World III War
And the Administered Economy of Ideas
In a 1996 presidential briefing, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan compared the economic activity of the early internet to the discovery of a new planet. The administration was looking at the dot-com bubble that would burst around five years later. The analogy wasn’t mistaken, though - just early. Greenspan’s cyber planet now accounts for around 15% of global economic output, and its GDP is expanding more than twice as fast as the physical world’s.
Thinking of the Internet as an abstract planet has always struck me as a fruitful way to view the sprawling technology. When I was in the business of building social media platforms, I found that giving the Internet a sense of place helped me to hold unfamiliar tech concepts together and communicate strategies to my collaborators. I thought of my co-founders as explorers and our developers as tradesmen as we carved out a piece of land from the limitless cybermass and built on it. We set up laws through code, instantiated customs through the user interface, and encouraged digital pioneers to set up profiles on our plot in the hope that one day, we would preside over our own digital country.
The fun and functional construct became more profound for me when I came across philosopher Karl Popper’s concept of the ‘Three Worlds’.
Popper wrote about three distinct “Worlds,” which he used as a categorical schema to think about and discuss reality as a whole. World One is the realm of physical objects, the lifeless domain of matter and movement. This world gives rise to living organisms from which a separate world of subjective states emerges. The second world is the realm of qualia, where all feelings, inner thoughts, and memories take place. From the subjective realm of World Two, a separate world of human abstraction can sprout - our intersubjective World Three (W3).
Popper’s W3 is a category that includes our ever-evolving language, art, culture, and concepts. It’s our collective world of meaning that’s not quite physical, although it manifests through material means, and it’s not entirely experiential, though it’s felt in our experiences. It has existed in different forms for as long as human beings have communicated, and civilisations are built and destroyed via its various configurations.
At any point in time, the entire corpus of human mental activity sits scattered across the planet, ready to be engaged with. This sprawling mess of symbolised thought is lost and rediscovered, built upon and arranged as human populations work together to create meaning and commune through it. Whether religious or ideological or combinations of both, human groups will organically arrange symbolic sanctuaries of meaning that form the basis for collaboration and community. Put another way, a sanctuary of meaning is a complex of facts, values, and stories that represent the world so that people can place themselves within a context and participate in the collective maintenance of the good while moving toward some version of “better”.
Early humans transmitted their tribal sanctuaries verbally, which put extreme limitations on how much complexity could be memorised and shared. Writing systems were a quantum leap for information storage and transmission, and phonetic alphabets, symbols representing linguistic sounds rather than entire words or ideas, were another technological breakthrough for civilisation building.
Much of what we call Western civilisation has proceeded from the collection of founding texts that make up the Bible. A myriad of secondary material was created and shared around the Bible, and the sanctuary of meaning we call Christianity emerged. I am setting aside any theological considerations here to focus purely on how human beings practically established and maintained Christianity as a civilisaitonal worldview.
Throughout most of the common era, the institutions of church and monarchy kept tight control over the world of meaning. This Catholic configuration of W3 was understood to be the word of God mediated through the authority of His institutions, which are best able to interpret God’s divine will. It was, of course, messy and complicated, but a level of stability was maintained through the masses’ willingness to bend a knee to the will of God and take their place in The Great Chain of Being. The church’s interpretations of God’s word motivated behavioural norms, conquests, inquisitions, and many different rhythms of cultural activity.
The invention of the printing press ~1440 meant that copies of books, pamphlets, and posters could be replicated relatively cheaply. Literacy spread, and through the work of Martin Luther, a Bible translated from Latin into the common language fell into the hands of the masses, who began developing and sharing personal interpretations of God’s will outside of the purview of the Catholic church and the basis for the institutional legitimacy of the church started to fracture.
This was a tumultuous time for meaning-making that erupted into decades of war, flurries of collective insanity, and bloody persecutions.
Those who study media will often point to the invention of the printing press as the technological breakthrough that laid the foundations for the Enlightenment, a period in the 18th century where rational modes of thought spread across the Western world with profound impacts on social organisation. The unceasing wars over God’s will had a way of increasing the perceived value of material reality, and the scientific method gained widespread traction as a source of authority. The new liberal order that would emerge was a complete reconfiguration of the nature and scope of W3 based on the radical idea that objective truth exists for all to explore and that we all benefit from the attempt to converge on it in a free and open way.
Since the Enlightenment, the institutions that were widely believed to mediate between God and the populace slowly began ceding authority to institutions that are believed to mediate between objective reality and the populace - universities, journalistic organisations, and the government. Material truth, not God’s truth, is the grounds for their authority. It is, of course, messy and complicated, but a level of stability has been maintained through the masses’ willingness to bend a knee to material reality.
“It is often very illuminating to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion?”
- Walter Lippmann (Public Opinion)
In 1922, a journalist by the name of Walter Lippmann published a book called Public Opinion, where he explored the limitations of the liberal democratic order in his burgeoning era of mass media. This was a time between the world wars when innovations in radio, the telegraph, industrial printing, and cinema were making their presence felt.
Running against many of the assumptions embedded in the liberal paradigm, Lippmann argued that people don’t have direct access to objective reality due to limitations in their knowledge and access to information. Instead, they rely on heavily mediated information and simplified constructs to create a functional but distorted version of objective reality. He called the sanctuary of meaning the ‘pseudo-environment’.
“We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.”
“The mass is constantly exposed to suggestion. It reads not the news, but the news with an aura of suggestion about it, indicating the line of action to be taken… Thus the ostensible leader often finds that the real leader is a powerful newspaper proprietor.”
Lippmann’s reflections on the human mind are at times cynical, but his observations about the inner workings of mass media and the manipulability of popular opinion are hard to fault. After identifying a long list of seemingly insurmountable problems with the liberal project, Lippmann came to the conclusion we ought to abandon the marketplace of ideas in favour of a scientifically managed information environment.
“It is no longer possible to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify.”
Lippmann wanted to refine democracy through a W3 mediating class of objective elites whom he perceived to be less vulnerable to confirmation bias and emotionally driven moral intuitions. These elites would study human populations scientifically and then curate public opinion toward their expert analysis. Public Opinion went on to be extremely influential and is now a seminal text for several academic fields.
Lippmann wasn’t alone in his studies of media and meaning at the time, as propaganda techniques were being developed all around the world. One might view the totalitarian regimes of the decades that followed Lippmann’s book as experiments in how far pseudo-environments could be manipulated via mass media technologies.
Radio, cinema, and industrial printing had a way of augmenting totalitarian control and the regimes of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Mao’s China, among others, completely deranged their populations through total ideological reconfigurations of their W3.
After the world wars, propaganda techniques were picked up by the free markets in liberal democracies, and experimental work evolved into the advertising and public relations industries of today. The information landscape we now inhabit is full of meticulously contrived messaging distributed at mass scales to elicit pre-determined behaviours from you. The practice is so commonplace that complaining about it is like yelling at a cloud.
“Language is the house of being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.”
- Martin Heidegger
When the enormous media distribution channels of the Internet opened up at the turn of the century, it facilitated a frenzy of W3 participation where anyone with a PC and web connection could have their ideas frictionlessly replicated across millions of screens worldwide. In effect, the media floodgates cracked open and dumped a tsunami of information and perspectives into our shared world of meaning.
If history never repeats itself but often rhymes, then the invention of the printing press and the advent of the Internet share a particular ring. They both increase information flows by orders of magnitude and facilitate meaning-making outside the purview of intermediary institutions.
Consider that before the flood, if your ideas were unpalatable or incoherent to the people employed by academic, media, arts, and religious institutions, they wouldn’t be circulated in an impactful way. In theory, you could still participate in the marketplace of ideas, but you’d be stuck trying to distribute leaflets or magazines on small scales, perhaps handing out CDs on a street corner or ranting from a soap box. Whether you’re excited by the possibilities of mass participation in the mass distribution or lament the loss of more rigorous institutional filters, the old establishment did function to make the world a more coherent place through their curation of our sanctuary of meaning.
The information floodplains we now inhabit have a hallucinatory feel - as if any sense of shared reality has come unstuck. Our human need to create sanctuaries of meaning compels like-minded people to form digital networks around different W3 configurations and generate vast amounts of mental material in ways that are faster and cheaper than has ever been possible. These networks interpret and arrange objective facts in different ways and battle for the legitimacy of their bespoke truth. In an environment awash with perspectives and uncertainty, a simple and emotionally resonant interpretive framework becomes appealing, and ideology is a means for cutting through complexity and coordinating amidst the noise.
Through my work on The Reformers, I was able to get a sense of why the Identitarian (Woke) ideology flourished in this environment. The activist researchers working in the Grievance Studies departments had been busy converting the marketplace of ideas into an administered idea economy long before the Internet arrived to aid the endeavour. For them, the meta-framework of liberal democracy had created an unfair playing field for women and racial and sexual minorities. They want to restructure it to afford those groups more representation. Or, more accurately, the views they assign to those groups within their worldview more representation. I call their work ‘discourse engineering’ because it’s designed to circumvent the conscious minds of rational agents to engineer their consent.
They study people, sociology, and meaning to develop sophisticated discourse engineering techniques and then use their ‘expertise’ in social justice to gain the authority to administer them wherever they can. This is why, I think, they’ve had such a smooth ride claiming power from within our ostensibly liberal institutions. The Lippmannesqe attitude that people live in a pseudo-environment that ought to be engineered by experts has become so dominant within Western institutions that the explicitly illiberal endeavours of Woke ideologists have found a home in them.
Throughout my time wandering the halls of different cultural institutions throughout the US and Australia, listening to as many people as would speak, I’ve been struck by a consistent observation - The liberal principles I thought governed these institutions aren’t widely believed or practised. A broad range of people, including but not restricted to Woke ideologists, employed by the media, arts, and academic institutions of the West, are guided by a vision closer to the refined democracy that Walter Lippmann outlined in his book.
The public the neo-Lippmannites purport to serve isn’t conceived of as rational agents capable of interpreting objective reality for themselves but as a dangerous, confused, ignorant, emotionally driven, easily influenced, racist, sexist, homophobic, environmentally unsustainable collection of nodes that ought to be managed into better decisions. The study of humanity seems to have given way to the study of human management, and this is what I will be exploring in my next major project.
Since the COVID lockdowns, I’ve been busy trying to make sense of the baffling new information landscape from both a technical perspective and a philosophical one. It’s obvious to me, and many others, that a vast network of neo-Lippmannites employed by government agencies, tech platforms, NGOs, and supra-national bodies have been hard at work creating an administered information environment.
Given that the neo-Lippmannites don’t have access to perfect knowledge and can’t be free of ideological motivation or financial considerations, how does their administered economy of ideas work and to whose ends? How will they distinguish ‘adversarial narratives’ from ‘different ideas?’ If the dominant attitude among those working in our institutions isn’t liberal, then do we live in a liberal democracy? If not, what is the new governing order? Questions like these have been plaguing me for some time now, which is an agitated state that usually means a film is getting ready to come out of me whether I want it to or not.
My two-part series with Mary Harrington and her concept of the Cyborg Theocracy was my first public foray into this complicated subject matter, and I’m in private correspondence with several other people who are doing cutting-edge philosophical, technical, and journalistic work in the area. Ideally, these investigations will culminate in a high-production-value feature film where I bring together the most compelling ideas on the subject and breathe life into them with case studies and visual representations.
With neo-Lippmannites busily building their censorship complex, the useful idiocy of Woke social constructors, tech industrialists buying up digital countries, hostile foreign powers actively deranging discourse and the endless cycle of culture war skirmishes over meaning, it’s fair to say there’s a World War is already raging across the surface of our cyber planet.
Your substack is criminally underrated.
This is maybe the best thing I've read online - it's at least in the top five. I've been an "internet person" since 1994. I have lived half of my life online and half off-line. I know what the internet was before social media and what it became afterwards. So much of what we're living through now is the fight for control of this new territory, not unlike when the Puritans sailed to the new world or the westward expansion. We're doing the same thing only now it's in the virtual space. Imagine what it would be if we could ever get off this planet and colonize others. I didn't see this mess coming. I was securely in my own bubble online. I have a Gen-Z daughter who was ground zero in the Tumblr fanaticism that grew the roots for the Woketopia. But I guess I never imagined so much power would be handed over to the Left. My former side used to be the side that was the counterculture, the rebels, the discards, the upstarts. To see the rise of totalitarianism on the LEFT is what continues to blow my mind. I know it isn't as simple as left or right.
World III is like the "habitus" that forms our reality. Before Musk bought Twitter that was decided by the blue-checks, the media and the Democrats who all formed a fascist-like alignment of power that allowed them complete control over our shared reality. That's what we seem to be at war about now. Who gets to decide that?
For people like my daughter, she doesn't know any other way of life. But I remember life before. That is why it bothers me so much. Anyway, thanks for this.