Subtitled: “Psychological Warfare and the American Mind”
(Norton, June 2024, xxv + 246pp, including 42pp of acknowledgements, notes, and notes.)
Here’s a book that offers a different spin on the ideas of misinformation, fake news, and narratives, than earlier books I’ve read on these subjects. The author is a journalist and science fiction novelist, with now three books each of nonfiction and fiction.
Broadly, as the subtitle says, this is about the idea of psychological warfare, of deliberately spinning the truth or telling alternative narratives for political purposes. Its techniques go way back before social media. From the perspective the modern ideas of fake news, psychological warfare isn’t about conspiracy theories; it’s about misinformation spread deliberately to sway people’s ideas and opinions. One surprising player in this history is one Paul Linebarger, who wrote science fiction under the name Cordwainer Smith mostly in the 1950s and 60s. It’s long been known that Smith worked for the US government and spent his early life in China, but I’ve never seen the extent of his work in psychological warfare spelled out as Newitz does in this book.
As a journalist Newitz travels around and interviews people to build the book’s stories. She begins — sorry, they begin — by traveling to the Hoover Institution at Stanford to go through Paul Linebarger’s personal papers. The subject goes back to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, 2500 years ago, with ideas about the fog of war, and how uncertainty and chaos could be weaponized. The US realized this in World War I, dropping leaflets to undermine German morale. After the war such techniques infiltrating advertising and popular media. Three recurring weapons: scapegoating, deception, and violent threats.
As I did with the previous review, I’ll dump my entire notes below, polish them up, then return here for a bulleted summary. … And we’re back.
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This book is about psychological warfare in the US, with examples from history, modern examples, and ways to fight back.
Psyops:
- Ch 1 is about the history of psychological warfare, beginning with Freud’s idea of unconscious biases and how those biases were exploited by advertising and in war, with a key figure in this history Paul Linebarger, famous in science fiction for his work as “Cordwainer Smith.”
- Ch 2 is how much of what we think about the American west in the 18th and 19th centuries was a result of “mythmaking” by the government, to encourage westward expansion, and pretend the natives either didn’t exist or could be converted to Christianity.
- Ch 3 is about voting and election misinformation, how tests to detect fascist tendencies were used by Steven Bannon to find Facebook users susceptible to slogans like “drain the swamp” and “make America great again.” And how Russians used the same technique to spread misinformation to try to swing elections.
Culture Wars:
- Ch 4. Such wars are generally about who’s more authentically American. Eugenics re-emerged with Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve with arguments to link IQs and economic fates, using flawed data and imaginary measures to reach the (racist) results he wanted.
- Ch 5 is about the moral panics over homosexuals since McCarthy in 1950, the FBI, Anita Bryant, et al; to the term ‘groomer’ in right-wing media, ‘don’t say gay,’ anti-trans bills, and various lawsuits to allow discrimination against gays.
- Ch 6 is about mental hygiene and the war against comics by Fredric Wertham in the 1950s, with Wonder Woman created as a defiant counter-example. Today similar battles exist over ‘wokeness’.
Disarmament:
- Ch 7 is about rediscovering real history, with the example of a tribe in Oregon once declared extinct, until a researcher found a ‘lost map’ that verified the tribe’s history.
- Ch 8 is about fighting propaganda online, with examples of ‘coordinated inauthentic behavior’, how much misinformation can be spread by just a few people, and suggestion of how to regulate social media.
- Ch 9 is about the future, using the public library as a metaphor for the public sphere, with the example of an eccentric library in San Francisco.
One book that struck me while reading about the historical example in Chapter 2 was MYTH AMERICA from about two years ago, which I skimmed and wrote about here. That book was about how stories Americans tell about themselves are simplified and idealized to the point of untruth (as I imagine the historical stories of other cultures and nations are); the book here suggests that some of those mythical stories were deliberately created.
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Full summary:
Preface: The Brain Fog of War
We’re in the middle of the war. Author recalls mid-2020 with misinformation about covid and Black Lives Matter and pizzagate. The storming of the Capitol. Musk bought Twitter and ruined it. Open AI. Roe v Wade overturned. Anti-trans ideology. Author does research and decides she has to tell a story.
Aliens and Psychic Wars
Author visits the Hoover Institution at Stanford, to study the personal papers of Paul Linebarger… (!). Who wrote fiction under a couple pen names, including a series of science fiction stories about “The Instrumentality.” And some unpublished books about ethics and war. He had taught solders how to weaponize stories. Some stories are ‘feel-good’; others are ‘feel-bad.’ Now psywar is indistinguishable from culture war. Like how police bought surplus military equipment. [[ this is what ‘defunding the police was all about ]]
Psyop vs. Psyop
Goes back at least to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, 2500 years ago. In the fog of war, uncertainty and chaos could be weaponized. The US realized this in WWI. Dropping leaflets to undermine German morale. After the war propaganda became different. But people disagree about how different.
All-American psywar
This book will explore psywar in the US. It’s aligned with advertising and popular media, and depends on three psychological weapons: scapegoating, deception, and violent threats. We’ll see various examples. The final section will detail how to decommission those weapons. Linebarger had his own ideas, xxiii.4. We need to rethink the role of stories in our lives, and how we react to stories we hear. People worry that people will imitate what they see in stories (thus concern about violence, reading about trans characters, etc.). Some of these are tales build on a shared mythical past. “Applied science fiction” pushes back against dystopian visions.
Part I: Psyops
Ch 1, The Mind Bomb, p3.
It began with Sigmund Freud and his discovery of the ‘unconscious.’ His ideas were co-opted by others. His therapy involved patients telling stories about themselves. NY advertisers used his ideas to sell products, by appealing to unconscious biases. Selling cigarettes to women. What did women want? Freedom to vote and other things. So they staged an ad campaign tying the Easter Parade to women smoking in public. Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew. He carried the idea to topple a government. Ideas about group psychology and the herd instinct. He began by popularizing bananas in the US. The government in Guatemala fought him for the profits. Bernays conducted a smear campaign against the president of Guatemala to reclaim control by United Fruit.
The Bible of Psywar
Linebarger wrote in the late 1940s. staying behind the scenes. A book called Psychological Warfare. It came to be applied in Vietnam. The Bomb was a veiled threat, overshadowing the proxy wars. The US spread leaflets while the Japanese government pondered surrender. Linebarger’s SF gave the impression he was a time traveler from the future…
Portrait of the Psywarrior as a Young Nerd
Born 1913. …Journals. He loved to travel between worlds as an observer. ERB. Pseudonyms, acclaim as Cordwainer Smith. He came to idealize propaganda as an “affirmation of human community.”
“I Must Cranch”
He had various ideas for psyops, or dirty tricks. He liked the idea of worldbuilding in SF; it was analogous to propaganda. Other SF writers worked in intelligence: Sheldon/Tiptree, Niven, Campbell. Ruthanna Emrys. They wrote about the process of making psyops. Example of “Scanners Live in Vain” (that involved a process called “cranching”). Oysters. Other stories.
Fascist Influencers of the Radio Age, p20
Linebarger focused on radio. Fake broadcasts were possible there, just as through modern platforms. Influencers. William Joyce, who parodied the snooty Englishman. Lord Haw-Haw. Linebarger saw how propaganda is nearly always built on truth. Voice of America was like cranching. … it was hard to tell whether a psyop had worked. The Bomb affected Linebarger’s fiction. “Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons.” Author spoke to Linebarger’s daughter.
The Brainwashed Generation, p27
Rumors were the communists had more powerful mind-control methods than the US. Brainwashing. The idea caught fire in the 1950s, via a guy writing a book about it. Later books followed. The idea took on a broader meaning. (It was like being ‘woke’ today.) The idea carried over into advertising; The Hidden Persuaders. Movies (Invasion of the Body Snatchers; The Manchurian Candidate). Philip K. Dick, including A Scanner Darkly. Hubbard’s Dianetics offered a cure by clearing ‘engrams.’ The CIA dabbled in it too. Funding for Skinner and Mead. Americans were never sure what to believe. Marshall McLuhan.
Ch2, A Fake Frontier, p35
The Art of War. We need to look further back, to the 19th century Indian Wars, a period of “violent mythmaking.” Benjamin Franklin created a fake newspaper, filled with articles he wrote, about the supposed injuries suffered by Americans under the British occupation. Both sides aligned with various Indian tribes. One story in particular went ‘viral’ and soured relations between US settlers and the Seneca. An example of demonizing the enemy. It became the myth of the vanishing Indian. Example: The Last of the Mohicans. Despite the fact that the Mohicans and others did survive.
Inventing the Wild West, p39. The wild frontier was a legal fiction. Forts were built. Militia were mustered. Rather similar to the US occupation of Afghanistan. The wave was the ‘removal’ of the Five Civilized Tribes along the Trail of Tears, beginning 1830, shipping them to Oklahoma. De Tocqueville witnessed it. Despite everything, the tribes survived. And somehow the government convinced people in the east that the Western frontier was empty.
Yet Another “Last Indian” Story, p44. Jean O’Brien, historian at U of Minnesota, researched various contradictory “last” stories, in various local histories. Indians who became Christian, or citizens, somehow didn’t count anymore. Flawed logic; Indians couldn’t be modern. The idea Indians were fading away appealed to both conservative and liberal voters, for different reasons. People came to believe in the stories.
The Original Brainwashing Program, p49. Other psyops were aimed at the Indigenous people themselves, to force US culture on them. Beginning 1848 was the “manifest destiny” period of the Indian Wars. In parallel with the abolitionist movement. It was understood in the west that the Indians could be exterminated, while in the east sympathetic movements sprung up—to convert them instead to Christianity. To assimilate. The Lake Mohonk conferences promoted these policies, thinking themselves enlightened. Separating children from parents. Into schools full of violence and abuse. Brainwashing machines.
Ghost Dance Moral Panic, p53. Meanwhile indigenous nations in the west hoped the white settlers would disappear, as expressed in their Ghost Dance, in the 1880s, to bring a new world into being. Soon taken up by multiple tribes. These dances triggered moral panic among white settlers and the US military. Signs of imminent attack? The military set out to arrest Sitting Bull and killed him, an incident blamed on the Ghost Dance. 1890. Then Wounded Knee, where the army murdered hundreds, and considered it just another battle in the Indian Wars.
Sitting Bull, Wild West Superstar, p57. Wild West shows were live-action reenactments of the Indian Wars. Sitting Bull became a global celebrity, thanks to William “Buffalo Bill” Cody. Sitting Bull had toured with him. After the massacre the government confined the Lakota to reservations. …how a Ghost Dance shirt made its way to a museum in Scotland. … By the early 20th century the Indian Wars were understood as part of “manifest destiny.”
The First White Replacement Theory, p61. The term originated in a right-wing paper in 1845, concerning the annexation of Texas. It became part of the culture, through Whiteman and Turner, p63. Indian villages became cities. The Europeans would replace the Indigenous people. The “frontier thesis” idea became popular. Not everyone bought in to it. Novelist Helen Hunt Jackson wrote a novel called Ramona to dramatize her opposition to the treatment of the Indigenous people. But Turner’s vision prevailed, and shaped how we remember the 19th century.
Ch3, Advertisements for Disenfranchisement, p67
About voting, and election misinformation. Social media election psyops go back to 1943 and an F-Scale Test at UC Berkeley, to measure a person’s likelihood of becoming a fascist. And they did find that some people are inclined to follow strongman leaders. P68b. People who were cynical, who hated everyone unlike themselves, who mistrusted science. And people don’t realize it, but remain in the unconscious. Just as in advertising, politicians could appeal to buried biases. You can’t argue people out of their feelings. What then? Education? A similar test 60 years later in order to *help* authoritarian politicians target people. In the 2014 and 2016 elections. Steve Bannon was a prominent player, and a firm called Cambridge Analytica (CA). Psychological warfare ensued. One target was white people who felt oppressed by political correctness. They used behavior on social media to find targets, using the five big personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism), 72t, and hosted a test on Facebook, which enabled them to harvest data from some 87 million accounts. Bannon wanted to find people exhibiting the “dark triad” of antisocial traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychoapthy. 73t. (71.7: to dismantle the government and support big business.) And to feed them slogans like “drain the swamp” and “make America great again.” Bannon searched for latent racial bias. Bannon sicced CA on Trump’s 2016 campaign. And succeeded.
The New Rules of Psyop, p75. Author took an Army course in PSYOP. Its policy was not to use PSYOP on US citizens. But Russia uses it on the US: flooding social media with misinformation. So nobody knows what’s true. No one trusts anybody. The CA operation is similar; it erodes consensus on basic truths. Tactics borrowed from advertising. PSYOP is now called MISO, with textbooks and worksheets, to target various foreign audiences.
“I’m Going to Be Angry for the Rest of My Life” p79. About a book by a soldier in Iraq and the troubles they faced deploying PSYOP. …Loudspeakers at night. How if the US doesn’t follow through with promises, the population feels betrayed. The US military bureaucracy can’t keep up. Whereas Bannon and his team worked much more quickly, and on target. Including ads to discourage blacks from voting.
When Americans Target Americans, p83. CA had an ally. Americans are primed by ads all their lives, and so vulnerable to propaganda. A Russian psyops operation hacked DNC emails, created fake Facebook accounts, and spread disinformation. Neither the FBI nor Facebook cared. One story created confusion about Bernie Sanders. Another inspired PIzzagate. Then came Q, and QAnon. FB eventually published a report about foreign operations and how they worked. FB wouldn’t admit the full story. …
Black Ops Marketing Campaign, p88. Since the 2016 election it’s been shown how target ads affected Americans’ behavior. Examples. Racist ads about immigrants. Overseas operatives disguise themselves as concerned ‘elites.’ It’s all gotten worse since 2016. Right-wing activists now use the Russian tactics. The appeal to “an incredibly strong, primitive emotion” 91.3. One result was the riot on Jan 6, 2021. Facebook became Meta and launched Threads, but still allowed RFK Jr to spread misinformation about vaccines. And Twitter became X. and so on.
It’s Just a Joke, Man, p93. We’re in an age of ‘stochastic terrorism’. It’s chaotic, unpredictable. It allows for plausible deniability; it’s just a joke. Which goes back to the Nazis too. Right-wing social mobs turned media franchises into attacks on anyone who disagrees with conservative takes. It’s very good at storytelling. And this takes us to… the culture wars. But we can learn from history what kind of weapons they use.
Part II: Culture Wars
Ch4: Bad Brains, p99
In culture wars, both sides are Americans. Often arguing about who’s truly American. Specific groups are framed as being “other” or foreign. The goals are not change of behavior, but to convince some Americans that others are an enemy, and to convince the enemy that there’s something wrong with them. That is there are two groups: those with good brains and those with bad ones. Example about brains of black people. Francis Galton popularized eugenics in 1869. Thus Jim Crow laws were a psyops. Brown v. Board of Education was significant. But debate against affirmation action reignited in the 1990s. And a science fiction story was part of it too.
Eugenics Rebooted, p102. Charles Murray’s THE BELL CURVE. He was a right-wing culture hero who opposed the civil rights movement. His book had lots of data, his thesis that intelligence determines economic fate. And that blacks had lower IQs. Welfare and affirmative action were counter-productive, making it easier for the dull to survive and breed. It was criticized by experts, but popular with the public. The book told white people what they wanted to believe. But correlation is not causation.
The Seductions of False Rationality, p106. One problem is there is an agreed-upon way to measure intelligence; another is that welfare leads to bad ends. (I.e., neither are true.) Social scientists take a dim view of IQ scores. They began in the early 1900s. Black educators fought against them; IQ correlated with economic status, location, education. The book didn’t have scores for the people they talked about anyway. As they admitted in an appendix. They drew data from a journal founded by segregationists. Eugenics justified colonialism and American exceptionalism. It went out of fashion after the Holocaust, but is being revived today by Tucker Carlson and others. If you disagree, it’s because you’re stupid or irrational.
Racist Futurism, p110. Furthermore, their data showed that blacks and whites with similar IQs had closer economic outcomes, but whites still came out ahead. So they invented a measure called Middle Class Values Index to demonstrate that blacks had, in effect, bad souls. Then they speculated on the future, in which rich and poor evolve into separate species, p112. Whites and blacks respectively of course. The government has to take care of the mindless underclass. Then they put forth various policy recommendations to prevent this fantasy.
“White Supremacy is a Psyop”, p114. Reaction from Ishmael Reed. Propagandists underestimate the reactions from their targets. Communists made the same mistake dealing with black prisoners. But the Bell Curve didn’t go away. Murray published a sequel, Human Diversity. Now we have immigration bans. An example of storytelling is N.K. Jemisin, who battled with Vox Day on Twitter. He called her an ignorant savage. She later wrote the Broken Earth trilogy. Novels that were counter-psyops.
Ch5, School Rules, p121
Some psychological war occurs locally, without limelight, as with anti-LGBT moral panic. This goes back to the Cold War, when gays and lesbians were demonized as immoral enemies of the state. Example of an advisor to FDR. It was claimed being homosexual made one a target for blackmail. 1950 saw Joseph McCarthy and the Lavender Scare. Eisenhower signed an order making them national security risks.
The Rainbow Sticker Purge, p124. Years later in 2012 a teacher in Irving, Texas, where someone went through the school scratching off rainbow stickers. Then the stickers were banned, unilaterally by the principal. When the teacher protested, she was put on leave. The conflict escalated. Students walked out. …
The FBI’s Homosexual Era, p130. It played into the myth of the groomer. Hoover had found need to put homosexuals under surveillance, as if LGBT people were pedophiles. Later came Anita Bryant in the 1970s. And John Briggs in California. In the 2010s QAnon revived the term groomer, and it spread in right-wing media. DeSantis and don’t say gay. Then anti-trans bills. Then the Bud Light boycott.
No Gays Allowed, p133. Then schools wouldn’t allow teachers to even mention certain topics. And the case of the Colorado designers who felt forced to do business with gay couples. They won the right to refuse service to gay customers.
An Educational Hot Spot, p136. The same school dealt with an incident of a Muslim student’s home-made clock. Elsewhere we have “parents’ rights” activities lobbying schools to remove LGBT books. In contrast to how indigenous students were taken away from their parents. Now, educators who fight back receive death threats, suicide rates among students go up….
Ch6, Dirty Comics, p141
William Moulton Marston, who wanted the world to respect women, created Wonder Woman. He invited a lie-detector test, and wrote a book saying that most sexual desires were perfectly normal. He was in a polyamorous relationship with three women. But his reputation got him dismissed from academia. He worked at Universal Studios, giving advice about what people wanted in movies, and promoted his beliefs that way. He predicted that women will eventually rule. He did so in creating Wonder Woman. She used a lasso of truth, and her villain ran an ad firm. But her greatest enemies were psychologists warning that comics filled kinds’ minds with filth.
Keep Your Brains Clean, Kids, p144. After the war mental hygiene was promoted as the antidote to brainwashing. Educational films went into classrooms. Tools to shape behavior. Pop culture was a war between hygiene and dirty minds. Fredric Wertham, in The Seduction of the Innocent in 1954, blamed everything on comic books. Codes of conduct were published. Good must triumph over evil. Comics threatened democracy. Earlier, he’d argued that mentally ill people shouldn’t be held responsible for their crimes. He disapproved of Wonder Woman as the opposite of what girls are supposed to want to be. He found Marston’s vision perverse. Anyone who disagreed with him was mentally unfit. But the character survived. Later evidence turned up that Wertham had fudged much of his data, 148b. He omitted key information to make his point, etc. Attributed one case to two others. Used second-hand reports.
“I thought Wonder Woman was Puerto Rican”, p151. One fan noticed that most girl heroes get killed or maimed, eventually. A “women in refrigerators” meme ensued. Author interviews an editor at Marvel. She and her writers update the story of Nubia. A new backstory. (And they all have to have superpowers.)
Culture Bomb, p155. Everyone thinks Wonder Woman offers lessons about womanhood, but they all reach different conclusions. These debates have spilled over into women’s rights, and her reputation shifted over the decades. She became a ‘culture bomb’ to change people’s minds. The mental hygiene wars have been recast as battles over ‘wokeness.’ With attacks even on actors. Fans attacked Star Wars movies for not being all white. As if they’re not ‘historically accurate.’ And they attacked Barbie. If there is wartime propaganda and peacetime propaganda, Wonder Woman is the latter. Lately the term ‘gaslighting’ has become popular. We’re in an era of gaslighting now… we have tools to recover.
Part III: Disarmament
Ch7, History is a Gift, p163
We need to take the harm from psychological war seriously. How do we rebuild? The UN teaches: disarm, demobilize, and reintegrate, DDR. We’ve seen examples in the past. In this case we need to change the stories we tell to undermine the weaponized stories. Psychological peace entails high national morale. Including freedom of movement across borders. (according to Linebarger). Fund social programs and tear down border walls. And rebuild history to reflect everyone. [[ whereas conservatives want to impose their own history that reflects only themselves. E.g. their Christian forebears. ]]
Remapping the Past, p165. Example of the Coquille tribe in southwestern Oregon, a tribe once declared extinct by the US government. Story of Jason Younker, recovering his past. “They lost the map” of locations they were allotted.
Jason Younker Goes to Washington, p168. He went to DC to research, and they found the ‘lost map.’
A Copy Better than the Original, p170. Author drove from SF to see the map, and the landscape. To the university in Eugene. Early research presumed culture like the white culture, and so missed a lot of things. The archive as called SWORP.
Potlatch Futurism, p173. The archive also had documents from the 1990s, and Younker and others held a potlatch to distribute them. These serve as a basis for building accurate history. And a kind of insurance against getting ‘canceled’ against. A defense against psyops.
Ch8, Deprogramming for Democracy, p177
Online is more difficult. You need to prepare in advance.
Propaganda Disaster Prepping, p178. Author recalls a two-stage psyop concerning Black Lives Matter, in 2020. First tweets with similar wording; then a round of tweets claiming the government was suppressing cell phone access to prevent spreading the truth. But of course there was no DC blackout. Then more tweets denying the blackout was happening. But these tweets were so obviously fake made it look like something really was going on. You couldn’t object or you’d look like you’re part of it. Very meta. “Coordinated inauthentic behavior.” Researchers later developed tools to detect such schemes. Feeding such tools new data every month leads to “prebunking.” But it will be an arms race.
An Election Without Hockey Sticks, p181. Back to Alex Stamos who once worked for Facebook. He later explained why he left, as he promised he would. He then founded the Stanford Internet Observatory. It tracked the 2020 election, along with a group called Election Integrity Partnership (EIP). And concluded that online influence campaigns were behind the 2021 insurrection. Mostly American ones. Priming voters to believe the election would be stolen, and so to see conspiracies everywhere. SharpieGate (about using Sharpies to vote with). Spread by ordinary people. All from 20 accounts on Twitter. Superspreaders. To kill the chain involves shutting down fake pages, and so on. Collecting data works like a democracy, analyzing incidents and deciding what to do about them. Yet platforms resist steps to stop the spread of such disinformation. The government has to work with social media. And AI could potentially make everything worse.
Slow Media, p188. Perhaps regulate social media the way smoking is regulated. Slow down circulation of content. Things that don’t post immediately. Mastadon is an example, compared to Twitter. Details. There’s a transformation away from large platforms to smaller ones. Some by invite only. …
Building a Better World, One Story at a Time, p191. Ruth Emrys Gordon, A Half-Built Garden. Her novels imagines ‘dandelion networks’, something better than the modern internet. Her work as a cognitive scientist is like an extension of Linebarger’s. She and some other authors write what can be called ‘applied science fiction.’ Malka Older is another. Peter Singer, with coauthor August Cole. Quartz magazine. Naseem Jamnia. Karen Lord. Still, Gordon says that some ideas should be ‘disallowed’ in the public square, 195t. Like disputes about who a person is. Rather, closer communities.
Ch9, Public Spheres of the Future, p197
Author realized that the public library is a perfect metaphor for a rejuvenated public sphere. With the example of Prelinger Library in San Francisco.
Sometimes You Need to Hide, p198. About the library, that opened in 2004. Prelinger is the author of a book about science and propaganda. The library is composed of stuff that other libraries consider unimportant, or discarded. Its own organization scheme. Younger visitors have never seen such roomfuls of books. Libraries are organized, unlike the internet. The default is silence.
Just Plain Information, p202. What would stories look like after psychological disarmament? Well, there will always be propaganda. But it can be good. Like a PSA. But we don’t need new kinds of stories to end this war. Trusting one another, acknowledging the right to be alive. We need to celebrate our commonalities, and remember our shared past.
