Class 41. The Black Market for Ideas
Why the "propaganda feedback loop" is putting the Truth out of business.
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In 1997, when I was living in Bogota, Colombia, I took a trip to Cuba. (Whole separate story about having to disclose this when I applied to the FBI and they grilled me on it for HOURS on my polygraph — I literally just went there to hang out on the beach.) Anyway, one of the fascinating things I noticed while I was there was that there were two separate economies going on. One was for the tourists, and that ran on dollars. The other was for the locals, and that ran on the Cuban peso. And here was the thing: They were completely disconnected from each other. In other words, there was no exchange, where you could buy Cuban pesos with dollars, or vice versa — it was illegal.1 The dollar was backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. The peso was backed by…well, I’m not sure, but I guess the government of Cuba. Which at that point, wasn’t getting any money from Russia anymore and was going through some pretty tough times (which is why the tourists had to pay in dollars). In other words, outside of Cuba (and largely inside of it, since at that time Cubans weren’t allowed to buy a whole lot anyway), the peso was basically worthless.
That experience came to mind when I was thinking about how to introduce the idea of the “propaganda feedback loop,” a model developed by scholars Hal Roberts, Robert Faris, and Yochai Benckler in their book Network Propaganda. In Class 39, we discussed the marketplace of ideas, and why it doesn’t quite hold up on social media. But I would remiss not to also add that the idea of fair competition among ideas has also been made almost impossible by the fact that we have two separate information markets. Basically, we have the informational equivalent of the monetary system of Cuba in the late 1990s.
I briefly referred to the propaganda feedback loop model in my (free) post about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and their foray into information warfare. I went into it in more detail in a later (also free) post analyzing the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit as an example of the propaganda feedback loop in action. I am repurposing a chunk of my latter post below, to explain why the influencer culture highlighted by Renee DiResta in Class 40, Trump’s recent cabinet picks, and the apparent capitulation of some billionaires who own some of the mainstream media outlets, is really, really bad news. Let me explain.
