Information Jamming, or, the Politics of Noise

One of the most annoying things I hear repeatedly is some self-proclaimed "ordinary guy" saying that "all politicians are the same", or, even the more basic "it's all bullshit". The reason why this bugs me so much is because only a moment's reflection should be enough to realize that this is total nonsense. Can anyone who really knows anything about Ontario---for example---say that Kathleen Wynne and Doug Ford "are the same"?

But having said that, I would draw reader's attention to the old proverb that says "When all candles bee out all cattes be gray.".

Here's a grey cat---and it's coming for you!

This can mean that if you don't know much, you can't distinguish between different individuals. It's obvious to me that these people who complain about the similarity between politicians are looking at them in the dark. The next obvious question to ask is "why?"

It might be easy---and accurate in some cases---to say that it's just a question of people being mentally lazy. But I think that what is more often happening is the result of a specific technique that has become more and more important in modern society, something I'm going to call "information jamming".

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Consider this analogy. You are a totalitarian government that is plagued by an outside agency that is broadcasting information you don't want your citizens to hear (think of NAZI Germany and the BBC during WWII). This means you have three different options.

First, you can destroy the enemy transmitters. Well, let's say that the enemy has a powerful air force and if you try to bomb the transmitters all you do is lose bombers and aircrews. The enemy also has a crackerjack intelligence service, which means you can't sabotage the transmitters either.

The second option is to confiscate people's receivers. This is an option, but difficult because they are really easy to hide and there are an enormous number already in people's hands. Moreover, you want to be able to use the radios to spread your own messages, so getting rid of them would be costly on a lot of different levels.

The third option is to find the frequencies that the enemy broadcasts on, and build really powerful transmitters yourself that can make a lot of "noise" that drowns out the enemy's info. This is the strategy that most totalitarian governments ended up following in the 20th century because it was the most cost effective. We call it "jamming the signal".

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Now simply change the idea from "radio signal" to "political information", and you can see how a new form of censorship has emerged in the 21st century.

The problem that reactionary forces face with the World Wide Web is that it is specifically designed to make it easy for the "signal" to always get through. This makes controlling the spread of unwanted information almost impossible. There is the vaunted "Great Fire Wall of China", but it is about as expensive to maintain as the original Great Wall. It is also just as permeable. If you want to get through it, it isn't that hard to find a way. I suspect that in the long run it will prove about as able to keep unwanted ideas out of China as the original Great Wall was at keeping out the Mongols.

Even if there was a way to keep the Web completely out of a nation, it would be economic suicide to do so. Commerce flows on it, and without the Web an economy would find itself impossible to function in the modern world.

This leaves jamming the signal as the only option. Unfortunately, a specific feature about how the Web operates makes it particularly vulnerable to this tactic.

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The Web only functions because of the existence of search engines---like Google, Bing, and, Duck Duck Go---that allow people to look up web addresses based on content. If you had to look for every piece of information by typing out the exact address of a specific website, most people would never use it.

A side product of developing good search engines is the creation of complex artificial intelligences (AI) that are able to create database profiles of almost everyone who uses the Web. And that allows the companies that create the search engines to sell targeted advertisements to companies that want to find the particular fraction of the public that would be most interested in what they have to sell. And, because the companies that create these AI sell huge amounts of advertising, they have the money to build these enormously complex networks that have bound the human race together in a way that has never before existed.

And, because these AI also allow companies like Facebook and Google to mechanize the enormous number of decisions that go into both finding a site address based on a information search, and, give you specific advertisements tailored to your life situations, there are no human beings involved who can decide what advertisements or website content is "real" and what is "fake". This isn't just an artifact of greed on the part of the executives running these corporations---there is simply no way these companies could be profitable if they had to hire enough people to oversee everything that is going on "under the hood".

This makes the existing Web particularly vulnerable to jamming attacks.

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The way to think about this is to consider a City Council meeting where some of the people present was allowed to bring in musical instruments, and, amplifiers turned up to "11"---and then they played during the entire meeting.

I rise on a point of order!!!
Iron Maiden at the Bercy Arena in Paris, July 1rst, 2008.
Picture c/o the Wiki Commons.

It doesn't matter how clearly and precisely someone was able to rebut the arguments put forward by Iron Maiden, Deaf Leopard, or, Black Sabbath---the odds are that no one would ever be able to hear them.

Even worse, the Mayor and the other Councillors will find themselves yelling louder and louder in futile attempts to get heard over the tremendous noise created by the rock band---which just adds to the cacophony. This would lessen their respectability in the eyes of ordinary voters. The result for anyone who is in the audience trying to find out what is going on will be alienation and a tendency to not bother showing up again to this exercise in frustration.

I'm arguing that that is exactly what is happening to politics on the Web.

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What I am trying to do with this news blog is to "push back" against the forces of disinformation that have recently created real problems for our democracies. I'm trying to show that through reason and evidence, it is possible to understand that all politicians "aren't the same" and that "it's not all bullshit". But in order to do that I need to show that it is possible to make some sort of income off the way I am doing things here. One of the ways, beyond Patreon and Paypal, is to simply send me money. You can send it by a check to "Bill Hulet, 124-A Surrey St. East, Guelph, N1H 3P9", or, if you know me by sight, you can just hand me some cash (thanks Stan for being so awesome!) 

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If any readers are wondering what the jamming signals being sent out look like, consider the following example. There's a website called the Buffalo Chronicle that appears to only exist as a means of creating fake news that can then be quoted by other parties with some veneer of plausibility. This would explain why an American news blog that purports to be based in Buffalo New York would have so many stories about the Canadian election. For example, when I looked at the home page while writing this story, I counted that four of the first six stories were about Canadian politics.  

• RCMP plans to charge Trudeau with obstruction in SNC Lavalin affair, following federal elections
• Tipped off by PMO, SNC Lavalin CEO left Canada fewer than 36 hours before he was to be arrested
• RCMP source says ‘security risk’ against Trudeau was contrived by PMO staffers
• Gerald Butts phoned Rosemary Barton repeatedly prior to CBC lawsuit against Conservatives

Why would a news source in America be devoting so much key "eyeball space" to a Canadian election? Well, there is the point that because it is outside of Canada there is no way that Elections Canada could go after the company for putting up what are, in effect, illegal negative advertisements against the Liberal party. It also means that it would be pretty much impossible for Justin Trudeau or any of the other people smeared to sue the company for libel. And, because it looks like a legitimate "news source", it is an excellent place for someone (or some organization) to post "hey look at what I just saw" stories to their followers on social media.

Tune up your guitars and warm up your amps---.

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One of the "complicating factors" of this problem is that our society is dominated by people called "free speech absolutists" (like Facebook, according to this article.) These folks think that the only way to deal with lies and disinformation is through more speech aimed at counter-acting the original statement. Unfortunately, this simply doesn't work when people have decided to use a jamming attack. That's because it is the same thing as saying that the solution to the NAZIs jamming radio frequencies is to come up with better arguments against Hitler on the BBC.

We've seen this happen before with regard to older forms of propaganda. That's why we have limits on election spending and campaign financing. It's a way of reducing the ability of wealthy political parties to jam the messages of everyone else. Businesses and unions are forbidden by law from giving money to parties because that stops advertising from flooding the market and jamming out the messages sent by points of view that are supported by people with less money. If society didn't do this, all the election advertising we'd ever see was stuff in favour of cutting taxes for the wealthy and removing "red tape" (ie: regulation for the public interest) that gets in the way of business "doing it's job".

Unfortunately, the naive sympathy of many people for free speech absolutism has let the jammers "weaponize" the idea of free speech, which allows them to complain bitterly every time they are denied a specific privileged position such as a cheap venue at a university. Indeed, it has become a common tactic for some fringe elements to get a foot in the door of a subsidized venue at a liberal venue like a university just so they can scream bloody murder about censorship when other people complain about why their particular institution is subsidizing a group that they despise. 

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A key point to understand when thinking about information jamming is that the forces that pursue it aren't trying to enter into a conversation where they hope to convince people based on the force of their arguments. Instead, what they are trying to do is destroy people's belief that there is any value at all in honestly talking about public issues. In effect, the jammers want to blow out all the candles so every cat will start looking grey. And at that point, people start saying "politicians are all the same" and "it's all bullshit".

I don't want to leave people with the idea that it is impossible to deal with jamming attacks. A lot of political activity is an "arms race" where every time someone comes up with an institution that helps make the world more democratic another person will come up with a tactic aimed at making it less so, and vice versa. I suspect that the fact that we've allowed the Web to be built by giant corporations that are financed by advertising has made it particularly vulnerable to these sorts of attacks. If that's the case then an attempt to "reel in" companies like Google and Facebook through increased regulation and taxation would be able to lessen this sort activity---if it was done right.

Moreover, the only reason why these attacks work at all is because our first-past-the-post electoral system creates vote-splitting, which means that even a slight change in the popular vote can make the difference between being in opposition and having a "majority" government. (Remember, because of vote-splitting the Liberals won a majority in 2015 with only 39% of the popular vote.) All the intense, crazy Web-based activity I'm talking about in this post is aimed at chasing a small percentage of the voting public. In a system of proportional representation---where there would be no "wasted votes", and therefor no vote-splitting---none of this stuff would be of much value to any party except one on the lunatic fringe. Adding together the parties that don't benefit from this nonsense, you can see that current polls would create a safe coalition consisting of 57% of people's voting intentions (Lib 31%, NDP 18%, and, GRN 8%, it becomes an overwhelming 64% if you add in the Block Quebecois, which might be a controversial inclusion).

But the first step is to raise awareness and create the vocabulary that will allow people to understand and discuss what is going on. I hope that this editorial will help do that for my readers. (If you think it did, please share it with your friends!)

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Furthermore, I say onto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!