Brave New World

Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment

Excellent story about political propaganda in the USA in the 21st century.

It's a little long. It talks about the collapse of traditional media and the rise of social media.

How Barack Obama Built An Omnipotent Thought-Control Machine... And How It Was Destroyed by David Samuels

Excerpt: 

When I wrote about Rhodes’ ambitious program to sell the Iran deal, I advanced the term “echo chambers” to describe the process by which the White House and its wider penumbra of think tanks and NGOs generated an entirely new class of experts who credentialed each other on social media in order to advance assertions that would formerly have been seen as marginal or not credible, thereby overwhelming the efforts of traditional subject-area gatekeepers and reporters to keep government spokespeople honest. In constructing these echo chambers, the White House created feedback loops that could be gamed out in advance by clever White House aides, thereby influencing and controlling the perceptions of reporters, editors and congressional staffers, and the elusive currents of “public opinion” they attempted to follow. If you saw how the game worked from the inside, you understood that the new common wisdom was not a true “reflection” of what anyone in particular necessarily believed, but rather the deliberate creation of a small class of operatives who used new technologies to create and control larger narratives that they messaged to target audiences on digital platforms, and which often presented themselves to their targets as their own naturally occurring thoughts and feelings, which they would then share with people like themselves. . . .

What I did not imagine at the time was that Obama’s successor in the White House would not be Hillary Clinton but Donald Trump. Nor did I foresee that Trump would himself become the target of a messaging campaign that would make full use of the machine that Obama had built, along with elements of the American security state. Being physically inside the White House, it turned out, was a mere detail of power; even more substantial power lay in controlling the digital switchboard that Obama had built, and which it turned out he still controlled. . . .

A key technique used in the Obama's 'digital switchboard':

permission structures - is most commonly defined as a means of providing “scaffolding for someone to embrace change they might otherwise reject.” This “scaffolding” provides:

• social proof (most people in your situation are now deciding to) 
• new information
• changed circumstances
• compromise

As one author put it, “with many applications to politics, one could argue that effective Permission Structures will shift the Overton Window, introducing new conversations into the mainstream that might previously have been considered marginal or fringe.” 

Later on we get this: 

The effect of the permission structure machine is to instill and maintain obedience to voices coming from outside yourself, regardless of the obvious gaps in logic and functioning that they create. The clinical term for this state is schizophrenia, . . . 

Samual's essay names a bunch of people and books, some of whom I knew and some I didn't. I collected them all in a spreadsheet.

Note: The first time I opened the essay, all I got was a plain orange screen. There is supposed to be a giant image there, but for some reason it didn't load. Anyway, scroll down a bit and you will get to the text.