Hi Antonio,

Thanks for writing on these issues. I wish there had been a bit more in your piece about what I thought the title meant - the mechanism by which propagandists come to believe their own spin. I think that is a fascinating phenomenon, and deserves an almost psychoanalytic study. Have you ever looked at Ortega y Gasset's "The Revolt of the Masses"? It offers some great insights in this area.

Do you remember that NY Times Magazine story where a top Republican strategist sneered at "the reality-based community" who didn't have the guts to reinvent history, and were therefore fodder for the Right Wing? This is level of authoritarian hubris inevitably leads to cataclysm, though it may bring down millions or hundreds of millions of people with it, as it topples.

It seems to me that the underlying logic and increasing accelerations of events suggests a huge inflation of social hysteria and then a sudden crash of the current political and financial system, which is increasingly detached from real world referents, much like the ancien regime before the French Revolution. The Chris Heath book, "American Fascists", makes it clear that the Evangelical Right is planning for this with the intention of establishing a Fundamentalist theocracy in the US. Unfortunately, there is no clear intention or collective project among people on the Left. My sense is that we had better construct one in a rapid timeframe, and then utilize the media tools now available to disseminate it. As Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt discuss in "Multitude" (consider this product placement for our reading group on the RS forums), there are "weapons" available to the people, that can counteract the weapons of the military authoritarian complex. The best weapons available to us are the tools of media, marketing, propaganda, and , I increasingly think, the techniqueof satyagraha, nonviolent direct action, developed by Gandhi. Imagine if the next mass protest wave, like the Iraq War protests, does not limit itself to meaningless street theater but includes a mass abdication from work-slavery until society is fundamentally reformed, according to an agreed-upon set of principles like the Earth Charter, or those developed by Jerry Mander and his group?

As for The New York Times, it seems clear that they are deeply compromised and infiltrated by intelligence agencies, or at the least willingly serve the agenda of elite groups such as the CFR. Their article did not mention Judith Miller, who must have been some kind of operative of military intelligence. That means that for this piece to come out, it reflects a schism or "meme war" within the intelligence community, which probably includes many civil servants and thoughtful people who do not think the manipulation of information, to this degree, serves the country, and may lead to disaster.

Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch is currently buying The Wall Street Journal and New York Newsday to add to the NY Post, to take an extraordinary Burlesconi-like stranglehold of street-level news in the New York area.

I have to hand it to Terence McKenna and Jose Arguelles: It does seem that history is speeding up and compressing into tighter and tighter fractal cycles as we approach whatever the heck is coming at us next.

 

 

 

"Will the transformation."-Rilke

I am not sure there is hope for a revival of the top-down newspaper or TVbroadcast model. What is going to be necessary, perhaps, is a more orchestrated system of news from the "here comes everyone" blogosphere, that self-organizes from the bottom up. This requires creating an underlying information architecture and interface design.

News made by everyone for everyone would be the necessary accompaniment to the global direct democracy that is projected, in an incredibly (and frustratingly) vague way, by Negri and Hardt. The system would have to be constituted to allow for expertise to influence debates and filters that provide editing/curating, and to naturally institute trust and transparency. 

"Will the transformation."-Rilke

Daniel,

Thanks for the comment. I, too, wish I had written the article that you wish I had written! The problem is that sometimes, like most bloggers, I shoot from the lip and was writing in a bit of the writer’s equivalent of road rage. You make wonderful points and I wish I had the time and space to deconstruct the psychological mindset of propagandists. Jacques Ellul did the most comprehensive analysis ("Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes") and the grandfather of advertising, Edward Bernays, lays out a good blueprint ("Propaganda"). The problem is that they write about media in a one-to-many broadcast environment in the context of WWII. Admittedly I'm not an expert on Nazi history, but as a student of media I think one thing that distinguishes the current moment from that period was the power of film as a novel form of communication. I'm fairly certain that the average person now is more media savvy than someone from the era of Nazi Germany, but I have not way to prove that. Of course it depends on who you talk to. As a recent Pew study showed, those who watch the Daily Show are better informed than those who watch Fox. Is it the shows themselves, or the kind of person attracted to those programs?

One of the points I was going for was that that a problem for propagandists who disregard truth is that they end up believing their own lies, which leads to a feedback loop that is ultimately self-destructive. Disinformation always is at least 25% true, we just don't know which part. But to play the "game," as the KGB called the power plays around the world, one must certainly hold the quest for control and power far above morals and truth. The problem with these guys, as Seymour Hersh once said in an interview, what scares him is that they actually believe what they say. With Kissenger, he said, at least you knew there was an angle on every deal.

Some feel that people who cannot read are susceptible to propaganda, yet the Nazi-era Germans were highly literate and educated. Is this reconcilable? In other words, in the case of Germans, education didn't matter. What they didn't have is the ability to critically engage film and other kinds of mass media. I think this is why we both believe *media* education is so important. What makes contemporary society different is that we have more antibodies in our media consumption habits; we are more immune to their effects because we have simply been exposed to so much. I believe advertisers are well aware of this as evidenced by their increased volume and sensory output. Yes, current media are incredible intense and manipulative, far beyond early film, still I think that they keep ratchetting up as a result of our own desensitization. From what I read in the marketing trade papers, advertisers are freaking out because they believe they are losing relevance. Though youth are more mediated, the kind of media they are consuming is a lot more interactive. The Nazi era and roughly the last 100 years of our media habits have been conditioned by the one-to-many model of information distribution. The exciting thing about our moment is the change into a many-to-many model. Of course the large corporations want as much of that pie as possible. Will they succeed? I don't know the answer.

Seems like every time we peel a layer from the onion, we find something stinkier inside. For example, I was looking at a new Air Force recruitment Website and it is apparent that the mentality behind all their slick new media is still pretty old: as long as you can identify something visually and can destroy it, you will successfully control the world. This is a consequence of what I call GridThink, which is a left-brained kind of rationality that reduces everything to things in a grid. Reality from this vantage results in the situation we are in now (I wrote more extensively about this in my book, Mediacology, out next in May)

Like you I also believe the top-down media model is dead, and not worth the amount of energy media activists put into criticizing it. Based on my reading of media and emergence theory, I believe that face-to-face contact remains the most powerful kind of communication, and it is the reality of sidewalks, trade and public space that shape language and civilizations. For example, after the last presidential election I looked at a county-by-county colored coded map of who voted Republican or Democrat (the so-called blue and red voters). I saw a very clear pattern: people who vote democrat tend to live on water—rivers, lakes or the sea. Since these are usually places of trade, movement and immigration, my guess is that a democrat-oriented voter tends to be exposed to different cultures and ideas. Not surprisingly, red states are in the interior, which have less contact with the outside world, and generally see things through mediation devices like television. This supports my idea that media very much behave like ecosystems, and different niches require different strategies. For years I went to these “fly-over” over states and did media literacy workshops around the issue of tobacco and alcohol awareness campaigns. Occasionally someone would make the connection, as once happened at a youth conference in Phoenix, “If you are saying all ads are manipulative, is that true for military ads too?” Bingo! So I think context is the key. On the one hand there needs to be counter arguments and other media sources to balance the information presented on MSM, on the other there needs to be more human discussion and context outside of media.

Unfortunately, both the Republicans and Democrats depend on a 10% margin of those “undecided” who tend to live in gated communities and suburbs. It depresses me that our electoral system has come to who can fight and win theses “crumbs.” This is why you see Hillary pulling out the Rove playbook as she tries to Swift Boat Obama on her way to the Democratic ticket. Fear will decide this next election, I have no doubt about that.

Anyhow, moving on. Like you, I do feel that the multitudes and “here comes everybody” flash mobs is the future. We cannot succeed by fighting GridThink on its own terms, we have to fight it with Aikido. Confuse and conquer! No, just kidding. A nonlinear, emergent, distributed intelligence is at the basis of nature and system-thinking; it is a holographic manifestation of universal laws. Our ability to think like that gives us a great advantage. The GridThinkers won’t see it coming, and are ill prepared to deal with that emergent paradigm. I’m still trying to solve the pedagogical problem of how that is taught. But I’m sure that in many ways it is emerging regardless.

um the world is round and it does orbit the sun.

I'm halfway through the Clay Shirky book and it's proving to be for me one of the most important reads of the past 10 years. I cannot stress how relevant it is to the Reality Sandwich community and anyone who is interested in the ways society is changing. It should almost be required reading. So grateful thanks, Antonio, for bringing that book to my attention. Some excerpts relevant to the conversation above:

"As they surveyed the growing amount of self-published content on the internet many media companies correctly understood that the trustworthiness of each outlet was lower than that of established outlets like The New York Times. But what they failed to understand was that the effortlessness of publishing means that there are many more outlets. The same idea, published in dozens or hundreds of places, can have an amplifying effect that outweighs the verdict from the smaller number of professional outlets. (This is not to say that mere repetition makes an idea correct; amateur publishing relies on corrective argument even more than traditional media do.) The change isn't a shift from one kind of news institution to another, but rather in the definition of news: from news as an institutional prerogative to news as part of a communications ecosystem, occupied by a mix of formal organizations, informal collectives, and individuals."

"An individual with a camera or keyboard is now a non-profit of one, and self-publishing is now the normal case. This spread has been all the more remarkable because this technological story is not like the story of the automobile, where an invention moved from high cost to low cost, so that it went from being a luxury to being a commonplace possession. Rather, this technological story is like literacy, wherein a particular capability moves from a group of professionals to become embedded within society itself, ubiquitously, available to a majority of citizens."

"In a world where publishing is effortless, the decision to publish something isn't terribly momentous. Just as movable type raised the value of being able to read and write even as it destroyed the scribal tradition, globally free publishing is making public speech and action more valuable, even as its absolute abundance diminishes the specialness of professional publishing. "

"The twentieth century, with the spread of radio and television, was the broadcast century. The normal pattern for media was that they were created by a small group of professionals and then delivered to a large group of consumers. But media, in the word's literal sense as a middle layer between people, have always been a three-part affair. People like to consume media, of course, but they also like to produce it...and they like to share it...Because we now have media that supports both making and sharing, as well as consuming, those capabilities are reappearing, after a century mainly given over to consumption. We are used to world where little things happen for love and big things happen for money. Love motivates people to bake a cake and money motivates people to make an encyclopedia. Now, though, we can do big things for love."

"We are plainly witnessing a restructuring of the media businesses, but their suffering isn't unique, its's prophetic. All businesses are media businesses, because whatever else they do, all businesses rely on the managing of information for two audiences - employees and the world. The increase in the power of both individuals and groups, outside traditional organizational structures, is unprecedented...The linking of symmetical participation and amateur production makes this period of change remarkable. Symmetrical participation means that once people have the capacity to receive information, they have the capability to send it as well...Amateur production, the result of all this new capability, means that the category of "consumer" is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity."

it is hard for some to be optimistic/when stuck in the septic bowels of American mantra, circa now/surrounded by opinionated circus clowns/who clone each others nonsense as they make the rounds/confused and drowning in hidden superfluous frowns/and pumping up our menial differences to put us down/ we’re still around/to count us out would be a mistake/a voice so loud it reverberates through the ages/wake up, rattle the cages and release your inner sages/bravery grows up through cracks in shallow capital graves/buckling asphalt with a new consciousness coming in waves from the postmortem slave wage concrete pasture we once grazed

on the free radio the other day, " it's like talking to a dog about arithmetic" that was his take on trying to reason with them.

Great article Antonio, and I have to say my thoughts while reading were pretty much exactly the same thoughts Daniel shared in his first response: time truly is accelerating and this shit is really happening.

In regards to what I believe needs to happen and what I believe can and will happen, I also am in agreement with Daniel but will try to extend it a little further.

"My sense is that we had better construct one in a rapid timeframe, and then utilize the media tools now available to disseminate it. As Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt discuss in "Multitude" (consider this product placement for our reading group on the RS forums), there are "weapons" available to the people, that can counteract the weapons of the military authoritarian complex. The best weapons available to us are the tools of media, marketing, propaganda, and , I increasingly think, the techniqueof satyagraha, nonviolent direct action, developed by Gandhi. Imagine if the next mass protest wave, like the Iraq War protests, does not limit itself to meaningless street theater but includes a mass abdication from work-slavery until society is fundamentally reformed, according to an agreed-upon set of principles like the Earth Charter, or those developed by Jerry Mander and his group?"

"a mass abdication from work-slavery until society is fundamentally reformed"

It's so simple, but this is all it takes.  And all this takes is food, water, and a place to rest one's bones.  All this takes is some land and some rain.  From what I've read about the return to the land occurring already throughout Russia, I think it's simply time we started doing it here and with a large enough multitude practicing satyagraha and refusing to pay any taxes or give any creedence to this government that is definitely not protecting us in anyway, there is no possibly way the big bad folks in charge would/could simply jail everyone.

We need to start finding land, establishing connected communities (while still paying taxes for now), until the advertisements of this peaceful world reach the masses, and then once the number is large enough we can simply shout to Empire that we're out. 

War doesn't work for them if we don't fight back, and if they want to jail us and feed us then fine: we still get to escape and abdicate from the work-slavery that probably is just as bad if not worse than being in prison; and they still don't have the intelligent people they need to run Empire; and if they do react negatively I can not think but it would only cause those still living "outside" the Multitude and "inside" Empire would immediately think: "wtf, why are they arresting everyone for doing nothing" and likely do the fighting (hopefully peacefull) for us...

I know this is all ridiculously ideal, but hey, aren't we ultimately trying to bring heaven back to earth and recognize that we have not ever fallen from paradise?

All bridges can be rebuilt.

Of course I just realized that for all of these "communities" to truly work in the "real world" at all, everyone involved must work at overcoming/have overcome their own ego and know how to live peacefully with others without being controlled by their desires or acting "out of line".

But this is something I think the magical people at RS and elsewhere can accomplish and teach others' to accomplish as well... we all just need a little bit more healing.

All bridges can be rebuilt.

From what I've read about the return to the land occurring already throughout Russia.

 I'd like to hear more about that. Links?

There was a recent dock workers strike against the war on the West coast, so there are rumblings of what you are calling for. I think the military may be bankrupt before anyone stops them, though. This may be one of those situations of a system spiraling down the abyss with the break lines cut. But I agree, nonviolence all the way. There is no other choice.

I think it was actually from an article on here although I just did a brief yahoo search and found nothin.  Here's the article on RS though: http://www.realitysandwich.com/call_ringing_cedars

I'm also wondering if you or anyone else might remember/know of an ancient Russian text on mystical farming... I remember someone speaking of it during Daniel's Burning Man talk this past year and the detail I remember is a spell that when cast over a seed will create the healing plant you'll need for that next year... sounded interesting to experiment with if anyone remembers this old Russian text.

It does look like the military is going to go bankrupt too... no money past June 15th already if Congress doesn't pass more money... which they both don't have to pass nor should pass since we need to get out of Iraq.

All bridges can be rebuilt.