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Weaponized Narrative: The Fog of Mental Warfare

Rung in the new year with an extended respiratory infection, like so many others. Even newscasters on TV are hacking up a lung. It still feels surreal, what is happening in the world. I get the unsettling sense that we are heralding in a new epoch, one of strongmen ruling, stealing elections with subterfuge, hypnotic mass messaging, and intimidation. With the changing of the guard still to take place in the upcoming presidential inauguration, it feels like we have been walking around in a daze since the national vote, here in the liberal bastions I call my homes. We are not yet fully understanding of what took place, how our march toward a paradise of diversity, equality, freedom and sustainability got so shook up. It seems obvious to me now that our pervasive technology, with its screen-based web of reality we all share, has been hijacked for the purposes of this coup. Weaponized narrative is what the military calls a threat like this – it “seeks to undermine an opponent’s civilization, identity, and will by generating complexity, confusion, and political and social schisms.” We are in the midst of this confusion, as if a mental cloud of smoke had descended upon us. More than a few people have noted that it feels like war time, and I am reminded of the phrase the “fog of war.”

I have had to restrict my intake of political news and social networking, as the mass hysteria has been bubbling and brewing all around me. I am not one to stick my head in the sand, but balance during this time of uncertainty can only help. Staying vigilant, keeping track of the wrongs, fighting for what is right – yes to all of this. But not simply assuming the worst and thereby creating an open invitation to trample on our hard-won freedoms. Granted, it is scary, the feeling in the air. But we must not hasten a new dark age by fomenting our fear of it.

In some ways, it feels like we are simply entering the heartless but logical culmination to the particular trajectory we have been on as a species, involving unsustainable capitalist growth, religious and scientific patriarchy, and the loss of our deep connection with nature. As a person in my 40s, my life span is likely just long enough to watch these old structures peter out, though perhaps not so long that I will get to see what new system replaces it. Instead, I imagine that I will be witness to the fervent actions of a dying breed of hegemons: the petro-oligarchs, church fathers, and other dichotomy-loving dinosaurs who fear their own mortality most of all. We thought they would go gentle into the good night. Alas, they are most certainly raging against the dying of their light.

I must admit, before the election, I was a bit checked out from popular culture. Happy in my own private world of creativity, supporting others in their personal growth, and celebrating all the little victories and sweetness to be found in day to day living here in San Francisco. And yet, after the brutal blow of Trump’s rise to power, I found myself trying to make sense of things by reading more articles online. Not political pieces, mind you, but articles about popular TV shows that I had started binge-watching in my effort to temporarily escape the doom and gloom of real life. One thing that shocked me was the quality of entertainment-related writing. I don’t just mean editing errors like misspellings. More like lazily put together arguments, a lot of shorthand speak, non-sequiturs, and hanging sentences. It may be the case that in the future, historians will consider the incessant demand to pump out arbitrary content to have been a key factor in the degradation of public discourse in this era. It is literally quantity over quality. Indeed, technology in its current form does seem to be furthering us towards an idiocracy. At least my survey of the wasteland out there motivated me to start blogging again.

Part of the feeling of confusion and desperation that I am feeling revolves around a desire to hold onto the outrage, to not forget the standards we have been held to bear until this point and thus slip into amnesiac complacency. There is a generational aspect to this as well. A sense that people of my age will remember and defiantly speak of the good old days, when honor, ethics and truth meant something. Aha, that is what the elders were ranting about, eh? Dismissed as grumpy old men and women, waxing nostalgic in their senility for bygone days. For we only knew the framework we were born into, not what we missed from the times which preceded it. How the very assumptions on which we operate can shift across human society in a wave of change that leaves little memory of what came before. Now we know better.

Though I am not young enough to call myself a digital native, my family were early adopters of tech. Working class but intellectual, we were the first of anyone I knew to have an Atari 2600 game system when I was a kid in the '80s. My older brother enjoyed programming with cassette tapes, innocuous hacks into the phone companies, and going to BBS socials. My siblings and I, we all read comic books and science fiction, played dungeons & dragons, and endured being called weirdos and geeks at school, mocked for our big words and bookish ways. Then revenge of the nerds became a reality, and all the things we were made fun of began to be cool. Except it still remained a boys club, from the virtual erasure of my favorite Marvel heroines in the contemporary film versions to the “bro-ing” of start-ups, to the toxic misogyny within the gaming community. I used to love reading William Gibson in the ‘80s, imagining the harsh yet sleek future he envisioned. Well, here we are. The future is now, ready or not. Much that was science fiction has transformed into science fact. And those adorably renegade cyberpunk dystopias with their slick depictions of body modifications and visceral virtual realities pretty much describe the present: corporate governance by one-percenter billionaires, extreme political, cultural and financial polarization, erosion of basic freedoms, psychological warfare and doublespeak, and tech-opiated masses. I had been asking myself how the hell did we end up here? The new question that is starting to nag at me is how do we successfully shift within this new paradigm? As progressives, as people who believe that hope ultimately triumphs over hatred and fear, may we find a way...