#Manufacturing Consent

[thoughtportal]

Media responds to Americans on Red Note

[poetessinthepit]

It is absolutely wild to see police tackling baby faced 19 year olds and beating up college professors all while the media keeps repeating these protesters are dangerous antisemites.

[graciereadshannigram]

hey, anybody wanna do a buddy read of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media with me?

originally written in the late 1980s with a new edition being published in 2002, you'd think the authors were predicting the future.

and i'm only on the 'Introduction to the 2002 Edition' section, god damn.

[emotionalsupportkelpie]

My Top 10 Best Reads of 2024

*Author’s note: This list is not based on books published in 2024, but rather the books I personally read in 2024. Some, but not all of them, were brand new releases this year; and some were published decades ago. This was a reading year full of nonfiction–lots and lots of great antifascist, anarchist nonfiction. Maybe that’s not surprising, given I joined a local Progressive Book Club that…

[theculturedmarxist]

Being labeled a Russian propagandist all day every day for criticizing US foreign policy is really weird, but one advantage it comes with is a useful perspective on what people have really been talking about all these years when they warn of the dangers of “Russian propaganda”.

I know I’m not a Russian propagandist. I’m not paid by Russia, I have no connections to Russia, and until I started this political commentary gig in 2016 I thought very little about Russia. My opinions about the western empire sometimes turn up on Russian media because I let anyone use my work who wants to, but that was always something they did on their own without my submitting it to them and without any payment or solicitation of any kind. I’m literally just some random westerner sharing political opinions on the internet; those opinions just happen to disagree with the US empire and its stories about itself and its behavior.

Yet for years I’ve watched people pointing at me as an example of what “Russian propaganda” looks like. This has helped inform my understanding of all the panic about “Russian influence” that’s been circulating these last six years, and given me some insight into how seriously it should be taken.

That’s one reason why I wasn’t surprised by Matt Taibbi’s reporting on the Twitter Files revelations about Hamilton 68, an information op run by DC swamp monsters and backed by imperialist think tanks which generated hundreds if not thousands of completely bogus mainstream news reports about online Russian influence over the years.

Hamilton 68 purported to track Russian attempts to influence western thought on social media, but Twitter eventually figured out that the “Russians” the operation has been tracking were actually mostly real, mostly American accounts who just happened to say things that didn’t perfectly align with the official Beltway consensus. These accounts were often right-leaning, but also included people like Consortium News editor Joe Lauria, who’s about as far from a rightist as you can get.

They played a massive role in fanning the flames of public hysteria about online Russian influence, but while they did this by pretending to track the behavior of Russian influence ops, in reality they were tracking dissent.

One of the craziest things happening in the world today is the way westerners are being brainwashed by western propaganda into panicking about Russian propaganda, something that has no meaningful existence in the west. Before RT was shut down it was drawing a whopping 0.04 percent of the UK’s total TV audience. The much-touted Russian election interference campaign on Facebook was mostly unrelated to the election and affected “approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content” according o Facebook. Research by New York University into Russian trolling behavior on Twitter in the lead-up to the 2016 election has found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.” A study by the University of Adelaide found that despite all the warnings of Russian bots and trolls following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the overwhelming majority of inauthentic behavior on Twitter during that time was anti-Russian in nature.

Russia exerts essentially zero influence over what westerners think, yet we’re all meant to freak out about “Russian propaganda” while western oligarchs and government agencies continually hammer our minds with propaganda designed to manufacture our consent for the status quo which benefits them.

All this and we’re still seeing calls for more narrative management from the western empire, like the recent American Purpose article “The Long War of Ideas” being promoted by people like Bill Kristol which calls for a resurrection of CIA culture war tactics like those used during the last cold war. Every day there’s some new liberal politician sermonizing about the need to do more to fight Russian influence and protect American minds from “disinformation”, even as we are shown over and over again that what they really want is to shut down dissident voices.

That’s what we’re seeing in the continual efforts to increase online censorship, in the bogus new “fact-checking” industry, in calls to increase the output of formal US government propaganda operations like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, in the way all dissent about Russia has been forcefully purged from the western media in recent years, in the way empire-amplified trolling operations have been shouting down and drowning out critics of US foreign policy online, in the way censorship via algorithm has emerged as one of the major methods of restricting dissident speech.

They claim there needs to be a massive escalation in propaganda, censorship and online psyops in order to fight “Russian influence”, while the only influence operations we’re being subjected to in any meaningful way are only ever of the western variety. They just want to do more of that.

Our rulers aren’t actually worried about “Russian influence”, they’re worried about dissent. They’re worried the public won’t consent to the “great power competition” they plan to subject us to for the foreseeable future unless they can exert massive influence over our minds, because they know that otherwise we will recognize that our interests are directly harmed by the economic warfare, exploding military spending and nuclear brinkmanship which necessarily accompanies that campaign to reign in Russia and stop the rise of China.

They’re propagandizing us about the threat of foreign propaganda in order to justify propagandizing us more. We’re being manipulated into consenting to agendas that no healthy person would ever consent to without copious amounts of manipulation.

[nando161mando]

Manufacturing consent

[pvnktimez]

On speaking

Autonomy and control over selfhood, that's the dream, baby! Isn't it? Have you ever wondered who the first person to come up with words is? Why do we use the speech patterns and vocabulary that we do? What do the subtleties of our speaking habits reveal about our underlying perspectives and attitudes towards the world, ourselves, our fellow humans, and all the other organisms and spirits who share the world with us. For example, that we differentiate between humans as people and nonhumans as animals shows a lot about how we unconsciously separate ourselves from other living creatures, justly or otherwise. 

Noam Chomsky is a well known social theorist and political commentator who got a big name first for his work in linguistics. Language is everything - it defines perception - a powerful, magically artistic and diplomatic tool to influence ourselves and the world at large. Being able to speak at all is an amazing gift our ancestors have blessed us with - to understand language and use it intentionally is, in my view, the mark of a powerful craftsman. It is intangible, yet has the capability to bend, twist, and transform reality when handled with skill, for good or bad. 

Consider gender - not only have members of the trasngender community been doing groundbreaking philosophical linguistic work for the better part of a century by developing new language to expand our collective perception and acceptance of gender diversity, many languages have already been using gender neutral pronouns since inception! I started dipping my toes into Turkish on Duolingo this year and learned that they do not use gendered pronouns - he/she/it are all wrapped up into the singular 'o' and the plural 'onlar'. Elegant, no? 

Back to animals, the capacity for symbolic speech is a uniquely human trait. While many animals have the capacity for auditory/vocal communication, none exhibit the same capacity for "hierarchical syntactic structure" as humans have. This involves traits like symbolism, abstraction, and creative grammatical construction. While it is true that some nonhuman animals, such as some birds, dogs, and monkeys can mimic language (a process called "phonological syntax"), use tools to construct basic sentences to communicate needs (like those button pads with pre-recorded words such as "treat" or "walk"), or even learn sign language effectively, they notably lack the biological faculties which would allow for the complex, creative combining of vocabulary and syntax to organically generate new sentence structures, speech or otherwise. This field of study is called Comparative Linguistics - it deals with the material, biological circumstances that result in the variety of language capacities across different species (Bolhuis, et. al.).

In an interview on the podcast "Conversations with Tyler", Chomsky describes the spectacularity of language in humans as follows: 

"The fundamental property of human language is this unique capacity to create, unboundedly, many new thoughts in our minds, and even to be able to convey to others who have no access to our minds their innermost workings. Galileo himself thought the alphabet was the most spectacular of human inventions because it provided a means to carry out this miracle" (Cowan).

Communication fosters connection and empathy, so it makes sense that many people feel disconnected from animals because communication between different languages is damn hard. It seems to me that when one group of people who are already deficit in empathy (such as the white colonizers who founded the current American empire) meets another group who does not share the same language (such as the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island and abroad), grounds for dehumanization are very easy to justify, particularly so within the cultural context of religious superiority. I even see that within a common language, people still manage to ignore the conversational partners, whether in casual or professional settings, by refusing to listen and using language to dominate and self-affirm, therefore separating themselves from the harmonious community. 

I would also note that I believe the chronic lack of empathy we're observing is, at least partially, on account of numerous types of trauma and repression from systems such as white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and religious extremism that modern science has barely begun to understand in the last century. We have a lot of healing to do, folks :) 

Moving onto the state and its monopoly on violence, it's well known that if someone can control the language a group of people use, they have control over that group's perception of reality and the consequent decisions made thereafter. George Orwell explores this theme in his notorious novel "1984". Even if you haven't read it, I trust the reader understands its premise primarily warns against government totalitarianism and censorship. I say this because I have not read it, but have listened to enough people talk about it that I feel like I get it. One notable comment I remember hearing went something along the lines of "1984 was not a prediction of the future, but a description of the author's present day environment", as is much of the sci-fi genre. We have to remember "1984" was published in 1949, not even a decade after WWII.

In the same interview mentioned above, Chomsky outlines more subtle ways the United States government has implemented this tactic. "Manufacturing Consent" may be one of his most well known books, written in 1988. This term was coined from Walter Lippman in the early 20th century, a member of Woodrow Wilson's propaganda committee. Despite campaigning on a platform for pacifism, Wilson decided the U.S. should enter WWI and was faced with changing public opinion from one of peace towards war to gain support for this decision. This is what the Committee of Public Information was charged with - dealing misinformation. Sound familiar?

Lippman developed the techniques to manufacture consent which “could control the public, shape opinion, completely turn them into, in this case, fanatic anti-German people who wanted to kill everything German. Can’t say frankfurter; you have to say hotdog. You have to change your name if you’re German to something else" (Cowan). This "new art in the practice of democracy" benefitted the private sector as well as the war by accusing labor unions of anti-patriotism. This rhetoric is remarkably similar to actions taken by the the House on Un-American Activities Committee, which was active from 1938 (eleven years before "1984" was published) until 1975. 

Chomsky explains that these tactics come from the liberal perspective that the public doesn't know what's good for them - we're dumby and should only be allowed to "spectate" public affairs, never to participate, so they lie to us to make think that everythings is fine <insert dog drinking coffee in a burning house meme>

Thanks, Dad. I'll just hang out underneath the bleachers doing fent while the forests burn down in the west and hurricanes ravage the east while telling myself that the economy is actually doing SO well. Here we wonder how misinformation has become such a huge issue today on the internet, the news, and media at large, but it doesn’t seem to be anything new. Rather, only recently is the public becoming increasingly aware of the nature of government deception as access to information and source checking becomes more widespread and accessible thanks to the internet itself. 

So now what? What do we do when we realize that our voice is not our own? That we've been told what to care about, what to talk about, so that powerful people can do terrifying things. I'm done sitting under the bleachers. In fact, I'd like to flip them on their side. There is no carrying on like usual anymore, not when social breakdown, environmental collapse, and nuclear war are on the line. Like every Jew before me, I ask, "How do we keep going?" 

If I've learned anything in my short, stupid life, it's that big change requires small, consistent actions. And to act effectively, we must maintain awareness. Awareness is so trendy right now - awareness in the media, the news! Spread awareness! Every other month is dedicated to spreading awareness about some major issue, be it black history or pride. But this is not the kind of awareness I'm talking about right now.

No, this is a linguistics column, and hopefully you come out of it thinking about things a little bit differently than when you started. I am talking about awareness over your speech - the kinds of language you use when you're making observations, judgements or demands. Do you use different speech patterns when talking to people of different backgrounds? Do you meet other people with a lot of resistance, countering anything they offer in conversation with "No", or "uhm, actually..."? Or maybe you people please, letting folks say whatever they want, even if it's harmful? 

This column will be a recurring segment where Underground readers can join me in exploring how we can harness speech to change the world. How can we programmatically create change with the world? It all starts with us, here and now. There's a lot of fear about the future and anger in our hearts, but holdfast readers, there's a whole world worth protecting in our hands. Take care out there, and tell your friends you love them. 

[sociologyboom]

Have a read…this will help with your understanding of how corporate or legacy media outlets have skewed reporting on Gaza since the latest phase of the siege has unfolded before our eyes.

[thoughtportal]

[hussyknee]

I started listing all the atrocities and war crimes and methods of wholesale systemic slaughter of a defenceless civilian population that's happened over the last two months alone and gave up midway because I lost track. But no, it's not the "ultimate crime". /s

The theory is they're doing this because signatories to the UN genocide convention have a legal obligation to prevent genocide, so if the US recognizes it as such they are required to take action against Israel. A dog being required to hit his own tail for misbehaving.

[bunnyhugs22]

That “something different” that they tell us, is a process called Manufacturing Consent.

[jbfly46]

The CIA has been taking advantage of the naivety of nations like China and Russia surrounding internet technology and cybersecurity to use their cyberspace to launch attacks against American infrastructure in order to manufacture consent for future operations.

[themistressofdolls]

[kaydub80]

Karma's a bitch for all of these pro-genocide celebrities

[leo-fie]

If you'd only consume German public news, you'd think that South Africa's accusations before the International Court of Justice are untenable. Just nonsense in legalese.

The Konsensfabrik* is working perfectly. You would never think that the accusations are all true and that Israel is cartoonishly evil and lying about everything, because the truth couldn't possibly be corrupted that much, could it? But it is.

Israel has been perpetuating a genocide against the Palestinian people for decades. It has been ramped up since Oct 7th, but the killing of everyone in Gaza has always been the logical conclusion of Israel's policy. And it's happening in the open, for all the world to see. Not that it would make a difference. Even in the age of social media, the guys with the bigger guns and the deeper pockets are still able to do what they want, no matter what the public thinks.

(* German title of Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman's Manufacturing Consent, first published 1988, first published in Germany 2023)

[vsthepomegranate]

We are in "manufacturing consent for genocide" mode. Take care of yourselves and each other. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.