Ep. 131: Information warfare, narrative-building: that kind of cyberwarfare
Manufacturing consent happens at warp speed with Big Tech
A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com here.
One of the intriguing facts about Western media is their knack of “manufacturing consent”, in the words of linguist and activist Noam Chomsky. The mass media are not a "neutral" source of news, but rather an ideological apparatus that reflects and propagates the views of powerful interests. They propagandize the populace in favor of the interests of the privileged classes and the state power they represent by relying on market forces, internalized assumptions (i.e. gaslighting), and self-censorship.
If all else fails, there is, of course, coercion.
Nowhere has this been more visible than in the deft U-turns taken by the likes of the New York Times, when they turn on a dime, so to speak, and convert an erstwhile friend into a foe practically overnight. This happened, for example, with Panama’s Manuel Noriega and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. The narrative changed, and they were turned into instant objects of hatred. It appears the elites ceased to see them as valuable.
The same thing happened to Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh. She had long been lionized as a role-model, a woman Asian leader elected by a popular vote, leading her country to prosperity. But when she allegedly rejected some demands from an unnamed Western country, she was promptly morphed into a ‘dictator’ and toppled in what looks suspiciously like a planned regime-change operation.
It works the other way, too. Kamala Harris who was, until a couple of weeks ago, projected as a bit of an embarrassment, has suddenly been anointed as the Woman Who Would Be POTUS. I am betting she will win the popular vote.
Thus what has changed in the recent past is not the motive, but the means. With Big Tech, media can create a narrative at warp speed, and anybody who does not toe the line is summarily dismissed, turned into a non-person and erased, thrown down a memory-hole. A current example is Richard Dawkins, a famous evolutionary biologist and atheist, who found his Facebook account deleted because he objected to an XY chromosome Algerian boxer competing in the Olympics as a woman. Dawkins, in a sense, has ceased to exist. Unpersoned.
Youtube, Twitter, Google, Wikipedia, Instagram, etc. are wonderful tools for mass-brainwashing. Wikipedia for example has shadowy ‘editors’ who may be, and often demonstrably are, highly biased and/or on the payroll of certain forces. They have a singularly high ability to create narratives. By the miracle of ‘truth by repeated assertion’, their fabrications eventually become the accepted truth. Furthermore, the content of Wikipedia, Google, Facebook etc becomes the training data for generativeAI, and unbeknownst to us, turns into the unquestionable Truth.
A recent article by Ashley Rindsberg, “How the Regime Captured Wikipedia”, talks about how the online encyclopedia pivoted from a decentralized knowledge source into a ‘top-down social activism and advocacy machine’. In other words, uber-woke. This is sort of well-known, but what was startling was the role that Google (former motto “Don’t be Evil”) played in both funding Wikipedia and making it the default source of ‘knowledge’ on the Web.
The bottom line is that epistemology is being weaponized and manipulated. Indians are avid consumers of the pabulum that social media and Large Language Models spew out. There is only one, drastic, solution: emulate the Great Chinese Firewall and keep Western Big Tech out, and feverishly build1 indigenous substitutes. Otherwise the narrative will consume India.
There is an interesting side issue as well. Large Language Models are running out of data to vacuum up. It turns out that they turn into gibbering idiots when this happens, and they are forced to, as it were, eat their own dog food, by consuming synthetic data. They hallucinate at scale. The trick is to find virgin sources of knowledge, so to speak, and lo! there are Indic Knowledge Systems to plunder! Digestion, yet again.
Addendum 1: A current example of NYT style ‘journalism’. Narrative rules!
Addendum 2: Right in front of our eyes, there’s a new narrative being built by Hindenburg Research: that the SEBI Chair is corrupt and was compromised by obscure links to Adani:
.This is a motivated attack, which probably lacks merit, but succeeds in sowing the seeds of distrust. Iago, anyone? Their previous ‘report’ was nonsense, too, as I said at the time:
Aug 10th, 2024 updated Aug 11th
India has the technical skills, but has not proven it has the managerial skills or the Patient Capital to achieve success. The Kaveri engine is a sad example.