 Hello and welcome to the reason live stream. I'm Zach Weissmuller and I'm joined today by my colleague Nick Gillespie. Hey, Nick Hey That's good. Hey, good to see you too today. We're talking with Jacob Siegel Journalist with Tablet magazine to discuss his quite remarkable piece on what he's termed the counter disinformation Complex it is a long and detailed essay Entitled a guide to understanding the hoax of the century 13 ways of looking at disinformation I'm gonna connect to a lot of the themes we've talked about on this show about social media Miss and disinformation the process of the government job-owning companies into policing speech And the ways that would be gatekeepers are trying to reassert control over the flow of information in this country This essay lays out our current predicament in a really compelling and comprehensive way I'm offers so much needed historical context as well that we'll get into into this conversation And I'm very excited to discuss it with Jacob today. Thank you so much for joining us Yeah, I'm excited too. Thanks for having me So it's a guide to understanding the hoax of the century. Let's just start with that title What is the hoax of the century? The hoax is the the false claim and I would argue the deliberately false claim that the United States and indeed all liberal democracies are under a dire existential threat from disinformation and Disinformation needs to be explained here if if indeed You know our survival is imperiled by disinformation It's it's worth taking a moment to consider what that thing is and in its original form disinformation was supposed to be a kind of targeted attack by hostile foreign entities who infiltrated the Media ecosystems and the social ecosystems of Western liberal democracies the United States obviously during the 2015-2016 campaign and election but also Great Britain during Brexit similar arguments were made there and So this was hostile foreign entities most notably Russia infiltrating these societies with deliberately false and deceptive Information disinformation the titular disinformation that was so dangerous in the way it undermined the foundations of electoral legitimacy and liberal democracy itself that it required a wartime response and a wartime mobilization meaning the suspension of due process of constitutional rights and protections and the giving over of the political system itself to security agencies and their adjuncts within the Administrative bureaucracy so that they could protect us from this disinformation threat which was you know like more dangerous than terrorism because it was everywhere at once coming in through our very screens and iPhones and so all of this Constitutes the hoax because there was no grave threat from disinformation let alone a existential threat that justified the sort of state of exception that was used to Fundamentally re-engineer the political system in the United States, which is what took place and I want to get into How that all happened the the recent history and then the deeper history But first before I kick it to Nick for a second I want to pull up an excerpt from the article to really linger on this term disinformation You write a name as a nation America not only has learned nothing It has been deliberately prevented from learning anything while being made to chase after shadows This is not because Americans are stupid. It's because what has taken place is not a tragedy But something closer to a crime Disinformation is both the name of the crime and the means of covering it up a weapon that doubles as a disguise Could you just expand on that a little bit? What is the utility of the term? disinformation to push forward a sort of new system of governance is Kind of what you're arguing in this piece well, it's a term that both evokes threat and danger as As fits its origins in the world of espionage and the Cold War while at the same time implicitly encoded in the term is That there is a deception that something is being veiled or obscured and so the the word is simply Confusing and threatening at the same time and so it is not an accident that disinformation is a term that is basically impossible to define in any meaningful way when you try and When you try and delimit, what are the categories of information that count as disinformation? it's basically anything that is counter to the prevailing you know official sort of Ruling party narrative at any given time is disinformation so to use real examples of this and and for anybody who thinks I might be Being hyperbolic here, you know one day it could be disinformation to say that You know to question vaccine efficacy in terms of whether or not vaccines Transmit excuse me whether or not vaccines prevent the transmission of COVID that could count as disinformation if it was Supposedly being incited if that claim was being incited or perpetuated by foreign actor Misinformation if it was merely domestic actors of their own accord making that claim Malinformation once it turned out to be true and yet was still in some sense undermining the the you know hygienic policies of this state so disinformation is literally has has Changed day-to-day based on sort of what suits the ruling party at any given time and the word itself the sort of recursive quality of the word itself where you get caught inside this riddle of what is disinformation is I think part of the point and it's not an accident that such a confusing term was born in the world of espionage and This is something that America's leading security Cold war security officials warned about for decades George Kennan I'm talking about hardcore anti-communist Cold Warriors George Kennan Daniel Patrick Moynihan were warning for decades that the growth of the secrecy bureaucracy within the United States government and the normalization and Spread of the tactics of espionage Which were going as the Cold War went on were going from being these specialized tools of a specialized cadre of spies and security officials and becoming the sort of operating procedures of you know non foreign facing government agencies that as this occurred the Confusions and illusions Inherents in those systems of spying and espionage and deception We're going to poison a political system in the United States that's supposed to be based on transparency and self-government Let's talk a little bit about the 2016 election and maybe into the into 2020 and and the rise of the COVID regime and whatnot and then you know towards the end of the of our time together We're going to talk more about the Cold War roots and kind of look back at you know What happened in post-war America that kind of put this all into play When you talk about the ruling party, you're not talking about the Democrats or the Republicans you're talking about a broader conception of a Kind of elite consensus or a managerial Consensus, could you talk a little bit about that? You know and say going into the 2016 election You know and it seems so far ago It's not you know, it obviously isn't that long ago but it already seems that and some of the big issues that got wrapped up in this Revolved around the the revelations that Hillary Clinton have been keeping as Secretary of State had been keeping a Private email server and was kind of sloppy in terms of you know What what were personal emails and what were you know actual official emails? But then also the DNC's emails got got hacked or you know and and it turns out it was I guess John Podesta had answered a phishing You know query and things came out What so two questions first in going into 2016? What was that? Ruling party you're talking about kind of suss out what that what comprises that and then let's talk a little bit about the specific moments of disinformation that people think change the outcome of the 2016 election the ruling party in a sense is Less important than the ruling class in America. I would argue and I don't say that to be pedantic but you know the United States because of how it's Structured has never had a a single ruling party in the way that other States and political systems are designed around the idea of a ruling party China has a ruling party We can all recognize that in the United States what you had was the emergence of a a ruling class Which had Members and representatives in both of the major political parties the Democrats and the Republicans I think you know famously I forget who said who said it was the Rosangelo Coat Villa But the the Republicans were the sort of junior members of the ruling party So they could belong but had a sort of second-tier role but the ruling class in the United States is a function of forces of Centralization that really accelerate in the second half of the 20th century and lead to these hyper consolidated, you know coastal enclaves and DC corridor and this emergence of a single national monoculture among the credentialed members of a ruling class who share a set of customs and who share a set of educational credentials and Underlying all that share some foundational premises, but before getting to those premises. It's important to distinguish how that's different from the Regional aristocracies and regional elites that have always existed in the United States and and have existed essentially everywhere At all times. So of course the US. Oh, you know, there was a southern gentry in the US. There were northeastern Manufacturing and financial elites there were You know railroad and and other Industry and and and developer elites and and and and a oligarchic You know, there were periods of oligarchic control at other points in American history but they had a Regional basis that meant that they did not act in concert with one another across the country and meant that they were both responsive to some of the Regional and local concerns and were themselves in their own tendencies and orientation Were themselves Molded by those regional cultures With the disappearance of the regional culture in the emergence of a national Monoculture in the United States and you know, these are not simply cultural trends that I'm describing There's an underlying political economic reality to this where we're talking about the consolidation of wealth and of capital and we're talking about the These sort of national credentialing institutions becoming the most important institutions in the country you get this single kind of monolithic ruling class and That ruling class is then Represented by the ruling party in the United States and the ruling party is the constellation of agencies and party apparatuses with both Republican and Democratic representation, but also Crucially spread across the nominally Non-partisan non-party affiliated federal bureaucracies and indeed across other institutions that are not even officially part of the federal government, but function as the function as the sort of Either in the nonprofit and NGO sector Or in the universities to some extent function as sort of extensions of this ruling party And so to put this in very concrete terms, what does this mean? It means a coordinated effort by One group of people in Americans to declare a monopoly over the political system It means that when somebody you don't like gets elected like Donald Trump somebody who's threatening to your interests and I should say there are many many reasons one could dislike Donald Trump and could strenuously and You know vociferously object this presidency The difference between that kind of political opposition and the ruling party is twofold one. It's the degree of consensus across the the ruling class and it's the use of the Federal agencies the use of the federal bureaucracy in order to Delegitimize an elected president Donald Trump and the way that this works where there is a sort of spontaneously Emerging consensus bottom up on the one hand, which is the cultural consensus among members of the ruling class Nobody needs to tell them. Yeah, Donald Trump is is an ogre is an existential threat They all feel this viscerally. So there's that element, but that's met at the same time by a top-down Coordinated effort across the agencies and we see this with the FBI quite plainly. We see this with the People inside of the FBI who are you know working on the Trump investigation while exchanging texts about how they're gonna protect democracy by keeping him from getting elected. We see this with the Jim Baker who was the one of the lead councils at the FBI leaving that job to then take a job as the deputy lead council at Twitter just in time so that when the Hunter laptop Hunter Biden laptop Story began to emerge. He was in place as the deputy council at Twitter so that he could advise the company against You know advise the company to go along with the the you know requests Mandates essentially from the FBI that they not publicize the story. So that's the that is the ruling party right and so it is not simply people in the media elite the Academic elite the cultural elite, you know, certainly, you know Economy whether it's Silicon Valley or industrial stuff Saying I'm really mad that Donald Trump got elected It is that Donald Trump's election represents an existential threat to America to the American experiment and also often comes with either Implications or or you know flat-out statements that the only way he could have been elected was through a manipulation of the American political system with disinformation and things like that. Yeah, all of that plus then because the the sort of corollary a conclusion of that is Because he represents this existential threat because he himself Used illegitimate means to get elected disinformation collusion with Vladimir Putin Therefore it is legitimate for us representatives of the ruling party right to suspend the normal rules of liberal democracy of procedural Government suspend those normal official rules enter into the state of exception where we can spy on the president you know where we can push through collude between federal agencies and Private partisan actors like Perkins Coy and fusion GPS who are the sort of brokers of the phony steel dossier In order to feed that to the FBI so that we can then feed that into the FISA warrant process So we can obtain a warrant to spy on the president of the United States and the members of his campaign We can break all of these rules for two reasons and I don't think you can actually separate these reasons out I mean, I don't think the people doing this could separate these reasons out They could not separate out the illegitimacy the sort of absolute illegitimacy of Donald Trump on the one hand and the way in which he was a threat to America and their steel Unbreakable conviction that anybody who was not one of them Was a kind of existential threat in that way and and again this I mean We'll talk about this later. This has Premonitions in the Cold War and the way that political discourse You know kind of was enacted in cultural discourse, but it's not just that they have a legitimate right to do this They almost have a responsibility Because otherwise everything's going down the tubes and they they have to you you've Used the term state of exception a couple times that is a phrase that is you know best Known or most popular is by Georgio Agamben the Italian philosopher who talked about that You know who came to prominence after the 9-11 bombings when he talked about how the suspension of civil rights in the global war on terror Was deemed necessary in order to preserve a free society and so he pulling off of Carl Schmidt The Nazi German philosopher who talked about how liberal democracies were particularly prone To morphing into kind of authoritarian states He said and I think with great power that You know the the state is almost always looking for a reason to declare a state of exception And the irony of it or the paradox of it is in order to save a free society We have to suspend all of the rules that allow it to be a free society in order to preserve it Um, are you pulling off of Agamben? You know specifically there and can you articulate a little bit more about You know do states of exception they're they don't necessarily get Declared in congress or in the press. I mean they can sometimes but oftentimes it's a consensus that is kind of under the wire, right? Yeah, I think the thing that gets declared by congress and the press is the existential threat so they by Once you've sufficiently trumpeted our excess threat and you've Clear that anybody would participate in Defense against that excess threat Is them now an enemy in the midian sense of a Friend enemy distinction right the press and they trumped the threat and the state of exception takes care Right. I wasn't it was not drawing explicitly on Agamben With his work. I'm especially familiar with Post-covid work. They would sort of brought him I think a public attend made him a pariah Among the very people we've talked about this on this program and elsewhere among the very people who were you know When he talked about it in terms of 9 11, they were like, yes, this is exactly right And then when coveted and he's italian and he was living in italy and he said, you know what? this is a socially constructed pandemic And panic so that the state can declare a state of exception and in many cases is Particularly his you know left-wing academic Followers in the u.s. Literally said you you are nuts. You are crazy. You are insane Um, yet the analysis works pretty well in both both instances Listen, I yeah, I think it's a fascinating question. Why that occurred why why you know, you could see the same thing with sort of grad student fuqoians Became the most ardent Embracers of the biosurveillance state after After covet emerged and to give a very short answer to what I think is a complicated and thorny question It seems to me that it's less about hypocrisy and more about the fact that for most people their political beliefs are a kind of Uh and an epiphenomenon of their relationship to power and it's like when you're close to the you know in the army Say, you know, you want to be near the flagpole, right? And it's like people want to be near the flagpole and and when their party is in power they justify what their party is doing and and And uh, but I think it's it's also a testament to how powerful agamban's critique and and ideas were that they've become state of exception feels to me like it's just A sort of phrase floating, you know, anybody could grab it out of the discourse at this point There was uh, it One thing I really appreciate about this article was that a lot of the analysis around What's come out from the twitter files? You know russia gait in general the hunter biden laptop is it tends to be on the media Layer, which is important and the media plays a big role in defining Threats and whether you know the scope of whether disinformation and misinformation is a threat and a lot of major outlets have certainly leaned into that in fact you pulled up a little montage here of articles that You know show donald trump won because of facebook facebook in crosshairs after election is Is said to question is influence russian propaganda effort helps spread fake news during election experts say But on the other hand, you know, you make the case that They the media is actually not the primary mover or culprit here and that it's uh, you you dive into the Role that let's say intelligence analysts and agencies have have played in pushing this idea that misinformation and disinformation is an existential threat that needs some sort of dramatic Intervention and I want to pull up a clip from one of the most prominent purveyors of that idea and one of the people who we saw on tv a lot throughout The discussion about russian interference in the 2016 election and that's former cia director John brennan I just like to play this clip and get your reaction to this clip and You tell me what you think Statements like this from the former cia director how they affected the conversation around these issues Hey, and can I just pipe it? I just want to say before we start not all irish americans Not all irish americans, but let's let's run this brennan clip. Okay Be to have with us former cia director John brennan who is now an nbc news senior national security and intelligence analyst Why won't the president confront vladimir putin? Why won't he read the cards and say the things that you say need to be said to vladimir putin? Do you believe he's somehow in debt to the president russia? I think he's afraid of the president of russia. Why? Well, I think one can speculate as to why that the russians may have something on him personally That they could always roll out and make his life more difficult What's your reaction to that in retrospect knowing what we know now? Well, first of all, I did command a rifle company in the Fighting irish fighting 69th infantry regiment. So I am an honorary irishman myself And um Yeah, I have two reactions and I I will get to the disinformation thing in a second But the first thing I'll say to come back to the question of the ruling party is that the The sort of tricked understanding on the ruling party operates in america is that It is because it is Uh run by the perhaps the most untalented incompetent group of people ever assembled in the country's history that they have insisted on such a Um, insisted on these coercive and monopolistic tactics for controlling the government. I mean, I think brennan is a um But by the the sort of the standard measures of what you would expect from the nation's intelligence chief phenomenally Untalented and unaccomplished where he is excelled is as a party hack, you know is a as a a soviet or chinese style party hack and The claim that he is making there which is that Donald trump is controlled by or indebted to or somehow under the thumb Of vladimir putin and therefore by extension the russian security services Is a claim that he is in many senses singularly responsible for entering into the official record of american politics when in one of his last acts a cia chief, um, he basically Singularly orchestrated what was known as the ica the intelligence community assessment So this was the I believe it came out in january 2017, but it was the first the seminal uh intelligence community assessment which declared that not only did putin interfere In the 2016 election, but that he had a preference for donald trump What we later found out through classified house testimony that you know People who had been privy to it spoke about was that rather than being a uh a statement on representing the opinion of the 17 different intelligence agencies, which is what an ica is supposed to be A consensus statement in other words that in fact brennan himself had handpicked a group of analysts and had personally led the drafting of the Ica that declared that putin had a preference for trump and that in doing so he had excluded the analysis from russia experts Who not only didn't find that credible But who said that no in fact as russia experts they had found that putin's preference was actually for hillary clinton because putin considered her the more Predictable candidate not that there was any nefarious relationship with clinton But simply that in ways that are quite easy to understand that he he wanted the sort of stock neoliberal candidate because he could guess What move she was going to make and So that that was brennan's doing Um brennan, you know the fact that he left the cia to immediately become a msnbc Analyst tells you a lot both about brennan and about msnbc and the relationship Between the media and the intelligence agencies and the media here is simply providing the amplification system For narratives that are originating elsewhere You know, that's why I Talk about the weakness of the media in relation to these other members of the counter disinformation complex Not because the media doesn't play a critical role in amplifying and enforcing these narratives But because it doesn't generate these narratives on its own and therefore it's not in charge of their final direction An orientation. Okay, so I may just I I would like to point out that morning joe Is kind of like the maxis kansas city or the studio 54 of the ruling party, right? this is it's you know, not accidental that this happened and on msnbc and on mbc news and things like that, so when you are when you observe this fact pattern around john brennan and see that he discarded certain information and privileged other information is is making these very pointed well not pointed but let's say very broad speculation on national television is your analysis that this is a kind of tunnel vision That he can he he believes this or that this actually is something more nefarious that this is That it that he's trying to Actually be a disinformation purveyor Well two things so one I would never accuse somebody of being a disinformation purveyor because I don't use the term in that way I think the term is deliberately obscure a tenist and it's an espionage term and I'm I'm not in the business of espionage So I'm not accusing anybody of disinformation. I think I think they get things wrong or they get them right I look I don't see any reason to try and impute motive here I think that the the facts of the case speak for themselves what we know about the crafting of the ica is that Brennan omitted contrary analysis and You should people should go back and read that ica from 2017 when I when I talk about how Untalented he is you know, I think sometimes the documents speak louder than these characterizations go read the ica It it establishes nothing. It proves nothing. It's not well argued It has a 12 page appendix drawing on russia today articles from 2012 It's like a a shoddy nomenclatura Kind of document that is a sort of placeholder Brennan's willingness to or or interest in transitioning from the cia To talking ahead on on msnbc to signatory to the false national security official document claiming that the hunter biden laptops were disinformation Speaks for itself. He's remarkably consistent on these issues. He's very close I think to the people in the obama world closer than he is to the people in the clinton world, for instance, so he has clear He has clear party connections, which are more important here than ideological Uh ideological convictions, you know, it's like a late soviet thing not an early soviet thing This is not what a what a terrible thing to say to anybody that they're not even a peak soviet facsimile No, no, it's it's not peak soviet. It's you know, it's like it's Brezhnev when he let himself go Right, he's not even trimming his eyebrows. So let me uh to extend this a little bit more You know, one of the things when I was you know, obviously we all live through this but then watching that clip again and preparing for this It's also to me. It's just staggering It in the press, uh, you know in this amplification process like You know the press didn't have richard helms on after you know when it came out that he a former cia director who had burned You know had ordered burn tons of documents that would have shown What the cia was doing? It wasn't like he showed up in a couple weeks on CBS news or mbc or abc and was palsed with people and they were like, oh, that's so fascinating Like you are a speaker of truth. They're the the kind of righteous antagonism between the press and government officials in many cases and this goes to kind of trying to Understand the way the ruling class kind of functions You know that you know the the press will say we're the watchdog of freedom You know democracy dies in darkness all of that kind of stuff But in fact they suck up to power and they kind of just repeat or amplify many of their claims without any uh, you know critical Analysis whatsoever and let's uh, zack. Let's look at the clip that you pulled and this is Related to this in a kind of new media intellectual You know kind of cloud People like sam harris the very you know who is part of the intellectual dark web once once upon a time And now has a phenomenally popular podcast Speaks to a lot of people, you know who used to he used to only talk about being an atheist And now he talks about being a psychonaut and being a meditator and also being You know a wise vizier of you know existential threats to democracy Um, let's run a clip of an interview with him with some British blokes, I think or the people behind trigger nomitry And then Jacob would you comment on The mindset that is being evinced by sam harris in this discussion of why It was a great goddamn good thing that twitter and facebook suppressed the hunter biden laptop story In the run up to the 2020 election So so my argument is that it was appropriate for twitter and the heads of big tech and journal and the heads of journalistic organizations to feel that they were in the presence of Something like a a one cent a lifetime moral emergency, right? Whereas this is not the same thing as not liking george bush You know or not liking john mccain or not liking mit romney for their politics This was here's a guy who Is capable of anything and we cannot afford to have four more years with this guy, right and and so So what what should Well-intentioned people do who have a lot of power in these various ways, you know, you're running the new york times You're running cnn. You're running twitter What should they Conspire to do what do you do with the hunter biden laptop story? When we already know we we know how this played out in 2016 with the hillary clinton email, you know press conference That was the killing Blow to hurt candidacy. It's like a coin toss for me the hunter biden laptop thing because I do understand how corrosive it is For an institution like the the new york times To show obvious bias and inconsistency and Dishonesty in how they it's like they couldn't even frame it honestly. It's not like It's not like it's like the way I would frame it is Listen, I don't care what's in hunter biden So I mean hunter biden at that point hunter biden literally could have had The corpses of children in his basement I would not have cared, right? It's like it's there's nothing First of all, it's hunter biden, right? It's not it's like it's not joe biden but Even if joe biden like even the whatever scope of joe biden's corruption is like if you if we could just go down that rabbit hole endlessly and Understand that he's getting kickbacks from hunter biden's deals in ukraine or wherever else, right or china it is infinitesimal Compared to the corruption. We know trump is involved in Yeah, well, listen, I'm thankful genuinely grateful to sam harris for He just he lines up so many corrupt and and fallacious ideas in a row and I think very usefully And this is where you know, I think he does a real um public service there is he usefully shows the Interrelation between these various kinds of fallacious and and I think destructive thinking so to take this from the top Here here is a person Sam harris whose whole career and reputation was built on being a sort of human truth optimizer But his whole career was that he was the dispassionate objective the the the one who couldn't be swayed by primitive and adivistic beliefs and god or or You know an intrinsic moral component in existence He was above all of those things And what it means in practical terms to be above all of those things um is to be precisely the kind of Technocratic judge of the good that harris makes himself here now not everybody not every atheist Takes this as far as harris does obviously, but um, I do think that it is not an accident that the that the same sam harris Who made his name as the great truth engine as the the human truth machine Is now very flippantly saying it doesn't matter what the truth is What matters is the greater good, which of course he is in he is in the position to decide not the American public or voters no sam harris can tell you sam harris has decided that it doesn't matter what's on hunter biden's laptops It doesn't matter that twitter and facebook censored and repressed this What matters is that he Recognizes the grave danger of of donald trump. So here we have a very important connection Which is the connection between the kind of underlying? Let's call it the the sort of Metaphysical layer of the technocratic mind, which he is a supreme representative of on the one hand and The oligarchic ruling party certainty that it is in the best position To decide whose votes should count whose votes shouldn't count what information can be seen what information can't be seen So I don't think You you should look at this and think ah sam harris great truth seeker hams sam harris is being a hypocrite here I don't think it's hypocrisy. I think it's a cop to call that hypocrisy. No that is a perfectly consistent position for sam harris to take and this is You know what it was the lenin call it like impure the highest form of imperialism This is the highest form of technocracy and the highest form of the technocratic mind sam harris is the supreme representative the technocratic mind and It's also worth thinking about if this was true if trump was indeed the danger that Sam harris and others are suggesting he was that justified everything Why did they have to keep lying about him? Why did they have to make up all these stories? Does he does sam harris not know that the steel dossier was not but a compendium of digitally constructed Sourced to washington d think tank employees meant much of the nonsense the steel dossier didn't It came, you know through E-function aware of you mean They couldn't really say Trump is a very bad. He's a very bad Not fit by the white house He is a donors this country He's a he's a racist. He's a nativist You know, there's truth in all of I just may know you might not agree with them fully but enough truth that you could possibly argue He's president in america, but even if you say he's in american history. That's still to Justify the unilateral pension of Constitue around free speed and and privacy so It's enough this president ever had to be The Singulistential threat because that alone five party Exercising such power as we're necessary to maintain Uh, we're getting a little bit of a interference there on on your end, uh, jacob the it's it's lagging a little bit but uh, we got most of that, uh, you know the the technocratic aspect is worth I think lingering on for a second because that is really what's this these technological systems have now enabled The platforms and the people pressuring the platforms to believe that they can really track these trends to a extremely precise level and then like dial things up and down in order to Improve the discourse or keep people from getting hurt. I mean, I think we saw this amped up Post pandemic or really like reach the next level in the covid era but when during the During the the russia gate era. There was this project Hamilton 68 and i've pulled a slide from their Dashboard, uh, all the links that this is an archived version and we we have a link in the description and it shows you know, these are the top hashtags that You know russian Lated or russian influenced accounts are tweeting out and uh, just to This is the little disclaimer they put on the dashboard that the charts and graphs here display Hashtags topics urls promoted by russian linked influence networks on twitter Content is not necessarily produced or created by russian government operatives. Although that is sometimes the case You know, let me let me jump in there for one second because it's it's important with that disclaimer Okay, so they had a disclaimer on the site saying these are not all directly linked to russia But clint watts the former fbi agent who was the figurehead of hamilton 68 also wrote A op-ed essentially an article in the daily beast or co-wrote an article in the daily beast in 2016 That was very influential in establishing the kind of narrative framework of russian disinformation in which he explicitly argues That there is a convergence between Russian troll accounts an official russian disinformation accounts and trumpkins as he Calls right. He says that they're becoming indistinguishable. So this the the disclaimer on the hamilton 68 Uh site is fine as far as it goes and establishing some degree of I guess What's intended to be a kind of uh protection from legal liability in cases of defamation But it's it's belied by the argument of its own figurehead who wrote explicitly That trumpkins whether witting or not whether deliberately acting as fellow travelers or not have become indistinguishable from russian operatives spreading deliberate disinformation and to be clear that that You know, this was one of the revelations from the twitter files is that the social media the the kind of safety in content moderation team Recognize that the methodology behind this was totally messed up and a yo yo roth I think was saying like we got to call this bullshit out and they never did but I mean, do you think that this had any measurable effect on The discourse, uh, just just having something like this out there kind of watching waiting to tag people with the you know russian linked propaganda meme I think it had a very significant impact as a additional layer of girding in this larger narrative structure Which was propagating the idea that the us was under attack from russian disinformation And that your fellow citizens with whom you disagreed were no longer merely fellow citizens But should be seen as extensions of nefarious illegitimate hostile forces So how many people's minds were I mean look, I'm sure it was a very big deal for the people who were getting smeared by this I don't want to to minimize that but I don't think that hamilton 68's analysis on its own Uh changed a lot of people's minds about anything I think it provided a critical layer of girding in this larger narrative structure so that it could be touted by the washington post and the new york times And various other publications as happened and it was quoted You know, I forgot what the the official test somebody did an official tally. It might have been Matt taibi, but You know, it was quoted thousands of times It was written about in glowing terms not as a partisan ruling party operation, but as a patriotic uh, you know This was a civil defense kind of thing and and the organization behind it the alliance for securing democracy Which was created immediately after trump's election as an explicitly anti trump Operation but in that environment that people like brennan helped to foster and and legitimize By spreading this false narrative about trump russia collusion you could create a explicitly partisan anti trump organization and pass it off as a patriotic civic-minded organization because people had simply Abdicated their response their their critical faculties Which is what the state of exception is intended to produce so things work as they were supposed to work And and so I I think that it was both extremely Sort of in the aggregate effect But I doubt that I doubt that any one the hamilton 68 Hashtag analysis accomplished much in isolation. You know, it is kind of fascinating to think about you know One of the one of the great fears about donald trump as he emerged on the scene and certainly You know after it became clear that he had won the election in 2016 was that He was a destroyer of norms that he was going to wreck everything that was good and decent about america About american history etc. And that his critics time and time again Actually then in the name of preventing him from destroying norms and and you know Breaking everything actually went out of their way to do exactly that You know by some of the methods that you're talking about here And eroding the line between you know in independent media And state action because you know this this is the you know, this is the end of the us as we know it if we don't stop trump So, you know extreme action is warranted. It's not merely You know, okay, but it's actually the responsible thing to do You're really in a in a way the paranoid mentality of you know, what you call the ruling class or the ruling party You have to go back to the cold war And you know But then it was a couple of people in the republican party of somebody like john mccarthy But it was really nut jobs like robert welch the head of the john birch society Who was prone to these kinds of global overstatements? You know that dwight eisenhower the president who had won world war two and was fighting the cold war was A you know a a witting agent of the soviet union. He was Side-lined. I mean he was considered a nut job Here you see it in plain view an analysis Analog this kind of worldview where your fellow countrymen are not simply mistaken But they are somehow either wittingly or unwittingly doing the bidding again of russia, which is also kind of fascinating to think about I want to ask to complicate Just a little bit of what you're talking about Or or rather to discuss the way this played out on social media Particularly facebook and twitter which were the places that you know that both suppressed the hunter biden Laptop story but more broadly were accused of pumping up trump and then you know on the right I mean, this is one of the reasons why so many republican Members of congress are trying to regulate social media because they keep saying you know We've been screwed we've been screwed these companies exist to fuck us over and to squelch our voices to suppress our reach And yet throughout you know the teens and throughout the trump years trump and other conservative voices actually Flourished broadly in the culture But especially on facebook and twitter where it seemed you know conservative right-wing people who are the target of the De-amplification process that you're talking about in the de-legitimation process actually did really well does how do you kind of You know figure all about it So I think that's exactly right and I think you have just hit on the impetus behind this attempt to seize control over the social media platforms Which is that they benefit the opposition? So the the apparent contradiction is reconciled by the fact that it is the success of donald trump and these putative populist elements That produces the counter reaction in the first place That leads the ruling party to decide it can no longer tolerate this degree of autonomy And needs to clamp down and effectively take control over the back end of these platforms They they don't do it Uh They don't do it all at once. They don't simply nationalize the industries as it were So it's always an incomplete process and there's always a space open for these now sort of uh, you know unofficially Illegal is too strong, but Unofficially blacklisted parties to still find ways to prosper And there's an argument to be made that the technology tends to benefit them In a kind of structural way But but this is it's just the the sequencing is the only the only place where I would disagree with you. So what I What I trace in the in my essay and tablet is a chronology in which first you have The open even bombastic embrace as of the internet as a technology of liberation and democracy by people like Donald, excuse me not Donald Trump, of course by people like Hillary Clinton And uh barack obama who are touting the benefits of social media in particular as a force for democratization across the world most famously in the case of The arab spring but also with the protests in iran And clinton is the the head of the internet freedom agenda at the state department You know one of her aides famously compares social media to che Guevara's This revolutionary force, you know very telling like the platitudes they come up with here, you know So so it's these same people The very same people who then declare the internet The single greatest threat to democracy. What causes this utterly dramatic 180 where they go from touting the internet as a great force of democratization To then declaring that we we need to enforce martial law on the internet Lest civil civilization be destroyed they perceive it as a threat to their own power And uh continued mandate to rule and it's as simple as that and they perceive it as a threat because You have this growing Populist insurgency you might call it but really the populist insurgency is part of a the populist insurgency You know sort of represented by people like trump and the brexit movement in the uk And macron. I mean, you know, this is I mean you point out it's a global phenomenon and it's it's multi determined It's but it's if if it was simply donald trump and russia somehow manipulating america You wouldn't be seeing kind of emanations of it in various forms all over the place right We saw that If I may I just wanted to and I real this is the worst kind of fan service, but I wanted to say to john pacquire Yes, the who asked in the comments. This is from a shop right checkout From my hometown of middletown new jersey I was visiting and the cashier said I could have it just so we know that Sorry, and I mean we saw that that pivot that you're talking about jacob from a kind of open embrace of the power of the web to Democracy and american ideals to a real threat in the figure of hillary clinton who Right after the election basically introduced into the lexicon The concept of fake news, uh, and we have that clip the best if you could just Pull that up our backs One threat in particular that you concern all americans Democrats republicans and independents alike, especially those who serve in our congress The epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the past year It's now clear that so-called fake news can have real world consequences This isn't about politics or partisanship Lives are at risk lives of ordinary people just trying to go about their days to do their jobs Contribute to their communities It's a danger that must be addressed and addressed quickly So, I mean I I do view that as a pretty important turning point in like modern american political history that that speech But really, you know you as you document very well in this piece the machinery for addressing these issues Was starting to be constructed In the obama years around the 2014 era a lot of this You know as so many things do started in our overseas conflicts with isis and now Have been brought to the home front Could for this latter half of the conversation here could you delve a little bit into that history? And also, you know, feel free to bring your personal experience. I know that you were an army intelligence officer And just maybe speak to What happened over there and how it was transported over here in the intervening years Yeah, so, you know, what I refer to is the counter disinformation complex is not simply an apparatus of censorship and you know, this is one of the really critical points that I Make in this essay and that I think distinguishes my analysis From some other people's analysis, including people who I think are very insightful But maybe don't see things quite in the same way I do The counter disinformation complex does not exist as censor. It exists to rule It exists as its own form of government, which is Replacing constitutional democracy and the way that it's replacing constitutional democracy is by introducing Both new rules of governance and that's where the state of exception comes in And then new technologies of administration So we could say broadly speaking that the old rule in america Was one of self-government broadly speaking or or of a liberal democracy that favored A pluralistic outlook in which the individual was the proper subject of state protections and that the The function of the government was to protect the rights of the individual within a liberal democratic framework And obviously there are revisions to that in the course of american history And you know, there's a I think a strong argument that there are a succession of republics in america But but that was a pretty consistent View of the political system in america counter disinformation and information regulation as a A Sort of foundational philosophical basis of government Just replaces that wholesale because it declares that the function of the government is not to protect the rights of the individual The function of the government is to protect the individual and the clients of the government from external threats And so it aggregates to itself the sovereignty that once belonged to the individual Inominally in order to protect the individual from these outside threats, but in reality to Protect the protect their own institutional position and and try and stay in power forever, so That's the counter disinformation complex philosophically Mechanically it consists of two Parts you might say one part is the surveillance apparatus and the other part is the As a sort of outward facing messaging apparatus So one part spies on the public and the other part messages to the public The part that spies on the public is really born I mean, it's really born during the cold war and maybe we'll talk more about that later, but it experiences a sort of Radical growth spur in the aftermath of 9 11 and during the war on terror and the critical thing that happens after 9 11 so Very briefly you have the growth of the security bureaucracy During the cold war and that's that bureaucracy is extremely powerful and it's extremely important But it does not have access to all the world's information. It's still running analog Then you have the growth of the internet, which is itself, you know, in some ways a defense initiative at its inception and after 9 11 the internet and in particular the the sort of crucial Internet platforms and later it'll be really the social media platforms Begin to operate as direct Adjunct adjuncts of the national security establishment and we learn a lot of the about this during the from the snowden revelations Obviously, but some of it's also happening sort of it's happening openly. It's just hidden in these sort of obscure acts that are that are redefining what bulk mass surveillance looks like in an age where everybody is Pouring more and more information into these vast data repositories online So that surveillance apparatus gets built up during the first decade of the war on terror More or less and the bush administration They play the critical role in that that's the bush administration. It's their decision to You know push through the the patriot act. It's their decision to suspend normal constitutional rights So that you can spy on American citizens or make it easier to spy on American citizens That's a bush administration initiative and it's a a bush administration of initiative with bipartisan support I should say or largely bipartisan support some pushback from people like white in and some other people in congress who Who voice objections but largely bipartisan to create this mass surveillance apparatus using the internet As a a way to Hoover up all the information in the world so that nothing can get past you Because if you recall in the aftermath of 9 11, what we were told over and over again was that This was the result of an intelligence failure, right? And so their approach to solving the intelligence failure was not To get smarter It wasn't that the cia analysts had failed to meaningfully connect the dots in the the sense of deliberate Reasoning human beings who needed to ascertain these patterns through critical thought No, the thinking was we just didn't collect literally all the information in the world And feed it into databases. So that's how we'll solve this problem So that's the first part the second part the outward facing messaging part Really gets built up during the obama administration Which the obama administration who is who really introduces the idea Of data governance first of all, so obama has a real feel for this There's a natural affinity between him and the kind of silicon valley people they share some cultural Mores and they sort of understand each other And they share that technocratic mindset in an explicit way that understands the technology as a platform for Social optimization, which you might also call social engineering At the same time during the obama administration The surveillance apparatus and the war on terror apparatus starts to take on a new role Which is counter messaging So you have this very critical change where what had been counter terrorism Enters this new phase that's called countering violent extremism CVE And this is the growth of a a new bureaucracy that's focused on You know jihadi re-education you might say and like on its face. Maybe that's not such a bad thing You know the the u.s. Ran some pretty effective propaganda campaigns starting with cold war radio free europe Encounter magazine like they did some good work there Encounters a great magazine and it's not clear that Encounter is a great magazine. It's not clear it in any way contributed to the collapse of the sub-aid union It fits in great literary and social criticism for short, but Absolutely, and it's also it's not like they were actually a cut out. They had funding from the CIA, but In any event my point is just that, you know, you could see a case for the national security establishment coming up with counter ISIS Uh counter al-qaeda messaging in a way that's not necessarily Sinister and totalitarian and its implications in this of and what actually happened to the obama administration was that you built up a CVE counterterrorism bureaucracy That utilized the surveillance methodologies developed during the war on terror in order to begin counter messaging these jihadi groups While developing the infrastructural and political framework to legitimize the idea of mass messaging through surveillance for non jihadi groups And it's a bit hard to trace all of that evolution But what i'll say is that the people who were recruited into cve had some of the progressive ideological Foundations that maybe made that transition Both not so difficult and also appear not nefarious, but like a natural extension of What they were doing, which was improving the kind of political hygiene of people on the internet And is this what you are referring to when you talk about hybrid warfare? this combination of conventional warfare with informational warfare or is there something more to that term? This would be one of the tactics that comprises the sort of assortment of tactics that Define hybrid warfare hybrid warfare refers to conventional and non conventional means occurring simultaneously So both over, you know, regular uniform troops and irregular You know, maybe special operation soldiers and civilian uniform accompanied by a heavy emphasis on informational and influence operations and also sometimes called fourth generation warfare has a sort of similar meaning in this context absolutely a part of that And a part of the larger organizational transformation in the u.s. And nato defense establishment away from building up conventional military strength and towards seeing these informational operations and these digital or internet based aspects of hybrid warfare as being essential to the future of warfare And and that that really You know, it's building for a while, but that really Becomes the dominant framework after 2014 when you have this series of events russia's invasion of Crimea the euro Maidan movement in ukraine and the ices capture of Mosul and declaration of its caliphate northern iraq all three of which involve very public over social media campaigns that are you know really sort of Spectacles that are hard to turn away from Even and perhaps most of all Isis broadcasting its brutality on social media It is so captivating as a spectacle That I think it leads many people in the defense establishment to including, you know, not that I was part of the defense establishment but as a reporter at the time and as Former I guess I was still in the national guard then but as somebody who had served in iraq in the army You know, I also I think overestimated in 2014 when I was writing about this including a piece explicitly about Isis's social media campaign where I quoted clint watts on the effect of social media I think I was also overestimating How significant this was at a time and I am mistaking The ability to captivate attention or to command attention Um with military efficacy and this is one of the Maybe confusions or ambiguities inherent in the Sort of attention economy is that we we have a bias towards overestimating things that capture our attention Yeah, this is why cony, uh, you know cony is gone right cony 2012 We solved that because we recognize it as a problem And then we ran a lot of hashtag campaigns and put soldiers in africa to take care of him Very quickly as we go to the uh, of course the end of this And we definitely want to talk about where we are and what what does all of this stuff look like going forward But just very quickly jacob. You mentioned a couple of biographical facts. How old are you? I'm 42 Okay, and you served in iraq in 2006 and 2007 in afghanistan in 2012 as an army intelligence officer that You know kind of papers over a lot of detail and nuance. Why did you um, why did you serve? What was your? impetus for joining the military well I was an american and a time when america was at war and so i thought that it was my obligation to serve i mean There were other reasons but probably none is um Probably none more important than that Did your commitment to americans? america's kind of foreign policy establishment or the or the ruling class and the ruling party establishment Come out of your service intact, you know, not your not your love of america or anything like that But could you just talk a little bit about what you saw in iraq and afghanistan and how that affects how you think about The ways that you know, um strategies to contain Uh, you know islamic extremism or anti american attitudes or anti democracy and anti human rights attitudes Um, you know that have now come home. You know, what how did your experience change your appreciation for that? Yeah, I would say it demolished it. Um, the demolished the sort of baseline presumption in the competence and good intention of The stewards of american policy Which which I held at the same time as I you know, I some of the best people i've ever known in my life or guys I serve with in the army, so um I had both of those experiences, but you know in iraq. I it's strange to say because I It was in a lot more physical danger in iraq and I was there during the surge but uh Sort of because of that I was almost more of a spectator to the political aspects of it and you know, I should say I never viewed it as my job to solve The politics of any of this I I because I took for granted the basic competence Civic mindedness Of the leaders the the nation's leaders I didn't didn't invest too much time in thinking about it for myself now I mean, I certainly I I thought we'd gotten iraq very wrong. I thought that Things had gone very wrong. I thought that there was a lot of stupidity and incompetence and delusion And I probably thought all that before I even deployed to iraq. I mean, I think by the time I deployed to iraq I had I already thought all that but I thought of that in Like decent people making catastrophic mistakes sort of way not just decent morally but Fundamentally sound people making catastrophic mistakes in afghanistan where I was in a you know relative terms Much safer much safer part of the country sort of safer period of the war less immediate physical threat I could see this sort of Both the lies of the war and the Strategic nihilism of the war up close So I could see the lies of the war in so far as we were all sending up reports about the training of the afghan security forces That were absurd And we had to send up those reports because it was only by certifying that the afghan national security forces Were trained to a certain degree that we could sign off that this tranche was ready to transition Which meant that the us could get out of there and hand it over Though of course what ended up happening was was you know They those tranches got transitioned on whatever timeline was determined by people way way above my level anyway I should say I mean I was in infantry battalions the whole time So I didn't have any access to any high level anything but but I saw that the way I saw the ways in which Baked into the reporting and the public messaging about the war because of course the public messaging about the wars We were always going to turn the corner. We only needed another year in afghanistan and And simultaneously the training of the afghan national security forces Became the sort of all important overriding imperative and I saw that that was based on deliberate misrepresentation Perhaps even more than delusion at the same time I witnessed up close this vast bureaucratic structure Created in afghanistan state department agencies and non-governmental organizations and a million and one Contractors I think people hear military contractor and they immediately think black water and mercenaries But you know the vast majority of the contractors that the u.s. Hires in war zones are folding laundry preparing food or even Even the more Specialized one because those are people we tend to recruit those are third country nationals as they're called. They're bangladeshi citizens who we bring in or they're From any number of countries who we hire in to do these jobs Then there are you know the military trainer experts or whatever civil authority experts we brought in to to teach afghans about how to Structure a police organization or all of this was being done in a country that had No organic coherence From one province to another Where the idea of the nation state was not simply foreign in the sense that they didn't believe in it It was foreign in the sense that most people had never heard of it Had no organic connection to it where the real lines of Connection were drawn along kinship and clan And to some extent ethnicity and religion And and I should say that all of that also Was not hard to figure out for a reasonably Aware person Who took a helicopter ride and looked at the terrain in afghanistan? Because if you saw what it looked like and if you understood how physically Cut off and connected these places were from one another and how that had not been That had not been bridged by technology in afghanistan yet. There were not these Globalizing technologies there even though cell phones were starting to become ubiquitous while I was there It wouldn't have been hard to understand why somebody in Paktika or kandahar Didn't necessarily have any direct connection to what was going on in Kabul. So I saw all of that It was extraordinarily um You know disillusioning and disheartening but even when I came back from afghanistan I I saw the war as being You know and and also I I should say all of that was being done to no strategic purpose There was no reason to be in afghanistan We were there was no vital strategic interest in remaining in afghanistan for two decades And and the real perversity is that precisely the bureaucratic waste and void that i'm describing With programs like opium eradication that we pumped tens of millions of dollars into only for opium yields in afghanistan to be at their highest levels as we were leaving All of that was then that was the true reason we were in afghanistan right was to continue these programs that we had started and um and that sort of machinery that that the defense establishment lived off of and that various sort of connected even if quasi non-military agencies Lived off of that's what we were we were really doing there and it was just easier to stay than it was to leave less politically costly But even when I left I sort of viewed that as a A horrible waste, but I didn't see it as necessarily um Speaking to the same conditions that were endemic across the entire political system. So it was a process of disillusionment Thank you for talking about that and you've written deeply and movingly about your military experience of people should Look for your byline scatter, you know, particularly a tablet magazine But elsewhere if we can bring this kind of back home To where we're going because you know One of one of the things that you talk about in the story, which I think is really important is that, you know, these kinds of Apparatuses technological cultural consensus making, you know surveillance apparatus and Mentalities and mindsets they get developed for particular Moments in time sometimes well-intentioned sometimes effective oftentimes poorly intentioned and ineffective But then they outlive, you know the the thing that gate, you know that conjured them into being um, and we talk a little bit about now that the kind of Attempts to surveil information flows and understand, you know, what was going on radicalization in central asian and the middle east and whatnot Now that that has come home and it's sitting here um What are the ways that we? Kind of change that so, you know, how do we make it more visible and how do we? You know, how do we dismantle? This type of apparatus because you know the ruling party ruling class now tends to be a kind of centrist left Or centrist liberal perspective There's no reason to believe if for whatever reason we become a center right country again You know the 80s are reborn and something like a Reagan coalition comes into power They're not going to be interested in dismantling this right because they will be able to use it to Maintain their kind of control. What do we do? I do think there's a sort of special synergy between progressivism not liberalism, but progressivism and techno surveillance states they They do share certain important things in common that can you talk a little bit about them I mean is what what is that is that that individuals are Are stupid or prone to being You know gulled into the wrong decision. So they need to know what else Faith in the expert class a faith in the idea that Things converge towards singular correct Outcomes or decisions that can be discerned through technical processes, you know, so inherent in the Sort of let's call it the original idea of liberalism was an idea the incompatibility of ends right and so liberalism is a liberalism is a means by which societies deal with Irreconcilable conflicting differences and the 30 years different. Yeah, different visions of life, right? I mean in an American context The point of politics is not to reach a consensus It's to create a system by which people who disagree on very important things are able to live peacefully Right, right. Yeah, and now and you're saying like in a certain kind of progressive mentality that's out the window because No, there is a right way to do this. There is a right way to do that This is moral that anything else is not right. Well, nick when it comes to Eradicating white supremacy. Can there really be two ways right when it comes to? When it comes to the vaccine when it comes to the entire never Thousands millions of lives are at risk. Can there do we do we really have to? Allow for disagreement over these You know if genocide is on the table or mass extermination is on the table We have no time for this. So, yeah, I but I but I that's a quibble I agreed with 95 of what you said and I agree that you could easily see a center right government making great use of all of this while also subscribing to some of those same sort of progressive technocratic underlying ideas Sort of or premises Look in terms of what we do about it I leave that to others for the most part my own feeling is that There's too much and it's too big and You know, we need Decentralization we need There's just it's not global information dominance Is not something where you want to have a more benign or a more democratic version of global information You don't want global information dominance. It is Itself it is the problem not the application of it or the Ideological superimposition on top of it or or the corruption of the people running it and so I think that I think that there's a pretty good basis for how the united states should be run and You know, I not to sound like I'm not an originalist But I just let's not throw out the constitution. You know, I mean I'm both not an originalist and I'm also somebody who feels perfectly comfortable saying in a non snarky or or Uh sarcastic way, let's not throw out the constitution because there is a real expert led consensus around the absolute that the the idea that the first amendment is obsolete now, so I would say the first amendment is not obsolete and We should protect the first amendment and But yeah, I beyond that, you know, I'm I would like politics to get sane enough so that I can go back to writing novels and Not feel like I'm missing anything, you know I asked Zach Because we we talk about this a lot and you know, jag I mean your analysis both, you know It captivated both of us and I really think everybody should read this Article and think it through and I tend to agree with you know most but but Zach, you know, we on an almost weekly basis We're often charting You know the the moments when people are escaping centralized control and people are able to live their lives More according to how they see fit and we talk jack of allot on, you know This show and elsewhere about things like bitcoin things like nostre Even blue sky, but where it seems as if in many profound ways we are decentralizing power and information And whatnot and zack i'm i'm curious. Do you do you agree with uh, jacob's pessimism? In terms of you know clearly he is describing something real and that is governing us But are you as as pessimistic as he is? I mean, I take everything he's saying as a warrant that If there's not some kind of counteraction Serious counteraction taken that things could get really bad and this new system of governance, uh, whatever that exactly Is takes shape that it's not going to be The the america that we all want to live in You know, there there was one audience question that I think kind of gets to this point. Um, you know, jacob mentioned decentralization fm here says the internet is the new printing press the elites are scared because the people are having access to information once reserved to a few a fascinating part of the article that that I liked from jacob was that The kind of history of the internet and we talked a little bit about it before how it started as this kind of defense project And but it at the same time there there's always been the kind of libertarian silicon valley ethos But part of the dna of the internet May have been to kind of police Social movements from the very beginning And I think we're just stuck with the fact of technology always being a double edged sword and We have to try to use the edge of the sword that is useful to kind of undercut the the weapon that would you know result in oppression and uh, I think Decentralization is exactly the way to think about it and those those tools are out there whether it is You know cryptocurrency just encryption generally The decentralized networks that are emerging are They have been designed in a way to be resistant to exactly the kind of at scale Moderation or manipulation that has occurred over the past decade that we've just been talking about um, the question is Will enough people Start migrating away from that in time And I think that is an open question and it's one that We can help answer by bringing all these issues to light because people need to know What's going on in order to react to it? It's what are you? Yeah, there's a I think that that's basically right. I mean, I I think that the there is a real danger from the internet and Applying this label disinformation was a way of Sort of capturing and corralling that danger and redirecting it But the danger from the internet is is like the commenter said that it disrupts this um hierarchy of And met But you know when you printing press again first sequences of the were and they kind of objective consciousness and the emerging modern nationalism we understand it and also very very wars and of of The first pamphlets and mobs and and war nationalism, which were extension printing press, you know this clue and formulation is that is certain asperity intentions of man they they accentuate and build characteristics that are inherent to human so one active the human personality get magnified and amplified while another is attenuated different technologies work on different characteristics of the human we saw how the printing press work and it went through a very very Bloody phase and then led to this resolution, which was liberalism in effect and and The attempt to sort of put the genie back in the bottle. That's what disinformation is in a sense It's it's the attempt to put the genie back in the bottle to recapture the kind of elite consensus That had previously existed and had allowed for this top-down messaging control And which was itself largely a product of these previous technologies television and radio Broadcasts and that simply doesn't exist anymore. That world is gone And we have to make our way through this new world without trying to put the genie back in the bottle Right. I mean, I you know I was thinking as you were talking, you know It took us hundreds of years to get used to the printing press and what that meant for human organization and you know, both experimentation and a kind of developing of radically different ways of living and then we had to come up with a way to You know to let people live more peacefully and you get liberalism, which is not simply a political philosophy or structure It's also it's an attitude towards life and towards pluralism and tolerance And it seems in in in many ways and in some of my work I talk a lot about this like we really only got comfortable in america with free expression in the very late 1950s You know before then you couldn't even fucking publish lady chatter least lover without being sued or brought into court And you know, we finally settled that and now the internet comes along and disrupts things even more So we might be looking at another, you know 500 years of disruption I mean, I certainly hope not and I do I agree with you that looking At the disinformation mindset and the hoax, you know that you talk about in your article Um is an attempt to you know, it's it's a sign that the elites are losing control But they can do a lot of damage, right? They're going to lose in the long run information maybe doesn't want to be free but Everything escapes the lab and you know starts doing Individuals start monkeying around with stuff in all sorts of ways that is interesting And you know and ultimately triumphant, but that's the issue the uh, you know I guess the final thing that I want to say and then maybe we can wrap up but the other Part of your story, which I think listeners should really think about a lot is You know at the beginning of the global war on terror and I wrote a piece and That came out in the december 2001 issue of reason about the new cold war and it was fascinating to see How both george busch but also donald rumsfeld who you know people kind of forget now because he died and he was You know, uh, he was an architect of two massive failures in american Kind of foreign policy or history both, you know when he was part of the fort administration But especially uh part of the george w bush administration He very much called thing, you know that the global war on terror was a new cold war and that it was going to help us Supply us with a national purpose, etc And rattling around there, which I think a lot of people have forgotten especially if they don't remember the cold war is that The cold war was not simply about foreign policy It was a structuring device that influenced every aspect of american life including the way the media operated the way it talked Sports, uh, you know, I mean boys in america had to learn chess You know in order to because we we were in an all out war against the soviet union who were great at chess We had to learn classical piano, blah, but you know like we had to take them on Every aspect of our lives that had seemingly nothing to do With foreign policy got structured by the cold war and jacob I think you know one of the things that your article does and your writing in general does by calling back to that period it kind of It reminds us that the global war on terror is kind of over But it remains a structuring device that has is Influencing a lot of what we do Without even realizing anymore in the same way that the cold war and that mentality persisted You know after the fall of the soviet union in the end of the cold war I guess, um, you know, do you want to give a final statement of You know, where where are the places either in history or in in current events or going on right now where you see A bit, you know some room for hope where we might actually Come to terms with this kind of stuff more quickly and more efficiently and more peacefully than Then we might have a hundred or 200 years ago Well, um I think that's a brilliant point about the uh the cold war as a structuring device and you know Sounds like you you understood that a few decades before I started to grapple with it, but I I I think that's very astute and that the way in which the one Transitioned into the other the way in which the cold war transitioned into the war on terror and the war on terror has now transitioned into the Into the war against disinformation speaks to how critical that structuring device is and you know One of the one of the things I realized that with all of these things I'm usually you know I'm wrong a few times before I start like groping my way and a sort of drunken Stumble towards being halfway onto something and you know when covet first broke out I was like let's lockdowns now. Let's lock down and I And I really thought like ah, this is an opportunity for the state to do something and be competent and ironically I was probably too influenced by right-wing weirdos on Online who had been hyping up the threat of covet at a moment when the sort of center left press was Saying it was racist to be worried about covet and so I was too swayed by the kind of You know like in a technical sense reactionary thinking and I I just thought ah well if the washington post is trying to censor this and These guys are saying it's the worst thing ever. It must be the worst thing ever And what I what I learned Six months later probably more like two months later actually was any technology of social control Introduced under the pretext of emergency becomes permanent Always it's a universal rule So lockdowns as a technology of social control are introduced in a state of emergency They will recur. This is not the last we've seen of them any technology of social control becomes permanent and That doesn't really address your question at all, but that's a think of that It's a good. Uh, it's a good, uh, but sober note to uh to end on for sure. Yes, uh, Thank you so much for joining us jay Uh, if this stream is not convinced you to read the article in full I I don't know what will but please check it out and anything Byline with uh by jacob seagull is definitely worth checking out Thank you for joining us today. Thank you nick for the conversation and thanks for everyone who Tuned in we will be back here next week same time