I want you to wake up and wake others up
From the frontlines of the disinformation governance regime and the war on the imagination
“World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.” - Marshall McLuhan “Culture is our Business”
I started out just wanting to write a post on the ideology of Obama’s recent speech at Stanford on the perils of disinformation in “democracy in the digital information realm” in the context of the disinformation war late state neoliberal finance capitalism is waging on the American public (and western public as a whole) in collaboration with Big Media, Big Tech, intelligence (sic), and academia in the name of providing us with the “truth,” with an update which truth tellers were being fucked with that week.
I wasn’t that interested in Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter and wasn’t going to write about it although I found Blue MAGA legacy media’s hysterical reaction to a self-declared free speech absolutist potentially assuming control of the digital town square very telling. I wasn’t even going to include the April 6 story from CBS in which the talking head squealed with wide eyed delight that Big Media was colluding with intelligence (sic) to regurgitate intelligence psy op lies in a flat-out, self-conscious information war against the America public for the purposes of drumming up domestic support for the Zelensky regime in its war with Russia. It seemed so obvious; barely worth noting. But as I gathered my thoughts, so much more happened and I learned so much more that had gone unpublicized, I very quickly I had much more to cover. I also knew that I no longer cared as much about tracking the suppression of individual truth tellers as much as I did about trying to get a systematic handle on how truth tellers were being suppressed, the game plan of TPTB, the entire strategy of “governance by disinformation” being enacted by the political class, Big Media, Big Tech, and the bloviating punditocracy against we the people
So, on April 6, a CBS anchor and their national security correspondent admitted straight up that Big Media was dutifully repeating intelligence talking points as hard news, even though a government source for the story admitted “it doesn’t have to be solid intelligence when we talk about it.” Elon Musk made his initial offer to buy Twitter on April 14. Senior intelligence officials released an open letter on April 18 urging antitrust measures directed at Big Tech be quashed since Big Tech’s control over the narrative about the war in the Ukraine was proving so helpful to the military-industrial complex, national security state, and foreign policy blob. Obama gave a speech on April 21 at Stanford on “challenges to democracy in the digital information realm” to two audiences: those who took him at face value and those who did not. 11 days after he offered to buy Twitter, Musk closed the deal. On April 27, the Homeland Security Secretary announced the formation of a new Disinformation Governance Board to the House Appropriations Committee, presumably to centralize all of the contra-”disinformation” efforts of the government and Big Tech.
Big Tech uses bipartisan national security heavyweights as a key feature of it lobbying efforts against dissolution of its monopoly status. Four days after Musk started playing footsie with Twitter sending Blue MAGA legacy media apoplectic, an April 18, 2022 open letter signed by senior intelligence officials and sent out to the Beltway Bubble at large. All of the signatories held positions at public relations firms, lobbying groups, and think tanks funded by Big Tech. The letter urged Congress to not to pass Big Tech antitrust bills because it would hurt American’s efforts in support of Ukraine in their war against Russia. The wholesale and unconstitutional surveillance of erstwhile citizens at home and conducting permanent war abroad is a completely bipartisan affair.
Through interlocking directorates, ad revenue sources, being owned by the same hedge funds that own offense contractors, and a variety of cozy and mutually beneficial funding arrangements, Big Media and Big Tech are completely committed to war. The signatories urged that the trust-busting measure be sent before the military, intelligence, and homeland security committees in both chambers of Congress. The letter focused almost entirely on Russia. It mentioned Ukrainian false flags at Bucha (twice) and Mariupol. In spite of that emphasis, it closed by calling on Congress to join big Tech “in the fight against cyber and national security risks emanating from Russia’s and China’s growing digital authoritarianism,” giving the issue a familiar framing as “democracy” vs. authoritarianism.
I have to presume that all of the signatories had access to independent sources of intelligence telling them exactly what was going on in Ukraine and knew that this letter was factually inaccurate, a lie being told to a DC insider audience for specific political and economic objectives. To wit, these were that: 1) the real objective of the letter is to preserve Big Tech’s monopoly status, 2) allowing more competition in the technology sector might end Big Tech’s monopoly but will not dramatically lower their immense profitability, and 3) ending Big Tech’s monopoly status would probably not have as deleterious national security repercussions as they assert, even if the single Approved Narrative did become harder to promulgate. Nevertheless, they were able to sign off on this tripe, which is worth quoting at length.
“This is a pivotal moment in modern history. There is a battle brewing between authoritarianism and democracy, and the former is using all the tools at its disposal, including a broad disinformation campaign and the threat of cyber-attacks, to bring about a change in the global order. We must confront these global challenges.”
“U.S. technology platforms have given the world the chance to see the real story of the Russian military’s horrific human rights abuses in Ukraine, including the atrocities committed in Bucha, and the incredible bravery of the Ukrainian people who continue to stand their ground. Social media platforms are filled with messages of support for Ukraine and fundraising campaigns to help Ukrainian refugees.”
“At the same time, President Putin and his regime have sought to twist facts in order to show Russia as a liberator instead of an aggressor. When reporting and images of the atrocities in Bucha began to circulate, along with evidence and testimony pointing to Russian forces as the perpetrators, the Kremlin was quick to label the claims as ‘fake news.’ The Russian government is seeking to alter the information landscape by blocking Russian citizens from receiving content that would show the true facts on the ground – and it has already received buy-in from other like-minded states, such as China, whose social media platform TikTok continues to abide by Moscow’s rules of “digital authoritarianism.” Indeed, it is telling that among the Kremlin’s first actions of the war was blocking U.S. platforms in Russia. Putin knows that U.S. digital platforms can provide Russian citizens valuable views and facts about the war that he tries to distort through lies and disinformation.”
“U.S. technology platforms have already taken concrete steps to shine a light on Russia’s actions to brutalize Ukraine. Through their efforts, the world knows what is truly happening in cities from Mariupol to Kiev, undistorted by manipulation from Moscow. Providing timely and accurate on-the-ground information – and disrupting the scourge of disinformation from Russian state media – is essential for allowing the world (including the Russian people) to see the human toll of Russia’s aggression and is increasingly integral to U.S. diplomatic and national security efforts. It is our belief that these efforts will play a part in helping to end this war.”
“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marks the start of a new chapter in global history, one in which the ideals of democracy will be put to the test. The United States will need to rely on the power of its technology sector to ensure that the safety of its citizens and the narrative of events continues to be shaped by facts, not by foreign adversaries.”
The April 18, 2022 letter hearkens back to an earlier one dated September 21, 2021 signed by a similar (and overlapping) slate of senior intelligence luminaries, this one addressed specifically to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. It differed from the previously discussed letter by urging antitrust measures under consideration by Congress be quashed because they would hurt Big Tech’s strategic competition with China for global technology supremacy. Again, all of the signatories held positions at military contractors, public relations firms, lobbying groups, and think tanks funded by Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft.
Among the 12 signatories to the September 21, 2021 letter were several who also signed the now notorious October 19, 2020 letter declaring that “more than 50 former senior intelligence officials” felt the Hunter Biden lap top story on the eve of the 2020 presidential election had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” With apologies to sex workers, who provide an ancient and valued service, this partisan whoring hall of fame signature list includes former CIA director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and former acting CIA Director Michael Morell, who signed all three letters.
In unguarded moments, signatories to the partisan whoring hall of fame letter and the two bipartisan military-industrial complex, national security state, and foreign policy blob letters might be willing to admit that ending Big Tech’s monopoly would probably be better for consumers and society as a whole. They might even be able to admit that ending Big Tech’s monopoly in the service of a disinformation governance regime coordinated with economic sanctions and a proxy war bonanza for the military-industrial complex is not the only way for America to maintain its global supremacy. What they might not be able to admit, however, is that it is no secure path to an accommodation with the inevitable reality of a multipolar world - because they would probably not accept a multipolar world as inevitable.
They would likely have a very hard time seeing past American hard power as a central feature of its global dominance. America’s key military planning documents from before, during, and after the Clinton administration are remarkably similar and completely bipartisan. Wolfowitz’ Defense Planning Guidance of 1992, the Quadrennial Defense Review of 1997, and Project for a New American Century’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses in 2000 all 1) take America’s unrivaled military dominance as a given, 2) demand that no “regional great power or global peer competitor” emerge, 3) reserve the right for unilateral, preemptive action in violation of international law, 4) require America to be able to fight and win two major wars simultaneously, and 5) have as a key national interest “uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources.”
One of the many difficulties facing America today is that we are well past the event horizons imagined by any of those documents. Since no one on Team Blue took Brzezinski up on his suggestion that a rapprochement with China and Russia might be advisable and since neoconservatives have commandeered Democratic foreign and military policy through the Lincoln Project, Trump Resistance, and other means, the approach of America under the dominance of Big Media, Big Tech, intelligence (sic), academia, and the military-industrial complex towards the world remains mired in an obsolete militarism singularly unable to recognize the emergence of a multipolar world, let alone even begin to adapt to it. The financial warfare component is not new either. America has been doing that since the Bretton Woods monetary conference of 1948 set the stage for the dollar’s dominance post WW II.
John Perkins’ 2004 classic Confessions of an Economic Hitman laid out the phases America presented to client and dependent states during that era. Accept the IMF, World Bank, and Wall Street loans that remove a country’s wealth from the neocolonial periphery to the metropolis. If not “the jackals” move in to stage assassinations, coups, and covert operations. Failing that, outright invasion can always be considered. The information war is not a new component either. Lies and propaganda have been a central part of war for millennia. It has certainly been no different in modern American war.
What has been different, however, has been the evolution of the technology of mass communications as the empire rose to prominence, dominated the world, and then began declining, and in the application of new and sophisticated psychological insights developed over that period since the innovations of Freud and Jung. Radio, film, television, and lately the internet and social media have all played their roles, especially in the coordination between the government, media, and now Big Tech in creating, controlling, and sustaining a single predominant narrative in order to drum up domestic support for mass murder.
The “don’t break up Big Tech monopolies based on national security because Russia bad” letter signed by Panetta, Morell, and company shows that, with the support of Big Media, Big Tech, intelligence (sic), and academia, it is still quite possible to create, control, and sustain a single predominant narrative. The ubiquity of smartphones, high speed internet, and social media, however, has made it more difficult. Facebook’s IPO of 2012 adequately marks when this proliferation occurred in earnest.
The fervor with which the government is creating “an intellectual no-fly zone” and clamping down on any dissent indicates to me that TPTB know that the omnipresence of information makes the edifice of lies undergirding any Approved Narrative extremely precarious. Any Approved Narrative. Glenn Greenwald put it succinctly: “Big Tech censorship of political speech is…virtually always devoted to silencing any meaningful dissent from liberal orthodoxy or official pieties on key political controversies.”
The model was initiated during the pandemic. It is being perfected now with the proxy war in Ukraine. In the future it will be over something else. The pandemic served the sickness maintenance industry, Big Pharma, and the state’s aspirations to create a bio-surveillance regime. The war in Ukraine is serving the military-industrial complex and helping the state perfect its disinformation governance regime. The next iteration will likely be enacted to support one of the other few remaining large sectors of the American economy and improve some other sector of the government’s war against its people.
(I hereby offer thanks and salutations to my podcast partner Mark French for providing me with such an apt metaphor in the form of a beloved rodent).
Like Punxsutawney Phil periodically popping up from beneath a chilly field in Pennsylvania to announce either the arrival of spring or a long kiss goodnight from winter, post-presidency Obama periodically pops up in public to give a well remunerated speech preserving his legacy and girding some weakening fascia of international neoliberal finance capital, from the perspective of their Team Blue factotums. In the case of his Stanford speech, it was to sell the public on the necessity of a still further enhanced disinformation governance regime: the selling of Approved Narratives in the guise of “protecting” us all from “disinformation.”
Every president is eventually asked who their favorite president is. In an agile nod to his carefully cultivated post-partisan branding, Obama’s answer was Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s nickname is the Great Communicator, usually capitalized for emphasis. Obama is, of course, no slouch in that department either. The key difference between the two, however, is that Reagan hit his marks and said his lines with a genial charm that grew out of his utterly imperturbable lack of curiosity as to their truth or falsehood. Obama’s eloquence, on the other hand, seems to stem directly from an omnivorous curiosity, which leads me to believe that he knows he was speaking to two audiences in the Stanford speech: those who take him at face value and those who don’t. This makes him more cynical than Reagan because he knows he is lying: his is the pride of craftsmanship.
In Ivy League and peer institutions at the apex of elite universities like Stanford, schools select students with skills, knowledge, and dispositions amenable to serving as technocrats of neoliberalism. Evidence of critical thought dissenting from the conventional wisdom of empire on sensitive matters is weeded out during admission process. Coursework rarely cultivates resilience, resourcefulness, initiative, or curiosity and evaluation never rewards it. It is no surprise that around half of the graduates of these schools go into finance, consulting, and law. Specialists in one small area, they are never exposed to a broad liberal arts education that gives them the desire to think broadly about society and culture in an interconnected way - let alone the ability to do so.
This makes them highly susceptible to simply accepting, at face value and without critical reflection, the content and ideological perspective of current events, society, and life in general that emanates from their favorite sources of information. Students know that their diploma will be a golden passport to the highest echelons of wealth, power, and prestige in the system, but the idea that this system omnicidal and predicated on endless war, ecological devastation, domestic repression, and wholesale social immiseration would never even germinate in their head. Professors know they need never burnish their resumes again because no further status climbing is possible. Students, professors, and members of the Democratic party’s new base (the predominantly white suburban professional-managerial class) watching clips of Obama’s speech in the news all understand subconsciously their continuous upward mobility in career paths and hierarchies is dependent upon the extent to which they can preserve and regurgitate the hegemonic ideology.
While perhaps vaguely unsettled on a personal level by the corrosive ennui, anomie, lack of social connection, and free-floating anger and anxiety engendered in themselves by neoliberalism economics, students, professors, and graduates of elite universities, and members of the professional-managerial class all repress these errant thoughts handily. Instead, they focus on the rich harvest of wealth, power, and prestige they know they will receive (or are receiving) by focusing on their narrow areas of specialization. By consuming the dominant ideology, believing it with either passivity or conviction, they reproduce it. So when the best salesman for that ideology in years is in town, they know a master class is in session. They are all ears.
Obama integrated coded messages into his remarks that telegraphed his self-conscious awareness that he was speaking to two audiences. One accepted his premise that “disinformation” was one of the worst “challenges” facing “democracy in the digital information realm.” The other knew Obama’s role was that of a salesman and were listening to find out what he wanted to sell. He achieved this with his opening and closing lines, two whoppers so prodigious no one with curiosity, empathy, adequate free time, and a brain could possibly believe it. Therefore, the rest of his speech should be considered a lie sandwich.
At the beginning he characterized Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as “a nuclear-armed despot’s response to a neighboring state whose only provocation is its desire to be independent and democratic.” Obama is smart and well-placed enough within the military-industrial complex, national security state, and foreign policy blob to know that Ukraine is not independent. It is a plaything of Ukrainian oligarchs, the IMF, and CIA. Neither is it democratic but instead easily the most corrupt country in Europe. Russia’s invasion is actually an understandable response to a dense and long-standing matrix of provocations emanating from the United States, NATO, and their proxies like the Nazi Azov battalion and Banderite politicians in Ukraine.
Towards the end of his talk Obama claimed that Russia’s “control of information has led public opinion further and further and further and further away from the facts,” making it a cardinal example of “what happens when societies lose track of what is true.” He even alleged that Russia has lost “almost a quarter of the country’s combat power” because of the special military operation. Obama is smart and well-placed enough within Big Media, Big Tech, intelligence (sic), and academia to know that the claims about how Russia’s information sphere is controlled is actually a neoliberal wet dream about how western oligarchs hope to control America’s information sphere.
He knows there is no metric by which anyone could conceivably say that one of the world’s most formidable militaries has suddenly lost almost a quarter of its combat power in a limited engagement on its near abroad. As George Tenet sat behind Colin Powell at the UN when Powell sold Gulf War 2.0 to the international community, so too did Obama’s former ambassador to Russia and regime change specialist Michael McFall by his very presence in the front row vouchsafe to the audience any claims he might make about Russia.
Those listening to Obama’s Stanford speech from the perspective of Big Tech had a vested interest in not taking his words at face value. To them, his tacit threat was that unless they let the government inspect their algorithms to verify that Big Tech is censoring the information the political class wants them to censor, Big Tech would risk having its liability waivers on content provided by Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 lifted.
Others unwilling to take Obama’s words at face value saw that he had several broad objectives with his speech: to 1) conflate “democracy, security, prosperity, free speech, and free thought” with a life of hyper-surveilled debt peonage in an anti-citizen information war in late internationalized neoliberal finance capital, 2) claim a universal validity for that kind of economic system, 3) disguise any trace of globalization as a self-consciously created instrument of global class war, and 4) disguise the permanent war and the war against the BRICS + belt and road countries.
Obama knows his coded message to Big Tech and those four overarching goals are the real objectives of his speech. He knows certain people listening to him are aware of this as well. His speech telegraphed to Big Media, Big Tech, intelligence (sic), and academia in no uncertain terms the ongoing and ever-intensifying imperative to participate in a sweeping, systematic, and seamless regime of identifying anything counter to the Approved Narratives undergirding the permanent war and corporate rule led by Wall Street as disinformation.
Any empirical descriptions critical of the toady henchmen of that regime and their assertions must be ridiculed, marginalized, and suppressed by the political class, Big Media, Big Tech, and the bloviating punditocracy as “disinformation.” Trust in the much-vaunted legacy media and democratic institutions has to be restored to keep the game afoot. Obama opined that:
“Once they lose trust in their leaders, in mainstream media, in political institutions, in each other, in the possibility of truth, the game’s won.”
“What social media platforms have done, though, thanks to their increasing market dominance and their emphasis on speed, is accelerate the decline of newspapers and other traditional news sources.”
“There are still brand name newspapers and magazines, not to mention network news broadcasts, NPR, and other outlets that have adapted to the new digital environment while maintaining the highest standards of journalistic integrity.”
“Once they lose trust in their leaders, in mainstream media, in political institutions, in each other, in the possibility of truth, the game’s won.”
Obama alleges that contemporary information overload destroys the people’s ability to judge the truth, requiring its curation by a nanny state.
“All we see is a constant feed of content where useful factual information and happy diversions, and cat videos, flow alongside lies, conspiracy theories, junk science, quackery, White supremacist, racist tracts, misogynist screeds. And over time, we lose our capacity to distinguish between fact, opinion and wholesale fiction. Or maybe we just stop caring.”
“What we consider unshakeable truth today may prove to be totally wrong tomorrow. But that doesn’t mean some things aren’t truer than others or that we can’t draw lines between opinions, facts, honest mistakes, intentional deceptions.”
As it stands now, Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 provides immunity for internet service providers and Big Tech for the content posted on their platforms. Section 230(c)(1) does not treat them “as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider…Section 230(c)(2) states that service providers and users may not be held liable for voluntarily acting in good faith to restrict access to ‘obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable’ material.’” Fatuous bromides aside, the main substance of Obama’s remarks for those mavens of Big Tech that weren’t taking him at face value was a tacit injunction to play ball or expect changes to the law giving them immunity from liability, lawsuits, and/or changes in the kinds and amount of data and advertising they can sell. He hinted at the bargain Big Tech might be expected to make when he said:
“With power comes accountability, and in democracies like ours, at least, the need for some democratic oversight.”
“A regulatory structure, a smart one, needs to be in place, designed in consultation with tech companies, and experts and communities that are affected”
Playing ball means the government will be lenient on their monopoly status and dubious custody of the first amendment if they provide secret access to their algorithms so that the government can verify that they are censoring the right people. As Obama put it:
“That said, the First Amendment is a check on the power of the state. It doesn’t apply to private companies like Facebook or Twitter, any more than it applies to editorial decisions made by the New York Times or Fox News. It never has. Social media companies already make choices about what is or is not allowed on their platforms and how that content appears, both explicitly through content moderation, and implicitly through algorithms. The problem is, we often don’t know what principles govern those decisions. And on an issue of enormous public interest, there has been little public debate and practically no democratic oversight.”
“Right now, a lot of the regulatory debate centers on Section 230 of the United States code, which, as some of you know, says the tech companies generally can’t be held liable for most content that other people post on their platforms. But let’s face it, these platforms are not like the old phone company. While I’m not convinced that wholesale repeal of Section 230 is the answer, it is clear that tech companies have changed dramatically over the last 20 years. And we need to consider reforms to Section 230 to account for those changes, including whether platforms should be required to have a higher standard of care, when it comes to advertising on their site.”
“In a democracy, we can rightly expect companies to subject the design of their products and services to some level of scrutiny. At minimum, they should have to share that information with researchers and regulators who are charged with keeping the rest of the safe. This may seem like an odd example and forgive me, you vegans out there, but if a meat packing company has a proprietary technique to keep our hot dogs fresh and clean, they don’t have to reveal to the world what that technique is. They do have to tell the meat inspector. In the same way, tech companies should be able to protect their intellectual property while also following certain safety standards that we, as a country, not just them, have agreed are necessary for the greater good.”
Two weeks after Musk made his initial offer to buy Twitter, he closed the deal. That same day, April 25, Jen Psaki declined to comment of Musk’s purchase specifically but did note that Biden was suddenly a long-time enthusiast of Section 230 reform efforts.
“I’m not going to comment on a specific transaction…No matter who owns or runs Twitter, the President has long been concerned about the power of large social media platforms, the power they have over our everyday lives; has long argued that tech platforms must be held accountable for the harms they cause. He has been a strong supporter of fundamental reforms to achieve that goal, including reforms to Section 230, enacting antitrust reforms, requiring more transparency, and more. And he’s encouraged that there’s bipartisan interest in Congress.”
Really? I follow politics closer than most. I never noticed Biden was such an ardent supporter of Section 230 reform. But days after senior intelligence officials and Obama weighed in, he suddenly is.
Two days later, on April 27, in a 2023 fiscal year budget request briefing to the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced the establishment of a disinformation governance board to be led by Nina Jankowicz and co-chaired by Undersecretary for Policy Rob Silvers and Principal Deputy General Counsel Jennifer Daskal.
Tucker Carlson, one of my favorite broken clocks who is right two times a day, led the bipartisan outrage brigade with some spot-on polemics and let Jankowicz ridicule herself. Tucker’s default expression: a cross between a gelatinous, pigment and bone free creature found 20,000 leagues beneath the sea, a dog who has just been shown a card trick, and a passive aggressive human reaction to an offensive smell finally served him very well indeed: in his response to a video so horrifying that, once seen, can never be unseen: Jankowicz as a grown up theater kid singing a disinformation ditty to the tune of Mary Poppins’ “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”
Tucker Carlson and sea blob - separated at birth?
Tucker’s reaction to that TikTok video posted on Twitter was, I would soon learn, actually my second exposure to the wit and wisdom of Nina Jankowicz. Now, breaking up is hard to do and your even faithful correspondent and devoted shitlib hating anarchist still occasionally listens to NPR, especially while driving.
It bears noting that NPR got a wine mom, Boomer, and shitlib shout out during Obama’s Stanford speech for “maintaining the highest standards of journalistic integrity” – the same NPR who called universal health care “mandatory Medicare” during the 2020 presidential campaign and very recently said the Dubya administration’s claim of Iraqi WMD was the result of “faulty intelligence.”
My driveway moment with Janowicz occurred when I heard the tail end of her recent NPR appearance:
“Who is this asshat?” I wondered. As soon as I hear about the establishment of the new board, I immediately reviewed of one of Jankowicz’s many talks promoting her book, “How to Lose the Information War.” It was instantly clear to me that she is a certified (and certifiable) highly partisan psy op specialist. I was even prepared to itemize her entire bill of disinformation lading but it is far more succinct to just steal Glenn Greenwald appraisal:
and
In other words, the perfect nanny for the nanny state’s information war.
I would imagine Obama is a busy man and has his schedule largely booked several months in advance. Unless the colossal and enormously complicated Patriot Act was already drafted and merely in need of a fortuitous opportunity for introduction days after the 911 attacks, government typically works at a slower pace. So I assume the process of creating the new disinformation governance board within the Department of Homeland Security began a few months before Musk made his public offer to buy Twitter. For those reasons, I don’t think we witnessed the Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and resolution at the speed of social media: the dragon of free speech absolutism, brave knight Sir Barack offering common sense limitations on free speech, and the dragon vanquished by the formation of a new governmental body. Obama’s speech, its venue in the heart of Silicon Valley, and the creation of a new board were probably not direct response to Musk’s purchase but they both were responses to recent trends of concern to the donor class.
As Greenwald noted when Useful Idiot’s Monday Mourning fan favorite Brian Stelter attempted to weigh in on the establishment of the board, dismissing it as right wing hysteria only,
The main challenge of the internet and social media to TPTB (The Powers That Be) is that the truth contradicting the Approved Narratives peddled to us by corporatist DNC Democrats, Big Media, Big Tech, intelligence (sic), and academia is instantaneously and widely available. It takes some initiative and you have to know where to look. Instead of overt censorship, so decried when China does it, the prevailing strategy is for those sectors to work in tandem together to let loose a decentralized array of intelligence cut outs, partisan hacks, dubious fact checkers, partisan attack dog journalists, Beltway Bubble access journalism aspirants, and a huge infrastructure of partisan nonprofits often fueled by massive Democratic dark money funding to disparage truth tellers as conspiracy theorists, Russian disinfo agents, Putin bots and the like, to demonetize and expunge their anti-establishment content left and right, to demonetize, expunge, and unsubscribe people from anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and anti-war content, to monkey with likes and dislikes, to hide comments, to keep them at the mercy of creatively interpreted terms of service, to use algorithms to bury anti-establishment websites left and right deep within search results, to have specific stories sent down the memory hole, to have specific users and websites booted off of platforms entirely, to boot entire platforms off of the internet architecture, or to simply confiscate their money on fintech platforms.
The role of the Ministry of Truth will be to keep a global eye on this flotilla of swarming psy op PT boats and offer intelligence and targeting instructions coordinating their maneuver for maximum effectiveness in furtherance of heterogenous BlueAnon disinformation efforts.
I think important social formations deserve a pithy phrase so that their place in the intellectual infrastructure can be referred to by shorthand. I hereby propose that the efforts this self-described “Mary Poppins of misinformation” will bring into greater concert can be described as the “disinformation governance regime.”
As of now it is run by corporatist DNC Democrats, Big Media, Big Tech, intelligence (sic), and academia. Big Tech employees donate almost exclusively to Team Blue MAGA. But make no mistake soon enough it will nonpartisan and put at the disposal of whichever half of the duopoly is in power at the time. In the end Bid Tech is just a business with one obligation above all else. This was laid out by Dodge v. Ford over a century ago: to make quarterly profits.
Big Tech has billions of dollars of surveillance state and national security state contracts. Mass surveillance hasn’t gone away, dear reader. The FBI was just revealed to be spying on millions of citizens without a warrant (which is legal under the reauthorization of the Patriot Act anyway). The is not just a nifty little earner for Big Tech, it is central to the state’s future vision of itself. It brings the interests of government, Big Tech, and the military-industrial state into complete and total alignment in the service of late neoliberal international finance capital.
The Ministry of Truth started trending on Twitter right after the disinformation governance board was announced because, all across the political spectrum, the American public intuited right away that the board would not being set up to “protect” them from disinformation but to spread it in a more coordinated fashion for specific political and economic objectives. TPTB can tell the people are hungry for the truth, as witnessed by the journalists who have jumped shipped from more corporate and institutional homes to Substack, like Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone, Glenn Greenwald from The Intercept, Aaron Mate from Democracy Now, and Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti from The Hill. This makes TPTB nervous even though the people are often not always sure where to look as yet.
The people are hungry for independent information because they know the game is rigged. That was a key part of Trump’s appeal in 2016, I daresay far more important than racism and white supremacy. “Finally!” the people groaned with relief. Someone was at least articulating it! But, then as now, they remain unclear on how they are being fucked and what to do about it.
“Orwellian,” like “Kafkaesque,” is an adjective that occasionally suffers from overuse but only because no other words can substitute for it. The novel 1984 is such an enduring vision of dystopia because it foresees a world based on two key features: torture and violence, and the control of language. The former is easily understood. It has been a key feature of American life since Plymouth Rock, the essence of its continental expansion, inherent in its overseas colonization, and central to its foreign policy with vassal states abroad since World War II. It is still a key feature of the School of the Americas at Ft. Benning Georgia. Or, as it is known in Latin American military circles, "la Escuela de Golpes" - the School of Coups.
Since Abu Graib, torture has become a practice the United States employs in theaters of war or other regions of the world under its control, like Guantanamo Bay. The latter feature of control of language in 1984, however, is a narrative innovation. The word “Orwellian” has the power and economy it does because no other word can stand in so well for meaning one thing and saying the opposite in furtherance of political objectives. This process is called doublethink.
Orwell lays out the precise psychological operation of double think as such:
“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them…to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again the moment it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again…That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then…to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.”
Doublethink in 1984 was induced by trauma-based mind control. Doublethink for really multi-Olympiad gold medal level partisan whoring like that of Obama, silver medal level like that of Panetta, and bronze medal level like that of Morell is based on attraction not trauma. Its attractiveness, the path of least resistance to wealth, power, and prestige for the vaunted stars of a tyrannical meritocracy is obvious and within their grasp: to service the system and not attempt to change it or criticize it from sociological, aesthetic, or prophetical traditions. These budding technocrats and mature stars may bring different faces to higher places and they may even sincerely believe themselves to be enacting Bentham’s “fundamental axiom” that the “greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.” They may even believe the “occasional” lie they tell to be noble ones. In their minds earning fat hourly rates that get paid assiduously and hustling big money donations for their foundations and think tanks are just means to an end.
There seem to be a finite number of ways one party can impose their will on another. There is a continuum of violence: actual violence, the threat of violence or incarceration, begrudging consent, indifferent consent, and enthusiastic consent. Althusser calls the government, administration, military, police, judiciary, and prisons the “repressive state apparatus.” Since they “function by violence” and non-physical repression they are too obvious to need much elucidation for the purposes of this essay.
More conceptually complicated, however, is the ideological component, the information war, the disinformation governance regime. It matters profoundly whether one is a producer and re-producer of that ideology-war-regime or a consumer of it. Obama, Panetta, and Morell are high level re-producers. They willingly reproduce it out of an attraction to the wealth, power, and prestige it can provide even when they consider their lies noble one or perhaps they may occlude it a little bit as a lie to themselves through some level of doublespeak. The responsibilities inherent in its reproduction by such high-level operatives makes them and their ilk uniquely blind to the foibles, lacunae, suicidal impulses and - now – terminal state of the ideology. By buying into the system, they exclude any alternatives that the system has already foreclosed.
Althusser also identifies the ideological state apparatus: religion, education, the family, the legal system, the political system including parties, labor unions, communications en bloc (he included “press, radio and television, etc.” and probably would have included the internet and social media), and culture (“literature, the arts, sports, etc”). Althusser states that “what distinguishes the ideological state apparatus from the repressive state apparatus is…the repressive state apparatus functions by violence, whereas the ideological state apparatuses function by ideology.” His list of the different types of ideological state apparatus is as good a working list as any.
Another theorist of manufactured consent is Gramsci who devised the hugely influential notion of hegemony. This is the process by which the ruling class generalizes its class interest as the interest of society as a whole by providing for a least some of the needs of the subordinate classes in the process of their leadership. It resides in “the equilibrium between consent and coercion.”
That equilibrium is starkly laid out in 1984 with its key features of torture and violence, and the control of language. While 1984 has been getting all the attention lately since the phrase disinformation governance board was a joke writing its own punchline, no one should neglect that novel’s first cousin, Brave New World. Huxley’s dystopian classic probably describes a society motivating consent in ways much more like contemporary western consumer society than 1984: sex, drugs, amusements, and medicalized social engineering. In fact, the 1985 classic Amusing Ourselves to Death grew out of a talk Neil Postman gave arguing that Brave New World is a better description of modern American society than 1984. Although the specific references might be dated, the gist of it remains as relevant as ever. It really only lacks any discussion about the impact of the internet and social media.
Although Obama, Panetta, and Morell, and company might be reproducing ideology at a very high and influential level, in consuming ideology we plebians also reproduce it. If I were to say whether the general population in America is giving a begrudging, indifferent, or enthusiastic consent to the social, cultural, and material conditions of their lives, I would call it indifferent at best. The late 19th century had its robber barons. The immediate post WW II era had Mills’ power elite. Today has its the 1% and Davos Man. This young imperial republic has always had its rich and powerful and they have long used the government to get richer and more powerful. The populists, anarchists, socialists, communists, social movements, and labor unions gave us some respite from the Robber Barons and the political pressure necessary to enact the New Deal. Social movements ended Jim Crow with the Civil Rights Act, recast the New Deal as the Great Society, and hinted at amazing new worlds with the counterculture.
The counterrevolution began in 1971 with the Powell memo. It laid out a clear and actionable blueprint for the corporate takeover of democracy and offered an outline of political neoliberalism. Its author was rewarded with a seat on the Supreme Court and the red team was the first to put this plan into action. The genius of neoliberalism since Regan has been to steadily withdraw from the life from the people all of the good and necessary things that usually cultivate a happier than indifferent consent from the governed.
Although the blue team was tardy in catching up by the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Democratic Leadership Council’s agenda of achieving fundraising parity with Republicans by serving the same corporate interests provided a road map for political neoliberalism for their side as well. Both strands shared a common imperative of maximizing profits by reducing labor costs and creating globe-spanning “just in time” supply lines, offshoring productive capacity, and hollowing out the manufacturing base in favor of the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector, and turning the labor force into a grossly underpaid clerical-service precariot, 36% of whom are in the gig economy.
There are numerous centers of power above and behind nation-states, and the political class, Big Media, Big Tech, and the bloviating punditocracy as their playthings. At the highest levels of those sectors they know this to be true and who they exist to serve. Western oligarchs have gained complete and total control over the national governments of the classic “core states of global capitalism” and subordinated the interests of the people in “representative democracies” beneath those of the nation-state which they use as tools to serve themselves.
Neoliberal international finance capital in a supra-national corporate kleptocracy privatizes the benefits, socializes the costs, encloses the commons, gives spondulicks aplenty to the well-connected, and privatizes the cost of living (food, shelter, transportation, education, etc) in a fashion as aggressive and unrelenting as possible. They say we get the political leadership we deserve, a sentiment akin to Benjamin Franklin’s famous quip after the Constitutional Convention. When asked what kind of nation young America would have he answered “A republic, if you can keep it.”
The average American could probably intuit or list dozens of things that need to change drastically and soon if America is to avoid ruin in the very near future. Unfortunately, there are a few interrelated prerequisite steps that need to be taken first before that process can begin. Even these seem well-nigh impossible. Citizens United, the Supreme Court precedent allowing unlimited amounts of corporate cash to flood into the political process, must be overturned. The high cost of elections has to end by instituting publicly financed elections. Ranked choice voting and other electoral reforms must break the duopoly’s stranglehold on power and give other parties a chance to win races. Corporate lobbying has to be dramatically curtailed and it is imperative that the revolving door between Congress and K Street be bolted shut.
Short of widespread labor militancy or sustained mass direct action, there is no conceivable scenario under which these basic reforms could possibly take place and remove the obscene amounts of money in American politics out of the system. What makes Biden uniquely appropriate for the times is that he has spent four decades trying to satisfy his ambition to become president of a system whose sole purpose over that same period has been to extract as much surplus value as possible without resorting to coercion on a grand scale or precipitating revolution.
As sublimely successful as the system has been at it over all these years, now, like Joe Biden’s mind reeling from rapid onset dementia, it is singularly blank and utterly without ideas, resilience, or the ability to forestall its own self-devastation, in a trap of its own making at the end of the line of terminal path dependency. Indeed, the monetary authorities have dispensed with the previously slow and complicated processes of extracting surplus value from the people. Now, they simply give trillions of dollars to the big banks and hedge funds while assuring the useless eaters that they cannot aspire to nice things ever. Biden serves as the mediating buffer between the oligarchs and a citizenry almost entirely too ill-educated, amused to death, exhausted, and atomized to even begin to imagine a better world. How incomparably atrocious Biden is as a person or politician, or how instrumentally responsible he is for much of the legislation that keeps us all incarcerated or in debt peonage does not seem to matter to anyone, least of all to the corporatist DNC Democrats.
The difficulty for the oligarchs is that the modus operandi of the system is as free of resilience as its globe-spanning supply chains. Europe treated the renewal of the Anglo-American partnership between Biden and Boris Johnson on June 10, 2021 on the sidelines of the G7 summit, the G7 summit in Cornwall UK on June 11-13, 2021, which included the heads of the European Council and European Commission, and two more days of summits in Brussels with leaders from NATO and the European Union as the triumphant return of normalcy between the United States and Europe after the discombobulation of the Trump era.
Western oligarchs and their political class did not listen to the veteran Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov analysis of Biden’s June 2021 visits. As Lavrov noted,
“the West wanted to send a clear message: it stands united like never before and will do what it believes to be right in international affairs, while forcing others, primarily Russia and China, to follow its lead. The documents adopted at the Cornwall and Brussels summits cemented the rules-based world order concept as a counterweight to the universal principles of international law with the UN Charter as its primary source.”
Neither did they listen to the clear and reasonable February 4, 2022 joint statement from Russia and China. It said in no uncertain terms that a Russia-China axis as the nucleus of BRICS + belt and road countries is emerging as a new block. This block’s role in the world would be based on principles enunciated by Lavrov like
“mutually respectful dialogue involving the leading powers and with due regard for the interests of all other members of the international community. This implies an unconditional commitment to abide by the universally accepted norms and principles of international law, including respecting the sovereign equality of states, non-interference in their domestic affairs, peaceful resolution of conflict, and the right to self-determination."
The “rules-based world order” is the west’s doublethink way of saying “whatever late neoliberal international finance capital wants to do at the time through the United States and its few remaining allies.” None of their June 2021 summit declarations mentioned the UN or the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, even though the OSCE would be an ideal instrument through which to negotiate an abiding European security framework. It is the largest regional security organization in the world and more inclusive than the EU, NATO, and Schengen visa area combined. They didn’t listen to the economic blueprint for the new BRICS+ belt and road countries global order announced by the February 4, 2022 joint statement from Russia and China provided by Russian economist Sergey Glazyev, Minister in Charge of Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Union, or his epoch-defining“Sanctions and Sovereignty.”
Glazyez envisions a digital currency backed by a gold-based ruble, petroyuan, the sovereign currencies of partnering countries, and tangible commodities like gold and wheat, which would make it highly stable and perfectly convertible. Lavrov called the June 16, 2021 summit meeting between Putin and Biden in Geneva “frank and generally constructive.” Biden’s subsequent rhetoric trumpeting “America’s return to European affairs,” however, also meant a return of their traditional sense of NATO’s purpose: “to keep Europe in, Germany down, and Russia out.” Recent US and European rhetoric regarding Russia and China sounds like something out of Secretary of State Blinken’s business partner and Democratic neocon Michèle Flournoy’s 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review for the Clinton administration. “In the period beyond 2015, there is the possibility that a regional great power or global peer competitor may emerge. Russia and China are seen by some as having the potential to be such competitors.”
The neocons are trapped in a 25 year old worldview. They think Russia can still be made prostrate again and stripped of its remaining assets. It can’t, even though the Rand Corporation just gave them the playbook and they are trying to use it. They haven’t fully absorbed recent data on China yet either. Its labor costs are higher than those of Ukraine. It is vying with the US for technological supremacy and making every country’s physical technology. Innovators can create prototypes in Shenzhen in 1/3 of the time of any western city. It has an advanced consumer sector, the hallmark of a mature economy. By purchasing parity power, its economy is already larger the United States. The neocons only response is “GPC” - great power competition. You know it is serious when the military industrial complex-national security state-foreign policy blob give something an acronym - even though their main tool to intimidate the Chinese in their own offshore waters is the Japan-based 7th Fleet, which can’t stop crashing.
Amidst all this, the only concept the western oligarchs have for a major rebranding among the “core states of global capitalism” is the World Economic Forum founder and director Klaus Schwaub’s Great Reset, which is already alarming millions.
Since late neoliberal international finance capitalism has worked so well for the last five decades their technocrats with highly regarded degrees like Obama are unsure how to patch a program that is all bug no feature. Like any good authoritarian their immediate inclination is to go to war on our imagination and dominate the battle space of word, image, sound, information, and culture. If we plebians reproduce culture as we consume it, we can use our imagination, intuition, and critical faculties to register our exception to the rulers by creating new culture and new ideologies and have, as Post-Orthodoxy enjoins us to do, “a better time with more people more often.”
At its moment of seemingly universal triumph, late neoliberal international finance capitalism is actually in the process of a slow, cascading economic, political, social, and ecological collapse into an information war-backed soft totalitarianism in all of its core states i.e. the United States and those of its few allies who won’t soon begin joining the BRICS + belt and road countries block. It is precisely this dramatically escalating accumulation of fundamental contradictions within the global capitalist system that information warriors and technocrats of the prevailing order try to deflect public attention away from with their vilification of so-called conspiracy theorists, Russian disinfo agents, and serial terms of service violators. This relentless disparagement continues even though these truth tellers often provide the simplest and most direct explanations. As Marx said in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”
The power elite are imposing limitations on free will, free thought, and free speech to mask the fact that, as human civilization has evolved from feudalism to democracy and we have traded kings and tsars for presidents and prime ministers, the money and bankster power behind the scenes has remained the same. The regime of capital accumulation survives by feeding off of the body while stupefying the mind with the myth of individual agency and doing everything in the regime's power to ensure that this agency cannot be used in any meaningful way. In such an environment, ridiculing, marginalizing, and suppressing Approved Narratives becomes the primary means of cordoning off the fact that the masses are being lied to every day of their lives by the political class, Big Media, Big Tech, and bloviating punditocracy.
Hydrocarbon-based consumer civilization is psychopathic and terminal. The provisional government of politicians lying and dissembling in the service of a money and bankster power collectively form a large secular oligarchy of competing camps working in tacit collusion and occasional competition. In America they can be found in the great commercial and financial dynasties, Fortune 500 companies and their lobbyists, the media simulacrasphere, civil and military services, large research universities, law firms, and big charitable foundations.
They hire the politicians and establish the boundaries of the politicians' agenda. They authorize the production of regular pageants known as elections to protect the brand name of American democracy. They convince a large enough portion of the general population that the system still works, so that the machinery of oppression, theft, incarceration, murder, and debt peonage can continue to operate without friction. Camps within this oligarchy make effective use of multilateral supranational bodies like the Bilderberg Group, World Bank, IMF, NATO, the EU, World Economic Forum at Davos, Bank of International Settlements, World Trade Organization, Council of Foreign Relations, Atlantic Council, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Trilateral Commission, Bohemian Grove and other organizations to calibrate their rhetoric, achieve consensus, and even set policy superseding that of sovereign governments. This isn't done in smoky star chambers but the miasmic group think of those with similar backgrounds, educations, class interests, and institutional positions, all pursuing the interests of the global capitalist system by pursuing misguided senses of their own self-interest.
For that reason, Big Media, Big Tech, intelligence (sic), academia, and all other gatekeepers will continue to dismiss anything that challenges the conventional wisdom or consensus reality until some catalyst reveals enough of the horrible truth to enough people and finally facilitates a paradigm shift of world historical importance.
Against these demons are arrayed us: poets, philosophers, griots, shamans, clowns, artists, penniless intellectuals, incorrigible vagabonds, anarchists, thought criminals, ethical hackers, roustabouts, lazy bums, good-for-nothings, ne’er-do-wells, also rans, raconteurs, psychonauts, preppers, tree-huggers, wilderness enthusiasts, trickster coyotes, and guardian wolves. As the dean of American conspiranoia, Robert Anton Wilson, put it "like it or not, the people of the fringe are in an apocalyptical struggle: either the elite techniques of control will be perfected to the level where dissent can be abolished or heretics will mutate to some level of consciousness where they can do holy and miraculous works to resurrect the old dream of freedom for all."
What we can physically defend ourselves in saying as we say it and keep body, mind, and soul together in saying it, we can say. Freedom of conscience and laws and rights relating to freedom of speech need not concern ourselves unduly. As Max Stirner said “State, church, people, society, etc…have to thank for their existence only the disrespect that I have for myself.” We must simply dream freely, think freely, speak freely, and live freely. We must reacquaint ourselves with the neglected avatars of how to live freely: Diogenes, Nietzsche, Emma Goldman, Randolph Bourne, and so many others.
Although this may seem to be a millennial hope, it is also a cogent empirical analysis of a decisive historical crossroads. In any event, until consciousness is liberated to such a degree as to enable the establishment of an abiding regime of peace, non-woke social justice, and an ungreenwashed ecological sustainability, as Rousseau said, “man is born free yet is everywhere in chains.”