Five lessons on culture wars from Annalee Newitz

Whatever your thoughts on the political moment we are in right now, I think most of us would agree that it feels pretty rough: turbulent, aggressive, full of conflict and fear. 

Our pick of the month for January, Annalee Newitz’s Stories Are Weapons, poses a lot of questions about how we got here and what happens next. What are the origins of the United States’ approach to psychological warfare? How and why did political actors start using these military tactics on the nation’s own people? Are the “culture wars” we see in American society today a form of psychological warfare? And how do we prevent or de-escalate the situation?

Some of these questions are addressed in the book, and they were a big part of a conversation I had with Annalee earlier this week.

Here are five takeaways from our chat.

The definition of “psychological warfare” is intentionally broad.

“Psychological operations, psyops, or psychological war… all of these things are deliberately-created messages by a military to either demoralize an enemy or threaten an enemy: to get them to do what you want. Usually what you want the enemy to do is surrender, so these are messages specifically aimed at creating a sense of confusion in the enemy, a sense of inferiority and terror. 

“There's actually a few buckets of kinds of messages that this can include. One is violent threats. Violent threat is a great psyop, because you don't have to shoot a single gun, you just have to tell people, “I'm gonna shoot you unless you do X.” And that's that's a psyop, especially when it's done at scale. 

“Then there are messages that are aimed at confusing the enemy, making them feel like their leaders are incompetent, making them feel like actually their enemy maybe is better. Maybe they want to come over to our side. And then there’s any message that just is basically, aimed at misdirecting the enemy: basically lies. So your basic psychological war packages is threats, lies and confusion. Those are very powerful. 

“Then there's all these other categories, like disinformation and propaganda. If you think of a kind of a sliding scale between a psyop being the most extreme and deliberate form of message intended to change people's behavior, and on the other end the least persuasive document you can imagine, like an instruction manual for using a database program. There's a lot of stuff in the middle there. Propaganda, I think, falls really in the middle. Advertising is a really good example of something that falls in the middle. Op-eds kind of fall in the middle. Anything that combines an emotional message, even an extremely emotional message with factual information is kind of in that middle zone. I often say that propaganda is kind of the perfect blend of fiction and non-fiction, and so that's kind of where I think a lot of these things sit.”

Psychological warfare has been part of the American story for a very long time.

“What we see in the United States is that as the nation is consolidating itself, this country develops its own type of psychological tactics… and it really heats up during the 19th century during the Indian Wars, which is when the U.S. government is waging war on a number of different indigenous nations and tribes.

The arsenal that the United States develops is a combination of pop culture entertainment combined with military force and eventually advertising. There are genuine threats to people's lives—in the 19th century, say, residential schools for Indigenous kids, which are basically brainwashing institutions and cultural erasure machines.

“But you also see the US has always had a really thriving entertainment and culture industry that has often echoed or underscored national interests. So in the 19th century you would have things like Wild West shows, which would reenact battles from the Indian Wars, and it sort of popularized the idea that the US deserved its manifest destiny of capturing the entire West and snuffing out indigenous tribes and cultures. So that's our arsenal: it's like, it's sort of like that Monty Python thing: “Our chief weapons are pop culture and the military” and we'll just keep adding more to that. 

“And so what happens in the 20th century is psychological warfare gets institutionalized in the military, especially in the Army… and that's when you start to see this spillover effect, or what I would call a weapons transfer program, especially during the Cold War, where the United States starts engaging in what would have once been psychological operations against an enemy, but they use those same tactics against Americans. And so you start to see pop culture reflecting a kind of anti-communist agenda that's quite dogmatic. And you start to see things like the McCarthy hearings, going after people who are communists, going after people who are LGBT, and getting people fired, getting people arrested. These are real threats. The way that psychological war works is that you always have to have a credible threat behind it. You can't just call someone names and scare them into doing something unless they really think that they might be imprisoned or lose their jobs or even be killed, or their family might be killed.”

Social media has put weapons for propaganda and disinformation and culture war that were previously reserved for the state into the hands of private citizens.

“We're still in that world where all of these psychological weapons, violent threats, using pop culture to paint certain groups as being evil or wrong: those are all still being used against Americans. But now, partly as a result of the popularization of social media, you're not just seeing the government engaging in these kinds of moral panics, these kinds of culture wars. You're seeing people do it to each other kind of stochastically. So the weapons are out of the hands of the government. They're also in the hands of the government, but we're now waging these culture wars on our own, without any help, necessarily, from the military or from a state power.”

Psychological warfare and physical threats are not mutually exclusive: they rely on each other and blur together. 

“What I wanted to do in the book was point out that there had been this weapons transfer from  psychological operations into moral panics and culture war and Jim Crow laws and anti-trans laws. 

“I had a debate with someone after the book came out who said Jim Crow laws are not culture war, they're not psychological war. But what do you think it is when you make it possible to arrest someone for being black for any old reason?

“The Jim Crow laws basically made it if you decide to victimize a black person, you can just pull it from a grab bag of ridiculous infractions, like, “you stood too long in one place” or “you were driving” or “you were walking around after dark” or “you spoke too loudly.” All of these things were punishable offenses under Jim Crow and a lot of the anti-trans laws are doing something similar, where going to the bathroom in public can become illegal, or anti-drag performance laws that are expansive enough that someone who's trans and is simply on stage speaking could possibly be arrested. So these kinds of laws create a state of psychological distress in the chosen victims, whether it's black people or trans people or immigrants. And that's the goal of psychological war: to make a particular adversary scared, confused, unable to speak out publicly about their situation unless they want to risk arrest or risk lynching or risk being beaten.”

Finding a way out of this moment requires a kind of cultural disarmament. But that’s going to be hard—and it will take a long time.

“One of the things that's really troubling about culture war and psychological war is that we don't have a way of thinking about how to end it. With kinetic war we have a set of UN principles. Basically, you have peace, you have ceasefire, you have methods of diplomacy for de-escalating a kinetic war. We don't have that for psychological war, even though militaries are actively engaging in psychological war, and we do know that there are dire consequences to it.

“So Paul Linebarger [a military intelligence expert who wrote some of the original manuals on psychological warfare] suggests this term “psychological disarmament” in the first edition of his book, and so I take that up and try to think through what we can do to to protect ourselves, to kind of take the temperature down. 

“One thing that we really need to be thinking about right now is maintaining histories of what's happening in the present, but also where we've been: keeping records or keeping receipts. One of the main goals of this administration, and any kind of authoritarian one, is to erase the history of marginalized groups that they're targeting. So to take away their history is not just an act of psychological violence, it’s a way of justifying persecution. You can say this is a group that's never existed before: they're this weird, creepy aberration, and we have to eliminate them right now. And this is certainly what's happening with trans people. It's what's happening with immigrants. And so it's very important that we be keeping receipts on what's going on and encouraging archives and libraries to maintain collections related to, say, trans people, and the history, like the long, long history of trans identity, the long history of the struggle for immigrants to be accepted in this in the United States.

“Another thing we really need to be thinking about, and this is something that I talk a lot about in the book and is really immediately relevant, is content moderation of our social media. We've just witnessed Mark Zuckerberg saying that Meta and all of its properties like Facebook, Instagram and Threads will now no longer prevent people from using really degrading, cruel terms for already persecuted groups like trans people and immigrants specifically. And you know, the more that we we've been talking about this already, the more that you have kind of a permission structure to think of an adversary as inhuman or as sick or stupid or evil, the more that those people are likely to be the victims of violence, because it's easier to commit violence against someone who you don't think of as human. And so as we look to the future, we need to be thinking about how we want to shift our content moderation in our social spaces to protect groups that are under attack, as opposed to welcoming attacks on those groups, which is what we're basically doing right now. 

“There's a lot of theories about how to deal with disinformation and propaganda. One theory is that we meet it head on and we debunk it. There's a lot of evidence that that doesn't work, and so what I propose is that we basically change the subject and we say we're going to tell new stories, instead of trying to debunk the story that's wrong, we're going to tell a truthful story, or we're going to tell a story that presents the facts very differently. A perfect example is that if you're seeing stories about how trans people are predators, seek out stories about trans people being regular people. There's lots of stories like that out there. 

“That's why Wonder Woman is such a great kind of iconic figure. She's not trans, but she's this iconic figure for powerful women who has been around for over 80 years, and has been this counter narrative to sexist and misogynistic stories about women being weak-minded, weak-willed, incapable of leadership. Wonder Woman is this counterweight. And that's what new stories, different stories can be: they can be cultural counterweights, and they don't have to be arguing with the misinformation. It's literally saying, let's talk about something else. Let's talk about how trans people are just regular folks. Let's talk about immigrants who are fleeing dangerous places and just need a place to live. And they're not criminals, they're not greedy, they're just human beings, and they are people that we can all relate to. And that's, I think, in a sense, the most important part is telling new stories, because it's something that we can all do. 

“And so there are a lot of little things we can do, and then they can add up to cultural resistance, and that resistance can lead to disarmament because it's not about trying to engage in a war. It's about trying to build community, and trying to build a community with history and with its own stories and with its own public sphere that isn't antagonistic, that's welcoming and democratic, that has optimism or hope.”

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Thanks to Annalee for the conversation. The video of the full conversation will be available for Club members next week.

It’s been an interesting few days, with some folks putting in orders for our October pick of the month On Tyranny: Graphic Edition. I can’t imagine why! But it feels like a good moment to remind you that as long as stocks last, you can pick up previously-featured books from the club by visiting our website: right now we have a few copies of nearly everything featured in 2024 on sale.

In the meantime, we’re getting ready for February’s book of the month with packing and prep

Onwards

Bobbie