The Blue Empire Strikes Back

It's both frightening and strange to reflect on the evolution of information warfare since the Trump era. As you read this, let all that has happened in the intervening years dominate your thoughts.

In my 2018 book, The Social Singularity, I wrote the following in a chapter called “Cracks in the Pillars.” The pillars in question are media, the firm, and science—which I perceived as changing fundamentally. I want to emphasize the media section because so much has changed since that writing, which is both eerily prescient and overly sanguine. Not only did Jordan Hall’s “Blue Church” return with a vengeance to form the censorship-industrial complex, but the Blue Church evolved into a more robust hybrid between hierarchy and network—a Blue Empire. It seems to be in retreat again. So, as you read this, think about all that has happened: How bold and muscular the Deep State got during Trump’s presidency, how the media played handmaiden to the corruption of science, and how much has been revealed about those who claim authority over us. During this time of deep liminality, there is peril and promise.

In 1953, Joseph Alsop flew to the Philippines to cover an election. Alsop was, at the time, a syndicated columnist. But he didn’t go because his syndicate assigned it. He didn’t go because a newspaper editor dispatched him. 

“He went at the request of the CIA,” wrote Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Carl Bernstein in 1977. Bernstein continues this story in an expose that ran in Rolling Stone.

Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty‑five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go‑betweens with spies in Communist countries. 

According to Bernstein, reporters gave the CIA their notebooks, editors shared members of their staffs, and some of those journalists had won Pulitzer prizes. Those less lauded foreign correspondents found it pushed them in their careers as “stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring‑do of the spy business as in filing articles.” In some instances, CIA documents revealed journalists were charged with doing the CIA’s work “with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.”

Bernstein’s expose was just the start of what would become a larger picture of collusion between U.S. government agencies and the news media. 

So much for objectivity.

By 1979, a few other intrepid journalists began to lay bare the extent of the incestuous relationship between the media and the CIA, much of which had apparently been covered up by the Church Committee in the wake of the Watergate hearings. The facts surrounding Operation Mockingbird, for example, demonstrated that, far from being an independent check on the federal government, the CIA had only to dangle a few carrots—and maybe brandish a couple of sticks—to co-opt the media for both intelligence and propaganda purposes. And indeed, the media were very different animals in the 1950s. Massive. Top-down. Corporate.

Theories abound as to why this had been the case, but one of the most persuasive comes from serial entrepreneur and social theorist Jordan Hall, who posits the media evolved this way. Hall thinks how media was organized in the twentieth century was an emergent phenomenon. In other words—even if power was conspiring with the media, it was just the sort of conspiracy that had been likely to crop up at that place and time.

Hall calls it “The Blue Church.” He says it “solves the problem of twentieth-century social complexity through the use of mass media to generate manageable social coherence.” 

We might be skeptical of grand designs and conspiracy theories, but it’s easy to notice that older people are more nostalgic about the Walter Cronkite era. In those days, they say, we were more united. Barring a couple of instances like Vietnam protests or civil rights marches, our general civic experience was, indeed, more coherent. And the older folks have a point, but for reasons that might now strike us as cynical.

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society,” wrote Edward Bernays in Propaganda. 

Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.

Though this should strike us as counter to the spirit of free expression and thought, Bernays was not exactly wrong. 

The twentieth-century social order was built on a shared, centralized form of collective intelligence, according to Hall. 

The Blue Church is a kind of narrative/ideology control structure that is a natural result of mass media. It is an evolved (rather than designed) function that has come over the past half-century to be deeply connected with the Democratic political “Establishment” and lightly connected with the “Deep State” to form an effective political and dominant cultural force in the United States.

Hall believes we can trace The Blue Church’s roots to the beginning of the twentieth century when it arose in response to “the new capabilities of mass media for social control.” By the time the CIA was deploying Joseph Alsop, The Blue Church began to play an outsized role in shaping America’s culture-producing institutions--and, thus, public opinion. Through the last half of the twentieth it peaked. But, writes Hall, “it is now beginning to unravel.”

In the twentieth century, society became way more complex relative to the past. Information traveled faster. And for people to see themselves in solidarity both with each other and with a larger protective security apparatus, everyone would need to get the right message. Something like: Our security requires both a common enemy and a common narrative.

And for the most part, it worked. The only way to achieve a shared collective intelligence, however, was to control the media. Power could no longer tolerate the idea of the media as a loose collection of beat reporters getting scoops and running with them on anyone’s terms. Outlets, editors, reporters, and readers would have to follow master narratives so that the people could socially cohere.

“The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace,” wrote Noam Chomsky in his classic of media conspiracy, Manufacturing Consent. “It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society.” Even if one hesitates to agree with Chomsky, as I often do, this point is compelling.

Why, then, is social coherence so important? 

Hall reminds us that in the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, there were massive shifts in social complexity: agrarian to industrial; rural to urban.

Horses gave way to railroads, which were replaced by automobiles and then airplanes — shrinking the world into a single connected meta-community. We went from Darwin's first postulating evolution in 1859 all the way to Crick and Watson’s DNA in 1953. We went from the first theory of electromagnetism in 1864 to the actual deployment of the Atomic Bomb in 1945. This was a hell of a century.

Human society cannot function “without a regulatory structure adequate to its level of complexity,” according to Hall. The Blue Church had been that regulatory structure and, therefore, the emergent solution to the problem of maintaining social order in an increasingly complex world. 

But then something happened: The Internet. 

In the 1990s, hierarchical media organizations started to falter. A series of events began to reveal the cracks, and one might argue that the twentieth-century apparatus of collective intelligence began its decline sometime between dial-up modems and the election of Donald Trump. 

The 2016 election was perhaps the first time the Blue Church media apparatus was in full-throated support for one politician and against another. And yet it failed. Hillary Clinton was a well-funded establishment politician running against a loutish outsider. According to Hall, however, Clinton’s opponents executed a digital insurgency to ignite the “Red Religion.” The Blue Church was neutralized.

The media had fundamentally changed.

Of course, there are all manner of distinct but interwoven causes for the 2016 election result. Populism. Nationalism. Scapegoating. Disaffection with the establishment. Hillary Clinton’s lack of vision and charisma. Even though all of these have been factors, Donald Trump would not have been elected without a digital insurgency capable of challenging the Blue Church. Old ideas. New tech.

Just one example lay with Cambridge Analytica. The big data startup, fresh off an apparent win with Brexit, worked its magic with Trump, too—or so the story goes. The modus operandi of Cambridge Analytica had been to harvest sentiment data from Social media posts. They would then match this data against the most powerful of the personality tests used by psychologists the world over—The Big Five. Finding the Big Five’s patterns in the data, Cambridge Analytica could then mine the messages that the campaign could parrot back to those from whom it had been mined.

But Cambridge Analytica might arguably be viewed as somewhat centralized. Memes from “Kekistan”—produced by the so-called “Autists of Kek”—were all about a clever mix of mockery and misinformation contra Clinton. Couple these Kekistani insurgents with foreign fake-news producers, and the result was a win for the now-famous billionaire who became beloved by both spit-and-sawdust America and those weary of Blue Church posturing. 

One brilliant strategist predicted, if not seeded, the Red Religion insurgency in 2015. In a paper for NATO, entrepreneur Jeff Giesea wrote:

Memetic  warfare  can be  useful  at the grand narrative level, at the battle level, or in a special circumstance. It can be offensive, defensive, or predictive. It can be deployed independently or in conjunction with cyber, hybrid, or conventional efforts. The online battlefield of perception will only grow in importance in both warfare and diplomacy.

Memetic warfare could be waged against ISIS or the Democratic National Committee.

Mainstream media as a mediating structure—a means of collective intelligence and social coherence—will never be the same. Decentralization means the popular control of making media yields agile platoons: Citizen investigators, checkers, trolls, purveyors of fake news, and other dynamic new hiveminds. These can assemble and dissolve in real-time. 

Think of the Gray Lady, aka The New York Times. Imagine her as a kind of automaton, powerful but stiff. A thousand tiny drones surround her. The drones are angry. The Gray Lady tries in vain to swat them with her staff. But her staff is no match for the swarm.

So, what does this mean for social coherence? 

It depends. Even if one thinks Hall is being too cynical in concluding that government and media were fated to collude in the twentieth century, one still might think the country needed some degree of social coherence. Social coherence is both a way of dealing with complexity and a way of maintaining some unifiedness in the face of cultural entropy—diverse values, beliefs, and so on that can tend to fracture people. Social coherence for great secular religions to preserve large, top-heavy nation-states might no longer be possible. (It might not be necessary, either.)

So, in reckoning with the coming era, how do we get social coherence? We’ll have to see. We can take heart in the fact that there is less at stake for any system as a whole in decentralized systems with smaller jurisdictions. Such systems are more “antifragile.” Social coherence needs only develop locally in most cases.

Whatever one thinks about our delicate hypothesis, hierarchical media structures no longer provide social coherence. Knowledge and information no longer travel in bidirectional flows up and down chains of authority and expertise. The media have been lateralized. Information and disinformation alike want to be free. Social coherence will have to come about through different means, as within smaller units of social organization. The media are not the only mediating structure that is weakening.

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