During his presidency, Donald Trump repeatedly helped propagate conspiracy theories about the so-called “deep state.” This shadowy-sounding conglomeration of government swamp-dwellers supposedly obstructed him at every turn, dragging his agenda of populist liberation into the mud and throttling it with a baseball bat.
From the perspective of Donald and his paranoia-prone constituents, the Deep State–consisting of officials at the Pentagon, in the American intelligence community, and in countless other government organizations–constituted a secret body bidding for unelected rule of this country, bent on executing some kind of shadowy “globalist” agenda. For now, we’ll leave aside the antisemitic undertones of theories like these, and simply ask: is it true?
Well, in a way, yes, it is. There IS a conglomeration of individuals, linked by a common agenda, inside government–and indeed, outside it, in the private sector–attempting to work together to bring about a massive global agenda.
And thank god for that; we’d be screwed otherwise.
In his book The Fifth Risk, Michael Lewis makes a point of digging into the less-scrutinized failures of the Trump administration. By “less scrutinized failures,” he means the huge number of federally appointed positions that Trump left empty, leading to “nobody home” issues around basic infrastructure and management tasks like, oh, idunno, keeping nuclear waste from leaking into the Columbia River.
In Michael Lewis’s assessment, “the deep state” is not a shadowy cabal. It’s just a bunch of government employees who actually know what they’re talking about.
Take John MacWilliams, who worked in what’s called “risk assessment” for the Department of Energy. “Risk assessment” covers a number of things, according to the New York Times: preventing dirty bombs from exploding at the Super Bowl, tracking nuclear weapons so they don’t get lost or damaged, protecting the electric grid from cyberterrorism, and, yes, preventing plutonium waste at the government’s facility in Hanford, Washington from leaking into the Columbia River.
But there are more ambiguous and ominous risks on MacWilliams’ plate. The most important, he says, is a lack of “program management.” Lewis defines an absence of “program management” as:
“...the risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions. ‘Program management’ is the existential threat that you never really even imagine as a risk. It is the innovation that never occurs and the knowledge that is never created, because you have ceased to lay the groundwork for it. It is what you never learned that might have saved you.”
During the Trump administration, because of the vacant positions, because of the lack of oversight, because of things like Trump refusing to even read his briefings, our ability to effectively manage our nation’s basic data-gathering programs–Health and Human Services, the National Weather Service, the Department of Agriculture, and many more–blew a gaping, cavernous hole during his term.
It was data collected by the Department of Health and Human Services that allowed journalists to eventually recognize the opioid epidemic. The Department of Agriculture made the discovery that allowed for the mass-production of the antibiotic Penicillin (it was discovered by Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming, but he couldn’t mass-produce it). The National Weather Service helps to predict and track hurricanes.
We lay the groundwork for the future by gathering data in, and investing in research during, the present. The current safety and prosperity that any percentage of the American People enjoy comes from groundwork that was laid in the past.
The horror that hides in our future should now be clear to you.
My brother, who works in management consulting for NASA, put it to me this way: “A huge part of the reason the USA works better than a lot of other countries is simple and kind of boring: we just keep better records. Tons of other countries are working with corrupt information and corrupt bureaucracies. They simply don’t have our information infrastructure.”
Trump trashed that infrastructure like Led Zeppelin trashing a hotel room. The problem is that millions of Americans had no way to know it was even happening.
When you ask most people when the Trump campaign began, they’ll tell you it started on June 16th in 2015. But the groundwork for that global reveal was laid long before. I’d argue that the first bricks were laid the moment Facebook started implementing their content curation algorithms in 2009.
This was the moment Alternative Facts were born. This was the moment the nation began to split into several entirely separate realities.
Much has been made of the failures of social media–the dopamine addiction, the fake news, and the way it’s torn our nation apart. But most of the critiques I’ve seen are just that: critiques. Not proposals for a solution, incremental or otherwise.
Ironically, the most effective steps toward solutions have been taken by the social media companies themselves. They’re nowhere near what we need, of course, but they’re more than anyone else has done.
Twitter’s labeling of misinformation surrounding the election and the pandemic were steps in the right direction, as was their eventual Trump ban. Jack Dorsey has also made much in interviews of Twitter’s ongoing efforts to break up information silos–to allow people “following the conversation” to be exposed to both sides of an issue.
Facebook has dragged its feet significantly more, and has been subject to repeated criticism for their lack of effort in fighting misinformation. And Facebook, maybe more than any other social media platform, showed its belly to international bad actors and was responsible for tearing our country apart. It’s reforming now, at the last minute, banning Trump entirely–but it’s going to take decades to undo the damage they’ve done, cumulatively, to our civic discourse.
YouTube played a thorough role as well–sending those in search of facts down rabbit-holes of videos catered to their interests, radicalizing them more and more over time, in an effort to maximize clicks and viewing time. They’ve worked on this problem in recent years, but the damage was done there, too.
On all three platforms, the core issue was the same: people getting information tailored and warped around their own worldview, whether that information was true or not. Over time, without us even realizing it, national dialog became impossible, because none of us were inhabiting the same world. We were all living in cold caves of isolation, watching the shadows flicker on the wall.
If an electorate isn’t operating with a shared body of accurate information, it can’t vote and make decisions in its own best interest, or in the best interest of the nation, or of the world. Somehow, information has to reach the voting population. Otherwise, voters will develop misapprehensions about what’s going on in the country, and about the goals and records of the various political candidates, and about other citizens.
We see the ultimate manifestation of this problem in the Q phenomenon: the aforementioned social media silos become black holes of disinformation and conspiracy paranoia. And these sorts of disinformation phenomena have gone further than anyone thought they would–we now have elected representatives who express support for Q. This is a serious deterioration of our government, and it’s an extension and continuation of the brain-drain Michael Lewis warned about that began under Trump. But it started online, long before Trump walked onto the political stage.
Those of us familiar with the dark, swampy parts of the internet where phenomena like Q originate–4chan, 8chan, and other less-known catacombs–understand that total deregulation and anonymity is what allows toxic cultures to thrive. That’s not to say there’s no value in spaces that encourage self-expression and authenticity. But many of these online forums are anonymized, and are breeding grounds for a certain type of Joker-aping troll (Ian Danskin does a particularly good job of explaining how these places breed fascism).
These forums are rife with homophobia, racism, and misogyny, much of it disguised as “humor.” And because it’s impossible to tell whether any individual commenter on these boards is trolling or serious–or even which person is leaving each comment–communication is consequence-free. It’s difficult to develop a bad reputation when nobody knows who anybody is. But these anonymous cultures can still recruit, grow, foment, and plan.
The point here is that we see what culture arises in the absence of consequences and fact-checking, and it’s not great. It’s incredibly toxic and corrosive. And if you’re familiar with 4chan-type culture, you can also look around at the rest of the internet and recognize that in the space between the advent of Facebook and the end of the Trump presidency, social media–especially Facebook and Twitter–began to resemble ‘chan culture more and more closely.
This nose-dive of the popular discourse was, before the current pull-back and implementation of fact-checking, only helped along by the systems and algorithms that undergird social media. One of my favorite examples is the original YouTube recommendation algorithm–in order to keep people watching, YouTube would basically, over in the right-hand bar, show you slightly more intense, slightly more radical versions of whatever you were already watching: eventually Rogan-ites get recommended Alex Jones videos, etc.
It’s easy to see how this would lead someone down a rabbit hole toward being a white fascist, or a radical leftist–basically, easy to see how it would contribute to the polarization in our country. Before long, the two sides would be living in entirely different information universes, and would be unable to communicate at all.
It’s also a great example because it shows that nobody has to be “trying” to radicalize you. The automatic YouTube algorithm wasn’t actively trying to turn you into a Nazi. YouTube was just trying to keep you watching, and the algorithm was showing you whatever was most likely to cause you to click. Your interests, fears, hopes, and viewing habits did the rest. Plenty of bad actors and propagandists out there–the Breitbarts of the world–but some of the forces acting on you are completely blind.
This shows why the recent baby steps by social media companies are so crucial. Because now we can clearly see that all totally deregulated, totally unmoderated social platforms basically slope, inevitably, toward 4chan-like culture.
We thought perhaps that just connecting everyone would lead to utopia. But in order to fight election disinformation, Facebook and Twitter had to actively make their products “worse”–less addictive, less connective, less growth-happy.
Now we’re starting to recognize that internet connection and real-life, empathetic connection aren’t the same thing. They have to be dealt with in different ways. If we want a way forward for our culture and our nation, we have to address this need–a deep and pressing need–for a better information infrastructure; a better way for people to hold public conversations, connect, and become informed. Just leaving things alone is not a solution to the problem. Leaving things completely alone results in 4chan.
Okay, so far so good. But what does all this have to do with the Illuminati?
The current conspiracy paranoia in the culture has a particular flavor: your typical Q-head, whether they’ve been drawn in from the left (new age anti-vax quackery) or the right (the Joe-Rogan-to-fascism pipeline), is under the impression that there are vast forces and powers trying to restrict their freedom–huge corporations and corrupt politicians that think they know best, controlling the behavior of everyone else.
This impression isn’t helped by the fact that these big social media companies are seen as rich, powerful, and with a sinister manipulative edge, especially by those that have no real understanding of the trials or intricacies of running a major platform. When Jack Dorsey went on Joe Rogan’s podcast as a guest, the comments were absolutely rabid–from the right and the left.
Joe Rogan’s right-leaning fan base saw the new fact-checking measures as disruptions of free speech, of course–they believe Twitter is just one more arm of the Deep State Globalist Conspiracy revealed by Q, and that all these “liberal techie” (is Jack Dorsey even a liberal? Doesn’t matter to them; I promise) coastal elites are in cahoots with the rest of their enemies.
The left, for their part, don’t particularly trust or like Jack Dorsey either. Why should they? He’s a billionaire; a structural beneficiary of massive inequality and a sign of so many of the problems with tech culture. He has promised to give away massive amounts of money to help sort out the problems he’s had a hand in, but firstly, he benefits massively from this as a tax scheme, and secondly, considering how he made the money, it’s sort of the least he can do.
There is no real room, between these critical perspectives, to have a solid public discussion about the actual solutions Jack Dorsey is proposing to improve social media infrastructure and whether or not they will work. Most people basically believe he just shouldn’t have this kind of power in the first place.
But as we’ve already discussed, totally unregulated connection leads to ingroup formation, information tunnels, vulnerability to foreign powers, and social breakdown. The social media universe needs active curation and moderation.
We don’t trust the people in charge, government (do we really trust the government to regulate this, given what just happened with Trump?) or the private sector (we’re going to hand over public discourse to Silicon Valley billionaires?), but having nobody in charge of moderating media doesn’t seem like an option, given what our country and our public discourse have just been through.
From the perspective of the paranoid Trumpist conspiracy theorists, this conflict produces the perfect nightmare scenario: they’re proven absolutely right. There IS a shadowy cabal plotting to manipulate them. It’s us. It’s Jack Dorsey. It IS the coastal elite. When we grapple with this social issue, even in the smallest ways, it’s a confirmation of all their worst fears. Any effort to fact-check live, de-platform liars, or fix the problem only confirms their paranoia. Why are you trying to manipulate what they think and learn? Why are you trying to feed information to them?
And what makes the cabal “shadowy” isn’t any real effort toward a secret conspiracy–instead, it’s the asymmetry of information and power. There is no way for a person living paycheck-to-paycheck to regard Jeff Bezos as anything other than an enemy, nor should they. He’s built an empire squeezing the value out of other sectors of the economy. He owns Whole Foods and The Washington Post. From their perspective, he controls how we buy things, how we get food, how we get information–he’s a walking Orwellian nightmare.
So we are put into a situation where it’s almost impossible to earn the trust and consent of the population to create some kind of new information infrastructure. And we desperately need one–because every other superpower is aggressively ramping up their own version of this infrastructure, and trying to undermine ours.
Many of them do not necessarily share our rosy (though unrealized) democratic ideals. But if we don’t figure something out soon, their models and values are going to be the only alternatives left, and America is going to look like Fury Road.
MIT management consultant Otto Scharmer’s massive tome Theory U, which outlines his total framework for helping organizations to adapt to changing conditions and “lead from the emerging future,” has a neat little diagram that lays out his vision for the ecosystem arising between business, politics, and civil society, which is basically the constellation we’re talking about:
Here, he emphasizes the relationship between each sector–and, as is his theme throughout most of the book, he sees us evolving from old paradigms of interrelationship that don’t work, toward new ones that do.
Scharmer believes that our goal, in order to be future-ready, should involve these sectors moving closer to the center of that diagram: toward collaborative dialog with each other, and from there into a unified ecosystem.
You can see that, for example, at a more primitive stage in the history of organizational communication, the relationship between “politics” and “business” is characterized by bribery and soft money–pure machiavellian maneuvering.
By Scharmer’s reckoning, as the two cultures get better at suspending their egos and moving into deeper dialog, the relationship evolves–into a negotiation of regulations, and thence into public collaborative conversation–and then into an even deeper state of collective presence together and co-creation that he’s observed in very special moments during his work with large companies.
This deep place of collaboration and innovation is where “leading from the emerging future” happens, in his estimation. And he’s worked with some pretty insane clients; he may know what he’s talking about.
This final stage of collaboration is an extremely terrifying idea to right-leaning conspiracy theorists (and to many other people). This is the merging of government, business, and citizenry into a single entity with a progressive agenda–from their perspective, precisely the terrifying Illuminati New World Order they’ve always feared. And this is exactly the agenda of some of the most advanced business leaders and politicians, including many on the progressive left.
Yet we know, after looking at the evidence, that we have very little choice. As we discussed from the beginning of this piece, the health of our society in the future is going to depend, in a very concrete way, on our ability to create, distribute, and interpret good data, and to understand needs and deliver resources.
We cannot do this in the future without society-wide collaboration. The citizenry need access to good info and education in order to vote and participate in civil society, and their elected government needs literacy in technology and business so that it can adequately regulate, as well as source data, innovation, and assistance from, the tech and business sectors. The entire interdependent system must be both upgraded and wired more closely together.
Tell all this to a Trump supporter and they will go pale with terror. This is manipulation. This is the takeover by the socialist elite. This is the end of the world.
You can see it in their reaction to falsehood-labeling and deplatforming of Trump by Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms. It’s impossible, given the reality-tunnel they live in, for them to experience this as anything other than liberal, coastal, tech-elite power brokers oppressing their perspective, exactly like a secret cabal that rules the world. Yet this “oppression” is necessary, because, again, all unmoderated online space slopes toward 4chan. Our civil society needs this “oppression” (read: education) in order to survive.
Both Scharmer, and Peter Senge of The Fifth Discipline (yes, an entirely different book from The Fifth Risk) fame, have worked with some of the biggest and most complex organizations on the planet in massively high-impact scenarios. Both agree that the movement of good data is crucial to an organization’s health, whether that organization is a corporation or a nation-state.
But currently we have no way to dialog with, or get information to, these people. They believe nothing we tell them, and any attempt to shape the information landscape toward truth feels like oppression to them. So they’re acting on bad data.
And when people act on bad data, both Scharmer and Senge agree, this leads to organizational decay. When it happens to a company, that company folds, collapses, sinks into dysfunction, goes bankrupt. What happens when it happens to a country?
I came across an optimistic-yet-sobering passage in Scharmer’s book that reads:
“The European social model exemplified by Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, or Holland is a good example of relative balance, autonomy, and co-dependence among the three sectors. Historical examples for the three modes of domination have been featured by socialist systems (domination by the state), theocratic systems (domination by spiritual leaders), or neo-liberal economic systems (domination by business) all of which come with their own set of problems and issues that stem from overly reducing the real complexity of our global reality today.
Although the current rise of fundamentalisms across the board seems to suggest the opposite, I believe that this phenomenon actually is a counterreaction to a deeper and still continuing societal shift towards a co-dependence of the three sectors.”
That last passage is the real doozy: the Right can feel it coming. That’s why they’re freaking out.
There is a nation that rivals or surpasses the US in size and complexity that currently functions as one model for a future-forward, intel-integrated, data-driven, populace educating, coherently led country. That nation is China.
The problem, obviously, is that China is not, in a host of ways, a model we want to replicate wholesale. We believe very much in free speech in this country, freedom in the realm of business, freedom of assembly, artistic freedom––basically, various kinds of freedom that would directly disrupt China-type strategies for data dissemination, education, collaboration, and control. We’re also not a big fan of their human rights violations, at least in theory, though our country commits plenty of them too.
So what can we use as a model? Are we forced to crib templates from European nations that are so different in size, resources, and demographic makeup from ours?
We need to be more imaginative than that.
Much is being made in the business world right now of “innovation hubs”–clearinghouses of collaboration set up by (for example) major healthcare companies in order to foster exchange between academia, the business world, the tech startup world, and government. They all need that collaboration, in order to create and leverage new data, AI, and advances in science and tech.
These are sites for the kind of interplay that will be crucial to the future–the building of solutions collaboratively, as well as the development of regulatory mechanisms that comprehend and restrain those solutions. Because the problem with the government right now is that they do not understand technology, so they cannot hope to effectively regulate it toward our flourishing.
During the Congressional hearing about anti-competitive tech practices, one official asked Mark Zuckerberg a question about tweets. Elected officials are hopelessly out of touch, and are over-reliant on private consultants.
Possibly even more worrisome, the hearing devolved into partisan bickering–just like everything else does these days–because the Republicans wanted to turn it into a referendum on free speech. The questions ping-ponged back and forth between Democrats asking about breaking up the tech companies, and Republicans pushing to keep their most extreme constituents allowed on the platforms.
With that climate, it’s unclear that Congress is even competent to decide if, or precisely how, the tech companies should be broken up. Do we demolish or fragment some of our largest and most effective data apparatuses, like Google, precisely when our country needs good, organized data the most? These companies must be regulated by a Congress who understands how they work.
To understand some of the complexities of the issue, ask yourself who exactly you’re rooting for in this fight. Google? The conservative video app? The government? do we have a Congress or a court system prepared to confront issues like this one?
Social media is a massive chunk of the problem; we must contend with it. Because it’s central to the information dissemination issue we’re confronting. Any effort toward public education of the electorate has to deal with the social media siloing issue. But can we really just hand it over to state control by nationalizing it, or making it a kind of public utility? Is that really any better than leaving it in the hands of corporations?
We need a uniquely American solution to this problem. The “innovation hub” idea is probably a crucial key–because we need an exchange of ideas between tech, government, and citizenry that will result in a regulatory framework of proper complexity to deal with our new set of problems.
It’s easy to feel like this is an impossible task, but we’re already doing it–the fact-checks by social media, and the public discourse around them, are a starting point. Much more advanced thinking is needed, but those are the baby steps–the convulsions of our civic failure birthed them, marked out prompts for how to think about what these platforms and algorithms regulate and disseminate, and how, and why.
What is social media for, in America? We act like it is impossible to think rigorously about this question. It is not. We just haven’t done it yet.
If we do that thinking, if we do our homework, it may be possible to develop a new vision for America–one that includes our best ambitions as well as the lessons from our worst moments; rock-bottom moments like this one right now.
Another possible solution, though it sounds trite, is just better schools. The better everyone is at critical thinking and media literacy, the better off we’ll all be.
We need these solutions, because the complexities of the 21st century are waiting for us. We must reckon with the reverberations of our racist history. We must reckon with climate change. We must reckon with massive failures of public health, and dawning automation, and cyber warfare, and a thousand other things that demand a new order of magnitude in terms of the complexity of our civic response.
The Fifth Risk is real: we cannot begin to plan for this future if we don’t even have the data infrastructure to learn about it, or to teach each other about it. And recent events in Georgia and the Capitol have shown us the power of an educated, versus a misinformed, voting population. We need an entirely new evolution of the “deep state.”
Like it or not, we’re all stuck on this rock together.
The original Illuminati of Bavaria, on which are based the massive web of conspiracy theories and fictional depictions that litter modern popular consciousness, were a group of artists and intellectuals in 18th century Germany that included free thinkers like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. According to Wikipedia...
...The society's goals were to oppose superstition, obscurantism, religious influence over public life, and abuses of state power. "The order of the day," they wrote in their general statutes, "is to put an end to the machinations of the purveyors of injustice, to control them without dominating them.”
Right now, that seems as good a prayer as any.