disinformation – Searching Out Loud

Plausible Disinformation Belief

It’s no longer the personal story of the hero but the political reality of the all-powerful where the fantasy life of today’s escapism is scripted, cast, and streamed. Movie fantasy? Meet video game.

What Happens When The Escapists Are Greeted As Liberators?

Inside the House chamber, lawmakers, staff aides and journalists were told that tear gas had been deployed and to grab an emergency hood from under his or her chair. Credit: Andrew Harnik/Associated Press

Prolog

Much has been said about America’s mud wrestling with media disinformation and political dysfunction. Much has been debated about the competing versions of what America stands for and what she stands against. This clash of narratives is nothing new. It comes straight from central casting and sucks your news feed dry.

What is new is a switcheroo between two competing versions of how Americans view themselves through the social histories that form of our American identity.

One is the ideal of the American dream. The other we’ll call the American hallucination. The willful removal of context from the telling of dark, American stories. Those are tales where backwards thinking slips out the back door. Casting retroactive judgments on moving pieces of the human chessboard is not just some parlor game. It’s what’s on the news menu. It’s the future of entertainment.

Retrofitting a movie ending around changing attitudes is one way to explain the wholesale rejection of the moral codes at work guiding their time-appropriate behaviors. Another is to say this is what happens to a culture that witnessed the death of the American dream. On our watch die she did. We grew up in the promise of an American dream that was within potential reach. Of which reachers? That would be the upwardly mobile as-in … anyone with modest means and slightly immodest ambitions. We all knew the dream was both imagined, and as real as our devotion to it.

Yes, it was a marketing ploy. Not everyone would rise accordingly. And yet, shouldering those hopes would nurture our stamina. We will endure this recession. We will break out of this bust cycle. We’ll reach the point where it’s our money that’s being borrowed. The ultimate payback! Such were the trailers for the American dream that fired our young, professional imaginations. A generation later, that hope has dimmed if not extinguished for millennials gaping at mountains of student loan debt. Didn’t we get ourselves through school? Wrong question to be asking, Buddy.

They don’t root for the little guy because they know first-hand their chances of taking on Goliath or selling him their start-up is nil. Instead they’ve escaped to a world where the entire power structure is questioned. The elites and the brokers and the deciders are all accountable for the corruptions wrought by their abuse of this power.

It’s a power they neither earned nor amassed but simply inherited, thus bypassing any of the accountability associated with traditional channels of leadership and trust through public dialog. It’s no longer the personal story of the hero but the political reality of the all-powerful where the fantasy life of today’s escapism is scripted, cast, and streamed. Movie fantasy. Meet video game.

Smell Testing Standards

Melanie Griffith as Tess McGill on her morning commute.

Like you, my wife and I watch our share of streaming escapism. Like you, sometimes we’re Googling while we watch to determine empirical fact from artistic license. Recently we traveled back to our formative professional adult times and streamed the movie Working Girl (1988) starring Melanie Griffith, Harrison Ford, and Sigourney Weaver.

If your post boomer curiosity is unaroused, I guarantee there’s no spoilers worthy of your alerting. The implausible resolution of a lurching plot twist rests on a wobbly bed of screwball comedy formulas. These wacky, zany, turns of narrative have long since thinned out on the expired belief they could pass the smell test. There were three bands of smell test results:

- - Sweet success (first and foremost): that an audience could invest its betting money in a series of improbable events coming true.
  - Scent of a popular B movie (next and likeliest): that the guy gets the girl (or in this case) the girl gets the gig and that conviction could lift the emotional prospects of its audiences.
  - Cheap cologne grade (last and least): that the silver screen could suspend enough disbelief to make them forget their off-screen troubles. Sometimes for longer than the film. Imagine! Are your movie muscles still limber? Can you still go the distance?

The final elevator scene has more sleights of hand than a fire-eating juggler of vanishing card tricks. And yet the world surrounding that bank of corporate elevators is grounded in the same plausible backdrop that would greet any movie-goer on their commutes the following work day. The change that director Mike Nichols is foisting on us lives between the hearts and minds of a repentant but worthy protagonist. Melanie Griffith’s hometown character is in a double destiny reversal with her antagonist boss. A worldlier and coddled arch-rival played by Sigourney Weaver. Who do we root for? Nichols makes the decision for us.

Crowd Scenes of Today

Is It Safe to Go to the Movies? Tara Santora, Fatherly, September 14, 2020

In 2021’s collective mental landscape, snootiness is not only in. It’s the cost of even entering the one remaining form of advancement. Self-promotion is the last resort of scoundrels and ambitious claims on climbing today’s corporate, political, and cultural ladder. Our seething anger can’t be directed at the privileged few cutting the line of our promotion. We were never up for one in the first place. And we still have jobs. Even if it’s a full time job just figuring out how to hold the one we have. Besides, no one is especially interested in our inability to rise in station or settle a personal workplace score.

However, aiming our invective at the tribe who cut the line? Sublimating my shame with healthy dollops of contempt for the success I’ll never be? Now you’re talking. Permission to uncork, sir? It is the contagion that knows no flu season. Our addiction to indignation is transmitted via smart phone notifications. No surgical strike implied when the car drives over the curb. Nothing pedestrian about these protesters.

Wait! How did we get from the crowd scene shot in a lower Manhattan office lobby a generation ago to the white supremacist march on Charlottesville in 2017? What do our current political upheavals have to do with screwball comedies, cultural smell tests, or the aerosols dancing off our phone sceens?

- Everything, if you’re streaming wholesale retakes of historic tragedies like Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
- Plenty, if you’re rewinding to episode one of anything Ryan Murphy revisits on his $300 million tab from Netflix, or what Midge Maisel doles out to the knuckle-dragging GI Joe Schmoes in the smokey take-my-wife clubs .
- A whole new backdrop to the Cold War once the viewer inserts heroine Beth Harmon into the cardboard cut-outs of gobsmacked prodigy bros and inscrutable Russians.

Bridge Construction Ahead

The point is to guide the viewer’s lust for justice to the obliteration of the bullies who tormented us through the 20th Century. The bridge leading back there is a fabrication that bypasses victims, heroes, and all history books that stand-in for the psychopathic reality hosts that set civilization on its heels.

- Is a bridge back to the Twentieth Century the way to throw the cold water of reality on a Dorothy who mistakenly thought herself in Kansas …
  but that Kansas prohibited free and fair reproductive rights services?
- Is it a bridge back to the Minutemen when San Francisco schools throw Paul Revere on the tinder of so many Confederate flags because of his mistreatment of Indians?
- Is it a bridge back to the time when a white man’s country was his shining castle and everyone else new their respective roles and places? Who needs cancel culture when you can delete entire decades of coalition-building and consensus-making?

Does the retelling require the wholesale re-staging of our revisionism? A post racial past where open hearts and independent minds upstage inheritance, tribal rites, and skin tones?

Is that how social justice wins over individual liberty?

Is that how merit transcends birthright?

Are we sure we’ve persuaded our libertarian friends this is the way, past our open intolerance for one another?

And can 71 million Trump voters be fully culpable for their own alternative realities?

These are weighty deliberations for the most reasoned of actors and the most sensible of cultures. For the winner-take-all USA, it is a bridge too far for anyone expecting to meet solid ground upon its crossing.

2020 as Hindsight

In the screwball past, the audience could indulge in the implausible outcome, so long as the good guy was believable. Maybe a little more faith would enable us to fight the good fight long enough to prevail in our own reality series. But at least we had to power to change for the better.

That was the known quantity after the credits had rolled. Our current indulgence for these flights of historic fancy is the outcome of losing that faith. That expectation of a future we can have a hand in shaping, not just a present we’re preoccupied with enduring.

In the narrative, this was once centered on the change and growth of the protagonist. These days you don’t need to identify with the star. In fact if you stage an anti-hero your plot can beat up on the larger society without needing to identify with the star, as-in…

- I don’t condone Walter White’s crimes in defense of providing for his meth empire family
- I don’t sanction the use of waste removal consulting services for packing Tony Soprano’s adversaries in garbage bags
- I don’t approve of Cersai Lannister’s power grab as much as I respect her dealing of bargaining chips. Would I despise a man any less?

But I do indulge with imposing my 2020 hindsight on the 1970s world — the same painted cloth of unyielding circumstance that hung behind the characters of my coming of age. The idea of switching out the social norms was no more conceivable than redirecting the crowd scenes in Working Girl off lower Manhattan. And into the East River.

Reality departures don’t mean that the reality keepers own the landing rights of reality’s return. It means that we must change and grow past where our own despair pacifies our anger and appeals to the notion of running out so many clocks. That would be the ultimate fiction and the breaking in the arc of histories yet to be written.

Talk is cheap. But shouting is even cheaper. Especially when it drowns out the opposition — the expense of listening.

And the cultural war prop room never closes for business.

Keeping Your Nose Clean (Part Two): Calling Out the Disinformers

In our last dispatch: BS Detection in a World of Fake News and Real Threats. Defining the fundamental differences and mutual dependencies between misinformation and disinformation in a complex world flooded with sweeping assertions and unproven claims.

So how do we identify these forms of coercion? So much of our public space is occupied by the intention of persuaders to influence our behavior that we’re likelier to notice the absence of manipulation in our digital interactions than neutral actors whose only impartial goal is to put their information before us.

You know you’re on the receiving end of a disinformation campaign when at least 3 of the following conditions are met:

Passive Voice:  Using the passive voice to validate a  premise or conclusion defies  plausible explanation, i.e. "it's been  said" … "people are saying" …  "we're hearing more and more", etc.  
Implicit Agreements: Messengers bury the unstated agendas of their sponsors and underwriters. 
Inconvenient Complications: They're glossed over when they don't match, confirm, and ultimately undermine the campaign goal. 
Battle-ready Posturing: Building resistance is the point -- not the actual conflict in question. 
Reflexive Responses: Ignoring a late-breaking event with narrative-altering potential. 
Gaslighting: Framing  an adversary with the very accusation that accounts for the disinformer's own misdeeds, rogue behavior, and punitive actions.
Time Warps: Confusing the ordering of events separates fact patterns from the arguments they're supporting.  
Self-confirming Statements: "I feel. Therefore I'm right." 
Circular Reasoning: This is the echo chamber of ad nauseum talking points. 
Under the Radar: What's  not only explicit or implied but escaping the notice of the messenger  completely, a.k.a. their blindspots. The wider the unawareness, the more  likely we are under a disinformation attack.

Reclaiming Our Agency as Investigators

So how de we keep our bearings in this cloudiest of landscapes? How do we regain our footing when the stampeding crowds are oblivious to detachment and perspective-taking?

Self-awareness: Our first line of defense against a muddle of mis- and dis- is to recognize our own predilections and assumptions. Only by recognizing our personal biases and instincts can we assess our own blind spots. Where are we most persuadable by misleading actors? Where do we let our guards down? When can we be most easily played?

The middle ground: Once we move past the polar bear clinging to the melting glaciers, we need to cast outward to the motivations of the message sender. Is it merely self-interest that places us in the line of their motivational fire? Have they gone the extra step to be transparent: “don’t take my word…” or conversational, especially if the motivation is of mutual concern.

On one side of the fence, accusers tend to inflate actual damages. On the other, deniers tend to under-estimate the unintended consequences of their public statements. Investigators should factor these confirmation biases into their own findings.

Smell test: Finally, we need to calibrate our BS detector. What’s the end game here? How complete is their full disclosure. Are they running past some loose-ends still a long way from resolution? How do you know your sniffer is working?

Always brake for integrity. Someone share a compromising piece of info? At whose expense? Clear your spyglass and take in an extra breath of empirical deliberation if it “costs” the provider something in the process.
Don’t let a skeptical nature dismiss competing explanations. Persons of good faith may differ but an understanding of those differences demands this.
Resist the rush to judgement. We’ve all been burned. We’ve got our suspicions. But they can be harbored under the protection of your better judgement while keeping an open mind to opposable sets of facts, alternative interpretations, and unshared experiences.

There are other fog-clearing practices to clarify the incoming mis and determine the unstated intentions buried in the dis. The hard part is absorbing the force of the disinformer’s aggression. Surprise and haste are two calculations made by disinformation campaigners to engage our visceral impulses.

We need to rise above the insistence to react at the provocation before us. This is not an unresolved issue up for debate. This is a willful act to influence the persuadable and shutdown the opposition.

In such matters the independent voice falls outside of either camp. We need to consume the message without absorbing its uncritical acceptance of its claims on our own judgments. Only then can we tell what’s worthy of attention from the falsehoods planted to distract our focus. Our own goals are not to evolve into impartial fact-checkers but of independent investigators, swayable by evidence. Only when we come to know the motives of the disinformer can we petition for our own interests.

Keeping Your Nose Clean So Your Sniffer Can Tell When Things Don’t Smell Right

Part One: BS Detection in a World of Fake News and Real Threats.

Dissing the Missing

We were once inundated with information overload. These days an information fog shadows us as persistently as the dragnet of personal data collection. Its density thickens with a sprinkling of the toxic twin-headed vapor trails of mis- and dis-information. These droplets rain down on us from clouds of doubt that fall on cynical brains. Conditions for a mis- and dis- cloud burst are rife for conflicts. In the gloom of low visibility, they descend with no clear path to resolution and “no good options” for getting there.

Why, you say, do I need the twins? I’m plenty confused and doubtful in the density of my own fog. I’m already being pelted with incoming mis. Now you’re seeding the clouds with additional dis? Facts and opinions are now going bump in broadest daylight. Conspiracies are flourishing, egged on by persuasion-filtered innuendo. The evidence is sketchy. Context is disappearing, and now at the tail of the 2010s, we’ve truly lost our way. Took no effort at all!

Another snoop can’t retrace our own footsteps. But I do have some suggestions about how you can get yourself back on track — become your own service animal in the quest for an empirical truth. But first, what of the twins? How did they grow into this hydra-headed two-faced scrambler of once common understandings and shared values? Can they metastasize into three heads? Egads, let’s look at that one with our eyes drawn away from direct exposure.

First, let’s step back over the bridge to the land of national media networks held together with printing presses and TV antennas. There’s a dot on that distant landscape called fringe media and it’s a xeroxed pamphlet or poster fastened by a dangling staple or pushpin. The low rent district has some exclusive members. And no one’s in a hurry to join the club.

Mis and dis are no strangers to conspiracists, bloviators, and persuasion seekers, heels firmly dug in. In fact, they have a working arrangement of mutual benefit. Think of them as a tag team. But there’s no carrot or stick here. We’re not talking good/bad cop interrogations.

Misinformation is a side-show. A distraction. Tall tales and urban legends. Misinformation scrambles the signal, amplifies the flog, sows the initial seeds of doubt. If there is any collusion it’s that a blob of misinformation is disorienting. Two blobs can throw us into a state of confusion. Three blobs and we’re flying blind.

Up the Frustration Vent

Enter the clarity and purpose of deliberately misleading information. And don’t discount certainty. In the hands of true believer it may be a leap for some. But in the hands of the disinformer, it’s an intoxicant, providing an outlet for those festering anxieties and uncertainties induced by a thick trail of mis. Disinformation provides the escape valve:

- - Grab your pitchforks!
  - Head for the exits!

A successful disinformation campaign not only clears the air but fans the grievance flames so that their frustrations are channeled towards the object of their hostilities. Often, they come with a lesson or instruction to act on the proof offered by the disinformer. In the case of social media, actors like Russia’s Internet Research Agency posed as like-minded American activists. The goal was for hostile agents like IRA to amplify already polarizing conflicts. Each schism a brand-ready theme for opening a new disinformation campaign front.

Disinformation is the main act, planting those seeds deep enough so that the earlier misinforming falsehood is sprouting up as a clearly absorbed conclusion. One in which recipients may be encouraged to take sides but will just as likely desensitize the un-inflamed:

This is a political food fight. Both sides are talking over each other and no one’s speaking to me.

In our next dispatch:

Tag: disinformation