Weaponized Narrative

[jducoeur]

Thanks to drwex for pointing out this fascinating and remarkably disturbing little article from a couple of months ago, titled Weaponized Narrative is the New Battlespace. It examines the current situation from essentially a military POV, and carries forward the previously-discussed logic: not only are we in a literal propaganda war, but the weapon being used is Narrative itself.

The article isn't very long, and it's a must-read -- it lays out the situation quite bluntly. It is, mind, not optimistic: the contention of the article is that there are assumptions about individual mental capacity built into the ideals of the Enlightenment and the democratic institutions that grew from it, and that Weaponized Narrative is all about overwhelming that capacity.

Note that there are some considerable differences from the traditional fears of propaganda-for-oppression that we're used to from 1984 and its ilk. First of all, in this discussion it's not just being used for internal oppression, it's being applied as a tool of conquest -- propaganda not just in support of a military advance, but as the military advance itself. Second, it's not about restricting the subject's available information to a single approved viewpoint; quite to the contrary, it's about overwhelming the subjects with so much contradictory information that they flee to a created narrative that is simpler and more comfortable than the complex reality. In the modern world, where information overload is a constant problem, that's a damned good tactic.

Seriously, read it. Thoughts welcomed...

Comments

[metahacker]

Welp.

Time to hire agents from /r/WeaponizedNarrative or something?

[drwex]

I'm glad you took that up. I think it's important but I just don't have the brainspace to chase it properly.

[drwex]

Let me lay out the line of thought I've been following. I do not think this is de novo. In particular, the author's contention that this is new is both right and wrong. It's right in how it identifies the use of electronic media to enable this, but it's wrong in saying we've never been here before.

In particular, this situation reminds me a great deal of how Europe was prior to the Enlightenment. In particular, the Church and its statist allies used contra-factual narrative (religious in nature) to undermine reason, fragment opposition, and so on. Substitute your favorite Medieval Pope for Putin and the picture doesn't look all that different, I think. Back then it was preachers from the pulpit; now it's a web of fake news sites. The creation of a self-referential, internally self-reinforcing narrative, requiring people to believe things that are plainly contradicted by their experience. If that's not organized hierarchical religion in a nutshell I don't know what is.

If you buy that analogy then the question is what caused the Enlightenment to rise and displace the previous orthodoxy and secondarily whether this is part of a pendulum or cyclical behavior, just with a periodicity we measure in centuries. Remember that Reason and fact had a pretty good run in parts of the world before the rise of Catholicism. Even under the Mohammedan religions, scholarship and logic fared not too badly.

Mind you this is far-fetched and I'm handwaving a lot and haven't really thought this through - see my earlier note about how many brain cycles I have to put into this - but I think it's probably mostly right.

[jducoeur]

To a large degree I concur -- the one difference, and I do think it is significant, is the way that information overload plays into it.

In the pre-modern examples, the prescribed narrative was *enforced*, often quite violently. It's more like the 1984 example: think as we tell you to, or you will be ruthlessly punished.

What's different here is that nobody is *making* you believe this nonsense. Rather, the assertion in the article is that the real modern world is so damned complicated and grey that folks are often left in a haze of confusion, and the propaganda techniques are being used to exacerbate that, while at the same time providing an alternate narrative that, while mostly bullshit, is simple enough, consistent enough, and has enough grains of truth to it to be more intuitively believable than the truth. (At least, to some people.)

So yes -- there's a great deal of precedent. What's changed is that they've *systematized* it nicely, and specifically with an eye towards making it more effective and focused in modern culture. This scientific weaponization is what's new -- the difference between throwing a plague-bearing cow over the battlements vs. modern biological warfare...