The Flooded Zone: A New, Mystified World

As authoritarianism grows, information is being poisoned and twisted, creating an existence where resistance is futile

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Something was off.

I’d started to notice on Twitter that every time I posted, regardless of topic, I was swarmed by replies that didn’t make much sense. To begin, it was avowed Zionists who critiqued me for stating my opposition to the crimes being committed against the Palestinians. According to them, I was a supporter of Hamas, terrorism, and an avowed anti-Semite. It didn’t matter that much of my work and research had revolved around tracing the usage of poisonous antisemitic conspiracy theories throughout history, how the oppression of Jews had been a useful tool of white supremacists, or consistently warning of rising antisemitism among the Right Wing as their authoritarian project took form.

But then it was other accounts that had sprung up out of nowhere as well. They criticized me for never supporting the cause of the Palestinians. For being a Zionist and supporting Israel’s brutal campaign.

Just an aside, for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but The New York Times released a report today that Israel has carried out an extensive operation to fight the war for public opinion through fake accounts and artificial intelligence.

I’ve talked to a lot of independent analysts and journalists, and they’ve experienced the same thing. A pincer attack. Add to that recent conversations I’ve had with Democratic Party strategists who’ve told me, to a person, that one of the aims of the Biden Re-Election Campaign has been to spend the early chapter of the effort neutralizing left-leaning accounts and figures from openly criticizing the president, utilizing bots and a select grouping of influencer “resistance” accounts to more or less serve as sock puppets for Biden’s messaging and attacks on Donald Trump.

Maybe this is shocking, maybe it isn’t. Since 2016 we’ve all lived in a cesspool of misinformation and disinformation, though we’ve been told it was relegated to Vladimir Putin and Russia meddling in our affairs. Since, we’ve learned China, Iran, and any number of other opponents have been busy. This is now a given fact, but that narrative and framing goes a long way in obfuscating the full scope and magnitude of the assault and its scope.

The simple truth is that we are living in a rapidly changing world. The weaponization of information is not new. In fact, it has been the main battle for millennia. Once more, if you haven’t read The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis, I’d once again recommend doing so and getting caught up. But, as it has been in the past, growing sources of information have always tended to fuel democratic energies, and authoritarians have continually used their resources and influence to neutralize those threats. This has led to a cycle of progress and reaction, oftentimes creating movements and incredible change, and others the type of soul-crushing systems that are simply dystopian and nightmarish in nature.

Additionally, it’s not just bad actors carrying out this attack. It is a system that motivates it, that influences and shapes and directs, and to continue treating it as the purview of individuals and nation states, rather than a systemic pursuit, will only exacerbate the problem and usher in that horrific future.

We must look clear-eyed and seriously at just what we are facing.

Flooding The Zone

General familiarity with the strategy revolves around Steve Bannon, the ideologue and provocateur who has continually called for “flooding the zone with shit.” This phrase has always been targeted at American media and involved taking advantage of the vast sources of information and creating an environment where there are readily available conspiracy theories, mis and disinformation, and creating a world in which anyone can live in whatever reality they choose while also distrusting nearly everything.

Bannon is giving more credit than he’s ever deserved. Much of what he peddles is runoff from masterminds like Aleksandr Dugin and classic fascist thinkers like Julius Evola. His flooding strategy is powerful and time has proven him undeniably correct. We live in this world now, and the waters are rising quickly.

This isn’t a new concept, however. Fascists, Nazis, authoritarians of all stripes, have consistently flooded the zone, though a new era of social media and changing technologies has only increased the potency of their attacks. In the United States we have been subjected to this concentrated strategy since our founding, but in the last century it has taken on disturbing clarity. When psychological manipulation (under the guise of “public relations”) was embraced by the burgeoning administrative state, citizens were intentionally alienated from the inner-workings of the powerful and fed a consistent stream of self-serving bullshit, relegating us to pseudo-environments populated with stereotypes and manipulated information. That quickly shifted from government to the consumer world, where corporations preyed upon unconscious fears and desires to peddle their wares.

A new chapter opened in the 1970’s following the social revolutions of the previous decade. After watching the Civil Rights, Anti-War, Free-Speech, Feminist, Decolonization, and Gay Rights Movements, the wealthy banded together under a new strategy suggested by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell in which “threats to capitalism” should be neutralized by a concerted effort to distort reality. Following the Powell Memo in 1971, the wealthy borrowed strategies from the Tobacco and Oil companies and funded alternative studies, publications, and an extensive network of think-tanks and institutes to flood the zone in their favor, attack the educational system, undermine scientists, and tilt society itself. We live in the consequences of that incredibly insidious and effective plan.

The Powell Strategy worked, and in part it created the pathway for the rise of Neoliberalism, Globalism, and the decline we are currently living through. What we are experiencing is the next stage in that long developing plan. An epoch in which the powerful’s domination of reality is ready to evolve and potentially create an unmatched hegemony.

Construction and Demolition

It’s not surprising that the spread of globalism was accompanied with the rise of the Internet. Trade and economic interdependence meant rising above borders in order to circumvent restrictions, as well as pesky regulations and guarentees for workers, and the Internet served as an information pipeline and communication hub to seal the deal. Eventually the rise of social media created a new public square where people from around the world could communicate, share their thoughts, and eventually coalesce into both movements and faux-movements.

You can point to moments like the Arab Spring in 2010, Gamergate in 2014, and the rise of Donald Trump and the alt-Right in 2016, but what undoubtedly raised concerns was #MeToo, which sprung to life in the early Aughts but gained incredible traction in 2017 following the election of admitted sexual predator Trump and the arrest of Harvey Weinstein. #MeToo scared the living hell out of the powerful because it wasn’t necessarily a political movement with political consequences (Trump had already shown that didn’t matter to the Right Wing) but that it carried an economic penalty. “Cancel Culture” was especially nervous-making in the Neoliberal world where, by design, people were consistently assured they were one wrong move away from total destruction, and being caught in the crosshairs of a social movement might mean legal repercussions, but it would most definitely have economic ones.

There was evidence, as well, that social media had the capability of serving as the frame for other movements, including BIPOC/Women’s/LGBTQ+ Rights, Labor, and global pushes for decolonization. The latter has shown its potential in the revolt of the masses against the brutality in Gaza, and the U.S. attacking TikTok after blaming it for poisoning the minds of young people is a relevant development. Simultaneously, the Right is peddling, as it always does, that this new technology and medium is spreading a “woke mind virus” among the young, grooming them for predators and turning them gay and trans, as well as making them ripe for Communist cooption. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that these tactics are being used: there’s a long history in the United States, running from fear of the Illuminati all the way to the Red Scare, of the powerful of all political persuasion banding together behind this nonsense.

Neoliberal Capitalism follows a predictable albeit insidious pattern. It works in aggressive pushes, constructing the framework for its own spread and domination, utilizing control over nation states that it uses as incubators before overtaking the nation state entirely, all the while identifying any potential threats and then absorbing, neutralizing, and then repurposing them for maximum profit and empowerment.

Social media is presently being fragmented, torn apart and sold for spare parts. The Twitter debacle is merely the most glaring example. The whole facade (a kind blue bird transforming into a dumb looking techno X against a black background) reflects what’s happening. We now have a class of historically wealthy oligarchs who can, just on a whim, buy one of the most influential websites in the world or, as is the case with The Washington Post, plunk down a quarter of a billion dollars on one of the country’s newspapers of record.

In the case of The Post we are seeing how this works in journalism. Everywhere, journalists are being either fired or pressured into conformity. Profit-obsessed freaks are enforcing “discipline” while ushering in tabloid strategies and bargaining with A.I. peddlers, creating an environment where even the most respected news sources are going to be riddled with errors, computer-created content, and an editorial mindset that is tilting ever more noticeably in the direction of their corporate overlords.

Higher education is supposed to be another bastion of information, but that war has long since been won. Colleges and universities have been conquered by an administrative class in complete thrall to the wealthy and the bottom-line, and for decades have been orchestrating a plan to neutralize troublesome professors and streamline an experience that looks more like a kiosk-driven, automated onboarding process, all while desperately trying to keep the veneer of “college experience” (football, luxury dorms, more and more dazzling amenities). Now, that push has reached its next evolution with the GOP and even the liberal strongholds of the Democratic Party and the media agreeing in principle that “woke ideas on campus” have “gone too far.” So, the curricula needs guided. Discipline needs enforced. So on and so on.

Science has been depowered to the point where a generational pandemic was accompanied by ready-to-order snake-oil peddled by the President of the United States himself.

Medicine, long stymied by the most brazenly abusive for-profit mindset in the world, has given way to New Age quackery that benefits an entire pulsing ecosystem of grifters, who then funnel their marketing list to fascists who return the favor by peddling dick pills and platforming their downstream marketers.

Mystification

In an absence of information - which was the goal of both the administrative state and Neoliberal Capitalism - conspiracy theories and mystified narratives fester. When people are relentlessly alienated from information that explains the material conditions causing present crises and events, they make up stories. Or, rather, they gravitate toward made-up stories that appeal to the certain stereotypes and narratives they prefer.

Some huddle around white supremacist narratives that people of color and immigrants are part of a larger plot by Jewish puppetmasters.

Some, raised in the evangelical tradition, have ready-made beliefs that godly Americans are being targeted by “Evil” and are locked in an existential struggle.

Some readily accept that everything is falling apart because women were given access to independence and “traditional roles” upended.

Some, inclined to believe they have earned their wealth and affluence through their own merit rather than privilege, maintain a religious allegience to the myth of meritocracy and are comforted by the idea that powerful surrogates (say, Robert Mueller, James Comey, Jack Smith, etc.) will ally with powerful institutions (say, the FBI, the CIA, the legal system) to address an interloper (say, Donald Trump).

Some, distrustful of power, will refuse to engage in solidarity with fellow citizens and instead spend their money on and base their identities around scams and New Age “alternatives” that funnel them into the waiting hands of fascist grifters.

Some, desperate for hope, will pledge undying fealty to the existing parties and politicians who helped create this mess in the first place.

The stories are different, but they are also related. They both intentionally and unintentionally embrace a mindset that benefits the growing Right Wing movement while, not surprisingly, benefitting Neoliberal Capitalism and facilitating the authoritarian evolution it requires.

Bots are only a fraction of the problem. They represent a new arena in which obfuscation and mystification are gaining more and more traction. The Internet moves past borders and allows anonymous actors to act in bad faith and flood the zone with more and more bullshit. All the while, the antidotes are dismantled or assimilated. Swallowed and regurgitated. A.I. is just another tool toward the same goal. Moving people further and further away from actual information and creating what feels like an inescapable vortex of bullshit.

The point is destroy, beyond any doubt, any hope of finding answers. Everyone is lying, everything is ruined. You are alone and the pursuit of anything real or of substance, anything liberatory or revelatory, is completely useless. And so, you’ll let all of it wash over you like so much fetid water and drown.

Authoritarianism is soul-murder.

The point is to not only entrap you in an unfair and abusive system, but to convince you there is no escape and no hope. To either join in the destruction or to stand down as it does what it will do.

Manipulation and lies aren’t even being hidden anymore. That’s how you know the plan is evolving as desired, that those perpetrating it, and the system that influences them, feels more and more certain the soul has been murdered.

It isn’t true. As is always the case, the authoritarians and the systems that power them, arrive early and become too aggressive as they near their goal. We are in a moment of awareness in which the flame still burns, in which there are signs the sparks are lighting elsewhere. But I cannot lie and say there isn’t an extensive and powerful effort to snuff it all out.