Bringing to mind the Ring Lardner quote: "Shut up, he explained" in his otherwise almost unreadable novel, The Immigrants. (it's the writing in dialect, tough to follow in 1920 much less 100 years later)
The author of this piece was a media analyst for the CIA and since his retirement has shown up on our pages a few times, usually in proximity to "ecologist of media" Andrei Mir.
From Martin Gurri at Discourse Magazine, March 30:
While your back was turned, the federal government erected a convoluted apparatus of control for what you can say and see online. They did this, we are told, to protect us. Protect us from what, you ask? Well, mostly from ourselves, but also from a threat that makes nuclear annihilation feel like a pinprick by comparison: disinformation. Also misinformation and malinformation—the latter defined as “bits of actual reality we totally object to.”
But disinformation is the big dog. And by “disinformation,” they mean the web. And by the web, they mean, of course, you—but I already said that.
I have written long, deeply researched tracts about the technical aspects of disinformation. Why did I bother? Nobody cares. Disinformation is just a jargon word with a subliminal meaning, thrown out by the mighty of the earth whenever they worry that they are about to lose an argument—something that happens with painful regularity these days. The word means, “Shut up, peasant.” It’s a bullet aimed at killing the conversation. It’s loaded with hostility to reason, evidence, debate and all the stuff that makes our democracy great.
The Biden White House is on record demanding that social media be held “accountable.” Accountable to whom, you ask—and for what? Well, accountable to them, naturally, for the spreading of disinformation. In 2022, Biden appointed Nina Jankowicz to lead an ambitious new Disinformation Governance Board that aimed to hold all of us accountable.
Who is Nina Jankowicz? She insisted, during the 2020 presidential campaign, that the Hunter Biden laptop story was part of a Russian disinformation campaign, something we now know was false. She also can be found on TikTok claiming to be the “Mary Poppins of disinformation” and elsewhere online asking, in song, who she needed to have sex with to get ahead in life. That was way too much information, at least for the rubes living in the more obscure parts of the map, so the scheme for a Disinformation Board came to nothing.
In government, if you can’t do it legally, you pay shady people to do it for you. Ordinarily, this is considered criminal behavior. In Washington, it’s called partnering with the private sector. The Biden administration, after writing a few checks, reached out to Nongovernmental Organizations, or NGOs—a shady underworld full of self-proclaimed experts who’ll say pretty much anything for money.
The federal government’s quarrel with disinformation was laundered through outfits like Stanford Internet Observatory, Global Disinformation Index and the Aspen Institute. These places found the situation to be much worse than anyone had thought. More money was obviously needed. Here is Renee DiResta of Stanford Internet Observatory, loudest voice on the subject from the penumbral NGO world, sounding the alarm: “Over the past decade, disinformation, misinformation, and social media hoaxes have evolved from a nuisance into high-stakes information war.”....
....MUCH MORE
As has been pointed out by many observers, those decrying mis-, dis-, and mal-information the loudest are the same people who most frequently use the tactic favored by sexual and psychological abusers: gaslighting, also known as flat-out lying to your face.
It's a corollary to our mantra: "The less virtue, the more signaling."
