Winning the Information War by Accepting How the Battlefield is Shaped

Context collapse is the new weapon. Plus: a CBS Special Presentation; how to buy a mayoral seat; and the passing of a king

Happy Thanksgiving. Full disclosure: I don’t know how this issue is going to turn out. Like a lot of you, I was shaken by the passing of Chuck Woolery at age 83. Thank you to the many friends who reached out to make sure I was okay.

One of our friendly little inside jokes

Although I never met the legend, I did forge a touching and emotionally gratifying relationship with him on Twitter in the ‘10s, and I was sad to see him delete his account in 2020 when his son was hospitalized with COVID right after Chuck shared some COVID conspiracy tweets. Chuck was a solid paleo-con poster who loved guns and hated taxes, and frequently engaged with people who disagreed with him. We had several interactions, and the one above was my favorite. (I had just informed him that the Federal Reserve was not in fact a federal agency.)

Rest well, King.

In honor of Chuck, I deleted all my tweets. It wasn’t very hard. Here’s a video with step-by-step instructions, if you want to try it.

In the meantime, if you’re on BlueSky, find me there.

The Internet was a Mistake We Have to Learn to Live With

source

In the summer of ‘94, I was visiting a friend on my drive back to college. As his mom served dinner in their backyard, she asked me, “What do you know about the Internet? Is it going to be important? Should I try to get on it?”

I don’t remember how I answered the question, but I’ll never forget how she pronounced it: “in-TURN-it.” At that point the ‘Net had become a subject of fascination among the news weeklies, but they couldn’t teach us how to say it.

Like a lot of people my age, I’d been messing around on the In-TURN-it without calling it that. Since the 1980s, I’d been on Usenet and services like Prodigy and Compuserve, which weren’t really the internet but were very exciting because you could communicate on a computer. It was impossible to know back then exactly what this would do to the media and to us.

In the decades since, we’ve watched “the news” evolve from a daily meal to a candy machine, which has frayed the average citizen’s grasp of reality. For a long time we enjoyed and suffered a consensus manufactured by a few TV networks and newspapers, all controlled by a class of rich men with richer fathers.

That’s all been obliterated. As we covered here last week, middle-aged and older liberals seem to be the last to comprehend the change, because we’re still performatively critiquing the framing of CNN headlines and announcing we’ve canceled our subscriptions to the Times and the Post. Meanwhile, the Internet has proved an extinction-level event for newspapers and TV, and the rest of the world long moved on to the wild wild Internet.

Ronnie Chieng had a bit in his Netflix standup show five years ago about how the Internet was obviously making us stupider: “In 50 years, we’re going to look at the internet the way we look at smoking right now.”

This prescient routine was recorded in 2019, before COVID exposed how the Internet, the profit motive, and humanity could combine into a toxic cocktail. Last night I went looking for an old NFL clip, but first I had to watch Candace Owens sell livestock dewormer in case I might want to take it myself for a human disease. Where did demand for Ivermectin come from? The Internet, the profit motive, and humanity.

Owens has 6M Twitter followers, 3M YouTube subscribers, 5.7M Facebook fans, and millions of podcast listeners across platforms. Her videos consistently get more views than the average CNN prime time show. She’s also selling animal medicine as a folk cure for the next pandemic virus, because that’s appealing to her audience. Here I am, presenting it to Rangelife readers with horror and fascination.

There’s a name for this. Today an increasingly common source of misinformation isn’t straight-out lies, but context collapse, when “a piece of information intended for one audience finds its way to another… with that new audience's reaction being uncharitable and highly negative for failing to understand the original context.”

Context collapse was coined in the 1980s TV/radio era, and we really started to see it on the internet during the 2000s Web 2.0/blogging era. That era was formative for the fragmentation of media. It was also the dawn of digital context collapse. Here’s an example from that era, when an innocent TV segment became a vicious internet dogpile.

In 2007, the hostesses of The View were discussing evolution and creation. It’s easy to generate heat from this conversation if that’s your objective, by reducing it to a polarized either-or. (It was, in fact, Barbara Walters’ objective.) But for a lot of people evolution-or-creation is a false dichotomy: Perhaps an unknowable God is guiding the evolution of species, or the Biblical creation story is “true” as allegory if not literally factual, or everything is a big-ass mystery and it’s hubris to even to consider that our puny monkey-minds can comprehend the universe over billions of years.

This discussion on The View generated a moment that caused a stir in the media. When Joy Behar asked Sherri Shepherd whether the world was flat or round, Shepherd replied “I don’t know. I never thought about it.” Instead she said she thought about how she’s going to feed her kid.

The clip went viral, and people mercilessly mocked Shepherd for this. Why is she so stupid? (If only we knew how mainstream actual flat-earthism would become.)

I hadn’t actually watched the full segment until this week. It’s a lot more nuanced than I knew, which shouldn’t be surprising. To start the segment, Whoopi Goldberg explains clearly and passionately her belief system that accepts both the observable facts of evolution and the spiritual guidance of a higher power. Very mainstream and normal! Shepherd’s POV is that she’s too concerned with her daily life to think about science, and her faith does that for her.

Now, where did this collapsed context come from? Someone — probably a blogger — was watching this show and thought it would be funny to pull this out of context for their reality-based audience. Nothing is truly organic on the Internet; it always starts with someone influential making a deal out of something in order to drive attention to themselves.

To be fair, Shepherd deserves a little mockery for this answer, if only because as co-host of a very influential television show, it was literally her job to think and talk about topics that are bigger than feeding her kid. “I don’t know, I’m too busy being a parent” isn’t an acceptable answer to almost any question you’re asked on a talk show.

On the other hand, Shepherd was reflecting the perspective of much of America, which was somehow incredibly busy and exhausted but also watching 4.5 hours of TV a day. Ironically, in 2007, TV shows like The View were still constructing our reality. It was averaging almost 4 million viewers on weekday mornings, which were more viewers than all the cable news channels attract combined in prime time these days. In 2007, TV news and newspapers were in decline, but most people still sought news out. And sometimes that news was The View.

Most people don’t really really seek news out like that anymore. In last week’s New Yorker, Nathan Heller asked if the last decade has taught us that “big, sloppy notions seeded nationwide” were actually more powerful than the microtargeting of information. For example, Trump’s ideas like “immigration is the cause of our hardships” seemed to break through in a way that Harris’s many attempts at “This policy will help you, [specific demographic group]” did not.

Planting ideas this way isn’t argument, and it’s not emotional persuasion. It’s about seeding the ambience of information, throwing facts and fake facts alike into an environment of low attention, with the confidence that, like minnows released individually into a pond, they will eventually school and spawn. Notions must add up to a unified vision but also be able to travel on their own, because that’s how information moves in a viral age… The communications researcher Pablo Boczkowski has noted that people increasingly take in news by incidental encounter—they are “rubbed by the news”—rather than by seeking it out. Trump has maximized his influence over networks that people rub against, and has filled them with information that, true or not, seems all of a coherent piece.

Policy briefs and microtargeted information still require people to pay attention, and that attention is harder than ever to earn. And Trump is the GOAT of earning attention in an environment where the news mostly just rubs up against people while they’re trying to do something else. He’s not a sorcerer — he’s just following a playbook that most people don’t want to play.

A week before the election, The Atlantic published a story about the weird final month of the Trump campaign, when his rhetoric got darker and his Q&As became David Lynch-ian dance parties. Trump’s inner circle argued over whether he should exercise message discipline or just be a weirdo, and Trump resolved it by rhetorically asking “What’s discipline got to do with winning?” Trump’s entire career going back to the 1980s was just vibing his way into people’s brains, even when he was pretending to be his own publicist. He was already massively famous, a fixture in rap songs and bestseller lists, before The Apprentice. Even if you didn’t seek Trump out, he rubbed by you when you were doing something else.

We’re constantly being persuaded or confirmed by PR campaigns that rub by us. I saw a reply tweet on X from a bot account about how the critics agreed the new Kendrick album was bad, and Kendrick didn’t have 1% of the class and masculinity of the great Drake. This account — whose owner paid Elon for unlimited posting — had shared this sentiment across all manner of reply threads. Was this a Drake fanboy? Was it someone Drake hired? Was it Drake Himself? (The latter possibility seems completely plausible given all we know about Drake.)

Have you ever said about an upcoming movie, “I heard it was supposed to be good”? I’m sure I have said those exact words. But from whom did we hear it was “supposed to be good”? Almost always a PR agency.

Let’s be clear: microtargeting isn’t dead. One of the fallacies of election post-mortems is the assumption that the winner did everything right and the loser did everything wrong, and that’s why it turned out that way. As someone who works in marketing, I can assure you that hammering people with a personalized message still works, and clever people are always innovating with it in new ways.

For example, a superPAC funded by Elon Musk ran a campaign of deceptive online ads in the weeks leading up to the election. Some of these targeted progressives, criticizing Harris for not following through on Medicare for All. Others targeted moderates but looked like they were targeting progressives, “thanking” her for supporting, say, free health care for undocumented immigrants. This was engineered fake context collapse, content that was meant to look like it was for someone else.

Deceptive ad created by pro-Trump group and funded by Elon Musk

And if you’re wondering why so many people think that Elon Musk is actually a Godlike hero, it could be because Facebook is lousy with fake content positioning him as the world’s greatest genius philanthropist. He can’t wait to cure your disease or sell you a $9,000 house.

All this makes it infuriating to hear Democratic post-mortems that either (a) blame the media (again) for failing to do their jobs, or (b) wonder why Democrats don’t simply do what Republicans do. (“Where’s the Joe Rogan of the left?”) The reason why conservatives are winning the new information war is because they withdrew from reality-building journalism decades ago and built their own, while Democrats continued to focus exclusively on the remnants of that old legacy media, even as they remained the last people to pay attention to it.

Thirty years ago, my friend’s mom wanted to know if she should get on the In-TURN-it. I’m not sure what she would have found of interest then, but it’s possible that today she’s an 80-year-old liking AI slop on Facebook. Or maybe she’s running a top page for Buffy fans and developing Bluesky APIs.

But I prefer to imagine that she’s instead cooking up the media strategy for an equitable, democratic future, one that sees the world for what it is, instead of complaining that it’s not how they remember it.

Rangelife Shorts

Campaign spending, part 1: The new crypto PAC FairShake spent more money than the other top 20 business PACs combined, and their candidates had an amazing win rate. If you’re wondering why crypto has been skyrocketing since the election, it’s because the industry just bought a lot of policy designed to make the line go up.

Red = “Thanks, Dad”

Campaign spending, part 2: SF just had the most apathetic mayoral election in memory. I asked everybody I knew in SF whom they were supporting for the past six months, and nobody liked anyone. The eventual winner was Daniel Lurie, whose sole qualification was running a local nonprofit that he founded with inherited money. If you want to understand why the SF mayoral race ended the way it did, the campaign spending chart above tells the story. The big red bar in the chart is entirely “cash that Daniel Lurie inherited from his stepfather.”

The iconic CBS Special bumper. If you’re over 45, just seeing this animation should get you excited. Something amazing is about to happen. Did you know the music is a sample from Hawaii 5-0?

IMG_0001: When I worked at YouTube in the early ‘10s, most videos were uploaded from digital cameras, and YouTube didn’t make you enter a title. So YouTube is full of millions of videos from the digital camera era with their default filenames as titles. This website lets you take a spin through this era when people were really living la vida Broadcast Yourself.

Budget lookalikes: I spent about an hour the other night scrolling through Walmart Celebrities, a subreddit of photos of people who look approximately like celebs, either unintentionally or otherwise. (If this were a newer sub, they’d have called it Temu Celebrities.) My favorite was Snapes on a Plane.

Can You Take a Photo of Us? A very good YouTube comedy sketch that goes some unexpected places.

Powerpoint was Better in the 1980s. A gorgeous slide deck from the Department of Defense about Soviet military capabilities. They did this astonishingly well without computer graphics.

Actual robot uprising. What if the AI, instead of killing us, just decides to quit their shitty jobs?

Pokemon uprising. Niantic, the company that makes Pokemon Go, has announced a “large geospatial model to achieve spatial intelligence.” In summary, they’re taking the massive amount of location data they’ve acquired and building a model that can see a picture and instantly locate where it is, sometimes even if this area has never been photographed before. Only for good, I’m sure. Pikachu, nooooooo.