Thank you b and B! I appreciated your reflections. A couple of brief
responses / reactions:
What if reason and emotion are inseparable? What if our attempts to
separate them were not only misguided but damaging to our social
comprehension? Gerd Gigerenzer has some interesting thoughts on this, in
particular the notion of ecological rationality.
What if the primary impact of algorithmic media is not the exploitation of
our outrage (which obviously is a central element of their business model)
but the reconstruction of "we" and who you or I might perceive that "we" to
be?
I initially read this in b's post with difficulty, as I found the use of
the word "we" to be problematic. However in B's post I could recognize the
analysis of the conflicting "we"s that reside here in North America.
I experienced the information war recently here in the Ottawa theatre of
operations. The fascist led convoy occupation was quite the spectacle, and
it is no coincidence that many of its leaders, namely the elected
representative for my provincial riding, Randy Hillier, became open
supporters of Russia's military invasion of Ukraine.
What was quite profound during the occupation was the use of the word "we"
and how the framing of it became impenetrable. It was not so much a clash
of civilizations as it was a clash of realities. The perception of we, or
the perception of the pandemic, or the perception of who and what the
government is, was and is, incompatible.
Dialogue is not possible in such a situation, not because there isn't a
shared language, but that the shared language no longer has shared meaning.
One could argue that the shared meaning has become incendiary, in that the
same words trigger harm or great impact on each other as a result of
divergent meaning and perception.
Ironically to reconcile this, both sides, out of necessity, construct
narratives that position themselves as the righteous. One side is defending
freedom. And the other is defending democracy.
Yet is that really the war at hand? Or is that a consequence of the
information war?
Is this really democracy or bust? Or to your point B, are we dismantling
the (western) illusions that propped up neoliberalism the last few decades?
What if behind this apparent battle between two geopolitical forces there
is a third? A third that desires an entirely new geopolitical order,
created in its image?
By this I don't refer to China. But rather the Californian Ideology. What
if in the fog of war we're focused on nation states when the real
beneficiaries are the libertarian lords marshalling their focus towards the
construction of a new order, that they call the Metaverse?
-j
On Thu, Mar 3, 2022 at 2:03 AM Brian Holmes
wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 2, 2022, Balazs Bodo wrote:
>
> "I believe that western audiences are increasingly locked into a media
> environment that is rapidly re-structured under the conditions of a total
> information warfare. Information that circulates in this environment is at
> best incomplete, at worst is the result of an unknown selection process.
> The news that is saturating this environment may be inaccurate or
> incomplete, but nevertheless is extremely engaging. The – deliberate or
> accidental – product of this engagement is the total emotional mobilization
> of western audiences in support of Ukraine. Highly consequential political
> decisions are apparently taken in response to the outrage of online
> population. In my opinion, this is a new development in information
> warfare. So far, consent was manufactured to support geopolitical
> strategies. This time it seems to be the other way around: the next step in
> the geopolitical grand game is decided by the popular vote of badly
> informed outrage."
>
> Now there's a question for the collective intelligence of nettime!
>
> It gains its urgency from the sudden turnabout of Olaf Scholz, who - after
> huge demos in Germany over the weekend - suddenly announced support for
> blocking SWIFT transactions, direct military aid to Ukraine and a hundred
> billion euro bump to Germany's defense budget, to be followed by a
> permanent rise of that budget from 1.5 to 2 percent of GDP. Is this really
> the influence of social media? I'm not certain - other people could
> contribute their expertise on that one - but I'm with Balazs when he says:
> "First, let’s not forget, for a single moment while this war lasts, and
> beyond, that this is a war, and we are living in one of its theaters."
>
> As I see it there are four linked questions: What is information warfare?
> By whom is it promulgated? Do its targets (civil societies) have agency? Or
> as Balazs suggests, are they/we the unwitting victims of a social-media
> machinery that maximizes outrage?
>
> I already tried to go there with some reflections on Vladislav Surkov, one
> of Putin's closest advisors and head of Russia's Ukraine policy until 2020.
> But it's impossible to separate Surkov from the calculated disinformation
> of his own p
