Categories
Philosophy

Disinformation and Propaganda: Living Lies and Midas’ Curse

In attempting to shape and influence the world through chaos and confusion, the Russian establishment and state media have themselves become both transmission medium and primary victims of these “active measures”. In trying to leverage and exploit lies, uncertainty and doubt – the totalitarian state has itself become the primary target and victim of these […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Freedom, Censorship and Totalitarian Psychosis

Context: Russia charges journalist who protested Ukraine war live on TV It seems that those most prolific Machiavellian manufacturers of misinformation have not learned even the rudimentary core of lessons in regards to the autonomous self-propagation of complex information artefacts, entities and systems. Prosecution and persecution intended to silence and intimidate only ever recapitulates and […]

Categories
culture politics

The Z: Participatory Totalitarianism

It represents a strange and yet sadly common symmetry of politics and ideology that while the chaotically effervescing freedoms of a real world’s media and information systems find the totalitarian state almost entirely impermeable to difference or diversity and truth, the unrepentantly fictional narratives of deception and misdirection broadcast by the totalitarian quite easily emanate […]

Categories
culture Philosophy

Myth as Propaganda?

Narrative culture as mythological abstraction optimally self-propagates through precisely these forms of wilful misdirection and perception-shaping. Appraised in gestalt, the roles of fictional narratives are really no different than any other essentially tautological and self-generating system of belief. The most beautiful aspect and functional bootstrap of this system is that which is hardly at all […]

Categories
Philosophy technology

AI as Propaganda

Context: Attack Mannequins: AI as Propaganda An interesting article but the assertion of ideological counter-propaganda in this context is a bit of stretch. It projects much more structure, aptitude and volition to the behavioural and regulatory (as control/governance) systems than has ever actually existed. The assertion of all ideological positions requires a foil, an antithesis […]

Categories
communication

How Disinformation Works

The old Nietzschean idiom about the abyss staring back seems apt here – as we gaze into an abyss of political chaos, partisan insecurity, confusion and intractable information complexity. This is precisely what is being done in the US right now through externally (and internally) sourced disinformation. Notice that, agnostic of truth-value, distributed patterns of […]

Categories
technology

Countering Influence Operations: An Enigma?

Context: Facebook: Recommended Principles for Regulation or Legislation to Combat Influence Operations It is a fascinating issue. I suggest that the complexity of the problem far outstrips these assertions of interdiction and oversight. We have seen pretty much the same thing happen in cyber security. Where a property or quality, if not the actual content, […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Populism, Authoritarianism and Cults of Personality

Context: The CCP’s Official Journal Falls in Line with Xi Jinping’s Cult of Personality As a more general philosophical observation agnostic of specific contexts (including -isms or persons), human beings are subject to reflexive psychological imprinting of a sort that leads us to cultivate these fantasies and fictions of triumphant great leaders as an inadvertent […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

On Propaganda, War and Recursive Self-Definition

Notice how, if we are conceptually and cognitively able to step back and observe the forest rather than the trees, that the primary information system function here is that of the recursive self-propagation of soliton-like, continuously self-propagating waveforms in patterns of behaviour and thought. Those artefacts that are produced at times of duress and stress, […]

Categories
communication

Information Entropy: Countering Propaganda

Falsity carries less information, less entropy and consequently travels more efficiently through a transmission medium.