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; it was 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.

A visualisation of Internet activity

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 established laws through code, instilled customs through the user interface, and encouraged digital pioneers to build profiles on our land in the hope that one day, we would preside over our own digital nation. 

The playful 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, he said, 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 experience, where all feelings, inner thoughts, and memories take place. From the subjective realm of World Two, a separate world of human abstraction is possible - our intersubjective World Three.

Popper’s World Three 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 various forms for as long as humans have communicated. Civilisations are built and destroyed via World Three’s many configurations.

Prehistoric humans reach into World Three

At any point in time, the corpus of human mental activity sits scattered across the planet within many media, ready to be engaged with. This sprawling mess of symbolised thought is created and destroyed, lost and rediscovered, built upon and reconfigured as human populations work together to create meaning and commune through it. Whether religious or ideological or a combination 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, allowing people to place themselves within a coherent context and participate in a collective maintenance of the good.

Early humans transmitted their tribal sanctuaries verbally, which put extreme limitations on how much complexity could be memorised and shared. When systems of writing were discovered, it was a quantum leap for information storage and transmission. Phonetic alphabets, in particular, symbols representing linguistic sounds rather than entire words or ideas, were another technological breakthrough that connected the linguistic architecture of the human brain with World Three, laying the foundations for our Western civilisation.

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 through worldly institutions.

Consider these churches as infrastructure for distributing and maintaining a sanctuary of meaning.

Throughout most of the common era, the institutions of church and monarchy kept tight control over the world of meaning. Their Catholic configuration of World Three was understood to be the word of God mediated through the authority of His institutions, which were understood to be best able to interpret God’s divine will. It was, of course, messy and complicated, but overall, a level of stability was maintained through the masses’ willingness to bend a knee to the will of God and take their place within 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 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 vernacular became accessible to laypeople. Ordinary believers began to develop and share personal interpretations of God’s will outside the purview of the Catholic Church. As doubts grew about whether the clergy were truly best placed to interpret divine will, word spread of their worsening degeneracy, and the foundations of the Church’s institutional legitimacy began to fracture.

What followed was the civilisational convulsion in meaning-making known as the Protestant Reformation. An era that erupted into decades of war, waves of collective delirium, brutal persecutions, and desperate flights into new sanctuaries of meaning.

A mass grave site from the Battle of Lützen

During the Reformation, the masses, unmoored from faith in their governing institutions, swung wildly between new sources of authority, searching for something to which they could earnestly bend a knee. As theological conflicts wreaked havoc, many turned toward more stable, observable truths, and the scientific method gained traction as a source of authority and conflict resolution.

This tension began to take explicit form in thinkers like Baruch Spinoza (1632 - 1677), a philosopher-scientist who sought to know God through proto-scientific methods. Not a personal, interventionist deity, but the inherent order and harmony of the universe itself. Centuries later, when asked about God, Albert Einstein replied, “I believe in Spinoza’s God,” the same deity that most pious scientists will now admit to worshipping in the depths of a late-night boozy conversation.

This shift in orientation is what Nietzsche was pointing to when he famously declared the death of God in the late 1800s. By then, God was no longer the central source of civilisational gravity around which World Three was oriented and European social rhythms revolved. In His absence, Western institutions had sought to replace Him with material reality, essentially aspiring to tether Popper’s World Three to his World One.

The new order that emerged marked a profound reconfiguration of the Western World Three. It was built on the radical notion that objective truth exists, that it is available for all to explore, and that we all benefit from the attempt to converge upon it.

Within a Liberal Democracy, in theory, the masses are granted legal rights and protections under the rule of law, with civil rights like freedom of speech, religion, and assembly. Tyranny is mitigated by a separation of powers, independent courts, and a pluralistic public sphere where competing parties, media, and interests can operate free from centralised coercion. Within the Liberal democratic meta-framework, countless configurations of World Three can be arranged and tended to by different populations and non-violent contests between these worldviews are seen as a sign of a healthy democracy.

Since the Enlightenment, institutions once tasked with mediating between God and the people have been replaced by those claiming to mediate between the public and objective reality: universities, journalistic organisations, and government bureaucracies. Clergy gave way to experts, and material truth, not divine revelation, became the basis of their authority. And while the process has been messy and complicated, a measure of civilisational stability has been maintained through the public’s continued willingness to bend a knee, not to the heavens, but to the facts.

“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 World Three 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 World Three.

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 crafted messaging distributed on a mass scale to elicit predetermined 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 World Three 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 a small scale, perhaps handing out CDs on a street corner or ranting from a soapbox. 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 its 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 World Three configurations, generating vast amounts of mental material in ways that are faster and cheaper than ever before possible. These networks interpret and arrange objective facts in different ways and fight for the legitimacy of their unique perspectives. 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 New Left (Woke) ideology flourished in this environment. The activist researchers working in the Grievance Studies departments had been busy for decades theorising how the marketplace of ideas could be converted to 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, and so they completely rejected it.

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 Lippmann-esque 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.

A contrast in attitude

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 has been hard at work creating an administered information environment.

The Global Disinformation Index - “Where the devil is in the details”

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 already raging across the surface of our cyber planet.