Who controls the technology controls the truth - A CONVERSATION WITH NOAM CHOMSKY
A CONVERSATION WITH NOAM CHOMSKY ON PROPAGANDA IN A DIGITAL ERA
Earthrise is the first photograph taken of the earth from the moon on December 24th, 1968. This photograph, or perhaps more correctly its timing, changed humans’ perspective of the planet – and of themselves! A symbol of media globalization, a revolution within Information Technology, micro-electronics, computer technology, but also a cognitive revolution! The same year that Bill Anders took the iconic photograph of the earth from Apollo 8, Language and Mind written by Noam Chomsky, one of the world’s most cited thinkers, surpassed only by Plato, Freud and the Bible. His language theory, which is considered as important as Einstein’s theories, is the idea that language is the pre-program on a par with the instinct to crawl, walk and eat, and that humanity shares the same underlying language structure across – and despite of – socio-cultural differences. Earthrise and Chomsky are both manifestations of new contexts at a time when technology’s possibilities exceeded those of imagination. The world became smaller; we became closer despite geographical and social boundaries.
I am meeting Noam Chomsky in yet another time – where Space Tourism is already old news and where it is possible to book a place on Virgin Galactic for US $250,000 – celebrities such as Brad Pitt and Justin Bieber have already booked their seats. He greets me at his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, where I have been invited to talk about propaganda in a digital age. “If you are trying to convince a particular person about something – the more information you have about that person and their interests and vulnerabilities, the more possible you will succeed in convincing them,” says Chomsky, referring to Big Data and the power contemporary tech giants wield over individuals of the earth. Globalization has merged with the ultimate individualization – manifested by the smartphones, which large parts of the global population carry in their pockets. The world is available 24/7 and so is the individual! And persuading a customer to buy more books on Amazon is one thing; those same tools being used in the context of democratic elections is quite another. Chomsky is, of course, referring to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where certain demographics were exposed to political messages by the said company based on their psychological profile. “Pretty Serious,” he concludes.
Noam Chomsky has been called the father of modern linguistics by some, though his theory of universal grammar is rejected by others. Some see it as a strength that he moves between topics such as philosophy, mathematics, language, mass media and politics, all the while being an activist, yet others criticize him for it. In recent years, he has become particularly known for his propaganda theory and criticism of the Western mass media – and, as he himself says, he does not bring politics into the classroom and he does not believe that linguistics can be used to understand the power that language can be used to achieve. According to him, it is not the language, but rather the discourse that drives an ideology and forms public opinion. He has kept the two fields completely separate throughout his lengthy academic career. But it is perhaps precisely because language is genetically determined that we do not think about it. We have an instinctive confidence and are, thus, willing to go a long way to collaborate and make what might not immediately make sense fit in, which may explain why propaganda is such an effective tool for exercising power?
Control of the public mind
“Propaganda has changed its meaning over the years – so if you go back to the 1920s, propaganda just meant persuasion and in other languages it still means that so it has no negative connotations in English different connotations during the period of, first of all, the rise of the Nazis and then the cold war, meant that propaganda started to mean what they do. Like the word terror: it used to be neutral – in fact if you read the US code from 1990 the term “terror” is just neutral but it’s been shifted in meaning to mean what they do to us, not what we do to them.”
He tells me about when Ronald Reagan launched his “War on Terror” – a statement which, Chomsky points out, can only exist in a quote because it is not possible to fight war on terror – it is not actually possible to say it without it coming across as a satire (self-ridicule). Nevertheless: “it set off a huge impact of – first of all, academic departments started to appear all over the world devoted to terror, there were conferences on terror, there were academic specialists and experts on terror, a huge industry developed.”
The particular characteristics of this War on Terror was that it was conditional on being redefined to create new meaning: “I started writing about terror at the same time, but I used the US code, the official US code, and according to the official US code it’s easy to show that the US is the leading terrorist state in the world – well, that is the wrong conclusion, so therefore it becomes a big problem to define terror. If you read the academic literature, there is a sober debate about the complexity in terms of international conferences and it is a hard problem to define the term so it excludes what we do. And includes only what they do – that is hard and, in fact, there have been many attempts to do it, like sometimes terror is now defined as subnational terrorist activities so not the US – but that won’t work well because we want to talk about Iran as a sponsor of terror, so that doesn’t quite work. There are many other efforts to try to get around it, but by now the way the term “terror” is used generally, and even in academic research, it excludes what we do. And it’s been a big effort to try to shape the term so it will have that effect and the same is true with many other things.” He mentions another example “the phrase “democracy promotion.” In fact, you’re supposed to believe that the US has omitted democracy promotion, but in order to maintain that, you have to change the meanings of the words. Because what the US does is undermine democracy, so you have to modify it somehow so it works well – all of that propaganda in the old fashion sense and very extensive propaganda, all of it is perfectly unconscious – I don’t think the people doing this think about it or recognize what they are doing.”
It is about being the good guy, about evoking confidence and creating a sense of community based on the fear of the enemy: a them and us. In his book Propaganda and Control of the Public Mind, he writes about how a great mission of corporate propaganda since the 1920s has been to “control the public mind … And the reason was that the public mind was seen as the greatest threat to corporations – that’s from early in the century. Business power is strong, but it’s a very free country by comparative standards, and it’s hard to call on state violence, not impossible, but hard to call upon state violence to crush people’s efforts to achieve freedom, and rights and justice. So, therefore, it was recognized early on that it’s going be necessary to control people's minds.” In 1988, he introduced a propaganda model in which he described how public debate is systematically “managed” by the media by “fixing basic principles and the dominant ideologies” and “fixing the premises of discourse.” This happens by strengthening and uncritically disseminating the power wielder’s perspective and marginalizing opponents.
He talks about a “filtering system,” and he did so long before words such as “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers” became the descriptors of the selection that takes place in algorithmic curation. Chomsky talks about “unhistory” inspired by Orwell’s “unperson” – “for creatures denied personhood because they don’t abide by state doctrine.” Some parts of the story are highlighted and other parts are filtered away, because they do not fit into the current optics. He has frequently mentioned Orwell’s essay “Literary Censorship in
England,” to describe how unpopular ideas are filtered away. As Orwell writes in his essay: “At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.” According to Chomsky, journalists use this filtering system, as he says in a BBC interview from 1995: “they play it like a violin – if they see an opening, they’ll try to squeeze something in that ordinarily wouldn’t make it through.” In the interview, the journalist asks Chomsky to describe this kind of self-censorship, to which Chomsky replies, “I’m not saying you’re self-censored, I’m sure you believe everything you say. What I’m saying is, if you believed in something else, you wouldn’t be sitting where you were.” A journalist can speak freely as long as he or she adapts to the premises of disourse. This means that situations may arise where it is necessary to choose not to be critical, despite it being a given for maintaining their place in the institution: for it is impossible to have a conclusion, which says “what we do is wrong.”
The power in fabricating consent
“It was quite striking that the end of the Vietnam War, very revealing when the war ended in 1975, everybody had to write an article about what the war meant. They are divided into two views. On the right side, the war was a noble cause and if we had tried harder, we could have won, but we were stabbed in the back by the media and the liberal establishment – so that is the right wing. If we go over to the left, let’s call it the left – people like, let’s say Anthony Lewis from the New York Times, became an extreme left position. The line was that the war began with blundering efforts to do good – but that is an axiom – if we did it in an effort to do good – it was blundering, because it didn’t work. And then he says, by 1969 it was clear that it’d become a disaster in which our efforts to bring democracy to South Vietnam could not be achieved at an acceptable cost. That is the critical end – how about, it is the worst act of aggressional atrocity since the Second World War? What about that? Take a look at public opinion. About 70 percent of the population, in the polls, said the war was fundamentally wrong and immoral, not a mistake.” And as Chomsky points out, a poll does not ask for reasons, they only give numbers (the pollsters don’t ask reasons, they just give numbers). In one interview, he mentioned how the person who carried out the polls, John E. Reilly, professor at the University of Chicago, said “what that means is that people thought too many Americans were being killed. Maybe. Another possibility is they didn’t like the fact that we were carrying out the worst crime since the Second World War. But that’s so inconceivable that wasn’t even offered as a possible reason.” The conclusion of the poll was that “70 percent of the population in the United States regarded the war as－in the words of the polls－“not a mistake” but “fundamentally wrong and immoral”. That is 2/3 of the population, 70 percent in fact, which is pretty amazing because these people never heard anything other than “efforts to do good,” which went wrong on a noble cause. If there had actually been a discussion, there might have been 95 %, but here you have the large part of the population on one side and the entire intellectual articulate community – left or right – on the other side – that is pretty effective propaganda. And the way it works: it targets the educated sectors and the rest of the population doesn’t pay attention to it. I think that is true in a lot of issues.”
In one of his most recent books, Requiem for the American Dream, he mentions that Dr. Michael Anderson gives socially disadvantaged families with children with problems in school medicated Adderall. Medication that earns a fortune by helping children diagnosed with ADHD focus and control their impulses. Anderson believes the diagnosis is being used as an excuse to turn children’s poor performance into the problem, instead of addressing the failings of the educational system: “We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid.” But as Chomsky highlights – “It is not quite the case that we as a society have decided on that – the masters of the society have decided on that.” That is the entire point of the effect of propaganda: given that “we” as a society decided it, you are automatically perceived as anti-American/against if you are critical. There is power in fabricated [global] consent.
Perhaps this is why we talk so much about “Fake News” but not propaganda? “Fake news is an easy topic,” says Chomsky. I think people talk about fake news because it is marginal – you can’t talk about the serious things, it is too complex” – It is easier to expose an obvious lie than it is to reveal an undemocratic propagandist structure. Here, at the end of the 2010s, his principles of the concentration of power have become a chilling outline of how developments in the media, particularly post the digital revolution, have affected us. The 10 principles include: “Reduce Democracy, Shape Ideology, Attack Solidarity and Manufacture Consent.”
The Silicon Valley Propaganda Model
With new technologies, such as Big Data and AI, the one who controls technology, the one who has their finger on the zoom function for global optics, is also the one who controls the future. Despite Chomsky not concerning himself with new technology in his writing, his propaganda theory is more relevant than ever before and a vital tool for analyzing – what might be called it The Silicon Valley Propaganda Model. And the question is whether the pill being “sold” in the classroom today, is called digital devices? If you use Chomsky’s filters, there are certain assumptions that are largely allowed to stand unchallenged. Viewed from an economic perspective, the classroom is an attractive market for various digital learning devices, which has enticed major companies such as Google to invest heavily in the education system. It is just not something we talk about. Then again, tech companies as Google has been successful at branding its business as the good guy, bringing about equality and democratizing access to information. But it is a democratic concept invented for a purpose. Demos Kratos means people and power – and in a Big Data reality, these are two separate entities. Power lies with those few who have back-stage access to the data. Only a few know how data is calculated for what it is used for. People do not have an iota of influence on either their data profiles or on the outcomes of the analyzes to which they are subject.
In Requiem for an American Dream, Chomksy points argues that “it’s important to understand that privileged and powerful sectors have never liked democracy. Democracy puts power into the hands of the general population and takes it away from the privileged and the powerful. It’s a principle of concentration of wealth and power”. There are things we do not talk about and things we do talk a lot about. Chomsky has just turned 90 and he has spent a great deal of his life talking about the blind spots that wielders of power have strived to suppress in order for them to appear in a better light; so as to have the patent on the optics through which we understand the past and the future. For, thereby, it is possible to concentrate power and prosperity.
In 1968, we as a global village underwent a shared revolution – we saw the earth from a new perspective – we saw how small, fragile and lonely the globe is in the vast, dark universe seen from the moon’s barren surface. Perhaps it made us move closer to each other. Some believe this is what roused our sympathy for the earth, the climate and the environment – we gathered around a photograph that changed our view of the world. Or did it? In his book Because We Say So, Chomsky analyses what he calls “the he says/she says” coverage of the climate change issue “kept [for] what is called balance” in an attempt to relatively objectify two different perspectives: “the overwhelming majority of scientists on one side, the denialists on the other. The scientists who issue the more dire warnings are largely ignored.” This type of sharp juxtaposition, which simulates objectivity, but perhaps serves other purposes, amputates nuances and perspectives that are otherwise crucial for actual enlightenment. At the same time, the energy industry’s massive campaigns have served the purpose of doubting whether or not global warming is man-made. And as Chomsky concludes with his usual understated humor: “The hypothetical extraterrestrial observers can be pardoned if they conclude that we seem to be infected by some kind of lethal insanity.”
Chomsky, Noam, Because We Say So, City Lights Publishers, 2015.Chomsky, Noam, Requiem for the American Dream The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power, Seven Stories Press, 2017.Chomsky, Noam, Because We Say So, City Lights Publishers, 2015.Yergin, Daniel “The Chomskyan Revolution” in Noam Chomsky Noam Chomsky: Critical Assessments, Volume 1; Volume 3, p. 53, edited by Carlos Peregrín Otero, Routledge, 1994 Lyons, John, Noam Chomsky, Penguin Books, 1978 & McGilvray, James, Chomsky: Language, Mind and Politics, Polity Press, 2014.Lukin, Annabelle, “The paradox of Noam Chomsky on language and power,” in the Conversation, November 14, 2011.This conversation was published in Pan & The Dream Magazine #3