This is a really interesting clip from Charlie Brooker's 2014 Wipe. Adam Curtis has discussed the idea before, but this hypothesizes that the reaction most people have to the media ('oh dear' because they feel it is something they can do nothing about) is now being deliberately invoked by politicians and media elites as a form of control.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcy8uLjRHPM
What particularly stood out was this quote about the war in Ukraine, from one of Putin's advisors.
QuoteThe underlying aim, Serkov says, is not to win the war, but to use the conflict to create a constant state of destabilized perception in order to manage and control.
By continually throwing contradictory information into the mainstream, and flooding us with a stream of information with little context (or deliberately misleading context) we are kept in a state of uncertainty where we do not have the tools necessary to form a coherent alternative to the decisions that are being made on our behalf. They - the politicians and decision makers - deliberately want to make people throw up their hands and say 'oh dear' because merely recognizing that a thing is bad
does not threaten them. Especially when they are ostensibly agreeing with you that the situation is bad and they would like to change it, whilst simultaneously working to perpetuate it.
This kind of thinking seems like it'd be quite familiar to Discordians - and it plays into some of the behaviours we talk about with people taking the opinions of their 'group' and seeing it as an attack on their identities when those opinions and assumptions are attacked. It is more sinister than we often ascribe to - I don't know about anyone else, but I assumed that the politicians were as much a victim of confirmation bias as anyone else, and tended to just be blind to the inherent contradictions in what they were saying.
But the quotes from the Russian advisor seem like a convincing argument that this isn't the case.
It also feels like I've been falling for this myself. Looking back over the year - longer, really - the news has just been a constant stream of horrible situations with the end result generally being a sense of powerlessness.
The question is, knowing this, what do you
do about it? It is almost the opposite of 1984's Ministry of Truth. Where the Ministry of Truth wanted to reinvent the past and make people believe in their version of events, this strategy relies on nobody knowing the present and casting doubt on the past so that the status quo can just continue. If you can't pin down what's happening, you can't respond to it. There's been massive anger and outcry over all sorts of issues over the past few years - MP's expenses, child abuse, banker's bonuses, the financial crisis and the Occupy movement - but this anger has failed to result in any actual changes or serious action (aside from some arrested celebrities) and eventually the news cycle just moves on with no resolution.
It seems like a strong and independent press to confront politicians when they lie and mislead, and hold them to account, should be the answer. In practice, any more voices will just add to the cacophony, because having many conflicting messages is itself part of the strategy. This problem is likely exacerbated in the UK by the fact the BBC has taken impartiality to mean 'give equal voice to the two most polarized individuals we can find on any issue'.
Step 1 is probably 'refuse to accept that things can't get better'. I'm just not sure how to translate 'media is probably being manipulated in order to provide confusion' into useful actions.
QuoteIt seems like a strong and independent press to confront politicians when they lie and mislead, and hold them to account, should be the answer. In practice, any more voices will just add to the cacophony, because having many conflicting messages is itself part of the strategy
Interesting read. Just wanted to pick on this for a moment.
It seems to me that any established power structure, be that government, press or other firstly makes a priority of protecting itself. To that end you get shit like Leveson in the UK where government and press collude to protect the powers of both at the expense of outsiders. The ongoing internal police investigations are much the same and mirrored in the USA with general levels of culpability admitted.
As a result of this somewhat, I can't see the traditional methods of protest being particularly effective in the future. There's realistically no press outlet that you can trust completely, if at all. Voting is right out as well really unless you can push a giant protest vote to the greens or something but I'd guess the populace to abstain or vote Nazi if that's the hot idea.
QuoteThere's been massive anger and outcry over all sorts of issues over the past few years - MP's expenses, child abuse, banker's bonuses, the financial crisis and the Occupy movement - but this anger has failed to result in any actual changes or serious action (aside from some arrested celebrities) and eventually the news cycle just moves on with no resolution.
This sort of ties into the above somewhat. The easy example I could use here would be the "Bring back our girls" thing that went around for a while. Last I checked there was still no resolution on that because everyone started shitting themselves over Isis spreading ebola. Such things seem to be exactly the kind of thing you're talking about - Serious problems with no clear narrative, obvious signs of improvement/worsening but a general mood pushed of "something must be done about this awful thing".
Is the media contradictory and providing bad signal? Almost certainly, with some much more blatant than others. It's never a surprise when say, certain newspapers giving high ratings to certain films, or low ones. Some outlets barely hide their contempt for their audience (Fox, particularly guilty here. Outlet built on "the big lie") and others are totally shameless about whatever yesterdays news was. I've lost count of the number of days shite such as the daily heil has screamed about house prices going up/down/up/down/up/sideways and we're all dooooomed/up on sequential days, not even any gap, to the point where I'd believe that half the text is just copy/paste with names changed.
Credit where it's due, Russel Brand has been doing quite well with his "trews" stuff, Something like that perhaps slowed and presented to target a broader audience may be a way to go, particularly when there's obviously a party line in the papers.
The way I see it (and I don't entirely dismiss the possibility this is an epic cop-out) is that their defensive position is practically unassailable. There is no physical way on earth to take down a corrupt superpower. Best I can do is watch and giggle as the whole thing comes crashing down on it's own. I've been patiently waiting for western capitalist economics to dissolve completely for the best part of a decade but it never does, it just teeters on the edge of oblivion with no end in sight. :argh!:
Posting here to remind myself to come back to this in a couple of days, when I have time.
I think it goes beyond that. It's the Brave New World method. If the onslaught of information is so saturated with not only contradictory and conflicting information, but with unrelated items, as well ("Movie star talks about butt plugs on Leno, then we'll hear from Tom who has been following the latest on the leaked nudes fiasco..."), you won't have the mental resources available to engage yourself on the matter long enough to for an opinion; let alone speak out in support of it. Postman refers to it as the "And now... this!" of our media.
And this is floating in a dingy amidst a piss ocean of entertainment media. I've never seen movies and TV shows shot out of the corn hole at such a rapid fire.
Quote from: I_Kicked_Kennedy on January 07, 2015, 03:58:11 AM
I think it goes beyond that. It's the Brave New World method. If the onslaught of information is so saturated with not only contradictory and conflicting information, but with unrelated items, as well ("Movie star talks about butt plugs on Leno, then we'll hear from Tom who has been following the latest on the leaked nudes fiasco..."), you won't have the mental resources available to engage yourself on the matter long enough to for an opinion; let alone speak out in support of it. Postman refers to it as the "And now... this!" of our media.
And this is floating in a dingy amidst a piss ocean of entertainment media. I've never seen movies and TV shows shot out of the corn hole at such a rapid fire.
"I could explain to you why this Fox News bit is propaganda, bu not only will it take MUCH longer than the actual bit, it will take MUCH more effort, and require your WILLINGNESS to hear a different pov... in other words, im fucking done and you can keep thinking what you like."
The best way to change someone's mind, IMO, is to agree with them, or at least acknowledge the validity of their point, and then to introduce some small question or exception.
When you go for full-frontal disagreement, it's more likely to result in an increase in disagreement than lead to agreement.
Quote from: Cain on January 06, 2015, 04:45:04 PM
Posting here to remind myself to come back to this in a couple of days, when I have time.
Posting here to remind Cain to come back to this in a couple of days, when he has time.
Quote from: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on January 07, 2015, 03:52:31 PM
The best way to change someone's mind, IMO, is to agree with them, or at least acknowledge the validity of their point, and then to introduce some small question or exception.
When you go for full-frontal disagreement, it's more likely to result in an increase in disagreement than lead to agreement.
Somewhat tangential, an old sales technique that I was once shown is "Agree-confirm-overcome".
Basically, regardless of what the objection is, you initially agree, as people like people who agree with them. Then you confirm that the objection is actually the objection. Then you move to get round it in some fashion.
Done right, people end up selling the product/service to themselves. I would suspect that this would all translate very closely to arguments/debate etc. A Conservative is unlikely to be convinced of much by a liberal, but they will be readily convinced by another conservative. The reverse equally applies and applies to most things where people segregate themselves into arbitrary groups.
Quote from: Junkenstein on January 12, 2015, 07:28:47 PM
Quote from: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on January 07, 2015, 03:52:31 PM
The best way to change someone's mind, IMO, is to agree with them, or at least acknowledge the validity of their point, and then to introduce some small question or exception.
When you go for full-frontal disagreement, it's more likely to result in an increase in disagreement than lead to agreement.
Somewhat tangential, an old sales technique that I was once shown is "Agree-confirm-overcome".
Basically, regardless of what the objection is, you initially agree, as people like people who agree with them. Then you confirm that the objection is actually the objection. Then you move to get round it in some fashion.
Done right, people end up selling the product/service to themselves. I would suspect that this would all translate very closely to arguments/debate etc. A Conservative is unlikely to be convinced of much by a liberal, but they will be readily convinced by another conservative. The reverse equally applies and applies to most things where people segregate themselves into arbitrary groups.
There was some hilarious (actually depressing) study in which Republicans were given economic proposals from Democrats, but told they were from Republicans, and vise versa. In every case, the Republicans strongly preferred the plans they were told came from Republicans, and the Democrats strongly preferred the plans they were told came from Democrats, and could even build arguments for why they preferred them and how they upheld their party's values, unaware that the proposals they were agreeing with actually came from the opposing party.
The same experiment was done with Israelis, Palestinians, and peace agreement proposals. In every case, affiliation made all the difference. ALL the difference.
Yeah, cognitively speaking, meatware is pretty impressive but only when considering the fact that the software wrote itself, by accident. This is why I'm reasonably confident that AI will not turn out to be the anthropomorphic comedy show that many people seem to think it will. Why go to all the trouble of making it rubbish, when it's much easier to make it practically flawless? That is without the irrational emotional circuitry and various other biases and glitches. Problem is many people think Homo Sapiens 1.0 is some sort of holy pinnacle of creation. If that were the case then we'd never have had to bolt on cognitive upgrades like satnav, databases and written language.
Quote from: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on January 12, 2015, 11:52:20 PM
Quote from: Junkenstein on January 12, 2015, 07:28:47 PM
Quote from: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on January 07, 2015, 03:52:31 PM
The best way to change someone's mind, IMO, is to agree with them, or at least acknowledge the validity of their point, and then to introduce some small question or exception.
When you go for full-frontal disagreement, it's more likely to result in an increase in disagreement than lead to agreement.
Somewhat tangential, an old sales technique that I was once shown is "Agree-confirm-overcome".
Basically, regardless of what the objection is, you initially agree, as people like people who agree with them. Then you confirm that the objection is actually the objection. Then you move to get round it in some fashion.
Done right, people end up selling the product/service to themselves. I would suspect that this would all translate very closely to arguments/debate etc. A Conservative is unlikely to be convinced of much by a liberal, but they will be readily convinced by another conservative. The reverse equally applies and applies to most things where people segregate themselves into arbitrary groups.
There was some hilarious (actually depressing) study in which Republicans were given economic proposals from Democrats, but told they were from Republicans, and vise versa. In every case, the Republicans strongly preferred the plans they were told came from Republicans, and the Democrats strongly preferred the plans they were told came from Democrats, and could even build arguments for why they preferred them and how they upheld their party's values, unaware that the proposals they were agreeing with actually came from the opposing party.
The same experiment was done with Israelis, Palestinians, and peace agreement proposals. In every case, affiliation made all the difference. ALL the difference.
Ah. So the short version essentially is "We are totally fucked."
There is, however, an idea somewhere in switching election slogans as a general thing. No attribution, just a raw text quote on a photo of someone allegedly wanting the opposite. It's 2AM, leave that with me.
We're all totally fucked if humanity stays in charge. Maybe AI is actually our only hope :lulz:
Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on January 12, 2015, 07:17:25 PM
Quote from: Cain on January 06, 2015, 04:45:04 PM
Posting here to remind myself to come back to this in a couple of days, when I have time.
Posting here to remind Cain to come back to this in a couple of days, when he has time.
Tomorrow. After I've slept and gotten back onto a day time schedule.
Surkov is one of my favourite modern thinkers, despite producing very little in the way of actual programmes to scrutinize.
I was aware of the name since about 2008, but I only noticed him as one of the "fixers" of Putin's regime until about 2010, when Adam Curtis forced my focus on him.
Surkov's strategy can be summed up as "weaponised postmodernism", which is not unfitting for someone who cut his artistic teeth in the underground and avant-garde milieu of 1980s Moscow. An earlier graduate of that milieu, the leader of the National Bolsheviks and Putin critic, Eduard Limonov, noted that Surkov had "turned Russia into a wonderful postmodernist theatre, where he experiments with old and new political models".
Of course, as a good former Soviet citizen, I am sure Surkov is aware that Marx said history repeats itself...second time as farce.
However, it's an inherently unstable mix. Surkov's system almost crashed in 2011. The wheels came off "Sovereign Democracy" a few years earlier, but the introduction of a fresh face in the new President and general momentum allowed the system to continue. Fortunately, while the system has splintered the Russian leadership, and caused corruption to metasize to such an extent that even Putin cannot truly control it anymore, Surkov's playbook keeps the Russian opposition weak and divided, allowing Putin to exploit them.
Surkov also followed this strategy in Ukraine, where he acted as Putin's envoy, after Putin's own attempts at improvisation went to shit. For starters, he exploited the divisions between the ultranationalists in Donbass to give the Kremlin greater control over the situation there. Surkov's confusion also gave the Kremlin a chance to "clear the deck" in Donbass and stack the cards to allow for Putin's preferred outcome - negotiations with Poroshenko and the West, while leaving the "People's Republic" as yet another frozen conflict and bargaining chip with Ukraine in the future (Crimea's gone, that ship sailed).
------------
The problem is, how does one discern "weaponised postmodernism" in a fundamentally postmodern society? Europe and North America are far ahead of Russia, on this side, so it becomes impossible to see how this method would be much different from naturally occuring social outcomes. The internet further complicates matters, creating epistemic conclaves where one can be exposed only to the evidence that supports ones inclination and ideology.
Thats not to say I don't believe this isn't also being used in the UK, USA, France etc. only that finding the Surkov like figure behind the curtain is going to be much harder. Not least because there are likely several ("America is also a one party state, but with typical American extravagance, it has two of them").
Also, see this piece (http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/russia-s-international-media-poisons-minds/508653.html) from the Moscow Times on Russia Today:
QuoteThese media investments ostensibly reflect the Kremlin's ambition to win sympathies abroad. Upon closer inspection, however, Russia's large and growing investment in international media is not about winning hearts through "unbiased coverage of events in Russia," as President Vladimir Putin has claimed.
Instead, the Kremlin is focused on poisoning minds through an insidious mix of information designed to muddy the media waters and disorient international audiences. Seen in this context, Russia's surging international media investment makes more sense.
QuoteOutside Russia, where Kremlin censorship cannot eliminate alternative views, the aim of Russia's media is different. In settings with media pluralism, Russia's goal is not to persuade audiences of the virtues of Kremlin policy but to create confusion and raise doubts about the facts of a given issue.
By muddling thinking about the Russian annexation of Crimea and use of military force to establish a frozen conflict in eastern Ukraine, the Kremlin seeks to prevent a coordinated and resolute response from the West.
QuoteAs media analyst Peter Pomerantsev observed, debunking false information is time-consuming and expensive; the Kremlin's fabrication of information is easy and relatively cheap. While the Kremlin tightens restrictions on the Internet at home, state media takes advantage of opportunities to make deeper inroads online beyond Russia's borders. RT's YouTube channel has garnered more than 1.3 billion views. Even accounting for clicks from phony accounts, this is a staggering number.
The aforementioned Peter Pomerantsev (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/putin-russia-tv-113960_full.html#.VKqnAnvvpKp), in Politico:
QuoteAt one end of the table sat one of the country's most famous political TV presenters. He was small and spoke fast, with a smoky voice: "We all know there will be no real politics," he said. "But we still have to give our viewers the sense something is happening. They need to be kept entertained."
"So what should we play with?" he asked. "Shall we attack oligarchs? Who's the enemy this week? Politics has got to feel like a movie!"
QuoteThe 21st century Kremlin might be controlling the media just as it did in the Soviet era, but there's one mistake today's Russian will never repeat: It will never let television become dull. In fact, the goal is to synthesize Soviet control with Western entertainment—and for that it needs the help of Western producers who, Russians believe, know the alchemical secret of great television formats.
QuoteThen there was the television, which I never worked on, with a more sinister mission: political-psychological control. The approach could be deeply counterintuitive. NTV, for example, one of the country's biggest networks, doesn't try to pretend Russia is a rosy place like Soviet channels used to do—which is also how they lost credibility with viewers. Quite the opposite: It shows non-stop horror stories about how dangerous the country is, encouraging the viewer to look to the "strong hand" of the Kremlin for protection.
QuoteAs the decade came to an end and as the Kremlin became ever more aggressive and paranoid, I began to notice how Ostankino TV was increasingly starting to reflect, however haphazardly, the underlying principles of a Lifespring training. It's programs confused viewers with bizarre conspiracy theories and itched at unresolved traumas about Stalin, the collapse of the USSR and the destitution of the 1990s—all before lifting the viewer up with stories of Putin-era triumph. Meanwhile current affairs TV presenters would pluck a theme (oligarchs, America, the Middle East) and speak for 20 minutes, hinting, nudging, winking, insinuating though rarely ever saying anything directly, repeating words like "them" and "the enemy" endlessly. It was a powerful technique.
Quote"There is no such thing as objective reporting," the managing editor of RT, Alexey Nikolov, told me when I interviewed him in 2013. By then, I was based in London again, working in think tanks, and Nikolov met me in his bright, large office at RT's Moscow HQ. A veteran international reporter, he spoke near perfect English and sat at the top of a very long desk wearing a knowing smile. In the corner was a Kalashnikov, a collector's item from one of his reporting adventures. "Does it scare you?" he half-joked, when he caught me looking at it.
"But what is a Russian point of view? What does Russia Today stand for?" I asked.
"Oh, there is always a Russian point of view," he answered. "Take a banana. For someone it's food. For someone else it's a weapon. For a racist it's something to tease a black person with."
QuoteSome of these tricks smack of an updated model of Active Measures, the Soviet era KGB-run disinformation and psychological warfare department designed to confuse and disorganize the West. Active Measures employed an estimated 15,000 agents at the height of the Cold War, part of whose brief was to place forgeries in international media. Stories ranged from "President Carter's Secret Plan to Put Black Africans and Black Americans at Odds," to those that claimed AIDS was a weapon created by the CIA or blamed the United States for the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. But if Soviet measures went to great lengths to make their forgeries look convincing, now the Kremlin doesn't seem to care if it is caught: The aim is to confuse rather than convince, to trash the information space so the audience gives up looking for any truth amid the chaos.
QuoteHaving seen how Russian TV works from the inside I wonder whether the West has the institutional or analytical tools necessary to deal with this new challenge. At a recent conference in Washington, U.S. officials told me they were surprised by how sophisticated Russian TV was. Up until this year they had been utterly unaware of the unique mix of authoritarianism, spin and entertainment the Kremlin has perfected.
My belief is that while the west certainly emulates the Russian approach in some ways, it is far more haphazard, circumstansial and unintnetional than it is in Russia, as a whole. FOX News certainly seems to fall into the Russian mould quite easily, for example. But the west's approach has been via a fractured polity, downsized news organisations and similar. Russia deliberately went about building the system by contrast.
Another thing to consider is a game-theoretic/strategic approach behind all this.
In game theory, if you're aiming for a status-quo outcome or a draw, then a deception strategy, marked by obscurity and obsfucation, is a potentially optimal approach. It allows for you to run up the costs of opposition while testing your opponents resolve and exploiting their weaknesses.
Huh. And one of the supposed points of conservatism is to maintain the status quo....
Thanks, Cain. You've given me something to think about. You're good at that.
:thanks:
More Surkov links:
http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/05/05/how-putin-is-reinventing-warfare/
http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21606290-russia-has-effect-already-invaded-eastern-ukraine-question-how-west-will
https://www.google.ie/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=4&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CDMQFjAD&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dtic.mil%2Fcgi-bin%2FGetTRDoc%3FAD%3DADA567190&ei=qrSnVJXqIdHe7AbRpYDwDg&usg=AFQjCNE3Tx_qPnV-yLdMIZwRlDsTv7vrEg&sig2=X5GLP0XGidtOKzLZc5nGAw
http://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com/2014/07/06/the-gerasimov-doctrine-and-russian-non-linear-war/
http://cryptome.org/2013/07/cyber-war-racket-0010.pdf
These were great reads, thanks Cain.
All this reminds me of a few years ago, when we were discussing the importance of teaching media literacy in schools. If people were able to identify the sources and biases in news more easily, that might help to counter the organized disinformation campaigns.
The trouble is, there's so much of it and it is so time consuming to do your own research and find the truth - and that delaying factor is part of the goal anyway. Its a very sophisticated approach to mass media.
It also encourages people to latch on to the media outlets they find comforting and form their own echo chambers - which is what we've been saying we've seen in the internet for ages. It is very easy to construct your own self-reinforcing hub of news, and since it moves so quickly by the time the story has been proven false, attention is already directed elsewhere.