N E W S • F R A M E S • • • • •

Algorithm politics & framing

– 7 June 2022 –

The biggest and most politically influential algorithm-based tech platforms (Facebook, Google, Twitter, Youtube, etc) have implemented measures designed to reduce things such as hate speech, “fake news”, bot-driven influence campaigns, etc – often at the expense of much criticism, since these measures, in many cases, seem heavy-handed and counterproductive. Some prominent critics argue that it amounts to “censorship”, citing, for example, the banning of Donald Trump from Twitter.

The framing of this debate quite often seems conceptually backward to me – with the now-prominent issues of “free speech” and “censorship” framed in ways still suggestive of legacy media gatekeeping “centres” (eg of publishing and broadcasting) – even though the debates concern mostly “decentralised” online media with algorithm gatekeeping – often featuring “censored” celebrities with access to multiple alternative platforms. Perhaps we have less of a “free speech problem”, and more of a “swamped by noise and disinformation problem”?

The viral spread of socially destructive content (the aforementioned hate speech, engineered fakery, botswarming, etc) has been blamed, by some, on the favoured business models of the big platforms. See, for example, my previous post describing Jaron Lanier’s critique of how these business models produce certain directives for the algorithms, which in turn blindly amplify the very worst aspects of humanity. Lanier argues that humanity will not survive the destructive social and political transformations being wrought – making replacement of the now-dominant B.U.M.M.E.R. business model as urgent an issue as climate breakdown).

But the owners of the big platforms love this business model because of its colossal profits – among other things. And so the main problem (according to Lanier and many others – eg see The Social Dilemma), ie the business model itself, isn’t tackled. Instead we get these stop-gap measures – bannings, suspensions, etc – which, to many people, look like clumsy, iron-booted, politically-biased “censorship”. The irony, for me, is that, in most cases, the owners of these platforms seemed motivated by libertarian notions of business. As Lanier wrote, “there was a libertarian wind blowing… We figured it would be wiser to let entrepreneurs fill in the blanks than to leave that task to government”.

‘At YouTube, I was working on YouTube recommendations. It worries me that an algorithm that I worked on is actually increasing polarization in society… The flat-Earth conspiracy theory was recommended hundreds of millions of times by the algorithm. It’s easy to think that it’s just a few stupid people who get convinced, but the algorithm is getting smarter and smarter every day.’
Guillaume Chaslot, The Social Dilemma

A.I. algorithms & McLuhan’s tetrad

Amid the recent noise about Elon Musk was his announced intention to make Twitter algorithms “open source” (ie available to public scrutiny, critique and improvement). If true, that seems pretty “huge” (the big media companies’ algorithms are apparently among the most tightly guarded secrets on the planet).

But Musk’s description of how this algorithm transparency would work sounds very much like the process of editing Wikipedia pages. I hope Elon reads Stephen Wolfram’s testimony to Congress on the subject, as Wolfram explains that what Musk proposes can effectively be considered “impossible”, due to the nature of current machine-learning systems: “For a well-optimized computation, there’s not likely to be a human-understandable narrative about how it works inside”. Wolfram proposes a different kind of solution to problems inherent with “monolithic AI” platforms: “Third Party Ranking Providers” and “Third Party Constraint Providers”.

Amid my own mental noise on the “negative” effects of those A.I. platforms (political chaos, nudged states of mind, etc) appears the notion that I should rethink more “positively” and “globally”. Or at least try to see different aspects of media evolution from various different perspectives – not just the ones which appear to have socially destructive trajectories.

Recall David Lynch’s scathing assessment of the new mobile media: “It’s such a sadness that you think you’ve seen a film on your fucking telephone. Get real”. But also note the simultaneously emerging “New Golden Age of TV” – an aspect of the same media evolution (eg streaming, on-demand, binge-watching). Those “critically acclaimed box-sets” – the quality and the depth of engagement seem off-the-scale.

Lynch’s own co-creation, Twin Peaks, heralded this Golden Age (David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, cited Lynch as major influence/inspiration). I picture – probably inaccurately – reactionary TV execs (circa 1990), when faced with the success of Twin Peaks, thinking, “Do people really go for this ambiguous, depraved weirdo liberal bullshit? I thought they liked sensible stuff like Fox News!”

Meanwhile, what happened to Fox News? As a UK resident, I don’t see it on TV – I just see clips on social media – mostly of folks like Tulsi Gabbard, Glenn Greenwald and Michael Tracey guesting on Tucker Carlson’s show. It looks like the only “mainstream” TV in the western world in which Putin gets consistently better publicity than the US president. The latest clips I saw were of Carlson presenting a Fox show called ‘The End of Men’, in which he discusses “testicle tanning”. It almost makes Twin Peaks look mundane.

Some media mutations appear visible and obvious – eg from radio to television. Others not so much – especially more recent transformations. A.I. algorithm-driven mobile apps, and their dominant business models, can be considered something “other” than “the internet” – in many ways replacing original conceptions of “the web” (ie web pages on browsers running on desktops or laptops). The medium is the message, and if media mutation follows the rate of technological advance, how do we better understand the effects, social, political and otherwise, soon enough?

‘Photoshop didn’t have 1,000 engineers on the other side of the screen, using notifications, using your friends, using AI to predict what’s gonna perfectly addict you, or hook you, or manipulate you, or allow advertisers to test 60,000 variations of text or colors to figure out what’s the perfect manipulation of your mind. This is a totally new species of power and influence.’
Tristan Harris, The Social Dilemma

For one thing, the role of “user”/”audience”, ie YOU, has mutated – no longer the customer, more the raw material forming the product – but that seems one of the more obvious changes. Do we need improved ways of seeing to apprehend the changes in question? The old constructs for apprehending “let us down” – unless we first recognise them as such (Ye Olde Metaphorical Constructions), and then perhaps re-perceive as kitsch or art. (Or, in Steve Bannon’s case, as networked political warfare – see below).

Marshall McLuhan’s tetrad seems a good starting point, as it yields a more “meta-” view of media, among other things. For an insightful guide to the tetrad and the current relevance of McLuhan (which also has a lot of fun, up-to-date examples), I recommend Paul Levinson’s ‘McLuhan in an Age of Social Media’ – a self-contained update to Paul’s ‘Digital McLuhan’.

‘The tetrad, in a nutshell, is a way of mapping the impact and interconnections of technologies across time. It asks four questions of every medium or technology: What does it enhance or amplify? What does it obsolesce or push out of the sunlight and into the shade. What does it retrieve or bring back into central attention and focus – something which itself had previously been obsolesced. And what does the new medium, when pushed to its limits, reverse or flip into?’
– Paul Levinson, ‘McLuhan in an Age of Social Media’

Steve Bannon’s project & the tetrad

We perhaps forget that as well as being White House strategist and Trump’s advisor, Bannon helped run Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica, and has spent his time networking his “far-right” political cause with a wide array of global influencers (eg Nigel Farage and George Galloway, to give two examples in the UK). Bannon made a fortune from investing fairly early in the successful US comedy show, Seinfeld. And as The Guardian put it, “Bannon’s wealth smoothed his path from finance to media and politics”.

To speculate on Bannon’s activities in terms of McLuhan’s tetrad, I refer to what I’ve previously documented – that Bannon adopted some old “leftwing” tropes, which he sheared of specifics (making them “cooler” in McLuhan’s terms), for appealing to a younger audience. He regarded Fox’s audience at the time as “geriatric”. Bannon had studied the output of people such as Michael Moore to see what “worked”, and he’d recognised the power that could be wielded by the huge online communities of alienated young people (audiences of sites such as Breitbart).

To quote Devil’s Bargain (by Joshua Green), Bannon “envisioned a great fusion between the masses of alienated gamers, so powerful in the online world, and the right-wing outsiders drawn to Breitbart by its radical politics and fuck-you attitude”.

Using McLuhan’s four-part tetrad “probe”, we can consider what Bannon’s project Enhances, Obsolesces, Retrieves and Reverses, in political-media terms. One obvious retrieval is what I describe above – Bannon’s project retrieved old ‘left’ tropes – binary political frames/categories, such as:

Anti-establishment vs Establishment
Ordinary folk vs Elite
Outsiders vs Corporate Media
Unjustly maligned “official enemies” vs Malign US Deep State

Tied to their original, left-ideological “hot” specificity, these tropes might seem inadequate for making sense of the fast-moving fractal-like chaos and complexity of 21st century political culture. But Bannon et al, I think, realised their “cool” effectiveness when used in non-specific populist expression – the kind tweeted by Trump, for example. (Prof Levinson writes that this non-specificity in Trump’s tweets – inviting people to interact and “fill in the gaps” – makes Trump’s communication “cool” in McLuhan’s jargon).

In terms of the tetrad, this enhances the revolutionary fervour of, say, anti-establishment protests (or, alternatively, you can see it as enhancing the angry rabble-rousing of demagogues). It obsolesces the “geriatric” aspects of the conservative right that Bannon saw as an impediment. It reverses certain traditional conservative moral associations with conventional “authority”, which perhaps flips into adoration of “strong” “maverick” types. (Frank Luntz has also worked on this reversal – with his advice to conservatives to always blame everything on “Washington” “D.C.” “establishment” authority).

More tetrad speculation: much (but not all) of the above seemed, for Bannon, about getting a younger online demographic into his “alt-right” vision. It also appears to enhance sweeping generalisations and either/or thinking – due to the binary nature of the original tropes, now shorn of specifics, and presented in “cool” (but ironically demagogic) soundbites. Social media algorithms, designed to maximise engagement, appear to promote content with the type of characteristics that happen to be enhanced by Bannon’s media strategy.

Sub-optimal political framing

Old-school (pre-social media) framing of “censorship”, “silencing”, “suppression” (of free speech), etc, seemed prominent in anti-war critiques of media coverage of the 2003 Iraq war – with good reason. But this framing doesn’t work so well when applied to newer “horizontal” networked media structures. War coverage has mutated significantly as a result of social media. In the current conflict in Ukraine, every Russian tank, truck and troop movement gets tracked and added to open source databases, through smartphones, etc – a country of 44 million people recording every move of the invaders, with real-time data (source: Guardian article).

When the framing used in anti-war critiques of earlier (eg 2003) media gets re-applied to the current Ukraine conflict – as if the lessons of earlier media failures can be re-applied without much modification – we end up with strange distortions and misperceptions. For a case in point, take this article by Matt Taibbi. It begins with the intelligent point that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has presented us with a terrible dilemma but then, halfway through, Taibbi performs a curious mis-framing with “war critic”, “anti-war” and “anti-interventionist” labels, regarding media coverage:-

‘Before “de-platforming” was even a term in the American consciousness, our corporate press perfected it with regard to war critics… [Matt then gives detail on exclusion of “Anti-war voices” from 2003 Iraq War coverage]
‘Since then, we’ve only widened the rhetorical no-fly zone. In a development that back then I would have bet my life on never happening, anti-interventionist voices or advocates for such people are increasingly confined to Fox if they appear on major corporate media at all.’ – Matt Taibbi, America’s Intellectual No-Fly Zone

That seems weird to me, as it implies that corporate media opposition to, and criticism of, the major war under discussion (Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine) exists practically nowhere but on Fox News! Taibbi’s comments make logical sense to me only if I assume at least one of the following:

I’m hallucinating the wall-to-wall media opposition to a major aggressive war currently being waged.
Matt Taibbi doesn’t see Russia invading Ukraine – he sees some other war that isn’t being opposed/criticised in current media coverage.
The terms “war critic”, “anti-interventionist” and “anti-war” have a special, qualified meaning for Taibbi, which he doesn’t specify.

(Actually, I see the “real” problem here as something Nassim Taleb has alluded to – outdated media models tied into a sort of logical fallacy. Incidently, Taleb, not so long ago, supported people like Glenn Greenwald, Tulsi Gabbard, et al, but has recently taken to denouncing them on Twitter – he’s repeatedly called Greenwald and Edward Snowden “frauds”, and his criticism along these lines extends to folks like Caitlin Johnstone and even Elon Musk. “Fraud” seems an over-the-top allegation to me – I prefer to think of these folks as using various outdated top-down constructs for media, “censorship”, “surveillance”, etc, while simultaneously using sometimes-valid notions of political corruption in “liberal” “establishments” – the latter to populist appeal; the former confusing the media issues. I’m trying to be charitable and diplomatic here!).

Orwell retrieved & obsolesced

Orwell quotes (often in the form of memes) currently seem a popular way to frame 21st century political and media scenarios. The above-mentioned Matt Taibbi piece uses Orwell quotes in this way, and cites Chomsky as “often” using them in a similar way. But the language here seems curiously anachronistic when you consider what Taibbi and Chomsky refer to.

Taibbi asks Chomsky about the negative responses on social media to Chomsky’s recent remarks on Russia/Ukraine. The MIT professor replies that it’s normal for “doctrinal managers” to condemn people who “don’t keep rigidly to the Party Line”. Taibbi cites Orwell’s view that “free societies suppress thought almost as effectively as the totalitarian Soviets”, and quotes Orwell saying certain inconvenient views are not “entitled to a hearing”.

I’ve looked at a lot of the negative responses to Chomsky’s Ukraine remarks – including the ones that Taibbi links to. I don’t see “doctrinal managers” or a “Party Line”. I see a lot of individuals on social media posting various (quite diverse) criticisms of Chomsky’s remarks. I see neither “suppression” of thought, nor any speech denied its “entitlement” to “a hearing”. (A typical example of the recent harsh critiques of Chomsky is this Twitter thread, which was retweeted by the journalist George Monbiot).

Orwell’s Animal Farm was published in 1945. His views on “suppression” of thought and speech reflect the media forms of the time. Similarly, much of the language Chomsky uses on political media dates back to his Manufacturing Consent (1988) – effectively pre-internet.

Nassim Taleb commented recently on the Orwell meme pictured (above right). He wrote: “exactly 100% backwards”, adding:

‘In 1984, there was no web; governments had total control of information. In 2022 things are more transparent, so we see imperfections. THE TRANSPARENCY EFFECT: the more things improve the worse they look.’
– Nassim Taleb, on Twitter

“Surveillance” frame & the new hypocognition

“Surveillance”, like “censorship”, tends to get framed in a way that implies vertical power hierarchies. And while still obviously valid for human political institutions, this framing seems inadequate for the new and increasingly dominant algorithmic, machine-learning, “decentralised” media technology. To the extent we continue to use established (and thus comfortable) but anachronistic (for media) frames, we miss the significance of newer, mutated “interventions” that operate on more “horizontally” structured media – continuous, dynamic (minimum 2-way) demographically-optimised micro-interaction data-mining/profiling and algorithmic behavioural nudging, using sophisticated machine-learning systems on mobile biometric supercomputers (aka smartphones).

I’m pretending to understand it by lining up a lot of words. The point for me is that hardly anyone seems to understand the new algorithm-media interventions and their social/political effects. It seems to be a problem of what the cognitive linguists call “hypocognition” – we just don’t have adequate semantic frames, or visual imagery, to comprehend and discuss it properly, “as a society”, yet.

To illustrate this point using the frame of “surveillance”, recall what happened when Edward Snowden’s NSA surveillance leaks hit the press in 2014. It made huge news and was widely discussed. Most people already had the cognitive frames available to understand that kind of surveillance – top-down government surveillance. Those frames have been around a long time and already seemed an established part of popular culture – Orwell’s Big Brother, brought up to date by TV shows such as ’24’, which showed government spying on their own citizens in “real time” using incredible technology.

That much we understand. Now try to picture what Cambridge Analytica did. Try to describe it in a way you might discuss with your friends or family. A kind of surveillance, a kind of political/social “influence”, using social media – but not in the easily comprehended way of what Snowden revealed (which most us probably already suspected and had mental imagery and verbal frames for).

Of course, the fact that we have difficulty understanding and discussing it doesn’t mean it’s going away. And I imagine its funders (and various influential others) have noted some of its “successes” in nudging politics, and various social phenomena statistically.

‘It’s the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behavior and perception that is the product… That’s the only thing there is for them to make money from. Changing what you do, how you think, who you are. It’s a gradual change. It’s slight. If you can go to somebody and you say, “Give me $10 million, and I will change the world one percent in the direction you want it to change…” It’s the world! That can be incredible, and that’s worth a lot of money.’
Jaron Lanier, The Social Dilemma

(Incidentally, my bank recently notified me that they’re “improving security” by introducing “behavioural biometric” checks for online payments: “We’re not actually checking your email address; it’s how you enter it that matters, including your keystrokes. It’s known as ‘behavioural biometric’ data and it should be unique to you.”).

Written by NewsFrames

June 7, 2022 at 4:09 pm

Posted in Marshall McLuhan, Media criticism, Orwell, Social media algorithms

“Whataboutism”

I haven’t posted to News Frames in a while, as I’ve focused instead on my “RAW semantics” project (which looks at the “neurosemantics” writings of Robert Anton Wilson). But a couple of thoughts occurred to me recently about so-called “whataboutism” and the framing that accompanies it… and this seemed worth commenting on.

Firstly (as a pre-emptive), making comparisons, say between governments or political parties on failures and wrongdoings, etc, seems a valid endeavor to me. As does highlighting the hypocrisies evident in media (so-called “MSM”) commentary – for example, the kind that attributes a generalised moral superiority to the “home” country, while largely demonising another.

That said, “whataboutism” clearly refers to something else – either 1) a compulsion to frame all apparent wrongdoings in terms of the wrongdoing of one particular “side”, or 2) a conscious tactic to persistently shift the framing of blame from one “side” to another. There’s an interesting 2008 article here (cached here, bypassing subscription requirement), from The Economist, that claims whataboutism is an old Soviet propaganda tactic.

Before it had the name “whataboutism”, I regarded the compulsion as harmless and “adolescent” – akin to the stereotype of, say, students blaming everything on their own government, “The Man”, “The System”, etc, coupled with a sort of “your enemy’s enemy is your friend” logic. But boosted – or indeed “weaponised” – on social media and Youtube, etc, I no longer regard it as harmless.

I first noticed whataboutery swamping social media during the Trump years (2016 and after). The framing appeared fairly simple: “If Trump seems bad, what about Democratic presidents (or generalised ‘liberals’)…”, often accompanied by a mocking reduction of any criticism of Trump to “Trump is Hitler”. The effect was, of course, to deflect criticism of Trump back onto “hysterical libs”. And it appeared to work – at least to the extent that it got boosted by armies of bots and trolls, supercharged by Facebook algorithms, etc.

Part of that, during Trump’s presidency, was the “Russiagate” frame – the mocking of any and all claims that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, etc, as emanating, again, from “hysterical libs”. With any criticism of Vladimir Putin reduced to the sarcastically intoned “Putin is Hitler”.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

Snowden said the advance warnings of Russia’s invasion were just a distraction
from a story about the CIA collecting data from American citizens

Most recently, many prominent “dissident” commentators, including Edward Snowden, lined up to ridicule Biden’s advance warnings that Russia was about to invade Ukraine. (Snowden actually blamed the US/western media for warmongering at this point – but I couldn’t find a single case of a “mainstream” US media outlet calling for military action; quite the opposite: they all seemed to be calling for calm and negotiations). When, a few days later, Russia launched a full-scale military invasion, I thought it might mark the end of this particular strand of whataboutist framing.

That turned out to be over-optimistic. After coming to terms with the fact that Russia was waging a major war of aggression, the instinct of many of these commentators (Glenn Greenwald, Tucker Carlson, Tulsi Gabbard, Jimmy Dore, Max Blumenthal, Michael Tracey, Jeremy Scahill, John Pilger, Caitlin Johnstone, etc) was either to blame America/”the West” for “provoking” Russia, or to focus on “western media hypocrisy”, for taking a different approach to, say, the 2003 war on Iraq. “Logically”, the latter seems a fair enough point, but comparisons to, say, 2003 wouldn’t be my initial and persistent response to a war waged in 2022 – ie it wouldn’t be my primary frame of reference (not to mention that “the media” has transformed in important ways over the last two decades, in a McLuhanist sense).

Bad takes prior to the invasion. Tulsi Gabbard says the people against the invasion are the warmongers.
Michael Tracey mocks the reporting of warnings of an imminent invasion based on troop build-ups.

And the point about US “provocation” (based mostly on framing the 2014 events/upheavals in Ukraine as a “US-backed coup”) contradicts pretty much everything I know about the 2014 Maidan Revolution, and seems a strange and weak attempt to frame largely non-military “American influences” (which don’t appear contrary to the Ukrainian population’s preferences, judging from polls, popular votes, etc) as military “provocations”. The “US-backed coup” framing also sounds like the propaganda that’s been coming out of the Kremlin.

Another way of framing this is as hard determinism versus soft determinism. The American “influences” in Ukraine have been framed as directly causing a situation which Putin can’t tolerate, ie “provocation” (hard determinism), whereas those US “influences” can instead be seen against a backdrop of all kinds of other influences and historical trends, which together made the situation (that Putin apparently can’t tolerate) simply possible (soft determinism).

George Monbiot, the UK journalist, commented on similar “whatabout” framings of Russian aggression on Twitter and in a Guardian article. As he puts it, these commentators “are rightly opposed to western imperialism, but will bend over backwards to accommodate Russian imperialism.”

Whataboutism tends to frame itself as “balanced”, in the sense that it provides “two sides” to what was previously “one-sided” criticism (ie the original criticism, and then the counter, “whatabout”, criticism). But as the examples that Monbiot cites demonstrate, this “balancing” always seems to occur in one direction only – which makes it look like a side-taking compulsion or a partisan tactic, rather than, say, a principled stand against “imperialism”, regardless of perpetrator.

A clear, empirically demonstrable case of this can be seen in the prolific tweets of Glenn Greenwald, as I documented in a previous long article. Over a period of years, Greenwald regularly and frequently responded to criticisms of Donald Trump’s idiocies and wrongdoings by posting supposedly comparable idiocies and wrongdoings from previous Democratic presidents or politicians. Now that Joe Biden is president (and target of much vitriolic criticism, some of it unjustified or inaccurate), might we expect at least a few examples of Greenwald employing his “whatabout” tweeting in a direction that favours Biden? Well… good luck finding such examples!

So what?

Why give a damn about whataboutism? My interest stems from noticing that social media seemed flooded with this form of argument during “interesting” periods (most recently following the Russian invasion of Ukraine). It can present itself as “non-partisan” (eg as “monitoring”, as undertaken by “media watchdogs”) – or as merely exposing hypocrisy, or countering “hysteria”, correcting institutional “bias”, etc.

Framed that way, one can imagine its rapid viral spread as organic (due to popularity) rather than engineered (botswarms, funded operations, paid trolls, etc). Single cases don’t reveal the trends. Patterns of reinforcement and support for a given person, party or “narrative” show up only in statistical studies. (I had to do my own modest empirical study of Glenn Greenwald’s social media output to convince myself, because he kept asserting that he didn’t support Trump! Eoin Higgins has conducted a similar study of Greenwald’s output).

All of which appears not to undo the pre-emptive points I made at the start. But following Marshall McLuhan’s “tetrad” thesis, we might want to ponder the ways in which “the internet” has already flipped into a largely unrecognised new “media form” – particularly for a demographic whose main usage is “A.I.” algorithm-run social media on mobile biometric-cybernetic supercomputers (aka “smartphones”). Whataboutism (as a logical form) seems to be most engaging, persuasive and shareable for those inclined to thoughts of rebellion, dissent and cynicism. The algorithms are of course programmed to maximise engagement for each individual user, based on recording and analysing in real-time their every tap, scroll, pause, movement, duration of interaction, etc, in response to the presented content.

Do I need to say more? If so, you might want to read a somehow related article that I wrote for my ‘RAW semantics’ blog.

Stop Press: Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s brand of whataboutism is apparently proving useful to the Russian state, according this this Guardian report, which claims Kremlin memos urged Russian media to use clips of Carlson.

Written by NewsFrames

March 14, 2022 at 2:07 pm

Posted in Russia, Whataboutism

Attn: Wage Slaves! (book review)

Most ‘work’ in this age is stupid, monotonous, brain-rotting, irritating,
usually pointless … Marx was quite right in calling it ‘wage slavery.’
– Robert Anton Wilson, 1986 – intro to ‘Undoing Yourself’, 3rd ed.

The Good Life for Wage Slaves

If I could go back in time to deliver a handful of ‘near future’ books to my 1987 self, Robert Wringham’s brilliantly entertaining new book, The Good Life for Wage Slaves, would probably be one of them. My younger persona wouldn’t understand his references to COVID-19 or to office workers distracting themselves with the internet – or even to the idea of “Quiet Rooms” (it would take years before such New Age type notions made it into British workplaces without a sneer) – but the deeper messages about contemporary Wage Slavery, and the information on how to cope, would have transformed my outlook.

Back then, I was starting in office work hell with no end in sight. Apart from a few Bertrand Russell and Robert Anton Wilson quotes and an anarchist essay by Bob Black, there seemed little in the way of intellectual self-defence against the onslaught of modern work culture. Politics of ‘right’ and ‘left’ seemed dogmatically agreed on the heroic virtue of jobs to deliver us from social and economic evil; insidious forms of corporate behaviourism and institutional emotional blackmail were rife. The Idler magazine (founded in 1993) was still a few years away; David Graeber’s essay and book on Bullshit Jobs (2013/2018) were still a few decades in the future.

Around 1990, a few dissidents, here and there, scraped together primitive desktop publishing resources to create various anti-work zines, stickers and graphic propaganda. I recall creating and printing ‘Crap Job Watch UK’ stickers, etc, making ironic use of business clip-art – and, by 1995, DIY-published my first issue of Anxiety Culture. Basically pre-internet, zine culture back then seemed a desperate (but fun) attempt to create and find others of similar creative mind.

To me, Robert Wringham’s book is like a flowering of that subversive spirit against the soul-crushing forces of modern bureaucratic Wage Slavery! I also found it an entertaining read. After once making the great escape (and sharing his insights in his New Escapologist project), circumstances had then conspired to force Wringham back into Wage Slavery (via a visa-related requirement under Theresa May’s ‘hostile environment’ policy).

In a funny, wisdom-laced narrative, the book describes his adventures returning to a daily reality of office Wage Slavery for two and a half years. Throughout, Rob refers to his Scottish workplace as “Concrete Island” (after the J.G. Ballard novel), and assigns his work colleagues cartoonish cat names (eg ‘Prince Chunk’ and ‘Tibs the Great’).

In this and other ways the book acquires a strangely surreal vibe, with Rob as some modern-day Bartleby (albeit with a better sense of humour). So even though it’s anchored in a persistent and deeply unpleasant economic reality, there seems – to me at least – a dreamlike novelistic flavour pervading. It also remains effortlessly engaging while providing useful tips and strategies, for not only surviving the situation, but living “the good life” (a notion which goes back – not to the suburban BBC sitcom – but to philosophers of ancient Greece).

Here, to give you a flavour (and with the author’s permission) is a brief excerpt, on ‘the art of the shrug’. I like the idea of gently subverting the ‘friendly’ psychology ‘They’ try to coerce you with.

[The art of the shrug]

There was a rather annoying little motivational poster pinned up behind the reception desk on Concrete Island, which said “Smile! lt’ll make you Happy [sic].” It made us all extremely unhappy. Motivational posters are, as every Wage Slave knows, only put there to make our lives more closely resemble Hell.

One day, after seeing the poster for the one-hundred-and-eighth time, I thought to myself: That bears some scrutiny, surely. Someone with too much time on their hands ought to look into that. Smiling makes you happy indeed. They’re confusing cause with effect. Motivational poster-writing bastards.

And then I realised that I had a lot of time on my hands. I was petty enough to look into a clearly apocryphal claim. Once I found out it was bollocks, I could tell Mademoiselle Fifi, the receptionist, about it (“That poster? It’s bollocks, you know.”) and then she’d say “I knew it!” and we could tear it off the wall together and feed it into the shredder in the name of truth.

Unfortunately, Google put an end to my reverie, by pointing out that smiling in fact does make people feel happier. Apparently it goes back to Darwin who observed that facial expressions don’t merely represent emotions but can in fact cause them, an observation which has been confirmed by numerous scientific studies in the meantime. How annoying.

But if smiling can make you happy, it stands to reason that shrugging might make you feel more nonchalant and consequently less negatively affected by your sterile and irritating surroundings. I asked a scientist using a research service online and once she stopped laughing at me and consulted the literature, she said that yes, a shrug may well make us feel more indifferent about something.

When we’re feeling irritated by the working environment, humiliated and depressed by the fact we have to go there at all, it’s apparently possible to shrug it off. If this seems unhelpful, we might want to look more closely at the ancient art of Stoicism, which is essentially a way of becoming a human shrug.

[Excerpt from Robert Wringham’s book, The Good Life for Wage Slaves]

Incidentally, Rob’s depiction of “Concrete Island”, as an office on wasteland surrounded by motorway and dual carriageway, reminded me of the fictional setting for a film made in 2001 and inspired by Melville’s Bartleby (and also called ‘Bartleby’), from which the following still is taken:

Written by NewsFrames

September 14, 2020 at 1:37 pm

Posted in Antiwork, Jobs, Wage slaves

Announcing new RAW blog

I’ve created a new blog – RAW semantics – with speculative, philosophical posts about semantics, themed around the writings of Robert Anton Wilson (who I’m a long-time admirer of).

For those interested, I’ve also set up a Twitter account for it – https://twitter.com/RAWsemantics – a basic affair, simply for posting links to new blog posts.

It’s in the early stages, so I’ll no doubt be changing and adding things as I go along.

Give it a look!

<--- THIS POST WILL SELF-DISSOLVE AFTER UNINTERESTED READINGS --->

Written by NewsFrames

April 28, 2020 at 12:32 pm

Posted in RAW semantics, Robert Anton Wilson

Media distancing – word as virus

April 2020 – I recommend the practice of ‘media distancing’ for your psychological well-being. — (Just as social distancing is advised for physical well-being). — It’s the opposite of having your head in the sand, and there’s an art to it.

Continual exposure to the news (including large sections of social media) doesn’t make us safe – it mostly just increases anxiety. I strongly encourage avoiding unnecessary exposure to certain types of “news” prevalent at the moment – although the types you might better avoid (and the evaluation of “necessary” vs “unnecessary”) will be personal, given that everyone reacts differently.

Example: I was recently exposed – inadvertently and unfortunately – to a “news” item posted by Derbyshire police on social media. It showed their drone footage of a couple walking their dog in the Peak District. The Derby police publicly shamed this couple for walking in a remote location – an activity they brand as “NOT ESSENTIAL” (in the context of government rules to prevent virus spread). Seeing this strangely authoritarian video posted by police definitely increased my background anxiety for several hours. For reference, here is a link to a BBC piece about the police video and critical responses to it – if you’re feeling masochistic.

(I finally managed to get some light relief from this stuff by relaxing with Alien: Covenant – Ridley Scott‘s vivid apocalyptic film-nightmare about evil spores which inevitably get into your body and then rapidly grow into predatory alien things which viciously eat their way out of your stomach or chest when you least expect it!)

Not that I want to make any sweeping generalisations about media coverage. That way lies Trump-style idiocy and anti-“MSM” populism. You don’t have to believe that the news media is uniformly bad to practice avoiding it. But if you do need more incentive to curb your news-consuming habit, consider the following (from Rolf Dobelli’s article, News is bad for you):

News has no explanatory power. News items are bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world. Will accumulating facts help you understand the world? Sadly, no… The more “news factoids” you digest, the less of the big picture you will understand…

News is toxic to your body. It constantly triggers the limbic system. Panicky stories spur the release of cascades of glucocorticoid (cortisol). This deregulates your immune system…

News inhibits thinking. Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you. They are like viruses that steal attention for their own purposes. News makes us shallow thinkers. But it’s worse than that. News severely affects memory…

News makes us passive. News stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence… It grinds us down until we adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitised, sarcastic and fatalistic.

Bottom line? You can probably reduce your consumption of “news” to a fraction of what it is at the moment, yet still stay informed on what you regard as essential information. That’s what I mean by ‘media distancing’ – you keep it at arm’s length away from your psyche, so to speak (mainly by avoiding it, having it switched off, etc). You thus reduce anxiety, which seems like a good outcome for everyone.

Several people I know are using this time to catch up on book reading. I am too (I’ve just finished William Gibson’s latest novel, ‘Agency’. Next is a re-read of Greg Goode’s ‘Standing as Awareness’).

(See also something I wrote for Anxiety Culture back in the 1990s, titled ‘Media-free zones’, which made some similar points to Dobelli’s piece linked above. Update: As a commenter below has kindly noted, there’s a longer version of Dobelli’s ideas about avoiding news here).

Written by NewsFrames

April 1, 2020 at 10:58 am

Posted in Anxiety Culture, Information anxiety, Media-free zones

The strange case of Glenn Greenwald – part 1

This article is also available at medium.com

Guccifer 2.0 – arbiter of “public good”

26 Feb 2020 – In October 2016, Glenn Greenwald had a conversation with Naomi Klein, in which Klein tried to pose a few criticisms of the ways Greenwald and Julian Assange covered the hacked Clinton/Podesta/DNC emails.

Unfortunately, the two media stars address only one of Klein’s criticisms – about privacy protections when hacked material is released without being “curated”. On the other criticism, which Klein frames carefully – possibly to avoid offending Glenn (they seem good friends) – Greenwald doesn’t take the bait, so nothing of much substance is tackled.

Naomi Klein puts her unaddressed criticism in the following terms: the hacked emails were published in ways to “maximize damage” (to the Clinton campaign); we’re not learning a “huge amount” from them – they’re just used to “reinforce” what we already knew about the venal side of campaigning; The hack isn’t non-partisan or ‘information wants to be free’ – it’s a “political weapon”.

Judging from the transcript date, Naomi’s criticisms came days after an article co-written by Greenwald that published hacked Clinton documents received from Guccifer 2.0. Titled “EXCLUSIVE: New Email Leak Reveals Clinton Campaign’s Cozy Press Relationship”, the material here seems relatively weak (the article concedes that “to curry favor with journalists” is “certainly not unique to the Clinton campaign”), but given Greenwald’s standing, the piece served to reinforce the relentlessly negative focus on Clinton during a crucial period in the election run-up.

Guccifer 2.0 was operated by Russian military intelligence according to the 2018 Mueller indictments, although some evidence for this Russian attribution was publicly established months prior to Greenwald’s October 2016 article. After his article, Glenn continued to claim there was “no evidence” of Russian state involvement (although he later reportedly accepted the Mueller indictments as genuine evidence of Russian hacking).

(Tweets from before and after Greenwald’s Guccifer 2.0 sourced piece)

Greenwald also wrote (a few days after his Guccifer 2.0 piece) that “the motive of a source is utterly irrelevant in the decision-making process about whether to publish”. The only relevant question, Glenn asserts, “is whether the public good from publishing outweighs any harm”.

That seems a nice soundbite, but the “public good” of a story’s publication is often precisely the thing that’s contested in regard to the source’s motive – especially with political stories in the run-up to an election! To ignore the motives behind the creation and timing of political stories is, perhaps, to risk turning journalism into a plaything of the powerful. (If I thought Greenwald understood this, I’d conclude he was disingenuous to suggest that Guccifer 2.0’s motives were “irrelevant” to the decision on whether to publish).

Unrelated, but sort of ‘illustrative’ here, I stumbled on a New York Times story (from 2015) about Bernie Sanders’ alleged cozy relations with wealthy donors. Although not entirely comparable to Greenwald’s story about Hillary’s “cozy press relationship”, it seems on a par in some respects. Both stories attack a political candidate, both rely on an anonymous source with dubious motives, and neither story seems particularly important in its own right. Does Glenn comment on the NYT piece? Yes, he does – on the source’s “cowardly” motives. He also retweets a comment about the NYT “abusing” anonymity to “dump” on Sanders:

(Web archive link to Glenn’s tweet and retweet – both dated 12 July 2015.
Greenwald deleted tens of thousands of his pre-2016 tweets, en masse).

After Wikileaks published material from the DNC hack linked to Guccifer 2.0, Julian Assange unequivocally denied that the source was Russian-state associated (on some occasions he merely said there was “no proof” of this, or gave credence instead to the Seth Rich conspiracy hoax). Like Greenwald, Assange played down the relevance of the source, reportedly telling news media that: “it’s what’s in the emails that’s important, not who hacked them”.

The journalistic equivalent of naïve realism is that there exists such a thing as raw, unmediated “news” – as if publishing is a window (whether clear or distorting) onto this objectively pre-existing “news”. This view certainly makes sources’ motives seem less relevant. But news is created and framed by the act of telling (ie publishing) – that’s what distinguishes it from non-news. Wikileaks asked Guccifer 2.0 for hacked material to create a story apparently timed to “engineer discord between the supporters of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton during the 2016 Democratic National Convention”:-

“if you have anything hillary related we want it in the next tweo [sic] days prefable [sic] because the DNC [Democratic National Convention] is approaching and she will solidify bernie supporters behind her after […] we think trump has only a 25% chance of winning against hillary … so conflict between bernie and hillary is interesting.” (Wikileaks to Guccifer 2.0 – from Mueller indictment)

When Greenwald (with the help of Guccifer 2.0’s hack) co-created the news story about the Clinton campaign’s “cozy press relationship”, his framing was of nefarious political influence on reporting. Central to the story was the source of this influence – namely, Hillary’s PR operation, with its obvious political motives in feeding stories to favoured journalists. Greenwald and his co-author try to make this sound suitably nefarious and newsworthy by using terms such as “plotted”, “manipulating”, “plant”, “induce”, but the hacked documents don’t live up to this framing – to me, they read just like boring, standard bureaucratic campaign documents (see for yourself).

So, Greenwald gives us a story about a source of stories (Hillary’s campaign) and its tactics to “shape coverage to their liking”. But it’s “utterly irrelevant” to the publication of Glenn’s story that his own source (Guccifer 2.0, Russian military intelligence by all accounts/evidence) had a motive to shape news coverage? As people say on social media: rriiiiiiiiiiiiight.

Tweet within tweet within tweet…

Trump-frame reinforcers

A while back, it became clear that my occasional criticism of Greenwald’s output was alienating some of my readers. I hope this post helps to explain why I’m critical of Greenwald, and why I regard his influence on the ‘left’ as a sort of lottery win for projects funded by people on the ‘right’ with an interest in framing debate among burgeoning ‘anti-establishment’ audiences. I’m interested in the analysis of framing, not in speculative conspiracy theories.

The first thing I noticed when I began paying attention to Greenwald’s prolific tweeting was that it seemed to constantly reinforce Trump’s talking points (usually by attacking the same politicians, media and commentators that Trump was attacking, on the same issues, and with more or less the same timing). This was in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, but it continued after Trump was elected.

Perhaps most obviously, Glenn promoted the notion that Trump was less likely (than Clinton) to start wars. This idea had been encouraged by Trump himself, as part of his anti-Hillary platform. Greenwald wrote that Trump had a “non-interventionist mindset”, and encouraged the generalisation of Democrats as being the greater hawks. His colleague at The Intercept, Jeremy Scahill, took a similar line, saying that Trump represents “the best hope we’ve had since 9/11 to actually end some of these forever wars”.

Relevant links: Scahill quote, Guardian piece

Greenwald and Scahill weren’t the only ones who swallowed the ‘war-averse’ version of Trump. It’s notable, and curious, that those who so closely monitored (and fearlessly reported) Obama’s drone-strike militarism seemed to stop paying so much attention when Trump was the one killing thousands. After Trump took office, there was an increase of US troops deployed abroad. Trump escalated every conflict he’s presided over, ramping up bombing in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia and Yemen, increasing civilian deaths (in some cases to record-high levels) while removing civilian protections and reducing accountability. In the year after Trump became president he oversaw more than 10,000 US-led coalition airstrikes in Syria and Iraq, with a 215% rise in civilian deaths. Trump’s drone strikes far exceed Obama’s. US weapon sales to foreign countries have increased under Trump.

None of this should come as a surprise if you paid attention to Trump’s strongman campaign rhetoric on the use of America’s colossal military force (“I would bomb the hell out of them”, “I would bomb the s— out of them. I would just bomb those suckers”,“take out their families”), outside of his rants against the foreign policy of Obama and the liberal interventionism of Hillary Clinton. But if you were focused on the latter – the anti-Democrat diatribes – perhaps you came away with a different story.

When those who viewed Trump as relatively ‘war-averse’ started citing Trump’s firing of John Bolton as support of their view, I felt we’d entered some really weird zone of cognitive dissonance. After all, Trump appointed Bolton in the first place. We’re supposed to think he fired him as a sort of principled stand, after suddenly realising Bolton wasn’t so averse to war after all?

Links: Greenwald tweet via @charliearchy tweet

Less obviously than with the “non-interventionist Trump” view, Glenn sometimes puts forward the notion of Trump as blunt, honest, straight-talking guy (which is something Trump and his people have pushed, no doubt to counter the widespread impression of Trump as habitual liar). Here’s an example: On 17 November 2018, the media reported that Trump was briefed on a CIA report about the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Greenwald had already commented on this assassination (on a Fox News show), reinforcing typical Fox News messaging about Obama and Washington media elites: “the reason people in Washington suddenly decided that they’re angry about Saudi Arabia is because this time their victim is somebody they ran into in Washington restaurants”.

Trump’s record is worse than Obama’s – as measured by Greenwald’s apparent criteria – when it comes to defending the Saudi regime’s barbarism (Trump also rejected measures intended to prohibit arms sales to the Saudis, and he rejected a bipartisan resolution to end US military involvement in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen). In fact, Trump’s record on human rights seems shockingly bad across the board – the product of the same shameless, brutal indifference and malice towards “the inferior other” (inhabitants of “shithole countries”, etc) that informs Trump’s whole worldview. So, out of all possible takes on this, what framing does Glenn go with? Well, Trump’s just being more “honest” and “blunt” – we’re seeing his admirable traits:

Link to tweet: just more honest & blunt

It’s not that the Democrats are undeserving of criticism on these issues – it’s that Trump is currently in power, and wielding that power in increasingly brazen authoritarian actions. Greenwald nearly always seems to reframe stories which are rightly Trump-damning as, instead, being about the failing and hypocrisy of “establishment liberals” and “scummy” Washington media. (It reminds me of Frank Luntz’s advice to Republicans to “always blame Washington” – to frame every bad thing as ultimately being the fault of the liberal establishment; to relentlessly repeat that it’s all about elitist D.C. complacency – that was the advice of Luntz, a rightwing spin guru). With occasional exceptions, Glenn’s reframing of controversies in Trump’s relative favour has seemed systematic for around four years.

The tendency hasn’t gone unnoticed by the Trumps:

(Incidentally, the comment from Adam Schiff that Greenwald links to above was from 29 March 2015 [full transcript here], just a few days after the first Yemeni casualties – the full extent of Saudi brutality unfolded over the following years. Cf: the evolution of Glenn’s opinion on hostilities against Iraq – see below)

Of course, the counter-examples shouldn’t be ignored, and this piece by Greenwald stands out as a direct attack on Trump’s escalation of hostilities. It was written after Glenn had been widely ridiculed for his depiction of Trump as “non-interventionist”, and it begins by replaying the shocking catalogue of increased killing under Trump’s presidency. But then it turns into a strange polemic which frames this barbarism in terms of “the clarity of Trump’s intentions regarding the war on terror”. Glenn writes that Trump’s escalation of bloodshed is “exactly what those who described his foreign policy as non-interventionist predicted he would do”.

For months, in 2016, Greenwald had a pinned tweet asking, ‘Is it really necessary to spend next 6 months pointing out that “criticism of Clinton” ≠ “support for Trump”?’ – no doubt to save him the bother of responding to all those who noticed that he seemed overwhelmingly focused on Hillary Clinton and the “lib”/”dem” establishment, while leaving Trump relatively unscathed. (Incidentally, I never noticed anyone arguing that Clinton was undeserving of criticism, or that criticism of her in itself implied support for Trump).

In August 2016, The Intercept’s Robert Mackey noticed a similar thing with Wikileaks: “In recent months, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed has started to look more like the stream of an opposition research firm working mainly to undermine Hillary Clinton than the updates of a non-partisan platform for whistleblowers.”

Both Greenwald and Assange rationalised their constant, relentlessly hostile focus on Clinton’s Democrats (in the 2016 election run-up) by claiming that Trump was already “prevented” from becoming US president. Assange said “Trump would not be permitted to win”. Greenwald said the US media was “preventing him from being elected president”. (After Trump won, Greenwald said the media “played an important role, as well, in ensuring that he could win”).

Greenwald’s style of political framing, with hyperbolic and sweeping denunciations of “liberals”, “Democrats”, “Washington”, NBC and MSNBC (and “liberal media” in general) – and with Hillary Clinton, Obama and the “liberal establishment” typically presented as the greater evils (relative to supposed outsiders such as Trump) – reminds me of so-called ‘alt-right’ framing – the kind of anti-liberal fuck-you message engineered by Steve Bannon and Breitbart (and seen also on 4chan, InfoWars, etc) to appeal to a younger “anti-establishment” audience. (See Joshua Green’s book, Devil’s Bargain, on Bannon’s project to capture this audience. Incidentally, Greenwald praised Breitbart for its “editorial independence”, of all things).

“Democrats are full of hatred and always need to have a heretic to demonize.
They have no ideology, so that’s their fuel.” (Glenn Greenwald, 23 November 2019)

‘Repulsive progressive hypocrisy’ (Title of February 2012 Greenwald article)

“NBC News and MSNBC have essentially merged with the CIA
and intelligence community and thus, use their tactics…
This is who they are. It’s also what the Democratic Party is”
(Glenn Greenwald, 8 July 2018)

“What are Greenwald’s politics, exactly?”

Back in January 2014, The New Republic published an article by historian Sean Wilentz which documented various views espoused by Greenwald, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange that seemed at odds with public portrayals of these men as broadly left/progressive dissidents.

For example, it cited a December 2005 blog post in which Greenwald writes the following:

“Current illegal immigration – whereby unmanageably endless hordes of people pour over the border in numbers far too large to assimilate, and who consequently have no need, motivation or ability to assimilate – renders impossible the preservation of any national identity.” (Glenn Greenwald, 3 December 2005)

“Hordes” of immigrants threatening “national identity”? Not a very progressive outlook – although many of Greenwald’s fans questioned the relevance of these political beliefs to the more recent NSA whistleblower stuff. So what if Greenwald and Snowden once had some rightwing views and hated socialism? Wasn’t this just another attempt to smear them?

Professor Wilentz’s article perhaps makes more sense in hindsight, following Trump’s ascendance to power. Wikileaks, for example, secretly offered to help Trump’s campaign, privately favoured the Republican Party over Clinton’s Democrats, and openly boasted of how influential it had been (via Facebook metrics) on the US election. Greenwald, with over a million followers on Twitter, and regular appearances on Fox News (on which he responds to the anti-liberal emphasis and framing of Tucker Carlson, usually with reinforcement rather than challenge), seems just as influential.

According to Wilentz, Greenwald envisaged uniting rightwing “paleoconservatives and free-market libertarians” with leftwing “anti-imperialists and civil-liberties activists” in a sort of popular revolt against an establishment composed of “mainstream center-left liberals and neoconservatives”.

This uniting of heterodox left and right against an odious liberal establishment, in order to shake up the status quo, seems a common enough trope. To the extent that it reframes libs/dems/”centrists” as the greater evil, it reinforces a political worldview of the right. Contrast a view expressed by Noam Chomsky in an interview following the 2016 election. Chomsky had been saying that Trump posed an existential threat, and that the main thing was to stop him. When asked if Slavoj Žižek had a point (that Trump would shake-up the system and be a positive force in undermining the status quo), Chomsky replied:

“Terrible point. It was the same point that people like him said about Hitler in the early thirties. He’ll shake up the system in bad ways… If Clinton had won, she had some progressive programmes. The left could have been organised to keeping her feet to the fire and pushing them through. What it’ll be doing now is trying to protect rights that have been, gains that have been achieved, from being destroyed. That’s completely regressive.” (Chomsky in interview with Mehdi Hasan, November 2016)

Although he often quotes the MIT professor approvingly, Glenn’s output regarding Trump-vs-Democrats seems to consistently push in the opposite direction to Chomsky’s advice. As I’ve noted previously, Glenn tends to frame the MAGA, Brexit, “yellow vests” movements, etc, as popular revolts against the elite establishment status quo, rather than as regressive projects that cynically exploit social discontent.

By the way, nothing controversial is implied here by drawing attention to differences/similarities
in the primary framing and emphasis of influential people with similar/different political personas.

Greenwald’s anti-left views?

In contrast to Greenwald’s recent positive framing of the “yellow vests” protests, etc, here’s his reaction to anti-Bush demonstrations (Latin America, 2005), which he says were “depraved” – he describes the protesters as “truly odious”:-

As is true in U.S., the Latin American socialist agitators who have captured the attention and affection of the American media are as substance-less as they are inconsequential. They are lovers of Fidel Castro. The[y] insist that the source of their severe economic woes is not their collectivist policies or national character, of course, but the evil economic policies of the U.S. (Glenn Greenwald, ‘Unclaimed Territory’ blog, 4th November 2005)

Their “national character” is partly to blame for their economic woes? I won’t speculate on what Greenwald meant by this, but it doesn’t sound good. Meanwhile, Glenn denounces the US media in sweeping fashion (“As usual, the truth is vastly different than what the U.S. media is reporting”) – but it’s a denunciation of the type one usually hears in rightwing circles:

Unsurprisingly, the attention-craving [Hugo] Chavez’s principal ally in these escapades seems to be the American reporters and correspondents reporting on Bush’s trip. They instinctively regurgitate stories of supposedly widespread anti-Bush sentiment based upon nothing but a handful of socialist stragglers defacing public property with anti-war cliches and jobless Latin American hippies gathering for some music, celebrity-gazing and chants. (Glenn Greenwald, ‘Unclaimed Territory’ blog, 4th November 2005)

Greenwald hammers the US media for exaggerating the scale of anti-Bush protests, and for suggesting that the “[Bush] Administration’s policies are flawed because people in other countries dislike Bush”. He writes that the US media are doing this because large-scale anti-Bush rallies are “consistent with their ideology”.

In the same post, Glenn argues that because the September 11th attacks didn’t occur in Latin America, “Latin Americans do not perceive the need to change the Middle East as being as critical and urgent as Americans perceive that need to be.”

Although Greenwald had become critical of Bush by this point, the ‘conservative’ framing/tone remains (on the topic of US national security). The whole post reads to me as if Glenn is implicitly defending Bush’s policy in Iraq against the protests of these “socialist stragglers” (and their friends, the US media), who don’t understand the threat posed by Al Qaeda because they haven’t experienced it for themselves, unlike the good American citizens who support Bush because they understand the dangerous reality he’s fighting. As Greenwald puts it: “It should be axiomatic that the risks posed to American national security will best be understood and appreciated by Americans, not by those in other countries.”

In another blog post, Greenwald writes that the protestors are “hard-core Communists” (his italic emphasis). That’s right: commies!:

“These demonstrators hate the United States because they are genuinely opposed to economic freedom and individual liberty, and they seek to impose the collectivist authoritarianism of Fidel Castro onto the entire Latin American continent. It really is that simple.” (Glenn Greenwald, ‘Unclaimed Territory’ blog, 5th November 2005)

Incidentally, Glenn was nearly forty when he held these views.

Greenwald’s deep moral-political worldview?

As the cognitive linguist, George Lakoff, demonstrated at length in his book, Moral Politics, our political opinions are rooted in complex moral worldviews which we form over the course of our lives, starting in childhood. We each have what he calls a “strict” moral outlook in some areas, and a “nurturant” outlook in others, leading to “conservative”, “rightwing” political opinions in the former and “progressive”, “leftwing” opinions in the latter. (See my extended summary of the Moral Politics thesis).

Lakoff uses the term “biconceptual” to refer to this dual outlook in an individual. When semantic framing of a ‘rightwing’ outlook is constantly repeated, it reinforces that outlook in our biconceptual minds, while neurally inhibiting the progressive outlooks (and vice versa). Our self-identity in any area is often most clearly expressed by what we fight against – someone with a well-established “conservative” moral outlook may be disgusted by, and fight against, liberals and lefties, and vice versa. And contrary to flattering opinions we have about ourselves, we tend not to change our established moral-political outlooks based on our changing evaluations of facts alone.

Having said that, people can radically change – it’s possible that a middle-aged adult with an established ‘conservative’ outlook in important (but not all) areas, and exhibiting a deep dislike of dissident lefties and socialist views, could invert this worldview, together with their own self-identity, in a few years. Maybe. Perhaps in Greenwald’s case you don’t need to make that argument if there is, in fact, no deep reversal of worldview, just a shift in hostile rhetorical targeting away from lefties/socialists, to focus more on establishment/liberals.

Glenn’s explanations of some of his earlier ‘conservative’-sounding views make interesting reading. Here’s how he accounted for his views on illegal immigration (he’d complained in his political blog that “nothing is done” about the “parade of evils” caused by such immigration):

“I had zero readers … there were many uninformed things I believed back then, before I focused on politics full-time – due to uncritically ingesting conventional wisdom, propaganda, etc. … nobody was reading my blog; it was anything but thoughtful, contemplative, and informed, and – like so many things I thought were true then – has nothing to do with what I believe now.” (Glenn Greenwald, 24 April 2011)

I find this unconvincing. By his own account, Glenn wound down his litigation practice in 2005 in order to pursue other things, “including political writing”. He was no “uninformed” youth when he started writing a political blog – he was (to quote Wilentz) “a seasoned 38-year-old New York lawyer”, who had, among other things, represented a white supremacist neo-Nazi leader (a remarkable story). Greenwald’s writings on immigration weren’t just isolated “uncritically ingested” factoids – they expressed an established, conservatively-framed worldview on that particular issue. His opinions and framing on other issues in his blog at this time – eg the anti-socialist views discussed above – consistently express this worldview (although it’s important to note that he had liberal views on other issues – what you might call a “partial progressive” in Lakoff’s terminology).

It also seems irrelevant to his political outlook that “nobody” was reading his blog at the time (this seems a strange point for him to emphasize – and one that’s echoed in his argument that his private support of the Iraq war didn’t really count as support because he had no platform as a writer at the time – see below).

Support of the Iraq War – and later denial

Glenn has often attacked ‘libs’ and ‘dems’ for any support they expressed for George W. Bush’s policy of invading Iraq in 2003. This is also attenuated in posts in which he mocks “Resistance” figures for referring to the Bushes in positive terms generally. In one recent example he sarcastically mocks Nancy Pelosi for making a casually friendly remark about the Bush family (somewhat off-target given that Pelosi was a vocal opponent of the Iraq war and a critic of Bush’s policies).

Greenwald also writes scathingly of the “rehabilitation” by Democrats and media of Bush-era hawks, claiming there is “little to no daylight between leading Democratic Party foreign policy gurus and the Bush-era neocons who had wallowed in disgrace following the debacle of Iraq”.

I can understand this – I’m of a similar age to Glenn, and I remember writing, in January and February 2003, to my UK Member of Parliament, Christine Russell (a loyal Blairite), pointing out that invading Iraq would result in humanitarian catastrophe and would increase rather than deter international terrorism threats. I still have the replies from Russell, and I still find it difficult to think of Blair or Jack Straw without a residue of anger.

So, it came as a big surprise when I read claims that Glenn Greenwald had actually supported the Iraq war. I checked this claim, of course. One of the first things I found was a somewhat defensive and repetitive denial from Glenn, who says the people making these claims are “fabricating” by making a “distortion” of the preface to his 2006 book, How Would a Patriot Act?. So, what’s the truth here?

In the preface to that book, Greenwald describes his reactions following the September 11, 2001 attacks in Manhattan:

“I was ready to stand behind President Bush and I wanted him to exact vengeance on the perpetrators and find ways to decrease the likelihood of future attacks. […] And I was fully supportive of both the president’s ultimatum to the Taliban and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan when our demands were not met.” (Glenn Greenwald, ‘How Would a Patriot Act?‘)

During the later lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, Glenn was concerned that policy was being driven by “agendas and strategic objectives that had nothing to do with terrorism or the 9/11 attacks” and that “[t]he overt rationale for the invasion was exceedingly weak”. But, he goes on to write:

“Despite these doubts, concerns, and grounds for ambivalence, I had not abandoned my trust in the Bush administration. Between the president’s performance in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the swift removal of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the fact that I wanted the president to succeed, because my loyalty is to my country and he was the leader of my country, I still gave the administration the benefit of the doubt. I believed then that the president was entitled to have his national security judgment deferred to, and to the extent that I was able to develop a definitive view, I accepted his judgment that American security really would be enhanced by the invasion of this sovereign country.” (Glenn Greenwald, ‘How Would a Patriot Act?’)

The bottom line, then, is that even though Greenwald had concerns over Bush’s invasion policy, he accepted it anyway. He evidently also supported Bush’s “American security” rationale for this act of aggression, despite apparently being aware of its weakness.

Given his own words quoted back to him, how then does Greenwald deny that he supported the invasion of Iraq? Well, his argument is that since he didn’t actively promote, or publicly argue for, the policy of war (as he was neither a writer nor activist at the time) it follows that he didn’t support it. Those who claim he did are, he says, “fabricators” who make a “complete distortion” of the preface he wrote to his book (by accurately quoting it?).

Links for above: Greenwald tweet, Daily Kos piece

I don’t often use the term “horseshit”, but that’s what this sounds like to me. Greenwald denies supporting the war essentially by redefining “support” to mean something else. Public “support” is quite an important idea in democracies – we register our “support” for policies at elections and referendums; our “support” is measured by opinion polls or inferred in other ways. You don’t have to be a writer, activist or politician to support (or oppose) a war policy. Millions of US citizens misguidedly supported the invasion of Iraq by accepting Bush’s “national security” rationale and by giving his administration the “benefit of the doubt” – and that’s precisely what Greenwald did.

Most of those who point out that Glenn supported the war (Glenn says they’re liars) aren’t claiming he publicly promoted war. They’re quoting his 2006 book to show he supported the war in exactly the same way that countless other Americans supported the war – by not being neutral or opposing it; by accepting the case for it, on balance, and trusting those who waged it.

Greenwald repeatedly protests that, before 2004, he was “politically apathetic and indifferent”, “not politically engaged or active”, “was basically apolitical and passive”, “had no platform or role in politics”, “wasn’t a journalist or government official”, etc. You get the picture. But in all these respects he was like the vast majority who supported the war.

It’s obviously possible to be relatively “apolitical”, “passive”, etc, and still support a war. That’s how most people with pro-war views do support any given war policy – since most people aren’t hugely active politically as writers, campaigners, etc. Most, like Glenn, were engaged in other activities, such as full-time jobs, but were still able to form an opinion in support of the war – as Glenn did.

Incidentally, it’s not really true that a passive, acquiescing support of war is “apolitical”. On the contrary, any such acceptance of war requires underlying political beliefs, including what Lakoff calls the ‘Fairy Tale of the Just War’, built on ‘conservative’ framing of ‘self-defence’ or ‘rescue’ scenarios – see my Iraq War Framing for Dummies. The views that Greenwald describes himself as having on Iraq and Afghanistan, following 9/11, use the framing of a typically conservative political worldview: “American security really would be enhanced by the invasion”, “my trust in the Bush administration”, “my loyalty is to my country and he was the leader of my country”, “I wanted him to exact vengeance on the perpetrators”, etc.

The pre-2004 attributes that, according to Glenn, disqualified him from “supporting” the Iraq war (political apathy, no public platform, etc) oddly didn’t disqualify him from supporting the US invasion of Afghanistan. Perhaps the last word on this is a nice quote from Glenn, in which he admits supporting the war in Afghanistan, and then compares himself to Martin Luther King over his stance on Iraq:

“It is true that, like 90% of Americans, I did support the war in Afghanistan and, living in New York, believed the rhetoric about the threat of Islamic extremism: those were obvious mistakes. It’s also true that one can legitimately criticize me for not having actively opposed the Iraq War at a time when many people were doing so. Martin Luther King, in his 1967 speech explaining why his activism against the Vietnam War was indispensable to his civil rights work, acknowledged that he had been too slow to pay attention to or oppose the war and that he thus felt obligated to work with particular vigor against it once he realized the need…” (Glenn Greenwald, 26 January 2013)

Update – 19 Oct 2020: I notice this post is currently getting a lot of hits, seemingly related to social media activity arising from a piece by the independent researcher/journalist Marcy Wheeler (@emptywheel), which is also critical of Greenwald, and which has some interesting updates on Greenwald’s publication of Guccifer 2.0 material, as discussed above. Marcy Wheeler’s piece is available here.

Written by NewsFrames

February 26, 2020 at 8:14 pm

Posted in Donald Trump, Frank Luntz, Glenn Greenwald, Iraq, Julian Assange, Moral politics, Populism

Behaviour modification empires for rent

Of all the “what the hell is going on?” type books that I’ve read in the last few years, the one I enjoyed most was Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts.

The title undersells this book’s importance, to my mind. After all, it’s neither self-help nor “clickbait” – it’s not like “10 arguments for quitting sugar”. I regard it more as an absolutely essential collection of insights (from a Silicon Valley insider) about why basic democratic and progressive norms seem to be undermined as a consequence of how social media works.

“But for the moment we face a terrifying, sudden crisis…
Something is drawing young people away from democracy.”
(Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments…)

Algorithm Politics & mass manipulation of humans

“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works.”
– Former Facebook vice president of user growth (quoted by Lanier)

Jaron’s book argues that while we should generally embrace the internet, we need to urgently reject what he calls “BUMMER” (his acronym for the destructive core of social media, short for “Behaviors of Users Modified and Made into an Empire for Rent”).

BUMMER is a sort of high-level business plan in which the end-users of social media are the product, not the customer (that’s why social media is free to use). The real customers are those who want to modify your behaviour in some way. The basic argument is that, statistically, social media algorithms boost certain negative aspects of human communication, since that’s what maximises engagement with the platform (thus maximising profit for the social media companies).

The algorithms don’t care how they maximise user engagement – it happens automatically (continually “optimised”), and it just so happens that tribalism and nasty adversarial conflicts tend to engage people more efficiently than, say, pleasantly reasonable discourse does. Nor do the algorithms care if the result is user addiction (with its related mental health problems).

“Social media is biased, not to the Left or the Right, but downward. The relative ease of using negative emotions for the purposes of addiction and manipulation makes it relatively easier to achieve undignified results. An unfortunate combination of biology and math favors degradation of the human world. Information warfare units sway elections, hate groups recruit, and nihilists get amazing bang for the buck when they try to bring society down.

“The unplanned nature of the transformation from advertising to direct behavior modification caused an explosive amplification of negativity in human affairs.” (Lanier, Ten Arguments…)

As the book frames it: “Social media is turning you into an asshole”. I’m reminded of the quote provided by Robert Anton Wilson at the beginning of his chapter on “The SNAFU principle” in Prometheus Rising:

“…the peculiar nature of the game…makes it impossible for [participants] to stop the game once it is under way. Such situations we label games without end.” (Watzlawick, Beavin, Jackson, Pragmatics of Human Communication – full quote here)

As for those who want to modify your behaviour, they range from advertisers to malign (and often secretive) parties seeking to amplify hatreds or swing elections. (Lanier doesn’t shy away from tackling emotive/controversial topics, such as Russian state exploitation of social media for disruptive purposes).

“Remember how it became cool in some liberal circles to cruelly ridicule Hillary, as if doing so were a religion? In the age of BUMMER you can’t tell what was organic and what was engineered.

“It’s random that BUMMER favored the Republicans over the Democrats in U.S. politics, but it isn’t random that BUMMER favored the most irritable, authoritarian, paranoid, and tribal Republicans. All those qualities are equally available on the left.” (Lanier, Ten Arguments…)

(Remember when Facebook promoted the “trending news” that “most doctors polled” had “serious concerns” about Hillary Clinton’s health, including the suggestion, in a poll question, that Hillary was a “flaming psychopath”? This “news” originally came from a rightwing group, AAPS, that promoted conspiracy theories, including that “vaccines cause autism“. It was also promoted by Trump and Wikileaks).

I found Lanier’s book to be an entertaining read, rich in insights (and in things you need to know about) – I recommend you read the whole thing for yourself. The bottom line is that the algorithms constantly monitor, via our online responses, preferences, framing, etc, the micro-level views/behaviours (you could call it the result of our “adaptive” unconsciouses) of hundreds of millions of people on an individual, targeted level (via their personalised social media feeds and searches), instantaneously in real time – modifying behaviour (so Lanier argues), in ways we’re not conscious of, and at the whim of parties who don’t have our best interests in mind.

Those algorithms? Lanier remarks that they’re among the best kept secrets on the planet – more carefully guarded than NSA or CIA state secrets. It’s worth quoting at length one example of how the book describes them as working:

“Black activists and sympathizers were carefully cataloged and studied. What wording got them excited? What annoyed them? What little things, stories, videos, anything, kept them glued to BUMMER? What would snowflake-ify them enough to isolate them, bit by bit, from the rest of society? What made them shift to be more targetable by behavior modification messages over time? The purpose was not to repress the movement but to earn money. The process was automatic, routine, sterile, and ruthless.

“Meanwhile, automatically, black activism was tested for its ability to preoccupy, annoy, even transfix other populations, who themselves were then automatically cataloged, prodded, and studied. A slice of latent white supremacists and racists who had previously not been well identified, connected, or empowered was blindly, mechanically discovered and cultivated, initially only for automatic, unknowing commercial gain – but that would have been impossible without first cultivating a slice of BUMMER black activism and algorithmically figuring out how to frame it as a provocation.

“BUMMER was gradually separating people into bins and promoting assholes by its nature, before Russians or any other client showed up to take advantage. When the Russians did show up, they benefited from a user interface designed to help ‘advertisers’ target populations with tested messages to gain attention. All the Russian agents had to do was pay BUMMER for what came to BUMMER naturally.” (Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments…)

Update: I recommend watching The Great Hack (a new Netflix documentary), as it makes some of the same points that Lanier does about the urgency of the situation. It covers the threat to democracy posed by the new kind of “weapons grade” psychological propaganda that’s researched (and used) by entities such as Cambridge Analytica and SCL, using social media data mining, etc.

By the way, I’m aware that descriptions of this material (including my own, probably) sometimes sound a bit like paranoid sci-fi melodrama. Even the more sober reports often add to that effect. Read about the interventions of SCL Group (Cambridge Analytica’s parent company) in the 2010 elections in Trinidad and Tobago, for instance.

Written by NewsFrames

November 15, 2019 at 2:05 pm

Posted in Post-truth, Robert Anton Wilson, Social media algorithms, Voting

“Weaponised” political framing – do you really know which side you’re on?

weaponised-trump-halftone-newsframes In the early 1990s, years before I had an internet connection, I read The Hacker Crackdown – an insightful journalistic account (by pioneer cyberpunk novelist Bruce Sterling) about the paranoid, heavy-handed reaction of the US authorities towards young computer hackers. From the countercultural perspective of the time, the hackers were seen as the “good guys”. (More on Sterling’s take on current events below…)

Fast forward to late 2017:- Recently leaked emails show that Wikileaks sought political favours from Donald Trump in exchange for helping his presidential campaign. Evidence for complex, multi-pronged Russian interference in the 2016 US election has become overwhelming, seemingly irrefutable. Reality Leigh Winner languishes in jail, largely unknown and unpraised, unlike Edward Snowden. Unfortunately for her, the NSA document she allegedly leaked (which documented attempts by Russia to hack US election infrastructure) didn’t reinforce the preferred narrative of the two prominent co-founding editors of The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, who, as a result, appeared to be less-than-enthusiastic relayers of the “persecuted whistleblower” story in this case.

Their narrative – fairly relentlessly pushed by Glenn Greenwald on social media – held that “the whole Russia thing” was largely a hysterical conspiracy theory promoted by “libs” and “Dems” seeking to blame anyone but Hillary Clinton for her election loss. Greenwald has also (until now) aggressively defended Julian Assange against accusations of collaborating with the Trump campaign and/or Russia.

Greenwald, Scahill and many other mutually-referencing influential left social-media commentators use a collection of old, familiar ‘left’ tropes to frame the unfolding events. Namely:

1. Anti-establishment vs The Establishment (“liberal” establishment in this case)
2. “Ordinary people” vs The Elite
3. Heroic outsiders/whistleblowers vs The Corporate Media
4. Unjustly maligned “official enemies” vs The Malign Western/US “Deep State“
5. Etc…

These binary political frames/categories, which I once found valid enough for high-level commentary, now look indurated – they seem inadequate for making sense of the fast-moving fractal-like chaos and complexity evident in 21st century political culture. At worst, I see these frames placing a kind of archaic tribal drag on attempts at a more sophisticated, empirical, up-to-date understanding of the political-social-media transformations occurring. Being simple, binary and readily internalised as “true reality”, they also seem prone to being co-opted and “weaponised” by starkly unprogressive interests. The obvious case in point: billionaire businessman Donald Trump, with funding and help from billionaire hedge fund CEO, Robert Mercer, ran successful sub-campaigns based on these traditionally ‘left’ anti-elite, anti-establishment, anti-media frames.

(The same appeared largely true of Brexit. I’ve written previously on how Glenn Greenwald and others bought the whole “left-behind ordinary people” anti-elite framing of the Leave campaign – apparently because it confirmed and reinforced the ways they were already thinking/generalising about politics from the perspective of these overworn ‘left’ tropes).

Weaponised: floating signifiers & hyper-generalisation

One problem of old-skool* ‘left’ political framing is a certain overuse of big floating categories (“liberal”, “elite”, “establishment”, “media”, etc) onto which pretty much anything nefarious can be projected. A demagogue’s populist rhetoric – parroting such hypnotic signifiers – easily sets up angry either-or, them-&-us territorial binary framing – but aligned with the demagogue’s interests. Steve Bannon used this type of rhetoric a lot during the Trump campaign and earlier (“There is a growing global anti-establishment revolt against the permanent political class at home, and the global elites that influence them, which impacts everyone from Lubbock to London” – Bannon to NYT, 2014). Breitbart, RT.com and Infowars, etc, also used it, blurring the lines between anti-establishment ‘left’ and so-called alt-right.

Why would you want to reinforce this framing? Unfortunately, a lot of influential ‘left’ commentators spend much of their time doing just that – overgeneralising about “libs”, “Dems” and “mainstream media”, as if these were bad uniform actors or fungible entities, and as if assigning inherent nefariousness to these big group abstractions were an act of deep truth-telling. There almost seems to be a tacit conceit that this constitutes true radical-left activism. I regard it as radical stupidity when it reinforces the “weaponised” political memes designed to put someone like Trump in power.

“Ordinary people” vs The Elite

As the story goes, “ordinary people” were fed up with the elite-run system. Trump, and Brexit, triumphed because of uprisings of discontent which united regular folks against the establishment elites. As a logical extension of this story, we shouldn’t be blaming Trump/Brexit for the long-standing evils/failures of the establishments which led to Trump/Brexit – our wrath should instead still be directed at those establishments (which are now in a battle with Trump/Brexit).

The Occupy movement expressed “the ordinary vs the elite” in terms of the 99% vs the 1%, which makes sense if you’re talking about the distribution of wealth. But it makes no sense if you’re talking about the distribution of political opinion. There is no uniformity of belief within the 99% – no common viewpoint which explains material discontent in political-value terms. The 99% – the “regular folks” – remain just as bitterly divided as ever when it comes to values/viewpoints/allegiances. The statistical correlations between things such as income level, class and voting preference remain just as weak and questionable as ever – even in the age of Trump/Brexit.

With so little empirical support for this “ordinary people” story, why do influential ‘left’ commentators argue as if this framing represented the real truth? You can validly argue, in the case of Brexit, that the Leave campaign in fact appealed to nationalist elitism – the British vs the non-British. That’s a fundamentally different framing than “ordinary people united against elites”. The rightwing UK tabloids have been full of this xenophobic, divisive elitism for years – in the form of endless attacks on immigrants, European bureaucrats and politically-correct liberals, etc.

Trump’s appeal to social elitism

Trump used “ordinary guy” anti-elite rhetoric, but his campaign spent a lot of time connecting with various subcultures (sizeable in voter numbers/influence) that have their own particular forms of social elitism. According to Joshua Green’s book, Devil’s Bargain, Steve Bannon’s business background gave him (Bannon) insight into the huge online communities that formed the audiences of sites such as Breitbart:

“Yet Bannon was captivated by what he had discovered while trying to build the business: an underworld he hadn’t known existed that was populated by millions of intense young men (most gamers were men) who disappeared for days or even weeks at a time in alternate realities.”

“While perhaps not social adepts, they were smart, focused, relatively wealthy, and highly motivated about issues that mattered to them, their collective might powerful enough to wreck IGE’s business and bend companies such as Blizzard to their will. As he would later confirm, this luciferous insight gave him an early understanding of the size and strength of online communities, along with an appreciation for the powerful currents that run just below the surface of the Internet. He began to wonder if those forces could be harnessed and, if so, how he might exploit them.” (Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain)

Bannon took it further, according to Green. He “envisioned a great fusion between the masses of alienated gamers, so powerful in the online world, and the right-wing outsiders drawn to Breitbart by its radical politics and fuck-you attitude”. Bannon said that Fox News’ audience was geriatric and that political campaigns needed to connect with this younger demographic, with its own form of in-group elitism.

Angela Nagle has a wonderful take on the elitism of various online communities that supported Trump. In her book, Kill All Normies (chapter 7), Nagle first mentions the ubiquitous framing of Trump’s victory as reflecting the views of “ordinary people” who felt “left behind” by aloof liberal elites. She cites Thomas Frank as one of the most insistent purveyors of this frame – but then she turns this idea upside-down:

“Although the idea that ordinary people felt alienated by political correctness was not uncommon in right-wing rhetoric, there was also quite a remarkable shift from a subcultural elitism to a sudden proletarian righteousness, or even a bit of noblesse oblige, as though the right had been making Thomas Frank’s argument all along. In reality they had been making pro-inequality, misanthropic, economically elitist arguments for natural hierarchy all along.” (Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies)

As Nagle remarks, before the “ordinary people” narrative became common on these ‘new right’ online communities, Milo Yiannopoulos could be seen in photo-shoots wearing a “Stop Being Poor” T-shirt (a quote from Paris Hilton, apparently). Nagle argues that while Trump’s supporters are busy rewriting history, it’s important to remember that Trump’s young rightwing online “vanguard” had long been characterised by “an extreme subcultural snobbishness toward the masses and mass culture”.

“Anti-establishment” weaponised memes

I’m old enough to have partaken (at least remotely) in the left cyber-utopianism that flourished in the 1980s and early 1990s. This brings me back to Bruce Sterling and the reading I submersed myself in at the time (mainly to provide an escape from a tedious 9-5 office job). Timothy Leary, having been at the heart of the psychedelic revolution, was now writing – ahead of his time – about the liberating potential of personal computers; Robert Anton Wilson was writing genius-level surreal social satire with an eye towards progressive change aided by technology. R.U. Sirius produced an impressive magazine called Mondo 2000 – an entertaining journal of this techno-utopian current.

The subversive, countercultural “question authority” type memes seemed sweeter back then. Even the notion of “fake” mostly had an innocent ring to it, to me at least. Conspiracy was fun to think about. Russian meddling was merely “reds under the bed” paranoia – seen mostly in conservative newspapers or spy novels, perceived by most as something quaint from an earlier era.

It seems a bad idea to exaggerate the new 21st-century Putin type of Russian influence – one wouldn’t want to blame it for all the weirdness happening in elections. But, equally, it seems a really bad idea to be in denial about it – or to play down its importance – given the abundance of evidence for it on countless fronts. Consider something I stumbled across from R.U. Sirius recently (from a conversation with Douglas Rushkoff):

“If you follow some of the ideological discourse from people who are really influential in Russia, it’s postmodernism and Operation Mindfuck in the service of amoral raw power and political strategy. I know secondhand that there are people in Putin’s mindtrust who have read their Leary and their Discordianism and so forth and they are following a chaos strategy for disrupting the American consensus… or however you want to phrase the collapsing neoliberal order. And not collapsing towards a good end.” (R.U. Sirius, in conversation with Douglas Rushkoff)

This brings us to another point made by Angela Nagle – that 60s/70s-style countercultural transgression created a kind of void into which any ideology can now flow, as long as it appears anti-establishment and contemptuous of mainstream values. Nagle argues that whilst it was originally “left-cyberutopians” who were optimistic about the shift from old establishment-media control of politics to “leaderless user-generated social media”, the reality of this has enabled the right, not the left, to take power:

“The online environment has undoubtedly allowed fringe ideas and movements to grow rapidly in influence and while these were left leaning it was tempting for politically sympathetic commentators to see it as a shiny new seductive shortcut to transcending our ‘end of history’. What we’ve since witnessed instead is that this leaderless formation can express just about any ideology even, strange as it may seem, that of the far right.” (Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies)

Tearing down is easy

The emerging digital, decentralised media and politics make disruption and destabilisation easy to achieve. This appears to be the Pandora’s Box of 21st century politics – as Bruce Sterling puts it, these modern disruptive movements are “fatally easy to assemble” and “almost never have the aim of promulgating rational programs for legislative action”. But the changing technological landscape enables such movements to seize power shockingly quickly and relatively cheaply.

Tearing down, taking apart, dismantling, removing, sweeping away, “draining the swamp” – these metaphors seem to be favoured by both alt-right and radical left, with regard to an existing establishment/system seen as rotten to the core. The framing isn’t about building or progress in Karl Popper’s sense of piecemeal democratic improvement – it’s about take-down, dissolution, “cleansing” and “purity”. The binary frames listed above (eg anti-establishment vs establishment) tend to reinforce these stark either-or, all-or-nothing approaches to politics.

Bruce Sterling – who is certainly no apologist for western imperialism/hegemony – puts it this way:

It’s the same phenomenon over and over, just with different branding: the Arab Spring, Occupy, Gezi Park, Euromaidan, the Ukrainian Civil War, Brexit, and now Donald Trump – except the last two have garnered legislative power. These miasmas appear anywhere save for the managed democracy of Russia and inside the Great Chinese Firewall, which is why both those powers now concentrate on spreading mayhem outside their borders. And whenever they do, they’re always electronically rapid. This means that they are spontaneous and therefore rantingly demagogic, unprepared for power, and tend to be poorly thought-through. Their political results are generally awful. (Bruce Sterling, Notes on the 2016 US election)

The bottom line, for me, is that progressive ‘left’ framing needs to evolve, starting with the big hackneyed tropes I describe above. As Angela Nagle eloquently concludes (in Kill All Normies): “When we’ve reached a point where the idea of being edgy/countercultural/transgressive can place fascists in a position of moral superiority to regular people, we may seriously want to rethink the value of these stale and outworn countercultural ideals.”

(*As for my own unfashionable old-skool ‘left’ stances: I ferociously opposed Bush’s Iraq war – back when Glenn Greenwald supported that catastrophic invasion. I campaigned for Universal Basic Income back in the 1990s, when it was unfashionable and largely seen as hopelessly utopian. Contrast that wonderfully positive, progressive idea with the horribly libertarian nastiness that Edward Snowden expressed in 2009, when he wrote that the elderly “wouldn’t be fucking helpless if you weren’t sending them fucking checks to sit on their ass and lay in hospitals all day”. Choose your heroes carefully.)

Note: I’ve also put this article on Medium.com

Written by NewsFrames

November 22, 2017 at 12:55 am

Posted in Authorities, Brexit, Donald Trump, Glenn Greenwald, Julian Assange, Narrative, Post-truth

The “alt-left” – what my Independent article left out

My preferred title was “Confessions of a 1990s alt-leftist”

After Donald Trump condemned the role of the “alt-left” at Charlottesville, a flurry of articles appeared claiming “there’s no such thing as the alt-left” – that it’s a “myth” created by the right and/or “centrist liberals” to discredit the left.

That’s the opening sentence of my Independent article. My intention for that article was to point out some errors – historical and semantic – behind claims that “alt-left” is a recently-invented bogus label. I wouldn’t normally have bothered going to the length of writing an article about this, but everything I read – from the Washington Post to influential bloggers such as Glenn Greenwald – seemed to be telling me that it was wrong and bad to use the “alt-left” label. Here’s a typical example of what I mean, from Jill Stein, the US Green Party presidential nominee:

Anyone using the term "Alt-Left" wants you to believe people who support human rights for all are morally equivalent to Nazis.

— Dr. Jill Stein🌻 (@DrJillStein) August 15, 2017

My article, as it turned out, contained only the historical point (origins and development of “alt-left”/”alt-right” usage). My related argument about semantic confusion was left out – so I’ll expand on that a bit here. For illustrative purposes I had included the above Jill Stein quote, contrasted with the following statement from Cynthia McKinney – a previous US Green Party nominee for president. (The editor at the Independent didn’t want me to include these quotes, unfortunately).

McKinney’s statement preceded Trump’s “alt-left” remark; Stein’s came after it – so these examples provided a striking “before and after” contrast, in terms of semantic usage. Stein’s statement (and the many others that echoed it in newspaper columns, political commentary websites, prominent social media accounts, etc) communicated the following logic:

1. ‘All uses of “alt-left” are pejorative/scurrilous.’
2. ‘All uses of “alt-left” are devoid of validity.’
3. ‘Ergo, you shouldn’t use the term “alt-left”.’

This doesn’t strike me as an accurate – or useful – mapping of the semantic territory, to say the least. The McKinney quote provided a recent example of non-pejorative use, and I provided others which go back to the 1990s. Furthermore, many uses of both “alt-left” and “alt-right” seem, to me, both pejorative and valid (again, I provided examples in my article).

Consider the possibility that the over-reaction over the “alt-left” label, although triggered by Trump’s use of the term, has little to do with any implied “equivalence” between “alt-left” and “Nazi”. I don’t imagine that figures such as Stein and Greenwald are really worried about being mistaken for white supremacists. I think their reaction possibly owes more to the valid uses of “alt-left” as a pejorative label for some of the views they express.

Life comes at you something something pic.twitter.com/tRt7hsPLoZ

— Eric Haywood (@EricHaywood) August 9, 2017

That will not happen. US establishments have unified around Clinton. What is occurring is power consolidation.

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 22, 2016

Wikileaks (ie Julian Assange), Greenwald, Stein and many others (loosely self-identified as “left” in some sense) are often criticised for reinforcing the talking points of Trump through framing, emphasis and selection of examples. This criticism seems important to me given the huge audience that these commentators reach through social media. Their particular anti-liberal/anti-Dem framing, which is often (as I mention in my article) combined with “establishment conspiracy”-type memes common to the so-called “alt-right” (as epitomised by Breitbart and Infowars) should, to my mind, be highlighted, given its prominence and media influence. “Alt-left” seems a valid descriptive label for this purpose.

Alt-Left and Alt-Right seem to coordinate their anti-Dem messaging. pic.twitter.com/h6TK6Jeltn

— Jared's Spokesman (@eliot_woodrich) July 18, 2017

Written by NewsFrames

August 31, 2017 at 8:42 am

Posted in Glenn Greenwald, Independent

N E W S • F R A M E S • • • • •

“Whataboutism”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

So what?

Attn: Wage Slaves! (book review)

Most ‘work’ in this age is stupid, monotonous, brain-rotting, irritating,
usually pointless … Marx was quite right in calling it ‘wage slavery.’
– Robert Anton Wilson, 1986 – intro to ‘Undoing Yourself’, 3rd ed.

The Good Life for Wage Slaves

Announcing new RAW blog

Media distancing – word as virus

The strange case of Glenn Greenwald – part 1

This article is also available at medium.com

Guccifer 2.0 – arbiter of “public good”

Trump-frame reinforcers

“What are Greenwald’s politics, exactly?”

Greenwald’s anti-left views?

Greenwald’s deep moral-political worldview?

Support of the Iraq War – and later denial

“Weaponised” political framing – do you really know which side you’re on?

Weaponised: floating signifiers & hyper-generalisation

“Ordinary people” vs The Elite

Trump’s appeal to social elitism

“Anti-establishment” weaponised memes

Tearing down is easy

The “alt-left” – what my Independent article left out

Info/Contact:

Latest posts:

New Book (2023)

On Framing:

Links:

News Frames categories

Archive (all posts):

Lazy Person’s Guide to Framing

– 7 June 2022 –

A.I. algorithms & McLuhan’s tetrad

Steve Bannon’s project & the tetrad

Sub-optimal political framing

Orwell retrieved & obsolesced

“Surveillance” frame & the new hypocognition

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

So what?

Most ‘work’ in this age is stupid, monotonous, brain-rotting, irritating, usually pointless … Marx was quite right in calling it ‘wage slavery.’ – Robert Anton Wilson, 1986 – intro to ‘Undoing Yourself’, 3rd ed.

The Good Life for Wage Slaves

This article is also available at medium.com

Guccifer 2.0 – arbiter of “public good”

Trump-frame reinforcers

“What are Greenwald’s politics, exactly?”

Greenwald’s anti-left views?

Greenwald’s deep moral-political worldview?

Support of the Iraq War – and later denial

Algorithm Politics & mass manipulation of humans

Weaponised: floating signifiers & hyper-generalisation

“Ordinary people” vs The Elite

Trump’s appeal to social elitism

“Anti-establishment” weaponised memes

Tearing down is easy

Info/Contact:

Latest posts:

New Book (2023)

On Framing:

Links:

News Frames categories

Archive (all posts):

Most ‘work’ in this age is stupid, monotonous, brain-rotting, irritating,
usually pointless … Marx was quite right in calling it ‘wage slavery.’
– Robert Anton Wilson, 1986 – intro to ‘Undoing Yourself’, 3rd ed.