TS: You put it really well. History doesn't repeat, of course, but history does offer you a reservoir of things that were possible. It gives you a sense of patterns, of what things tend to go together and what things don't go together. It also offers a source of examples for people who want things to go in a certain way, which I consider undesirable. There's been a certain renaissance of thinkers from the 1920s, 1930s, and '40s in America, also in Europe, and maybe especially in Russia, and this is part of the politics of eternity that you go back to the '30s and you say, "Well, the '30s weren't so bad after all. Let's revive this fascist, or that fascist. Let's imagine we can go back to there and that things will turn out well."
What I think is that we've reached the turning point where basically none of us, I hope, are convinced anymore by these automatic ideas of progress. But many of us are already convinced that we're stuck in some kind of a loop and there's no way out of the loop. That has something to do with the past. Fascist ideas and other far right ideas are being revived. White supremacy is more important unfortunately in America than it was until very recently. But, there's also something new about it, which are the techniques, the internet techniques, the various psychological techniques of persuading us that there's nothing that we can really do besides leaving the couch.
The other thing that is new is the kind of lack of a final goal. In the 20th century, there were big ideas about where you might take the nation, or where you might take the class. Those don't exist anymore. What's going on now is more of an attempt to just kind of beat out of your head any notion that things might get better, and to get you on a different track where instead of thinking that other things might be better for all of us, we just get used to imagining every day, every minute, every second, that there's somebody on the other side who's trying to make things worse.
SR: This is really interesting. I've recently interviewed people running for office. There's a new line, which is, "I can't fix this, but together we can, so elect me and we will all do our part." That's kind of appealing in a certain way, but it acknowledges that downward spiral. I've also talked to publishers who say, "I don't even know what's real anymore." They look at tips and wonder who got this information in the first place. Both feel like there's no solid ground.
TS: But there is though. One of the methods that I follow in Road to Unfreedom, in the new book, is that I paid a huge amount of attention to investigative journalists. I write about things which are very confused at the time, and are still pretty confusing like the Maidan [protests] in Ukraine, or like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, things which were just propaganda drenched, things which were kind of testing grounds for the new unreality in the new forms of cyber war that we now deal with all the time. It turns out that if you just pay attention to the actual investigative reporters who actually wear out the soles of their shoes and go places and talk to people, you can kind of figure out what's going on if you pay attention to them.
It's a tiny percentage of the bandwidth of what's out there in the so-called media. It's a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage, but for a lot of these events it's really enough. These are important examples to me. Like what happened in Russia in 2012 with their election, what happened to the Ukraine in '13 and '14. These are all really important to me. They take something that concerns all of us, economic inequality, we know about economic inequality because of the reporters. Those who broke the story of Panama papers [international money laundering by financial and political elites], who broke the story of the Paradise papers [more overseas financial shelters]. We have the numbers and we have the examples from people who are actually doing this work.
SR: As you've said before, in an era deluged with fake news, real reporting matters.
TS: We can start from them, and the more investigation we have, the better we feel. In terms of our own habits, we do make choices about how we consume the internet. But what I did in Road to Unfreedom was I paid a lot of attention to human investigators, and then I treated the Internet very critically. I treated the internet as kind of a subject rather than a source. I tried to figure out the patterns of how it's used to influence people. There are things that we can do, but I agree with your basic concern. Without factuality, we're not going anywhere. Without factuality, we can't speak to each other, let alone begin to solve problems.
SR: I've been to forums at Stanford with top people at Google, Facebook and other platforms. Google says, "You are saying the problem is there's too much information and people are making too many decisions? Isn't that an outbreak in democracy and independent thinking?" They say they're giving journalism tools so their reports can be seen as more authoritative. Facebook does this too. That helps their brands because it elevates their content. Meanwhile, the way these sites are designed to trigger reactions, for advertisers, including politicians, hasn't changed. People are going to social media for news more than ever and it's impulsive. It's almost as if human nature wants to react before it thinks. And that's the propaganda model that's been used. Am I saying it correctly?
TS: I think you're seeing it completely correctly. Look, fundamentally what we have to see with the internet is that it's a kind of space just like the real world is a space. We've known the real world is a space for millions of years. We've been kind of thinking about how you reconcile the real world space with democracy, or rule by the people, or law for at least 5,000 years. Maybe we've gotten a little bit better at it, but it's always hard. The internet survives because the internet is treated as a place of exception. It's this magical place where the normal rules don't apply, and you don't have to pay taxes, and yada, yada. Anything's possible.
But that's all nonsense. It's just another space. Like the space that we live in when we're not on the Internet, it has to have some rules. Those rules can't just be like the things which are at the top of the mind of the people who happen to be the CEOs of these companies. We all have to think about this seriously, and think about what the rules are going to be, and think about how we're contributing to those rules. Secondly, I agree with you about the psychology. One of the things which has gone wrong is that we're not defeating the robots. The robots are defeating us.
SR: That's a critical point.
TS: The robots have figured it out. The way that all of this stuff works from Facebook, from Cambridge Analytica, to the Russian interventions, is that rather than us using computers to think, computers are using our nervous systems to move us around. The computers are getting around our frontal lobes where we make decisions, and down to the simpler more business like parts of our brains where we feel, where we have impulses, where we decide who's us and who's them. That's what's happened, this combination of psychology and machine learning. That's what's pushing us around.
When people in Silicon Valley use the kind of language of rationality and choice, and say, "Oh, we're just giving you more choices," they know that's not what they're doing. They're actually teaching us how not to choose... A choice is something that you consider. You use a certain part of your mind for that. It's not the same thing as, "I like this. I like this. I like this. There's the enemy, I don't like him." That's something that's a different part of our minds. There has to be a more humanistic conversation about this. For my part, I've been trying to have it with some of them.
SR: Right, right. The reason I asked about this is because you go into great detail about how the internet fueled misinformation and disinformation in Ukraine, Russia and in 2016's campaign. In many respects, people who throw the first punches in politics always gain an advantage. Then those left reeling end up copying the tactics just used against them. I'm not sure the technology sector really understands what they have unleashed. What bigger patterns do you see?
TS: Yeah. Well, one of the patterns I see is the relationship between wealth inequality and communication. The further you let wealth inequality go, the harder it is to communicate because the people who have all the money just don't live the same kinds of lives the people who don't. That's actually one element that the Silicon Valley and rest of us communication problem. It's kind of hard to get through to them because they're not really living the same kinds of lives as everyone else is. They may have this kind of notion that everyone can make it [financially] the way they did, but that's just not going to happen.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
