
I'm in New Zealand, so they say things like wank and that kind of stuff.
Anyway, yeah, so check this out.
Obviously, there was no hotline, but this report from New Knowledge dubbed these memes as evidence of, quote, the timeless espionage practice of recruiting an asset by exploiting a personal vulnerability to blackmail and manipulate these individuals in the future.
And maybe that future is now.
Maybe we don't know about it yet, but it's in the future.
No, I mean, it seems like these kinds of memes are like basic engagement bait.
They're often used on like just really cheap, chintzy sort of like Facebook pages that maybe like, you know, the purpose is to like build up the, you know, the build up the followership or build up the spread of it rather than like this being the primary message that page may want to spread.
Absolutely.
Now, again, and this is sort of like cliche that we have like old senators presented with information about the internet.
And of course, these guys don't understand anything about it.
It's almost like, that feels like a Silicon Valley like PR strategy to make sure that like Congress never regulates anything.
But again, this is presented in the austere sort of like, you know, this dignified Senate Intelligence Committee as like proof of like the grand plot.
Again, we're still in the kind of early days here.
It's still kind of like a vulgar social science, but it did help give shape to like this idea that there's like a credible academic discipline and policy program that comes out of that.
And again, this is a report that's been cited, you know, much like the as Cambridge Analytica shows, right?
As New Knowledges Senate Intelligence Committee report shows, right?
There was also, obviously, again, halcyon days.
Peter Dow for a moment was much mocked for his Verit idea.
Another guy was Clint Watts, who was on MSNBC a lot with his Hamilton 68 dashboard, which I can't emphasize this enough was like total phony baloney nonsense.
But, you know, look, this guy has like parlayed himself.
He's now head of Microsoft's Threat Analysis Center.
And so this is a kind of like entrepreneurial trade craft that's emerging and very much relies upon like, you know, generating media hype around this kind of narrative.
Meanwhile, Dow is a comrade now, right?
Yeah, Peter Dow is woke.
I haven't heard from Peter Dow in a while.
No, he's on about all the right stuff.
He has been for a while now.
He must have like listened to like a single episode of Chopa or something and just learned from social cues where the wind was blowing.
You know, it's incredible how deeply invested people are in not understanding where the wind is blowing.
You know what I mean?
That's what I'm saying.
Be a Dow.
For real.
For real.
Shout out, Peter.
In a world of Watts, be a Dow.
And again, new knowledge, because this is sort of like a very gray area, they no longer exist as a firm because they were part of this elaborate Democratic dirty op that in their own words, quote, an elaborate false flag information campaign in the, if you remember the 2017 Alabama Senate by-election with Roy Moore and Doug Jones.
New Knowledge spent $100,000 to make it look like Roy Moore was being supported by Russia and then was generating headlines in places like Mother Jones about how he was like a Putin cutout.
So this is like a little bit unseemly.
New Knowledge changed their name to Yonder and Yonder shut up shop a couple years later.
But there was a diamond in the rough at New Knowledge that we do need to talk about.
Renee DeResta.
So we have to talk about Renee DeResta.
She's the lead author of the Senate report and the shining star of the disinfo research field.
And I think of her work as someone who is a policy entrepreneur who really came to define how disinformation worked its way into academia, the media, and tech-backed NGOs.
Now, I want to make a disclaimer and try to be as generous about this as a sort of academic reader of Renee's work.
She's absolutely been the subject of really nasty, personalized attacks from the right.
And from her time at the Stanford Internet Observatory, I will say that there's absolutely been some useful scholarship produced there as far as the methods of disinformation research go.
But it's kind of like how Bellingcat will do some good work on domestic neo-Nazi groups.
But what's really important is for Bellingcat essentially to be a funnel for national security state interests.
The fundamental problem here I have with Stanford Internet Observatory and Dursta's work is how it works to naturalize American platformed capitalism and priorities and the interests of the national security state as self-evident truths, right?
And I think we're asking the wrong questions here about how these people have contributed to the breakdown of our democracy.
The other problem, which is very common for public-facing academics, is the allure of policy influence and high media visibility, which really does create some galaxy-brained moments.
I think Zuboff's scholarship is a lot better than her New York Times columns, right?
But trust me, I'm the exception.
I'm better on podcasts.
But in general, beware the media-facing academic.
I think that's just a good rule of the road here.
So we got a little clip here.
It's a little behind-the-scenes interview with Renee DeResta from the documentary The Social Dilemma, which she's a prominent figure in.
And in this clip, she's talking to Azza or Aza Raskin.
Apologies, Aza Azza, whichever one it is.
He's a co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology alongside Tristan Harris.
We'll come back to him in a second.
But this is the kind of work that we're talking about here.
Renee, who's a disinformation researcher, she broke my mind just recently.
So she's like, hey, do you know that the Russians are pushing anti-fracking?
I'm like, really?
Yeah, there are fake accounts linked To the Internet Research Agency in Russia, we know that they're spreading narratives about fracking because they have a state-owned oil company, right?
And so it's very much being done not because of any particular feeling about fracking one way or another.
And yet they're targeting the left with these anti-fracking narratives, recognizing that they've traditionally been receptive to this type of narrative and just kind of like pushing the envelope just that much more.
And that was a moment I was like, wait, fracking is just sort of, it's a default opinion of mine.
But I don't really know why I have the opinion about fracking that I do.
Oh my God.
How is it that I know what I know?
The realization that I couldn't answer that question just really hit home for me.
I am personally just as influenceable and vulnerable as every other human about things that really matter about the environment, about our world.
And yeah, that was a gut punch of just like, I don't know why I know what I think I know.
Oh my God, this must hit so hard if you're fucking dumb.
Like this is so crazy.
Man, I don't even know what even is fracking.
What do you fucking mean, asshole?
It take two seconds to fucking Google it and how it poisons the fucking like layers of water that like feed all of the nature around it and how it's poisoned towns for generations.
Yeah, why do I even hate fracking?
Man, shut the fuck up.
God.
Seriously, I think that's the right response, Julian.
But what I think he's really doing here, he's like making a virtue of having no guiding ethical core or politics or ideology and just needing the technocrat to give him the inputs because he's a dumb machine whose brain might break.
Yeah, also, also like, I love the idea that your opinion on fracking will change whether or not a fucking Russian op has like promoted tweets related to it.
That's how dumb you are.
The Russians will literally get you to embrace fracking by just opposing it like in five or six posts so that someone else can document it.
I just genuinely, we are ruled over by some of the fucking dumbest people, man.
How do these people get to make any decisions related to our fucking lives online?
It's crazy.
It's, but do you see how this is like, oh, things are complex?
You know, you may not know where like this narrative has come from.
You need to do, you need to spend a lot of time meditating on like some whatever, looking at the spider graphs or the network graphs of where the flows of information are rather than like, I don't know, having core guiding beliefs or ethics, man.
It's also, they got to Josh Fox a bit.
Like Josh Fox has been bullied a lot by the Russia wants you to hate fracking people.
And here I am.
I'm going to bake.
Like, you know, Nordstream 2, Europe is totally dependent on American LNG now.
You know what I mean?
I'm like, I'm thinking about how like, yeah, we need to, we need to stop as a domestic security issue, the anti-fracking environmentalists, because this is our ability to control Europe, essentially.
Anyway, bake it a little bit.
No, there's not that much baking.
Either you believe the Hirsch version or the version that later came out in mainstream media.
Both of them are pretty damn good.
Yeah, again, this is, again, this weird claim that there's some sort of connection between the veracity of the claim and whether or not the claim has been pushed as part of a information operation, which is, yeah, there's no relation between the truth of something and whether or not that claim was somehow useful to some sort of like online, I guess, yeah, a propaganda campaign.
Yeah, like if that simple fact throws your entire understanding of what you believe into a fucking chaos, then I'm sorry, but you gotta stop giving interviews.
You should probably be sequestered at home.
Like you should not be interacting with us.
I have yet to check out the Raskin and Harris podcast that they do as part of the Center for Humane Technology.
But yeah, I mean, honestly, you shouldn't operate a phone, a microwave.
No, yeah, you're going to get hurt.
You're going to get hurt trying to make your way through a doorframe.
So Darresta's analysis and media impact are very important for what takes shape in this post-2018 era.
And then she becomes at the center of the Twitter files backlash.
And I think, you know, look, her background is very instructive in terms of the set of interests that are served by casting the tech lash along the narrow grounds of disinformation.
So Doresta is a computer scientist and former Jane Street trader who became involved in the startup scene in the 2010s Web 2.0 era.
She worked for Tim O'Reilly's VC firm Alpha Tech Ventures.
O'Reilly is the famous Web 2.0 guy.
She also went on to work at the Thiel Foundation between 2012 and 2016, where she was advising the little upstarts who drop out of school to become bloodboys and help the head vampire mine asteroids and that kind of thing.
So she was a fellow there.
Now on the Peter Thiel stuff, she says that bringing it up is guilt by association and that when she was advising these 18 year olds, it was before Peter Thiel went reactionary.
So we all know that distinct moment where he was like a good lib.
Yeah, I remember when that changed.
Yes.
So again, I got to say, you got to be careful with the Russian anti-fracking posts, but don't worry about the teal bucks.
And again, Peter Thiel, he wrote his manifesto saying women shouldn't have the right to vote back in 2009.
And Peter Thiel's foundation has all been about like waging war against campus and the indignities he suffered at Stanford, et cetera, et cetera.
Daresta is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which is a NATSEC think tank.
She's a frequent writer for The Atlantic and gives speaking engagements to the Aspen Ideas Fest.
And in the New York Times, she advocated for Biden to create, quote, a reality czar to help us fight disinfo.
I got to say, I love how we want czars.
This really speaks to the fantasy, right?
Like we want czarist power to protect liberal democracy.
Yes.
Full disclosure, I did tease Renee on Twitter about the reality czar thing and got blocked.
So, you know, I'm sorry for whatever joke I made about the reality czar.
Toxic.
I know.
I know.
Get it together, man.
Now, the right wing would come for Renee, dubbing her CIA Renee during the Twitter files backlash because as a student, she did a CIA fellowship, which was a Part of her bio that she didn't really advertise.
And I'm going to resist the temptation to bake there.
Also, the fact that she currently resides at Georgetown, not going to bake with that.
I'm just merely going to say that the people attacking her are part of the same national security tech elite.
This is a squabble between those elites as to how we run the imperial infrastructure of Silicon Valley platforms.
And this whole CIA Renee Kfab is a way for the reactionary teal Musk side of this to pretend like they're opposed to the deep state, right?
We know this.
You've seen this on your podcast.
It's an empty meme that shitcoats everything.
And now we can't bake anymore because we're sort of caught in these culture war terms.
Stanford Internet Observatory.
Okay, so Renee, as I said, she's the star of this field because of her perch as research director at the Stanford Internet Observatory from 2019 to 24.
It was an interesting ensemble at the Internet Observatory under the auspices of Michael McFaul, Obama's former Russia ambassador, and Alex Stamos, who's formerly the chief Infosec officer at Facebook.
And honestly, putting my, I'm baking here, don't really have proof to verify this, but I honestly feel like he's playing a role of like, look, go manage this problem out there for us.
That's honestly how I feel about Alex Stamos in terms of how substantive his critiques are of the tech industry.
So what the Stanford Internet Observatory established itself as, and Stamos described it in this way, was to essentially be a clearinghouse for platform data to help fight foreign interference and fight for election integrity.
And the idea was that they in the dark beating heart of Silicon Valley would be the ones to develop the research tools and this new social science that's just sort of like this cutting edge emerging field that would help us restore truth and democracy from the foreign menace.
Now, again, I'm going to be petty.
I'm so petty.
But I think there are really massive limitations sort of methodologically in terms of what they're trying to do, notwithstanding some of the useful access they got.
It was definitely the behavioral psych warfare model of communication that platforms view human activity as fundamental, right?
So this is very much understanding it in the terms that the platform themselves think about us and our social interactions.
And just to give you a sort of like a callback to this idea of the overview effect, there's this cliche in data science that, quote, the data understands you better than you know yourself.
I don't think that's true.
I don't think that the subconscious is something that is reflected and these categories that, you know, of postmodernity and the Frankfurt School, that's not reflected as data to be manipulated and programmable.
I mean, I mean, what is this except the new secular idea of the soul?
The cloud of data that sits out there is actually more defining of you than your mind, of your expressions, than your actions.
Like it knows you better than you know yourself.
It is a form of soul.
And look at how Raskin is performing that type of subjectivity.
Like, I don't know what I know.
I'm like, I'm empty.
Tell me, tell me, fill me up with meaning through the data.
That's it.
Yeah.
I have no idea.
Everything is just a calculation.
And that's kind of true of like a lot of liberal policy.
It's like it's never about whether the policy is good.
It's like, how do we communicate this better?
Like, how do we get a bigger audience for our discourse?
They never really question the actual underlying moral stances or policies.
That's right.
So it's, you know, and again, back to Raskin, this is like very anti-like critical theory, like the idea that there are like fundamental critiques that can be sort of arrived at through, you know, staking a moral and ethical position.
But what this does is it essentially, you know, the disinfo researcher, they're the ones that get this overview effect.
They are like gods and we can adopt to their methods because they got all the secret stuff that's very important.
And so one of the things that, again, methodologically, if you look at these papers, they're not really interested in like what's in the content of communication rather than identifying networks of disinfo, which again, doesn't really explain why people resonate with any type of conspiracy content.
And often the determinations about these networks of disinfo are made through like fact-checking indexes and organizations that are like, you know, not doing academic work.
Yeah, it brings us back to guilt by association.
Like, aren't we doing that?
That's right.
Oh, I found a pattern.
Doesn't that say a lot?
No, it doesn't.
Explain.
What do you mean?
Can we talk about correlation, causation?
What are we fucking talking about here?
Well, and it's also, it can just simply invoke this icky feeling, this feeling that you're being attacked.
It feels awesome.
We're all targeted individuals.
It's so true.
I mean, anyway, God.
I'm also gangstalked.
Yeah, I'm gangstocked and targeted.
And Travis specifically is doing all that to me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sometimes it works better than others.
I can serve one of your mental health degrades.
I know I'm doing good work.
I know, yeah.
Travis is definitely the superego of the podcast.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, fighting back against him just involves like bringing on different communists that have like infiltrated the highest ranks of academia.
So he can't argue with it because, you know, he worships the institutions.
So what I do is I smuggle in the fucking plastic explosives in a package that just seems to Travis like, well, of course.
A PhD wants to come on and talk?
It's molecular, you know what I mean?
That's the method.
It's the glancing of the eyes.
Yeah, I'm doing exactly what that video explained, but to Travis.
So again, just to harp on here, but this is a very, you know, one-to-one, monosemic idea of how meaning is fundamentally coercive, right?
That intent and reception are singular, and that singular thing may be Russian chaos.
Again, here's what I'd say.
You can quote me on this.
I don't think this is like academic research methods so much as the tradecraft of cybersecurity consultants and OSINT practitioners, which it's not worthless, right?
But it's more reflective of, yes, the hybrid war industrial complex than academic methods.
And that's why he's very prone to massively overstepping the mark.
And this is also the allure of like naming the new thing.
So, two things you got to watch out for: the media-facing academic and the one who says they've named the new thing.
Like, these are moments of incredible hubris.
And I'll give you an example of this.
So, Stanford Internet Observatory and the Aspen Institute were very pivotal in seeding an idea called information disorders, which is a nonsense concept, not backed by any kind of, you know, I've mentioned behavioral psychology.
It's not even act, it's like this normative theory, not backed by any sort of social science or the psychology of what information disorder is, but it's become the dominant framing for how we think about disinformation causing social chaos and disorder.
They don't define it in any substantive terms, but it's become a normative principle in research in this area.
You know, there's a lot of crazy subfields in the disinfo space.
My favorite, though, is, quote, cognitive security.
Imagine, you know, this, yeah, wonderful, wonderful coinage.
Putting my brain into a cock cage so nobody can reach it.
Exactly.
Yes, yes, yes.
I think of Azza, who's scared.
He's just got to put the in a jar.
We're back to like Descartes, brain in a vat, right?
Like, actually, maybe the matrix is good.
Maybe that's the ultimate form of cognitive security.
I don't really know.
Staying on the petty tip, I got to give a special shout out to Elliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, who has one-upped Renee by getting an honorary doctorate from the University of Leiden for his work on, quote, information disorders.
So Higgins is proof, man.
Like, he made his bones in OSINT as a, you know, OSINT warrior for NATO, and he's a bootstrap story of how you can go from being a gamer to Western intelligence funnel.
So tip of the hat to Dr. Higgins.
AKA Brown Moses.
Yes, hell yeah, brother.
So yeah, this is the kind of policy entrepreneurialism that existed in spaces like Stanford Internet Observatory or the Digital Forensics Research Lab at the Atlantic.
Again, to your point, Travis, about the Kudis, the Disinformation Research Lab, they were very pivotal in saying, oh, actually, it's the Iranians that want you to think that the Zionist lobby wants a ban on TikTok.
So disregard.
Their game has fallen the fuck off.
You know, they used to be able to thread this needle a lot better.
But again, I think Israel is just like a breaking point.
I do think so.
I think it really has been like everyone's ass that can be shown has been shown because you can't really talk ideals and then and then end up kind of like carrying water for this.
So, all right, let me bring this back to I mentioned the sort of two competing models between a kind of like free market American exceptionalism thing and a kind of jerry-rigged system in which some of these disinfo researchers would be allowed some access to then like flag content for removal or harm and this kind of stuff.
And during the tech lash moment, platforms were interested in this system as a way to placate the national security state and avoid like, you know, the antitrust scrutiny by playing their part in protecting democracy.
And look, this was never going to hold.
This was not going to work as a proper new social contract for internet regulation.
It was more like a stage-managed glassnost.
So for this very limited time, the tech companies availed themselves to the NATSEC disinfo complex.
And that meant things like access to Twitter's API or Facebook had this research tool called CrowdTangle.
And again, some of this work is useful and fine, but the overall structural issue remains.
And honestly, I think this was always like a clever oakie doke.
And how the disinfo researchers are ultimately like jilted tech enthusiasts that just wanted to go back to the good old days of Google not being evil.
And, you know, the libs are very credulous about this kind of stuff.
And here's an anecdote for y'all.
I'll never forget this.
2019, I'm at a journalism research conference in Sydney, and there was a whole Google-sponsored journalism initiative talking about all the various ways in which Google is going to help the cause of journalism and democracy.
And one of those was a workshop on fusion tables.
Ezra Klein definitely knows fusion tables.
Like the Vox guys, the data journalism guys, do you remember that moment?
Holy shit, they loved fusion tables.
It was like a kind of proof of Google's beneficence that Google could create this tool that's going to like help us all through technology.
Now, I'm at this research conference.
I'm there the day that Google Fusion Tables got shut down.
They were supposed to be giving this talk about this great tool.
They're shutting it down because guess what?
The tech companies, they bring us in and then whatever, in shitification, whatever you want to call it, they get rid of that stuff.
None of that is there to stay.
And the same is true of how disinfo researchers got access to Twitter's API or CrowdTangle.
That shit was never going to stay.
Center for Humane Technology.
Now, this spirit of Glasnost had this idea of how we were going to uplift civil society resilience to the harms of disinformation.
And that meant NGOs.
And I'm going to talk about this in our context here in Aotearoa, New Zealand.
We were at the center of a lot of this, obviously, because of the horrors of the Christchurch mosque terror attack.
And so our prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, dame Jacinda, she established an NGO known as the Christchurch Call, which very much modeled the ideal of governments, civil society, and tech companies coming together to rise up to the moment.
And there's some fine work that occurs in these spaces, but functionally, it's technocratic and works against democratic state power reigning in corporate monopolies.
What's even more cynical here about the Christchurch call is much of what it achieved was something that was already in the pipeline at places like Facebook that they got to pass off as like, quote, we're listening to civil society voices.
And again, if y'all know Jacinda, you know, a very accomplished politician.
She's kind of like our Obama.
She's a great political performer and was a very inspiring leader in the aftermath of all that.
But ultimately, you know, she's just part of a global liberal centrist NGO class, right?
Like she's now working at Harvard Berkman Klein's Center for Internet and Society.
Pretty sweet job.
And she's this model Of good governance and humane technocratic leadership that will help us rise to the challenge, that kind of stuff.
She wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post describing her work as, quote, the model for governing AI.
And this line is great.
She recounts the sort of challenges of the terror attack and whether they should, quote, regulate in haste or bring in government officials and academics to build consensus and make progress.
And like this idea that like, we're going to kill the golden calf of the internet after it's already done so much fucking harm is just, yeah, it's pure Silicon Valley NGO talking points.
So this is the way in which things like the Center for Humane Technology, the Christchurch Call are managing this glass-nosed period.
So the Center for Humane Technology, they're really at the heart of Silicon Valley again.
They are advised by Stanford Internet Observatory.
The Christchurch Call is a member.
There's a lot of tech philanthropy from the likes of Omidyar.
And their big intervention was this documentary, The Social Dilemma.
Y'all have seen this?
Yeah.
Yeah, so I think this do is kind of the height of like a media literacy approach.
It's the kind of thing you're supposed to show high school students, middle school students, right?
And you'd think it would be fair enough, but I got some big problems here.
The docko was also co-produced by Exposure Labs, who also made the Christopher Wiley the Great Hack Daco on Cambridge Analytica that, again, traffics in much of the kinds of stuff that we've looked at today, really emphasizing digital hygiene and media literacy as opposed to like, you know, taking on structural tech capitalist power.
So the face, we've met Aza.
The other co-founder is, of course, Tristan Harris.
He's the face of the documentary.
And I think of him as a great example of a Silicon Valley wise man that really knows very little.
At the start of the documentary, if you guys remember, he's rehearsing this like TED Talk to an empty theater.
And when I was first watching this, I thought, oh my God, this is hilarious.
He's doing like a meta bit about what like being a tech guy is about.
But no, he really is like that vapid TED Talk dude.
Like he's just that guy.
It's very self-congratulatory, insipid stuff designed to show how smart and moral the tech elite is.
That, hey, look, they created the like button and it's really, really powerful, but at the same time, they can fix it, you know?
So there's a scene in The Social Dilemma where Harris insists that like social media is like this unique problem, different to other technologies.
Like, for example, the bicycle.
No one got upset when bicycles showed up, right?
Like if everyone's starting to go around on bicycles, no one said, oh my God, we've just ruined society.
Like bicycles are affecting people.
They're pulling people away from their kids.
They're ruining the fabric of democracy.
People can't tell what's true.
Like, we never said any of that stuff about a bicycle.
If something is a tool, it genuinely is just sitting there waiting patiently.
If something is not a tool, it's demanding things from you.
It's seducing you.
It's manipulating you.
Damn, son.
Has he heard of like fan death?
Yeah, simply not true.
Every time there is a, I guess, a sort of a paradigm changing technology, there is a big fear that it's going to harm society or individuals in a substantial way.
As was the case with bicycles, right?
Like it was going to ruin the family.
It was going to ruin fertility and give women bicycle face.
So yes, no technology exists outside of political economy or the complex ways in which politics, the state, and capital make decisions about social value.
Dumbass.
Anyway, so that's what's really infuriating about this kind of person leading the discussion on communication and tech policies.
There's like a way of staying chipper and cheerful about like American techno-optimism while being totally ignorant or obfuscating or who knows, an op, right?
Like America's been building this apparatus of capital technology and psychological warfare for 80 plus years.
And so getting off of that like requires politics and ethical values, not this whole like, let's just get back to our tools.
So this is where I think we really come into fruition about what's the role of Center for Humane Technology and somebody like Tristan Harris.
So he's the guy that was brought on to 60 Minutes to talk about the unique evil of screen addiction and China programming our teams.
It's owned by a Chinese company called Byte Dance.
And Harris says the version that's served to Chinese consumers called Du Yen is very different from the one available in the West.
In their version of TikTok, if you're under 14 years old, they show you science experiments you can do at home, museum exhibits, patriotism videos, and educational videos.
And they also limit it to only 40 minutes per day.
Now, they don't ship that version of TikTok to the rest of the world.
So it's almost like they recognize that technology is influencing kids' development, and they make their domestic version, a spinach version of TikTok, while they've shipped the opium version to the rest of the world.
The version served to the West has kids hooked for hours at a time.
The impact, Harris says, is predictable.
There's a survey of pre-teens in the U.S. and China asking what is the most aspirational career that you want to have.
In the U.S., the number one was influencer.
Social media influencer.
And in China, the number one was astronaut.
Again, you allow those two societies to play out for a few generations.
I can tell you what your world is going to look like.
TikTok tells us it gives American users tools to limit screen time, but those tools are entirely voluntary.
Can we just say, like, America is perfectly capable of numbing itself and turning themselves into drooling morons gazing down at a screen without help from China?
I'm sorry.
Eliminate TikTok and you still have fucking Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat.
Like, man, it's the one Chinese one.
And they're like, you know what?
The Chinese actually have regulations back home.
Yeah.
It's like, yeah, you get regulations too, then, dumbass.
It's also funny sort of like, I don't know, like cell phones.
Like, you know, in China, they make a point of using technology, technological media to enrich children.
We don't do that.
We have no interest in doing that.
That is never going to happen here.
So like, where are you going with this?
It's just, it's a very strange point.
We got to nuke the Chinese internet.
That's it.
They forced us to do it.
They created a better system that's centrally controlled, but it's communism.
So we got to destroy it.
Yeah, you can't, right?
Regulating how children use apps is communism.
We can't possibly rein in our various powerful fucking tech oligarchs.
We can't tell them what to do.
They tell us what to do.
And that's that's crack cocaine.
That's the good drug.
Opium, that's the bad drug.
You don't want opium.
Spinach.
This again, like the level of historical illiteracy or you're a psyop, you have to be to go on 60 minutes and talk about like the Chinese opium TikTok menace.
Man, the first time I saw this, though, was on Joe Lonsdale's podcast with Aston Kucher.
Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of Palantir and overall creep.
But we've been whipping up this TikTok Manchurian candidate thing for a while now, right?
Like, and that's sort of really captured this generalized, again, think about what Q thinks about their liberal opponent as sort of inhuman or manipulable.
And we are all the same now.
TikTok has closed the loop and it's effectively finished the disinfo field.
The Twitter files.
Oh man, so actually I hate thinking about the Twitter files, but I think the abbreviated version is this moment of liberal glasnost comes crashing down and the disinfo technocrats are no longer managing the tech lash for two reasons, right?
TikTok's emergence as the number one policy concern.
And number two, you know, the techno-oligarchs got their groove back, baby, thanks to Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter.
So again, TikTok has been great for the likes of Palantir, Facebook, China Hawks, the Israel lobby to use the disinfo panic in the ways that it was always meant to be, right?
Like as this kind of communist menace that means that we need to like close our digital borders, if you will.
And there was, again, this notion that our tech companies need to be strong to fight the civilizational war with China, whether it's on looped video content or AI.
This is fundamentally fighting China, it's fighting Russia, fighting Hamas.
And in that war, the jerry-rigged system of disinfo specialists as a moral authority totally hindered this mission.
So Renee and many of the other stars of the disinfo field have been dragged in the kind of online culture war with, you know, Elon Musk calling, for example, Elliott Higgins and Bellingcat a psyop.
There was the whole scary Poppins attack on Nina Jankovitz.
So she was going to be appointed to the Department of Homeland Security's Disinfo Governance Board.
And then the right wing dragged her because she did a lot of like Harry Potter musical slash fic videos.
They sound as amazing.
They are as amazing as that sounds, Julian.
But honestly, look, this is also somebody who's made their bones in the disinfo field in the sort of Russia-Ukraine NGO space.
And, you know, there are some substantive critiques to be made, irrespective of the way that the online culture war right, you know, obviously loves to harass and target prominent women online.
So the right in this culture war had a much simpler message that the freedom to post is the core freedom of our age.
And there they'll find lots of, you know, Q and far-right partisans that wholeheartedly agree.
And the idea was that the disinformation field was woke censorship throttling the freedom to post.
And that was captivating for people.
And it's a lot simpler and more coherent.
And again, to return to Baudrillard, to the political economy tradition, this self-publishing ideology at the heart of social media is what people love irrationally, right?
Like there's just, that's the genesis quai of why we love the post.
And so Elon Musk was able to champion this cause and say that he was, you know, taking over Twitter to save free speech.
And the Twitter files were a great way to use self-serving leaks to reinforce that story with pliant media hacks like Matt Taibbi, Barry Weiss, and Michael Schellenberger.
And it helped set up the coordinates in which, like, I don't know, only Elon Musk can resist the deep state because he's not woke and cringe.
Again, it's hard to countenance this as like a serious thought, but there we go.
That's how this broke down.
And they sort of, they leaked and they exposed elements of this jerry-rigged system.
And there were a lot of really ad hoc and stupid takedown requests relying on lazy definitions of disinfo and foreign interference, which again, there was a massive overreach here.
But part of that was already sort of just baked into this system as they understood it.
Now, amongst, I suppose, the left liberal side, this was fundamentally going to end election integrity.
And look, I think if election integrity is over, it's because of whatever, fascism taking over America, rather than our noble disinfo warriors being disestablished.
And, you know, things like the Stanford Internet Observatory was effectively sued out of existence.
But I still want to re-emphasize here that this is like a civil war between a kind of national security and tech elite.
So where are we now?
Well, thanks for asking, Julian.
The disinfo research paradigm is over.
It's over, baby.
The tech mega coalition is feeling itself.
It's done away with the modicum of shame that allowed disinfo researchers some access and some moral authority.
So yes, Twitter API access is done.
Crowdtangle, done.
Stanford Internet Observatory and Election Integrity Research shut down.
The cuts to USAID are very substantive because that's a huge blow to the NGO cadres of disinfo researchers that are carrying out this work in sort of like the broader like NATO Atlanticist sphere.
And, you know, for Trump, it's kind of personal.
Like he views them as like the key part of the Russia hoax, as he put it.
And so disinfo research has been relentlessly attacked.
Some of this comes from Stephen Miller's America First Legal.
And in sort of in memory of the disinfo research field, like they've definitely accumulated an impressive list of enemies, but I still think we can't confuse that for the righteousness of their cause or their scholarship.
The descent into AI slop world through a brute forcing of the internet into generative AI clearly goes well beyond the problem of truth and disinfo.
And we're back at some, you know, old knowledge.
We're back at some fundamental old knowledge that we need here because what shrouds itself as technological complexity and a rewiring of consciousness through AI is the same old corporate power, right?
Like it still needs like fiat state power to allow itself to be a business model and to go forth.
So the importance of political economy principles, of data and labor rights, corporate arbitrage, monopoly, and the public trust are still, they're still there, you know?
Like they're still objectively issues, even if we don't have exactly the right academic language to attack this.
And I don't want to be too utopian here, but I think the work of Lena Khan was impressive and was more promising an angle, right?
So I'm just going to hold on to like the shrinking iceberg of like antitrust work because it did create some odd political bedfellows.
And I'm not, you know, don't want to be too romantic here, but I think this is a much better path forward than the tradecraft of national security contractors.
It's a politics that can make use of popular discontent with the tech elite and grass towards something like, you know, the notions of public trust.
So there's ultimately no technocratic fixes to these political questions.
Now, perhaps some lessons have been learned here.
Renee DeResta has a new book in which she modifies her earlier work and says that misinfo and disinfo are misdiagnoses of the problem.
So, I don't know, better late than never, I guess.
Those are all good things.
Some of us have learned from this process.
That's good.
But frankly, the harm has been done.
I think this is part of like making a much more vengeful Trump and a liberal and media political class that are even more perfectly incapable of resisting him.
So I put this in the category of like, I don't know, eight years of wasted liberal political activity that has cemented very stupid ways for thinking about communication.
And, you know, you guys on the show often sort of allude to how Q is like a Black Lodge version of like communication as warfare.
And, you know, I think the disinfo people are also very much invested in the lurking virus.
And essentially, we've all become the memory TV meme.
That's where we're at, right?
Like everyone believes that their opponents are psychically driven or possessed by some algorithmic force or a demon or some dark power.
And it's also like a generational thing.
Like it's a way of completely discounting like the Zoomers as like the TikTok possessed.
And this ultimately, this warification of social life is just perfect for like Palantir and the Department of Homeland Security, right?
Like I think this weapon of repression is in the hands of its rightful owners.
So great job all around, everyone.
Yeah, it's really how like successive administrations have failed to make a big difference when it concerns, you know, Citizens United or some of these larger things that like so very clearly need to be repealed or removed altogether.
I think that they're fueling the rise of the right and like their ability to hijack the narrative.
So, you know, you're a petty bitch, but you're also spot on.
So I really appreciate you bringing this perspective to the podcast.
And, you know, I think we've done at least some psychic damage to Travis.
Sure.
I mean, like, I just want to like kind of reference like why I got interested in the subject matter generally is that, you know, like back in like, you know, the early 2000s, you know, on the internet, there are a lot of like young earth creationists.
You know, there are people who believe that the earth is 6,000 years old.
And further, there were some people who believed in this sort of like this sanitized version called intelligent design.
And I was really interested in this, not because I believed it was the product of some sort of like foreign government seeking to undermine America.
This is an extremely American sort of belief system that is completely batshit.
It was very detached from reality and as American as it gets.
I mean, globally, Catholicism is perfectly comfortable with scientific evolution.
Global Protestantism is generally fine with it.
But American evangelical Christianity does not like it very much and consequently took to the internet to spread these bullshit beliefs about the age of the earth and the origin and complexity of biology.
See, Travis has become a return guy, but he like wishes we would return to like, you know, Christians trying to modify the education system so that dinosaurs have Jesus on the back.
The other thing, interesting thing about that was like, it was part of like a real conspiracy.
Discovery Institute was like pushing this because they thought that like people believing in evolution led to children believing in like, you know, atheism and the socialism and stuff.
That's right.
Then they're, they need litter boxes in their classrooms.
Yes, exactly.
It was a part of a panic, but it was, it was all-American, but it was disinformation.
It was like just bad because it's preferable to believe things that are more closely aligned to the truth than not.
And I think that's like generally true of like most disinformation.
You know, this is generally a self-inflicted problem domestically.
Like I'll talk about like, you know, harmful disinformation campaigns.
I think of like, you know, anti-vax stuff.
Again, a very American concept.
Globally, not nearly as much of an issue.
This is Americans pumping falsehoods into the brains of other Americans.
And I think that's bad.
I think we could return to exporting miracle solution.
Yes, exactly.
And frying the insides of people in foreign countries.
Drinking bleach.
Yeah, that's another sort of American thing.
I've read a lot of research about these sorts of like, you know, disinformations and sort of like there's conspiracy entrepreneurs that operate totally domestically against each other and why that's bad.
And this doesn't come from a framework of thinking that like America is so pure and truthful, but were it not for these foreigners?
I mean, it comes from a framework of believing that like, you know, there are false beliefs that are uniquely American that are pushed upon other Americans.
They're harming Americans.
So I mean, that's, I mean, that's the kind of perspective that I see when I see a lot of disinformation research.
So reimagining self-publishing as a right is got to be is a very, very, very complex thing.
But it is something that's like possible.
Like, you know, Jeremy Corbyn, when he was running back in 2019, talked about like, well, how can we think about the BBC licensing fee and a public broadcast approach to like platforms, right?
Like, what would a kind of government public broadcasting approach to the digital public square look like?
And we are not even like close to starting those conversations, but we could have them.
Julian, you're in France.
I remember Minitel and again, which were government-owned portals.
There are some antecedents that we can grasp towards, but my view here from Aotearoa, New Zealand, where obviously we've been experiencing the same sort of whatever, anti-vax right-wing populist convulsions as everywhere else in Western liberal democracies is that we did get a kind of disinfo approach that totally mirrored the American thing.
And this is in a country that has the most deregulated media market with no public broadcasting.
And it would be more accurate to say that we have had American right-wing culture war unleashed upon us as like, you know, a foreign media policy settings that have sort of led to this deluge of that kind of stuff.
It makes much more sense to think about it that way than to say that like Russia is manipulating New Zealand attitudes towards vaccines.
But that's what we got.
We didn't get a public policy.
This is sort of, it all comes down to the lack of desire for, again, neoliberals to imagine getting off of this trajectory.
They just simply don't have it in them to think big enough to challenge these material problems that are the cause.
And I would say, here's one real practical thing.
I think we need to like somehow, we need to subsidize copy centers and pamphleteers and return to like print culture.
So you can espouse whatever bullshit you want, but you got to like hand out pamphlets.
That's good.
Yeah, yeah.
You want to be cat turd?
You got to become a Trotskyist, bitch.
Get a table.
That's right.
You got to bring back zines.
We'll cure this all.
Yeah, I was in a cafe three years ago and somebody came in in a fencing outfit handing out pamphlets about electromagnetic something full of typos.
And I was like, slowly.
This is what's up.
This is an artisan.
This is a craft.
And that's what we need.
We need to bring that back.
We need to bring back, yeah, artisanship.
I totally agree.
Well, it's been a long and fruitful episode.
This is an ongoing debate.
And I am, you know, continuing my psychological operation to demoralize Travis.
And I think it's been somewhat successful.
Olivier, where can people direct any complaints they have about this episode?
And by that, I mean find your work.
Right.
Oh, I'm still on the bad website at OJUTEL.
I'm in the liberal safe space, Blue Sky as well, Olivier.jutel.
And all my academic work is like open access.
So if you Google Scholar Me or ResearchGate Me, you can read that stuff if you so desire.
And yeah, and send me nasty emails.
That's fine.
I like that.
I'm a petty bitch.
Exactly.
He's petty and he's trained for this.
I, on the other hand, will shatter if I hear a single criticism about our beautiful podcast.
Travis, where should people go to, you know, if they want an extra episode?
You know, I mean, do you think there's a place for them to get an extra QA episode every week?
Yeah, you know, if you're really interested in another QA episode, which you should be, you should go to the patreon.com slash QA and sign up for five bucks a month.
I hear that there's also this other platform called CursedMedia.net, where you can go and find all of our mini-series of the past and our ongoing mini-series by Liv Agar and Spencer Barrows.
Science in Transition is the beginning of this project.
Go support it.
And you can say that you were there at the beginning.
You weren't like, I don't know if these guys are going to pull it off.
What do you think?
Have we been doing this for seven years?
See, this is what happens.
Every time I start to threaten them.
And then Travis has to tell me, no, we have to start this over.
But we're not going to start it over.
And I love you guys.
I'm not threatening you.
At least not more than I threaten other people I love in my life.
All right.
And with that, we will say goodbye and good night to all our sweet listeners.
Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.
Bye.
Bye.
*music*
We have auto-keyed content based on your preferences.
In a world so connected, it's easy for information to travel fast, but not all of it brings people together.
A piece of information can quickly become twisted, weaponized, and used to cause harm or incite fear.
A phenomenon known as information disorder.
False information shared on purpose to mislead or harm is known as disinformation.
Like a chain reaction, people who hear disinformation often go on to believe and spread it, resulting in misinformation.
But there's a third type of information disorder that's sometimes harder to detect.
When we discover true information and use it to harm, manipulate, or sow fear.
That's known as malinformation.
These forms of information disorder are deeply connected.
Malinformation is true with the intent to harm.
Disinformation is false with the intent to harm.
And misinformation is false and shared without the intent to harm.
Both malinformation and disinformation work to harm others, while both disinformation and misinformation thrive off of false information.
We can fight these forms of information disorder by breaking the cycle of misinformation, verifying our sources, and standing in solidarity with those who are often targeted by harmful narratives.
When we take responsibility for the information we share, we help build stronger, more connected communities where truth can truly thrive.
