It’s been a challenge this week to think about much beyond last week’s debate (and its aftermath) and even more importantly1, the SCOTUS decision to overturn the Chevron deference doctrine. But those aren’t the narratives to which my title refers; instead, I wanted to write a little bit about Annalee Newitz’s Stories are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, which I read this week. Newitz is a science journalist, the founder of io9, and a science fiction writer—in fact, I’d read their book The Terraformers fairly recently, so I was curious to pick up Stories.
I’ve got a couple of other disinformation books on my to-read pile, so it’s possible that I’ll come back to Newitz once I have a chance to crack them. When I finished up Stories are Weapons, though, I found myself a little nonplussed. This isn’t to say that the book doesn’t have some strengths—it may be a function of the reading I’ve been doing over the past year that I didn’t react as strongly as I might have.
The book is laid out in three main sections. The first (“Psyops”) is mostly historical, focusing on the fact that the weaponization of story is embedded deeply and thoroughly throughout the history of the United States. Newitz draws on the explicit psyop work of the US military, weaves it with developments in advertising and marketing, and links it to operations both recent and distant. “Military psyops exist on a continuum with advertising and popular media,” they explain, and the early chapters of the book demonstrate this, with a solid discussion of the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica fiasco as well as the process by which the US dispossessed, disenfranchised, and all but destroyed its indigenous populations.
They signal the second section of the book by explaining that “Psychological warfare in the time of stochastic terrorism has morphed into culture war—the battleground shrouds America in its fog, regardless of whether we are formal combatants.” The section itself (“Culture Wars”) is basically a series of case studies. Newitz spends a chapter each on the datawashing of eugenics in the Bell Curve (and its knock-on effects), the post-hoc politicization of pride stickers at a Texas high school, and the moral panic surrounding the comics industry in the 2nd half of the 20th century (particularly as it related to William Moulton Marston’s work on Wonder Woman. Insofar as we might describe these as episodes, what they have in common is a fundamental tactic of culture warfare, the move to other a particular group of people, declare them enemies, and then subject them to a campaign of “moral hygiene.”
If this seems like an odd set of case studies, I wouldn’t disagree with that assessment. But then, I’m also not sure what a more representative set would be. One of the points that they make towards the end of the section is that culture war-style psyops perform a double move: not only are they concerned with demonizing the “opposition,” but they insist on the unreliability of the opposition’s own narratives. “…attackers portray their adversaries as stupid, criminal, and crazy—the kinds of people who stories can’t be trusted.” Newitz points out that this has become so pervasive that it’s no accident that we speak frequently of “gaslighting.” She explains that “We are in an era of stochastic, decentralized gaslighting…” and that it’s so widespread that “we cannot recover fully until our communities are also given the tools to recover.”
And that’s the subject of the third and final section, “Disarmament.” There are three chapters here as well, each of which offers a different vision, although they’re pretty compatible. The first chapter of the section begins with an observation:
It’s worth thinking about a phrase that the United Nations teaches people engaged in peacekeeping after conflict: disarm, demobilize, and reintegrate, or DDR. DDR refers to the step-by-step process a nation goes through after war, with the goal of creating a sustainable peace between previously warring factions.
I wouldn’t say that DDR functions as a structure for the section, but it does provide a loose sense of the case studies that follow. The first chapter of the section (#7) focuses on the SWORP (Southwest Oregon Research Project) archive, an ongoing project to collect and preserve “widely scattered and overlooked original documents pertaining to the history of the Native peoples of greater Oregon.” The eighth chapter (“Deprogramming for Democracy”) is where I spent the most of my highlight energy, as Newitz turns specifically to contemporary, online/social media spaces. This chapter is a little less a case study than the others==it’s more generalized. They speak with Alex Stamos, Safiya Umoja Noble, and Ruth Emrys Gordon, and this is the chapter where DDR is perhaps most explicitly structural. Stamos (formerly of Facebook) is tapped to explore the potential for “disarmament,” they speak to Noble in the context of slow media “demobilization” (where the federated cozy web is mentioned), and the work of Gordon is cited as a model for “reintegration.” The chapter closes with a hopeful note on ‘applied science fiction,” the creation and sharing of near-future stories that might lead us out of permanent cultural warfare.
The final chapter tries to drill down on this idea of imagining (and narrating) a better future, and Newitz ultimately turns to “a perfect metaphor for a rejuvenated public sphere. The public library.” They draw heavily on the Prelinger Library in San Francisco, but the chapter itself is pretty short, concluding with the ultimatum that “we must end this war”:
And it means acknowledging one another’s right to be alive, in the United States, as sovereign minds that do not require cleansing, disciplining, or civilizing. To do it, we’ll need epic adventure tales that celebrate our commonalities, and philosophical treatises that remind us of our shared past. We must change ourselves, together, and our stories can light the way.
And that’s pretty much the book. It’s really a combination of some interesting case studies alongside a fair bit of access feature journalism2, and as far as that’s what it sets out to accomplish, it’s a decent book. I hoped for a little bit more from it, but I’m fully aware that this may be more about my goals as a reader than Newitz’s as a writer.
I do want to press on one thing, and that’s the title itself. Part of my secret syllabus is George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, where the authors explore how conceptual metaphors buried deep in our everyday language tend to influence how we experience the world discursively. One of their most compelling examples is the metaphor “argument is war.” They detail how much of our language surrounding argument draws on martial metaphors (attacking, defending, winning, losing, et al). But then, they speculate about what might change if we were instead to understand “argument as dance,” where
…the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, experience them differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently. But we would probably not view them as arguing at all: they would simply be doing something different. It would seem strange even to call what they were doing “arguing.” Perhaps the most neutral way of describing this difference between their culture and ours would be to say that we have a discourse form structured in terms of battle and they have one structured in terms of dance.3
Perhaps you can see where I’m going with this. When I crack open a book that puts its conceptual metaphor on the cover and contains passages like the following, it makes me a little wary;
Stories are weapons. They are also, as the Coquille potlatch [from ch7] attests, gifts of peace. Still, they must be subject to democratic forms of moderation and structure if we don’t want to be overwhelmed by information chaos.
Even though Newitz concludes that no one among us is in need of “cleansing, disciplining, or civilizing,” I occasionally got the sense that this commitment is a little hazy. The NYT review of Newitz’s book hints at this as well:
There is a tension, then, between the imperative to seek the truth and the imperative to win the war. The vocabulary of war divides the world into stark binaries: Whatever helps the cause is good; whatever hampers the cause is bad. Complexities that don’t fit neatly into the ironclad narratives brandished by either side can get obscured.
Stories Are Weapons critiques this dynamic, but sometimes Newitz succumbs to the urge to oversimplify.
I found myself somewhat ambivalent throughout Newitz’s book for this reason. Part of the reason that I picked it up in the first place was having written a couple of posts about storytelling (and storyselling)—I wanted to pursue those topics further, and I hoped that Newitz’s book would get me there. And I do understand that the starkness of the title cast a shadow over the book for me that isn’t entirely fair to the book itself. But I felt the same sort of vibe that that review articulates, the sense that weapons (or psyops) are being asked to do “a lot of heavy lifting,” metaphorically speaking.
There’s another piece of this for me, and that’s the extent to which the idea of “weaponization” has penetrated the discourse in recent years. it’s become a common complaint on the Right in this country that the Left has “weaponized” the government to go after their political opponents. Which led to this fine example of legislative integrity, a Congressional committee weaponizing the government to go after what they perceive to be examples of governmental weaponization—a governmental body literally designed to the do the very “crime” it claims to be rooting out. It’s perhaps the clearest bureaucratic equivalent to TFG’s habit of projecting his own flaws (“crooked,” “sleepy,” “lying,” “crazy”) onto his opponents, the “I know you are but what am I?” tic that many people still haven’t caught onto4. So yeah, I’m not particularly well disposed towards discussions of weaponization at the moment, I suppose.
I’ve been reading Rebecca Solnit’s classic Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities lately, and I tagged the following passage, which felt antidotal to me:
Stories trap us, stories free us, we live and die by stories, but hearing people have the Conversation is hearing them tell themselves a story they believe is being told to them. What other stories can be told? How do people recognize that they have the power to be storytellers, not just listeners? Hope is the story of uncertainty, of coming to terms with the risk involved in not knowing what comes next, which is more demanding than despair and, in a way, more frightening. And immeasurably more rewarding.
If I’m being honest, I think Newitz would find that passage entirely compatible with what they’re after in their own book. I don’t think they want to see story reduced to weapons, figuratively or literally. While I do think that social media has shifted what being a “storyteller” means since Solnit penned this passage 20 years ago, it felt like an appropriate place to end this post and my direct engagement with Newitz’s book.
[One final quick note that didn’t make it into the body of this post: its title was an intentional pun on the idea that if stories were weapons, then they’d be covered by the 2nd Amendment. Newitz’s line about stories being “subject to democratic forms of moderation” had a weird echo for me with gun regulation discourse.]
There’s a lot to say about SCOTUS lately, but the Chevron decision touches on some stuff from Scott’s book that I may write about in the next week or so.
I’m really ambivalent about this style of writing, as I think I mention in my discussion of Chayka’s Filterworld.
I don’t know if I’m going to write about this, but I should mention that one of the core elements of Robin Sloan’s Moonbound is a culture with a much different take on argumentation, one that itself reminded me of Lakoff and Johnson’s speculation.
We’ll never have definitive proof of this, but I suspect that the noise from TFG’s camp leading up to the debate about drug testing was no accident.