April14_2025

War Against NonFiction

Key reference and context on this subject and naming:

"This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality is a 2019 book by Peter Pomerantsev about disinformation and propaganda, which covers such campaigns in multiple countries." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_Not_Propaganda

Background 1985

Fertile ground for the situation comes out of technology adoption. The very information systems of news changing from paper to electric television.

In year 1985, the second term of entertainer President in White House, a book was published describing the emerging media ecology problem:

"For all his perspicacity, George Orwell would have been stymied by this situation; there is nothing “Orwellian” about it. The President does not have the press under his thumb. The New York Times and The Washington Post are not Pravda; the Associated Press is not Tass. And there is no Newspeak here. Lies have not been defined as truth nor truth as lies. All that has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference. Which is why Aldous Huxley would not in the least be surprised by the story. Indeed, he prophesied its coming. He believed that it is far more likely that the Western democracies will dance and dream themselves into oblivion than march into it, single file and manacled. Huxley grasped, as Orwell did not, that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions. Although Huxley did not specify that television would be our main line to the drug, he would have no difficulty accepting Robert MacNeil’s observation that “Television is the soma of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. ” Big Brother turns out to be Howdy Doody." ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, year 1985

This was outside the realm of weaponized / media invasion. This is strictly domestic USA technology of change from printing press for newspapers and magazines over to television.

Andrew Postman, son of Neil Postman, came out in public on February 2, 2017 to confirm that this (1985 media ecology theory) was the root of our USA situation: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/feb/02/amusing-ourselves-to-death-neil-postman-trump-orwell-huxley

Many independent media practitioners have raised the same concerns and pointed to Neil Postman's 1985 book, such as this March 27, 2024 assertion: https://www.northjersey.com/story/opinion/columnists/2024/03/27/us-politics-2024-predicted-media-expert-neil-postman/73022583007/

Background 1993

Texan Rick Roderick at Duke University in year 1993:

"if that’s true then all of the strategies by which ordinary people try to live decent good lives are lost along with it. I am not necessarily going to buy that right away, I am really not. I do think that the new, ah, technologies are going to call forth… I mean this is why the title of this course has been “The Self Under Siege”. If I didn’t think it was a real, virulent technological siege and just some thought up philosopher’s dream, which would not have interested me. I mean, I have no interest in that."
"The battlelines may be between anonymous forces that have been unleashed by technology that grew out of capital, that will be controlled in the hands of not many people – perhaps, perhaps not, I mean we don’t know – and people who still would like to have some experience."
"The war zone, in other words, may not be – in defending the self – may not be any of the classical ones. Like the working class versus the ruling class, the slaves against the masters, oppressed women against, ah, patriarchal society, blacks against whites. No, the struggle in the future may be to maintain the real against the unreal or the hyperreal or the irreal."

I think it is important to distinguish / focus on that final quote, describing it as a war zone, where Neil Postman described it purely as a naturally emerging situation of media ecology changes. Rick Roderick was looking in the future ("the struggle in the future may be") that technology itself and even hostile forces may be weaponizing the techniques.

The entire 1993 video series is recommend, multiple viewings: https://rickroderick.org/308-baudrillard-fatal-strategies-1993/

Background 1995

A decade after Neil Postman's book, another university teacher made similar observations. Independently describing the same media ecology crisis without being aware of Neil Postman's previous 1985 book on the subject.

“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a (year 1995) foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. As I write, the number-one videocassette rental in America is the movie Dumb and Dumber. “Beavis and Butthead” remain popular (and influential) with young TV viewers. The plain lesson is that study and learning—not just of science, but of anything—are avoidable, even undesirable.” ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, 1995

year 1995 media 10-second sound bites == year 2025 Bluesky and Twitter media reaction comments / images.

Year 1999, a new method of governing

Year 1999 brought about a radical change in government and governing to the world. Fiction storytelling (art) as a deliberate technique of society leadership.

Described 15 years later by BBC / Adam Curtis at the very end of year 2014:

"a central part of a new system of political control. And to understand how this is happening, you have to look to Russia, to a man called Vladislav Surkov, who is a hero of our time. Surkov is one of President Putin's advisers, and has helped him maintain his power for 15 years, but he has done it in a very new way. He came originally from the avant-garde art world, and those who have studied his career, say that what Surkov has done, is to import ideas from conceptual art into the very heart of politics. His aim is to undermine peoples' perceptions of the world, so they never know what is really happening. Surkov turned Russian politics into a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theater."

This quote is from a video presentation: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/12/31/bbcs_adam_curtis_on_the_contradictory_vaudeville_of_post-modern_politics.html

September 9, 2014 - public notice of "War Against Reality"

"The new Russia doesn’t just deal in the petty disinformation, forgeries, lies, leaks, and cyber-sabotage usually associated with information warfare. It reinvents reality, creating mass hallucinations that then translate into political action."

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/russia-putin-revolutionizing-information-warfare/379880/

September 27, 2025 public notice of "War Against NonFiction"

https://autistics.life/@RoundSparrow/115276777460150029
https://bsky.app/profile/roundsparrow.bsky.social/post/3lzt7nlbbds23

...

The amount of nonfiction of the cosmos has been stable for billions of years
The amount of Fiction shared on Bluesky and Reddit has drowned out nonfiction.

The War Against Nonfiction.