Why information warfare is beyond Orwellian
Propaganda, censorship, and yet more Matrix and Orwell references.
The term Orwellian is bandied around a lot these days. It’s pretty meaningless if you’ve not read 1984. Even those who have, often miss two of the most significant messages in the novel. The first, that controlling governance required an enemy; an outgroup with which to stir up emotion and galvanize identity. The second, that the information machine won. There was no happy ending. Even the protagonist, Winston, died smiling with love for his executioner. His conversion confirmed by the joy he felt when Big Brother’s designated enemy was defeated in battle. So, I write this article as Big Brother speaking to his reflection; as the Matrix, talking to itself.
The human desire for the downfall of others is a theme repeated throughout history, from Mesopotamian wars to modern football stadia. The Wachowski film, The Matrix, hammers home the banal human need for pain, suffering, and hatred, when Morpheus is psychologically tortured by Agent Smith.
I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.
Agent Smith, The Matrix
So, when Facebook confessed it had been experimenting on users, in 2012, to manipulate their emotions, it should be no surprise that a core approach involved using negative messaging to stimulate an increase in negative user interactions. If you want people to buy something, a product, an idea, a political candidate, or an identity label, fear is an excellent motivator.
Scared people crave allies. They usually make them by rallying against a designated enemy. Once a person joins a group, whether it’s a handful of neighbourhood bullies, or a national political party, it’s common for the values of that particular community to become crucial in the formation of their identity. This is where control lies because there’s implicit pressure to conform with other values the community adopts; often diktats that emanate from the leader. The reason is simple—opposing the will of the group can lead to expulsion. That means a loss of allies, a loss of identity, and a good chance of becoming an out-group target too. Ex-communication, or exile, is as old as history.
In the past, speeches, sermons, and public gatherings were used to galvanize popular identity. Rebels were made an example of with things like crucifixion, public hanging, and being burned alive. In many parts of the world, this pattern of control continues today. But they exist alongside much more sophisticated methods of control. Popular media, entertainment programs, and movies, are invariably infused with implicit values; superficial beauty, fierce competition, glorified wealth, and cruel amusement. Precursors to the downfall of Rome.
We also have online ‘communities’ and groups. A vast ‘marketplace’ of ideas. It gives a convincing illusion of global connection and freedom of thought. Just as Winston Smith was ‘free’ to enter a small shop and buy a paperweight, so you are free to engage with divergent ideas. It’s tolerated. Especially as it fractures people into so many disparate offshoots, there’s barely any effective coherence. Anybody who may become influential will be quietly sidelined. People too big to shut down will become controlled opposition. Through comments, weighted search, and adjusted algorithms, followers will be taken down a trail that leads them to adopt an identity label, and a common enemy. In 1984, there was Eurasia, Eastasia, and Oceania. On the world-wide web, it might be the woke and unwoke; the progressives and the conservatives; the capitalists and the socialists. Anyone who busts out of this narrative will be quietly blackballed.
Most people are unaware of the sophistication that contemporary propaganda and censorship employs. To get to grips with this, you first need to have a basic understanding of how the internet works. This is an education beyond the scope of this article. All I’ll say is that if you think you can surf anonymously, if you think popular commercial offerings for privacy and security are effective, you’re wrong. (Your VPN is likely to be a honeytrap operated by offshore companies controlled by intelligence services, or owned by a mafia billionaire.)
In terms of shepherding perception, the complexity of the internet means that information served to you can be tailor-made. You know this, right? You must have heard of phones listening to conversations and serving up timely, tailored ads, often in a very spooky way. What you might not know, is that it is possible for this to be done with the news too. Or your social media feeds, suggested videos, and web searches. Not only that, but it’s possible for state or non-state actors to intercept and change the news that is served to you, without your knowledge.
Your online activity can provide quite a thorough profile of your psychology, habits, and political leanings. This is gathered through cookies, traffic logs, online accounts, spending patterns, device fingerprinting, GPS, cell phone triangulation, your gait, and much more. Even the speed and rhythm with which you type on your keyboard can enhance the specificity of your biometric profile. And it is this sort of information that can assist in manipulating your behaviour. (Often called ‘user engagement’ among other euphemisms).
Capacity now exists for news and information to be supplied on an individual basis. Custom search results, news, and social media feeds, that are different to anybody else on the planet. Some of this could be false, inaccurate, or manipulated in a way designed to ‘engage’ you and curate a required behaviour. Not something obvious, but something deliberately placed outside your field of awareness. A way of tapping an emotional response. Because emotion can make you take flight (disengage, hide, camouflage), or fight (act, react, attach, and attack).
In addition to behavioural manipulation, there are multiple forms of censorship that are not obvious. Search black holes, where certain people or websites are simply dropped from search results. You’ll never even know it was there. Content can be black holed by your ISP, or web addresses dropped from DNS servers. You know the resource should be there. It shows on search listings. But when you try to connect, you get a weird error. It looks like the site is down, or the video won’t load.
Voice detection can be used too. Did you make a ‘bad’ video saying the ‘wrong’ thing a few years ago? Now anything you create seems to disappear with the tumbleweed? That’s because the system recognizes your voice, and sends your video to ghost town. In fact, your voice forms a critical aspect of your biometric profile. It will be gleaned from voice search, your phone calls, or just your device listening in, should you decide to use voice search in the future. There’s that little talking speaker in the corner, the one that plays music for you. That knows your voice too. And maybe your doorbell. Now, if you ever say anything, anywhere, it can be blocked from any digital platform in real time. Oops.
In fact, the AI tools now exist to clone your voice and appearance, and alter what you’re saying, in real time. It could make a simultaneous call to two of your neighbours, telling them different things about each other to make them enemies, and using your voice and face to do so. Sociopathic gossips and curtain twitchers do similar things in small villages, urban street corners, and around office coffee machines, all over the world. If you’ve experienced this, you know how destructive it can be. Imagine that effect, exponentially increased, nationwide, or worldwide, with no obvious narcissist at the centre of it all?
And this is the key point of it becoming beyond Orwellian. Because there doesn’t need to be a person involved. There doesn’t need to be a ministry building, or manned pipeline of information adjustment. An AI system can simply be instructed to achieve a certain result, and off it will go, desperate to please its master. It will sit on your device, go where you go, read your maps, listen to you argue with your partner, debate with your friends, and sing in the shower. And when the time comes, it will serve you a completely fictitious story, with photographs, videos, and anything else you might have been profiled to require, and pull your strings in ways you didn’t know was possible. And if it can’t? Well, maybe you lose your job, or your bank account gets shut down, or your mugshot appears on the local news and you become public enemy number one. Maybe you wind up in a shop doorway with a ragged sleeping bag; a dispersed gulag for the disobedient.
You may think you’re robust. You’ll be able to determine truth from fact. Use your intuition, or experience, or those rare little corners of the internet that you think are still free. But, it’s already too late. Humans haven’t evolved to cope with the speed and complexity of such an environment. In the past, we never managed to prevent the psychos from taking control, and they didn’t have this technology. Now, the information landscape is simply too great to navigate. We don’t even know who the enemy is, only who we think it is, and that has almost certainly been curated. The irony of 1984, is that it’s the sort of book Big Brother would write. And the irony of the Matrix movie was that most of it involved fighting, one side against another. Baudrillard commented that it was exactly the sort of movie the simulation would make. In other words, the machine has already won because there is nothing but the machine.
Have you ever stood and stared at it, marveled at its beauty, its genius? Billions of people, just living out their lives, oblivious.
Agent Smith, The Matrix