This is Not Propaganda

Ong noted that no one, at any level in this business, ever described their activity as ‘trolling’ or producing ‘fake news’. Everyone had their own ‘denial strategies’: the architects stressed it was merely a side hustle to their regular PR work and thus didn’t define them, and anyway they weren’t in charge of the whole political campaign; the community-level operators said someone else was leaving the really nasty, hateful comments. In any case this was the architecture of online influence, which would shift into a more aggressive gear when Duterte came to power.

‘The disinformation architect’, concludes Ong, ‘denies responsibility or commitment to the broader public by narrating a personal project of self-empowerment instead.’

If there is one thing I’ve been impressed with while browsing the shelves in the spiral-shaped library of my university, it is that one has to look beyond just ‘news’ and ‘politics’ and also consider poetry, schools, the language of bureaucracy and leisure to understand, as French philosopher Jacques Ellul put it, the ‘formation of men’s attitudes’.

Russian hackers run ads for Dubai hookers alongside anime memes supporting far-right parties in Germany.

I hear the same phrases in Odessa, Manila, Mexico City, New Jersey: ‘There is so much information, misinformation, so much of everything that I don’t know what’s true any more.’ Often I hear the phrase ‘I feel the world is moving beneath my feet.’ I catch myself thinking, ‘I feel that everything that I thought solid is now unsteady, liquid.’

Politicians no longer know what their parties represent; bureaucrats no longer know where power is located; billionaire foundations advocate for an ‘open society’ they can no longer quite define. Big words that once seemed swollen with meaning, words that previous generations were ready to sacrifice themselves for – ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’, ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’ – have been so thoroughly left behind by life that they seem like empty husks in my hands, the last warmth and light draining out of them, or like computer files to which we have forgotten the password and can’t access any more.

We live in a world of mass persuasion run amok, where the means of manipulation have gone forth and multiplied, a world of dark ads, psy-ops, hacks, bots, soft facts, deep fakes, fake news, ISIS, Putin, trolls, Trump …

Today, the world they hoped for, in which censorship would fall like the Berlin Wall, can seem much closer: we live in what academics call an era of ‘information abundance’. But the assumptions that underlay the struggles for rights and freedoms in the twentieth century – between citizens armed with truth and information and regimes with their censors and secret police – have been turned upside down. We now have more information than ever before, but it hasn’t brought only the benefits we expected.

Everyone prepared for the worst. His mother-in-law taught him a secret code based on sausages: ‘If I bring sausages sliced right to left, it means we’ve been able to get out news of your arrest to the West, and it’s been broadcast on the radio. If I slice them left to right, it means we failed.’

The Chronicle was how Soviet dissidents documented suppressed facts about political arrests, interrogations, searches, trials, beatings, abuses in prison. Information was gathered via word of mouth or smuggled out of labour camps in tiny self-made polythene capsules that were swallowed and then shat out, their contents typed up and photographed in dark rooms. It was then passed from person to person, hidden in the pages of books and diplomatic pouches, until it could reach the West and be delivered to Amnesty International or broadcast on the BBC World Service, Voice of America or Radio Free Europe.