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These astroturf libertarians are the real threat to internet democracy
George Monbiot, Guardian (UK)
As I see in threads on my articles, the online sabotaging of intelligent debate seems organised. We must fight to save this precious gift
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… I’m talking about the daily attempts to control and influence content in the interests of the state and corporations: attempts in which money talks.
The weapon used by both state and corporate players is a technique known as astroturfing. An astroturf campaign is one that mimics spontaneous grassroots mobilisations but which has in reality been organised. Anyone writing a comment piece in Mandarin critical of the Chinese government, for instance, is likely to be bombarded with abuse by people purporting to be ordinary citizens, upset by the slurs against their country.
But many of them aren’t upset: they are members of the 50 Cent Party, so-called because one Chinese government agency pays five mao (half a yuan) for every post its tame commenters write. Teams of these sock-puppets are hired by party leaders to drown out critical voices and derail intelligent debates.
I first came across online astroturfing in 2002, when the investigators Andy Rowell and Jonathan Matthews looked into a series of comments made by two people calling themselves Mary Murphy and Andura Smetacek. They had launched ferocious attacks, across several internet forums, against a scientist whose research suggested that Mexican corn had been widely contaminated by GM pollen.
Rowell and Matthews found that one of the messages Mary Murphy had sent came from a domain owned by the Bivings Group, a PR company specialising in internet lobbying.
… Reading comment threads on the Guardian’s sites and elsewhere on the web, two patterns jump out at me. The first is that discussions of issues in which there’s little money at stake tend to be a lot more civilised than debates about issues where companies stand to lose or gain billions: such as climate change, public health and corporate tax avoidance. These are often characterised by amazing levels of abuse and disruption.
Articles about the environment are hit harder by such tactics than any others.
… The second pattern is the strong association between this tactic and a certain set of views: pro-corporate, anti-tax, anti-regulation. Both traditional conservatives and traditional progressives tend to be more willing to discuss an issue than these rightwing libertarians, many of whom seek to shut down debate.
So what’s going on? I’m not suggesting that most of the people trying to derail these discussions are paid to do so, though I would be surprised if none were. I’m suggesting that some of the efforts to prevent intelligence from blooming seem to be organised, and that neither website hosts nor other commenters know how to respond.
(13 December 2010)
I don’t think “Libertarian” is the right label for these mindless attacks. The Libertarians I know are more articulate and respectful of free speech. However, Monbiot is certainly right about how commenters of a certain stamp ruin online discussion. My rule of thumb is that without a moderator or a strong sense of community, online discussion turns into a cesspool. -BA
Untellable Truths
George Lakoff, CommonDreams
… As someone who studies how brains work and how language affects politics, I see things somewhat differently. From my perspective, there is a form of surrender in advance on both sides — a major communications surrender.
Let’s start with an example, the slogan “No tax cuts for millionaires.” First, “no.” As I have repeatedly pointed out, negating a frame activates the frame in the brains of listeners, as when Christine O’Donnell said “I am not a witch” or Nixon said “I am not a crook.” Putting “no” first activates the idea “Tax cuts for millionaires.”
… Language, The Brain, and Politics
When democratic political leaders go to college they tend to study things like political science, economics, law, and public policy. These fields tend to use a scientifically false theory of human reason — Enlightenment reason. It posits that reason is conscious, that it can fit the world directly, that it is logical (in the sense of mathematical logic), that emotion gets in the way of reason, that reason is there to serve self-interest, and that language is neutral and applies directly to the world.
The brain and cognitive sciences have shown that every part of this is false. Reason is physical, it does not fit the world directly but only through the brain and body, it uses frames and conceptual metaphors (which are neural circuits grounded in the body), it requires emotion, it serves empathic connections and moral values as well as self-interest, and language fits frames in the brain not the external world in any direct way.
Conservatives who are savvy about marketing their ideas are closer to the way people really think than Democrats are, because people who teach marketing tend to be up on how the brain and language work. And over the past three decades they have not just built an effective message machine, but they repeated messages that have changed the brains of a great many Americans.
… I am often asked, “Is there a slogan I can use tomorrow that will turn things around?” Certainly there are better things that can be said tomorrow. But things don’t turn around so quickly. There is a lot do and to bear in mind over the long haul. Here is a brief list.
* Communication is a long-term effort. Political leaders rarely say anything that isn’t already in public discourse. That means that people who are not in office have to start effective communication efforts, including new ways of thinking and talking.
* All politics is moral. Policies are proposed because they are assumed to be right, not wrong. The moral values behind a policy always should be made clear. …
* Democrats need to unite behind a simple set of moral principles and to create an effective language to express them. … They need to be said out loud and repeated over and over.
* Leaders need a movement to get out in front of. Not a coalition, a movement. We have the simple principles. Those of us outside of government have to organize that unified movement, and not be limited by specific issue areas. The movement is about progressivism, not just about environmentalism, or social justice, or labor, or education, or health, or peace. The general principles govern them all.
(11 December 2010)
Although Lakoff describes the differences in framing between Democrats and conservatives, I think the ideas have a much braoder application. Attempts to educate about climate and peak oil fall into the same rationalist trap as the campaigns of the Democrats. -BA
Internet Worries
Michael Albert, ZSpace
… Issue One – The Obvious Problem
Our online information practices are overwhelmingly defined by the choices and agendas of a relative few massive information corporations. They directly govern the most widely used parts of internet communications and exchange. More, by their scale, they acclimate users to designs, styles, and approaches, and inculcate habits and expectations. The spread of these habits and expectations among users in turn cause nearly all information providers to make decisions that trend toward replicating, ratifying, and reinforcing – or at least accommodating to – the decisions of the dominant few.
… Google, Facebook, and Twitter – what do they sell? It seems like they sell nothing. We use their offerings, but we don’t pay them. Well, that’s because we aren’t their consumers. We aren’t buying their product. Instead, we are their product. We are what they sell.
Like TV, radio, and to a very large extent print media, online information corporations like Google, Facebook, and Twitter very typically sell – or try to sell – access to their users to other corporations and also, taking it another step, access to information about their users to other companies.
… Issue Two – The Less Evident Problem
The new approaches to online information exchange that are currently sweeping the planet largely entail quickly perusing small nuggets or snippets of information, with constant flitting between options and almost no in depth, immersive attention to anything. This type of communication is steadily encroaching on and even replacing longer uninterrupted more immersive approaches such as reading books and even articles that one gets deeply into without jumping to and fro, and even reading longer letters, longer email, seeing longer videos, and soon, I bet, even playing attention demanding games.
What is emerging in place of all these is a new dominant style of interfacing with information. We move quickly from item to item. We examine items always with other items clamoring for our attention. We get better and better at and we get more and more comfortable with quickly evaluating content arriving in nuggets and snippets. However, we get steadily less practiced at and less comfortable with reading and otherwise engaging more deeply and continuously with information.
To accommodate and then reinforce our new practices, our attention spans decline. This is not something anyone intended.
… Tim O’Reilly a famous internet innovator and capitalist writes, “A growing number of people are never offline, even at night… People search the web several times a day for information on the same topic, because the flow of data is constantly expanding, changing, and transforming itself. All of this happens too quickly for most people to simply stop. This hyper-networking of people is fueled by what appears to the the unstoppable ascendancy of social networks like Facebook. It is also driven by short and terse communication in a network environment that is increasingly doing away with its user’s private sphere.”
… Christine Greenhow at the Univ of Wisconsin tells us “Clever will become a synonym for networked, at which time the word intelligence will express the ability to condense widely distributed bits of information into a coherent form.” This is probably meant neutrally, as observation, but notice that it matches perfectly with the idea of one new skill rising – while an old skill dissipates.
Nicholas Carr is the author of the Shallows, the book I mentioned. He writes “Intelligence can be redefined to emphasize how quickly you can find information, rather than how deeply you can think about it.”
Mitch Kapor, programmer, entrepreneur, and advocate of net neutrality: “Getting information from the internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.”
… Nicholas Carr writes, “Text messaging now represents one of the most common uses of computers, particularly for the young. By the beginning of 2009, the average American cell phone user was sending or receiving nearly 400 texts a month…the average American teen was sending or receiving a mind-boggling 2,272 texts a month. Worldwide, well over two trillion text messages zip between mobile phones every year, far outstripping the number of voice calls.” There is something happening here…
(13 December 2010)
