Footnotes:
1) Paranoia
Rules for Paranoids and a Paranoiac Poetry
Gravity’s Rainbow — Rules for Paranoids. Some useful tips:
- The innocence of the creature is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.
- If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
From Crying of Lot 49’s (line breaks added for emphasis)
or outside, lost.
2) Data Point: Microtargeting
Micro-targeting
Inside the Trump Bunker, With Days to Go:
On Oct. 19, as the third and final presidential debate gets going in Las Vegas, Donald Trump’s Facebook and Twitter…www.bloomberg.com
Nobody saw it coming. Not the media. Certainly not Hillary Clinton. Not even Donald Trump’s team of data scientists…www.bloomberg.com
3) Data Point: The Bots
Folks disagreeing with McElrath’s conclusion. I don’t find these convincing but here you go:
The David Brock propaganda mill Shareblue has published an article titled “Watching the hearings, I learned my ‘Bernie…medium.com
There’s a bogus article up at ShareBlue that’s been making the rounds on what appears to be a complete misreading of…medium.com
4) Data Point: Manipulating the Emotional Environment
Text and images below from The Agency, Adrian Chen, New York Times Magazine.
On 9/11/2014, the Columbian Chemical plant near Centerville, LA, appeared to have exploded.
- Locals received text messages: “Toxic fume hazard warning in this area until 1:30 PM. Take Shelter. Check Local Media and columbiachemical.com.”
- Hundreds of Twitter accounts were documenting a disaster right down the road. “A powerful explosion heard from miles away happened at a chemical plant in Centerville, Louisiana #ColumbianChemicals,” a man named Jon Merritt tweeted.
- The #ColumbianChemicals hashtag was full of eyewitness accounts of the horror in Centerville. @AnnRussela shared an image of flames engulfing the plant. @Ksarah12 posted a video of surveillance footage from a local gas station, capturing the flash of the explosion. Others shared a video in which thick black smoke rose in the distance.
- Dozens of journalists, media outlets and politicians, from Louisiana to New York City, found their Twitter accounts inundated with messages about the disaster.
- Some included screenshots of CNN’s home page, showing that the story had already made national news.
- ISIS had claimed credit for the attack, according to one YouTube video; in it, a man showed his TV screen, tuned to an Arabic news channel, on which masked ISIS fighters delivered a speech next to looping footage of an explosion.
In December of 2014 the same accounts touted a fake Ebola disaster at the Atlanta, GA, airport. Simultaneously, a different set of accounts began spreading a rumor that an unarmed black woman had been killed by police again in Atlanta.
Again, the attention to detail was remarkable, suggesting a tremendous amount of effort. A YouTube video showed a team of hazmat-suited medical workers transporting a victim from the airport. Beyoncé’s recent single “7/11” played in the background, an apparent attempt to establish the video’s contemporaneity. A truck in the parking lot sported the logo of the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
And, again:
On the same day as the Ebola hoax, a totally different group of accounts began spreading a rumor that an unarmed black woman had been shot to death by police. They all used the hashtag #shockingmurderinatlanta. Here again, the hoax seemed designed to piggyback on real public anxiety; that summer and fall were marked by protests over the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.
5) Social Cohesion defined and some insight into it’s dynamics.
A great place to start is Peter Turchin’s War and Peace and War, particularly Chapter 8: “The Bowling Alley in History: Measuring the Decline in Social Capital”. He considers various definitions of social cohesion, what he terms asabiya, and an provides as an example an eye-opening look at the quite different societies of northern vs southern Italy.
What is being discussed is the degree to which all members of a society assume common purpose.
What are measures of disaffection? What’s the assumed social contract and how widely is it shared? What happens to societies when common purpose dissolves or is destroyed?
Another extended look at the drivers of social decohesion and it’s impact is Thomas Piketty’s instant classic, Captial in the Twenty First Century.
Amazon’s paragraph book summary does a decent job: “The main driver of inequality—returns on capital that exceed the rate of economic growth—is again threatening to generate extreme discontent and undermine democratic values.”
Quoted in the New Yorker, “Piketty notes, the level of inequality in the United States is ‘probably higher than in any other society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world.’
6) = (The Long Playing Version of 12) —
The Counterforce: Where They Attack, We Defend
A longer list of Counterforce possibilities
Political:
A Legislative First Step
To get a grasp on this we need some immediate transparency.
We currently have the right to see our credit data and when it is used. It is no less vital to know when some enterprise is selling our stats to advertisers. We need the ability to find out ‘what they have on us’ and how they’re using it …particularly since it seems pretty easy for anyone, no matter how fucked up their purpose, to purchase ad space embedded in our social stream.
Making this information available to each of us individually would be the most effective engine of change. We could see how and why we were targeted and by whom. It would have the advantage letting us take subsequent steps from an informed position.
There’s Legislation in Europe that does this but not in the US.
California, Massachusetts, or New York would be great places to start. Let’s race!
Here’s a sample letter and some resources.
Remember: where they attack, we defend.
Assume that the enemy’s key attack point is where they see or most significant vulnerability. They’re primarily attacking solidarity, looking to create hopelessness, and dissolve the type of social cohesion that leads us to seek broad solutions. The Russian operations are teaching us that these are key points to defend.
Cultural/Collective:
Strengthen the Tribe; Build Bridges
Since the enemy’s key attack point is where they see our most significant vulnerability and they’re primarily attacking solidarity…trying to dissolve the type of social cohesion that leads us to seek broad collective solutions…that is where we defend.
First we can take the easy step of defending by strengthening the tribe to buffer it against future fractures. Take the time to cultivate your real world connection with friends and family. We’re a tribal species. This part is essential to our cultural, collective, and individual health and it is the antidote to letting ourselves be driven into isolated hopelessness and become ineffective cultural and political actors.
Then comes the hard part: building bridges. This requires us to assume common ground with folks where that assumption can seem a stretch. Yet there are folks of decent intent on all sides of most issues and, important to note, while the most extreme examples of a position are the most visible, they’re not the most numerous.
70% of the folks on any particular ‘side’ have a nuanced and rational position that is open to dialog, and an instinct to meet folks halfway. The concept of ‘sides’ is in itself non-helpful. Most folks likely agree with you on other significant political and cultural issues even if they go another route on some. (We might want to save putting effort into the other 30% until a bit down the road:-).
Let’s make a pact to assume we’re all good guys until we’ve figured out a way to frustrate the enemy. They want us at each other throats. Once we’ve got that out of the way we can go back to being amazed at how misguided everyone else is.
Here’s an inspiring example of dialog under adverse conditions and a pointer to a context wider than our differences.
Individual:
Check Your Reactions
The social media post or news item that disgusts, outrages, or depresses you might be designed to do precisely that. In fact, it probably is, whether the intent is your demoralization or simply getting clicks. Awareness of that can help. It is likely going forward that the more effective you are, the more you’ll be a target.
Here and in the point below, disrupt your initial reaction. Disconnect, take a walk, sit zazen, wait 24 hours before hitting send…then act.
Refuse Outrage.
Everyone loves outrage. Heck, I love outrage. The Right uses it as motor. The Left likes a good wallow. Without getting into ego, politics, and contaminated emotion, I think we need to give it up. It’s been eaten by the Grey Goo! It hurts us as it pretends to provide value. We are more manipulable but not more politically effective. It dissolves opportunities for common ground and erodes dialog.
Seek Unmediated Experience
It can be a beautiful thing to dance all night in an evil time.
– Micheal Ventura, Shadow Dancing in the USA
If the information flow is manipulating you, get out of the flow. This is part signal jamming and part reset. Look for the things that give us back to ourselves: nature, dance, art, ‘non-ordinary’ experiences that take us out and then return us more complete, communal cooking, nature, friends / connections…to each their own. Anything done with a tribe gets bonus points.
The articles in section 2 above give pointers. Here’s another resource:
Tools:
Science
It’s easy to see how someone might distrust science. Look at diet guidelines over the last 50 years. Who can tell what’s good for you amidst all that science.
Yet science is the best engine we have for separating the wheat from the chaff. Being 25 years past what would be my likely pre-science expiration date, I’m a big fan of science.
The key is a better understanding of how science works as a grand long-term project, i.e. go with skepticism but avoid ignorance. I’ve got a more extended look at that here. Hint, a deeper look at how science works and the models behind climate science make it pretty clear that ‘climate skepticism’ is mostly ignorance and not honest informed skepticism.
Big Boat Religion
In a world of Us vs Them there are clear religious mandates for broad inclusiveness…at least in the religions I know enough about to offer comment. Christianity’s core is (should be) love God and love your neighbor…with a clear Big Boat definition of neighbor. (I consider the use of Christianity as a tool of division to be blasphemy.) Mahayana Buddhism is almost literally Big Boat religion and seeks the enlightenment of all sentient beings. More recent religious geniuses such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King tell us that no one is free until all are free.
Considering our survival now depends on our finding broad common cause with all sentient beings, they might just have had a point.