Anatomy of the consensus-borg

How is narrative discipline kept?

In 2016, something changed in a big way. It felt like the various nodes of power, previously diverse in their concerns and orientations, converged as though in response to a mortal threat. When the pandemic hit in early 2020, expert and expert-like lay opinion were settled on scientific matters that were in reality quite unsettled, and there was aggressive moral censure of resulting questions and disputes that could be quite intimidating. At almost the same moment, we saw an unprecedented display of institutional unanimity and activism, using what seemed to be an approved set of phrases, in response to the killing of George Floyd. By May of 2020, it became impossible not to notice that we were living under a new dispensation, though it has remained difficult to understand how it came about.

To explain the manufacture of rigid consensus around empirical claims and policy positions that seem eminently debatable, a number of ideas and observations have been offered, mainly in those precincts of the Internet where the prevailing sense is that something has gone seriously awry. The explanations offered have included

- “preference cascades” in prestige opinion

- the increasing tendency of Western governments to invoke “states of emergency” to pursue unpopular measures

- credentialed but basically entrepreneurial fear-mongers working in symbiosis with media

- the erosion of scientific integrity and independence through centralized funding and “research cartels”

- the function that moral panics play in coordinating various nodes of power around some agenda that would otherwise remain controversial or debatable

- the role that a “politics of repudiation” and moral denunciation play in securing elites’ release from allegiance to the national community

- the group self-hypnosis that has been called “mass formation”

- the “over-production of elites” who end up competing with one another in ways destructive of society, for example through ideological purity tests and cancel culture that induce conformity

All of this has been interesting and fruitful, in my view. In response to the extravagant untruths that saturate public space in the new era, and the surprising deference they enjoy, “sociology of knowledge” has become an urgent and fascinating topic for people who still have a taste for critical inquiry.

As a matter of intellectual hygiene, many of us have focused on these sociological questions and resisted the siren of conspiracy thinking. The latter seems epistemically déclassé -- too simple and too much guided by credulous indignation.

But, thanks in part to the Twitter Files, we are now beginning to learn about a machinery of narrative control that is in fact quite top-down.  Even, dare we say, a bit conspiracy-adjacent. How effective it has been in generating and sustaining fake consensus is an important question. But in any case, the (often bungling) efforts to shape our reality by a network of information warriors in government, tech and elsewhere give us a further explanatory avenue to consider when we are trying to understand how the borg of right-thinking organizes its constituent parts into something that can appear frighteningly cohesive.

One of the more powerful entries in this emerging picture was published last week in Tablet by Jacob Siegel. Siegel was an Army intelligence officer who served in Afghanistan and has since become a journalist with interesting and important things to say. He traces the rise of an “information warfare” infrastructure in the US government that began with 9/11 and, on his account, later got turned to domestic political purposes.

The methods of counterinsurgency -- winning hearts and minds through propaganda – used early in the Global War on Terror (GWOT) were of Vietnam vintage. But in 2014, several events occurred that convinced the US government of the need to overhaul its information warfare capabilities.

First Russia tried to suppress the US-backed Euromaidan movement in Ukraine; a few months later Russia invaded Crimea; and several months after that the Islamic State captured the city of Mosul in northern Iraq and declared it the capital of a new caliphate. In three separate conflicts, an enemy or rival power of the United states was seen to have successfully used not just military might but also social media messaging campaigns designed to confuse and demoralize its enemies.

[U.S. and NATO security officials became convinced that] the state had to acquire the means to take control over digital communications so that they could present reality as they wanted it to be, and prevent reality from becoming anything else.

Once ISIS was in retreat and Osama bin Laden was dead, the American public lost interest in terrorism. But by then the information warfare apparatus developed in the GWOT had evolved into a “self-interested, self-justifying industry that employed thousands of people in and out of government who operated without clear oversight or strategic utility,” Siegel writes. To justify its existence, it needed to have threats.

The 2016 election of Trump provided a fresh threat to the nation, indeed to humanity. Of course, such a statement is hyperbolic. But, to judge from the wholesale freakout, I think it accurately reflects the hyperbolic state of mind of those in power and those who felt more or less comfortable with present arrangements. While the Democratic Party succeeded in neutralizing (indeed sabotaging) Bernie Sanders in 2016, the Republicans weren’t organized enough to do the same with a candidate who appeared, at least, to threaten “their business ties with China, their access to cheap imported labor, and the lucrative business of constant war,” as Siegel puts it. (As it turned out, all of these interests remained secure.) Trump was able to bypass party control and use social media to reach voters directly.

His election to the presidency was regarded as a usurpation by both parties. It was widely said to have been caused by Facebook’s and Twitter’s failure to control disinformation that was being seeded by Russia. This is the key moment, and the key assertion that ushered in a new era. The field of political contest was now explicitly epistemic. Combine that fact with another: domestic politics had been corrupted by a foreign enemy. This meant that we were in a “state of exception,” the sort of emergency in which executive war powers were thought appropriate and constitutional principles could be suspended.

Vladimir Putin had cunningly used social media to turn America’s own less-enlightened citizens into enemy combatants against the democratic process, making them quite literally enemies of the state, if one follows this logic. Social media was a powerful weapon that could not be permitted to fall into the wrong hands in this way. The election was a wake-up call, in light of which the First Amendment seemed like a quaint scruple from another era.

As we now know, the precipitating claims about Russian interference overstated the scale and efficacy of that interference.  Major powers try to influence other countries’ elections routinely, probably none more doggedly or successfully than the United States. Exaggerated claims of Russian meddling metastasized through algorithmic enhancement and the usual mimetic processes of journalism, but an important early element in the story appears to have come from “a new outfit called Hamilton 68 [which] claimed to have discovered hundreds of Russian-affiliated accounts that had infiltrated Twitter to sow chaos and help Donald Trump win the election,” Siegel writes. This became a major news story, but as we know since the release of the Twitter Files, Twitter executives quickly figured out that it was a scam. Quoting Matt Taibbi, Siegel relays that when Twitter reverse-engineered the list of flagged accounts, it found that Hamilton 68 had “simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming.” The discovery prompted Twitter's head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, to suggest in an October 2017 e-mail that the company take action to expose the hoax and ‘call this out on the bullshit it is.’” That did not happen. The reason it did not happen is that Twitter and the other social media firms were just then in the process of becoming integrated with the national security state.

In his last days in office, after the debacle (as it was seen) of the 2016 election, President Obama signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which according to Siegel “used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war.” Obama designated the State Department’s recently created Global Engagement Center (GEC) to head up the U.S. counter-disinformation campaign. But this was not a task that could be accomplished by government alone. It would require “not only the whole of government, but also whole of society” approach, according to a document released by the GEC in 2018. “To counter propaganda and disinformation will require leveraging expertise from across government, tech and marketing sectors, academia, and NGOs.”

Siegel suggests that with this whole-society mobilization (which he documents on a number of fronts, including that of NGOs),

the government-created ‘war against disinformation’ became the great moral crusade of its time. CIA officers at Langley came to share a cause with hip young journalists in Brooklyn, progressive nonprofits in DC,… racial equity consultants, private equity consultants, tech company staffers in Silicon Valley, Ivy League researchers,

and so on. Whatever the role of government may have been in precipitating it, which would be hard to establish, there really did seem to be a consolidation of diverse actors around certain shared scripts, to the point that dark references to “the regime” begin to sound less paranoid.

Siegel writes,

by conflating the anti-establishment politics of domestic populists with acts of war by foreign enemies, it [the information war] justified turning weapons of war against American citizens. It turned the public arenas where social and political life take place into surveillance traps and targets for mass psychological operations.

There is much else in Siegel’s very long piece, and he succeeds in connecting a lot of dots. He traces the pentagon’s development of “memetic warfare,” that is, weaponizing memes to “defeat an enemy ideology and win over masses of noncombatants” as well as scaling up automated means of detecting and censoring terrorist messaging online. (Which should have struck us as ominous at the time, if we had known about it, given how pliable the term “terrorist” has turned out to be.) This culminated in the State Department creating the Global Engagement Center mentioned earlier. On the same day the GEC was announced, President Obama and

various high ranking members of the national security establishment met with representatives from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other Internet powerhouses to discuss how the United states can fight ISIS messaging via social media.

This was January 2016. Siegel argues that, after the populist upheaval later in 2016, the integration of American social media companies into the security state became useful for fighting the enemy within, and in fact was so used.

In the Clinton and Obama worlds, the rise of Donald Trump looked like a profound betrayal - because, as they saw it, Silicon Valley could have stopped it but didn't. As heads of the government's internet policy, they had helped the tech companies build their fortunes on mass surveillance and evangelized the internet as a beacon of freedom and progress while turning a blind eye to their flagrant violations of antitrust statutes. In return, the tech companies had done the unthinkable - not because they had allowed Russia to "hack the election," which was a desperate accusation thrown out to mask the stench of failure, but because they refused to intervene to prevent Donald Trump from winning.

What could the leaders of the ruling party do? They had two options. They could use the government's regulatory power to counter-attack: Break up the data monopolies and restructure the social contract underwriting the internet so that individuals retained ownership of their data instead of having it ripped off every time they clicked into a public commons. Or, they could preserve the tech companies power while forcing them to drop the pretense of neutrality and instead line up behind the ruling party -- a tempting prospect, given what they could do with all that power.

They chose option B.

Declaring the platforms guilty of electing Trump… provided the club that the media and the political class used to beat the tech companies into becoming more powerful and more obedient.

And this:

By 2020, the counter-disinformation machine had grown into one of the most powerful forces in American society. Then the COVID-19 pandemic dumped jet fuel into its engine. In addition to fighting foreign threats and deterring domestic extremists, censoring “deadly disinformation” became an urgent need. 

And this:

In March, the National Science Foundation’s chief information officer, Dorothy Aronson, announced that the agency was “building a set of use cases” to explore how it could employ ChatGPT, the AI language model capable of a reasonable simulation of human speech, to further automate the production and dissemination of state propaganda.

That last bit about AI-generated propaganda is ominous. Siegel presents arguments and observations of varying persuasiveness. He writes with a moral fervor that is likely to disqualify him from polite society but seems fitting as a response to events, particularly for one who enlisted in the military on behalf of a country that seems in process of being transformed beyond recognition. In this he resembles that Boomer icon, the Vietnam vet who comes home and speaks truth to power. Currently we are warned by extremism experts on NPR that complaints of feeling betrayed by those in power is a sure tell for fascist sympathies, the resentful language of the Beer Hall Putsch. But of course, there really is such a thing as betrayal by those in power, as I believe the Vietnam vets were right to perceive. To disqualify political anger with strained historical parallels to Munich in 1923, rather than to the (more proximate and directly relevant) American military-industrial-political complex of the 1960s, starts to look like an effort to protect the current constellation of power. It is a constellation that can look, well, a little fascistic. Not least, for its insistence that domestic political enemies are agents of a hostile foreign power – which, incidentally, was also the premise of Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1950.