This is a stunning piece of work! It should be an essential paper for all students at school, colleges & universities. All politicians should have this printed out and stuck in front of them at all times. Every social media platform should have it as a part of a legal contract and be prosecuted if ignored! I’m not holding my breath as too many evil people would be put out of business.
Great piece. What we're dealing with is a convergence of two equally worrying trends; a growing and largely unregulated market for reputation laundering ("marketing", "PR", "think tanks", etc), and the privatisation of our social relationships by DataFarming platforms like FarceBook and Xitter.
The DataDarmers sell more advertising by hijacking more eyeballs for longer, for which they've found spreading fear and anger to be very effective. This memetic pollution creates an emotionally overwhelming online environment, in which it's easy to slip things past people's exhausted critical faculties. Like commercial television, a perfect medium for reputation laundering.
One solution, radical as it may sound, is to stop using apps that steer your attention with opaque recommendation algorithms. Or any "service" offered by companies that make them. There are ethical replacements available, and more in the works. But to scale them up requires a social movement for community-controlled online media.
If DataFarmer can't trap your attention, and make you scared and angry and overwhelmed, then reputation laundries lose the most effective weapon they've had since the net started eating television's lunch.
I think we're peeling back the layers here, and accepting that we are living a post-truth existence.
Have you seen/followed political and moral philosopher Vlad Vexler on YouTube?
He talks a lot about the threats to democracy these kinds of tactics engender.
Much of it seems to be to make people increasingly disengaged from politics.
He plots a future for western democracy where more bad faith populism will be used to wrest more control from the people, and place authoritarian leaders in power.
His background is of someone who grew up in the Soviet Union, but fled to the West as the USSR broke up in the early 1990s.
Vexler has a chat channel where he Q and A's the audience, and a main channel where things are more "produced" like mini documentary films.
His output on the main channel is patchy as at best he has about 4 hours a day of good enough health (he suffers from ME)
Thanks James. I haven't heard about him before and no doubt he will have great insights. Without looking, I imagine it's much worse, systematic and entrenched, than what I gleaned from posting on Reddit for a few months. i.e. The operations are widespread. I did want to articulate how I came to sense what was happening around me, which at first, didn't seem fully rational to me.
I think you've captured so much of the how. You've also made clear the most salient point in internet (and irl) political discourse: no matter how good-faith you try to be, the world is full of massively disingenuous mis/disinformation sold as good faith argument. It is there to muddy the waters so an observer can't tell good from bad. Maybe that observer gives up. That's a win. Maybe they waste energy fighting bad faith arguments. That's a win. Maybe they adopt the bad faith arguments. Also a win.
This might seem out of left field, but Vexler weaves in a lot of allied themes including the disingenuity of powerful people claiming they are "apolitical" and climate change, neo-liberalism, fascism and much more, with a discussion of 2 interviews given by a Russian billionaire.
This is a stunning piece of work! It should be an essential paper for all students at school, colleges & universities. All politicians should have this printed out and stuck in front of them at all times. Every social media platform should have it as a part of a legal contract and be prosecuted if ignored! I’m not holding my breath as too many evil people would be put out of business.
Great piece. What we're dealing with is a convergence of two equally worrying trends; a growing and largely unregulated market for reputation laundering ("marketing", "PR", "think tanks", etc), and the privatisation of our social relationships by DataFarming platforms like FarceBook and Xitter.
The DataDarmers sell more advertising by hijacking more eyeballs for longer, for which they've found spreading fear and anger to be very effective. This memetic pollution creates an emotionally overwhelming online environment, in which it's easy to slip things past people's exhausted critical faculties. Like commercial television, a perfect medium for reputation laundering.
One solution, radical as it may sound, is to stop using apps that steer your attention with opaque recommendation algorithms. Or any "service" offered by companies that make them. There are ethical replacements available, and more in the works. But to scale them up requires a social movement for community-controlled online media.
If DataFarmer can't trap your attention, and make you scared and angry and overwhelmed, then reputation laundries lose the most effective weapon they've had since the net started eating television's lunch.
Amazing, coherent writing here!
I think we're peeling back the layers here, and accepting that we are living a post-truth existence.
Have you seen/followed political and moral philosopher Vlad Vexler on YouTube?
He talks a lot about the threats to democracy these kinds of tactics engender.
Much of it seems to be to make people increasingly disengaged from politics.
He plots a future for western democracy where more bad faith populism will be used to wrest more control from the people, and place authoritarian leaders in power.
His background is of someone who grew up in the Soviet Union, but fled to the West as the USSR broke up in the early 1990s.
Vexler has a chat channel where he Q and A's the audience, and a main channel where things are more "produced" like mini documentary films.
His output on the main channel is patchy as at best he has about 4 hours a day of good enough health (he suffers from ME)
Very worth a look.
Thanks James. I haven't heard about him before and no doubt he will have great insights. Without looking, I imagine it's much worse, systematic and entrenched, than what I gleaned from posting on Reddit for a few months. i.e. The operations are widespread. I did want to articulate how I came to sense what was happening around me, which at first, didn't seem fully rational to me.
Thanking,
Tui
I think you've captured so much of the how. You've also made clear the most salient point in internet (and irl) political discourse: no matter how good-faith you try to be, the world is full of massively disingenuous mis/disinformation sold as good faith argument. It is there to muddy the waters so an observer can't tell good from bad. Maybe that observer gives up. That's a win. Maybe they waste energy fighting bad faith arguments. That's a win. Maybe they adopt the bad faith arguments. Also a win.
This might seem out of left field, but Vexler weaves in a lot of allied themes including the disingenuity of powerful people claiming they are "apolitical" and climate change, neo-liberalism, fascism and much more, with a discussion of 2 interviews given by a Russian billionaire.
https://youtu.be/k0Tvtk8dJtw?si=sxd8KJmPpoWcoyd1