The fundamental issue is that the basis of informed choice that’s supposed to keep the democratic process on track is broken by an attention-based information economy. We have a decision-making process in America based on our conversations - upon our discourse. Disruption of the fundamental assumptions of Gricean felicity conditions in discourse has "snowballing”, cumulative effects on the quality of the decisions that emerge from that culture.
Gricean felicity conditions are common informal covenants, or maxims, on how we talk to each other that all human language speakers obey. These are the maxims of quality, quantity, relevance and manner. If I speak nonsense or make a low-effort contribution to the conversation, I fail to meet the requirements of the condition of quality; if I speak excessively or insufficiently, I breach the maxim of quantity; if I speak on a topic irrelevant to our conversation, I have violated the maxim of relevance. Finally, if I speak in a manner that is obscure or ambiguous, I have violated the maxim of relevance.
Disinformation is intentional, strategic presentation of untruths with the intent to make the reader or viewer believe something untrue. The “four D’s” of disinformation strategy: dismiss, distort, distract, dismay can be seen as invitations to breach Gricean maxims, or cases of performative breach of Gricean maxims.
The epitome of this problem is the 2015-2016 “attack” on American decision-making culture.
This was a non-linear informational attack; the degradative effects on culture end up being more profound than the direct impact. Think about it in terms of being on a fight with someone in a situation of mutual dependency; disrupting that state of mutual dependency doesn’t take much, but once the cycle goes eccentric and starts devolving, there isn’t much to make it go back on-center. Once the maxims of quality and quantity cease to matter, distortive tactics like “gish gallops” or simple confabulation become legitimate; once the maxim of relevance ceases to matter, conspiracy theories or simple distraction starts to become tools that you can use.
Once you accept that speech has a strategic value independent of its truth claims and communicative intent, you move into the realm of strategic communications; and disinformation is the dark side of that realm aimed at strategic damage to a decision-making culture, rather than its strengthening and repair.
A full assessment of the consequences of discourse degradation and collective pathology arising from the rise of the disinformation era remains to be done, but full knowledge of mode of causation and forms of action is not a necessary prerequisite to counter-action.
The urgency of the situation, however, does put us into an “ends-justify-the-means” approach to reverse it; we have to focus on counteracting the effects while triaging repair of the basic conditions of culture. We end up burning the candle from both ends at some level.
That catches up to you. The catching-up-to-us is this state of post-COVID information culture; you could look to the outbreak of pathological social withdrawal and the rise in stochastic violence as part of these issues, alongside permanent scission from reality for substantial portions of the populace. You can only tell people “this is the most important election of our lifetimes” so much; at a certain point, it becomes “this is the most important election we’ve had so far, and compared to the choice we’ll have to make soon, it’s going to be the least important election you’ll ever vote in going forward”. Inaction leads to frustration; that frustration leads to anger, and anxiety, and ultimately a kind of learned helplessness that emerges in the worst moments we face, in the outbreaks of depression and social withdrawal that happen every time there’s a high-profile mass shooting.
It is difficult not to see the state of national discourse as a national security concern. A through-line stretches from the degradative effects of Russian disinformation on a relatively small subset, catalyzed through vicious cycles of social feedback into the rise of Trump, all the way through to anti-vaccinationists and election-denialism in the post-2020 period. If we are agnostic as to who is causing this, or whether there is an intent, it becomes relatively undeniable that it looks like culture is broken so badly it at least looks as if someone did it on purpose.
It lapses dangerously closely into totalitarianism of the intelligence-industrial state to propose that we should consider so much of the state of our nation at any given moment to be the province of an effects-based information-war defensive effort, even more so when we abandon the principle of disinformational intent in assessing non-linear informational threats.
It isn’t hard to craft right-sounding, even potentially dangerous justification to consider culture as a national-security issue. As people point out, there’s a lot of mass shooter ideology that ends up resembling terrorism, and there’s even shooters being prosecuted on terrorism charges now.
The causes of a lot of - not all - stochastic violence with terroristic effects and intent ends up having to do with exposure to radical ideology, entrenchment, then escalation from word to deed; even in cases of non-ideological violence (like domestic violence) we can still tie it to narrative and ideologies that appear to emanate from or be amplified by foreign sources (e.g., Russian support for far-right influencers with misogynist audiences and narratives).
We end up in a place that justifies, essentially, thought-policing, very fast when we decide to err on the side of caution in Popper’s tolerance paradox.
There are ways to avoid some of the danger inherent in locating culture in terms of national security: basing mitigation & counter-action in citizen effort, rigidly maintaining minimum levels of veridicality and responsibility to correction, locating national adaptiveness efforts in a stewardship rather than control paradigm; these are practical questions worthy of a separate inquiry.
At the theoretical level the examples of what civilians can do within terms of sanction policy and disinformation are inverses of each other in terms of their place in the activist continuum-of-action, but they produce the same eventual result.
In sanctions policy we are fundamentally negotiating with the powers-that-be to achieve change, and direct action isn’t a real possibility - that makes it a boycott, which is different than the unique force of law and international reputation that a sanction provides. When the government is already sufficiently active in an area - this is actually not unusual in sanctions policy - we simply let things be; you can’t “designate people harder” than they already are.
In counter-disinformation efforts, in contrast, we assume for failure of the negotiation process altogether; this is necessitated by the largely overview-less, unregulated field of content moderation on social networks. In this context, only direct action to force a public crisis works; we arrive at this after researching the problem, attempting to negotiate with the powers-that-be, assuring ourselves of the surety of our motivations and the truth of our beliefs, then on that basis forcing a public crisis from “the high ground” in terms of faith in the relevant cause - here, reassertion of truth.
What unites both is that these are non-governmental efforts on a more or less grassroots basis aimed at changes to the basic conditions of the playing field - either reassertion of “grassroots truth” in the case of counter-disinformation, or the disruption of economic support for genocide with OSINT-based sanctions designations, in the case of sanctions policy.
That relationship is common knowledge now; that awareness that it’s on us, that cognizance of the urgency of “now” as Obama put it. It’s the easy relationship you have with people who’ve also been activists during the Trump era, the kind of assumptions as to beliefs in common that you can have with the majority of people in America - not all, certainly a minority in some areas like red states, but still; it’s the knowledge that you’re not alone in seeing massive injustice with impunity and being outraged by it enough to jolt out of apathy and do the right thing.
The movement that we ended up needing to counteract disinformation has arisen in a kind of inchoate, parallelized form, like a buildup of awareness and frustration and knowledge that nothing’s going to go right because of the disjunction between citizen desires and government action; over time, that buildup starts to transform into something different, a commonality across individuals.
It is, perhaps, a somewhat unique basis for a movement, but the common “what now?” of the resistance movement post-Trump, but not post-disinformation, seems to be located in this kind of common subjectivity.
Try this: say out loud, sometime, at a bar or a cafe or next time you’re out, “I fucking hate Nazis”. See how many people also say they hate Nazis, and will know that you are talking about Trump-era nationalist fascism. It’s probably not going to work out for you well at, say, an Arby’s in Ohio right now.
A lot of other places in America, however, some of them with laws that are substantially less insane than Ohio’s, the number of people who say something like “oh hell yeah I hate Nazis too” might surprise you.