[Fis] FW: On disinformation. Why disinformation survives
Joseph Brenner
joe.brenner at bluewin.ch
Tue Dec 8 09:30:27 CET 2020
Dear All,
Disinformation survives and flourishes in part because supported by
statements such as those of Bloom. They are strictly equivalent in form to
Trump’s saying that “there are good people on both
sides”, when one of those sides is composed of people who kill peaceful
protesters.
In the United States, despite their uniformly good reaction to the current
attacks on the electoral process, the courts will not be able to help in a
catastrophically large number of cases in the future. Apart from the
ideologue majority in the Supreme Court, the lower courts have been stuffed
with young right wing reactionaries who will poison decisions for at least a
generation.
A new process is required, one that explicitly recognizes the existence of
objective altruistic criteria in behavior, where economic or social
self-interest can be shown to be absent. I order not to drown in pessimism,
I repeat to myself the statement of the biologist E. O. Wilson: “Selfishness
beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups.
Everything else is commentary.”
I like to think that this discussion, in a small way, is part of such a
process, since the trans-categorial role of information is crucial.
Best wishes,
Joseph
_____
From: Fis [mailto:fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Howard Bloom
Sent: mardi, 8 décembre 2020 02:39
To: dai.griffiths.1 at gmail.com; fis at listas.unizar.es
Subject: Re: [Fis] On disinformation
thanks, dai.
one man's truth is another man's lie. each subculture has its own truth and
its own devil spilling disinformation.
to trumpers, joe biden is part of a coup to take the white house
fraudulently. to trumpers, the democrats are the liars.
to anti-trumpers, trump is trying to pull off a coup to upend the election.
trump and his "army" are the liars. the disinformation spewers.
which group is right? which truth is right?
how do we judge? especially if freedom of speech is one of our most basic
values?
so far, we are relying on the courts.
with warmth and oomph--howard
-----Original Message-----
From: Dai Griffiths <dai.griffiths.1 at gmail.com>
To: fis at listas.unizar.es <fis at listas.unizar.es>
Sent: Mon, Dec 7, 2020 9:05 am
Subject: Re: [Fis] On disinformation
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 <mailto:dai.griffiths.1 at gmail.com>
<dai.griffiths.1 at gmail.com>
To: <mailto:fis at listas.unizar.es> 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
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
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