Internet infowars - foreseen half a century ago

 

From Stafford Beer's 'Designing Freedom' (1974)

The genius Stafford Beer foresaw our present dilemma almost 50 years ago, some years before the spread of home computing and 15 years before the birth of the World Wide Web. 

On the right of the above cartoon (click to enlarge) is a person surfing the Net for information, to store his own data, to connect with a friend etc - and especially, demanding to keep his activity private.

On the left is the threat posed by an 'electronic mafia' that gathers and correlates volumes of data on the individual and uses it not only to sell more goods and services, but to change his behaviour and beliefs.

Where we are now is a combination of the two, because the 'electronic mafia' have reached out to the surfer on the right through his telescreens, suppressing enhancing inventing and distorting his understanding of reality.

'Who controls the past controls the future,' said Orwell in '1984', so that e.g. the citizens are told the chocolate ration has increased when it has been cut. Evidence to the contrary is put into the 'memory hole', i.e. binned.

There's a host of other reality-twisting techniques now, as you will know. Some of them are currently at work in the Western coverage of the war in Ukraine - the one that has been going on not since February this year but since 2014.

But there is a more radical restructuring of consciousness going on; censorship, lies and distortion not only in current affairs and historical information but also in fiction. Two recent short videos touching on a laudable anti-racial-discrimination policy illustrate this. 

The first, by author and historian Simon Webb, makes the point that the history of Britain is being taught in a way that heavily over-emphasises the multiracial nature of this country before WWII. Individuals are being shown to us as if they represent a multitude when in fact they were clearly exceptions:

The second, by 'Demirep/Granniopteryx', discusses how from the same praiseworthy motive a dramatisation of Anne Boleyn casts her as a black woman; and another drama, even more absurdly, has the earl/jarl of a Viking horde cast doubly against type, both in race and gender.

There is an understandable temptation to provide people with bad reasons for believing good things, and 'pious frauds' are not new. For example there was the 16th century 'Rood of Grace', a secretly steampunk-animatronic figure of the Crucified Christ designed to increase the religious faith of the gullible as well as raise funds for the Church.

But there is a danger in messing with people's memory and reason in this way. Apart from the risk of collective madness founded on engineered ignorance, the process of propaganda can be used negatively as well as positively: it can foster positive feelings towards minorities of various kinds, but can also be exploited to demonise - as we now see e.g. with President Putin and all things Russian. 

Principles may be debated and negotiated, but facts - as far as we can ascertain them - must remain sacred; especially when mass media can now hit the masses with overwhelming force.