:blink::unsure::wacko:
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Hi Elen,
but that's old news!? :)
QAnon and the Emergence of the Unreal
by Ethan Zuckerman
Ethan Zuckerman delves into how the conspiracist community surrounding QAnon represents a hazardous new form of participatory civics and digital storytelling.
We have a tendency to assume, especially in academic communities, that the acceptance of unrealities, whether they are those of vaccine skeptics or climate change deniers, are the consequence of poor education or emergent technologies. Robert Proctor and Iain Boal coined the term “agnotology” to refer to the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt in order to distinguish ignorance that is consciously created from that which occurs naturally. (I am grateful to danah boyd for introducing me to Proctor’s book with Londa Schiebinger on the topic, which introduced me to the term.) Those who benefit from the stasis caused by imposed doubt are those who are already in positions of power. Those who suffer the most are those who have been excluded from power. In that sense, unreality and the doubt it generates is an inherently conservative force.
What’s worse, perhaps, is that many of our responses to the doubt brought about by emergent unreality have been reactionary. In much of the discussion of mis- and disinformation is the thinly disguised desire to return to a world where there’s a single authoritative voice, a Walter Cronkite to tell us “That’s the way it is.” There is an understandable temptation to hand more power over control of speech to platforms like Facebook in the hopes that they’ll somehow return us to a mutually shared reality. This is an unlikely scenario given their role in allowing these splits to emerge. The alternative, asking governments to regulate and control speech in online spaces, seems equally unwise.
Before we hand control of speech to Facebook or to Congress to free us from the complications of the Unreal, we would benefit from mapping this space more comprehensively. The goal of this issue of the Journal of Design and Science is not to conclusively define the Unreal, but to explore some of its dimensions. The nature of the beast is such that a singular view of the Unreal would always be incomplete, so we should expect these visions to challenge and conflict with one another as much as they mutually reinforce.
Given antecedents in agnotology within the Russian media space, we invited Peter Pomerantsev, a celebrated writer on contemporary Russia, to explore the idea of unreality as a mirror of a society facing a post-ideological world. Pomerantsev argues that understanding the purpose of disinformation is like trying to understand the purpose of art. Propaganda, like art, simply exists. It’s just a reflection of the time.
Masha Gessen, professor at Amherst College, author of The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, and contributor to The New Yorker, has challenged overly simplistic narratives of Putin as a singular architect of Russian media interventions. In conversation, she and I explore the idea that the unreal can still be corrosive to democracy even if there’s no grand plan behind the complex and conflicting forces that lead to Russian strategies in the information space.
Dr. Gregory Asmolov, a scholar of the Russian internet and early career fellow at King’s College London’s Russia Institute, argues that the participatory affordances of digital networks offer novel opportunities for political manipulation. Relying on his research on the use of social networks in Russia and Ukraine, he explores the idea that manipulations of social media seek to divide friends, breaking alliances and leaving individuals isolated, online and offline.
Dr. Joan Donovan, Director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, is one of the nation’s leading scholars on online disinformation. As someone who has watched the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Bureau very closely, her essay with colleague Brian Friedberg, examines the power of psuedonymous identities that adopt the persona of oppressed people to capture their voices and power.
Julia Ebner, an Austrian scholar and researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, whose book The Rage is a leading resource on Islamist and far-right extremists in Europe, uses her knowledge of Neo-Nazi organizing online to give us a tour of alternative infrastructure to support speech that quotidian platforms have rejected.
Unreality can also be routine, as Nina Lutz, an MIT Media Lab researcher on computational geometry and computer graphics explores in an essay that examines how makeup can be used to completely transform identity, and how these transformations impact our understanding of real and fake.
Dr. Judith Donath, former MIT Media Lab professor and alumna, researcher at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, author of The Social Machine, expands on her current research on signalling theory to explore the idea of the “deep fake” and to examine our relationship with video as an arbiter of truth, arguing that we must move from understanding video as reality to video as testimony.
Pursuing other spaces where the Unreal pokes into our everyday life, entrepreneur, game designer and former MIT Media Lab professor Kevin Slavin looks at how alternative reality games, a space first explored in the late 1990s and early 2000s, may have prefigured some of the fractures in reality we are encountering today.
And finally, Benjamen Walker, whose Theory of Everything podcast has long been one of the most prescient and provocative explorations of internet culture, reflects on a recently completed series, “False Alarm,” that explored the blurry lines between fact and fiction. What happens to a media maker whose practice skates across reality’s boundaries when the shifting of those boundaries becomes a moment of crisis for society at large?
We will be releasing these essays—and hopefully others—in pairs over the summer of 2019 and encouraging readers to react to them online, inviting other scholars in the field to comment specifically, but also taking advantage of this digital platform’s affordances to solicit reactions both to our work and to other voices who should be included in the project.
Keeping firmly in mind the idea that progress is possible through this sort of plurality, I want to return to the question that frequently circulates in the QAnon community: Who is Q?
Is Q a dissident intelligent agent in the President’s inner circle? A team of agents? Or perhaps President Trump himself? Is he (or she or they) a profit-making operation put together by opportunistic 4Chan trolls? A giant prank that has grown wildly out of control? A real-life role play, or LARP, as some QAnons like to describe it? Is Q a Psyops effort, designed to keep up the spirit of Trump’s most ardent supporters as the President struggles to drain the swamp as he promised them he would do? Is Q an international disinformation operation designed to further pull apart the left and the right much as the Internet Research Agency sought to pull apart Black Lives Matter or the LGBTQ community?
The answer: Q is all of this and more. All of this for the simple reason that somewhere, someone believes this interpretation of Q, and is working to impose that reality on the rest of us. This war between realities is the landscape we find ourselves collectively navigating. It is our task to understand how we act as individuals and citizens in a world where the emergent mode of discourse is not to persuade someone of your interpretation of the facts, but to recruit them to your own reality. Our ultimate challenge is not only to navigate this space but, at best, to heal and transform it.
Starting with Climate warming and Vaccine lol just shot themselves lol.
Climate warming is a real discussion. The question of our contribution is a matter of debate. The subject is plenty real.
Indeed. And so taking sides and drawing lines won't help us.Quote:
Our ultimate challenge is not only to navigate this space but, at best, to heal and transform it.
I'm aware of those who are out for blood, I've posted their words here many times. I'm not sure how to heal bloodlust, but I'm willing to try to find a way.
Ironically, we've just tightened contact with a couple who are friends. Their name is Blood.
True Aianawa, I don't think the article was intended for Agnotologists, it was for those that would look for a way to recreate a consensus reality defined by just that...mutual agreement.
I noticed no one here is discussing the fact that our President was censured by Congress. This hasn't happened in a century.
Mainstream or Alternate, that's big news. Huge. Big League.
But folks will still go on about Clinton or Obama like pavlov dogs.
It's embarrassing.
My mother is rolling over in her grave.
I think we all suffer from Trump information overload.
It seems his tactic is to do so many deplorable things in a day that people just stop caring and don't even notice any more. He has done a hundred things that would be historic lows for any other president, but we've actually gotten used to his deplorableness by now...
While this is indeed true IMO, with Captain Chaos hitting all time lows, and easily the most despicable public figure I've ever personally witnessed, I still see an underling problem here that I only see being addressed by a still relatively fringe aspect of the Left. Same with the small fringe Libertarian Right.
Just because Trump is taking the rhetoric to all time historic lows for this country, by modern standards anyway, doesn't mean what these guys are actually doing policy wise is necessarily all that much deviated from previous administrations.
For instance the golden boy Barack Obama was Deporter in Chief before Trump assumed that crown, but I don't recall any moral outcries and pictures from detention centers because he was so damn well spoken, polite, and downright likeable. Same with the going after of whistle blowers, the drone strikes, the sanctions, the wars, the false flags, etc., that callous empire shit has been going on for a long long time. Things do seem to be coming to a head now, there's definitely trouble in paradise, but that's because the table was already perfectly set for him to maybe get people goose stepping in the first damn place.
America needs a long, sad, gut wrenching look in the mirror before ANY of this shit has any substantive change, but I'm afraid the "Manufactured Consent" as Uncle Noam put it is already like the train done left the station. It's too late. We Americans are by nature a good and kind hearted people, we just know not, or care not, what's being done in our name.
We know not what we do...
Ain't that true, Fred.
Emperor's change and yet they still wear the same suit and every emperor has blood in their hands, be they clowns made out of Cheetos dust or golden chocolate boys. That is the nature of an empire. Very few leaders would or even could rise above that. Where do we have Marcus Aurelius when we need the likes of him? Oh well...
https://www.azquotes.com/picture-quo...-82-1-0120.jpg
Trump’s immigration policies are different and new as was argued in court by Jeff Sessions and by Trump in the public arena.
Obama’s never separated families in this manner nor did he keep the immigrants in remotely similar conditions.
And if he had the outrage would have been enormous.
Let’s not pretend a bruise is in the same league as a gunshot wound.
The false parallels are just as damaging.
Still, I think Fred has a point, Sister. The methods used by the left may be different from those used by the right, but in the end, the policy remains the same. And that's because he who controls the left also controls the right.
People have to wake up from that foolish belief that it makes one iota of difference what team you're on. But sadly enough, too many people are feeling perfectly happy being on a team, because it feels good to them to kick the other team's ass. They need the rivalry and the strife. The fanaticism of sports team fans not only illustrates this, but it also serves as the proving ground for The Powers That Be™ that the strategy of "divide et impera" works.
Hell, even Julius Ceasar already knew it, and that was 2000 years ago. And yet we keep on falling into that same trap, over and over, and over again. Are we stupid or what? (Don't answer that. :p)
Recent photo of Buzz Aldrin with my newly found cousin. Notice Aldrin isn't swinging his fist in this picture.
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