Both “right-wing” and “left-wing” enthusiasts have this vision of a handful of billionaires controlling all of the news in the world. While there is some grain of truth to this, in the sense that politicians and rich people have certain narratives they want pushed, we are vastly overestimating how much these narratives are centrally controlled. Here’s why.
When it comes to the “information war” – remember that journalists, or at least the vast majority of them, are not paid agents of the state. So they willingly go along with the party line on the Ukraine war, do receive an intense degree of peer pressure to not deviate from it, but they are not being held at gunpoint. That’s why I think it is silly when people talk about “cracks are appearing in the Ukraine narrative.” You see, there was never a monolithic, centrally controlled narrative. People were organically, under their own free will, parroting the same narrative.
But here’s the thing to remember, journalists are bottom feeders. They’re ambulance chasers. They’d sell their own grandma for a good story. Remember Ken Bone, popularly known as “Red Sweater Guy” in the 2016 US presidential election season? Long story short, he was a guy in a bright red sweater who asked a question during one of the televised debates and accidentally became a celebrity for the proverbial 15 minutes. Cool for him, but what did journalists do? Once his identity was known, journalists poured over his social media profiles and found old comments he had made about Taylor Swift’s butt or something. Think about it. Grown-ass adults spending hours looking through a stranger’s Reddit profile trying to find something embarrassing they can publish to humiliate him, and they did it for literally no other reason than they wanted a story, and humiliating some random citizen is a story.
So now there are a bunch of western journos sitting in Ukraine and, as far as I can tell, things are going poorly for our favorite NATO puppet. Than we expect a bunch of sleazy Twitter mafia from the NYT, CNN, and CBS to ignore a sensational story unfolding in front of their noses? Of course not. So next time you read a mainstream article about Russian artillery outgunning the Ukrainians, please don’t be astonished. It’s not Big Brother losing his grip on the media. It’s just a bunch of paparazzi-grade journalists seeing a good story and running with it. Yes, they do want to stick with the “Ukraine Good/Russia Bad” narrative, but these people are soulless ghouls with no values they wouldn’t immediately betray if it benefited them.
No conspiracy. Sorry, guys. Personally, I blame George Orwell. More than anyone else, he created this mental image of an all-powerful government that watches every single person 24/7 through magic television screens, controls every tidbit of news, no matter how inconsequential, and ruthlessly suppresses all dissident thought. Reality is much less interesting.
In 1980(!), world-famous author Isaac Asimov wrote a review of 1984, and it’s one of the most hilariously cruel things I have ever seen and I implore everyone to go read it. For the purposes of my post, consider this passage in particular:
At the very beginning of the story, it is made clear that television
(which was coming into existence at the time the book was written) served as
a continuous means of indoctrination of the people, for sets cannot be
turned off. (And, apparently, in a deteriorating London in which nothing
works, these sets never fail.)
The great Orwellian contribution to future technology is that the
television set is two-way, and that the people who are forced to hear and
see the television screen can themselves be heard and seen at all times and
are under constant supervision even while sleeping or in the bathroom.
Hence, the meaning of the phrase ‘Big Brother is watching you’.
This is an extraordinarily inefficient system of keeping everyone under
control. To have a person being watched at all times means that some other
person must be doing the watching at all times (at least in the Orwellian
society) and must be doing so very narrowly, for there is a great
development of the art of interpreting gesture and facial expression.
One person cannot watch more than one person in full concentration, and
can only do so for a comparatively short time before attention begins to
wander. I should guess, in short, that there may have to be five watchers
for every person watched. And then, of course, the watchers must themselves
be watched since no one in the Orwellian world is suspicion-free.
Consequently, the system of oppression by two-way television simply will not
work.
Orwell himself realised this by limiting its workings to the Party
members. The ‘proles’ (proletariat), for whom Orwell cannot hide his British
upper-class contempt, are left largely to themselves as subhuman. (At one
point in the book, he says that any prole that shows ability is killed – a
leaf taken out of the Spartan treatment of their helots
twenty-five hundred years ago.)
Furthermore, he has a system of volunteer spies in which children report
on their parents, and neighbours on each other. This cannot possibly work
well since eventually everyone reports everyone else and it all has to be
abandoned.
Orwell was unable to conceive of computers or robots, or he would have
placed everyone under non-human surveillance. Our own computers to some
extent do this in the IRS, in credit files, and so on, but that does not
take us towards 1984, except in fevered imaginations. Computers and tyranny
do not necessarily go hand in hand. Tyrannies have worked very well without
computers (consider the Nazis) and the most computerised nations in today’s
world are also the least tyrannical.
Orwell lacks the capacity to see (or invent) small changes. His hero
finds it difficult in his world of 1984 to get shoelaces or razor blades. So
would I in the real world of the 1980s, for so many people use slip-on shoes
and electric razors.
Then, too, Orwell had the technophobic fixation that every technological
advance is a slide downhill. Thus, when his hero writes, he ‘fitted a nib
into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. He does so ‘because
of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with
a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil’.
Presumably, the ‘ink-pencil’ is the ball-point pen that was coming into
use at the time that 1984 was being written. This means that Orwell
describes something as being written’ with a real nib but being ‘scratched’
with a ball-point. This is, however, precisely the reverse of the truth. If
you are old enough to remember steel pens, you will remember that they
scratched fearsomely, and you know ball-points don’t.
This is not science fiction, but a distorted nostalgia for a past that
never was. I am surprised that Orwell stopped with the steel pen and that he
didn’t have Winston writing with a neat goose quill.
40+ years after Asimov penned this review, I think history has vindicated him. Even with how the American surveillance state ballooned after the 911 attacks, it’s still not anywhere close to the extreme as portrayed in 1984. And it is of course, almost completely automated. Also considering how authorities still routinely fail to stop actual criminals and leaks (like Manning and Snowden), it’s debatable if the surveillance apparatus is actually worth the enormous cost that went into building and operating it.
In addition to the immortality of Big Brother, Orwell presents two other
ways of maintaining an eternal tyranny.
First -,present someone or something to hate. In the Orwellian world it
was Emmanuel Goldstein for whom hate was built up and orchestrated in a
robotized mass function.
This is nothing new, of course. Every nation in the world has used
various neighbours for the purpose of hate. This sort of thing is so easily
handled and comes as such second nature to humanity that one wonders why
there have to be the organised hate drives in the Orwellian world.
It needs scarcely any clever psychological mass movements to make Arabs
hate Israelis and Greeks hate Turks and Catholic Irish hate Protestant
Irish – and vice versa in each case. To be sure, the Nazis organised mass
meetings of delirium that every participant seemed to enjoy, but it had no
permanent effect. Once the war moved on to German soil, the Germans
surrendered as meekly as though they had never Sieg-Heiled in their lives.
Second – rewrite history. Almost every one of the few individuals we meet
in 1984 has, as his job, the rapid rewriting of the past, the readjustment
of statistics, the overhauling of newspapers – as though anyone is going to
take the trouble to pay attention to the past anyway.
This Orwellian preoccupation with the minutiae of ‘historical proof’ is
typical of the political sectarian who is always quoting what has been said
and done in the past to prove a point to someone on the other side who is
always quoting something to the opposite effect that has been said and done.
As any politician knows, no evidence of any kind is ever required. It is
only necessary to make a statement – any statement – forcefully enough to
have an audience believe it. No one will check the lie against the facts,
and, if they do, they will disbelieve the facts. Do you think the German
people in 1939 pretended that the Poles had attacked them and started World
War II? No! Since they were told that was so, they believed it as seriously
as you and I believe that they attacked the Poles.
I have to agree. There’s just no need for conspiracies to hide the truth. Every single CIA scandal can be found on Wikipedia, for God’s sake. When it comes to tribalism, people don’t need much help believing that “our” side is good and “their” side is evil.
In the end, the idea of the government rounding up every random nobody who commits “thought crime” is just silly. It’s not practical and a powerful government does not feel threatened by ants. People like me are free to make blogs and Facebook accounts to rant all day and, in the absence of credible threats of violence or terrorism, we generally get away with it.
When it comes to “woke” culture, like teachers and white collar executives being canceled for having the wrong opinions about gender or LGBTQ, well, again, that’s not a 1984 Big Brother conspiracy. That’s an organic grassroots movement of “us” and “them.” People in the workplace stab each other in the back without any help from Big Brother. I do also want to point out that Asimov’s earlier point – that informant culture is counterproductive because everybody is snitching on everybody – this is probably playing out to be true in the USA (and allies) now. If you disagree with me, let’s just wait and see who wins World War III, and let history be the judge.
News and entertainment media have evolved extravagantly over the centuries, but they were always entwined. Here’s a review of broad trends and how they all culminated in the Ukraine war.
Transition from the written word to the visual. With the birth and proliferation of the internet in our daily lives, our daily consumption of information shifted more and more from the written word to pictures, then from pictures to videos. This trend is self-evident from a single glance at how social media platforms have changed in the last 10 years or even 5 years. Compare TikTok to Myspace, for example. Our brains want a stream of constant visual titillation and there’s no replacing it.
The news cycle tightened from days to seconds. We live in a 24-hour news cycle that never sleeps. Every time you scroll your favorite social media app you demand fresh news. Contemplate for a moment how different our lives are from the cavemen on the American frontier had to wait for the weekly paper to show up. But as radio, television, and the internet appeared in succession, a problem emerged. The mechanisms for delivering news to the consumer outpaced the mechanisms for finding news, and actually, the world itself just isn’t interesting enough to produce enough news to fill the void.
Internet usage has been almost monopolized. The internet used to be a wild west of blogs and chat forums, now most users have been gobbled up by a handful of tech giants, such as Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and Google. The advent of social media has changed the way we use the internet, and in my opinion, not for the better. I will cite one example – Donald Trump. When the ex-president got the boot from every major platform, he tried to create a blog. It failed. Even one of the most famous human beings on the planet couldn’t get enough eyeballs on a blog to justify the fairly onerous workload required to maintain it.
Social media has deliberately retarded our ability to understand and verify information. It’s hard to get people to read past the lead of a news story, or even the headline, and that’s an old problem. But social media algorithms have made that problem much worse. Even as those companies loudly proclaim “fake news bad,” they’re more responsible for the proliferation of fake news than anyone else. It’s quite simple, really. Facebook wants you on their platform, and for as long as possible. Everything else is competition, and therefore bad. So you want to share an interesting news story to your friends? That link would take people to another website, so is bad, and Facebook deprioritizes it on their feed. Instead, people share screenshots of news articles. But of course screenshots can be easily faked, and Facebook proudly “fact checks” the fakes, which is an entirely self-inflicted problem to begin with.
Think all of this over as you consume the next few news cycles. Try to pace yourself, and don’t let yourself fall for the sensationalist news from either side. No, Azov Battalion isn’t about to sack Moscow, but the opposite is likely to be not true either. I don’t think the Ukrainian army is on the verge of collapsing. I bet this is going to drag on for several more months at least, the next big decision point will be around November, roughly 9 months after the “special operation” began.
Speaking of special operations, one last point I’d like to make. Russia has not declared war on Ukraine. And Ukraine has not declared war on Russia. Gas is still flowing through the Ukrainian pipeline, and the Russians haven’t even seriously tried to destroy Ukraine’s government. They’re not bombing the rada, they’re not decimating Ukraine’s government buildings, they’re not doing all the normal, typical things that would happen in a typical “invasion.” So… it’s not an invasion. Whether you like it or not, it’s an intervention, and meets the criteria of one.
Ian Kummer
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Sorry Ian but i dont agree with you. Ever heard of operation Mockingbird en the Church commission ( established by the US congres en named after its chairman Frank Church to investigate the operation )?
Mr Asimov is a simple writer of SF books who, for more than only one reason, can never come close to a giant like George Orwell.
Orwell got the perpetual war in a far away land right — “We have always been at war with East Asia”. Also, the language — “Department of Defense” my ass! (c:
But I agree that up to now, the censorship / propaganda hasn’t been very effective, at least in the U.S. where I live. But ineffective censorship along with crisis of authority could lead to more effective censorship.
The whole Russiagate nonsense was illuminating for me. In my view, it was all B.S. blaming Putin (and Trump), but a majority Americans don’t realize that because of the effective scapegoating of Putin (and Trump). It’s not only journalists who need a paycheck. A large portion of employment is dependent upon staying in the good graces of the establishment with regard to the “intelligence” / conventional wisdom with regard to core ruling power issues.
I’m not so sure about that. There are far too many people who a) are terrified of the unmasked in grocery stores b) are terrified of those with dissenting opinions yet c) are not afraid of antagonizing a man with a lot of nuclear warheads and the means to deliver them.
Not sure if I commented here before, and I am normally a big fan of the site and its content. But I sort of had to post a negative comment now because wow, that Asimov review is a really bad review of “1984”.
So about the surveillance, no a dictatorship doesn’t “have everybody watching everybody”. They use a fraction of the population to watch everybody. It seems to be 10% of the population. We actually know this because its a historical fact that East Germany did have 10% of the population watch everybody. We know this because the files were declassified after the Cold War. Countries have a huge supply of people with Cluster B personality disorders, petty criminals, busybodies, people who value doing the government a huge favor, for this work. Its not that difficult.
The way the electronic surveillance works, which in 1984 is done mainly by two way TVs, is that you literally don’t have someone watching the TV from the other side 24/ 7. The footage is recorded. The recording is stored and can be accessed later if security wants to know what the target was up to at a different time. You let people know that, so they start self-censoring their behavior. It works this way in China now and to a considerable extent in the USA too.
Media outlets in dictatorships certainly do NOT compete to get people interested in the stories published or broadcast, so they can get more eyeballs or more revenue. Really, this hasn’t really been true in Western countries since World War 2. They publish propaganda and employ people to publish propaganda. Often they have to be members in good standing of the ruling party.
Correct – the modern surveillance state works by intercepting all the electronic comms it possibly can, and saving the records for later. Multiple purposes for that – first to hold over anyone and everyone as a coercive tool. Second, if there is a more specific policy goal, automated analysis can be brought to bear. E.g. YouTube algorithms, during the later parts of the war on terror, for automatically detecting potential jihadist content – and when eventually reviewed by a live person, the data set was filtered down to a drastically reduced and thus manageable size. So 1984 is a little bit of a strawman in this sense.
Asimov, as fantastic and fun a writer as he was… also was hopelessly polyanna in some ways. One of his famous scifi characters was famous for his line “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent”. Which I’m afraid is complete BS – in the real world, violence, and the thing it directly enables – successfully applied threat of it, is typically an early and liberally exercised option, in the hands of the powerful. Willingness to do so is based simply on lack of morals. Same goes for any other unscrupulous methods. It’s simply that those simultaneously immoral and also incompetent, are the ones who manage to get punished and thus end up in the history books. Which is not to say that efforts to create a world which is better for everyone by enforcing rules against such behavior should not be attempted! Just because there are always bound to be criminals, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have police. Just because there is always bound to be disease, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have medicine. Hope that’s clear. But I’m saying that it’s unreasonable to dismiss the claims of cynical observers of human nature, by claiming that evil behaviors, of any scale and magnitude, is somehow impractical or the mark of a poorly functioning power structure. Not so.
i won’t go that far but what i remember about “telescreens” is really opposite to Asimov’s obviously, even blatntly absurd
“This is an extraordinarily inefficient system of keeping everyone under
control. To have a person being watched at all times means that some other
person must be doing the watching at all times (at least in the Orwellian
society)”
That AFAIR never was what Orwell wrote. He wrote that telescreens were always on and 24×7 provided means to monitor. There never was 24×7 active monitoring, it is obviously impossible. But there was a CHANCE that right this very second the monitoring was active. And people grew groomed to behave because while 99% of misbehaving would not be seen it would be enough for one single fit of misbehaving to be caught to be punished very cruelly.
“Math expectation” is not a probabiulity, it is a product of probability by cost.
We all grasp it intuitively. And telescreens were exactly that, never ceasing albeit low-probability threat of maximum punishment. And that produced “chilling effect” and “self-censorship” and tell me again those expressions are old and do not belong to modern days.
So at this point i start to wonder if Asimov even read 1984 and twisted it mercilessly, or if he penned some mandatory piece without reading it.
OTOH, what should we had expected of the author of infamou Three Laws Of Slavery…
Hey Ian, you discussed Orwell, who, yes, was not such a nice, honest man as he is supposed to have been. I used to read both Orwell’s dystopia “1984” and Huxley’s dystopia “Brave New World” and the endless discussions about which one has come closer to reality today. I think Huxley’s has, but such predictions, even the most brilliant, can never match the unfolding reality, which is simply not entirely predictable.
Anyhow, I have decided to insert a link to my recent letter to my neighbor who is now seriously worried by the rising inflation and cost of living in the US. So I have decided to tell him what I really, really think about the human species and our, so called “civilization”:
https://kazdziamka.com/my-letter-to-my-good-neighbor/
I’ll take one more crack at this. Ian seems to have responded here to my comment on the previous post claiming that Russia is drawing the line on the increasingly “Orwellian” Western military intelligence complex. This was in a post about the “right to dislike” — a post about “culture”.
My view is that Western “culture” is becoming more Orwellian in the sense that certain dystopian viewpoints are becoming accepted without question by the vast majority of the citizenry. Thus, that any country would dare to oppose the U.S. militarily is insane by definition on even the anti-establishment fringes where we here at readingjunkie reside. Ian does not believe this, but rather believes that Western culture is just lost in capitalistic fervor rather than the victim of an Orwellian “conspiracy”. At what point is such a distinction meaningless?
Let me disagree…
The Ukraine Information War – is not Ukraine War at all. Ukraine is merely a pretext and a FoaF marker.
Fresh new bowl of stale dirty water https://the-arioch.livejournal.com/99609.html
“FoF” AKA “IFF” not “FoaF”, my civic bad
> journalists, or at least the vast majority of them, are not paid agents of the state. So they willingly go along with the party line
correct
> You see, there was never a monolithic, centrally controlled narrative.
Wrong. Non sequitur.
See, Ian, it is like microeconomic vs macroeconomic, like musical chairs game.
If you say “no one prohibited your or me to grab a chair” you would be correct.
But would you say “game was not rigged and everything had a seat” you would be very wrong.
Journalist – who is this? Me? You?
Journalist is a person granted with access to mass audience.
Is this access warranted unconditionally? Not at all.
Yes, every specific journo is voluntarilly, willingly chooses to “go along” – and in exchange he is allowed to “get along”.
Try to fail to willingly abide to “Party line” and you end up jobless and cancelled.
So, sure, every specific journalist and in a frozen time has a right of choice.
All journalists as a strata and in a living time – do not have any choice. They have “editorial policy” instead.
Now, the “free market” motto was that every newspaper lies, but because they compete they lie differently and by buying and reading every existing newspaper you get, in total, an unbiased information.
That is where oligarchy comes to play. The well known figures, that USA MSM were owned by 60 disjoint enterprises but now are owned by only 6.
Isn’t it obviously that big business can not be independent (as in uncorrelated) with gov’t? either the gv’t would enforce control of big biz, or big biz would control the gov’t – but one way opr another they become siamese twins. There is just no equilibrium otherwise, as buisiness grows big enough the nation as whole becomes its environment and nation-global changes become its interests, and gov’t become natural competitor, predator, enemy and resource for it.
Well, you know… rewind to 2015 now. Do you remember what Obama called three worst threats to mankind? They were ISIS, some African then pandemy and Putin. Those words were reprinted everywhere.
Then there was some international meeting, G-20 in Australia or something, and Putin there told, officialyl and bluntly, that ISIS is EU trade partner if not proxy, that EU steals Syrian oil by means of ISIS.
And then it was said that none of major western MSM reported that.
I could not believe, it sounded too absurd!!! This just paraded Putin and ISIS as two worst global threats of three. And now you have one of top threats spaking about another. It is a total killed for newslines! Mock it, attack it, warp it, lie about it, do whatever, but you must make money reprinting it as hot news, you absolutely have to!!! Journalist are always hungry to find any spicy happening to inflate and make hot news of an hour, and here you have it ready to serve!
I rushed online and read and googled and read and listed and scrolled and read…
RT of course published it. But none of Western media of matter did so. NOT A SINGLE ONE. Total and uniform silence.
Sorry, Ian, about important matters there absolutely IS an iron hand rule over all the self-appointed free media.
Surely, the less important topic is the more deviation is allowed. But on point that matter – there is little leeway or none at all.
Now, would you kindly, if you had not yet, read about some of the American journalists who naively thought they have any choice.
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-our-great-purge-of-the-1940s/
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-giants-silenced-by-pygmies/
Also
https://www.mintpressnews.com/spooks-establishment-journalists-circling-wagons/281217/
Asimov is doubtless correct, at least to a persnickety degree, on Orwell’s technological shortcomings, but what he misses is Orwell’s grasp of human nature. We still read 1984 not because of its (arguably) dated use of machinery, but because Orwell, like Kurtz, looked into the heart of human darkness. Orwell writes about who/what we are. Human nature. Good and evil. Asimov writes about how the machines we invent will eventually bite us, a good but not deep point (see Frankenstein). As a writer and thinker, Asimov simply isn’t in Orwell’s league.
Sure. He’s probably on the spectrum, as evidenced by him taking everything literally.
Asimov, the very obvious member of the cult you bring into this? STASI would beg to differ regarding the use of informants, as would most of the “Security Services”, the EU and several of the Banker owned Corps hired ex STASI officers/Informants the last decade. All the things we learned the last years also put your article in the back of the bus.
Sorry, but Asimov was in absolutely zero position to criticize anyone else for a lack of futuristic vision. Within the first three pages of Foundation he’s regaling us with a description of cargo being loaded onto spaceships in the far distant future with literal rope hoists. The entire initial cover story for the titular Foundation is that they’re assembling a literal, physical Encyclopedia Galactica. Whatever his merits, Asimov was frequently a quite poor and unimaginative futurist.
Was Orwell a snobbish elitist? Yeah, probably. He also put his life on the line and went to Spain to fight for a broadly leftist workers cause even though he didn’t agree with all its factions. I don’t care that this is a trite cliche when it comes to defending Orwell: he fought and got shot in the neck for his convictions. The fuck have any of his critics, then or now, ever done in comparison?
1984 was very much a reflection of Orwell’s own bitter experiences with the British Ministry of Information in WWII. It wasn’t just a portrayal of a possible future; it was a discourse on things that were already coming to pass at the time. 1984 has problems, and predictions that turned out to be incorrect. It also contains more wisdom in a single chapter than Asimov managed in his entire career.
I just can´t get over your cognitive dysfunction regarding this subject, all your other opinions have been put in the shade over this and it´s so ludicrous that I give it even odds of being a conscious lie but why lie so transparently? Are you on something perhaps, have you böösted?
Tl;dr
Gevalt, you´re meshuggah 4 realz as the kids say.