Shadow Warrior | How Big Tech, mass media nexus 'manufactures consent’ favouring vested interests

One of the intriguing facts about Western media is their knack of “manufacturing consent”, in the words of linguist and activist Noam Chomsky. The mass media are not a “neutral” source of news but rather an ideological apparatus that reflects and propagates the views of powerful interests. They propagandise the populace in favour of the interests of the privileged classes and the state power they represent by relying on market forces, internalised assumptions (i.e., gaslighting), and self-censorship.

If all else fails, there is, of course, coercion.

Nowhere has this been more visible than in the deft U-turns taken by the likes of the New York Times, when they turn on a dime, so to speak, and convert an erstwhile friend into a foe practically overnight. This happened, for example, with Panama’s Manuel Noriega and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. The narrative changed, and they were turned into instant objects of hatred. It appears the elites ceased to see them as valuable.

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The same thing happened to Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh. She had long been lionised as a role model, a woman Asian leader elected by a popular vote, leading her country to prosperity. But when she allegedly rejected some demands from an unnamed Western country, she was promptly morphed into a ‘dictator’ and toppled in what looks suspiciously like a planned regime-change operation.

Thus, what has changed in the recent past is not the motive but the means. With Big Tech, the media can build a narrative at warp speed, and anybody who does not toe the line is summarily dismissed, turned into a non-person, and erased, thrown down a memory hole. A current example is Richard Dawkins, a famous evolutionary biologist and atheist, who found his Facebook account deleted because he objected to an XY chromosome Algerian boxer competing in the Olympics as a woman. Dawkins, in a sense, has ceased to exist.

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It works the other way, too. Kamala Harris, who was, until a couple of weeks ago, projected as a bit of an embarrassment, has suddenly been anointed as the ‘Woman Who Would Be POTUS’. I am betting she will win the popular vote.

Youtube, Twitter, Google, Wikipedia, Instagram, etc. are wonderful tools for mass brainwashing. Wikipedia, for example, has shadowy ‘editors’ who may be, and often demonstrably are, highly biased and/or on the payroll of certain forces. They have a singularly high ability to create narratives. By the miracle of ‘truth by repeated assertion’, their fabrications eventually become the accepted truth. Furthermore, it is the content of social media, etc, that becomes the training data for generative AI, and unbeknownst to us, turns into the unquestionable Truth.

A recent article by Ashley Rindsberg, “How the Regime Captured Wikipedia”, talks about how the online encyclopaedia pivoted from a decentralised knowledge source into a ‘top-down social activism and advocacy machine’. In other words, ‘woke’. This is sort of well-known, but what was startling was the role that Google (former motto “Don’t be Evil”) played in both funding Wikipedia and making it the default source of ‘knowledge’ on the Web.

The bottom line is that epistemology is being weaponised and manipulated. Indians are avid consumers of the pabulum that social media and large language models spew out. There is only one drastic solution: emulate the Great Chinese Firewall and keep Western Big Tech out, and feverishly build indigenous solutions. Otherwise, the narrative will consume India.

There is an interesting side issue as well. Large language models are running out of data to vacuum up. It turns out that they turn into gibbering idiots when this happens, and they are forced to, as it were, eat their own dog food by consuming synthetic data. They hallucinate at scale. The solution is to find virgin sources of knowledge, so to speak, and lo! There are Indic Knowledge Systems to plunder! Digestion, yet again.

The writer has been a conservative columnist for over 25 years. His academic interest is innovation. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.