Scroll through a Twitter feed and you can see how ‘flooding the zone with shit’ really works. Most obviously…

Scroll through a Twitter feed and you can see how ‘flooding the zone with shit’ really works. Most obviously it’s the ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ you can find there. But you don’t understand it by sticking at the level of content. /1

Flooding the zone with shit is only secondarily about *what* information is out there. The real strategy is to allow the proliferation of information. To overwhelm the capacity of people to create a coherent narrative for public life. /2

This leads to perpetual confusion. Humans don’t like being confused. And that’s how bad people win. Because once you have people perpetually confused about what to believe, you have them doubting who they can trust. /3

And that’s what the people winning in the games of power today target above all else. Trust. To destroy the hierarchies of trust in our societies, and replace them with just one. A hierarchy with their chosen ‘Great Leader’ at its apex. /4

When a population no longer defers to distributed hierarchies of expertise in all areas of life, whether on what cars to buy, what foods to eat, how to deal with infectious disease - whatever. When those hierarchies are weakened and removed, then people will crave certainty. /5

And that’s when the Great Leader with their simplistic certainties pounces. To offer a framework of certainty in ‘confusing times’. The content of a platform like this is a distraction. Adding ‘fact-checking’ just adds even more information to digest, more confusion. /6

Social media is dangerous because its actual structure creates this confusion, by default. Scrolling through your feed here, what organising principle links every post you read? Nothing, at the level of content. What structures it all is likes. Popularity. Influencers. /7

That’s what the algorithms feed, and what structures what our eyeballs see. It’s the same process the Great Leader types use. Harvesting confusion by offering structure where there is none. This endless stream of disconnected thought bubbles. /8

None of it ever adds up to action to fix anything, despite the heroic projections people use. It’s not connected or coherent. It pulverises coherence, and by doing that pulverises trust. Vacuuming up that distrust behind the calming certainty of influencers and their teams. /9

Despite the gibberish ideas about democracy of this supposed plurality of views that we supposedly should celebrate, it’s the death of democratic society. Democracy is the purposing of hierarchies of expertise, towards the common good. Not the destruction of hierarchies. /10

The elevation of snake oil salesmen to world domination. Trump took the US presidency using this platform. When they booted him off, he created his own. We’re not paying attention. /end