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Misinformed dissent

From Landru to Vrillon to Trump to Musk

Still image from “The Return of the Archons” (STOS, 1967).

Every new morning on Twitter brings evidence of the site’s rapid decay. The bird on Musk looks increasingly like the anarchic Festival from “The Return of the Archons” punctuated by cute animal videos. Except Musk is no Landru and every day is Festival.

“Over on Twitter it’s like the Penguin is in charge of Gotham,” writes George Takei at Mastodon. Chaos.

Brian Klass offers a decades-old tale of media hacking to support why he believes America’s lurch toward authoritarianism will not end soon:

Forty-five years ago, tomorrow, something unusual happened in southern England. It was November 26, 1977, and the nightly news was covering violent clashes in Rhodesia (modern day Zimbabwe). Suddenly, without warning, the picture on the TV went fuzzy, before being replaced by a buzzing sound.

For the next six minutes, viewers listened, perplexed, as a distorted, electronic voice began to speak to them. “This is the voice of Vrillon,” the voice began. “A representative of the Ashtar Galactic Command, speaking to you.” It urged viewers to pay careful attention to what is truth, and what is “confusion, chaos, and untruth.” The transmission ended with a kind note.

“May you be blessed by the supreme love and truth of the cosmos.”

The phones of Southern Television started ringing off the hook. Viewers wanted answers, and the broadcast company didn’t have them. Hundreds of people reportedly called seeking reassurance that an alien invasion wasn’t imminent. Vrillon made headlines in international media.

The official line, of course, was that it was a hoax, caused by some technical wizardry. But not everyone was certain. In a letter to The Times two days after the broadcast, a concerned citizen wondered: how could the authorities “or anyone else – be sure that the broadcast was a hoax?” The incident became a favorite for proponents of UFOs, recorded proof of intelligent life out there. Heck, these were no simpletons. They even had a Galactic Command.

In the last forty-five years, nobody has come forward to take responsibility for Vrillon.

“Vrillon” hacked the media and sowed disinformation. Some of it took root in soil prepared for it.

Regan King offers an E.O. Wilson quote from 2009: “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”

I once explained the resurgence of medieval spirituality, mysticism and superstition (even as technology accelerated) as resulting from people trying to navigate a 21st century world with a medieval collective unconscious.

The spread of hateful, false information and conspiracy theories is fertile ground for authoritarianism.

Klaas writes:

At its core, democracy is a system aimed at forging compromise through informed consent of the governed. In other words, the chief mission of democratic institutions is to create a forum for engaged citizens to debate and discuss problems, find common ground, enact solutions, and do so with the informed approval of the citizenry writ large. But if you don’t have accurate information about what’s going on in the world, you can’t properly consent to what the government is doing.

Everything in democracy therefore relies on two core assumptions: that citizens have a shared sense of reality, and that they agree that a problem exists, because otherwise it’s futile to have a debate about how to fix it. Neither of those assumptions currently holds true in the United States, and, to a lesser extent, in a few other dysfunctional rich democracies.

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Bottom line: Spreaders of disinformation intend to break down external reality and create a public space where “Nothing is true and everything is possible.” The point is not to convince people that anything specific is true but to make them wonder if it might not be true (like election results upon which the democratic process depends). The resulting chaos is the desired result.

Once you believe that nothing is true, that truth itself is subjective, then everything becomes possible in a Choose Your Own Reality-style adventure, and that opens the door to conspiracy theories, hucksters, and downright deranged people who prey on those who are looking for a more comforting version of events that aligns with their skewed worldview. Anything that challenges that worldview can be explained away with another possible version of events. Who cares if it’s not right? After all, nothing is fully true anyway.

On Jan. 6, 2021, we watched Festival unfold on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol. Security shot and killed Ashli Babbitt. Others died and hundreds were injured because people like Babbitt weaned on “confusion, chaos, and untruth” believed the conspiracy theories, the hucksters, and the deranged. For the more strategic among the disinformers, foreign and domestic, things unfolded just as they’d hoped.

They are at war with the truth and with those who still value it.

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