How to Win An Information War

Hope, forgiveness and love as highly effective weapons

WHEN WE WERE YOUNGER WE WATCHED MOVIES WHERE THE GOOD GUYS FOUGHT THE BAD GUYS, AND THE GOOD GUYS WON. WHY, WHEN WE LOOK AROUND US TODAY, DOES THE OPPOSITE SEEM TO BE HAPPENING?

I am not trying to neutralise people, or numb them or dismiss their anger or say it shouldn’t be expressed. I am not a Democrat or a Kier Starmer supporter or any kind of centrist: I believe in the revolution. I believe our capability to organise such a revolution, though, is being stamped out out by the algorithm, which prioritises being right over everything else, and burns the precious area of nuance from which hope and community can grow.

Using the example of a real life argument: say you have an argument with a loved one, and anger streams in and out of you like waves. Anger might be the primary emotion you experience over that half an hour, but it’s mixed with shame (still unpleasant, but potentially useful if processed correctly), plus a tiny crack of the extremely precious substance we call forgiveness.

This sliver of forgiveness, though far too small and skittish to be picked up on any digital radar, ends up being the star of the show - a vital tool, i.e. a weapon - when our argument comes to an end, and we go back to the business of loving that person.

Like I said, though, the radar (in this case algorithmic social media) does not pick up on this forgiveness, even though it is the ultimate weapon in the back pocket of love (love being a sense of justice and equality, which is the thing we all have in common).

A while ago someone tweeted something kind of witless about the Palestine marches: “someone should set up speed dating at these protests”, they said: “I want to meet a baddie who’s down for the cause”. Someone quoted this tweet, saying “this person is everything that’s wrong with the left”, and it went off, getting hundreds of retweets and likes.

I can absolutely see why the second person did it: we’re taught from birth to correct mistakes; be right; know stuff; win debates; eviscerate opponents. This behaviour is rewarded handsomely by algorithms: hundreds or thousands of buttons of validation that hit like an excellent drug, getting us high as fuck on how correct we are (pride), and the numbers push our take to the top of the feed, and we get given more and more of it.

But on the other side, unless the person responsible for the original tweet is uncommonly well regulated, being shamed en masse by a social group they seek to be a part of will make them feel as low as the second person is high (shame, rejection, fear).

And where might we go when we’re low? There’s an increasing danger that we might seek a remedy for this feeling in the very same algorithm which caused it in the first place, only this time we’re looking in a different corner, where people agree with us, where we can get high ourselves: and so the left is splintered and shattered once again.

One time in 2021 I was at the gym, and I wrote a note in my notes app about how algorithms were getting stronger, like the gym bros I saw before me. At the time I was referring to the Spotify algorithm, I think, and I had this vision of the algorithms as little alien blob like creatures, all different colours (green for Spotify, blue for Twitter, black and white for TikTok etc etc). They were in the free weights section, splayed over various benches doing sets and reps while we scrolled. “I be up in the gym just working on my fitness” type thing. I had no idea what it meant, but thought it was a cool metaphor. These bodybuilders are strong, now, years later, as they’ve been bulking out exponentially: strong like big horrible corporate orcs.

They are winning a battle we didn’t even know was happening - but instead of killing us, they use their strength to turn our souls inside out, rendering us a) right and b) alone. The echo chambers are getting smaller and smaller, until they turn into tiny islands in a stormy sea. We stand at the top of the high turrets on each island, serving hot take after zeitgeist after comment section: “this opinion is correct, and if you can’t see it from my perspective, you’re fucked and i want nothing to do with you”. They are killing our souls instead of our bodies, emotionally hollowing us out. We stand on our turrets, just out of earshot of each other: I am one hundred per cent correct about everything, and oh, look at that: I am also astoundingly alone.

Zhuangzi said “Your life has a limit, but knowledge has none. If you use what is limited to pursue what has no limit, you will be in danger.” We have all the information in the world at our disposal, and yet somehow we’re still losing. Knowledge is availing us nothing. We stand at the turning point.

I never stop thinking about ‘annoyance is the price you pay for community’. The algorithm blunts the crucial and, frankly, awe-strikingly beautiful process of being annoyed at someone, processing it, working through it, forgiving them (maybe, as a treat), and then emerging as a stronger unit.

Forgiveness makes no sense; it's acutely uncomfortable, and at odds with the bulletproof facts and logic offered by the algorithm (everyone wants to frictionmaxx, but no-one wants to forgive the person who really fucks them over).

I personally didn’t mourn Charlie Kirk’s death, the same as I don’t mourn Margaret Thatcher’s or any other powerful figure who encouraged the fast or slow death of the oppressed. I can’t help but notice the parallel, though, between this talk I’m making of love and forgiveness, and the speech made by Charlie Kirk’s wife at his memorial - she forgave the person who killed him, she said. “The killers in high places say their prayers out loud”, says Leonard Cohen.

To conflate the love, hope and forgiveness the left so desperately needs, with the teachings of the Christian god who’s name is used to kill and oppress by those on the right, is to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I heard somewhere in the last ten years that World War Three would be an information war. These words, as most do, went in one ear and out the other: I had no way of conceptualising what an information war would look like, and every time i tried it made my head hurt, so I gave up, adding it to the vaguely shame-tinged bank of “things I don’t and won’t understand”. Then, a few months ago I read something, about how technology is moving so fast right now that no human brain can conceptualise or understand it. The only way we’ll understand it is in fifty year’s time, if we make it that far, when we read it in the history books.

As soon as I fully accepted that I had no fucking clue about anything, it all started very slowly falling into place.

Information goes into our brains, affecting our thoughts, which affect our feelings, which affect our actions. Something must be malfunctioning in the middle of this transfer - the thoughts-feelings bit - because I think it’s fair to say that, largely, the actions aren’t actioning right now (see: the state of the world, the good guys losing, etc, etc.).

Luckily, these thoughts and feelings aren’t set in stone: they are malleable, and have the potential to transform completely - and I know this to be true, as someone who was convinced her thoughts and feelings were stuck in one place forever, then watched as they slowly got infused with hope and shifted to a different plane entirely.

We can get hench just like the algorithmic bodybuilders are getting hench: as long as we are alive, we do stand a chance in this battle.

So, with all that said, what’s a legal way of shifting people’s thoughts and feelings? I think stories are a good place to start.

‘ATLiens’, Outkast

- Love Iona, your favourite storymonger -

(P.S. If you liked this story and want to support my writing, you can buy me a coffee at the link here. I see and appreciate every single one of you, and am so grateful!)