A science fiction obsession led me to psychological war
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"While in Korea, Linebarger masterminded the surrender of thousands of Chinese troops who considered it shameful to give up their arms. He drafted leaflets explaining how the soldiers could surrender by shouting the Chinese words for ‘love’, ‘duty’, ‘humanity’ and ‘virtue’ – words that happened, when pronounced in that order, to sound like “I surrender” in English. He considered this act the single most worthwhile thing he had done in his life."
Further analysis here: https://languagehat.com/chinese-endangered/
(His Psychological Warfare is well worth reading; not only does he warn the reader up front that PSYWAR operators are not always to be taken at face value, but I believe both 1948 and 1954 versions can be easily be read between the lines as promoting racial integration in the DoD; compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9981 )
> British expert Lee Richards told me that the picture itself is propaganda. By 1943 the M unit only sent "black propaganda" into Germany and the picture is probably meant to disguise that fact and imply that they just ballooned harmless white leaflets. In fact, he adds "Looking closely at a higher resolution version of the photo you can see that just the top leaflet is the Safe Conduct, beneath it are the forged Skorpion newspapers."
"White" propaganda is when you say stuff you wrote is yours; "black" when you claim it comes from the other guys.
Linebarger goes at length into the problem of "source attribution", which, however difficult it was in the 1940s, can only be even more so nowadays.
most of those anecdotes were likely detrimental to the good overall outcome, but they work as great promotion and effectiveness signal for some expensive team.
like some google PM boasting how they sold more pixels because of some dumb feature that actually annoyed all users, and everyone just bought pixels because the competition for even worse... but saying it was because that feature gets him and his director and their vp a promotion.
The story also doesn't seem to make sense as told. (Ironic considering the neighbor comment about source attribution.)
Why would saying different words make someone willing to give up their arms?
You can't "what's a dikfore" someone into surrendering.
Young men with guns might have been more willing to go down fighting if they'd felt their surrender was dishonorable. Linebarger's tactic "sweetened the deal", and very likely saved a lot of lives.
坐井觀天。
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Chinese_Stories/The_frog_of_th...
Anyway, corporations still engage in slavery with open endorsement from major powers including the US: they just launder it through supply chains that are broadly outside the reach of states with leverage over them. See eg the supreme court's repeated endorsement of slave labor outside the US (thank you Nestle & Neal Katyal).
Psyops are, fundamentally, propaganda.
Some of the most devastating propaganda is rubbing the enemy's face in truths they would prefer not to face.
It is more accurate to say that propaganda, and therefore psyops, are indifferent to the truth. In many ways this makes it more dangerous than lies.
So what does this author consider “psyops”, exactly? I assume anything that subverts the culture being maintained by the ruling class in the current time for a given place.
Linebarger was employed by the US Army during WWII with a Psychological Warfare MOS and wrote a textbook (with the obvious name, available in the obvious places) on the subject; after that, having been among the group that "lost China", he updated his textbook with lessons learned.
(but yes, subverting the culture* which the other guys' ruling class maintains to keep their subjects fighting on their behalf is an obvious part of the job; Linebarger gives biblical examples demonstrating this line of work, and the Cyrus Cylinder fits in his model. He was himself part of the class depicted in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPPpjU1UeAo and, at least by the 1954 version of his book, was aware how this may have damaged his side's credibility in the eyes of the modal chinese peasant)
* culture explains the stasis hypothesised in 1984: because all three geopowers have superficially-different but structurally-identical socioeconomics, they have a shared interest in not attempting to subvert each other deeply, only competing superficially.
That part is not super surprising. There was a ton of para-psychological, New Age woo-woo happening within military circles of the 60s, 70s, 80s. Men who stare at Goats is a fun book that delves into some of the really bizarre psychological experiments the US military ran and a lot of pop culture draws from that intersection, Metal Gear Solid for example. There was a thing called the "Human Potential Movement" that originated in 60s hippie circles that somehow made it's way to the military as well and influenced some apparent programs trying to create superior soldiers.
It's pretty hilarious and a little bit concerning that these ideas were sometimes as popular within these institutions as they were in the conspiracy theories about them.
And the IRL depiction wasn't that far fetched...
In the Arpanet days, a lot of people walked 'inside' the net as if your aunt Gertrude walked inside an official secret bulding carelessly without too much effort...
And, as Alan Ford, the critizised the Spanish society/politics as well.
And maybe the OGs Metal Gear 1 and 2 under MSX, which now have proper English translations to be played anywhere. OpenMSX it's a good emulator.
For Spanish speakers/readers, there's a short,half hilarious scifi/fantasy/triller/comedy novel called 'Más fría que la guerra' (colder than [the] war), which begins with Woodstock hippies summoning dark entities from who knows where, a la Lovecraft. You'll get these military/agency tropes and lots more. BTW, for Latin Americans, CESID = basically old CIA-like state agency from Spain.
Can you expand on what you have in mind here? This seems like the polar opposite of my take on it.
metal gear solid and later are best thought of as ninja stories that put on a tom clancy veneer. that a bunch of psy-ops and other initiatives kind of line up with that genre all the better, but when they didn't kojima just sort of handwaved them away. like there was a vampire guy in MGS2, and sexy robot ladies in MGS4.
"nanomachines, son!"
Benefit from system that you are against sounds like hypocrisy. Also, could be morally unacceptable to benefit from money of involuntary collected money - taxes.
I benefit from society all the time. I buy cheap food from the store, and the low prices are a benefit I get from societal policies which I do not agree with. To avoid hypocrisy, would I have to grow my own food?
nsa today is full of furies. pretty much all the staff out of Hawaii (analysts) and Langley (liaisons) is all furies and anime girls avatars on the employee chat thing i can't name.
There are many interests more common to people on the autistic spectrum. Gender and identity is experienced as much more performative and arbitrary by many on the spectrum.
https://www.wesa.fm/science-health-tech/2019-07-10/for-some-...
See also: the literature on trans and gender-nonconforming experience of those with autism
See also: prevalence of neuro-atypical ppl in the nordic larping community (an unscripted in-depth long-form roleplay experience)
https://nordiclarp.org/2021/11/29/atypical-journeys-of-neuro...
> I grew up difficult. I was a difficult child and a difficult teenager.
> The world was a maze. I felt I was the only one without a map.
> Everyone seems to have figured their way out.
> So I built my own world, full of all the things I liked.
> I had an interest in magic, spells, witches. A specific one.
> I’ve been labeled unhinged and crazy.
> Because
> I thought animals were better than people,
> I walked bare feets,
> My face was strange,
> Because I looked for magic.
Something which I showed was the huge difference between what you see from the USA, Germany/Poland and Canada.
Canada doesnt have a real cyber army; but was caught pushing propaganda: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/psychological-warfare-influ...
Canada for the most part is ultra exposed to hostile foreign nation state propaganda. Whereas USA's cyber army is protecting against this.
the problem with unfiltered internet is that bad actors across the world can simply post upon social media and cause problems. You need some sort of defense against this, but Canada is too broke to afford a legitimate cyber army unlike the rest of the world.
One of the interesting things that happened when I was writing this book.
I shocked a ton of people with a random prediction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Paul_Pelosi
When this happened, I made the early prediction this guy was going to be Canadian. In fact, I could have predicted he would be from BC but I didn't. There was absolutely nothing early on to suggest this and people called me crazy.
But this is exactly what's happening. Foreign nation states unopposed by cyber armies are convincing people online to do attacks like this.
Can you explain what this might consist of? On the face of it, the US is a pretty difficult place to simply remove posts, and has a massive domestic propaganda industry.
Elon Musk exposed that removing content was routine by a large list of US agencies as part of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files
Zuckerburg publicly confirmed that the same thing is occuring at facebook. Especially in context of the Biden laptop story for example.
This seems to be true here on HN, which is rather surprising. I expected HN to be too small potatoes for the US government.
The important legislation to look at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countering_Foreign_Propaganda_...
>In both the House and Senate the bill was included in the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2017.
So this is a department of defense effort; cyber command obviously. Which is quite interesting because in the twitter files, they never mention DoD at all. Most focus was on the FBI. Obviously a factor of national security you might consider?
>and has a massive domestic propaganda industry.
You have to be careful with this though. What's the attribution here? Snowden never revealed this right, surveillance is obviously true but not necessarily propaganda.
There is perhaps the CIA mockingbird program which is still operating, but much smaller then during the cold war; so it's difficult to suggest this is massive.
A big one though started under Obama isn't so public to be able to make those conclusions. We are simply seeing the consequences and collapse of the USA journalism because of this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization...
It's important to note, this is fully bipartisan supported. Seeing from a Canadian point of view where this isn't happening, it's a much worse situation.
>You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.
Welp, got shadow banned on HN again for this post. I also see I'm censored and quite negative on the parent comment... i wonder who it was lol... none of my other posts have gone negative votes.
I always find it funny when I get shadowbanned on HN and I'm obviously not posting too fast.
guess I'll be taking another break from HN?
One actual Russian spy in the NRA was caught: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-44885633
You take some clips of movie footage with lots of gore and carnage, ideally films we've seen. Then you mix it with some real world footage showing the exact same things.
If the picture is the same, how can one be enjoyable and the other horrific? "It's not real" we tell ourselves as if it matters. You can think of plenty of visuals that wouldn't be acceptable. If you stitch someones head onto some porn it's not real either?
I read /r/Canada regularly, and I have formed a strong belief that domestic government propaganda (or to be more epistemically cautious, misinformative messaging, intentional or not) is a much bigger problem.
Do you believe I have formed a necessarily incorrect belief?
I don’t recall the deeper substance of the disagreement anymore unfortunately.
>I read /r/Canada regularly,
This subreddit was subject to a number of studies in relation to echo chambers. The mods chose to ban all conservatives. At least this was true many years ago. It's possible they have since stopped doing this, but I don't know because I was perm banned.
>I have formed a strong belief that domestic government propaganda (or to be more epistemically cautious, misinformative messaging, intentional or not) is a much bigger problem.
My take was that the mods for r/canada are liberal party affiliated and curate content against the conservatives and to a lesser degree the ndp.
So yes while the liberals are in power, it doesn't quite logically follow for me that this is equivalent to 'government propaganda'
Now outside the context of r/canada. The CBC can be seen as domestic government propaganda. Obviously defunding the CBC is #1 most popular position the Conservatives hold.
It's unclear to me why the CBC decided to give up on their political neutrality but in the end conservatives are never going to be able to fix this situation. Defunding is the only option. It's only a matter of time until this is the case now.
>Do you believe I have formed a necessarily incorrect belief?
Going back to my comment above that it's possible they stopped banning conservatives. It's also possible they got even worse. I really don't know. It's completely reasonable that you know more then me as I havent been on that subreddit in many years.
I know way back in the day there were often sticky threads saying they'd stop censoring conservatives but then just get caught again and again doing it.
This is generally true of how almost the entire world runs (only to the degree that it is though, of course).
And how!
The series definetly portrayed an interesting future be it slightly simplistic. Is there anything else that isnt dystopia?
What harm is there if we turn the only non dystopian sf series into more piew piew? I dunno, but it seems it could turn out very expensive.
It isn't a paradox. Star Trek is entertainment, first and foremost, and conflict is entertaining. Gene Roddenberry may have wanted to portray a post-human utopia of luxury space communism, as it were, where humans all evolved beyond their base desires and vices and everyone was a paragon of superior intellect and virtue, but no one wants to watch that all the time. His ideal of the perfect Federation human was Wesley Crusher, the most hated character in Star Trek history (long before the identity politics around hating the new Star Trek series came about.) People want dogfights in space and snarling Klingons and scheming Romulans. Drama and violence. Sturm und Drang.
>Is there anything else that isnt dystopia?
There is no utopia or dystopia. Star Trek was never very utopian, except maybe on paper. Idealistic and hopeful, sure, but the struggle for liberation from an oppressive order is by definition idealistic and hopeful. Star Trek doesn't become dystopian when it bothers to examine its own ideals, or acknowledge the flaws in human nature, nor is it utopian when it pretends they don't exist. I think that looking at science fiction in terms of utopia and dystopia is missing the forest for the trees. These are two opposing and impossible ideals, while most stories (excepting purposely grimdark stuff like 40K) take place in the middle.
And that's fine. Humans can't aspire to perfection, but we can be inspired by the struggle to be better than we are.
> Gene Roddenberry may have wanted to portray a post-human utopia of luxury space communism
He went a bit further than wanting. If the goal was communist propaganda he couldn't have done a better job.
From a reddit post:
> There are a lot of mentions throughout multiple series about how the Federation civilization is post scarcity and doesn't internally use currency. It is stated that they work for personal fulfillment, almost as volunteers in a fashion.
> The series also has a number of time travel related episodes that venture back to near the end of the capitalism system and describes in detail an America that's suffering from massive income inequality and collapsing. Generally that period isn't painted in a favourable light by any of the characters often being referred to as a period of unchecked greed and ignorance
And then there were the ferengi? Lmao
Earth didn't reach post scarcity by seizing the means of production through class warfare, but scientific and technological advancement and culture shock from first contact with the Vulcans. The Bell Riots you're talking about in the time travel episodes are probably the strongest explicitly socialist part of recent canon, but within that canon they still didn't result in an anti-capitalist revolution since the themes the writers wanted to touch on were homelessness and sociopolitics from the 1960s and 1970s (Attica, Kent State, etc.) The Federation doesn't require its member worlds to be communist nor does it foment revolution in potential member worlds. As portrayed, most Federation worlds appear capitalist in some form.
People have jobs with clear non-collectivist hierarchies (see Sisko's restaurant.) We're just supposed to accept that this is entirely voluntarist, but the whole issue of how labor in this post-scarcity society actually works is swept under the rug because no one writing the show actually cares. The pacifist Federation flagship whose only purpose is exploration and diplomacy carries enough firepower to glass a planet, and it uses that firepower often. "God" is an alien and a jackass but also somehow working in humanity's benefit, and as often as Trek espouses atheism, it does a wink and a nod to theism. Even the relatively low bar of gender and sexual equality was often undermined by producer Rick Berman's homophobia.
The Ferengi (ignoring the first few appearances) are explicit parodies of American capitalism, but they are also portrayed sympathetically and heroically, and often used to criticize the Federation's own ideals and human nature (see Quark and Garak's famous "root beer" scene in DS9[0].) This is obviously a criticism of American cultural propaganda but is also slyly pro-American imperialism, since of course the (deeply America-coded) Federation will sweep in, guns blazing, kill the (asexual and trans-coded) evildoers and save everyone.
So I have to disagree. If the goal was communist propaganda, they could have done a lot better.
Kind of a neat example of a religion outgrowing the pressures that created it but still being a source of meaning to the believers.
While I find communists the most annoying ideologues I've ever met, I'm fine with communist propaganda if it assumes postscarcity as a necessary precursor for communism. It's people's tendency to handwave the getting to postscarcity that makes my eyelid twitch.
Mostly not. Sure, the Klingon and Romulan episodes have something of a Cold War in them (but that’s a total of 10 out of 79 TOS episodes.)
Or am I reading too much history to be taken seriously in this myopic place?
The justifications to project power changed greatly over time and vary between the set of political ideologies in charge at any given time, but US and western foreign policy was always rooted in unspoken, consistent motivations.
That's why the transition between pre- and post- cold war foreign policy was so seamless. The covert action, coups, interventions, military support, economic warfare didn't change at all. Afganistan 1 was about the "red scare", 2 was about "international terrorism". Iraq, Syria and Libya was about "tyrannical despotic regimes". etc.
I could cite the revealed preferences of many prominent figures in the military and state policy world: Rice, Power, Rumsfeld, Kissinger, Bolton, Nuland, etc. And those are just the people at the top; the hierarchy is stocked with true believers.
Yes, the belief in the empire, it was always about (neo)colonialism/imperialism, I think even neoliberalism and LIO is just justification rather than a true belief of the people that drive foreign policy of western nations.
> They reflect persuasive arguments (aka propaganda), not true beliefs and actions.
People have been so infantilized by this propaganda, its really frustrating to talk with most people about it.
Never underestimate how stupid an aristocracy can become. Some portion will always be true believers. The idea that it is all Machiavellians is a probabilistic impossibility, and revealed preferences (interviews, slips of the mic, secret conversations, whistleblowers, etc.) have shone sunlight on them in the past. There are genuine ideologues in the US military and state department. Calling them "conservative" or "neoliberal" is a useless simplification that does not adequately describe how deranged their beliefs are.
I also think it's why most contemporary sci-fi isn't resonating, but that's just my own opinion based on speculation. I have a suspicion that contemporary sci-fi doesn't sell well. They all present societies which have solved social and material problems through progress, or which are still solving them, critiquing an image of the Western world in the 20th century. None of them nab at any kind of biting truth relevant to young readers today.
Short story "Best Of" omnibuses are especially depressing for me personally. This is where I found some of the most mindblowing stories and concepts I had encountered when I was younger, and now they're essentially no better than tinder for firestarting. The people running the Nebula or other awards have astoundingly safe and poor taste.
What are some examples of scifi you're referring to there? Because the noteworthy scifi stories I can think of, ones which drew enough attention to be televised at least, are stories like the hunger games (dystopian), divergent (dystopian), the new star trek series (which I haven't seen but I understand shoehorned scarcity back into the startrekverse), Foundation (fall of a golden age), The Expanse (dystopian) etc. I think the only optimistic scifi I've read in the last twenty years or so was Anathem, and there's no way that's getting a miniseries.
Maybe it's a function of the authors I follow, but I just don't see this optimistic contemporary scifi you speak of, naive or otherwise.
The maximally unequal society of Hunger Games is resolved via a violent revolution in favor of more egalitarian values. Same with Divergent. Star Trek Discovery is about a sexually and ethnically diverse crew somehow (in a future that was supposed to have solved these things) facing bigotry and solving it by simply applying or arguing for the "morally correct" values they already have. In Foundation, enlightened technocrats shorten a regressive civilizational collapse and return to "upward" progress by literally tricking the surrounding cultures into the Foundation's value judgment of the "correct" path (very VERY State Department of them). The Expanse is a TTRPG novelization and subsequent TV adaptation where a near-literal paladin (Holden) applies enlightened egalitarianism, diplomacy, and pacifism to stop an interplanetary faction war.
ALL of the specific stories you mention feature extremely strong Whiggist storytelling, and further than that, Isaac Asiimov (author of Foundation) was a famously outspoken activist for enlightened, Whiggist, progressive, technocratic ideals. Many peoples' first introduction to these ideas was Star Trek, though modern Trek handles its themes with all the subtlety of a mace.
I suppose I might have been imprecise in my speech by conflating optimism with utopianism, but 'depiction of future I'd like to live in' and 'optimistic scifi' are close enough concepts to those of us untouched by modern English departments that those of you who are could just disambiguate and move on when you encounter it.
Incidentally, I think a lot of insights can be gotten into psychological warfare if one likens it to cellular biology and the games viruses and engineers play to get a cell to accept foreign code. What we're seeing here is an excellent example of an immune response that looks for 'tells' of hostile activity causing an allergic reaction.
I doubt I'd have had the same response if you'd used any kind of phrasing that demonstrated the most basic level of competence in the subject matter. Talking about "the military arm of the deep state" is like claiming to understand aerospace engineering and then talking unironically with a straight face about "the spinny thing on the front of the plane."
"anyone who uses xyz" is such a unsubtle poisoning the well strategy, it surprises me that the [Enter] key was still struck.
"The Ballad of Lost C'mell" is probably Cordwainer Smith's best piece.
It apparently has more content than the book.
Seriously though, it was a decent read with material on Linebarger I hadn't seen before, the various photos and his life in China were new to me despite having skimmed other bio's in the past and having real life book copies of his work under several of his names.