[Fis] On disinformation

Dai Griffiths dai.griffiths.1 at gmail.com
Mon Dec 7 15:05:59 CET 2020 

That's all true, Howard.

I think it is important to distinguish between compliance and consensus. 
Throwing dissidents to the lions does the trick for compliance, and 
preventing challenges to power (as per the shocking first chapter of 
Foucault's Discipline and Punish).

As to consensus, the creation of a canon is partly a practical matter: 
given it takes so long to copy a book, which ones do we think are worth 
copying and sharing. Printing, and now information technology, have 
completely changed these decisions. But on top of these features of the 
medium, there is a political process. For example, it seems likely that 
leaders in early China saw how consensus through control of the canon 
could provide an alternative (or a useful addition) to lion feeding as a 
method for achieving authority, by promoting Confucian ideas. Both 
strategies are at work in Hong Kong today, it seems.

The two strategies continue side by side in differing combinations. Some 
absolute rulers don't worry too much about consensus outside the group 
of those standing in line to assassinate them. Others focus more on 
control of the development of consensus through control of the 
communications ecology, and perhaps Russia has taken the lead in this. 
Neither of these two extremes is attractive, but both are widespread. 
Most of us on this list have been fortunate to live in a democratic 
space carved out between the rock of forced compliance, and the hard 
place of manipulated consensus. The configuration and maintenance of 
that space always involves hard work, compromise, and trade-offs that 
are never ideal for everybody (and maybe for nobody), but I am certainly 
grateful for it.

If we want to say something sensible about all this, and if we want to 
make any practical step which might preserve both our discourses and 
democracy, then I think we need to address two quite different kinds of 
questions:

1) What is the impact of information technology, its accompanying 
regulatory framework and established patterns of use, on the ecology of 
communications? How might the patterns change if we altered this or that 
part of the system? These are cybernetic questions.

2) Who is benefiting from the emerging communications ecology, what are 
they doing to shape it's future, and why? What (if any) changes would we 
like to persuade legislators and organisations to make in response and 
how can this be achieved? These are political questions.

Dai

On 06/12/2020 02:16, Howard Bloom wrote:
> dai,
>
> as an indication that your idea that disinformation is the norm and 
> consensus the exception,
>
> look how hard previous ages have worked to impose consensus. spreading 
> roman culture amongst tribal peoples in the days of the roman 
> empire.  throwing dissidents to the lions. making sure that everyone's 
> education was the same with the same roughly five books studied and 
> the same alphabet used from roughly 200 bc onward in china.   hunting 
> heretics once rome turned christian.  the inquisition.  the absolute 
> rule of the tsar in russia, with all printing presses used for just 
> one thing: printing the tsar's ukases.
>
> howard
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dai Griffiths <dai.griffiths.1 at gmail.com>
> To: fis at listas.unizar.es
> Sent: Sat, Dec 5, 2020 9:41 am
> Subject: Re: [Fis] On disinformation
>
> Dear all,
> We tend to think of 'surveillance capitalism' and other related trends 
> as being a disruption of normality. But seen from a longer 
> perspective, perhaps we are living in an unusual period (or the 
> possibly the end of it) in which there has been relatively widespread 
> social agreement about the nature of the world that we are living in. 
> "Ask the priest" used to be the answer to questions of eschatology or 
> social propriety (and often still is) but that doesn't help much in 
> establishing who is giving the orders or why, and what is going on in 
> the town over the hill. We have relied on newspapers for that, and, in 
> the UK, the BBC. As a result, flat earthers haven't much traction 
> recently compared with the conflict between Galileo and the church, 
> and even McCarthyism was primarily about economic power and control, 
> not as unhinged as the witchcraft hysteria that Miller (rightly) 
> compared it to. If it is true that we have been living in an oasis of 
> relative consensus, where did that consensus come from?
> I would argue that it emerged from the inherent limitations in access 
> to printing technology, and the editorial, commercial, political and 
> social processes that developed to cope with that limited access. It 
> is these processes that generated the authority of some ideas over 
> others, the generalised trust in some media rather than others, and 
> the ability to identify consistent biases in those that were trusted.
> I suggest that we should recognise that disinformation, fake news, and 
> plain old gossip, are the default state for human social interactions. 
> It is evolved and designed social structures and institutions that 
> overcome this. Our challenge is then to disentangle the way that that 
> informational authority was generated in the past, and the (perhaps 
> disfunctional) way that it is generated at present. My suspicion is 
> that we won't get far in improving the situation unless we question 
> the central role of the recommender algorithms that have taken over 
> much of the work of human editors in determining what is seen heard 
> and read, and by whom. To have any chance of achieving political 
> traction in the face of commercial interests and personal preferences, 
> proposals for change in that area will have to tell and extremely 
> clear story about how we got to where we are, where we should try to 
> go next, and how we could get there.
> Best
> Dai
> On 04/12/2020 14:06, Pedro C. Marijuan wrote:
> Dear Terry and FIS colleagues,
>
> Thanks for the reflections--I will try to continue with rather 
> disconnected ideas.
>
> The term 'surveillance capitalism' introduced by Shoshana Zuboff 
> (indeed complemented with a parallel 'surveillance authoritarianism') 
> is  addressed to cover the new negative aspects of current 
> technological developments. However, my opinion is that these 
> phenomena are inherent in all human societies in all epochs, for there 
> is always a tension, say, between the individual "fitness" and the 
> whole social "commons", which can be set in quite many different 
> dynamic equilibrium points, basically maintained via circulating or 
> communicating info flows. It is easy to see that information, 
> disinformation, surveillance, persuasion, and coercion travel together 
> in the socialization-communication pack. Historically, every new means 
> of communication (then we land on McLuhan) alters those social 
> equilibria and somehow demands a social or cultural reaction to 
> re-establish an acceptable collective situation. The problem now, you 
> mentioned in the previous post, is the enormous concentration of 
> power, of brute info flows,  around these new media--without 
> appropriate social curation at the time being. I doubt that these 
> technologies can bring the solution by themselves . Institutional, 
> social intervention would be needed...  Scholarly analysis might be 
> important, providing cues on the the influence on individual and 
> collective moods/personalities, on the possible counteracting 
> institutional alternatives and on the needed new cultural norms to 
> abide along these new forms of communication (sort of 'traffic 
> regulations'), even a personal hygiene of communication...
>
> The problems are far more serious, complex, and faster than in 
> McLuhan's time. We have to reinvent his views... But how can we 
> organize a collective, cumulative discussion? I was thinking that a 
> feasible first step, apart of what we can do directly in the list, 
> could be calling for a Special Issue in some interesting, 
> multidisciplinary Journal. Well, at the time being, Terry, Joseph, and 
> myself are promoting a sort of ad hoc group to move things--anyone 
> else would join??
>
> Best regards
> --Pedro
>
> El 01/12/2020 a las 22:54, Terrence W. DEACON escribió:
> Dear Pedro,
>
> Great suggestions. I like the idea of an ongoing separate thread 
> addressing disinformation.
> Of course I only addressed Western disinformation and didn't even 
> touch on highly massaged information that is often disseminated with 
> centralized governmental control.
> This disinforms by selective censorship and redundancy and is 
> increasingly taking advantage of the myriad new forms of surveillance 
> that can be used to shape the information made available to different 
> targeted audiences.
> And Yes McLuhan is definitely relevant.
> I wonder how he would think about the effects of these new media.
> How do they reshape the nature of content?
> How they can be understood using his notions of hot and cool?
> What is now in the rear view mirror within the new media that once was 
> in the foreground?
> On these matters Bob Logan might want to weigh in.
>
> -- 
> Professor Terrence W. Deacon
> University of California, Berkeley
>
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> -- 
> -------------------------------------------------
> Pedro C. Marijuán
> Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
>
> pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es  <mailto:pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es>
> http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
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> Professor David (Dai) Griffiths
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