Loud Voices Carry on an Uncertain Network
Making sense of the “Post-truth” moment
From August to September 20th, 2016, groups of Americans gathered in small clusters on highway medians from Fort Myers to Pensacola Florida, clutching signs and each other's hands as they alternated chants of “lock her up!” and “Trump, Trump, Trump!” Drivers honked their horns in solidarity. Identical flash mobs organized by the Facebook group “Being Patriotic,” formed in seventeen U.S. cities -- sometimes nobody showed up, other times a dedicated political organizer would take responsibility for the Facebook post and rally supporters to the curb. The online group cajoled individuals with the now-familiar emotional, nativist language endemic to the alt-right. “Being Patriotic” described patriotism as prevention of “uncontrolled inflow of criminals [...][;] to see Old Glory flying free and proud, not burnt and torn down by vandals.” Above the text was a banner photo of a gloating Trump, two thumbs up, with a defeated Hillary superimposed behind prison bars. According to Bellingcat’s digital forensics journalist Aric Toler, the organizers and participants of the flash mobs may have been surprised to learn that “Being Patriotic” was part of a Russian psyops mission, executed remotely from a Moscow “troll factory.”
Post-truth was Oxford Dictionary's word of the year in 2016. For Oxford Dictionary, post-truth means “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Post-truth can also describe a general mood. In a rare moment of clarity, President Donald Trump offered a salient diagnosis of the moment last December. As he put it, “the whole age of computers has made it so nobody knows exactly what is going on.” He may be right.
The accepted wisdom in 2017, especially for left-leaning pundits, is to describe the manipulation of American voters in terms of Russian bravura, Trumpian collusion, or some combination of the two. In truth, these folk explanations of the predicament ascribe too much agency to cloak and dagger operations and not enough to the structure of the U.S. media environment and the dynamics of human behavior within it.
Media theorists like Evgeny Morozov suggest that the 2016 election, Brexit, fake news, and the growth of mainstream conspiracy thinking are a pattern in a larger post-truth moment: a moment allegedly fueled by digital capitalism. In Morozov’s own words, “post-truth is to digital capitalism what pollution is to fossil capitalism -- a by-product of operations.”
Ironically, the origin of the post-truth dilemma is rooted in journalistic trends that pre-exist the internet. Chief among these trends is the transition from a subscription-based system for financing news, to an on-page advertising model and finally, a system of click-based advertising when news went digital. The result is an advertising incentivized journalism where the headline itself becomes the click-through revenue stream in the form of the eponymous “clickbait” piece. In the process, citizens are reconfigured as consumers whose attention in clicks per-second is the grist for the mill.
Parallels abound in cable news, where the clickbait corollary took shape through the twenty-four-hour news cycle incentivized through its own unique relationship to advertising revenue. Cable news was faced with a freshly empowered audience, thumbs hovering over a remote, always a dull moment away from disengaging. Whether on TV or the internet, the commercial incentive for sensational, breezy coverage is the same across platforms.
Even for dedicated editorial staff, the exigencies of survival leave very little time and energy for fact-checking. Cash strapped news agencies make for overworked journalists. Overworked journalists can’t scrutinize sources with the rigor needed to screen out fake news. Media researcher David Banks described the predicament as an epistemic autoimmune disease accelerated by social media and the internet. “Reporters with no research budget and a huge publishing quota are understandably going to do a bit of Googling, pull a quote from Twitter, and call it a day. Overworked and underpaid journalists are the weakened immune system that lets viral fake news take over the body politic,” according to Banks.
Now, most of these dynamics are mediated through the superstructure of Facebook, where an increasing fraction of all news is shared and consumed. Facebook adds a second, overriding consumer-advertising relationship through the feed. Even the most rigorous news must now pass the gauntlet of each individual's feed algorithm, a program that opaquely distributes information to Facebook users based on their preferences and friends, not on the maxim of molding an educated citizenry. Media critics often refer to the resulting network as the “splinternet” and the process more broadly as the “balkanization of the internet” via “filter bubbles.”
But the post-truth problem is also more than the structure of digital capitalism. It relies on a public both vulnerable to fake-news and desperate for a specific genre of truth claim, which, however fallacious, appears to simplify an increasingly complex world. Post-truth relies on a rejection of an existing regime of truth making. Today, that looks like a rejection of expert knowledge and “mainstream media,” all lumped into a fictive construct of “the establishment.” In the vacuum of distrust, alternative narratives and fake news metastasize into a post-truth milieu.
The emergent genre of alternative claims is extraordinarily telling of the pervasive sense of socio-political insecurity that blankets parts of the United States. Whether as part of a state-sanctioned psyops campaign or rogue publishers in Macedonia, fake-news follows the click rate. The rate of engagement seems to correspond invariably with themes of anti-globalism, anti-establishment and anti-immigration. These are the themes on American minds.
Katy Starbird’s landmark paper on the propagation of alternative narratives (conspiracy theories) following mass shootings, empirically corroborates the assumption that post-truth is a relationship between socio-political anxiety and rejections of official claims. Indeed, the study found that these conspiracies scarcely map onto a left-right axis and instead follow a theme of anti-establishment skepticism, independent of political ideology. Starbird affirms that,
We can [...] understand the production of these narratives as a form of collective sensemaking, whereby people attempt to reduce their uncertainty and anxiety and increase their sense of control by providing explanations to events -- in this case, explanations that are informed by deep skepticism of official sources.
And as attention has declined, so too has the capacity for citizens to interrogate their news. The current media ecosystem is impossible to scrutinize because of the volume of traffic (also known as the “hyperculture” dilemma). The simplest explanation of the post-truth predicament may be that hyperculture and declining attention mean “truth is whatever [captures] the most eyeballs,” as Morozov put it. In such an arrangement, honest reporting errors can’t be retracted effectively and dishonest actors can insert information into the ecosystem at will.
In conjunction with hyperculture, or the speed and density at which events are perceived to happen, is the death of the “uncanny valley.” The uncanny valley relates to our ability to tell the difference between a fake image, film, sounds, etc., and the real thing. Digital reproduction has reached a point in which the valley has dissolved and the human nervous system is incapable of telling the real from the fake. As it relates to the post-truth moment, the death of the uncanny valley means that what is fake appears real and conversely, we begin to treat the real with more skepticism. It also means that any fact, even the most obvious, becomes up for dispute. The death of the uncanny valley has already been exploited as a part of a post-truth strategy, or so-called hybrid warfare, by Russian psyops teams. An analysis published by the open-source intelligence site Bellingcat uncovered a Russian attempt to pass off video game footage of an airstrike as evidence of U.S. aid to ISIS. President Donald Trump recently challenged the validity of the Access Hollywood tapes in the same vane.
During a talk at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, Benjamin Bratton, a political theorist teaching at Moscow’s Strelka Institute, was asked about the Russian perspective on their covert operations in the West. Bratton gave a curious response. The Russians never anticipated their ability to substantially manipulate the U.S. election outcome, he said -- it was a surprise to strike such fertile ground. And that, Bratton continued, “says much more about us then it does about any of their Machiavellian machinations.” The discussion which Bratton’s statement provokes run to the core of democracy and the “marketplace of ideas.” The Economist’s report on the media climate, states unequivocally, the challenges of post-truth society have only just begun. If the current openness of the U.S. media environment makes it uniquely vulnerable, does censorship become a policy to consider? The Economist’s report offered a solution that involves keys and cryptography to verify that information came from a trusted source. But who defines a trusted source? Will the average reader trust the designation?
The post-truth dilemma is a fundamental complication of democratic assumptions. On one hand is a path that takes the U.S. towards a market based authoritarian state like China or Russia, where the entire network is centrally regulated and walled off to prevent epistemic breakdown. On the other hand is a solution that requires fundamentally delinking journalism from the attention economy, reaching financial buoyancy through subscriptions or some yet to be discovered business model. Neither approach is particularly attractive, as the first compromises democratic principles and the second further diminishes the limited options for financing journalism. However, without a change to the current information regime, the fog of post-truth will congeal and thicken, allowing dishonest actors to flourish. The current administration is an ideal case study in the domestic politics of post-truth: a prologue to an obscure future of hypercultural vertigo.
In the United States, the brazen relativism of the current administration feels novel at first blush. It’s not. The current executive exploits post-truth with postmodernism: an approach to communicating in bad faith. How could President Trump dispute the objective size of crowds? How can President Trump shrug off a deluge of career-ending accusations? Russia has existed in a post-truth condition for some time. It’s worth familiarizing democracy with the Russian media playbook so that at the very least, even without fixing the network, there’s a literacy with how post-truth is exploited.
Metahaven, the experimental Dutch design studio, provides an instructive Russian translation from their “Sprawl” project on contemporary propaganda.
If they can do it -- we’ll do it too
If they can’t do it -- we’ll do it still
If we can’t do it -- we’ll pretend
If they tell a truth -- we’ll tell our own
If they disagree with our actions, we say there was a provocation
If they say we hurt them -- we say they hurt themselves
