Dick Pountain/Idealog 272/15 March 2017 13:54
A few months ago (issue 269 to be exact) I wrote a column about the way the so-called 'alt-right' in the USA had built an alarmingly effective alternative web of sites that pumped a continual stream of 'fake news' stories into the mainstream social and news media during the 2016 presidential election campaign. A US professor of communications, Jonathan Albright, mapped the topography of this dark web, which he dubbed a 'micro-propaganda machine', and the Guardian printed his map. This network employs advanced SEO and link tweaking tricks to stay hidden.
Turns out though that this was barely half the story, and after I found out some of the other half I rather wished I hadn't, because I've been feeling slightly queasy ever since. I found out through a highly entertaining blog post by Dale Beran, a writer and comic artist who had the distinction of being an early user of the 4chan.org website (where his comic work was admired). Now I've personally only been on 4chan.org once - by accident when following some obscure search - and I began to feel uncomfortable after about three minutes, fled after five and spent the next half hour scrubbing against malware. Bit like a jungle, bit like a locked-ward, bit like a circus, good test of your anti-virus solutions...
According to Beran's extraordinary piece (https://medium.com/@d1gi/the-election2016-micro-propaganda-machine-383449cc1fba#.gp86cg9ns) 4chan was the breeding ground for the Anonymous hackers network, the 'Gamergate' scandal, Bitcoin, and more recently for the alt-right micro-propaganda network. Its denizens tend to be nihilistic, misogynistic, game-playing nerds with an extremely dark (and often very funny) sense of humour. Beran explains why they swung their considerable online skills behind Donald Trump, not because he was any good, not because they agreed with his politics (they don't really do politics) but precisely because he's so awful - the ultimate prank, elect a nutjob as president of the world's sole superpower. They also supplied the Trump team with its mascot, that unpleasant cartoon frog Pepe.
I recommend you read Beran's piece for yourself, with couple of big Solpadeine and a glass of water to hand. And I have to admit being jealous of the deft way he wove a Charles Bukowski novel about horse racing into his narrative. But what I intend to pursue here is the likely effect of this apotheosis of fakery on the future of our affairs, which might go way beyond mere prankery. The overall effect of all this fake news and contempt for rational argument - which has started popping up not only in Whitehouse press briefings but everywhere from Sweden to Turkey to China - is to erode trust, and trust is perhaps the most valuable commodity in the whole world.
Surely a slight exaggeration? Everyone tells a white lie now and again don't they? No need to get so worked up about it. Actually I'm not worked up at all, because I don't see this from a moral perspective. No, what terrifies me is that debt, credit, markets and even money itself, are all just forms of materialised trust. If I hand you a fiver, you not only trust that I didn't forge it but more importantly you also trust everyone else to recognise its value and give you the equivalent goods in exchange for it. The very word 'credit' is defined by Collins as 'the quality of being believable or trustworthy'. Undermining trust is like putting sand into the engine-oil of the world economy.
To be sure the relationship between money, credit and trust is rather more complex than I've just suggested, as extensively analysed by everyone from Adam Smith to Maynard Keynes. My favourite recent study is 'Debt: The First 5000 Years', a lively and groundbreaking work by David Graeber (one of the masterminds behind Occupy) in which he says:
'A debt is, by definition, a record, as well as a relation of trust. Someone accepting gold or silver in exchange for merchandise, on the other hand, need trust nothing more than the accuracy of the scales, the quality of the metal, and the likelihood that someone else will be willing to accept it.'
Which brings me to another dangerous online lifeform, the gold-bug. You'll have seen those websites where folk that argue that all our bank-created 'fiat money' is actually worthless, bits on hard disk, and that gold is the only real source of value. A few years ago this seemed either mildly eccentric or mere gold-salesman hucksterism, but keep undermining trust in everything and these arguments start to be believed. That way eventually leads to Northern Rock. Once you believe nothing, in practice you'll believe anything: say, that insulting China will resurrect America's rusting factories, or that leaving the EU will save the NHS from collapse.
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