Technocrats of the new disinformation governance regime - part one - the role of Big Tech and academia
The mechanics of selling anything that contradicts the ideology of late neoliberal global finance capital as "disinformation." A case study: Obama's April 21, 2022 speech at Stanford.
genial and intelligent neoliberal uberghoul
(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 the arrival of spring or not, so too does post-presidency Obama periodically pop up 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 April 18, 2022 Stanford speech, it was to sell the public on the necessity of an enhanced disinformation governance regime: the selling of Approved Narratives in the guise of “protecting” us all from “disinformation,” the only thing the Democrats could conceivably build back better.
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.
In Ivy League and elite peer institutions like Stanford, schools select students with the 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 the admission process. Coursework rarely cultivates resilience, resourcefulness, initiative, or curiosity. Evaluation never rewards it. It is no surprise that around half of the graduates of these schools go into finance, consulting, and law because they don’t know what else to do. They never have cultivated a passion. Specialists in one miniscule area, they are never exposed to a broad liberal arts education that even gives them the concept of thinking broadly about society and culture in any interconnected way - let alone facility with it.
Students know their diplomas will be golden passports to the highest echelons of wealth, power, and prestige in the system, but any abiding concern this system is omnicidal and predicated on endless war, ecological devastation, domestic repression, and wholesale social immiseration will never trouble their restful sleep. 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 regurgitate the hegemonic ideology, no matter how vaguely unsettled they are on a personal level by the corrosive ennui, anomie, depression, lack of social connection, and free-floating anger and anxiety engendered in themselves by neoliberalism. By consuming the dominant ideology, believing it with 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. Why it bears attention even after the class is because it is really a master class in decoding the ideological supports that prop up neoliberalism.
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 dichotomy 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 is a lie sandwich and must be regarded as such.
At the beginning of his speech, Obama 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, CIA, and CIA cut out National Endowment for Democracy. Neither is it democratic but 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 politicians in Ukraine - both of whom worship WW II Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera as their patron saint.
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.
Obama 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 with supply lines on its sovereign territory. 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 kind of information the political class wants them to censor, Big Tech would risk having its liability waivers on content provided for them 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 international neoliberal finance capital, 2) claim a universal validity for that kind of economic system, 3) hide 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 + China belt and road countries.
Obama knew 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 correcting 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 lost.” Virtually no one in America trusts their leaders, mainstream media, and political institutions.” What he says “truth” means he means bullshit from the branch of the oligopoly he serves.
Obama went on to say: “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.” The readers of the brand name newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post he is referring to self-identify as Democratic at approximately 90%. No one would suggest they are anything other bastions of Blue MAGA legacy media. Network news has been more irrelevant than the highly partisan cable news for decades. NPR?! A wine mom, Boomer, and shitlib shout-out. 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” when anyone with half a brain knew since before the war that WMD was yet another bullshit pretense to drag America into war yet again. What he is really saying is that these are the sources of information acceptable to our overlords.
Obama alleges that contemporary information overload destroys the people’s ability to judge the truth, requiring its curation by a nanny state. Of course he mentions “conspiracy theories” - an evergreen epithet, one created by the CIA to lambaste anyone who didn’t agree with the asinine conclusions of the Warren Commission and sent forth into the media through Operation Mockingbird. “Junk science” and “quackery,” so familiar from the pandemic, make their appearance as well. Junk science and quackery that very often became settled medicine within months.
Obama worries “over time, we lose our capacity to distinguish between fact, opinion, and wholesale fiction. Or maybe we just stop caring.” America has survived as a major experiment in free speech for well over 200 years. It may be on life support now but that is not because we have we “lost our capacity to distinguish between fact, opinion, and wholesale fiction.” We might have stopped caring. Diseases of despair like alcohol and drug addiction run rampant. Overdoses hit their highest mark ever in 2021:108,000. Suicide is rampant.
Obama offered this logic pretzal. “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.” If something true today and totally wrong tomorrow how are some things truer than others?! We can draw lines between “opinions, facts, honest mistakes, intentional deceptions” but you would have us regard the intentional deceptions of the overlords you serve as truth.
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.’” No porn,ok, but there is obviously no shortage of it on the internet. Curtailing harassing and cyberbulleying was the entering spearpoint of content moderation that now threatens to end free speech of the most utilized platforms. Those three words “otherwise objectionable material” given TPTB all the wiggle room they need to content moderate truth and anti-establishment views right out of existence.
His 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, to anticipate lawsuits, and/or changes in the kinds and amount of data and advertising they can sell. in other words, changes to their bottom line. 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 democracy in name only, bought and sold by the corporations. Democratic oversight means the government will continue to say that as private companies they have wide latitude in the material they allow to be seem on their platforms, 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. Obama goes on to mention section 230 by name and gives the analogy of meat inspection.
“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.”
If any food processor had a proprietary technique to keep our food safe it should be commandeered to serve the public good, exactly how Big Tech should be condemned and run as public utilities with open source algorithms. The fact that they not shows they are too valuable in support of corporatist DNC Democratic smokescreens.
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. 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.