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March 18 - March 19, 2020
“No troll factories exist,” the trolls wrote.
They defined a “troll” as “an online account that deliberately targets an individual with messages of hate and harassment online,” and “state-sponsored trolling” as “the use of targeted online hate and harassment campaigns to intimidate and silence individuals critical of the state.”
“We observe the tactical move by states from an ideology of information scarcity to one of information abundance,” writes law professor Tim Wu, “which sees speech itself as a censorial weapon.”18
Why should you care? Our problems are fast becoming your problems. Boundaries around the world collapse and we can begin to see a kind of global playbook.”
The very form of social media scrambles time, place, proportion: terror attacks sit next to cat videos, the latest jokes surface next to old family photos. And the result was a sort of flattening, as if past and present were losing their relative perspectives.
Neil Postman. All the way.
Srdja’s belief in nonviolence doesn’t come so much from pacifism as calculation. Regimes have the upper hand when it comes to physical force; what they can’t deal with are massive, peaceful crowds out on the street.
if all the world is a conspiracy, then your own failures are no longer all your fault. The fact that you achieved less than you hoped for, that your life is a mess—it’s all the fault of the conspiracy.
An Oxford University analysis of bots calls this process “manufacturing consensus.”10 It is not that one online account changes someone’s mind; it’s that en masse they create an ersatz normality.
Information-Psychological War Operations: A Short Encyclopedia and Reference Guide (the 2011 edition, credited to Veprintsev et al., and published in Moscow by Hotline-Telecom, can be purchased online at the sale price of 348 rubles).
In the sly words of diplomats, values and interests don’t always align.
Instead, the best future one can hope for is an “information peace” in which each side respects the other’s information sovereignty: a favored concept of both Beijing and Moscow, and essentially a cover for censorship.
Janis Berzins of the Latvian Military Academy describes a shift from direct annihilation of the opponent to its inner decay; from a war with conventional forces to irregular groupings; from direct clash to contactless war; from the physical environment to human consciousness; from war in a defined period of time to a state of permanent war as the natural condition in national life.15
Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (about a man who obsessively records himself and then repeatedly listens to and comments on his own recordings);
There are no post-truth moments if you are building a bridge, for example. Facts are necessary to show what you are building, how it will work, why it won’t collapse. In politics, facts are necessary to show you are pursuing some rational idea of progress: here are our aims, here is how we prove we are achieving them, this is how they improve your lives. The need for facts is predicated on the notion of an evidence-based future.
like an old bar of soap coming apart in mushy flakes.
Dude. Get a better editor.
Meanwhile, 22 TB of video recorded by the White Helmets sits in safe houses across Europe. To that one can add 60 TB of videos, tweets, and Facebook posts held by the Syrian Archive; 800,000 documents and over 3,000 witness statements collected by the Commission for International Justice and Accountability that link crimes to Syrian officials.38 It is as much archive as we have ever had relating to torture, mass murder, war crimes. And it sits there, waiting for facts to be given meaning.
“Populism is not an ideology, it is a strategy,”
The “populism” thus created is not a sign of the people coming together in a great groundswell of unity but a consequence of “the people” being more fractured than ever, of their barely existing as one nation. When people have little in common, you have to reimagine a new version of the people.
We are living in a time of pop-up populism, when the meaning of “the people” is in flux, we are constantly redefining who counts as an insider or an outsider, and what it means to belong is never certain, as political identities burst and then are remade as something else.
promoted the use of the raised-arm Sieg Heil salute because he had worked out that the forceful double exhalation of breath and repeated, strenuous arm movements caused hyperventilation and exhaustion among Hitler’s followers, putting them in a trance-like state and making them more susceptible to messaging.
Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that social media’s favorite genre is memes: pictures that can be defaced by people with new phrases that change the meaning of the image, symptoms of a time when sense is ceaselessly unstable. So that one might take a picture of a pipe and write beneath it: “This is not a pipe.”
