Total information collapse

It's started. And it's only going to accelerate from here.

A few days after the US presidential election, I wrote a piece about how the coming age of information chaos and the profound consequences on what comes next. The destabilisation in our information system that we woke up to in 2016 has now entered a wholly dangerous new reality: the merger of Silicon Valley and an authoritarian US state.

But, the speed of it still shocks. And the events of the last week show how fast this is going to happen, in a confused hyper-accelerated political news cycle that cannot even process what is happening let alone adequately respond.

The world has never seen power like this before. The state machinery of a global superpower allied to the power and reach of global information platforms. And this last week has been a preview of what this is going to mean: a restructuring of the world order and global geopolitics as we know it.

Flooding the zone

Trump’s threats against three sovereign nations are just the start. He’s said that he’ll acquire Panama and Greenland by force and Canada he will take through “economic force”. This is mafia tactics. And for us, in Europe, trade agreements aka “economic force” are nothing compared to the big one: US withdrawal from NATO, a sword of Damocles, over our heads.

But, the biggest threat is that we can’t even see or hear or contemplate this, what it means let alone engage in the urgent debates needed because our entire news cycle has been drowned in noise. This is how it happens.

Steve Bannon who may turn out the most prescient philosopher of our era said you don’t have to prove or disprove anything, you just need to drown the zone in shit. Or, in the case of Elon Musk a ten-year-old British scandal that has dominated the news cycle and parliamentary debate for day after day.

We are so ill-equipped to face the coming threat. Our entire news and information system was submerged by a barrage of noise from the richest man on the planet and because we’ve failed to grapple with the enormity of what’s happened to the underlying communication and power structures of our world, we are helpless to withstand them. We walked straight into Musk’s trap and allowed him - facilitated him - to set the political agenda in a crucial week.

Donie, who posted this, is an Irish CNN reporter who stood amid the insurrectionists on January 6, 2020, and said conspiracies on Facebook had done this. He’d spent months interviewing Trump supporters at rallies about the conspiracies they’d been reading on Facebook. And, through it all, he reported straight without judgment. I watched him that night, live on CNN, and saw him break cover and make that statement and that he had no choice: this was an insurrection that Facebook facilitated.

We need to start understanding that Elon Musk’s X is a weapon. It’s a weapon that is currently owned and controlled by a non-state entity. But from January 20, that changes. At that point, Musk’s behaviour must be understood in the context of information warfare from a hostile nation state.

That’s a week away and the UK parliament and half the press has been obsessively talking about the fire that Musk started rather than what that tells us about the colossal firepower he controls and the profound national security threat that poses.

This looks like a joke. It isn’t. And it’s exactly the same approach the Kremlin uses. It at least had to infiltrate an independent platform. Musk is the platform. It’s a whole new paradigm of threat.

Britain is utterly powerless against this currently. Worse, swathes of the British media actually increased the velocity and power of these threats. Meanwhile, the UK government is still refusing to even investigate foreign interference or how it works. That’s the entire thrust of the legal case I’ve helped to organsise with three MPs who are taking against the UK government: its failure to protect our right to a free and fair election.

The personal attacks against Keir Starmer, Jess Phillips and ex-prime minister Gordon Brown are exactly the the kind of witch-hunts that are going to accelerate from here. The third point in my guide “How to Survive the Broligarchy” was this:

What I didn’t anticipate is that those witch hunts would start in the UK against elected officials before Trump had even been sworn into office.

But that’s why this also goes far beyond a witch hunt. This is “foreign interference”, a fundamental threat to our sovereignty and security. Musk owns the information equivalent of an entire fleet of aircraft carriers and fighter jets. And last week he demonstrated his almost total command and control of the UK information space.

And this is all before contemplating the profound cynicism of Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that he would not no longer allow “politically biased” factcheckers to establish anything so old-fashioned as actual facts. Truth will now be outsourced to a global community of bots and trolls, state actors and highly motivated online edgelords. The first victims of this will be the most vulnerable: Muslims, women, LGBTQ, children. But it won’t stop there. No-one will be immune.

It was the open society that enabled Zuckberg to build his company, that educated his engineers and created a modern scientific country that largely obeyed the rules-based order. But that’s over. And, this week is a curtain raiser for how fast everything will change. Zuckerberg took a smashing ball this week to eight years’ worth of “trust and safety” work that has gone into trying to make social media a place fit for humans. That’s undone in a single stroke.

So much has happened in a single week, the live-time dissemination of conspiracy theories and finger-pointing blame while the LA fire is still raging is another terrifying glimpse of our infodystopian future. The biggest danger in the coming months and years will be the exhaustion of our critical faculties, our failure to withstand the noise, and to retreat into personal spaces. Certainly, no good came this week from listening to UK political coverage: much of it was, at best, witless, at worst dangerous. The BBC Today programme channelling Musk’s political agenda into the mainstream is in the second category.

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Dystopian news in brief

The Financial Times published an op-ed from Peter Thiel on Saturday. It billed Thiel, the founder of the data firm Palantir, as a “technology entrepreneur and investor” and not as the libertarian who’d bought himself a vice president: Thiel has nurtured and funded JD Vance’s career for the last decade.

He also singlemindedly set out to destroy an entire news organisation and succeeded. In 2016, it was revealed that Thiel had funded a suit brought by Hulk Hogan against Gawker Media which had published critical and intrusive reports about him. Thiel’s revenge was planned, meticulously, over many months if not years. Hogan won the case and Gawker was forced into bankruptcy.

Thiel’s piece, headlined “A Time for Truth and Reconciliation” makes the case the US government and media have colluded in a system he calls the “Distributed Idea Suppression Complex”. That is about to be smashed apart, he suggests. Information will be freed. Government files will be opened. He doesn’t mention that a million conspiracies will bloom and a witch hunt will destroy lives but that’s where this leads.

There’s no paywall on the piece, instead the Financial Times chose to publish it with a pop-up box promising it would promote “unbiased reporting” in the new era. One hopes that there is no correspondence from FT journalists when these archives are opened.

The piece dropped on Saturday morning minutes alongside news reports of Mark Zuckerberg’s outing on Joe Rogan’s show. There was a lot he had to say including that workplaces need more “masculine energy”, because that’s obviously what they’re lacking, and that 3.2 billion people engage with at least one of his apps every single day. But what really stands out is his call for a “repopulation” of the “cultural elite class”.

In fairness, he’s not the first to suggest this. China’s Cultural Revolution got there first.

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Law for change

I’ve done some questioning recently of my so-called career choices. But I don’t regret the four years of unpaid non-profit work that came out of my experience of trying - and failing - to hold Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and the UK government to account over the EU referendum, when the unlawful use of data, money and social media created a perfect storm.

It was those attempts at accountability that Mark Zuckerberg most resents. He told Joe Rogan that he certainly wouldn’t be making the mistake of apologizing as he did in the wake of the scandal or taking responsibility again.

"I kind of think in 2016 in the aftermath, I gave too much deference to a lot of folks in the media who were basically saying, OK, there's no way that [Trump] could have gotten elected except for misinformation," he said. "Some of it started with the Russia collusion stuff, but it kind of morphed into different things over time."

By “Russia collusion stuff” he means the actions of a hostile nation state that infiltrated his and other social platforms systematically from 2014. (There’s more about fyi that in episode 4 of our investigative podcast Sergei & the Westminster Spy Ring which drops tomorrow.)

Meanwhile, Jason Kint, a DC-based tracker of all tech lawsuits, flagged this week that Zuckerberg is about to be deposed - again - in one of the many still outstanding lawsuits triggered by the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The case being brought by state pension funds who invested in Facebook allege Zuckerberg lied to shareholders and overpaid the FTC $4.5 billion to cover that up.

Meanwhile the Guardian’s decision to give away the Observer brand and “transfer” out 70+ journalists to Tortoise Media is forcing some hard decisions. I’m one of another large group of journalists who are simply having our contracts cancelled, after 19 years in my case but one journalist has worked continuously and full-time for the organisation for 36 years. We’ve been told Tortoise Media is going to offer us one-year contracts on the same basis. In the meantime, I’ve been grateful to the many people I’ve met in recent years including Law for Change, a non-profit founded by Stephen Kinsella, a leading lawyer, that tackles “societal harms” through legal actions in the public interest.

Law for Change backed a case by Oxford University lecturers who sued Oxford University for its use of “sham” employment contracts. This was when an endowed multi-million pound institution kept its workers on “gig economy” contracts.

Law for Change has subsequently brought - and won - two other cases that have challenged two other companies. What they’ve proved is that the law is there to protect workers from exploitative employers, it’s just that the time, expense and aggravation involved means that most people can’t afford or have the stomach to take that route.

None of this is where I want my focus to be right now. The Guardian’s strike before Christmas and the campaign to stop the “transfer” was endlessly time-consuming and ate up thousands of collective journalistic hours. This is now another time sink. But I read this piece last week on a US journalism union organiser’s Substack, Matt Pearce. He quoted research by a journalism professor, Karin Assmann, on a wave of unionization that swept US newsrooms over the past decade and I found it cheering. Our actions are not happening in a vacuum:

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Thank you for reading

I set up this Substack in five minutes and there’s so much to figure out (the name??) but I’m so grateful for the interest and support. The matter alluded to above delayed the publication of this post so thanks for the patience but equally I want to keep my Sunday paper sensibility: to recollect emotion in tranquility, as Wordsworth put it. To try to reflect on the noise not contribute to it. Do let me know what you think. With thanks, Carole