Want to Understand Today’s Political Debate? Study PsyOps

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This week’s episode

Today’s chaotic information environment is so hard to understand, so fundamentally disrupted, that many thoughtful people spend energy coming up with metaphors for it. Just to get our arms around it. It’s the familiar old gossip mill gone viral, for example. It’s traditional propaganda supercharged by social media.

Annalee Newitz, today’s guest, is an award-winning journalist and science fiction novelist who introduces an intriguing analogy in a new book, Stories are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind.

What we’re seeing, Annalee says, is a kind of psychological warfare operation, using the tools of military psyops in our culture wars, as a way to undermine the institutions of liberal democracy.

Annalee and Eric discuss the history of psyops and the stories that psyops weaponizes; the difference between Russian and American psyops; why flooding the zone with misinformation is so effective; how psychological disarmament can happen, and how creative visions of the future, including those expressed through science fiction, can help inspire positive change.

Let Eric know what you think of the episode at eric@ericschurenberg.com

Transcript

Eric Schurenberg (00:01.677)
Annalee, welcome to In Reality.

Annalee (they/them) (00:04.258)
Thanks so much for having me.

Eric Schurenberg (00:06.081)
It is great to have you here. One of the things about your book, Stories or Weapons, is that you introduce the idea of the information environment as kind of polluted, if you will, with PSYOPs. PSYOPs is a military term that refers to propaganda or misinformation or other emotional appeals designed to demoralize an enemy on the battlefield. Now, how is that a useful way of looking at today’s civilian information?

Annalee (they/them) (00:39.65)
Yeah, I I started out with this book really wanting to get into the backstory behind a term like culture war, which we hear all the time now in our political discourse, but also even just in our general conversations about culture, pop culture, you know, even Star Wars is, you know, subject to culture war. And so the further back I went into U S history, the more I saw that.

Culture War really does have this antecedent in military operations around, as you said, propaganda. And, you know, this is a really old part of warfare. It goes all the way back to one of the first written records we have of the Art of War by Lautze and by Sunseh, sorry, the Art of War by Sunseh. And

You know, at that time it was just sort of trickery and warfare, the idea of avoiding violence through, you know, creative means. And in the United States, we have a very specific way of practicing this type of warfare. And so that’s what I trace in the book is how the United States developed its own approach to PsyOps…

…and how it starts with the military, but it also always exists in our pop culture too. And there’s this kind of mutual relationship between our pop culture and what now we call culture war and military warfare, total warfare on the battlefield.

Eric Schurenberg (02:19.103)
One could argue that the internationally most skilled practitioners of PsyOps, at least of this kind of PsyOps, are the Russians. And then in your book, you talk a lot about how US military has used PsyOps in its recent wars in the Middle East, not very successfully and rather painfully as you record in the book. On the other hand, the Russian version of conducted say during the 2016 election was quite successful. What’s the difference between the two?

Annalee (they/them) (02:55.758)
I think now the difference is becoming, there’s less of a difference now. And I think that’s partly because both the US and Russia have learned from each other a lot. And of course, during the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States were going head to head and doing all kinds of operations, both kinetic and psychological against each other. as was, as PsyOps, were conceived in the US. When you first start to see military commanders and analysts writing down formulas for how to do this stuff, it really was quite different from what the Soviets at that time were doing. And in the United States, I talk a lot in the book about a very interesting army analyst who worked in intelligence and in PSIOPs. His name was Paul Linebarger.

And he wrote the first army manual for PsyOps right after World War II. He had worked in psychological operations throughout the war, particularly in the Pacific theater. And so he was kind of recording what he’d seen and then giving a lot of kind of, here’s how to do it, a little recipe book for future military commanders and enlisted folks. so his idea was

The United States’ unique strength was that we had great stories to offer about our way of life. know, that the United States was just a great country. And then if we could just convince our enemies and our adversaries that we were the best way to go, our brand of democracy, our brand of capitalism, that people would just come over to our side, especially because, of course, we also had the atomic bomb. So it’s always good to have that in your back pocket. And he was well aware of that, as were many other practitioners of the art.

And so he says, you know, we think of typical propaganda as being, you know, square jawed men teaching you to farm. And he’s there. He’s definitely sort of subtweeting Soviet propaganda, which we’ve all seen from the 1930s. And he says, you know, really, it should be much more like a Laurel and Hardy movie. It should be fun. It should be engaging. It should be a story.

Annalee (they/them) (05:12.884)
And this is what the United States was great at. You Hollywood was one of our biggest industries, still is, and U .S. entertainment had invaded the world. know, people loved American pop culture. They loved Disney. And so he was like, look, this is this is what we’ve got. You this is how we’re going to sell ourselves. And so for that reason, a lot of PSI ops in the states kind of built themselves around this idea of telling a really…

…engaging action -packed story about how wonderful this country is. Whereas, you know, the typical Soviet Psy -op was much, and again, I’m sort of talking about sort of mid 20th century, up to the present. So the Soviet approach is much more akin to unleashing uncertainty and chaos.

What now is kind of called flooding the zone with misinformation and making it so that people don’t trust any institutions, making it so that people are just unable really to make any kind of decision at all because they don’t know what’s true. And so that’s very demoralizing. It’s an extremely, effective form of PsyOP. But so is the US. mean, there’s a reason why still

U .S. pop culture is consumed throughout the world. We are good at that stuff. And so really, know, we it’s true that within the military, there’s a lot of anxiety about how terrible we are at PSI ops, partly because of lack of funding. But in terms of propaganda, the U .S. is still king.

Eric Schurenberg (06:57.933)
That’s really interesting. Being on the receiving end of sort of Russian style, flood the zone with misinformation, I sort of feel that we are on the losing end of things. In fact, in your book, you quote Leinbarger talking about what he calls a propaganda dizzy citizen who cynically sees everything as propaganda and nothing else.

Annalee (they/them) (07:08.053)
Mm

Eric Schurenberg (07:26.711)
I’m reminded of that quote from Hannah Arendt saying that authoritarian propaganda aims to convince people that everything is possible and nothing is true. I sort of feel like that is a state that we are in danger of reaching here in this country. What’s your take on that? How effective has that flooding the zone with nonsense strategy been?

Annalee (they/them) (07:37.912)
Mm -hmm.

Annalee (they/them) (07:52.8)
Yeah, I’m really glad that you brought up the propaganda dizzy man, because that was line bargers effort to kind of characterize what happens to someone who’s being targeted with this particular kind of psychological operation that you what happens when you have this Russian style, si op is that instead of learning that media is…

…should be regarded skeptically. Instead, the result is that you just assume everything is PsyOps and propaganda. And that’s where we are in the States right now. You hear a lot of talk about how everything is a PsyOps, including Taylor Swift. It’s a PsyOps, which people in the military like to joke that they just wish that they had the money to have a PsyOps like Taylor Swift. So the result is this kind…

…paralysis feeling like there’s nothing that you can do. And what I track in my book is the way this style of Psyop in the United States, because really my book is focused on the United States and kind of US propaganda, especially against our own citizens. And these days in our culture wars, in our political debates, we’re seeing this style of Psyop. And, you know, of…

…know, you wouldn’t see a political campaign sitting down in a war room and saying, all right, what kind of PSI ops will we do against the American people? but, you do see the same strategies being used, but there’s been a real, I would call it a weapons transfer program between, the kinds of psychological, campaigns that the military has engaged in, and civilian political campaigns and, and…

…and civil society campaigns. And as a result, I think the American voters in the wake, of course, of Russian propaganda during 2016, but now, you know, eight years of propaganda coming from inside the house, from inside the United States, people do feel incredibly demoralized. I mean, it’s no surprise. These are rhetorical weapons designed to make people feel like and to undermine our faith in our political institutions. And so when you have, you know, political operatives, like people in the Trump campaign, for example, trying to figure out ways to just confuse the voting public about what’s real and to kind of deal in lies as a form…

…you political rhetoric, you do get, there’s a lot of blowback. And people in the military who talk about PSYOPs talk a lot about second and third order effects. And so the primary intent may be to get people to vote for Trump, but then the secondary and the tertiary effects are people feel like completely disengaged from American politics. They don’t feel like citizens anymore. They hate their neighbors. They don’t feel like if there’s an emergency that they’ll…

…get any help from government agencies. And so people start to hate the country, you know, even if they want to be here, they start to feel alienated from everything. And that’s an outcome that I don’t think anyone wants on any side of the political spectrum. it’s really, it’s happening everywhere

Eric Schurenberg (11:29.065)
It is so pervasive that it’s hard to disentangle. And I’m sure you’ve heard, as I hear many times, that no one knows what’s true anymore and people are tuning out the news because they decided not to trust it. I want to move particularly to

One of the anti disinformation campaigns that you described in the book with with I read a certain amount of admiration that was the election integrity project that was, you know, a more or less coordinated effort by researchers and election boards, other civic organizations to protect against disinformation around the 2020 election. And while it may have been successful at…

…keeping people coming to the polls and not being diverted by misinformation. It did lead to a backlash, one of the second order effects you might’ve been talking about. One of the leaders of the election integrity project was the Stanford Internet Observatory, which was recently basically folded under pressure from among others, GOP congressmen and investigators.

Annalee (they/them) (12:49.08)
That’s

Eric Schurenberg (12:50.203)
A question I guess is why did that work in 2020 and what does it tell us about what we should be doing about 2024?

Annalee (they/them) (13:01.25)
Yeah, it is really unfortunate because this was a terrific project. It’s free online. You can go look it up as you’re listening. And what they found as they, so basically it was two groups of researchers at Stanford and at University of Washington in Seattle. And then they were working with local election boards and groups and working with…

…social media platforms and their goal was just to track election misinformation. So they were only focused on very narrowly on specific information that was misleading people about really basic stuff like where to vote, when to vote, how they could vote. So it was anything like that. So it was not looking at things like the Russian propaganda campaign in 2016…

…wasn’t looking at that kind of stuff. was just purely like, are Americans able to get the information to go to the voting poll, you know, box or go to their local polling place? So, and what they did was they just had a ticketing system, just like if you were filing a bug on a piece of software, you you fill out a form and you say, I saw this problem. And so they were hearing from people, you know, all over the place…

…you know, mostly people who are working in elections, but also people on social media platforms saying like, yeah, see like Sharpie Gate, which was one of the pieces of misinformation that they tracked about. If you vote with a Sharpie, it won’t count, or you have to have a specific kind of Sharpie. And there’s all these questions around like, is Sharpie a legitimate pen to use for voting? And it was all just made up. It was just people, you…

…misinforming the public about how to vote. And so because they were able to get these real -time reports on misinformation, the researchers could see how rumors spread online, which is really valuable just from the perspective of trying to help people get correct information. And again, this is not controversial information. This is just information

Annalee (they/them) (15:20.46)
Where is your polling place? When can you vote? How do you vote? So again, this is a nonpartisan kind of effort. so as they track the misinformation, they did find like there were nodes, know, particular types of people who tended to spread the misinformation more. They would see, for example, a pattern where a that they called the hockey stick pattern, where there’d be a little rumor kind of bubbling.

And then suddenly it would just one person would retweet it. They looked a lot at Twitter at the time. And then the hockey stick would happen. It would just shoot all the way off the chart. Suddenly hundreds of thousands of people are sharing this story. So that’s the bend in the hockey stick. And so their goal really is like, how do we stop the hockey stick from happening? There’s always going to be rumors, of course. You’re not going to suppress people saying weird stuff online. But what you can stop is like a runaway rumor…

…keeps people away from the polls, basically disenfranchises people through propaganda. you know, they, what they did in the course of this work was when they saw those kinds of hockey sticks, they would alert local election officials and say, like, listen, you know, we see a bunch of people talking about Sharpies, just FYI, you should know this, people will be asking about this, you might want to like put out a message to people saying it’s okay…

…or people are being told they can only vote on Tuesdays, but actually, of course they can vote all week. You might want to let people know. So there was conversation back and forth between the researchers and polling places and people working in elections. but it was not, nefarious. was, it was what, I refer to in the, in the book, as essentially like a propaganda weather report. Like they were trying to gather this information about…

…the rumors and misinformation before it became so widespread that it was a problem and just warning people about it. Like, know, incoming propaganda today, the propaganda will be about Sharpies tomorrow. It’s going to be about, you know, polling places. And so I think that’s I and of course, a lot of folks who study misinformation online do think that this is a viable model. This this weather report model.

Annalee (they/them) (17:44.046)
And it fits into an idea that’s called pre -bunking, where instead of waiting for a rumor to start and then debunking the rumor, you catch the rumor before it goes wide and you let people, you pre -bunk it. You tell people like, you’re about to hear something that’s incorrect and look out for this incorrect information.

And you know, it’s the kind of thing you see in PSA’s all the time for little kids, like, you know, if somebody in a van drives up to you and offers you candy, don’t get in. That’s pre -bunking, right? That’s like teaching kids don’t get into the van with the candy. So that’s kind of the model that grew out of that. And unfortunately, it was very, very threatening for, you know, for political groups that were sort of thriving in a misinformation environment, because there are a lot…

…political, especially far right groups really do want to have that kind of misinformation environment, that fear and uncertainty, because it really helps, you know, it helps their cause. It helps them convince people that everything is terrible. And so the Stanford Internet Observatory did get a ton of pushback for this kind of report and other that they had been doing on misinformation around vaccines.

Eric Schurenberg (19:06.223)
So with the shutting down of the Internet Observatory and also silencing of the Kate Starbird’s team at the University of Washington, how confident are you about the 2024 election?

Annalee (they/them) (19:21.934)
Well, we already know that you’re not going to have any kind of studies coming out of the 2024 election like what the Election Integrity Partnership did. And that’s partly because of these lawsuits just kind of having a chilling effect on researchers. But it’s also because a lot of the platforms now are not making their data available to researchers. So one of the things that kind of gets left out of that conversation is the fact that in 2020, these researchers had…

…access to the APIs at Twitter and I think to a certain extent at Facebook. And they were just, they were freely, you know, roaming through the data in a way that simply wouldn’t be possible now. So we’re, you know, I hate to be, doomerish about this, but, we are looking at a situation where there’s going to be a huge…

…There already is a huge amount of misinformation and disinformation. And what’s really chilling to me is that we won’t really be able to track it. The only way we’ll be able to track it is by what researchers are doing now, which is you get all of your research team to open as many accounts as you can on a platform and try to track what people are seeing.

And that’s great. Like that is helpful. Of course we should be doing that, but it would be a lot easier if we had, you know, research tools that would let us get a much bigger picture of what’s happening.

Eric Schurenberg (20:58.931)
One of the most effective arguments that have been leveled by the kinds of organizations that thrive in a disinformation environment, that oversight committees and so forth, has been that the social media platforms and the research that urged them to correct misinformation are actually censoring free expression of conservative viewpoints. I was struck by a quote…

…from your interview with Ruth Emmerich Gordon, who said that in an ideal information environment, some toxic ideas need to be disallowed. Is that censorship?

Annalee (they/them) (21:44.686)
I mean, I don’t think so. We have, you know, a kind of moving target for how censorship is defined legally in the United States, and it’s changed a lot over time. you know, we there’s this, I think, I think myth really in the United States that we have absolute free speech and, you know, the First Amendment guarantees free speech, but even just a cursory glance at all of the laws…

…you know, around what the First Amendment does will give you a peek at how many exemptions there are to the First Amendment. And in fact, I was teaching media studies at University of San Francisco last semester, and I made the students look at just like a website with like a congressional record of all of the exemptions to the First Amendment. And it’s long. And a lot of them were very surprised, like…

…we didn’t realize that there were all these things that don’t count as free speech. And so if you have a category of speech or expression that doesn’t fit into this rubric of free speech, suppressing it is not censorship. For example, a really simple one is CSAM, child sexual abuse material. We don’t have any trouble with the idea of eliminating that on the internet. And we don’t think of that as censorship, we think of that as safety. And so a lot of this, there’s a…

…a relatively new field in social media platforms, but also technology generally called trust and safety, where you have teams that are set up within an organization like, Facebook, which, of course, just fired most of their trust and safety team, sadly. But the organization is designed to create an information space that is safe…

…but also to do other things like make sure passwords work and that you’re safe in robust ways across the platform. so it’s really groups like these that I think would handle these questions, trust and safety groups would handle these questions around what kinds of speech is allowed or expression. But to go back to your question about censorship really quickly, one of the things that is exempt from protection under the First Amendment…

…there’s a whole bunch of ways that advertising is exempt because advertising, of course, it’s one of these weird liminal forms of speech where it’s a little bit propaganda, it’s a little bit creative expression. And there’s a lot of regulations around it because of the fact that we, know, legislators and experts know that ads aren’t the same thing as a story and that an advertisement

Is intended to change your behavior to get you to do something to maybe give up money, which could possibly put you in a vulnerable position. It could mean that you might, you know, become poorer because you fall for, from an, for an ad. So that’s why these things are regulated. And I think that, you know, a lot of disinformation falls…

…vaguely into that category. And of course, advertising has been a big influence on psychological warfare historically. So it makes sense that there’s a lot of that they’re kind of cousins, rhetorical cousins. So I think that it is not censorship. And I think that it is because of the fact that it’s a special kind of expression, which is designed to change people’s behavior…

…and is designed to target people’s vulnerabilities in a lot of ways. And again, this is somewhat similar to advertising. And so when we talk about regulating disinformation, we’re not talking about censoring just typical speech. We’re talking about censoring. We’re not talking about censoring. We’re talking about making a safe information sphere where people are not being targeted by this very weaponized rhetoric.

Eric Schurenberg (25:47.117)
That is very interesting. hadn’t quite reflected on thinking about PsyOps or propaganda or disinformation as a kind of weaponized advertising. But you’re right, it does play on emotions. It tells stories that may activate people’s underlying beliefs. That’s very interesting.

We just mentioned Ruth Gordon, who’s a science fiction writer. So was Paul Leinbarger, who drafted the first handbook of PsyOps. So looking ahead to the science fiction future, imagining the future through the eyes of people who do that for a creative living, what…

…do they say would have to happen to have a kind of psychological disarmament in our information warfare? What would like Gordon see as being the path out of the culture wars and the psyops that are used to wage

Annalee (they/them) (26:50.112)
Yeah, so I spoke with Gordon because I do think that in some ways she’s a modern day version of Paul Linebarger, although she’s working on the civilian side. And she’s one of these researchers who tracks disinformation. But she’s worked with the government as well as academic institutions. she’s written, she has this great novel called A Half -Billed Garden, which is set in the future United States. And it is about imagining in part, I it’s about a lot of things, the future of democracy among them. And she imagines how the internet might function if it were a more safer information sphere, one that was more pro -social as opposed to one that now feels like a battleground. part of it has to do, there’s a couple of ways that it’s different from…

…network. It’s a little bit more like a federated media system where people are on essentially servers that can choose to link to each other or not. Information does not move virally across it so you don’t get the hockey stick problem. The hockey stick is really the kind of map of virality. So people are sharing information more mindfully and they’re using…

They’re using the internet for problem solving of real world issues. They’re dealing a lot with mitigation of climate change and the worst effects of climate change. so it’s become, the internet has become much more like a neighborhood bulletin board, but also kind of a first responder service where people are volunteering to help with…

…clean up of toxins in the environment and handling emergencies as they come up. So it’s an information dense environment, but the information is all very grounded. It’s not people swapping rumors about each other. So that’s kind of her very specific vision, especially because she’s thinking a lot about climate change. So she’s like, how can we use this technology to deal with disasters that come out of climate change. But Paul Lineberger coins the phrase psychological disarmament in his book, Psychological Warfare, which he writes in the late 1940s, which I just found so interesting that he, at the moment of conceiving of how we can engage in psychological warfare more effectively and in a more deadly and cruel way, he also felt the need to have the section on, well, here’s how we deescalate.

And interestingly, when he revises the book in the 1950s, he takes that section out and he kind of imagines that we’re always going to be at war forever. But in his initial book, he lays out a really careful set of rules for recognizing when psychological war is easing. you know, it’s a lot of stuff that you…

…think of as kind of democracy’s balanced breakfast, right? Like it’s a free press, it’s the free circulation of books, like libraries are not having book bans. It’s things like being able to move freely across the border. He was very against border controls and he really, really, he traveled a lot throughout his whole life and he really felt like borders were a psychological trauma as well as being obviously physical borders.

He also thinks a lot about how publicly funded spaces are really important to psychological disarmament. So schools, town squares, public parks. really, emphasizes a lot that we need to have public spaces that are funded by governments and that allow people to just meet face to face and that let them feel what it means to be in public in a safe way.

And this comes up in Gordon’s work as well. She’s really, she talked to me a lot about the importance of face -to -face meetings, like seeing people, not just going on a server or going on social media and like yelling at somebody who’s like a cartoon face with a weird name. you know, what is it like to actually physically meet your neighbors? And so a lot of disarmament comes down to basically rehumanizing each coming out into places where we see each other in public, but also kind of recreating our information sphere as something more like a public park than a battleground. so that I think is a really compelling way of thinking about it, sort of re -imagining the public sphere.

Eric Schurenberg (32:01.869)
Well, that’s very interesting. then to some extent, Gordon’s vision is already realized, at least the federated servers are in things like Mastodon, although that doesn’t seem to have caught on quite or anything like.

Annalee (they/them) (32:17.547)
Not as much as I wish it had.

Eric Schurenberg (32:20.321)
Or blue sky, which Julia Angwin of the New York Times and Proof News talked about in our last conversation. But let’s talk about you. And you have just laid out this optimistic vision of how we can psychologically disarm and what that would look like and things like nuance and civic discourse and everything returned to the public spaces. Are you optimistic about that or do worry that the damage done by the current environment is irreparable.

Annalee (they/them) (32:54.094)
I’m hopeful. I don’t know if I’d say optimistic, but I definitely think that there are many pathways out of our present moment that are more pro -social and offer a more hopeful vision of a country where we take care of each other and where we set aside our differences in order to, say, repair the infrastructure or give people more access to healthcare and housing…

…things that are not particularly controversial, like just general taking care of our health, that kind of thing. And I think that there’s several ways that we get there. And they are big, these are systemic problems, right? So like you said, has it been wrecked so much that we can’t get out of it? I mean, that’s the kind of question you ask when you’re facing a problem that permeates almost everything in your…

…in your society, right? Like, how do I pull this out of every institution and fix everything? And that’s really hard to do, and it will take time. And in the book, in the final section of my book, I do talk about some examples of people who are trying to engage in this project of repairing the public sphere. And that’s really how I see it, is that we’ve kind of trashed our public sphere…

…the point where we don’t trust any of the information in it, which means we can’t trust our neighbors. So how do we get back to a public sphere that’s safe, where we do trust people? You know, one way that’s really important is preserving the stories and histories of people who have been targeted by misinformation campaigns and disinformation. This really gets into the realm of culture war because culture war is really…

…the bath that we’re in right now. Maybe it’s not a bath, that sounds too nice. It’s the problem that we’re dealing with right now in the United States. so lots of groups have been targeted and demonized, like immigrants, trans people, black people. There’s a whole bunch of, and in different places at different times, it’s different groups. But these are people who…

…become convenient scapegoats in political rhetoric, especially from the far right. And so I talk about in the book, I talk about indigenous archives, archives set up by people from indigenous nations, which chronicle their histories and chronicle the ways in which, partly the ways in which they’ve been marginalized and attacked by the U .S. government, but also how they’ve survived and who they are and who they are now as opposed to 100 years ago.

And so I think that’s really important just because a big piece of culture war does involve demonizing certain groups because the way that you kind of wreck a public sphere is to say some people don’t belong in that public sphere. And if those people are citizens of the United States, but somehow they can’t participate in our in our public that damages the public sphere. That means that…

Eric Schurenberg (35:53.231)
Mm -hmm.

Annalee (they/them) (36:11.756)
…certain people who can’t participate and therefore it’s no longer really public anymore. It starts to be more of a private sphere. So that’s one piece of it. And doing that involves things like pushing back against book bans because a big part of the book ban movement is about silencing the voices of queer people and people of color. There’ve been a ton of studies coming out of the American Library Association and PIN America showing that the books that are banned are overwhelmingly books that have queer and BIPOC protagonists or that deal with issues around race and sexuality. So that’s one piece. The other piece I think may be more interesting to your listeners, which is around how do we manage digital public spheres? Because a lot of us experience town squares as going onto social media, whatever that is. And there’s a lot of…

…I really do prefer the trust and safety approach to how we’re going to manage our future public spheres. I think that that’s going to involve a lot of research and experimentation. I do think there’s a lot of hope in things like propaganda weather reports, treating disinformation like spam, so developing propaganda filters, for example. And I think all of this needs to be done really transparently. I’m not saying that suddenly Google should implement a scheme for screening out what they deem propaganda and not tell anyone. I’m just picking on Google because they’re big. I’m not saying that they have a program like this in place. So I think we need to have transparent public entities, civic organizations, trust and safety organizations that are answerable to the public who are saying, listen,

Here’s a propaganda filter you can use. If you don’t want to see anti -trans rhetoric, use this filter. If you love that stuff, great, have that. But that’s a way of protecting ourselves in the public sphere. And also again, having these weather reports where it’s like, get ready, there’s going to be a wave of Russian propaganda or there’s going to be a wave of propaganda from this far right group that hates vaccines. You know, it’s vaccine season, get ready for anti -vaccine propaganda.

Annalee (they/them) (38:33.71)
So that’s really helpful. The other thing, the other piece of that which I already talked about in kind of the science fictional mode is putting the brakes in place on virality. There’s this idea that I talked about in the book of slow media…

…which I got from Safiya Emoja Noble, who studies, who wrote this great book, Algorithms of Oppression, and studies how algorithms shape our experience of the public sphere. And she suggested to me, you know, maybe we should slow everything down. Like, what if, what if instead of when you try to share a post, you have to wait an hour or a day, you know, like, that’s not so bad, you know, and then it gives you time to savor a post that you’re sharing and the way you would savor slow food, you know, and then you share it after you’ve kind of marinated on it for a while. cause a big part of the problem with rumors and disinformation online is that people just instantly share things without really knowing what they’re sharing and really investigating where it comes from. So I think those are all part of how we can build up trust and safety in our public spheres.

And also thinking thinking really carefully about the fact that we are building these public spheres. don’t think people, I don’t think that the public has fully processed what happens when all of these spaces like X, for example, are privately owned. Because what happens is when you have a privately owned public sphere is that if a new guy takes over, he can transform it from Twitter into X or from a diverse space into a very, you right -wing, narrowly focused space. So I think those are all pieces of what I’d like to see going forward. And of course, there’s a role for people like me who write science fiction or who write creatively, which is to tell new kinds of stories, to kind of fill people’s imaginations with visions of what this future might look like, because we can’t get there without imagining it first. And we need to have those kinds of tools.

Eric Schurenberg (40:48.111)
Great. Well, Emily, that’s a great place to leave it, a future where we’re motivated by transparency and moderation and slowing things down and a creative, even a fictional at first vision of the future. And that is great.

Annalee (they/them) (40:57.098)
Mm -hmm.

Eric Schurenberg (41:11.688)
Stopped short, I would say, of being optimistic, but certainly pointed the way towards a lot of possibility with a beneficial outcome. Thank you so much for joining in reality.

Annalee (they/them) (41:21.218)
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Created & produced by: Podcast Partners / Published: Jul 23 2024