As we turn toward the U.S. Nov 5th elections final approach,

we would do well to get all up in our Brill.

  

This book just came to my attention yesterday, while reading a review of another title. It jumped my queue, and, I'm now a good way through it. It is so timely.

 

 

I've cited the work of the astute Steven Brill multiple times across multiple posts previously.

 

 

Relatedly, how about some Tom Nichols, "The Death of Expertise?"

 

 

See also my prior riffs on disinformation.

UPDATE: MORE FROM UP IN OUR BRILL

Here is a selection of the completely false stories that appeared online and gained traction on social media platforms around the world over just a four-week period beginning in mid-June 2023. These and many more added to the debris that was already online in a vaster, much worse, wasteland:

Deaths blamed on bird flu were actually caused by cell phone radiation; U.K. government report shows COVID-19 vaccines caused five hundred excess heart disease deaths weekly; the World Economic Forum called for a new Bible written by artificial intelligence; elderberries are more effective protection against flu than a vaccine; Disney-Pixar animation movies contain hidden references to adrenochrome, a chemical product from adrenaline that QAnon conspiracy theorists say is harvested from blood trafficked for its anti-aging chemicals; the Iwo Jima memorial will be updated to feature the Pride flag; a photo has surfaced of Aileen Cannon, the federal judge presiding over the Trump national security documents case who is thought to favor Trump, at a Trump campaign rally in Pennsylvania; Brendan Whitworth, the chief executive officer of Anheuser-Busch, is a CIA operative; the actor Jamie Foxx was left blind and paralyzed by a COVID vaccine; no Amish children have been diagnosed with chronic conditions like cancer, diabetes, or autism because Amish children do not get vaccinated; NATO was behind the Wagner Group rebellion in Russia; electric cars have been spontaneously combusting throughout Europe; Target is selling satanic clothing; the 2023 Canadian wildfires were caused by arsonists wanting to promote fear of climate change; a whistleblower with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma was found dead; Michelle Obama is transgender; Vladimir Putin ordered the destruction of COVID-19 vaccine stockpiles in Russia; John Kerry said U.S. farms could be confiscated by the government to fight global warming; photos from the humiliating invasion of Beijing in 1900 by eight countries, including the United States, are displayed in a U.S. military classroom; a video shows a U.S. soldier opening a gate and allowing immigrants to illegally cross the border; the World Health Organization confirmed that COVID-19 vaccines can induce multiple sclerosis; the Italian food company Barilla withdrew its pasta due to insect contamination; California law allows kids to receive gender-affirming procedures without parental consent; the Presidential Records Act allows outgoing presidents to retain classified documents; a video shows Maricopa County election officials breaking into voting machines; U.S. missiles in Ukraine are trafficked to Mexican cartels; Europe and the U.K. are offering citizenship to mercenaries who fight in Ukraine; Ontario doctors suggested the unvaccinated should be given psychiatric medication; Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are not melting; a Washington state law allows the government to take children from the custody of parents who do not let their children get gender-affirming surgery; the Ukrainian intelligence chief is in a coma in Germany; Bill Gates is funding a new Chinese pathogen that will sicken Americans.

Again, this is new material that got traction on the internet over just a four-week period in 2023. — Whether it is a matter of be: by the legitimate businesses that are the essence of a free market economy, people around the world are contending with a sea of misinformation and disinformation aimed at triggering their insecurities, exploiting their grievances, and drowning out the trustworthy sources that they once relied on. This modern information environment has shattered trust, laying the groundwork for those hoping to thrive when enough people believe nothing or are willing to believe anything. [The Death of Truth, pp 98-100]

"Flood the zone with shit"—Steve Bannon

 

MONDAY PM UPDATE

 

I finished The Death of Truth. A riveting read. It could not be more timely. 

Over the last two decades we have seen the center eroded. The truths and trust shared by those in the center eroded, too. When government stopped working for people in that center, they drifted off to the fringes, lured by the fringe information they were barraged with online. Like so many of the rioters who stormed the Capitol or people who refused a safe vaccine, they became vulnerable to the false promises promoted by the demagogues, hucksters, and conspiracy theorists that the algorithms were steering them to. 

[In  chapter 15] we have listed the practical ways that governments can step in to make the internet a calmer, safer place. If that happens and if, at the same time, those who have been lured to the fringes begin to see their elected officials—given attention by calmer, more trust-building online content—working together and actually getting things done, the disaffected and the alienated will be less cynical and less likely to sign on to the demagogues’ alternatives. If some of what these center-oriented officials get done is in areas where there is dire need and broad consensus—such as initiatives aimed at fixing immigration or public education, creating a fairer tax system, or addressing elder-care and health-care costs—public cynicism and vulnerability to those bad actors and their toxic misinformation barrages will likely recede further. This could create a virtuous cycle in place of a downward spiral. Those who have been lured to the fringes will start to believe again in democracy, in government, and in other institutions and experts. They will be less likely to believe that the world is full of conspiracies that threaten them. 

They will start to believe in truth again. [The Death of Truth, pg. 236]

The final chapter (15) discusses Steve's broad range of promising tech and political reforms. The latter include  things such as "top two," "ranked choice" elections voting mechanisms, and direct plebiscite ballot referendum initiatives to counter and/or mitigate the pernicious effects of gerrymandering and deep-pockets dark money PACs. While I find that all intriguing, I cannot shake my abiding concerns going to interference by courts stuffed with reactionary FedSoc judges.

In any event, Steven Brill rocks. And, this book harks to a number of prior post relevant topics:

Might U.S. military veterans take up arms against us?

The Age of Grievance
Define "Civility"
The AI Mirror
The new Apple of my AI
Project 2025 posts

Just to cite a few (click any headline). Below, a conversation with the author.

 

 

 

TUESDAY UPDATE

 

Generally apropos of this overall riff? My daily stop at The Atlantic turned this up.

When the coronavirus pandemic started, the media scholar Lilie Chouliaraki, who teaches at the London School of Economics, knew she’d have to be more careful than many of her neighbors. A transplant recipient and lymphoma patient, she was at very high risk of serious illness. In her new book, Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood, she writes that rather than feeling victimized by this situation, she was grateful to have the option of sheltering in place. Still, as the pandemic wore on and opponents of masking and social distancing in Britain—as well as in the United States and many other nations—began to claim that they were victims of government overreach and oppression, Chouliaraki grew both confused and compelled by the role that victimhood language was playing in real decisions about the degree to which society should reopen.

 

COVID isn’t the only recent context in which victimhood has gotten rhetorically vexing. At the height of #MeToo, in 2017 and 2018, the U.S. seemed to engage in a linguistic battle over who got to call themselves victims: those who said they had suffered assault or harassment, or those who stood accused of committing those offenses. In Wronged, Chouliaraki links this debate to pandemic-era arguments about public health versus personal freedom in order to make the case that victimhood has transformed into a cultural trophy of sorts, a way for a person not just to gain sympathy but also to accumulate power against those who have wronged them. Of course, people call themselves victims for all sorts of very personal reasons—for example, to start coming to grips with a traumatic experience. But Chouliaraki is more interested in the ways victimhood can play out publicly—in particular, when powerful actors co-opt its rhetoric for their own aims.

Central to Chouliaraki’s exploration is the distinction she draws between victimhood and vulnerability. She argues that victimhood is not a condition but a claim—that you’re a victim not when something bad happens to you, but when you say, “I am wronged!” Anyone, of course, can make this declaration, no matter the scale (or even reality) of the wrong they’ve suffered. For this reason, per Chouliaraki, victimhood should be a less important barometer for public decision making than vulnerability, which is a condition. Some forms of it are physical or natural, and cannot be changed through human intervention. As a transplant patient, Chouliaraki is forever more vulnerable to illness than she used to be. Other sorts of vulnerability are more mutable. A borrower with poor credit is vulnerable to payday lenders, but regulatory change could make that untrue (or could make payday loans affordable). Such an intervention, crucially, would protect not just present borrowers but future ones. Focusing on vulnerability rather than victimhood, she suggests, is a better way to prevent harm…

Just what I need—another book dropped into the endlessly accruing pile.

We'll see how this coheres with Frank Bruni's The Age of Grievance. Ahhh... "victimhood."

Ever heard of the "Rescuer-Victim-Persecutor Triangle?" The "scripts people live?"

Steiner's book was the first one Cheryl and I read together in 1974 at our outset. It has aged rather well, IMO (It's been updated / re-issued w/ a new Forward, BTW).

Short take: To the extent you live a "scripted" life (your socially shaped "persona"), you are not "free" (in the moral agency sense). Don't know about you, but I've spent most of my 78+ years laboring to unlearn that shit.

Of late I can think of no more poignant "Victims" than those of our Poor Oppressed Majority of the Heritage Christian Nationalist Project 2025 drama.

 

LILIE CHOULIARAKI UPDATE

This woman personifies the word "scholar" at its best.

THE PLATFORMIZATION OF PAIN

Although our languages of pain are deeply grounded in the past, there is nonetheless something irreducibly new about the uses of victimhood today. The platformization of pain—that is, the performance of vulnerability on and through the commercial logic of social media platforms—has transformed the premises upon which victimhood is now claimed. It has done so in two ways: by reorganizing the communicative politics of pain and by expanding the realms of suffering in which victimhood can be claimed.

To begin with, platformization has enabled everyone with a mobile phone and a social media account to broadcast their pain to the 4.48 billion users across social media platforms. Such openness on internet platforms had earlier been greeted as a democratizing move, where marginalized groups found a way to voice their suffering and mobilize social forces for political change. Merlyna Lim, for example, had early on argued that to understand the massive Arab Spring protests of 2011 against the Hosni Mubarak regime, we need to explore the online habits of Egypt’s oppositional youth. Their engagement with Facebook and Twitter, she said, gave them “the means to shape repertoires of contention, frame the issues, propagate unifying symbols, and transform online activism into offline protests.”

In the course of the past decade, however, most scholars became ambivalent about this potential. Rather than a matter of benign technological connectivity, they contend, such expansion of voice has been driven by digital platforms’ corporate interests, which capitalize on user attention and engagement for profit. This means that even though social media platforms continue to make a difference, for instance in the case of the hashtag #MeToo, where they amplified women’s voices about their experiences of violence and abuse, they often do more harm than good. A sinister counterexample that makes the point is the emergence of misogynistic activisms that claim victimhood in order to legitimize violence against women. In this context, Alice Marwick and Robyn Caplan discuss the “manosphere,” a male-only community in websites such as incels.com that spreads its “misogynistic ontology by portraying feminism as a man-hating movement which victimizes men and boys” and that uses this portrayal as an excuse for attacking women. Such groups instrumentalize the communication of pain to turn women into wrong-doers who sexually manipulate their “vulnerable and innocent victims.” This online amplification of misogyny, critics argue, should be seen not only as a matter of patriarchal ideology but also as a matter of the algorithmic logic of platforms that in the pursuit of profit maximize the visibility of any claim to pain so as to monetize user attention: “The misogynist manosphere,” as Molly Dragiewicz and her colleagues’ research shows, “is significantly empowered by the ability to exploit the affordances and algorithmic characteristics of the contemporary digital media environment.”

The platformization of pain, to summarize, does not simply disseminate content but further reorganizes the communicative politics of pain in terms of how and by whom claims to pain are made, who gets the most visibility, and which online communities get legitimized and empowered or not. At the heart of this process lie the platforms’ technosocial architectures, specifically their capacity for anonymous and automated connectivity, which enables competing claims to pain to proliferate online, disconnected from their conditions of emergence—that is, both from the identity of the claimant (through anonymity) and from the context of the claim (through automation)—and so further dismantles the distinction between sufferer and perpetrator. At the same time, the platforms’ orientation toward virality—quantifying user engagement by response counts (retweets, likes) and size of communities (followers)—amplifies already popular claims to suffering without asking questions about who makes them or in which contexts of violence those claims are made. As José van Dijck puts it, “There is no quality assessment built into these [app] buttons[, so that] online quantification indiscriminately accumulates acclamation and applause and, by implication, depreciation and disapproval.”

Beyond restructuring the communication of victimhood, platformization has also expanded the realms of vulnerability within which claims to pain can be made. Digital violence, particularly in the form of online hate speech, has today extended these realms of suffering in that as hate speech goes online, it transfers already existing claims to trauma or injury onto social media platforms… [Chouliaraki, Wronged, pp. 30-33]

Jus' sayin'. Read her Sheet.

 

Scholar. Eminently so. LSE is lucky to have her.

 

More to come..

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