On Propaganda as a Tax

It often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it;

~Jonathan Swift.

Oral Calumny is tardy, feeble, and circumscribed, but give her paper wings, and, like a bird, she cleaves the clouds, and flies from province to province, from kingdom to kingdom...

 ~from 'the Confessions of Jean Baptiste Couteau'

A lie can travel halfway round the world before the truth has even put its shoes on.

~dubiously attributed to Mark Twain.

This is a meme:

Generated by nobody from diylol.com a website that allows anyone to make a meme from a template, one presumably of many. It takes seconds to create one, and perhaps a second to share on social media.

This is also a meme:

That was shared by several artists I follow on instagram and via rss feeds on my feedly news aggregator in the wake of the Christchurch shootings. It contains a lot of... stuff? and while it took somebody a matter of hours (probably) to make the graphic it takes somebody perhaps a few seconds to glance over and a second to share. It's created by nobody, that we know of, and doesn't show up on knowyourmeme.com, it says it is 'adapted from' a piece of work.

I've done it before, and redid it now, and after 15 minutes, it's hard to hit bedrock in terms of the source of this fascinating 'information' it's easy for example to find the meme it is adapted from:

Much harder is to find the information it is adapted from on the seemingly respectable SPAN website, the nearest I could get was this pdf document, written by somebody but with no publication date, sighting no sources (though it recommends several books) and the author while named is nobody of note, in terms of a google search, there is a linked-in profile that might probably be the author of this pdf document.

To be honest, my bullshit detector need not go that far down the rabbit hole before I would throw out the original diagram. Because the anonymous author demonstrates their ignorance in the box in the top right hand corner:

"In a pyramid, every brick depends on the ones below it for support. If the bricks at the bottom are removed, the whole structure comes tumbling down."

I learned in high school, why pyramids are so stable, and from I believe one of the Zork games, the tower of hanoi mathematical puzzle of which many infants will have some kind of toy version of  that they play with, made from wood or plastic from which we all probably have the requisite experience to know the statement about the fragility of pyramids doesn't wring true. We will never see a pyramid collapse like the Twin Towers on September 11. We'll never see a pyramid burn to the ground.

It's too tempting to go even further picking apart this meme. I've started that rabbit hole of text and deleted it several times to keep it on point.

And what is the point? The point is the asymmetry. These memes can propagate faster than I or anyone can fact check them, qualify them or refute them. What if one sees a concerning meme doing the rounds? how does one respond?

At great expense to limited effect.

The very fact that I've seen people respond to the 'Flat Earthers', that any rational person has spent a moment of their time reminding themselves that these people are indeed crazy, settles my case that propaganda is tax...

Except that having completed an economics bachelor degree, I'm not sure myself if I should be using the word 'tax' 'levy' or perhaps even 'externality'. I don't have sufficient authority to conclude, but the cost of propaganda is out there and someone generally has to pick up the tab, whether that is technically a tax, a levy foisted on a subset of the population or an externality that has to be addressed by some future generation.

What is propaganda? I'm not sure I know. I guess it would be an effort to assert and propagate a counter-factual claim. Let's see what wiktionary says:

information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.

But we live in a society where an idea with no factual basis, like vaccines causing autism, the earth being flat, Trump/W Bush/Reagan being brilliant etc. spread, and spread quickly such that at dinner parties the few have to expend energy as the social equivalent of white blood cells pushing back.

As per the second of the opening quotes, verbal lies were more manageable because they had to go via one-to-one communication, or perhaps one-to-many but there would have been far more gatekeepers to arrest their spread. More points at which they can fail.

The printing press and the pamphlet allowed lies to scale up, something that enabled the literal witch hunts of the past I'm told. This was addressed by establishing a principle of authorship, table of contents. Tim Snyder testifies to this history here:



The internet and social media, well you don't need to imagine. You know. And I don't need to elaborate the discussion is being had by better thinkers than I.

I was crossing the street. Not the most novel of experiences. I was jaywalking. Also not that novel. Two ladies on the other side of the street saw me crossing, and they crossed, nothing unusual yet. I crossed, they stopped and had to back up. Also perfectly ordinary. I'd seen this behavior a millionty times in my life, I understand it, I understand how it happens, I never fail to notice it.

They had taken their cue to cross the street by watching me, not the traffic. I had a different vantage point, a different starting point so relative to the vehicle moving towards me it was safe to cross. Not for them.

What was unusual was that it made me think that maybe this was a life hack. It made me recall a children's story that I feel was written by English-Australian author Morris Gleitzman but can't find from his largely unsearchable website. The story I recall, by him or another, featured a narrator character that was illiterate. Unable to read menus, he had a way of getting around his illiteracy by standing in line at the fish and chip shop and listening to what the person in front of him ordered, if it fit the bill he would say 'same again.'

Mugen's illiteracy also gets revealed through a similar inability to read menus in Samurai Champloo.

While I'm sure what I witnessed with the two ladies' abortive jaywalking attempt wasn't a kind of traffic illiteracy, but social behavior common to all humanity. What struck me was that I never considered before the possibility that a lot of people find life complicated and much of our behavior are hacks.

For example, a case can be made I feel, that a bunch, if not most people, don't understand what makes the Nazi's bad. They don't understand German National Socialism on any real economic, socio-political level of analysis. So they use hacks to be on the lookout for 'Nazis' which might boil down to wearing a Swastika or tattoo, antisemitism, and perhaps even 'being unpopular'.

And you produce a person that will lose their shit over Prince Harry wearing a Nazi Uniform to a fancy dress party but will vote for a political party that is looking to deregulate media ownership while legislating tough new police powers to deal with a negligible gang problem among at risk teenagers from a refugee population.

The broader principle I'm currently entertaining, is that society is going to operate at a level of complexity above what is necessary for the majority of it's constituents to understand. On some level this has to be true. How many people can use money as a medium of exchange without understanding monetary policy, money supply, inflation, the velocity of circulation, money illusion, etc. We just need basic numeracy and trust, for money to work as a medium of exchange.

There are examples where understanding the complexity of something yeilds us no real utility - for example understanding the endocrine system probably doesn't make the information of your emotional states any more useful to you.

If you have the presence of mind to say 'I'm angry' it doesn't help any, and possibly diminishes your utility to yell 'My CRH is spiking!'

But it leaves us all vulnerable to propaganda. Because most if not all of us, in some contexts are illiterate kids standing in line at a Fish and Chip Shop, with no ability to read the menu, what we order depends on what we hear others ordering.

The term 'conman' comes from 'confidence man' which in turn comes from a gentleman who stood on the streets of New York asking his marks if they had the confidence in him to lend him some money or their watch. Cons have become more sophisticated and often more elaborate since. However when I think about it, I walk past a store with 'McDonalds' written in a certain type face on it's facade, and I feel confident I know what I will be able to order within it, just about anywhere in the world. That's a pretty good hack, and one that might spare me having to listen to other customers to figure out what to order, if I know what I like I can probably order it in English anywhere.

Just so, a bank may operate in a city where people take their money and deposit it, secure loans to finance their businesses and so forth. One learns that the bank can be trusted with money, (well in the Old West perhaps), without understanding it's because they are regulated, they are insured, they have reserves of cash deposits against which to guarantee their loans and other practices, learned over years and in an ongoing way how to protect themselves from robbery and burglary etc.

People learn, their money is safe in the bank. They learn that the bankers wear suits, shirts with collars and sleeves, they are lettered, professionally attired. People learn that people you can trust with money dress professionally and conservatively.

Then a con man just turns up wearing a suit and tie is lettered and speaks financial gibberish and promises you a 30% return if you deposit your funds in his trust.

This is what our illiteracy hacks leave us vulnerable to. With con men, there's an obvious financial cost. What about propaganda?

Well propaganda generally has a benificiary, someone for whom whether conscious of it or not would find life easier if the propaganda were generally accepted as fact. Thus the loser who is motivated to actually pick up the cost, are the people who are adversely affected by the propaganda. A government official may find their job much easier if the public perception of their performance is their ability to provide simple solutions to non-problems like cracking down on statistically insignificant gang violence, rather than having to tackle costly problems like a conversion of the energy grid to a sustainable and renewable one.

Let's say you are a junior employee in a corporation, and you are tasked with mailing out the new price list to your network of retailers. You put 1,000 envelopes into the post, and job done. Then a sales rep calls you up after a week and points out there's a misplaced decimal meaning that over the past week the corporation has sold 3,000 units at a 90% discount.

In this case, addressing the error is easy, the company fires you for your lack of proofreading, corrects the pricing in the system that generated the error and sends out the correction using the mailing list of retail clients.

With a social network, you read a horrifying article about a person who caught aids from a persimmon that sights 'sources' that you don't bother to check and post it to your social media page visible potentially to 400 friends you can't name off the top of your head and often forget can see what you post. The link you post gets shared 45 times, it becomes a news story and suddenly it is echoing back on itself, being covered by the press, and you are seeing follow up newstories about persimmons being pulled from supermarket shelves and being destroyed. In the meantime, one or two of your 400 friends, that perhaps graduated from medical school points out that you cannot catch AIDS or HIV from eating fruit or any other foodstuff, it can only be transmitted through blood or ejaculate from a carrier.

Still the bad association with persimmons may linger for years, and it's because people's heuristics for navigating a society more complex than they can comprehend got hacked. People seeing that the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Age, The Guardian etc. have websites that look polished, and have links to share on social media attached to articles, and named authors etc. and when you share the link it has a picture with a watermark of the publication brand etc. and that's what legitimate news looks like (without going down the rabbit hole of how to identify an Op-Ed from a reporting of factual events...)

You may be saying 'so what? who gives a fuck about persimmons? stupid fruit.'

Someone might though, and we've lost the ability to intercept or conduct an idea recall. We have thousands of signal fires that ideas can move through, and their quality control functions are potentially primative.

Imagine a well intending good person who wants to help their community avoid catastrophe and prosper and thrive. They don't understand economics, medicine, psychology, philosophy, civics, law, finance, chemistry, biology etc. not to any degree of complexity. They have a voice, and they have a rule and the rule is 'communism is bad' they 'know' the way to help steer their community in the right direction is away from communism.

Unfortunately they don't understand communism, Marx, socialism, taxation, etc. this person is easily presented with ideas and their rule is - if it denounces communism, share it. So they see an article that says a National Disability Insurance Scheme is communism, they share it. They see a meme that says a mining tax is communism, they share it. They see a gif that ridicules a politician for suggesting a failed financial institution should be nationalized as part of it's bail out. They share it. They see a meme that says the water supply should be privatized to lower costs to the consumer. They share it.

They are networked in with a 1:100 ratio of other signal repeater stations that do not share their primative decision rule. By the time that 1 person has pushed back on just one of those memes, it's had 100 opportunities to spread and contaminate a new 1:100 pool of repeater stations.

So what gives me optimism in this hopeless situation?

For one this isn't the first time the world has faced the introduction of a disruptive technology, as per that Tim Schnyder video. Between the invention of the printing press, and the enlightenment there were the dark days of the reformation. And it isn't like Protestantism was all bad, it was a source of important reform. The Enlightenment was better, but as is being discovered, it didn't and perhaps didn't need to, penetrate humanities consciousness very wide or very deep as Douglas Murray somewhat puts it.

But eventually the gate keepers regulated and addressed a large part of the problem. In hindsight my year 10~11 geography teacher Mr Schomburg (or something) when he extolled the virtue of going to the library and using actual books for our assignment because they were written by creditable authors, unlike the internet information super highway, was one of the most valuable lessons I received in my schooling.

I can also remember, just vaguely the days when my McDonald's hamburgers came in a Styrofoam container. When my grandparents had a garbage incinerator in their back yard. In my lifetime, early on in my lifetime, scientists and baby-boomers got together and got rid of styrofoam packaging in McDonald's. Apollo Bay got rid of plastic bags maybe a whole decade before the major supermarket chains followed suit.

If society can have it's attitudes shifted about the physical garbage they dump into the ecosystem, they can be shifted on the garbage ideas they dump into social media spaces.

There's also regulatory steps that can be taken to exclude the public from discussions where they are doing more harm than good spreading propaganda. On the harsher end of the spectrum, a distributor of a false and misleading meme could be fined like 5c for every time it is shared. Such that a few pariah's wake up to discover they have a several billion dollar fine for their efforts to combat climate action.

On the more gentel end of the spectrum, a government could regulate that each time you log into social media a load screen flashes you a message like 'articles shared on social media are rarely fact-checked.' and 'social media is not an appropriate place to relieve mental anguish.' and so forth.

I do sincerely believe that social media and smart phones are the cigarettes of this century. We are only a few decades in and we are starting to notice and document the adverse health effects and addictive nature. Huge gains were made in the anglosphere against smoking, (until perhaps, the advent of social media) and the same can be done I am sure, for social media.

And there's consumer activism, endeavor to share less content and instead write things in your own words, speaking on your own behalf. A big culprit in a lot of issues is time-poverty. Your time is taken away from you through rising living costs and decreasing job security, then the market steps in with a product, and one such product it seems, is to spare people the effort of thinking and throw them back on their primitive rules of 'Nazis are bad' 'Communists are bad' etc.

In the meantime, while I'm sure Donald Trump has speech writers on staff, we have this prominent example of a tax on journalism, and information in general. The press does an admirable job in staying on top of Trump's penchant for just uttering complete and incoherent bullshit. From journalists to comedians, many many people are employed just to keep us tenuously in touch with reality thanks to the impulsive utterances of just one man.

It's even a tax imposed across national borders. The Australain public broadcasters have to spend money commenting on and correcting Donald Trump. It can be argued that Trump has boosted subscriptions and ratings for journalism and in that regard, creates employment in the industry. But that employment is literally engaged on the singular task of just correcting for his own propaganda. Important and consequential issues get substantially less airtime.

The truth needs fact-checkers, researchers, presenters, office buildings and overhead. Propaganda needs two thumbs and a smart phone. Someone has to pay for this mind pollution. Don't be like Donald Trump.