[P2P-F] Fwd: How We All Became Russia's 'Useful Idiots'

Wed Dec 5 20:12:28 CET 2018

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: <douglas at rushkoff.com>
Date: Wed, Dec 5, 2018 at 7:59 PM
Subject: How We All Became Russia's 'Useful Idiots'
To: <rushkoff at simplelists.com>

Lots going on as I prepare for the Team Human release and book tour. For
now, if you're in NYC, we're doing a live Team Human recording at Civic
Hall on Thursday December 13 at 6p, with guests Mark Pesce (co-inventor of
VRML) and Penny Abeywardena (NYC commissioner of diplomacy) live at Civic
Hall in NYC. Tickets are free but reservations encouraged
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/penny-abeywardena-and-mark-pesce-with-douglas-rushkoff-team-human-live-tickets-52664675462?aff=ebdssbdestsearch>
.

I'm doing a bunch of book launch events in January/February, but the one
most likely to sell out fast will be my conversation with Naomi Klein at
WNYC Greenspace on February 4
<http://www.thegreenespace.org/events/thegreenespace/2019/feb/04/team-human-naomi-klein-and-douglas-rushkoff/>.
I'll send a full rundown of the tour when it's finalized. For now, it's
 NYC: Jan 22 McNally/Jackson, Jan 23 Civic Hall
 DC: Jan 24 Politics and Prose
 LA: Jan 28 Last Bookstore in LA (assuming 25 people buy books in advance
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/team-human-with-douglas-rushkoff-tickets-53038442409>
)
 SF: Jan 29 City Lights, Jan 30 Commonwealth Club
 NYC: Feb 4 WNYC Greenspace w Naomi Klein
 Boston: Feb 6 MIT/MediaLab 2p, Harvard Books 7p
 London: Feb 14 RSA (2p), Feb 15 British Library with George Monbiot
 Portland Feb 21 Powell's, Feb 22 Team Human Live at Bunk Bar
 Toronto March 2, Curious Minds Festival
 Austin March 8-12 SXSW

Yes - the book is available for pre-order everywhere. You can start w
Norton's page to find links to retailers and Indybound. But right now, TARGET
has it cheaper than I can buy it myself
<https://www.target.com/p/team-human-by-douglas-rushkoff-hardcover/-/A-54245950?ref=tgt_adv_XS000000&AFID=google_pla_df&fndsrc=tgtao&CPNG=PLA_Entertainment%2BShopping&adgroup=SC_Entertainment&LID=700000001170770pgs&network=g&device=c&location=2840&gclsrc=aw.ds&ds_rl=1246978&ds_rl=1248099&ds_rl=1246978&ref=tgt_adv_XS000000&AFID=google_pla_df&CPNG=PLA_Entertainment+Shopping&adgroup=SC_Entertainment&LID=700000001170770pgs&network=g&device=c&location=2840&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI2-H_kquJ3wIVFFqGCh0UkQ6HEAQYAyABEgJh7vD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds>
-
at just a bit over 15 bucks per book! You can also pre-order Kindle or
Audiobook (read by me) on Amazon.

Meanwhile, a great new episode of Team Human went up this morning
<https://teamhuman.fm/episodes/ep-113-jamie-cohen-the-commodity-of-authenticity/>,
with Jamie Cohen talking about how Youtubers adapt themselves and
manufacture authenticity to maximize views.

My monologue on the show, about how we all became Russia's "useful idiots",
was adapted into a piece on Medium and I've pasted it below.

Please feel free to forward this email to others who may be interested in
Team Human or my stuff. Thanks for caring!
d

*How We All Became Russia’s ‘Useful Idiots’*
*Nationalism may have started as a side effect of fake news, but it’s
quickly becoming the new American way*
by Douglas Rushkoff

The New York Times recently ran one of the most compelling and informative
documentaries I’ve seen since Adam Curtis’ mind-blowing Century of the Self
series. “Operation Infektion,” as it’s called, is a tragically, egregiously
underpublicized and difficult to access trio of 15-minute videos — either
lost to the ineptitude of the Times web staff or simply buried in the
torrent of other daily news and treasonous revelations.

The films chronicle the Russian effort to spread conspiracy theories in the
United States since the 1980s, beginning with the planted story in an
Indian newspaper about the AIDS virus being concocted in a U.S. military
lab, right through the story about Hillary Clinton running a child sex ring
out of the basement of a pizzeria — which turned out to have no basement.
The movies show how 85 percent or more of Russian intelligence activity and
budgeting went to promoting fake news stories in the United States.
Intelligence agents’ yearly review focused primarily on how many ideas they
came up with for conspiracies and how many they were able to get picked up
by dupes, called “useful idiots,” such as Alex Jones and Sean Hannity. The
possibility that a U.S. president would retweet such planted stories, or
even repeat them in his speeches, was beyond their wildest hopes.

For anyone confused about or, worse, still doubting the Russian
exploitation of Donald Trump’s campaign to sow division in the United
States or of the campaign’s infiltration by Russian operatives, from Marina
Butina to Paul Manafort, the videos are must-see TV. But they’re less
important for their indictment of Trump and the agents he hired than for
how they expose the way we all continue to buy into this manufactured
animosity. So, no, the liberal elite did not infuse the landscape with
today’s more belligerent forms of identity politics. Neither did the far
right invent the most contagious conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton
or George Soros. They are the result of four decades and hundreds of
millions of dollars of targeted disinformation by Russia. Even more
damaging than the stories themselves is how they make us feel about the
“other side,” who we believe has stooped to this level of shameful lying
and rhetoric. (And, as the metrics indicate, those of us who are outraged
by a sick tweet are just as likely to spread it as those who agree!)

More important, though, is that this half-century Russian effort — and its
embrace by the current administration — reveals more than a shared love for
fake news. Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump also share the opinion that the
United States’ influence over the world, and its attendant
responsibilities, have become too great. Just as the Soviet Union fell in
the 1980s under Mikhail Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush, Pax Americana
should be dismantled under Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, or so goes the
theory.

>From the Russian perspective, it’s just tit for tat. The former Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed in no small part due to economic and
political pressure from United States throughout the Cold War. When the
Soviet Union fell, George H.W. Bush was actually careful not to gloat. He
likely understood that a vengeful Russia would be a dangerous Russia. For
just as we helped break up the Soviet Union into Moldova, Estonia, Ukraine,
Armenia, Georgia, and so on, Russia had its eye on undermining the European
Union, breaking up NATO, and leaving its member states isolated and beyond
the influence and protection of the United States.

Although Gorbachev was a moderate, the KGB under Putin continued its
massive campaign to launch conspiracy theories in the West. As Putin rose
to power, his efforts became better funded. It may have looked ridiculous
at the time: The best that Russia could do to challenge the United States’
global power was to spread conspiracy theories on late-night radio? But
Russia was playing a long game: Identify the existing disagreements and
hot-button issues in the U.S. population and amplify them. Russia targeted
like-minded communities — from gun owners and Christian fundamentalists to
black activists and anti-war organizers — with extreme versions of their
own beliefs and sensationalist lies about their opponents.

With the advent of social media, it became even easier to speak to one
community, enrage its base, and turn opponents into inhuman enemies. Many
protests and counterprotests over the past year were actually convened not
by domestic activists but by Russian bots. And all this effort had nothing
to do with the issues at stake but were simply to get Americans to a place
where we no longer know what to believe. In the words of one of the former
KGB agents running the effort, the idea was “to change the perception of
reality of every American to such an extent that despite an abundance of
information, no one is able to come to a sensible conclusions in the
interests of defending themselves, their families, their communities and
their country.”

All this effort was intended to divide the U.S. empire — the United States,
Europe, and its various allies — back into separate, self-interested
nations. In the resulting landscape of individual countries, Russia would
be relatively bigger and more powerful.

It worked even better than Russia planned. Not only is one of their most
trustworthy conspiracy theorists in the White House, but also the United
States is seriously considering isolationism as a national policy. Thanks
at least in part to these campaigns, we have a president and a significant
portion of the population who believe the United States is better off as a
separate country, unencumbered by obligations to the alliances we
established after World War II. It’s not simply that we are too busy
fighting one another to defend ourselves from the rest of the world; we are
now actively pursuing stronger boundaries and withdrawal from global pacts
from the Paris climate agreement to the TPP and WTO.

Rather than trace this isolationism back to the propaganda and fake news
that spawned it, we must now engage with nationalism in its own right. This
is the way many Americans (and, by the same process, Brexiters) now feel,
and it almost doesn’t matter why or how they came to feel this way.

A smaller, less influential United States is attractive in a lot of ways.
It may not work so well for growth-based capitalism, which has always
depended on expansion into new markets, but that could force positive
changes in extractive corporatism. It also relieves the United States of
the short-term expenses of protecting other people in other places. There’s
a certain shame in standing by while people in China, Russia, Myanmar, or
the Middle East are oppressed. But humanitarian crises are not the
responsibility of a nation going it alone. “America first” doesn’t mean we
can’t help other folks, just that we remove the plank from our own eye so
we can see clearly enough to remove the speck from our brother’s.

It would be nice to think that Putin is simply encouraging us to accept our
place in a new brotherhood of equal nations. But the problem with the
United States’ retreat from the global stage is that Putin is advancing.
Sure, he wants us to be a divided, paranoid, and self-obsessed nation — but
only so he can pursue his own expansion into Ukraine, Syria, Iran, and
beyond. While the United States dismantles its global apparatus, Russia
will restore its own.

If the United States truly wants to adopt a less interventionist foreign
policy, it should do so — but not for the wrong reasons. There’s a
difference between empire and alliances. NATO and the United Nations are
not extensions of the U.S. empire, but rather compromises made in the
interest of a peaceful global order. If anything, maintaining a nation’s
economic and military security without such alliances is harder and more
expensive.

Worse, if the United States really does retreat into nationalism, exit its
trade blocs, and dismantle its strategic alliances, the rest of the world
will be left to negotiate arrangements with Russia and China
instead—countries that prefer domination over alliance. This is where our
constant state of distraction and infighting may prove debilitating. We are
so ready to see our domestic adversaries as Russia would paint them that we
are losing sight of who is turning us against one another, how they want us
to respond, and what they mean to do after that.

-- 

Douglas Rushkoff
http://rushkoff.com
Founder, Laboratory of Digital Humanism and Professor of Media Theory and
Digital Economics, CUNY/Queens

Team Human <http://teamhuman.fm> - the podcast!

Sign up for RushkoffMail <http://www.simplelists.com/subscribe/rushkoff> to
get updates and newest writing

----
This is RushkoffList, a monthlyish update and advance look at work in
progress. Feel free to
forward to your friends as long as you include this footer.
To subscribe, use this link: http://www.simplelists.com/subscribe/rushkoff
To unsubscribe:
http://www.simplelists.com/confirm.php?u=grdK4Lvi7veNxafT2DxZrw1oAyoTFsEc

-- 
Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

<http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates:
http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ourproject.org/pipermail/p2p-foundation/attachments/20181205/3459d646/attachment-0001.html>