Virtuous Parasites

In my last article be less informed I argued that individuals needed to be careful about who they trust online, and consider the reasons they are consuming content. This article focuses on the people creating content. I specifically want to target a type of content creator, those that create semi-educational content with an intentional political bent that bends the lines of propaganda.

At it’s heart propaganda itself is not an issue, in the same way advertising in and of itself is not an issue. Trying to influence or coerce people to your worldview is a standard human affair. The problem with both lies when deception is relied upon. This deception is by no means necessary. You don’t need to lie to sell people on a product or on ideology, unless being honest hurts your case. You might be wondering why I am lumping advertising and propaganda together, this is intentional. After the work of people like Edward Berney’s I think the two are inseparable, and their practical implementations mirror one another.

My precious

Expanding on a topic I covered in be less informed, we live in an attention economy. Many people will have a shallow analysis of incentives wherein just the amount of cashflow someone gets is considered. “This person might be lying because they’re trying to sell me something”. This can be a useful skeptical instinct, however what’s being sold is not always directly for monetary gain. Often times attention itself is more sought after commodity than direct cashflow.

Attention can buy much more than boring old money can. Influence, political capital, whatever you want to call it, people would happily die, and kill for it. It’s a much more precarious and illusive resource. Money is (relatively) easily attained, fame, power and influence are much harder. Even in traditional markets speculation itself can be more profitable than direct cashflow. How many of the top companies that have meteoric rises are based on what they’re doing? Not many, most, if not all have investment based on their potential. The same is true of politics, how many of our thought leaders and politicians have done anything of note and value?

Do you wanna build a chamber?

So if we have attention avarice then what do we need to do. Well first we need to acquire eyes to peddle to. If no one can see how virtuous we’re being, what’s even the point. These days the market is saturated so we need to do something “different”. It’s no longer good enough to simply fight for a cause, you better damn well be willing to lie for it. If you want eyes you need to be outlandish and entertaining. If you intend to be agitative for change you need to be radical enough to feel novel. People need something unique to keep coming back to. Tell people “they” are making the frogs gay¹, or that America deserved 9/11². Make sure to keep “they” ambiguous, if you’re too precise you’re losing out on far too many scapegoats. The next few paragraphs is where we finally see divergence between advertising, and online activism these days. Keep this in mind since the next few points will only apply to the activist crowd.

Now that you have people you need to keep them around. Ideally you need to try to normalize a set of language and terms that “mark your territory”. Call conservatives “hogs”, call liberals “fascists”, whatever you can do to paint broad brush accusations. This helps you to isolate people and “wake them up” to your beliefs (whether you truly hold them or not). Once you’ve created a vocabulary there is a clear “in” and “out” crowd. This distinction can help isolate people and reinforce them into an echo chamber. The more people disagree with them the more “the world doesn’t understand”. If possible you should make the vocabulary as self-referential as possible so people are forced to buy in to understand anything. Great, so now we need to make sure we justify our claims, or else people will start realizing we might be full of it.

Just kidding, fuck no, you never want to justify your beliefs, at least not in a way that’s verifiable. If your beliefs accuracy can be readily measured, if there are checks and balances then you will be unable to make the sorts of outlandish claims that distinguish you from the rest. Ideally you want to present a front of intellectual authority, and where you have to “cite” anything make sure to do it by-proxy. Don’t rely on first party sources, or you risk exposing your “in” crowd to “the outside”, instead reference someone else who’s part of the “in” crowd’s summary. That way you can “address it head on”, without having to address anything head on.

The blind leading the blind

At this point we’ve talked about propaganda/activism, and a potential approach for how to do it, but what about the mechanisms that help spread it? Search engines play a huge role in how people live their lives. The approaches we talked about above work because of algorithmic searching, and lax speech laws. I would argue the lax speech laws to be a positive personally, but their role in helping allow people to become more radicalized certainly plays a part. The more concerning piece to the dissemination of this propaganda is algorithmic searching.

Search engines in their various forms rely on user data. The reality is that every web search, or YouTube search is powered inherently by you. The quintessential goal of the engines is to get people to use them, to stay engaged like a good little consumer. What way to better get people to continue using your service than to placate them. If someone has a political belief you need to construct a reality around them that comports to that. Each person simultaneously needs to live in their own reality, while believing they live in the “real world”. There isn’t “a matrix”, each person can have their own artisanal, contemporaneously crafted reality.

This creates a horrific positive feedback loop. For someone who “cares” about a topic to be able to get more eyes on themselves they have to:

1. Play into the algorithm
2. Then the algorithm in turn brings them more people
3. Then those more people need a reason to stick around, so you have to keep upping the ante
4. Therefore the next set of “influencers” and activists need to continue being more radical, and doing more ridiculous things to get attention

As time goes on, and as search engines become “enhanced” by AI, there will be a more excised effect. Not only can you have a personalized echo chamber, but the chamber can even respond in real time to potential criticisms you have. Instead of dangerously reading sources for yourself it can warmly give you a synopsis of various sources on a topic while weaving it’s responses to cater to your sensibilities. As time goes on there will be deeper and deeper divides that will become necessary to keep peddling the sorts of things that keep people interested. It’s populism given meth, and it’s injected into every persons everyday life regularly.

I’m working on a separate dedicated article about this topic, but a result of this is that the companies that have the most data on me, are the most useless for me. On multiple occasions I have gone to look for information on a current event and instead of the information itself I find countless articles that adhere nicely to my own biases. This combined with the fact that no one cares about citations means that search engines have become a third-layer proxy for information where it flows via:

1. First party sources
2. Second party interpreters
3. Third party aggregators that the engines then pull from

It’s becoming more and more important to look into ongoing conflicts before something major kicks off. If instead you wait until a major development you run the risk of your information being poisoned by every jackass willing to “stand out from the crowd”. After the war in Ukraine kicked off the well of information about Ukraine’s history was so thoroughly poisoned from various sources that it was genuinely frustrating to find facts about the topic. The historical influences, political ones and economic had become the latest spectacle to “speak to people” through. Luckily the attention of people is so short lived that it’s gone back to being more normal now people aren’t “as excited” about the war, but that’s not a reliable system. News stations falsely printing factual information should have consequences, the same is true for influencers (who often have more of a reach than news).

Nothing New under the sun

Remain faithful to the earth, my brothers, with the power of your virtue. Let your gift-giving love and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth. Thus I beg and beseech you. Do not let them fly away from earthly things and beat with their wings against eternal walls. Alas, there has always been so much virtue that has flown away. Lead back to the earth the virtue that flew away, as I do—back to the body, back to life, that it may give the earth a meaning, a human meaning.

• Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra ³

As I said before, advertisers who engage in some of these behaviours make sense, but the question is what do the other types of people I talked about get out of this? As the quote above may have given away I would argue it’s an old phenomenon. At it’s heart lots of the people who hungrily post on the latest “in-vogue” conflict or strife are simply doing moral masturbation. Given a few months they will have forgotten all about it, and all mentions of it will be buried by the latest “in-vogue” topic. There are a few reasons why someone might do this:

• To make themselves feel like they contributed to a solution
• To make themselves feel morally superior to others
• To get attention and eyes on themselves

Fundamentally this urge is the same urge that historically lead things like the satanic panic^{4 5}, McCarthyism⁶, and QAnon⁷. These and many other activist ideologies fall into the same problems, namely their willingness to:

• Over generalize
  • Be self-fulfilling; Everything reinforces the ideology because it’s so broad
• Be reliant upon unfalsifiable claims like conspiracies
• Be indifferent to any actual change

Actually becoming informed is slow and boring, activist entertainment is sexy and easy, and like any good business they need the people. The goal becomes “awareness”, which is just a proxy for attention in this case. Then once there’s enough attention there will be some who become willing to act, but the original progenitors are rarely the ones who act on their beliefs. Instead the people espousing these topics become virtuous parasites in which they feed on the good will of others to indulge their ego while never making steps towards any improvement. After all, if people actually improve their situation then they won’t need leaders like them anymore.

Conclusion

This article is incredibly vitriolic. This was intentional because I think it’s necessary for this topic as a counterbalance. There are lots of people who are trying to make the world a better place genuinely. There are even some people who do what I’ve described above unintentionally. That being said there does need to be a more vicious bent to the criticism lobbied at these approaches. People who adopt a position because it is aesthetically, or egoicly pleasing without ever having done anything to help the cause are a massive hinderance to social change. If you don’t care about a topic, that’s fine, but don’t go online to show people how much you care by at best meaningless posts, and at worst profiteering. Arguably these people are worse than detractors because they pull energy away from those who would act.

You should care about doing things, and evaluate people on what they’ve done, not on what they’ve said. Words are cheap, but actions rarely lie. There are endless justifications for why they will never need to do the active part of activism, but it’s important to not make idols out of people who have done nothing for your cause. They aren’t helping, and they’re often parasitic to the sort of engagement that could have a real impact. To the people doing the world to make things better give your respect, to the people endlessly talking, but never acting I would say ”your principles aren’t your principles until they cost you something”⁸.