A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century - 13 Ways of Looking at Disinformation.

Taibbi and Greenwald have done a good job commenting on the disinfo industry, but some other guy just did a really deep dive into how it got started and where it's going. I saw Taibbi linked this the other day. He also just did an interview with him. Maybe one of you autists can really dig into the material.

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The crime is the information war itself, which was launched under false pretenses and by its nature destroys the essential boundaries between the public and private and between the foreign and domestic, on which peace and democracy depend. By conflating the anti-establishment politics of domestic populists with acts of war by foreign enemies, it justified turning weapons of war against Americans citizens. It turned the public arenas where social and political life take place into surveillance traps and targets for mass psychological operations. The crime is the routine violation of Americans’ rights by unelected officials who secretly control what individuals can think and say.

What we are seeing now, in the revelations exposing the inner workings of the state-corporate censorship regime, is only the end of the beginning. The United States is still in the earliest stages of a mass mobilization that aims to harness every sector of society under a singular technocratic rule. The mobilization, which began as a response to the supposedly urgent menace of Russian interference, now evolves into a regime of total information control that has arrogated to itself the mission of eradicating abstract dangers such as error, injustice, and harm—a goal worthy only of leaders who believe themselves to be infallible, or comic-book supervillains.

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A guide to understanding the hoax of the century.
Here a part of the interview.

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Years ago, when I first began to have doubts about the Trump-Russia story, I struggled to come up with a word to articulate my suspicions.

If the story was wrong, and Trump wasn’t a Russian spy, there wasn’t a word for what was being perpetrated. This was a system-wide effort to re-frame reality itself, which was both too intellectually ambitious to fit in a word like “hoax,” but also probably not against any one law, either. New language would have to be invented just to define the wrongdoing, which not only meant whatever this was would likely go unpunished, but that it could be years before the public was ready to talk about it.

Around that same time, writer Jacob Siegel — a former army infantry and intelligence officer who edits Tablet’s afternoon digest, The Scroll — was beginning the job of putting key concepts on paper. As far back as 2019, he sketched out the core ideas for a sprawling, illuminating 13,000-word piece that just came out this week. Called “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century: Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation,” Siegel’s Tablet article is the enterprise effort at describing the whole anti-disinformation elephant I’ve been hoping for years someone in journalism would take on.

It will escape no one’s notice that Siegel’s lede recounts the Hamilton 68 story from the Twitter Files. Siegel says the internal dialogues of Twitter executives about the infamous Russia-tracking “dashboard” helped him frame the piece he’d been working on for so long. Which is great, I’m glad about that, but he goes far deeper into the topic than I have, and in a way that has a real chance to be accessible to all political audiences.

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Matt Taibbi: What gave you the idea to do this? It’s such a huge project.

Jacob Siegel: There are whole sections from this piece that come from a draft that I started working on in 2019. I think I submitted the first version of this in late 2020. So I’ve been working on this for a long time. I moved to Israel, my son was born, shite happens, you know… I just couldn’t quite bring it all together in the original version.

I wasn’t an immediate Russiagate skeptic. I didn’t see it and immediately think, “This is bullshite.” I saw it and thought to myself, “This is exaggerated… Adam Schiff is exaggerating, but he can’t be just lying like that (laughs) in public.” Really on a very fundamental level, in terms of my unquestioned premises, I was not capable of believing that an American national elected official could lie that brazenly, or that the intelligence agencies, which I knew to be corrupt and inefficient in a billion different ways, could be involved in a grand sort of conspiracy. It seemed too farfetched.

Adam Schiff is a weird guy to be responsible for lifting the veil, because he’s such a schmuck. But realizing that he just kept lying over and over, something clicked for me. Probably the next big turning point was the Russian bounty story. I wrote a piece on that for Tablet at the time, and there was no going back from that.

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