Discourse Is a Dangerous Technology
We’re not fighting for truth, and thinking ‘our side just needs better propaganda’ means you're in the wrong war.
The EVENT happened, the PERSON said the WORDS, and now Team A and Team B are duking it out in the comments, wielding their arsenal of personal projections: the righteous sword of the Straw Man, the bow of Whataboutery, the axe of Bad Faith.
This entrenchment of position and collapse of nuance is not new within living memory, but it is new at the scale and speed currently normalised. The internet allows combination and breadth of discourse never before seen, and where there is discourse, there is influence.
Influence is the least discussed currency of the world. Soft power is soft precisely because it goes unmentioned. Being influenced is a naturally human experience and is not a sign of weakness or threat, rather a sign of having a free mind. It is related to, but not the same as, being manipulated. Where manipulation seeks to subvert agency, influence respects it.
“Why do billionaires hoard money?” is a reasonable if naive question that gets asked pretty regularly. Influence is the answer – more precisely, insulation from challenge. That is a security and operational freedom that money alone does not afford.
Influence via discourse used to be a highly protected and curated affair. Debate was seen as a necessary technology but was understood to be dangerous - it threatened established power structures by challenging them: exposing their weakness and testing their strength.
In the first forums, councils and magistrates set the agendas of discussion. Rhetorical framing dominated speech, water clocks kept time, and reputation and status of the speaker mattered a great deal.
Being a radical at the time could result in ostracism, exile, loss of honour, career or worse. Analogy, myth and precedent were used to fit these notions into conservative frames. Satire and theatre were often more permissive and expressive of radical positions.
Moving to more modern times, we see the curated, credentialed gatekeeping eventually gave way to plurality, access and speed, paying the price in coherence, mutual understanding, and rhetorical compatibility.
“Be led by the best at speaking persuasively” is not a compatible requirement with “have the brightest minds addressing fundamental questions”. The spicy polemic will inevitably overwhelm the unglamorous solution in the court of modern Western public opinion.
The demand for curated discussion and reasoned framing may be incompatible with the concept of plurality and unilateral inclusion, by a dogmatic interpretation of plurality and inclusion at least.
The problem is that the inclusion afforded currently is a veneer. A simple byproduct of incompatible incentive structures creating an ideal outreach platform for the worst possible actors. Our town square is streaked in slung mud, as people turn out time and time again to scream ideology and morals at each other, while absorbing the omnipresent advertising billboards.
The Demon Headmaster is a marvellous series of books by Gillian Cross. I cannot speculate whether or not Cross was setting out to write a chilling Orwellian portent or simply a gripping children’s yarn, but she firmly nailed both in my esteem.
The titular character seeks to impose order in his school via his powers of hypnosis. Through various methods over various novels his plans are foiled by those meddling kids. He eventually arrives at broadcast television as the obvious attack vector to take over the nation. Trite? Perhaps, but I was a child and hadn’t learned about propaganda yet.
The Demon Headmaster’s tale would be challenging to write now. While the internet featured in the novels, it did so in the manner it was most used at the time – a subversive place where organisers and operators could communicate in coded languages. In today’s algorithm driven forums of walled gardens, echo chambers and monetised API access and data harvesting, one might think he has already won.
The main reason he has not won, is that there are literally dozens of him, all with equally hypnotic levels of influence, and competing goals. The question isn’t how to beat the hypnotists, it’s whether we can speak without them. If you think ‘your side’ needs better messaging, you might be in the wrong war.