Dreaming Against the Machine - Episode 14： Psychological Warfare, with Annalee Newitz

00:00:00.000 Welcome back to Dreaming Against the Machine. I'm your host, Adam Becker. This week's guest

00:00:07.140 is author and journalist and my friend, Annalee Newitz. Annalee writes both novels and nonfiction

00:00:15.440 books. Her most recent novel actually is coming out in October of this year. It's called A Wall

00:00:20.660 is Also a Road, and you can pre-order it wherever you get your books. But we spend most of this

00:00:27.000 episode talking about her most recent non-fiction book, Stories Are Weapons, which is about

00:00:32.620 psychological warfare. And I know that sounds pretty heavy, but I promise this is streaming

00:00:38.560 against the machine and we find a way to have fun with it, which is easy because Annalie is a fun

00:00:46.180 person and we always have a good time talking. So I hope you enjoy it.

00:00:51.620 annalee welcome to dreaming against the machine thank you so much for having me let's see how

00:01:01.860 would i describe you i would i would describe you as a science journalist and science fiction author

00:01:08.440 and uh also founder of a website that uh that was near and dear to my heart io9 and just general

00:01:15.440 cool person. I don't know if you feel that this is an accurate description.

00:01:21.280 I mean, very kind of you to say. I think very cool person should definitely be part of my bio.

00:01:28.320 Yeah, you should have it on business cards.

00:01:30.540 And I write books that are both nonfiction and fiction, but not in the same book. I don't mix

00:01:36.280 them in the books. I keep them separate. We've known each other for a while. How

00:01:41.000 did we meet? I think it was Kishore's fault. Kishore Hari brings lots of cool people together

00:01:47.500 and is himself insanely cool. What an awesome guy. I think that is how we met. But also then

00:01:55.680 I asked you to be my science advisor on my second novel, which dealt with time travel.

00:02:02.120 And I had this idea that there was a scientific way to do time travel. And you said the kindest

00:02:08.740 and most helpful thing to me, which was, you were like, you know, time travel, it's, you're never

00:02:14.180 going to have a technological device, but you can use it as a literary device. And I was like,

00:02:19.340 all right, fair enough. So it was, it was a literary device in the book. It was, it was,

00:02:27.120 good. Yeah. I'm glad that was helpful. I remember talking with you about it. And I guess I remember

00:02:33.060 saying something like that. That sounds like something I would say. I mean, you did say like,

00:02:36.680 sure, at a quantum level, maybe there could be time travel, but that's not what's happening in

00:02:41.940 this book. So yeah. No, I mean, science fiction is about having the conversation you want to have

00:02:49.560 and using the science fiction as a setting to do it, not about, you know, oh, wouldn't it be cool

00:02:54.280 if we have rockets? I mean, I like to make my science fiction as accurate as possible, but

00:02:58.860 time travel, time travel was the, I think the one time when my science fiction was

00:03:03.240 just completely speculative. Like you could never have the time travel that these characters have.

00:03:08.660 But in all of my other books, I think I've made stuff that's plausible that could exist.

00:03:13.280 So we were just talking about your science fiction and your latest book is actually

00:03:17.740 science fiction. It's Automatic Noodle. But I brought you here today in part because you're

00:03:22.660 fun to talk to, but in part because I want to talk about your latest nonfiction book,

00:03:26.600 Stories Are Weapons, which is about psychological warfare. I was reading it and

00:03:31.740 And I already knew some of the stuff that I was reading in there, but I certainly didn't know all of it. And in particular, it was depressing to me to see that, you know, a hundred years ago, Walter Lippman, the journalist, was saying, you know, we've got a real problem with public persuasion and things that we would now call psyops.

00:04:00.240 And then, you know, what, a decade later, you have people coming in and saying, yeah, no, no, no, no, this is great.

00:04:07.920 Let's use really dirty tricks to, you know, influence public opinion and change, you know, national and international policy.

00:04:18.720 And, of course, that was only a problem from, like, the 20s through the 50s and isn't a problem anymore, and we don't have that problem at all.

00:04:26.620 Completely solved, yeah.

00:04:27.720 Yeah, it's completely solved.

00:04:28.780 Yeah, that's why Stories Are Weapons is purely a historical look at psyops and culture war.

00:04:34.120 Yeah, I mean, that was really my first question was, why did you write this and why did you think anyone would care about it?

00:04:41.280 I mean, it's actually not a bad question because when I started working on the book, I mean, of course, we've never, I mean, throughout my lifetime, we've never had a phase in our lives where we didn't have tons of propaganda, even if it was just advertising, right?

00:04:58.060 We're so surrounded by ads, which really do grow out of, of propaganda, um, which I talk

00:05:03.840 about it in the book a bit.

00:05:04.920 Um, but what I really, I think when I started the book, it was around 2019, 2020.

00:05:15.560 And, um, I was pitching the book because I, you know, as a science journalist, I'm very

00:05:23.180 interested in history.

00:05:24.980 I've written a lot about deep ecological time.

00:05:28.480 I've written a lot about archaeology.

00:05:30.160 I'm working on a book right now about archaeology.

00:05:32.900 And so my impulse is always to turn to the past, to understand what's going on around

00:05:39.020 me.

00:05:39.380 And of course, I think we can all cast our minds back to the faraway times of 2019 when

00:05:46.460 we were absolutely in the middle of an onslaught of culture war and psyops in the United States

00:05:54.740 And maybe we can get into defining what psyops are in a second because culture war and psyops

00:05:58.760 are obviously not the same thing, although they're kind of, they're similar to each other.

00:06:03.200 They sort of speciated at a certain point.

00:06:05.720 And so that was what happened was I was like, how did we get here?

00:06:08.900 What's even happening when I'm doom scrolling on my phone?

00:06:11.840 Like, where did that come from?

00:06:13.120 And so I immersed myself in the early history of the United States to look back and see

00:06:19.920 how national programs had developed around propaganda.

00:06:25.500 And it grew into this book, which I should say, again, is very focused on the U.S.

00:06:31.300 because I think anytime you're talking about propaganda,

00:06:34.900 you have to really situate it within a community or a nation

00:06:39.000 because propaganda really varies a lot across cultures.

00:06:43.480 I mean, there's certain themes like, you know, lying and threats,

00:06:46.320 But a lot of stuff, a lot of the particulars are very, very different.

00:06:50.420 Well, okay.

00:06:50.680 So let's start with the definition that you were promising us.

00:06:54.680 What's a PSYOP?

00:06:55.440 How is it different from propaganda?

00:06:57.320 How is it different from a culture war?

00:06:59.060 Yeah.

00:06:59.820 So like I said, they're all related.

00:07:01.980 But I think what's really important to remember is that usually when we talk about PSYOPs

00:07:07.900 in a kind of classic sense, these are weapons developed by a nation and typically the military

00:07:15.520 of the nation. You know, oftentimes there'll be an intelligence agency behind them or at least

00:07:21.840 involved in the creation of them. And a PSYOP is any kind of information, it could be a movie or

00:07:29.440 a pamphlet dropped out of a plane that is intended to undermine the morale of an adversary. And again,

00:07:36.940 in the classic sense, classic PSYOP, it's a foreign adversary. So you never, never do PSYOPs 0.77

00:07:45.580 against your own fellow citizens, fellow neighbors. I mean, they don't even have to be citizens,

00:07:51.840 just people who live in your nation. But that has really changed over time, which again,

00:07:57.620 we can talk about. But there's also, there are all of these other kinds of information warfare

00:08:04.840 that really echo the PSYOP that don't necessarily come from an organized military or a nation.

00:08:11.840 So culture war describes what happens when we start kind of lobbing psychological weapons

00:08:19.800 at each other, but we're doing it, I guess you could say, recreationally.

00:08:24.160 We're doing it in the media.

00:08:25.580 We're not, you know what I mean?

00:08:26.520 We're not being, there's no one being paid to come up with culture war.

00:08:30.480 I shouldn't say that.

00:08:31.580 There are some people who do.

00:08:32.760 I was going to say there are some people who are paid for this.

00:08:34.840 Yeah, classically, there are people who get paid for it now.

00:08:38.420 But again, if you look back to in the United States, really World War I is when we're starting to codify a lot of these ideas and certainly devoting a branch of the military to it with the Office of War information during World War I.

00:08:52.140 That was all very new stuff to actually say, oh, yes, we could pay someone to make a word bomb.

00:08:59.380 That wasn't really an idea.

00:09:01.680 People were doing it before then, but it hadn't been professionalized.

00:09:04.840 And so after kind of the rise of professional PSYOPs, you start to see things like the Cold War. When that comes along, that really changes how we think of PSYOPs because that's when PSYOPs start to kind of make the jump into culture war.

00:09:21.160 And you start to see people, you know, in the media, people just even on the street or talking to their neighbors, kind of engaging in propaganda without, sometimes without even realizing it.

00:09:32.200 Um, and then the difference between all of that and propaganda, um, that's, that's complicated

00:09:37.940 because propaganda is really, um, it's more like a genre.

00:09:42.500 Um, so when, what I like to do when I was teaching media studies, what I would tell

00:09:46.460 my students is there's fiction, there's nonfiction, and then there's propaganda.

00:09:51.260 Propaganda lives right in the middle of fiction and nonfiction because propaganda is any kind

00:09:56.440 of statement or form of communication that's intended to persuade the audience of something

00:10:03.020 using an element of truth and a strong dose of fiction, a strong dose of an emotional narrative

00:10:09.160 that may not have any evidence behind it whatsoever. But there's always that dose of

00:10:14.220 truth and of nonfiction, factual information. So both culture war and psyops deal in propaganda,

00:10:22.960 but lots and lots of other entities also produce propaganda, including, like I said,

00:10:27.380 you know, Madison Avenue, the advertising industry. They're great at propaganda.

00:10:30.900 Yeah. I was going to say, you just gave a definition that that certainly applies to

00:10:34.420 the advertising industry as well. Also, I was hearing some clicking and clacking behind you,

00:10:39.060 which it looks like that was a cat. There is a cat in the room. Why don't we take a little,

00:10:43.560 a quick break while I let my cat. Oh, no, no, no, no. Well, before you do.

00:10:47.940 Oh no, is that okay? We need, yeah, we need to talk about the cat. Cat. We love cats on this

00:10:52.460 podcast oh good okay well my cat feels my cat feels seen yeah although I can't see her actually

00:10:59.100 I saw her she ran off she was it looked like a black cat yes I have two black cats um infrared

00:11:04.840 and ultraviolet and um and indeed ultraviolet through no fault of their own they they grew

00:11:10.840 into their name so infrared is actually much larger than ultraviolet so that's how you can

00:11:15.480 tell the difference. Larger, but lower energy. Yeah, I absolutely. Yeah. Incredible. She has

00:11:23.460 bursts of energy, but yeah, generally not as energetic as ultraviolet. So incredible. Um, 0.98

00:11:28.760 yeah, so they're, they're occupying either end of the non-visible spectrum here in the house.

00:11:33.480 Amazing. Yeah. At some point my cat may show up. Uh, I don't know if I told you this. I have a cat

00:11:38.860 now. Yeah, no, you didn't mention it. I look forward to seeing your cat. Yeah, no, she's,

00:11:44.540 She may, she often like will just creep in while I'm talking and just hang out on the 0.70

00:11:50.440 futon behind me because she wants to like be in the same room that I am anyway.

00:11:56.460 I mean, she might be a thought leader. 1.00

00:11:58.860 You don't know. 0.63

00:11:59.620 She could be a thought leader among cats.

00:12:01.840 Well, so it's funny that you say that the Bobca is actually her title on the podcast

00:12:07.160 is she is our fearless leader.

00:12:09.060 Yeah.

00:12:10.040 Yeah.

00:12:10.320 Better than being your furless leader, which no shade on furless cats.

00:12:14.280 but like no i like fur yeah for fur on a cat i think is probably better for everyone including

00:12:19.980 my cat well there i can see my cat in the background i was gonna say climbing bags that

00:12:25.240 are attached to the doorknob which is not something she normally does oh well that's

00:12:30.600 definitely something that babka does um anyway um this has been the podcast within a podcast about 0.92

00:12:38.440 cats um yeah propaganda is definitely something that we see a lot of in in advertising as well

00:12:45.080 uh but i also found myself thinking about when you said that you know we do this for

00:12:48.640 entertainment there's something in the structure of social media um and maybe also the 24-hour

00:12:57.920 news cycle though i don't you know the 24-hour news cycle has existed my entire life i don't

00:13:02.760 remember the world without it same but certainly in the structure of social media that seems

00:13:08.040 to reward stuff that rides that line between truth and fiction the way that propaganda does.

00:13:15.180 Yeah, I mean, I think what is so seductive about propaganda is that when it's done well,

00:13:20.900 it is like a really entertaining story that also promises to tell you a secret truth or

00:13:29.580 an important truth. And I mean, anyone who's ever stumbled across a clickbait headline online knows

00:13:37.660 That's the thing that's most clicky is something that will reveal a real truth, but it's wrapped in a kind of a narrative like a thriller narrative or it's wrapped in a kind of romance narrative.

00:13:52.680 Oftentimes, you can even start to recognize when propaganda is taking on certain fictional contours. For example, if you listen to the New York Times has a daily podcast, and they always play this sort of thriller-ish music at the beginning of the podcast, and they'll say,

00:14:12.600 It's Tuesday. And it always feels like the opening to like a procedural drama. And that's a real hallmark of how you use a kind of fictional gloss to make truth more exciting and more interesting to consume.

00:14:32.740 And I'm not accusing the Times of engaging in propaganda all the time, but it is a way that nonfiction borrows from fiction in order to become entertaining.

00:14:43.480 You know, I think surprising nobody, I was an NPR kid.

00:14:46.900 Well, same, yeah.

00:14:47.940 Yeah, exactly. The household I grew up in was an NPR household.

00:14:49.840 Raised on NPR.

00:14:50.840 Yeah, exactly. And so I'm contrasting what you're telling me about the New York Times' daily podcast, which I don't listen to, and I didn't know that about it,

00:14:59.060 uh with you know um the introduction to morning edition or something like that like

00:15:05.640 yeah it's very cheerful and wholesome and yeah which as a teenager i hated i was

00:15:12.220 very very punk rock and i was like oh what is this oatmeal crap my parents are listening to

00:15:16.860 so uh yeah i was a little um i was a little suspicious of it but i feel like now i have

00:15:24.220 like nostalgia for, you know, any kind of news broadcast that isn't trying to become some form

00:15:31.720 of entertainment, you know? One of the questions that I think I want us to, to like think about

00:15:37.220 in the course of this conversation is, okay, what is it about the structure of the existing

00:15:45.000 news cycle and information ecosystem that rewards that stuff? Yeah. And what can we do to break out

00:15:52.180 of it. I think it's right to take us back to someone like Walter Lippman, who's writing 100

00:15:57.280 years ago about the news. And he was the founder of the New Republic. So he himself was a producer

00:16:03.640 of news and he'd written for a lot of newspapers. But he also, during World War I, he worked at the

00:16:09.680 Office of War Information. He was an American, so he was embedded with the U.S. military in the war.

00:16:15.460 And he wasn't the only writer or journalist who did that. And the Office of War Information was

00:16:20.940 in the business of making propaganda and also censoring the news.

00:16:24.880 Like censorship was a huge part of what they did.

00:16:27.520 But that meant that they were constantly dealing with major newspapers all the time

00:16:32.440 about what could be printed and what couldn't be.

00:16:36.200 So I think that was a crash course for Lippmann in how psyops work,

00:16:41.160 how government-mandated, formalized, professional psyops work both domestically

00:16:48.280 and in kind of in foreign adversary contexts.

00:16:52.500 When the war was over, Lippmann wrote a book

00:16:55.760 that we would now call kind of a thought leader book

00:16:58.040 called Public Opinion.

00:17:00.120 And what he was interested in doing in that book

00:17:03.000 was just explaining to audiences at the time

00:17:05.960 how mass media, which remember was still kind of a new idea,

00:17:09.180 like the idea of mass media news was still,

00:17:12.500 you know, there only been a couple of generations

00:17:13.960 that had had access to that.

00:17:15.580 And he was saying, you know, we now have enough information about how mass media works that we can start to study it kind of sociologically and think about what are patterns in how people get persuaded, what are the kinds of messages that they respond to, and also, like you said, how do we kind of get away from that?

00:17:37.300 And a lot of thinkers over the past hundred years have been either really enchanted with

00:17:44.100 what Lippman said or kind of pissed off at it because he was a nuanced thinker.

00:17:50.220 And one of the things that he points out is that all news in some way has to deal with

00:17:57.520 what he called at the time stereotypes.

00:17:59.800 And he actually popularized the term stereotype, and it meant something slightly different

00:18:04.600 then than it does now.

00:18:06.740 But what he meant was there's certain kinds of shorthand that we use in the news.

00:18:12.500 For example, you might describe all Republicans in a particular way or all Democrats, which

00:18:22.780 remember at that time around the turn of the century had different meanings than they do

00:18:26.980 now, too.

00:18:27.740 Yes, indeed.

00:18:29.860 So that's interesting to think about.

00:18:31.900 And but he was saying, you know, listen, you'd have an article where you say Democrats voted X way and you don't have a lot of space in the article to get into the nuance of like, well, actually, there were three guys who were kind of not into it.

00:18:46.040 And like, maybe the vote wasn't quite what you think.

00:18:49.020 He's like, look, when you have, you know, an hour deadline and you have to get this

00:18:54.220 stuff down, you are by definition losing that kind of nuance.

00:18:59.920 And you're kind of engaging in a certain amount of propaganda because you're reducing

00:19:04.480 things to stereotypes.

00:19:05.460 You're saying all Democrats did this thing.

00:19:09.280 So that's why people get pissed at him, I think, is that they're like, no, no, no.

00:19:13.360 but there has to be a way to do the news where you're not engaging in that activity.

00:19:19.460 No, no, keep going. I have thoughts, but yeah.

00:19:23.140 So Lippman publishes this book, and I would say overall, the book has the effect of really just

00:19:28.360 getting the American public thinking critically about their news and thinking about how the news

00:19:34.260 frames historical issues, how conflict is framed, because that was a really big part of

00:19:39.960 his concern with stereotypes was, what does it assume your audience knows? You know, what are

00:19:45.640 kind of the ways in which that changes how a story might be perceived? So people start thinking,

00:19:50.920 wow, yeah, this is a big deal because the news media can, in fact, persuade people at scale.

00:19:56.540 And the at scale part is the really important bit. Thinking about the public as a whole and how

00:20:04.980 straight news media can make them vote differently, make them feel differently about a war,

00:20:11.140 make them feel differently about women's rights, which was a really big deal at the time,

00:20:14.440 et cetera. So a couple of years later, a advertising guy who also had worked in

00:20:21.040 propaganda named Edward Bernays writes a book that's kind of in response to Lippman's book,

00:20:29.200 And he calls his book Shaping Public Opinion.

00:20:32.980 And Bernays, he's an interesting guy.

00:20:35.460 He's a nephew of Sigmund Freud.

00:20:37.420 He's very interested in using psychoanalysis

00:20:39.980 to help with this project of shaping public opinion.

00:20:43.820 So Lippman's out there saying like,

00:20:46.180 guys, guys, guys, public opinion is being manipulated.

00:20:50.320 We need to think through this and think about the ethics.

00:20:53.340 Bernays is like, guys, we can shape public opinion.

00:20:57.240 Isn't that great?

00:20:58.100 We can use it to, like, change the course of diplomacy.

00:21:02.200 We can use it to sell cigarettes.

00:21:04.200 We can use it for all kinds of neat stuff.

00:21:06.740 Here's a book all about how to do it.

00:21:09.940 So he's taking a really different tactic.

00:21:13.560 And apparently he was a fan of Lipman and kind of wrote to Lipman and was like, hey, dude, check out my book.

00:21:19.420 And Lipman was like, I am not answering your mail.

00:21:22.100 Oh, God.

00:21:23.600 Speaking of problematic people, I'm thinking of a scene in Annie Hall.

00:21:27.440 There's a scene in Annie Hall where some blowhard is pontificating about Marshall McLuhan.

00:21:34.560 Oh, yeah.

00:21:34.940 And Marshall McLuhan steps out of line and is like, hello, I am Marshall McLuhan.

00:21:38.680 You have understood nothing about my work.

00:21:40.620 Exactly.

00:21:41.340 Yes.

00:21:42.520 Yeah.

00:21:43.680 That was, as a kid, that was my first exposure to Marshall McLuhan.

00:21:47.220 Same.

00:21:47.620 I was like, who's that guy?

00:21:48.880 Yes.

00:21:49.100 I'm Canadian.

00:21:49.720 um so yeah I mean and so but of course Lippman didn't have that ability to kind of step out of

00:21:56.880 line but he did get to found a very important magazine um and you know continue to um cover a

00:22:03.040 lot of uh important topics in American media so basically though if you think about the Lippman

00:22:10.040 Bernays um the verses of it all the the fight between them I would argue that Bernays kind of

00:22:16.860 And he winds up having an incredible career in advertising. And then he goes on to do covert work for the CIA in Guatemala in particular. That's the one that he's kind of remembered for the most.

00:22:32.340 So he combined his knowledge of advertising and his knowledge of politics to do, you know, essentially dirty work. He was planting stories in the U.S. media about how the Arbenz government in Guatemala was dealing with the Soviets.

00:22:52.480 There's no evidence that they were taking money from the Soviets or that they were acting on behest of the Soviets.

00:22:59.660 It was just it was a liberal government that wanted to take back land for local farmers, land that had been owned by colonial powers.

00:23:10.020 And that was like their main campaign was just like, hey, we'd like to control our own farmland.

00:23:15.200 And the company that became Chiquita Bananas was not psyched about that.

00:23:19.200 And so they hired Bernays. So it was Chiquita, which was at the time called United Fruit. They kind of hire him. And then he's working also with the CIA to plant these stories. So he's using his skills as an advertiser because as an advertiser slash marketer, you always want to be planting stories in the media about like your product, right? Like whatever it is. Bananas are great.

00:23:45.360 And he actually had been working on banana campaigns because apparently in the 50s,

00:23:49.640 Americans, North Americans were not sure about bananas and didn't really know how to use them.

00:23:54.540 So he had planted all these stories about like great ways to use bananas,

00:23:59.560 which at the time were mostly sold in cans, which just sounds so horrible.

00:24:05.420 So how do you use canned bananas in your like Jell-O or whatever?

00:24:10.760 Yeah, I'm thinking about those 1950s like Jell-O salads.

00:24:14.600 Yeah. I guarantee that that was, so that was part of his propaganda, Jell-O salad propaganda. But actually, I don't have a citation for the Jell-O salad thing, so I don't want to make that claim.

00:24:29.140 Okay, but canned banana is bad enough.

00:24:31.240 Right. He was advocating on behalf of canned bananas and then became someone who was advocating on behalf of destroying the Guzman presidency there.

00:24:41.140 And indeed, the CIA did successfully wage this campaign, both a military campaign and a propaganda campaign.

00:24:51.560 So he was instrumental in getting a more U.S.-friendly regime put back into Guatemala at the time.

00:24:59.140 Do you know, I mean, this is a complete derail, and I apologize, but do you know if this is where we get the term Banana Republic?

00:25:04.560 This is part of that.

00:25:06.640 I mean, Banana Republic comes from, there's a number of Central and South American countries that were Banana Republics, right?

00:25:14.660 Like places where colonial powers came and grew bananas there, right?

00:25:19.120 So, yes, but it is absolutely part of the genre of Banana Republic activity.

00:25:26.940 Yeah. 1.00

00:25:27.200 So this is classic Banana Republic shit. 1.00

00:25:30.120 Good. 0.99

00:25:31.560 So my point is that what's interesting about Bernays as a figure is that he bridges the gap between advertising and formalized psyops.

00:25:42.700 And he makes that jump into bed with the CIA in the 1950s. It's a really important moment where things start to change dramatically in terms of public sentiment about propaganda and public sentiment about PSYOPs.

00:26:00.620 because the Cold War isn't just a war between the U.S. and communism.

00:26:07.160 It's also a war at home.

00:26:08.880 It's a culture war.

00:26:10.080 And it's a war of the U.S. government against U.S. citizens.

00:26:14.520 And the U.S. government starts using all these strategies

00:26:17.880 that they developed during World War I and World War II

00:26:20.520 to fight foreign adversaries.

00:26:22.740 And they start using it against people at home.

00:26:26.500 So there's the witch hunts against communists, 0.97

00:26:28.880 closely followed by witch hunts against gay and lesbian federal workers.

00:26:36.100 And we also see, of course, tremendous crackdowns at the time

00:26:41.120 on the burgeoning civil rights movement as well.

00:26:44.100 And that's when you start seeing covert activity,

00:26:47.640 people following MLK around.

00:26:49.320 And then later in the 60s, you get things like COINTELPRO.

00:26:53.280 So it's a real sea change.

00:26:56.760 I say it's kind of like a weapons transfer program where things that had been used only

00:27:01.960 in the military, only to demoralize our foreign enemies, are now being used to demoralize

00:27:07.920 American citizens.

00:27:09.200 And I would argue that we're still kind of in that moment as a country, that we're still

00:27:15.420 right there with the idea that, you know what, it's actually kind of okay that we're using

00:27:21.340 these military grade psychological weapons against Americans, because that's just become

00:27:27.040 the norm. It hurts. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, we, so we started in a bad place and now we've,

00:27:35.160 now we've, you know, gone all the way down. Awesome. So what do we do about it? How do we

00:27:42.580 fix this? How do we get out of this? There's two things that we need to be doing. I think first,

00:27:50.200 we kind of have to go start again at square one with our old buddy, Walter Lipman, and start

00:27:56.140 thinking about identifying propaganda when it's happening. Because I think right now we're in a

00:28:03.660 moment in terms of our media consumption where we're just bombarded with so much information,

00:28:11.740 so much of which is false or misleading or propagandistic, that it's really hard to just

00:28:19.440 take a beat and say, wait, is what I'm reading, is that evidence-based or is that just vibes?

00:28:26.260 You know, is this just some kind of fantasy that's coming from, you know, a political party or just a

00:28:35.020 random political weirdo on the internet? So what I really advise is thinking about, go back to first

00:28:44.180 principles, think about what a PSYOP does. So PSYOPs, as I said, they're intended to demoralize

00:28:50.440 the enemy, and they work kind of in three registers. One is they always contain a grain of

00:28:56.760 truth. They are always also embedded in misrepresentations or lies, and they also often

00:29:07.100 contain a threat, either an overt threat, like if you don't surrender right now, we will kill you,

00:29:15.260 or something that's a little bit more subtle, like if you don't obey the rules,

00:29:21.140 your job might be in jeopardy. And by the rules, I mean things like if you don't dress

00:29:26.840 appropriately to work, or if you don't shut up about trans rights, or if you try to

00:29:36.760 blow the whistle on ice coming to your house. It's just kind of rude. We don't like that at

00:29:44.420 this workplace. We don't want you to be late because you're blowing your whistles all the

00:29:49.280 time. And so just keep that in mind. All of that stuff falls under what traditionally would be

00:29:55.980 called a psyop, but now it's out in the wild. It's just part of the culture war that we're in.

00:30:00.640 So we need to start thinking as we consume whatever it is, if we're on Blue Sky, if we're watching CBS, if we're reading a book, we need to start thinking about, what is the message that I'm getting here?

00:30:17.540 Is someone trying to persuade me of something? Do I sense misrepresentation in here? Is there some kind of threat that's implicit in what I'm reading, a threat against me or against someone else? What's really happening beneath the sheets here?

00:30:34.860 The other thing that I recommend people do if they're trying to, like, identify whether something is propaganda or part of information warfare is remember that there's three basic ways that – I'm very three-pilled, so everything is in threes.

00:30:52.980 There's three basic ways that –

00:30:54.400 So you're an LLM is what you're saying.

00:30:56.460 Yeah, probably a little bit.

00:30:57.840 Yeah.

00:30:58.560 Or at least I've swallowed all the LLM propaganda.

00:31:01.460 Oh, wow.

00:31:02.460 um uh and then I barfed it up it's okay um I don't know why I'm just anyway this metaphor is

00:31:10.880 really it's really going going way too far but there's really there's three types of insult

00:31:16.540 that you often hear um in culture war um statements like three ways that that you will

00:31:24.060 that that basically um people will try to use to undermine your morale and one is to call you 0.99

00:31:32.240 stupid, one is to call you crazy, and one is to call you evil. And I use some of those words, 1.00

00:31:38.100 which are nasty words. I'm using them in quotes. This is literally what happens. And you see it

00:31:44.200 all the time. For example, you'll see a news article, which is about trans healthcare,

00:31:50.000 but no trans person will be quoted in the article. And implicitly, the reason why no

00:31:56.400 trans person is being quoted is because they are viewed as being too compromised to talk about

00:32:03.800 themselves. And that falls under crazy. That's always, you know, anytime there's a marginalized

00:32:08.620 group that we aren't allowing to advocate for themselves, oftentimes it's because implicitly

00:32:14.480 the authority, whoever is creating this piece of media is saying that those people are just,

00:32:19.220 they're just too mentally off. They're either too dumb or too crazy to speak for themselves. 1.00

00:32:26.400 And in my book, Stories are Weapons, like a huge part of the book is devoted to all the insidious ways that these basic schoolyard insults get turned into like scientific proposals and like studies and grants and like advertising campaigns and propaganda campaigns that masquerade as being something perfectly reasonable, but are at bottom, just like a kid calling you stupid on the playground. 0.99

00:32:54.940 So there's two different directions that I want to take this. 0.87

00:32:57.360 I'm too pilled, I guess.

00:32:59.860 Yay.

00:33:00.740 I do this a lot, actually.

00:33:02.200 I say, like, I have two things.

00:33:03.840 And then those two bifurcate further.

00:33:06.260 And then suddenly there's, you know, 128 things.

00:33:08.900 But yeah.

00:33:10.920 I, okay.

00:33:13.360 So you want to talk about solutions.

00:33:15.200 I want to talk about solutions.

00:33:16.440 Yeah.

00:33:16.680 And part of the reason I want to talk about solutions or part of the way I want to do it is I want to push back on what you just said a little.

00:33:23.740 Yeah.

00:33:24.260 But also I want to talk about the connection to science.

00:33:27.500 I hear what you're saying.

00:33:28.820 Like, cause, cause when it comes to solutions, like I hear what you're saying, you're totally

00:33:33.820 right about identifying the pattern.

00:33:35.240 That makes a lot of sense.

00:33:37.300 Um, but I worry about, I worry about saying like, okay, well, we need to think more critically

00:33:44.620 about the stories that were, that were being fed.

00:33:47.000 Like, is this evidence-based so on and so forth?

00:33:49.140 Because I see a lot of people, and maybe this is just my media bubble, but I see a lot of

00:33:53.820 people on the internet pointing to various things

00:33:57.080 and saying, oh, that's a psyop or that's propaganda

00:33:59.880 or positing, you know, various conspiratorial-like thinking

00:34:05.440 around various things, some of which, yeah, okay,

00:34:07.900 that's probably true, it's justified,

00:34:10.140 and some of which is just, no, that's just a thing

00:34:12.260 that happened, you know?

00:34:14.960 Like, I keep thinking about, oh, the classic essay

00:34:21.160 by Richard Hofstadter, right,

00:34:22.540 The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and one of the things that Hofstadter says in that essay is, you know, this idea of like shadowy evil cabals controlling U.S. or world politics goes very far back, not just in U.S. political thinking, but just in, you know, political thinking around the world.

00:34:47.460 and and he says you know one of the functions that it serves is that it it posits a simpler

00:34:54.380 world than the one that we actually live in where everything is connected and there are levers of

00:34:59.380 power that can be seized and yes you know the bad news is they're in the hands of some you know

00:35:07.280 ill-defined enemy or sometimes you know too well-defined enemy of like a particular

00:35:12.460 cultural or ethnic minority, but it means that they're there for the taking. And so all you have 0.92

00:35:20.840 to do is suppress that scapegoated group of whatever kind, and then you can seize those

00:35:27.320 levers of power, and then you'll be in control. And I just, maybe I'm Hofstadter-pilled,

00:35:34.580 but discussing the different ways that we're pilled here on Dreaming Against the Machine.

00:35:39.480 I mean, it's, you know, pills of the future, man.

00:35:43.880 Yeah, exactly.

00:35:44.800 I mean, I just, when I see people saying, oh, that's a psyop, that's propaganda, some

00:35:51.820 of this is just you thinking that the world is more coordinated than it actually is.

00:35:57.000 I'm super glad that you brought that up because especially right now, one of the things that

00:36:02.360 is so frustrating is that I would almost say that we're living in a world of meta propaganda 0.96

00:36:08.500 because one form of propaganda is to flood the zone with bullshit, right?

00:36:16.400 And one of the people who I think is brilliant at talking about this 0.88

00:36:20.140 is Peter Pomerantza, who has a new book out pretty recently,

00:36:24.720 I think from last year, called How to Win an Information War.

00:36:29.740 But he's spent his whole career studying how propaganda works

00:36:34.720 in closed regimes, but also increasingly in so-called open regimes like the United States.

00:36:40.740 And one of the things he always points out, because he does have a lot of background in

00:36:46.480 Russia, is that flooding the zone with misinformation and getting people thinking

00:36:52.520 that everything is propaganda and that everything is a psyop actually plays into the hands of people

00:36:58.760 in power. Because when you get that confused and you trust nothing and you're being told that the

00:37:06.280 media is fake the way Trump always does, then you're kind of ripe for being manipulated by

00:37:12.940 a very powerful authoritarian figure who promises to deliver you that secret truth

00:37:18.240 that I talked about at the beginning of the episode. Because the lure of finding out the

00:37:23.300 secret truth is so powerful, especially when you're surrounded by this like fog of information

00:37:29.720 war. And it is a fog. So I think that that's hugely toxic. And I agree that it's only step

00:37:40.160 one to identify when something is a psyop. And then step two is to actively produce

00:37:48.480 counter narratives. And I don't mean that in the simplistic way of like more speech is free speech

00:37:55.600 because you don't want to add to the fog, right? You want to be able to develop stories and ideas

00:38:04.480 and messages that are clear, that are evidence-based, but also that are fun. And I think

00:38:11.220 that's one of the things that really gets lost, especially when we're talking about science,

00:38:15.380 Because I think any of us who are really science-minded and really love the idea of rational debate, we're like, well, all we need to do is peel away all of the pyrotechnics and the silliness, and then everyone will agree with us that climate change is real.

00:38:29.860 We'll just cite the truth.

00:38:31.640 We have these statistics.

00:38:33.120 And that is so freaking important.

00:38:36.380 And thank goodness that people are citing statistics and doing that work.

00:38:41.620 But in order for public opinion, as Lippman would put it, in order for public opinion to be swayed, that stuff has to be put into a narrative that people are excited about.

00:38:54.540 And actually, there's a great new film by Boots Riley called I Love Boosters, which is a great example.

00:39:01.920 Oh, I really want to see that.

00:39:02.340 Yeah.

00:39:02.620 It's so great.

00:39:03.380 He's our local guy.

00:39:04.880 He's an Oakland filmmaker.

00:39:06.520 And he also did the film Sorry to Bother You.

00:39:09.920 I love that movie.

00:39:11.200 Yeah.

00:39:11.380 I know. And both Sorry to Bother You and I Love Boosters are about propaganda very much.

00:39:17.300 But one of the things that Riley has said in interviews is that he wanted to make a film,

00:39:21.880 you know, explaining to people that they were being propagandized and dealing with issues around

00:39:28.300 class conflict and, you know, billionaires having too much power and too many resources,

00:39:33.100 but he wanted it to be fun. And so he made this comedy that's just this goofy romp that's really

00:39:39.920 silly and joyful but has these moments where like the characters unionize that's not a spoiler it's

00:39:46.440 a boots riley movie you know there's going to be a union in there um but but it's not it doesn't 0.69

00:39:52.300 feel heavy-handed it doesn't feel like it's like i know kids let's talk about class warfare it's

00:39:57.800 yeah it's spontaneous it it's something that the characters do that's in character and and so

00:40:04.160 you're really just following the story of these people. And I think that's something that we

00:40:09.740 forget, especially progressives, especially science-minded people, we kind of forget about

00:40:14.020 the fun. And fun is like a huge part of getting people to come over to your side and inviting

00:40:21.920 them into your perspective is to say like, hey, I'm going to show you a good time. And while I'm

00:40:26.860 showing you a good time, like, hey, maybe like learn a little bit about what it means to do,

00:40:31.260 um, you know, predictive models for the climate and, you know, you know what, this could actually

00:40:36.020 help you fight fires. You don't like fires, right? Fires suck, you know, and then you can kind of

00:40:40.540 meet people in a more human way, um, instead of kind of presenting yourself as an expert who knows 0.81

00:40:47.340 everything. Annalie, are you saying or suggesting that math isn't fun? I think actually math is

00:40:56.400 really fun. And I only know that from like, you know, starting learning about math on like Sesame

00:41:03.580 Street and from, you know, like cartoons that taught me about how math is really cool. And

00:41:11.320 later math became cool to me because I got really interested in urban infrastructure and you can't

00:41:17.840 have a bridge without math. That's true. And that's really exciting. It's really exciting to

00:41:21.960 think about math in context. And so you tell the story of why, for example, something that

00:41:27.900 happened in my hometown of San Francisco was they redid some of the struts on the Golden Gate Bridge

00:41:35.300 and it caused wind to make this whistling sound as it passed through the bridge. I think they

00:41:43.440 fixed it now, but it was really uncanny. And like, again, that's a math story and a physics story.

00:41:48.360 You know, why is the bridge singing? So I think we all know that this stuff is fun. And we know

00:41:56.180 that having access to resources is also really great for all kinds of people. And so stories

00:42:02.300 about how we can make that happen using math, or using, you know, better agricultural science,

00:42:08.120 those can be really fun stories, too. So ingredient number one in fighting this shit 0.99

00:42:12.500 is tell better stories 0.99

00:42:14.680 and get those stories out

00:42:16.780 however you can, you know

00:42:18.820 it doesn't have to be, I think we're stuck

00:42:20.840 on this idea that like, well if I don't publish

00:42:22.820 this story in the New York Times or if

00:42:24.820 I don't have something on television

00:42:26.400 no one will ever know and it's

00:42:28.740 that's just not true anymore, like you

00:42:30.760 can be doing it in a classroom, you can be

00:42:32.720 doing it on the street, you can be doing local theater

00:42:34.840 productions, you can be

00:42:36.260 you know, posting on social media, you can

00:42:38.840 be doing all kinds of things

00:42:40.440 to educate people and to correct the stories that they're hearing from unreliable sources.

00:42:46.880 But another big piece of what I advocate for in Stories are Weapons is doing a lot of

00:42:54.780 looking back through history and telling stories about history that place our present moment in

00:43:00.820 context. Because one of the things that happens when you get drowned in propaganda is you start

00:43:06.040 to be in this endless horrifying present moment where you feel totally disconnected from the past

00:43:13.360 you feel like the past isn't even relevant to you and the future is a total unknown so you're just

00:43:19.680 stuck and you can't think your way out of the present moment because all of the past models

00:43:25.720 don't seem relevant which is totally untrue if you actually look back through u.s history it's

00:43:31.060 Like, we've been here before, including in these hyper-propaganda moments, like the Cold War, and we made it through.

00:43:38.300 And there were tools that we gained as we made it through that really helped, like direct action, political organizing, opening libraries that had archives of information.

00:43:50.540 Like one of the really awesome parts of working on Stories or Weapons was I got to talk to indigenous archivists and researchers who were preserving history of how the U.S. government had tried to eradicate their tribes and relocated their tribes.

00:44:06.920 And they'd been told, actually, there's no historical records whatsoever of what happened. And then they went to the, you know, Library of Congress and the National Archives and found all this history and brought it back to their tribal elders and have copies of it in their local libraries, like not just their tribal library, but also the university libraries that are nearby.

00:44:31.740 So it's really important that we preserve that history

00:44:35.240 and we keep it in mind and remember

00:44:36.900 that there's good tools there

00:44:38.880 and we can learn a lot from it.

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00:47:21.340 So one of the things I like about this is I feel like there's, in the same way that there's like a great man theory of history that I think is bullshit and I try to push back against, there's something that I think of as the great man theory of science communication.

00:47:37.060 that the way that you solve a problem like climate denial is you put a bunch of climate

00:47:43.540 deniers in a room and then you put like a Carl Sagan in the front of the room and then they

00:47:51.100 learn that they're wrong the debate me bro style exactly and that's just not how anything works

00:47:58.240 it's true and it's funny because um for anyone who's ever watched like the Jubilee

00:48:03.860 channel on YouTube, which is also like, you can see it on TikTok and IG and everything.

00:48:10.760 Debate itself has become a form of propaganda and entertainment. And that whole idea of like,

00:48:17.320 debate me, bro, which is done often in really bad faith. Like it's people arguing,

00:48:22.880 even though they're arguing about human life, they're treating it like a game.

00:48:27.280 And it's really super unhelpful. And I think it really misleads people about

00:48:32.320 why we have debates in the first place because the point is to actually try to reach

00:48:38.220 agreement and compromise. The point of debate is not to just state two opposing opinions and

00:48:44.240 walk away with a cloud over your head or to have people score how cool you were while you were

00:48:50.340 debating. The point is we live in a democracy. We have to compromise. That's the whole freaking

00:48:56.440 point. So we debate until we're like, fine, I'll give up the one thing if you give up the one 0.53

00:49:02.260 thing. And then we'll have the thing that we kind of agree on. That's the juicy, cool part of the

00:49:07.420 debate that you just never see. But Annalie, I thought that Charlie Kirk was doing politics the

00:49:12.440 right way. Yeah. Actually, it turns out he's doing them the wrong way. And I know. But that in

00:49:19.860 itself, that statement, I love that you said that because that is propaganda. Well, yeah. Also,

00:49:26.440 I'm never going to pass up an opportunity to rag on Ezra Klein, but please keep going.

00:49:30.620 Oh, no, me too. I fully appreciate your project here. But I mean, it is important to remember that

00:49:37.240 Ezra Klein is a great example of kind of your great man theory of communication, right? Of

00:49:43.740 ideas communication. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I was going to say it's not just science. Yeah,

00:49:47.860 exactly. Yeah. But in Stories Are Weapons, I talk about this idea of false rationality,

00:49:53.280 which is a style of address and presentation. It's an aesthetic. And the aesthetic is I am more

00:50:01.480 calm than you are. I am more rational than you are. I am now going to explain to you like your

00:50:09.680 very favorite high school teacher what's actually happening. And if you disagree with me, the

00:50:15.860 problem is that you're just kind of hysterical and you're not, you're too emotional. And what

00:50:22.240 we're doing here is we're just considering ideas. And one of the ideas we have is that immigrants 1.00

00:50:29.320 should be locked up in prisons. And that's, that's just an idea. Like, why do you need to 1.00

00:50:34.560 get emotional about that? Why do you need to get emotional about the idea of trans people being 0.97

00:50:39.360 denied healthcare? I mean, it's just an idea. Yeah. You know, I'm, I'm pretending to be Ezra

00:50:44.520 Klein here. I'm sure he never used those exact words. Of course. Yeah. And we're just using him

00:50:49.040 as a type. There's plenty of other guys out there. I mean, the people you're reminding me of

00:50:54.140 are some of the people from my own book, from More Everything Forever, the rationalists saying,

00:50:59.120 well, but we're just discussing the idea of whether or not Black people are genetically

00:51:04.040 inferior to white people. It's just an idea. Why are you getting emotional about it? 0.89

00:51:08.000 And I actually have a huge section of my book about that exact idea, about the bell curve

00:51:13.120 and about this long-standing history in the United States

00:51:17.020 where white people really, really,

00:51:19.760 in a kind of hysterical, paranoid way, 1.00

00:51:22.060 want to assert that black people have inferior intelligence. 0.99

00:51:25.640 And it's like, first of all, 0.99

00:51:27.460 going back to my playground insult point, 0.98

00:51:31.660 calling someone dumb is truly a playground insult. 0.96

00:51:34.980 But also, you only say that 1.00

00:51:37.200 if you're scared that you're the dumb one. 0.99

00:51:39.160 And so it's very much a giveaway. 1.00

00:51:41.240 It's like white people are like, 0.99

00:51:42.180 I swear I'm not dumb. Like, these guys are dumb. And it's like, yeah, no, you're dumb. 1.00

00:51:48.400 Well, definitely. I mean, nobody's dumb. That's the point. But yes, anyone who's making that 1.00

00:51:54.640 argument is automatically, I would say, foolish. I agree. But this also brings us back to stuff 0.99

00:52:00.200 about science and how it intersects with all of this and the way that science is perceived.

00:52:05.040 One of the things that I worry about, science depends on public funding, right? We've built

00:52:11.440 this infrastructure in this country where, you know, where we have public funding for science

00:52:16.660 and other countries around the world have done the same thing too. And now we have an

00:52:20.920 administration in this country that is dismantling that infrastructure and trying to turn it to their

00:52:25.840 own ideological ends and talking about gold standard science without actually defining what

00:52:30.680 gold standard science is and intervening in what had been a, you know, scientific process of peer

00:52:37.760 review of grants. And I look at this and I think, well, this is the creation of a propaganda machine

00:52:45.360 under the banner of science. Again, to go back to the Cold War, this isn't the first time that

00:52:50.860 science has been used as propaganda. And the longer that we insist on this idea that science

00:52:57.200 isn't political, the more we blind ourselves to that history. You just hit one of my hot buttons.

00:53:03.600 I'm so angry when people say that science isn't political.

00:53:06.560 Science is political.

00:53:07.740 Science has always been political.

00:53:09.300 How could it not be political?

00:53:10.880 It's an activity that humans engage in.

00:53:13.360 Politics is something that happens the minute you have more than one person in a room.

00:53:16.700 It's so true.

00:53:18.440 It's very true.

00:53:19.860 And there's been so many amazing books written about the politics of scientists, of funding for science.

00:53:26.760 But what I think is really interesting is we, I think, because people get so obsessed with this idea of science being objective and apolitical, they forget that there's always been right-wing and left-wing science or progressive and conservative science.

00:53:43.680 And they've always been battling it out.

00:53:46.160 And science has, at least for the past 150 years, been a political football, like who gets to use science, who gets to, and what kind of science.

00:53:56.160 And right now, as you've chronicled brilliantly in your book, we're at this moment where certain kinds of science, like the development of LLMs and other kinds of algorithms that are called AI, that's being hyperfunded.

00:54:11.860 And that does lead to other kinds of science being funded or gaining access to resources sometimes. But then other types of science, like environmental science or the science around civil engineering, that stuff is now being starved. And many other kinds of science too.

00:54:30.960 And so there's always this like push and pull around what is legitimate science and what isn't. And we really need to be, again, back to my point about telling stories and being aware of our history, we need to be thinking about how we can promote what I call just progressive science, which is, and by progressive, I really mean it like in a basic sense of like,

00:55:00.620 the government should be funding basic research. Science should be taught in school. People should

00:55:06.820 learn about the scientific method. Science helps us solve problems around health and around traffic

00:55:13.260 in cities and around how to explore our world. No, I mean, this is, to me, one of the things

00:55:21.980 that drives me up a wall when people say that science isn't political. Not only is it inexorably

00:55:27.740 political because it's a human activity and all human activities end up being political.

00:55:32.420 But also, if you say that science isn't political, you make it politically toothless. You reinforce

00:55:39.620 the status quo and deny science's power to try to change the status quo, right? Because

00:55:46.320 if we're going to have science-informed policy, that means that science is political.

00:55:52.080 And if science isn't political, then how are we supposed to use it to inform policy?

00:55:57.040 Because, yeah, you know what?

00:55:58.620 I think that we should be doing more to address the climate crisis.

00:56:03.280 And that is an opinion that I have that is based on science.

00:56:06.620 And if you disagree with me, I'm going to say that you're ignoring the science.

00:56:10.160 And that means the science is political and I don't care.

00:56:13.940 Yeah.

00:56:14.740 You know, I want to run something by you that I've been thinking about for a while,

00:56:18.680 which is that one of the things that I think conservatives,

00:56:22.200 and particularly like the reactionary type

00:56:24.560 that we associate with the MAGA movement,

00:56:26.940 why they find science so challenging

00:56:28.380 is that the scientific method is about two things. 1.00

00:56:32.560 I mean, it's about a lot of shit, 0.98

00:56:33.620 but two things that are important. 0.99

00:56:35.040 One is that you always re-examine your assumptions

00:56:37.780 and that all truth is provisional.

00:56:41.440 So you never reach like ultra super truth,

00:56:45.300 even if it's like, well, but gravity works all the time.

00:56:48.320 It's like, you're always open to the idea that like,

00:56:50.140 whoops, we found a new thing that means gravity is totally different.

00:56:54.380 That's really challenging.

00:56:56.040 The idea that truth could change at any time and might be rapidly changing right now, that's

00:57:02.980 really scary.

00:57:04.040 The other thing about science is that in the scientific method, truth is based on consensus.

00:57:10.800 And the consensus doesn't always work.

00:57:13.120 Sometimes the consensus goes in the wrong direction.

00:57:15.480 And we get 50 years of people arguing about plate tectonics because a lady discovered

00:57:19.620 it and we don't like that. But that is the method is that we come together as a group of peers

00:57:27.060 and we hash it out and we try to reach consensus. We don't do the Jubilee thing, the Charlie Kirk

00:57:34.240 thing of like, well, you think this, I think this. It's like, no, we get to a point and then

00:57:39.340 that point can be changed. Like we can, that's a moving target. But that's why I just think that

00:57:46.820 the scientific method can feel like progressive politics because it's all based on this idea that

00:57:53.020 we reach a provisional consensus and we keep having revolutions. We never stop having revolutions

00:57:59.080 because if we don't, we stop being able to aim at truth and aim at evidence. We start just going

00:58:06.080 off onto like some weird, I don't know where we go to the land of not truth. Okay. So first of all,

00:58:13.920 going back to a different podcast

00:58:15.480 within the podcast of etymology.

00:58:18.600 My understanding,

00:58:20.100 and I could be wrong about this,

00:58:21.340 but my understanding is

00:58:22.540 that the usage of the word revolution

00:58:25.560 to mean like a political revolution

00:58:27.620 as opposed to like a physical motion

00:58:29.340 actually goes back

00:58:31.060 to the Copernican revolution in science

00:58:33.660 where, you know,

00:58:34.640 the motion and the change in thinking were one.

00:58:38.480 Yeah.

00:58:39.600 I mean, even if that's not true,

00:58:41.040 let's just say it's true.

00:58:42.100 Yeah, yeah.

00:58:42.760 Yeah, this is our headcanon.

00:58:44.560 Yeah, this is our headcanon about the history of science.

00:58:47.420 That's what we do here.

00:58:50.220 But also, like, when you think about in the 19th century, Karl Marx, who was a philosopher of revolution more than anything else.

00:58:58.360 I think now his name is associated with many, many things that he would be very puzzled by.

00:59:02.500 But he really wanted his theory of revolution to be based in science.

00:59:07.800 And he talks all the time about like what we really need is a scientific understanding of history, which again, maybe that was wrongheaded, but he was, that was what he was trying to do. And I feel like that's kind of what we're still trying to do within in this place where science and culture meet, you know, or where science and politics meet. We're like, how can we have an evidence-based approach to public policy, to economics, to discovery?

00:59:35.540 I completely agree. And I'm so, so tempted to take us down another derail here and talk about one of our shared passions, science fiction, and how thinking about Marx wanting to have a science of history sounds an awful lot like something from one of the most famous foundational pieces of science fiction foundation.

00:59:56.860 Psychohistory.

00:59:57.800 Psychohistory, exactly. But instead, I'm going to say that we're going to have to leave that for another time.

01:00:04.320 And I think that actually this is a pretty good place to wrap it up.

01:00:08.180 So, Annalie, thank you so much for coming on and talking with me about this.

01:00:12.500 This has been a lot of fun.

01:00:13.880 Yeah, thank you for having me.

01:00:15.300 Thanks for letting me expostulate.

01:00:17.840 Of course.

01:00:18.500 I kind of just wanted to say expostulate.

01:00:24.800 Thanks again to this week's guest, Annalie Newitz.

01:00:27.440 Next week, we have science fiction author Becky Chambers.

01:00:30.900 And I'll be completely honest with you, I'm a huge fan of hers. 0.59

01:00:34.320 And it took everything I had not to just fanboy out at her.

01:00:37.420 But I think it was a great conversation and a great episode.

01:00:41.360 To submit questions for future guests and to suggest other guests and to see more pictures of Babka, join the conversation on Patreon.

01:00:51.120 You can also find us on YouTube, on Instagram at DATMPod, on the web and on Blue Sky at DreamingAgainstTheMachine.com or just find us wherever you get your podcasts.

01:01:02.800 Dreaming Against the Machine is a proud member of Multitude Productions.

01:01:06.880 Our executive producer is Nick Carissimi.

01:01:09.660 Our theme music is by Jared Emerson Johnson.

01:01:12.720 Our show logo is by Nick James.

01:01:15.340 And our fearless leader is Babka, the greatest cat in the observable universe.

01:01:20.300 I'm Adam Becker, and I'll see you next week.

Dreaming Against the Machine - July 14, 2026

Episode 14： Psychological Warfare, with Annalee Newitz

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