We Weren't Built to Absorb This Much Propaganda

We are besieged by information warfare. Is it any wonder why we feel like we're drowning?

Here’s the most important thing you need to know about any geopolitical or internal business conflict, anywhere in the world:

Absolutely nobody involved has any incentive whatsoever to tell you the truth about what’s going on.

Zero.

That’s the quick answer to why your guys say everything—everything—is going just great when they’re in power, and everything is going badly when it’s the other guys. And the other guys somehow believe the exact opposite. Both have evidence to back them up.

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a breakdown of emotions on the internet like what’s happening at the moment with Israel and Gaza. This isn’t drawn as cleanly along political lines as Russia vs Ukraine. And as someone who has no particular personal skin in this game, all that I see are people screaming past each other.

We, here, in the West, as the vast majority of my readers are, have no choice but to absorb the progress of this war via what we’re permitted to know of it through information relayed to the media largely by governments and military generals. Footage is smuggled out of the warzones and given competing contexts. Both sides claim the other are faking their dead.

Everybody has picked a side. Everybody is equally distraught, not only by the senseless death and misery, but by the revelation that so many of the otherwise ordinary people who surround us are evil. Not just evil, either, but an evil not seen in this world since Europe in the 1930s and 40s. Because they follow the other side, and nobody could honestly fall for the obvious lies peddled by the other side.

Which side is telling the truth about all of this? Both, probably, to a degree. And neither. The people around you, the people you respected who let you down because of their opinions about this, are very unlikely to be anywhere close to the types of monsters that you’re being told they are.

I’m not going to talk about Israel and Gaza today, in part because I’m not qualified to educate you about any of that. What I do know is that we are caught in this crazy battle being waged for our minds, and it’s being waged by all sorts of people who control the flow of information in one way or another and for one reason or another.

Everybody curates the truth. You do, I do, everybody does. Primarily we do it when we’re trying to get people on our side. And as the world becomes more globally connected the number of sides fighting for our allegiance grows to an absurd number. Every time there is a war, every time there is an election, every time there’s some feud in the halls of capital, anywhere in the world, we are bombarded with competing manufactured narratives.

Is it any wonder why we’re going insane?

We’ve got some pretty big, sophisticated computers up in our heads, but we weren’t built to handle this degree of relentless propaganda. It hammers us. All ideologues are convinced they hold The Way in their hands and their mind and their job is not to educate us—if it is, this goal is secondary—the goal is to convince us. To either get us on side or get us out of the way.

The full and non-curated facts of any matter are rarely any good for this. They’re complicated, confusing, fuzzy, hard to read. Any time you’re told a story, no matter who is telling it, you are getting a story told to you by someone who wants you to come to a conclusion from hearing it. That is the basis of critical literacy. That is the basis of media literacy.

Users on social media this week were bombarded with images and video from the January 6, 2021 Capitol protests. One side hit you with a firehose of graphic violence, swinging gallows, and fierce, bloodied scowls. The other side countered with endless footage of people just kinda wandering around looking at stuff.

It takes understanding of the fact that both of these narratives contain truth in order to construct a clearer story about that day. For their own reasons, some more malicious and misanthropic than others, different people want you to believe very different stories about that day and will curate what they show you in very different ways accordingly.

Most won’t look at both narratives. They’ll pick the one that appeals to them.

Now I’m absolutely not one of those both-sides centrists (most of those people, all of them maybe, are fooling either you, themselves, or both). If you’ve read enough of what I’ve written then you probably have a pretty good idea of what kind of ideologue I am and what kind of narrative I draw. But I try to see as much of the story as I can and man, I’m telling you, that gets exhausting.

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I feel like this drives a lot of our tribalism and partisanship as human beings because there just isn’t enough space in our heads for the data we need to crunch to be 21^st century world citizens. We overheat like overclocked motherboards when we try. We resort to shortcuts. We package our ideologies like we’re getting a bundle discount. We pick one side or the other. We avoid nuance, reject it angrily. Just pick a side.

It's how so many can’t get their head around the charge of Elon Musk being an antisemite when, by all appearances, he really seems to be Team Israel. People will excuse reams of antisemitic dog whistles, piles of memetic tropes and even the open endorsement of blood libel conspiracies if he’s also hitching his wagon to Pentecostal Zionism in the ranks of the Republican party.

We boil our whole worldview down into this absurd two dimensional political compass that fails utterly to account for the existence of such real albeit fringe ideologies as far-right communism and ecofascism.

You have to enter a higher dimension to construct a shape on which to map a political compass that Jackson Hinkle fits on

Political strategists, pundits, and social engineers all take our exhaustion for granted—it’s an integral part of the strategy. Like herd animals we are easier to control when we are worn down. We stop questioning things when accepting them becomes the path of least resistance, when the narrative is moving with the grain. We reject things outright when it doesn’t. The more tired we become, the easier it is.

Earlier this week a married couple from New York drove to Canada to see a KISS concert. They didn’t make it. Their car, from what we can tell so far, lost control along the Rainbow Bridge border crossing and crashed spectacularly. Neither victim survived. But thirty minutes hadn’t passed before Laura Loomer and the Libs of TikTok, two immensely high profile political grifters, announced to the world that authorities had confirmed that the couple were Hamas terrorists who had infiltrated the United States and this was the first strike in a coordinated attack made possible by Joe Biden’s loose border policy.

These were outright, conscious, and deliberate lies. They weren’t even quality lies—it doesn’t make any sense for terrorists to attack the border if they had already slipped through it. Less sense that they would attack from the US side, moving northward into Canada. It doesn’t matter, nobody who was the target of the propaganda was in any state of careful mental acuity to question it.

But the most insidious herding method isn't necessarily the blatant lies. These lies work primarily on the already-exhausted. When these people fabricate whole cloth lies it’s just a booster shot. Worse than this are the curated truths.

My mind goes back to the mainstream breakout of conspiracy culture that was occurring around 2015 during the Trump-Clinton presidential election, and a conspiracy narrative that preceded QAnon, which people call Pizzagate. Thousands of private emails shared by the Democratic National Committee were obtained by a hacker likely commissioned by foreign intelligence and passed on to Julian Assange to release to the world through his organization, WikiLeaks.

Already curated more than once for different purposes but similar ends—by state actors with a geopolitical strategy, and by a notorious ideologue with a known grudge, the release was tainted already even where the emails themselves may have been real and unedited. It was tainted by what was chosen to be released and by what was chosen to be left out. Even down to its careful timing.

Fringe elements got a hold of the emails and curated them again, using keyword searches to construct a disjointed narrative about coded language and child sex trafficking. It was a much wilder narrative than even Assange could have dreamed or designed.

Pizzagate, the story, was not created by the Wikileaks dump. The conspiracy theory, the “they’re eating babies secretly” myth, goes back millennia. It’s the Jewish blood libel. But this outbreak of it (and let’s be clear, Pizzagate and its bastard child QAnon have had a devastating impact on politics and society) is a disease caused by weaponised and ultra-curated data.

Much fun was had by the anti-censorship free speech crowd over on Twitter when they caught wind of the word “malinformation.” How can true facts be deemed malicious? It sounds like a bad joke in a George Orwell novel. But facts can be mishandled. They can be misrepresented, curated, targeted, poisoned with lies. You have to pay attention not only to what people are telling you but also why they are telling.

I have to be careful because if I misspeak here then I will sound like a conspiracist myself, or a centrist, or an acute postmodernist, or who knows what. I’m not going to rip on a bong and tell you that there is no truth, only that information is laundered.

Knowing this does not make you immune from its influence. This bombardment, relentless, yanking you in different directions at the whims of those who want to use your allegiance as fuel, it’s designed to make you angry, or at least passionate. To move you. For many years I had a job that heavily involved fact checking and filtering bullshit, and still it gets me. Shit gets under my skin, I run my mouth on social media, I get caught making remarks I’m not qualified to make. I get caught making the problem worse. I try to catch myself and I’m optimistic that I’m getting better at it.

For those who feel like the world is just getting less sane as time goes on, I would put much of the blame for that on information warfare, its increasing sophistication and global reach. Some people have the power to just be zen. For others, we just break sometimes. Some break in much worse ways than others.

I don’t have any advice or solution for the madness or the despair except to try to do what I do and direct the anger toward the social engineers. If anyone has ever wondered why I have such an acute and focused case of Musk Derangement Syndrome, this is that. It’s why I despise Murdoch and revile the book-burners. Anyone who would seek to consolidate the media and the avenues of communication to assert greater information control. It is our greatest malaise and it is the greatest assault we face.

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