Robert Anton Wilson as media critic

‘At times, the media seems so creepy I almost
believe that theory.’ – RAW, in letter, 1995*

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My modest Robert Anton Wilson-inspired attempts at media criticism, in the pre-infobahn days of DIY zines, sort of shifted me away from grandiose, overarching attacks on the press (aka “populism”) to a preference for example-focused forays with a more satirical/surreal intent.

But the sweeping, overgeneralising style – cue video: “Russell Brand Destroys MSM!” – often gets the loudest cheers and fastest up-ranking. The broader the “takedown” of “The Media Narrative”, the more “ballsy”, uncompromising and indicative of “integrity” it evidently seems to fans of this approach. To my present sensibilities, though, it looks corny, clickbaity and one step from demagogic. (As if the bigger the semantic sweep, the more “boss” the circuit-2 credentials).

Yes, folks – I think Wilson’s “sombunall” applies to “the media”, as to other collective abstractions. Perhaps more so in some ways, since we’re talking about a realm of “communication” rather than anything imaginable as concrete entities or entity. (And: “No two brains are totally alike, just as no two fingerprints are.” – RAW, Everything is Under Control, intro).

Incidentally, those attention-grabbing war metaphors for criticism (“TAKEDOWN”, “ANNIHILATES”, “DESTROYS”, etc) apparently boost algorithm ranking dramatically on Youtube. So, in the competition for numbers, we end up getting “Elon Musk Just DESTROYED What Was Left Of The MSM’s Credibility” and “Economist DESTROYS Tory Budget”, etc. (Owen Jones, the UK journalist who posted the latter, admits he puts “DESTROYS” in his video titles because it gets him a larger audience).

So it goes. Strongman metaphors and dumb generalisations. To quote Wilson: ‘the rumour that a political candidate might be a Third Circuit “thinker” rather than a Second Circuit “bully” is enough to defeat any candidate.’ (RAW, The Starseed Signals).

WARNING: This post gets more “opinionated” as it goes along.
Divergences of view welcome, as ever…

“Mainstream”

RAW appeared to dislike the term, “mainstream media”, which he called a “cliché”. But he recognized that we must generalise at times, and he sometimes referred to “the major media” or “mass media”. Occasionally he wrote of the “corporate media” (especially in TSOG). And once or twice I’ve seen him refer to “the respectable media”, “the popular media” or “official media”. But not so much (if at all) “the mainstream media”, and I think a broad scrutiny of his oeuvre would show that he doesn’t really go in for the kind of one-word-fits-all damning characterisation of “The Media” that now seems common.

A section in TSOG, titled, ‘Daddy, What Does “Corporate Media” mean?’, noted that 80% of US news outlets were corporate owned (at that time), listing the ownership of CNN, ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC (info he sourced from democrats.com). Of all RAW’s books, TSOG seems to contain the most generalisations of “the media” (with the possible exception of Everything Is Under Control). An example: “I just don’t like the lynch-mob stink that our media always emits when somebody gets accused of a major felony.” Here, he’s comparing the US (“our”) media to Irish media (TSOG, ‘Irish Mist’). He uses “the major media” (once) and “the corporate media” (several times) in TSOG, but not “the mainstream media”.

Another example from TSOG:

‘A rival “leftish” view, banned from the corporate media but widely available on Internet, holds that the world does not consist entirely of endless enemies, but does contain many, many peoples who want to get out from under the heel of the IMF, the World Bank and the multi-nationals.’ – RAW, TSOG

Again, I think he refers here to US corporate media. You could find this “leftish” view represented in some British and European “corporate media” – although still a relatively low circulation section of those media. For example, the UK’s Guardian, Mirror, and Independent (before it was sold to a Russian oligarch’s company in 2010), if you can call those “corporate”.

“The Media” as conspiracy

The popularity of the idea of Grand Takedown (eg of the “Mainstream Media”) overlaps the viral spread of Big Conspiracy Theories (“The Great Reset”, Alex Jones and QAnon spring to mind, but not only them). In the genius intro to Everything Is Under Control (EIUC), RAW comments that conspiracy theories tend to mutate from relatively rational example-based constructs to stark raving over-generalisations that rely on big collective nouns and other semantic abstractions.

‘Nonetheless, most existing conspiracy theories tend to move toward the hypothesis of the fungibility of the devil-group’ – RAW, EIUC (intro)

The same tendency appears often with criticism of the media. Bob in fact warns of seeing “The Media” as a conspiracy in this way. He comments on “patterns” and “biases” he’d noticed in media coverage of certain figures – he cites Marlon Brando, Eddie Murphy, Orson Welles and Timothy Leary as examples – and then adds, “You can’t look at this as a conspiracy. If you look at it as a conspiracy, literally, it becomes preposterous.” (Trajectories #16/17, from an article in which he writes about his experiences on Bill Maher’s ‘Politically Incorrect’ show, Autumn 1996).

EIUC also features an entry titled, ‘Media Criticized: General’, which recounts a speech supposedly given in 1953 by a former chief of staff of the New York Times, one “John Swinton”. This speech asserts, as factual, some conspiracy tropes: “The business of journalists is to destroy the truth; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of mammon… We are the tools and vessels for rich men behind the scenes…”

As RAW notes, the “1953” quote from Swinton has been exposed as fake (NYT employed no such person during that time). But, as most agents of disinformation know, effective fakes typically contain an element of truth, and it seems that a “preeminent New York journalist”, one John Swinton (1829-1901), may have said something very similar around 1880. I’ll leave that for others to investigate (a 1955 book, Labor’s Untold Story, by Richard Boyer and Herbert Morais, seems the main source). If accurate, it would illustrate to me only that these Big Conspiracy tropes have been around for a long time, long pre-dating modern media.

Conspiracy trivia: “The Mighty Wurlitzer” – a metaphor for the CIA’s influence on public opinion via various fronts and agents embedded in media organisations. Coined reportedly by CIA official Frank Wisner.

EIUC has many references to the CIA (over a hundred, including entries that mention its cocaine smuggling business, LSD research, James Jesus Angleton, and Bob Woodward’s book, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA: 1981—1987). But it doesn’t mention CIA’s influence on media. I wonder if RAW considered that topic hackneyed (like the “Mainstream Media” term)?

For a brief summary of “The Mighty Wurlitzer” that contains actual details/specifics (names of CIA-associated journalists, dates, etc), as opposed to merely broad assertions, see Mark Zepezauer’s short 1994 book, The CIA’s Greatest Hits. Meanwhile, the hypergeneralised form (popularised by folks such as Glenn Greenwald, who wrote: “NBC News and MSNBC have essentially merged with the CIA”) seems overdone on social media, almost to the point of banality. The problem with that: virtually anyone can be arbitrarily included in these big, undifferentiating conspiratorial sweeps – as you might recall, both Wilson and Leary were at times accused of working for the CIA (to Bob’s amusement).

Interlude: Trajectories on media

RAW’s Trajectories journals frequently featured mini-extracts from news media, accompanied by RAW’s unpredictable (and thus great fun) commentary. Later issues contain some fascinating remarks on media censorship – or rather the impossibility of it – in cyberspace (which I visit below). Not all of the Trajectories content got included in the two book compilations, incidentally. Occasionally, RAW commented on “the media”, itself, in critical terms. Here are a couple of examples, which provide quite different takes:

‘Editor Bob Banner prints almost anything, no matter how far right or far left, if it challenges the Liberal Consensus of our mass media. Provocative, irritating, amusing and absolutely unique.’ – RAW, review of Critique journal, Trajectories #2, 1988

‘According to the Center for Media and Public Affairs, the three major TV networks have shown a clear anti-Clinton bias in nearly two-thirds of all news, as compared to a 51/49 split in coverage of George Bush during his term in office. Virtually no bias in favor of Clinton’s health plan appeared, although much bias against it did… Freedom of the press, evidently, still belongs to those who own the press.’ – RAW, Trajectories #14, 1995, citing Washington Spectator, 1 October 1994

“Censorship”

‘You can publish anything you want on the Net, under the present laws, and it’s hard to believe in any form of censorship that would really work effectively.’ – RAW, Trajectories #16/17

RAW remarked (on several occasions) that he loved Internet (which he sometimes capitalised, without “the”) because “it” made censorship virtually impossible to enforce. Yet reading some prominent media critics today, you might almost think the internet enabled censorship more than any media technology before it. At the very least, “censorship” has become one of the loudest and most frequently-voiced criticisms of online media. One can cite countless examples – from Tucker Carlson and Trump to Matt Taibbi, Joe Rogan, Glenn Greenwald, Russell Brand and Elon Musk (not to mention many others in the influential “rightwing” blogosphere), regularly making online media “censorship” their main talking point. What’s going on?

‘… decentralization has increased as more and more systems have entered the Net. Any attempt at censorship would quickly become as funny as the kind of Three Stooges routine where Curly, Larry and Moe all run around plugging holes in a water pipe and more and more water pours out of more and more new holes.’ – RAW, Life and Death on the Infobahn, Trajectories #14, 1995

Despite the current noise about it, I think Wilson appears correct: the trajectory of media evolution makes “censorship” (original sense) look increasingly an unenforceable practice – outside autocratic regimes (and even they find it virtually impossible to enforce, as RAW noted when musing on an August 1994 Christian Science Monitor article about Saudi Arabia “wigging out” over their inability to stop anti-regime internet propaganda – Trajectories #15). Many of the folks who regularly agitate about “censorship” – together with the material they get most agitated over (Hunter Biden’s laptop? Anti-vax?) – rack up huge audiences (sometimes in the millions), pointing to a remarkably ineffective form of “censorship” (not to mention support of RAW’s thesis).

‘Let the censors set up a hundred blocks, a thousand – the signal will find another path.’ – RAW, Trajectories #14

Project Censored, which RAW cited a few times (eg see Trajectories #15 item on secret radiation testing) currently list as their #1 censored story, the following: ‘#1 Fossil Fuel Industry Subsidized at Rate of $11 Million per Minute… Fossil fuel companies received $5.9 trillion in subsidies in 2020, with support projected to rise to $6.4 trillion by 2025…’ (Project Censored, 23 November 2022).

This sort of makes RAW’s point for him. Project Censored apparently made this their #1 censored story because the US “corporate media” didn’t cover it – which seems pretty creepy. But for anyone with an internet connection, the full details were always one click away – on the IMF website, and in a well-publicised Guardian article (which had literally hundreds of tweets linking to it, and from which it seems Projected Censored got their info in the first place).

It looks weirder when you realise that “corporate media” increasingly take their cues from online/social media. Indeed, ever since Facebook prioritised “news” in its feed, they can’t afford not to. This affects both selection of stories and framing (since they have to compete with online/social media’s clickbaity style). So if the story was already “out there”, via the Guardian and social media, why didn’t US “corporate media” also run it? (Assuming Project Censored‘s survey was thorough).

‘In 1984, there was no web; governments had total control of information. In 2022 things are more transparent, so we see imperfections. THE TRANSPARENCY EFFECT: the more things improve the worse they look.’ – Nassim Taleb, on Twitter

So, weird stuff still happens in the colossally nebulous evolving abstraction known as “the media”. But it seems increasingly old (and unrealistic) to see these things in terms of “censorship” and “free speech”. That dichotomy looks inadequate and anachronistic when the supposedly “censored” material exists one click away – available to all, globally, instantly.

‘Nobody can successfully censor the Infobahn.’

RAW, Life and Death on the Infobahn, Trajectories #14, 1995

“Puritan malice” in media/censorship

‘Only a World Government (the last thing wanted by the right-wing smut-hounds who long for censorship) might have a chance to block the info-torrent; and even that seems doubtful.’ – RAW, Trajectories #14

Many of RAW’s references to media censorship addressed puritanical suppression. This reflects the early era in which Bob wrote – when conservative attitudes dominating much of the US (and UK) media included offence over “obscenity”, “dirty” words, “indecency”, etc. (More recently, a bleeped on-air joke about Trump and Putin led to thousands of complaints to the FCC).

But the “indecent” signal won’t be stopped. As RAW remarks, “It will search the Net for another path to its destination… it also simply will not let itself get blocked by mere puritan malice.” (Trajectories #14). Bob cited the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (originally 1995), from senators Exon and Gorton. This attempted to regulate obscenity and indecency in cyberspace, although legal changes over the years apparently limited it to sections covering children. Here’s how RAW commented in 1995:

‘Some, of course, still think censorship can work in Cyberspace. Two such idiots happen to sit in the U.S. Senate and they (Senators Exon and Gorton) have come up with a bill, S.314, that even surpasses our “war on drugs” in the number of ways it destroys individual freedom, violates the Constitution and creates an endless boondoggle (due to its unenforceability).’ – RAW, Trajectories #14 (RAW’s parenthesis, but my bold emphasis of it).

“Freedom”, “level playing fields” & AI ranking

Note that “ranking” (algorithm) and “reach” (audience) refer to something fundamentally other than what people generally have in mind with media issues framed as “free speech” vs “censorship”. This seems one area where RAW’s wording perhaps doesn’t ring true, in hindsight. He describes the internet as “the first mass media where everyone has an equal chance” (Trajectories #16/17), reflecting the “levelling the playing field” cyber-optimism of the time. Jaron Lanier also commented on this – that nobody predicted how Big Investment would later move in and re-calibrate accessibility of web content according to profit-ranking.

With Google search, the shift seemed noticeable (my legacy 1998 website, anxietyculture.com, which I built from scratch in HTML, was getting a million “unique visits” a year – mainly because it was listed near the top of Google searches for phrases such as “how do I stop worrying?”! That dropped off, and wouldn’t happen with the current search algorithm, no siree). And then, of course, the “free” mobile-app, social-media business model arrived, with AI-driven algorithms determining content amplification and ranking in unforeseeable ways…

‘Up until the Internet, the First Amendment had the practical defect pointed out by the Marxists: “Freedom of the press belongs to those who own the press.” Freedom of the Internet in contrast belongs to anyone who buys a computer and a modem.’ – RAW, Trajectories #16/17

So, Bob remarks that freedom of the Net belongs to anyone with a Net connection – in contrast to earlier media, whose freedom was enjoyed only by the owners. But that new freedom hasn’t translated to “an equal chance” or “an equal voice”. Not exactly. Interestingly, Bob continued:

‘One problem that does come up is the signal-to-noise ratio of the Internet, once everyone has an equal voice. But you’ve got your choice. It’s like television, only more so. You don’t have to stay tuned to one channel.’ – RAW, Trajectories #16/17

And:

‘Another self-correcting problem is bad data. If everyone has an equal say, how do you separate good data from bad?… But the enormous numbers of people online can correct even bad data… So even if the amount of BS that gets online runs pretty high, the amount of corrections that follow it run much higher than any medium.’ – RAW, Trajectories #16/17

The self-correction of bad data, of online BS, seems like another optimistic forecast that hasn’t quite panned out. But not because of censorship. Good, accurate data, even when inconvenient to powerful interests, doesn’t get stopped (successfully “censored”) on the internet – as RAW rightly predicted/noted. But it might end up effectively de-ranked out of influential circulation – by profit algorithms or something more sinister that “games” them (while BS gets amplified out of all proportion). Which nobody predicted, or at least not quite in the way it happened. Consider:

• Youtube’s recommendation engine pushed videos by Alex Jones 15 billion times, according to ex-Google engineer Guillaume Chaslot.
• Viral election falsehoods on Facebook outperformed all top stories from 19 major news outlets combined in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.
• An MIT study published in Science found that on Twitter, falsehood spreads “significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth, in all categories of information, and in many cases by an order of magnitude.“

A lot of people (including RAW) thought, and still think, that Big Money running political elections seems a very bad thing. We might also consider that Big Money running AI-driven media platforms seems a very bad thing (given its political influence). And when I think of Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, I admire their business-running skills, but then recall this quote from the first chapter of RAW’s Prometheus Rising:

‘Businessmen are allegedly hard-nosed, pragmatic and “objective” in this sense. A brief examination of the dingbat politics most businessmen endorse will quickly correct that impression.’

RAW, Prometheus Rising

And I suspect that some of the most prominent Substackers, who earn six-figure sums writing articles about “censorship” (mostly about “liberal” online “censorship” – they don’t seem very concerned by Republican-run US states prohibiting books in schools, etc), have their eye more on macro-level platform “ranking” than on “censorship”, per se. One of the giveaways for me – the partisan issues with which their concerns about “censorship” usually seem framed.

(Incidentally, I’m not against AI, per se, in media or anywhere else. We’re talking here about the dominant dysfunctional-toxic AI media business model. I’m looking forward to reading a full-length version of RAW’s The Tale of the Tribe, written by AI, with a final edit by knowledgeable humans!)

New forms of media criticism

‘Only those aware of the speed with which new techniques are appearing can appreciate the seriousness of this question…’ – RAW, The Starseed Signals

Having followed many different critiques of “the media” since the 1980s, I think the criticism has generally evolved less than the media itself. RAW’s futurist takes always enthused me, and I loved the way he incorporated new metaphors (eg from the latest science and technology) into his thinking. For example, he and Leary used chaos theory metaphors for describing social transformations, and information technology metaphors for the human nervous system. Maybe we need a major injection of new metaphors into popular “media criticism”, so it can “catch up” with media technology evolution, and end the regression to Fox-level framing. (The Tale of the Tribe looked like something new along these lines, and RAW recommended Paul Levinson’s book, Digital McLuhan, and I’d recommend his follow-up, McLuhan in an Age of Social Media. Or you could always check out my new book on media framing for a different perspective).

One of the most forward-looking media critics, for me, Jaron Lanier, wrote an influential book – Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts – which I’ve been enthusiastically pushing, for some time, as the most insightful critique of social media currently available. I did a search of Jaron’s book for the following terms:

“Censor”/”censorship” (and all variants) – ZERO mentions
“Surveillance” (and all variants) – 6 mentions
“BUMMER” – 317 mentions

So, Jaron doesn’t mention “censorship” at all, and he mentions “surveillance” only a few times, even though “surveillance capitalism” has become a popular designator for part of the problem he describes in his book. Instead, he uses his own acronym (“BUMMER”) to refer to the new forms of social media behaviour modification and the AI business model that profits.**

I would contend, or guess, that he doesn’t (much) use the old, top-down frames of “censorship” and “surveillance” because they deflect from, interfere with, or occlude, our understanding of the new forms of AI micro-behaviour nudging and reality-tunnel shaping. This new, currently ubiquitous media technology – collectively labelled “BUMMER” – requires fresh understandings, new conceptual metaphors and models, which we currently lack. Most people, including myself, probably don’t really “get” it yet – even if they have watched Netflix’s The Social Dilemma. That lack of familiar comprehension – a phenomenon known to cognitive scientists as “hypocognition” – brings to mind the Josiah Warren quote that RAW seemed fond of: “It is dangerous to understand new things too quickly.”

Meanwhile, those who want greater “reach” (and/or more money), and who resort to clickbait, populist soundbites, etc, necessarily (statistically speaking) use well-established concepts and clichés that connect with audiences instantaneously. Semantic regression by stealth, over a statistical distribution.

‘… few aside from Dr. Leary realize that this issue will become the most important social debate of all as we progress further into “the neurological age”.’ – RAW, The Starseed Signals

STOP PRESS: a censorship conspiracy?

Hat-tip to Chad Nelson for making me aware of “The Censorship Industrial Complex“ – Michael Shellenberger’s testimony to the Republican-chaired US “House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government” (labelled the tin foil hat committee by some). This is a little off-topic, but I found it a fascinating example of the kind of conspiracy literature that now passes as credible in some MAGA/Republican circles. And since it combines themes of media censorship and conspiracy…

At first glance, Shellenberger’s document looks impressive and ominous, seemingly full of citations of government-associated/funded groups forming a giant, sinister “complex” of censorship. On closer reading, I recognised a familiar kind of conspiriologic that many of you will be acquainted with – unsupported hyperbolic assertions as the rule rather than the exception, various kinds of link, association, funding or shared interest/affinity, eg with the by-definition nefarious government, framed as conspiracy, and various kinds of “involvement”: regulation, moderation, “fact-checking”, flagging of content origins, “psychological manipulation”, vague “pressure” to boycott, measures to “deamplify”, even just straight research on countering misinformation, apparently all fair game for branding as “censorship”. (In this way Shellenberger labels as “censorship advocates” people who don’t actually advocate censorship at all).

As an example of the latter, Shellenberger cites the National Science Foundation’s funding of various scientific research on countering misinformation, and writes: “NSF justifies its censorship program as a way to defend civilization”. So, somehow, “research program” becomes “censorship program” in Shellenberger’s mind, even though he cites no examples of censorship or recommendations for censorship from NSF. He continues: “NSF repeats the central claim of the censorship industrial complex that the Internet requires censorship.“ But NSF says no such thing – not even close. See for yourself – pages 8/9. If you can make what Shellenberger quotes from NSF match what Shellenberger ominously asserts about NSF, I would consider you a better magician than Orson Welles.

Another example that’s easy to check: Shellenberger claims that someone called Chris Krebs (former CISA Director) “advocated for censoring critics of government COVID-19 protocols”, and points to a Youtube video as source for this claim. I watched the video – nowhere in it does Krebs advocate for censoring, or anything close. So what does he advocate? Greater platform transparency. Maybe he advocates for censorship in a different video, and Shellenberger got the links mixed up? Well, no – you don’t make mistakes like that consistently, as Shellenberger seems to. This sloppiness, bordering on dishonesty (I’m being charitable here), characterises most of Shellenberger’s document – but don’t take my word for it, check the “censorship” rhetoric to see if it’s supported by the footnote links. Why has it been taken seriously, by a “House Judiciary Select Subcommittee”, no less? Inevitably, given the wild, conspiratorial accusations flying, there have been some interesting responses from people Shellenberger has accused of “censorship”.

The irony of this Big Conspiracy framing of online censorship, for me, is that in the small subset of cases where one can actually demonstrate that “censorship” (of a kind) took place, the “censors” – Twitter employees – felt they were responding to something far more serious: organised disinformation campaigns that effectively exploited the algorithms to nudge electoral outcomes. I take the latter kind of thing seriously after the intervention of AIQ (Canadian branch of SCL, parent company of Cambridge Analytica) in the Brexit referendum in Britain. The official Vote Leave campaign, that was found guilty of breaking electoral law, reportedly spent 40% of its budget on AIQ (also known as AggregateIQ). This seemed to be what you would call “a real conspiracy”, in RAW’s terms – with receipts, bank accounts, criminal charges, etc. Thus the irony: research on how to counter this kind of thing, including research funded by government, gets branded as part of a Deep State Plot or “Censorship Industrial Complex”, or whatever.

If only a fraction of the people who read the unconvincing, overhyped “Twitter Files” were to read, say, the far more (to my mind) explosive and important MIndf*ck – Christopher Wylie’s eye-opening account of the democracy-undermining work he undertook with SCL and Cambridge Analytica – then the “public discourse” might actually start to shift from old Fox-type talking points to something more relevantly 21st century. (Wylie, like Jaron Lanier, regards the “moderation problems”, or “censorship”, as merely symptoms of the underlying terrible design of the platforms that work to a toxic business model).

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🔜 Stay tuned for Part 2 of this post – including RAW & Chomsky on war media…

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The banner graphic refers to RAW’s famous quote: “if you think you know what the hell is going on, you’re probably full of shit.”

* The quote is from a 1995 letter from RAW to me. The theory about the media that he mentions relates to a conspiratorial framing of the anxiety-inducing aspects of mass media, which I’d written about in Anxiety Culture, and which he’d also noted from some New York radicals.

** “BUMMER” – Jaron Lanier’s acronym for “Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent.”