Asymmetric power in the information age - III
Asymmetric power in the information age - III
Chapter 3: How an infodemic is reshaping the world
Information operations and crowd-sourced distortion interact in complex ways to destroy democratic processes and pose existential threats to human rights, democracy, environmental ecosystems, and in the case of weaponized conspiracy theories, our humanity
Fragmented realities have real-life impact
Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality, no democracy, and it becomes impossible to deal with the existential problems of our time. — Maria Ressa, Nobel Peace Prize lecture, 2021
Here, we will look at four case examples of how fragmented realities and a broken epistemology works against the public good and threatens democracy, even the whole world.
Epistemic neutralization of regime-critical journalism
For many, the case of Rappler vs. Duterte was and is eye-opening to how social media dynamics can be weaponized by state actors to undermine journalism. Most people however have either never heard of it, because it is a developing country they don’t care about, or if they are Filipino, believe various conspiracy theories about the news outlet and its independent journalists.
Rappler is a Filipino online news website founded by Maria Ressa, a trained investigative reporter who aimed to bring veteran journalists together with young tech-savvy digital natives to speak truth to power.
Rappler was reporting on the rise of a Filipino major who had a very radical ‘tough on crime’ rhetoric, a disdain for independent journalists and the press, and a populist-folksy and nationalist appeal against the democratic ‘elites’ in the capital Manila. In short, he was a ruthless man with a polarizing and hateful message, positioning himself as a savior to take the country back for the poor and forgotten Filipinos.
In complex systems, small inputs can have disproportional outputs. Unable to compete with the money required to run a traditional campaign, Duterte opted for going fully online. The relatively cheap social media campaign by Duterte’s team of like 500 staff, together with bots, paid influencers, and fanatics, was sufficient to create an emotionally engaging online narrative that poisoned the well of public discourse, seeding fear, doubt, and hate. Amplification dynamics on social media (more than 50% of Filipinos are on Facebook) made sure that Duterte’s extreme movement became the center of attention online, and with it, got more mainstream media coverage, more followers, more outrage, and more engagements yet again. The winners take all, remember? Frustrations and divisions were sharpened, reporting narratives and journalists critical of Duterte were served up as public enemies, threatened and intimidated by online mobs stirred by pro-Duterte fanatics and influencers. As everybody knows, Duterte won.
“Just because you’re a journalist you are not exempted from assassination, if you’re a son of a bitch” (Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines at his inauguration).
This should just mark the beginning. Independent journalism is a negative feedback loop on power in democracies and is often among the first to be dismantled by autocratic leaders. Others have written about the chilling effect of online hate and harassment, and how it can be weaponized to either suppress free speech or silence dissent. In the Philippines, the social-media radicalization of hateful discourse is nothing short of stochastic terrorism against journalists. The results are chilling. Social media has been intensively and widely used for propaganda. Human rights abuses and extrajudicial killings in Duterte’s drug war have become accepted by a large segment of the population as the price for an increased sense of security of the general population. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt tactics call for a strongman after all. Once in power, Duterte did of course not shy away from using the tools of the state to really crack down on independent media in the more classical sense as well.
A handful of media outlets have tried to cover Duterte’s authoritarian excesses. In March 2017, the irascible president warned them: “I’m not threatening them but someday their karma will catch up with them.” They included the country’s leading newspaper, the Philippine Daily Inquirer. It was bought up a year later and its journalists were brought to heel. The next target was the country’s leading radio and TV network, ABS-CBN. In July 2020, the ever-compliant congress sealed its fate by refusing to renew its franchise. He is now targeting the last bastion of press freedom — the Rappler news website and its CEO, Maria Ressa. Hounded by lawsuits and prosecution brought by Duterte’s allies, she is facing the possibility of sentences totaling around 100 years in prison.
Thanks to collusion at all levels within the state apparatus, Duterte has an arsenal that he can use to wage “total war” against journalists, an arsenal that includes spurious charges of defamation, tax evasion or violation of capital legislation; rescinding broadcast licences; getting accomplices to buy up media outlets and bring their journalists into line; and using an army of trolls to subject journalists to online harassment. -Reporters without borders
The Philippines currently is ranked 147th out of 180 countries on the press freedom index, tendency falling.
It is really worth reading the whole 3-part series (part1, part2, part3) of excellent investigative journalism from Rappler. Trying to make sense of what was happening to the Filipino population online is what led to Maria Ressa being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021. Her unrelenting nature also likely has sealed her fate.
Having lost her appeals in the Filipino justice system, she is currently facing lengthy jail sentences and Rappler has been ordered shut down.
In the end, it can be said that with the help of social media, the bad guy(s) won, and democracy and the public good lost. And this is a pattern we will see, again and again, so let’s jump to a different case study.
Epistemic sabotage to prevent science-based action
It is no secret that CO2-emitting industries have tried everything in their power to manipulate public perception about the scientific reality of anthropogenic climate change. (I really do not want to rehash that whole story, you all know the drill, and if not, please, please read literally anything on the topic and work your way from there)
But eventually, businesses would lose the fight with science over the reality of climate change and a majority of the world today is finally aware of the looming danger if we do not decarbonize.
Well, for CO2-emitting industries, the fight over reality might have been lost, but the real war has just started.
Recently, disinformation researchers have reported a set of new strategic aims that emission industries use to shape the information battle space to their benefit. They can be summarized as deny, deceive, delay.
As the public conversation on climate change evolves, so too does the sophistication and range of arguments used to downplay or discount the need for action […] One strategy has received relatively little attention to date: policy-focused discourses that exploit contemporary discussions on what action should be taken, how fast, who bears responsibility and where costs and benefits should be allocated. […] We call these ‘climate delay’ discourses, since they often lead to deadlock or a sense that there are intractable obstacles to taking action. — Lamb, W., et al., Global Sustainability, 2020
By selectively focusing information operations against climate actions on exploiting contemporary political discussions, information combatants from the emission industries aim to throw sand in the gears of democratic decision making, halt democratic processes to implement climate actions and manipulate people to not participate in climate solutions… all for the ‘noble’ goal of keeping their revenue streams running a bit longer. Every extra day of delay brings billions in profits, and if there is a war driving oil and gas prices up? Jackpot! So spending a few hundred million on dedicated anti-science think tanks publishing misleading books, fake universities targeting children with climate misinformation, pay-to-engage services, or bot networks is really pennies on the dollar to their businesses.
I recommend you read the above report because it is important and well presented.
How these popular climate-denial networks interact with other rightwing political ideologies to create self-sustaining alternative realities we outlined already in Chapter 2. Attention is power. Being the first or loudest, or having the most engaging content, goes a long way to convince people that climate change is a globalist plot, especially when they have never heard the actual scientific evidence supporting what climate scientists claim.
Infusing undeclared amounts of often dark money to finance influencers, entities, and platforms to amplify narratives that align with your business interests is the easiest and most straightforward way to manipulate public discourse on these online platforms where people spend their time. That is what they were built for. Take PragerU, an advocacy group that markets itself as ‘university’ (despite not being an academic institution, granting no diplomas and holding no classes) and posts well-produced ‘lectures’ (misleading content & straight propaganda) on youtube.
PragerU’s online platform was launched in part through investment from fracking billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks, and regularly platforms other key players in this network such as Bjorn Lomborg, Patrick Moore, Dinesh D’Souza and Alex Epstein. According to their main website, PragerU content has garnered over 5 billion views with 4 million average views daily. It also claims that 60% of its YouTube audience are under 35 and 70% of them’ changed their mind on at least one issue’ after viewing PragerU content. — King J. et al., Institute for strategic dialogue, 2022
Part of the popular appeal of PragerU comes not from just climate misinformation, but from targeting their information products to politically conservative audiences (their niche market) by frequently playing on religious themes, immigration fears, or day-to-day political issues. Pretty odd for a supposedly ‘educational’ channel. And yet, PragerU is just one node in a network of well-financed influence operations.
Technically, CO2-emitting industries are not only within their rights, they are encouraged by social media platforms to just do some smooth behavioral advertising for their climate-destroying causes, and gee, if that happens to distort the public’s perception of scientific reality, unfortunate.
The truly remarkable part about all of this is how mundane and old these tactics are.
Businesses using disinformation playbook tactics against scientific experts to squash public health or safety is well documented going back to at least the 1950s (just read about the tactics against scientists coming from the tobacco industry). We, as a society, are none the wiser in spotting these tactics or discarding arguments that go against the scientific consensus and we have to do better.
There is however one notable difference compared to the past: Undermining public perception of the scientific consensus has become easier and more effective with information operations. These inauthentic entities and actors get paid to create engaging meme content that then again gets paid for to be made viral. Once attention was captured, once a topic is up there, an ecosystem of winner-takes-all dynamics makes sure that climate contrarians (paid or self-made!) with the hottest takes and best USP get rewarded mightily for selling their anti-science contrarianism to the masses, consequences be damned. Forever, if need be.
Our current information architecture makes resolution impossible and conflicts perpetual, because conflict is engaging.
In the past, it took the CO2-emitting industries decades of hard work, hundreds of millions of dollars, sophisticated rightwing influence networks, political lobbying, and every trick from the disinformation book to barely manage to create a legislation-blocking minority (the GOP) to protect their interests against the scientific consensus on climate change in the US. The US is an important country, but still just one country.
Compare this to the mostly low-effort, bungled-together anti-vaccine grift that swept over the world recently, turning from multiple niche movements and actors to a disinformation behemoth in less than two years. A behemoth that is now kicking the scientific consensus aside like an old can of garbage, demonizing vaccines, institutions, and scientists (& hospitals, pharmacies, doctors, and nurses) during a life-threatening pandemic of all times. This behemoth is currently destroying public health progress made over decades, and we will see more pandemics of already defeated diseases make their return to our society because of it.
My absolute disdain for anti-vax influencers is likely no secret to anyone who has seen my Twitter feed. Given the attention a Joe Rogan, Bret Weinstein, RFK junior or all the other anti-science shysters (not linking to their misleading claims, if you are truly unaware, listen to this entertaining and educational decoding podcast) attract, is it really a surprise that the public is increasingly skeptical of or gaslighted about scientific authority on a scientific question such as vaccine safety?
Microtargeted influence operations aimed at dismantling scientific authority are of course not a thing of the past either. Using already existing anti-scientific networks build up from rightwing climate disinformation, pivoting the manipulative message from climate policy to public health sabotage is quite easy in today’s world.
Let’s say you are someone from the owner class (yep, smuggling in Marxist theory words here, seems only appropriate given the topic) who would not like to shut down his factories while still paying workers, just because of a stupid pandemic? What if you are not okay with any % drop in profits, even if it means a % drop in life? What can you do to make the public see eye to eye with your way? I don’t know, but maybe it would look like some pseudo-scientific ‘let it rip’ policy with a grandiose name or something.
The Great Barrington Declaration was a ‘public health’ *cough* proposal to not do anything against the spread of SARS-CoV-2, a misinformed, stupid, and anti-scientific idea that somehow *wink wink* found its way into public discourse and policy (Zenone M. et al., PLOS Global Public Health, 2022).
Lockdowns were tough, the pandemic sucked and many things did not go as well as we hoped. We all understand that. However, the idea that not doing anything, not even masks or distancing as GBD advocates suggest, would have been actually better is false,. For example, studies showed that lockdown measures saved millions of lives in 11 EU countries alone (Berry CR., et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 2021). Cost-benefits of different NPIs, including lockdown measures, are not always easy to quantify, but the idea that outcomes would not have gotten much worse following the GBD policy is not based on any evidence and vehemently contradicted by domain experts (Lewis Dyanis, Nature News & Views, 2022).
The fact that the same right-wing network that promotes anti-scientific inaction on climate measures also promotes anti-scientific inaction on public health measures, with often the same tactics and talking points, should give the public some pause though, if only they were aware of the shady asymmetric actors behind it.
Online misinformation against scientific consensus is a critical determinant of perpetuating unnecessary human loss and suffering, and I do wonder:
Are democratic citizens really on board with throwing out science so that a fraction of influencers and businesses can profit mightily?
My guess is no, but again, in my experience, scientific institutions have a very small megaphone to make their concerns heard or compete for attention in the current information environment.
Do you want to know what else can go wrong when science and institutions take a back seat in societal sense-making?
You guessed it, we’ve finally arrived at one of my pet peeves:
Epistemic confrontation through strategic weaponization of conspiratorial thinking
Conspiracy theories are ubiquitous on social media platforms, it is almost a cliché at this point, but scientifically, it is actually not entirely obvious why.
For example, some research suggests that conspiracy theories are knowingly shared by individuals for social motifs, like building connections and social status (Ren ZB. et al., researchgate, 2021), so their prevalence on social media platforms is somewhat expected.
It is noticeable how conspiratorial audiences develop strong parasocial relationships with conspiratorial influencers, not unlike cult members with their gurus. Many cognitive psychologists and anthropologists have a lot more to say about how crowdsourced misinformation plays into the dynamics and mechanisms of cults than I ever could, and how easy it is for anybody to fall for them. (Do check out the decoding-the-gurus podcast where two professors do a brilliant and entertaining job of tackling the worst offenders!)
However, a recent study also indicates the arrival or use of social media did not change the prevalence of conspiratorial beliefs over time (Uscinski J. et al., PLOS One, 2022). Others have noted that conspiracy theories are nothing new and have been with us for a long time (Prooijen JW & Douglas KM, Memory Studies, 2017). What is maybe less known is the unexpectedly large percentage of any citizenry has a predisposition to conspiratorial ideation (i.e a conspiracy mentality) (Uscinski J. et al., PLOS One, 2022).
Contrary to our intuition about a human trait so prevalent, conspiracy mentality is not evenly spread between left-or-right leaning political parties, but rather reflective of extremism and authoritarianism of the respective political grouping, and currently most authoritarian parties are politically on the right (Imhoff R. et al., Nature Human Behavior, 2022)
Taken together, supporters of political parties that are judged as extreme on either end of the political spectrum in general terms have increased conspiracy mentality. Focusing on the position of parties on the dimension of democratic values and freedom, the link with conspiracy mentality is linear, with higher conspiracy mentality among supporters of authoritarian right-wing parties. Thus, supporters of extreme right-wing parties seem to have a consistently higher conspiracy mentality, whereas the same only counts for extreme left-wing parties of a more authoritarian makeup and with less focus on ecological and liberal values.- Imhoff R. et al., Nature Human Behavior, 2022
But if conspiracy theories and psychological attachment to gurus/leaders have been around forever, when extreme & authoritarian parties are equally susceptible and social media did not change the overall prevalence of conspiratorial ideation, why are we experiencing such a dramatic impact of conspiracy theories over our lives today?
Well, part of the answer might lie with information combatants.
Political leaders and movements can use conspiracy theories to gain power, and this is not unique to the US by any means, as we have seen for example with the Philippines, but we could also talk about Poland, Italy, and Hungary, or Myanmar, Nigeria, and Brazil, and many other nations currently in democratic decline. Making use of conspiracy theories is one of the oldest tricks in the book that authoritarian leaders and dictators use to attack opponents, galvanize followers, shift blame and responsibility, and undermine institutions that threaten their power (Ren ZB et al., Curr. Opin. Psychol., 2022). Most politicians who share conspiracy theories are usually regarded as less trustworthy, but certain political actors can create the authentic impression of an ‘outsider’ capable of changing the system (Green R. et al., Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2022). Some experiments suggest that lying demagogues appeal ‘authentic’ to people who perceive the current system as unjust or illegitimate (Hahl O. et al., American Sociological Review, 2018).
[…] conspiracy beliefs are correlated with alienation from the political system and anomie — a feeling of personal unrest and lack of understanding of the social world. — Douglas KM. et al., Political Psychology, 2019
Interestingly, conspiracy theories in themselves might present another asymmetry in what type of political actors (spoiler: it is not the friendly, normal ones) can make full use of them to further their strategic aims. Demagogues have a clear incentive and an advantage when they can weaponize available grievance, hate or fear narratives, but their political opponents can not.
So when we understand information spheres also as battle spaces, certain actors weaponizing crowd-sourced conspiracy theories for strategic aims is like using available terrain advantage for battle advantage. A broken info sphere makes their influence operations more effective and likely to succeed.
Another way to phrase it:
Conspiracy theories are crowd-sourced information operations in wait to be weaponized by certain politicians.
Leaders often spread conspiracy theories to direct the attention, emotion, and energy of followers toward a common enemy who threatens their interests, thereby galvanizing followers. Toward this end, many conspiracy theories depict a nefarious perpetrator engaging in covert activities to harm the welfare of followers. — Ren ZB et al., Curr. Opin. Psychol., 2022
While autocratic movements might arise spontaneously, the vast majority of autocratic political movements today have been flying under the radar of democratic societies for a long time. Take Italy’s (prospective) new prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, a neo-fascist, grievance populist and head of Mussolini’s successor party, a party who after decades at the margins of society, found itself profiting from the current forces favoring autocrats. In Meloni’s case, in the form of a softer-looking strongwoman and demagogue with a ethnochristian-patriotic sentiment towards Italy and a hateful, conspiratorial message against the ‘establishment’, ‘elites’, and immigrants. This is not to single Italy out, far-right parties all over Europe have been strengthened by playing exactly the same messages.
In many places around the world, we are currently observing targeted online mass mobilization around shared conspiratorial narratives, either shaping available conspiracy theories towards political ends or manufacturing new conspiracies that tap into conspiratorial audiences for a strategic purpose.
Nowhere does this conspiratorial mass mobilization seem more visceral and impactful than in the US, so we will have to look a bit under the hood of what is going on there.
Has anybody noticed something weird going on in the US?
January 6th and Trump’s election steal myth, anti-vax conspiracy fantasies, lableak fearmongering, QAnon, white genocide, and moral panics about immigrant caravans or LGBTQ minorities; many of the most hateful and conspiratorial narratives seem to aggregate around a political party, leader, and ideology. Prima facie, it is odd to see such a diverse set of conspiratorial ideas neatly align with a large segment of the population that happens to vote for the same political party under the whip of an autocratic demagogue. Even before the weird cult-like parasocial worshipping of this demagogue, this is a weird and dangerous situation.
Donald Trump was always a quite limited character with thinly veiled autocratic and anti-democratic tendencies, his ascent to political power very much a harbinger of democratic decline as well as a reflection of damage already suffered. Not to spend any more words than necessary on his central role, his actions and tactics were very much boilerplate autocratic and pretty commonplace all over the anti-democratic world.
Politicians who adopt conspiratorial strategies find this to be an especially effective tactic if their own claim to power is illegitimate or controversial. Moreover, since the exposure to conspiracy theories reduces followers’ confidence in democratic institutions, leaders may even mobilize followers to engage in violent actions that further undermine these institutions (e.g., disputing an election defeat by initiating riots or mobilizing military forces). — Ren ZB et al., Curr. Opin. Psychol., 2022
Many journalists and academics have written elegantly about the roots and impact of the January 6th insurrection, Qanon, and all the other anti-democratic conspiracy theories currently advanced by US political actors. It is easy to get lost in these details, so again, I just want to focus on and highlight some of the larger systemic patterns.
An important feature of weaponizing conspiratorial thinking in the information age has been technological targeting. As we have mentioned in our introduction, there are many sociological, psychological, and cognitive characteristics that are associated with believing and sharing misinformation, including conspiracy theories (Uscinski, J. E et al, HKS misinformation review, 2020 , Bruns H. et al., Publications Office of the European Union, 2022).
If social media does anything well, it is good at segmenting the population of users based on demographic, behavioral, or engagement characteristics.
One striking characteristic of being prone to conspiratorial ideation is the fact it does not stop at any specific conspiracy; usually, the best predictor for believing in a specific conspiracy is already believing in other unrelated conspiracies (Goreis A. & Voracek M, Front. Psychol., 2019).
The best predictor of believing in a conspiracy theory? Already believing in others.
That is a simple enough pattern to figure out for example by the ranking algorithms on youtube that drive people down rabbit holes of ever more extreme conspiracies about a topic. Take ‘crisis actor’ content:
[…] YouTube’s role in spreading this “crisis actor” content and hosting thousands of false videos is akin to a parasitic relationship with the public. This genre of videos is especially troublesome, since the content has targeted (individual) effects as well as the potential to trigger mass public reactions.
The view count for 50 of the top mass shooting-related conspiracy videos is around 50 million. Not every single video overlaps directly with conspiracy-related subjects, but it’s worth pointing out that these 8842 videos have registered almost four billion (3,956,454,363) views. — Albright J., medium, 2018
Four billion views and endless videos about a baseless conspiracy theory are pretty crazy. If you have been sleeping behind the moon, these dynamics are why convicted conspiracy influencer and liar Alex Jones profited heavily while his promotion of ‘crisis actor’ conspiracy fantasies put a target on the back of grieving parents who lost their children. And we all lost a bit of our humanity. Alex Jones is of course a political influencer furthering right-wing ideology on all kinds of issues, not only gun legislation. But the reason why he could reach so many audiences has everything to do with ranking algorithms pushing people in his direction, and the financial reward for influencers who create outrageous and engaging content that grabs attention, irrespective of truth, accuracy, context or value. This is one way to weaponize the conspiratorial predisposition of people for political aims.
The other way how conspiracy theories can be weaponized by political actors is of course via influence operations. Oh sorry, that is just called political campaigning now, at least when you are part of the MAGA movement. All political campaigns of recent times, including Trump’s, made heavy use of anti-democratic microtargeting to find voters susceptible to their message, and when your message is a conspiracy theory like the “birtherism” myth, well guess what type of audiences the microtargeting algorithms will deliver to you?
If you have a Custom List of three hundred thousand people, […] you can use Lookalike Audiences to find another three hundred thousand Facebook users with attributes similar to those in the first group. One of the most difficult tasks of a political campaign — distinguishing likely supporters from the undifferentiated mass of the American electorate — can now be accomplished instantly through artificial intelligence. — Brad Parscale, Trump’s 2016 social media campaign manager, profiled in The New Yorker
That is preparing for mass mobilization. The best predictor of believing a conspiracy theory is already believing in others. Today, we understand much better what actually happened, and what is still going on. Right-wing US politicians have been playing hard into the power of conspiracy theories to mobilize voters.
While unethical and dangerous, it is somewhat expected from an electorate and ruthless party who feels their current grip on power is threatened, potentially permanently, unless they subvert democracy to remain in power.
Systems such as open elections and the free press can safeguard democracy by illuminating corrupt behavior and ensuring the peaceful transition of power. Leaders may use conspiracy theories to undermine the credibility, legitimacy, and authority of these institutions, however, if they threaten their power.- Ren ZB et al., Curr. Opin. Psychol., 2022
The next steps are also somewhat predictable, no matter if Qanon, January 6th, or ‘democrats are groomers’ conspiracy fantasies, we should by now have a good intuition of where things are going. Very much as with the anti-vax behemoth, climate denial, or anything about Covid, once an emotionally engaging narrative (and what is better than fear, anger, and hate directed at a scapegoat, right?) is brought to the peak of the attention economy (platformed by let’s say a former president, let’s say), it is very hard to put the conspiracy demons back in the box.
Even worse, the ‘winner takes all’ dynamics of our attention economy will make sure that an array of subservient content for the conspiracy theory will be created by manipulative information combatants and persuasive influencers.
Those asymmetric actors will mainstream, justify, normalize and expand upon any conspiratorial narrative that reaches a wider audience.
This dynamic is very much desired by those politicians who can abuse the conspiracy theories they set into the world, or promoted to the front pages. They will use the asymmetric advantage our epistemic crisis provides to them, for example by utilizing conspiratorial talking points to keep attacking their political enemies, often even intimidating them out of public conversations by exposing them to harassment, doxxing and stochastic terrorism from whipped up radicalized supporters. They might abuse the power of the state to do show trials and witch hunts to boost their profile, as we observe for example by Senator Rand Paul’s attacks on Anthony Fauci. By now, the keen observer will have seen this dynamic in action already multiple times, from the ever-expanding lableak conspiracies to the January 6th gaslight attempt to rewrite history. Once attention has been captured by a conspiratorial narrative, politicians can use it (almost casually) for their personal aims, even plain obvious campaign ads.
The systemic effect of conspiratorial political movements and it’s associated dehumanization of political opponents in the same larger network is corrosion and disintegration, a falling apart of the shared whole system, leading to disarray, dysfunction and chaos. Preconditions for civil war between the remaining components of the old system and the alternative dominance networks currently being build. If the US will still be a democracy after this conflict is anybody’s guess.
But it does not have to come this far. The future is not deterministic and there is a lot of systemic immunity building up, in the US and democratic societies elsewhere, against the asymmetric forces, actors and behaviors trying to reshape the world in their image.
Democratic societies can still find a new stable equilibrium in the technological age.
The next chapter will offer some solutions to the epistemic crisis, but before we can go there, we have one more example to talk about. How bad it can really get.
Creating epistemic nihilism to facilitate war
How could I not talk about Russia?
Decades of asymmetric misinformation warfare have contributed to gradually shaping the Russian nation and its people of 150 million to become cynical, disengaged, or ignorant enough to allow a kleptocratic megalomaniac in power to usher in a new dark age of imperialist war, slaughter, and nuclear escalation.
In many ways, current Russian circumstances are the product of many of the asymmetric forces and actors we talked about, just driven to extreme and in action for a long time. Today, the Russian society serve as the tragic example of what can happen to a citizenry where epistemic crisis gave way to epistemic nihilism.
But let’s start de-tangling the Russian system best we can by outlining some themes. The Russian population has suffered an assault on their epistemology long before social media systems were even conceived, and this came not out of nowhere.
In complex systems, understanding initial conditions is critical to describe system behavior, and while it is not always easy to pick where to start, maybe the previous system state before transition to the current one can be helpful. So we have to talk about the Soviet Union before talking about post-Soviet Russia. From Stalinist regime to final collapse of the Soviet Union, Russians had been living in a state of fear, terror and uncertainty, threatened by random purges, gulags, economic crises and paranoid leaders, and Putin is very much product and continuation of that heritage.
Conspiracy theories became a principal element of Russian society thinking twenty years ago as a reaction to the sudden and inexplicable collapse of the Soviet Union. — Shinar Chaim, SSRN, 2016
However, there was a short period of hope after the collapse of the Soviet Empire that democratic reformers will manage to secure the stability of a young democracy, which ultimately failed (McFaul M., Journal of Democracy, 2021), not in small part by the economic havoc caused by reckless privatization (‘shock therapy’) on behest of dubious American economists like Jeffrey Sachs, an autocratic power player who nowadays turned full Putin apologist, Uighur genocide denier and lableak conspiracy theorist. But I digress…
Nearly all the post-Soviet states suffered deep and prolonged recessions after shock therapy, with poverty increasing more than tenfold.
Point is, millions of deaths of despair after the system collapse and instability, while simultaneously causing redistribution of wealth to a kleptocratic oligarchic elite, would certainly foster resentment and desire for a strongman who can put the Soviet empire back together. Enter Putin.
In the name of this stability, he has consolidated power in his own person in an astounding way. In his first two terms, from 2000 to 2008, he brought down the oligarchs, thereby regaining total control of the news media and orchestrating the breakup of Yukos, the giant oil company (and jailing its chief executive, Mikhail Khodorkovsky), which returned two important power sources to the state. His loyal friends now run most of Russia’s important industries. Unfettered democracy also pointed the way to chaos, and so he developed something his advisers called “managed democracy,” providing only the semblance of popular will. Opposition parties were neutered, and Russians lost the ability to vote in direct elections for local or regional governments. — Steven Lee Myers, “The New Tsar, The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin”, 2015
With Putin’s regime came a war on critical media. Since then, many books have been written about the Kremlin’s weaponization and utilization of conspiracy theories (see e.g books from Yablokov, Borenstein, or Abrams) as part of their “active measures” for political influence operations against their own people as well as other nations. These range from the basics of exerting control over media companies, even the newly formed tech giant Yandex (a google competitor who got transformed into a propaganda tool), to an array of sophisticated covert information operations like “tainted leaks” (Hulcoop A. et al., Citizen Lab Research report, 2017) to thwart political enemies. The details are often bizzare and dystopian. The effect of the sum total of this assault on the media infrastructure in Russia can be understood as “digital repression” (Earl J. et al., Science Advances, 2022). And the effects are chilling.
Many Russians today live with a learned cynicism towards the concept of obtainable truth, swallowing up conspiratorial talking points delivered by syncophantic state media, playing on the same few emotional themes of fear, doubt, uncertainty and patriotism (to the pain of the remaining independent journalists in Putin’s Russia who have not been bought, locked, up or killed). The average Russian believes that everybody and everything is lying to them, that nothing and nobody can be trusted, and that no matter who is in power, nothing will make a difference (Skillen D., Post-Truth and normalized lies in Russia, 2019).
“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.” — Hannah Arendt, political theorist, philosopher and holocaust survivor
This systemic nihilism towards obtainable truth and subsequent apathy to politics seems like a key pillar of Putin’s grip over Russia, but then again, I do not have any special expertise on offer, and in complex systems, causal mechanisms are not linear or independent. Many Russia experts however noted the role of sedative effect of nihilism in the Russian society.
Although Russia is fascist at the top, it is not fascist through and through. […] Putin’s regime functions not by mobilizing society with the help of a single grand vision, as fascist Germany and Italy did, but by demobilizing individuals, assuring them that there are no certainties and no institutions that can be trusted. This habit of demobilization has been a problem for Russian leaders during the war in Ukraine because they have educated their citizens to watch television rather than take up arms. Even so, the nihilism that undergirds demobilization poses a direct threat to democracy.- Timothy Snyder, foreign affairs, 2022
Epistemic nihilism does offer an explanation why so many Russians looked the other way, ignored, or were ready to swallow up propaganda about the reasons for the “special military operation” that would see Russia invade Ukraine, a nation where many of their brothers, sisters, cousins, and relatives lived. Why even months into the war, they supported Putin’s war.
Where were the mass protests, civil disobedience, and Russians fleeing the country at the start of the war?
Epistemic nihilism is of course not a sustainable condition when the reality of the war comes crashing in, for example in the form of mass mobilization Russians cannot ignore any longer because it is their children, not just minorities, who are drafted to be cannon fodder. Not that the reality on the frontline has been any less sobering to the soldiers misled about their mission.
That the real reason for the invasion has been a democratic transition of Ukraine that threatened the political legitimacy and power of the Putin regime is barely worth mentioning, and we will refrain from sweeping declarations about history that has not yet been written. Just support Ukraine however you can.
There is just one last point I want to make.
Putin’s regime has also acted to subvert democracies all around the world (as did other regimes, information warfare is a global phenomenon with many combatants), and this is an illustrative example of how complex systems interact with each other, forming their own meta-dynamics. What impact did covert information operations from Russia have on US media? What about Russia’s financing of far-right European parties (Futàk-Campbell, Atlantisch Perspectief, 2020)? Would they have made the political gains they did if Russia were a democracy? What about Brexit? How can we exclude the possibility that the sum total of the countless information operations coming from asymmetric actors actually influenced, accelerated or even triggered event cascades leading to the democratic backsliding we observe around the world?
In complex systems, small inputs can have disproportional output.
Intentionally or not, hateful narratives seem to be tinder in a complex world at odds with its own technological disruptions.
The gift of Russian propagandists has been to take things apart, to peel away the layers of the onion until nothing is left but the tears of others and their own cynical laughter. — Timothy Snyder, foreign affairs, 2022
But that complex system’s coin might have two sides too. While democratic decay in some nations might empower democratic backsliding in others, the fight for democracy in one nation might inspire others to defend the democracy they have too. That is my hope at least.
If only we manage to find the epistemic clarity to understand the reality of our circumstances, preferably before our planet burns or we get drafted into war too…
Conclusion Chapter 3:
The technological disruption of our information infrastructure has resulted in an assault on science, education, journalism, and more generally the notion of obtainable truth.
Our epistemic crisis is a systemic weakness that favors the powerful in multiple ways to the detriment of the public, democracy and the planet, as this chapter has painfully documented.
Democracies might not survive the assault from asymmetric forces of influence in our information age, and I am certainly not alone in my worries:
Right now, the huge potential of technology to advance our societies has been undermined by the business model and design of the dominant online platforms. But we remind all those in power that true human progress comes from harnessing technology to advance rights and freedoms for all, not sacrificing them for the wealth and power of a few.
We urge rights-respecting democracies to wake up to the existential threat of information ecosystems being distorted by a Big Tech business model fixated on harvesting people’s data and attention. — Maria Ressa & Dmitry Muratov, 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureates, calling for pro-democracy action against big tech
It is important to understand that technological change has certainly disrupted the “societal information industry”, but technology is not deterministic, nor is technology the sole driving factor (complex systems, remember?!) in upholding our currently broken info sphere.
Many powerful forces or newly empowered actors, from autocratic states to capitalist platforms and businesses, all the way down to influencers, amplification dynamics, and our own lazy cognitive biases, try their hardest to entrench the current state of affairs in an unprecedented power grab for our attention and our beliefs, and with it, our capability for self-determination.
It is an all-out assault on our democratic values and worldview, yet every day, democratic citizens find themselves getting pushed, pulled, or sucked in more and more by fragmented realities full of half-truths, lies and conspiracy theories, building walls of conflict along arbitrary lines against each other while asymmetric actors make strategic gains against the public good. We have our attention stolen and our beliefs manipulated by system dynamics and emergent phenomena we are part of but don’t fully understand. We have reached a point of epistemic crisis where the public good is sabotaged by accident and Machiavellian interests, where large amounts of citizens are role-playing in hateful fantasy realities made up by self-serving political actors, sometimes driven into epistemic nihilism and cynicism to the extent where a Russian populace discovers itself willing to shed the blood of a former brother at the behest of an imperialist madman, under the outrageous but profitable applause of too many western influencers and sympathizers. Is this really the authentic will of free, democratic citizens?
We are witnessing the descent into a darker future that is less egalitarian and less democratic, and that leaves us less capable to take agency over our own lives and shape the systems we are part of. This is neither right nor sustainable. It will lead to continued humanitarian, ecological, and environmental catastrophes, and eventual system collapse.
Is there really no way out of this gradually self-fulfilling misery course we have charted?
Read next: Chapter 4: Science as a candle in the dark