Propaganda and you (and your devices)
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Data streamoutputComputer programmingSocial engineering (security)Line (geometry)Multiplication signYouTubeReal numberSoftware engineeringTrailStreaming mediaMereologyQuicksortFood energyTelecommunicationPhysical systemRevision controlKernel (computing)1 (number)Escape characterFrustrationCASE <Informatik>Interactive televisionHypermedia
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Large eddy simulationSpacetimeGroup actionFacebookComplex numberSocial engineering (security)Video gameWordLevel (video gaming)TelecommunicationAnnihilator (ring theory)BitNumberPower (physics)Insertion lossOffice suiteSpeech synthesisPentagonNormal (geometry)Game theoryVirtual machineCuboidInformationMetropolitan area networkStatement (computer science)Shooting methodOpen sourceTrailInternetworkingFrequencyMultiplication signTerm (mathematics)Theory of relativityHypermediaService (economics)Point (geometry)Case moddingInteractive televisionPropagatorLatin squareIdentical particlesSinc function1 (number)Negative numberProjective planeGodSound effectHTTP cookieBootingQuicksortSoftwareMereology
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State of matterSource codeElectronic mailing listMultiplication signProduct (business)Perturbation theoryVulnerability (computing)Group actionInformationLeakRadical (chemistry)Exterior algebraDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Case moddingFormal verificationAuthorizationInternet forumWave packetIdentifiabilityVolume (thermodynamics)Prime idealOffice suiteFirewall (computing)Instance (computer science)Ring (mathematics)Limit (category theory)Letterpress printingSoftware testingMereologyChecklistMessage passingFeedbackReading (process)Field (computer science)Automatic differentiationInverter (logic gate)MeasurementHypermediaSlide ruleOpen setPatch (Unix)Social classGenderSpeech synthesisIndependence (probability theory)TwitterKeilförmige AnordnungElektronisches MarketingFacebookInternetworkingMathematicsElectronic program guideSeries (mathematics)
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Source codeExpert systemTrailHypermediaLine (geometry)QuicksortPower (physics)Pay televisionInformationMessage passingChemical equationRobotModule (mathematics)Boss CorporationTerm (mathematics)Programmable read-only memoryPhysical systemEndliche ModelltheorieHypothesisState of matterMassOrientation (vector space)ConcentricMereologySystem administratorCase moddingRight angleEncryptionFingerprintWebsitePoint (geometry)Multiplication signBuildingSign (mathematics)Goodness of fitSpeech synthesisSingle-precision floating-point formatUniform resource locatorComputer fileSphereBound stateOpen sourceTouch typingComplex numberFilter <Stochastik>CloningDigitizing
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Natural languageSineCloningRobotScripting languageSoftware frameworkLie groupDigitizingWebsiteRevision controlDrop (liquid)Mathematical analysisLink (knot theory)CodeRight angleComa BerenicesDemo (music)TwitterGastropod shellVideo gameCausalityUML
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State of matterWordEuler anglesVideoconferencingDomain nameAuthorizationIntercept theoremMereologySelf-organizationComputer animationXML
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Euler anglesLimit (category theory)Arithmetic meanIntegerSelf-organizationText editorMereology1 (number)Computer animation
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Euler anglesSheaf (mathematics)Demo (music)MereologyComputer clusterComputer animation
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MultimediaUniformer RaumWebsiteCellular automatonRight angleTheoryPressureStatement (computer science)MereologyInheritance (object-oriented programming)CountingTwitterThread (computing)InternetworkingWhiteboardKnowledge baseRow (database)Line (geometry)FreewareProduct (business)NewsletterHypermediaDisk read-and-write headFacebookMultiplication signLink (knot theory)MultimediaReal numberBuildingTraffic reportingSurjective functionSubsetComputer animation
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Source code
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
How's everyone else doing? It's the last talk of the day. Still got a lot of energy. You know, I was, uh, the first day I was streaming the 101 track and there was a lot of people that were, uh, you know, coming up here and encouraging people not to go to the talks.
00:20
They're like, oh, just, it's always uploaded on YouTube, why would you go to the talks? And I'm usually one of those people. I'm usually the person that thinks that you're crazy if you're gonna come to a talk and stand in all those lines. Mostly it's the lines. Being from Wyoming, lines aren't a thing so it, like, makes my heart hurt when I see people standing in the line. But, I don't know, to encourage people not to come to a
00:46
talk, that's, um, that's not, uh, I'd say it's misguided because there's something about being a part of an audience that's just electric. And, you know, this is no surprise. You know, if you think about any sort of sitcom that's out there, what do they do?
01:00
They pipe audience into your living room. They're piping, uh, soundtracks into you. Or, uh, canned laughter into you just to make you feel that you're doing the right thing. To make you feel that, oh, I shouldn't have to go make real friends. Um, I've got all the friends I need here in my living room. So, I mean, it kind of makes you wonder. It's like, um, oh, so first off, yeah, thank you. Thank you for, um, braving the,
01:23
uh, the colds and the sinuses, infections and whatnot and being here with me today. Um, uh, yeah, so, uh, yeah, there's something electric about being in the audience. And it makes you think. It's like, what is that? What is that that's programming us to, like, to
01:41
yearn to be a part of these social, uh, interactions? And, you know, if things like laughter, canned laughter, can program us to act differently, you know, just how open, how vulnerable are we? And I thought, yeah, well, let's just examine one of the hardest cases that we know about. And I'm talking about Colonel version Helen Keller. She
02:02
was blind, deaf and mute. And look at that. She's still reading. You're still piping input into her. Teaching her who knows what. So, it's like, if she's, she's the most locked down system I could think of, and if she's not locked down, how wide open are we? And, you know, I'm joking, but at the same time, I'm really not because we can't
02:21
stop stuff from coming into our eyes. We can't stop stuff from coming into our ears mostly. You walk around Vegas, you're bombarded with stuff. So, yeah, what's my motivation? I'm a software engineer by day, but I'm a frustrated consumer by night. A media consumer. You know, it's one of those things that says you just feel icky. You feel it like propaganda's just all over you. You know, you can't escape it. Um, so
02:46
what can you do about it? You figure that the people who can do something about it are the ones that are doing the propaganda to begin with. You know, you can't expect anybody else to, you know, come to your rescue for you. So, I thought, well, I mean, Python solves a lot of my other problems. Could Python solve this problem for
03:01
me as well? So, I guess it's time to take a journey. It's time to fight your friends in alleyways and tell them to put on the glasses. And if you don't get this, you haven't watched They Live, and that's your fault, you're wrong, not me. So, let's define propaganda. Propaganda is defined in this talk. It's, uh, real simple. You have
03:24
node A, you have node B, and you have a communication stream or a data stream. This data stream is an attempt from node A to get node B to behave in such a way that directly benefits, or get node B to act in a way that directly benefits node A. It's real simple. And it goes by many names. You know, advertising, lobbying, social
03:47
engineering, all of Las Vegas, essentially, that's all one big propaganda. Yeah, so,
04:06
propaganda is defined by this talk. It goes by very many names. And, um, you're probably thinking, oh, I do some of these. Am I a propagandist? Yeah, you are. We all propagandize a little bit, for sure. And it's a, it's a level like what we're willing to tolerate. What we as an individual, what we as a society, we're willing to
04:20
tolerate as far as what we're able to deal with, or what we're, what we find acceptable in propaganda. What about the word? I'd like to give a little history of the word, um, because none of these, none of these words are as scary as propaganda. Propaganda is the only one that really is scary. Maybe social engineering is a little bit scary. But propaganda is the only one that's really scary. You know, the one that's
04:42
always used as a pejorative. You gotta ask, well, what's, what's behind that? There's definitely a reason behind that. Uh, propaganda, you know, was, you know, first came into vernacular in like, you know, the mid, uh, 1622. It was, it stood for propagating the faith. Uh, the world was getting larger and that like our ships could, uh,
05:02
sail further. The world was also getting smaller and that kingdoms and factions were starting to bump into each other. And so you had like this pope that's like, God, I don't want to deal with all this shit that's on the outer reaches of my kingdom. I'm just gonna, he didn't say that, he speaks Latin. And, um, he, um, he, uh, you know, he, he stood up this, uh, you know, this propagation, uh, propagation of
05:23
faith. And it became effective almost immediately. In fact, like, the guy that was in, you know, the, the cardinal that was in charge of the propagation, you know, committee, he was, uh, he was known as the red pope. He was essentially an ad hoc pope for all the external kingdoms out there. Very powerful. But even then, I mean, it, it wasn't a, it
05:40
wasn't a pejorative. It didn't become a pejorative until, as in like a negative connotation, until World War I, after World War I. What's going on there? Well, World War I is, if you, you know, if you, I've listened to George Carlin's, uh, Dan Carlin's, um, uh, World War I history. I don't know if, uh, I highly recommend it. But, uh, you know, he, he brings up, like, World War I was the first war, you
06:03
know, major war in, in, um, uh, uh, since, like, the Napoleonic era. So you had this group of people, you know, who weren't used to fighting. And you had to get them spun up. You had to get them hating the other people. And Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, he wrote a whole chapter on war propaganda. He's like, this is where we fail. The English were, the English and the Russians, they were way
06:22
better than us. We've got to do a lot better. It was at this time also, and, and Hitler called it propaganda. You know, he, he loved the word. So that's why it became a bad word here. Edward Bernays, um, uh, you know, he's the father of modern day propaganda. He wrote, he lived at the same time period. And he was actually wrote in his book propaganda. He lamented. He goes, propaganda is such a fine
06:43
word. And the Nazis went and ruined it. He's like, well, we've got to come up with a different word. And the word he came up with was public relations. You know, that's the term. Did the Germans learn their lesson? Well, after World War II was over, the, the
07:00
liberators, or however you want to look at them, were coming through Germany. And they came across this man named Reinhard Galen, Galen. And they looked at his, uh, anti-communism propaganda. And they're like, man, this is good. Can you do this in English? And he was like, yeah, I mean, yes. I can totally do that. And, um, it was very
07:23
effective. We have this, uh, retired CIA officer saying that we fed his propaganda, that, you know, his anti-communism propaganda, they fed it Pentagon, the president's office. And it was just, he called it, it was basically bullshit. It was boogeyman bullshit. So yeah, the Germans did lose, uh, learn their lesson. And they still lost
07:43
the war, but their propaganda machine was much better. Um, yeah, thanks for sitting through that, uh, brief history. Let's fast forward to, like, we have the rise of the machines with propaganda. What has that done? Now, you've probably heard a lot of stuff about, like, how much it cost Google to power, you know, to run their, you
08:03
know, just to pay their power bill every day. Probably heard stuff about, you know, Target, uh, you know, could particularly, um, predict when one of their customers was pregnant, all those kind of stories. You know, there's just big numbers. We're not really quantifying it as a, as human brains. But then I saw this, uh, this, um, this
08:22
really neat article. The Heterotopia of Facebook. The thing is, Facebook is, uh, doesn't really matter. This could be any social, uh, uh, network out there, on, on, especially online. And, yeah, go ahead and, go ahead and, I highly recommend reading Heterotopia of Facebook. And it's, it describes what is going on with the human brain very
08:44
succinctly when we participate in these social media groups. You know, these, um, these other spaces is what a heterotopia stands for. Heterotopia is where you can go. It's a space that exists in real life, but it's a space that you can go and kind of project and live a sort of, you know, your own utopia. The thing is, everyone else is
09:05
doing the same thing. So you can get curb stomp if you go out there and project your idea. You can also get your boots licked by a sycophant. What Foucault argues is that, like, whatever happens in these heterotopias, if you're investing real, uh, uh, parts of
09:21
yourself into it, every action that happens inside this heterotopia will have an effect on you in the real world. Because your brain really can't distinguish between the things that you do. It's like, if I was a dumbass in there, why wouldn't I be a dumbass outside? And the answer is, there's no reason. There's nothing stopping you. You are a dumbass. That post, that was a shit post. Your whole life's been a shit post. You
09:45
know? So yeah, so let's say, you have these heterotopia, these spaces, and you're a propagandist, and you're like, you know, a salesman comes up to you and says, look, I have these spaces where people just come and live their lives and interact with all these other people. And it is like a direct pipeline to how they act in the real world.
10:03
Also, we've had machines and we've recorded everything. Could this be of use to you? I don't know. I don't know if it'd be worth my time, says the propagandist. Obviously that's not what they say. We know this because, um, these industries are titans. Uh, their owners are billionaires. The people, you know, are trying to wine and dine
10:23
the owners all over the place to try to get their services on, you know, to be beneficial to them. So yeah, these heterotopias, or these, uh, social media groups that collect all of our data that we invest very real parts of our lives in, it's a very important, it's very important. Let's go back to 1993. Al Gore was talking about,
10:44
you know, this, this idea of like a gap between the information haves and the information haves not. He's warning that if we don't, you know, provide technology to, you know, uh, poorer populations, they'll just get left behind. Now, in his book,
11:00
I mean, that's fine. That's a noble, that's a noble thing to say. In his book, Data Smog, oh, yeah, David Schenk, he, he made a really good point. He goes, it, it's one thing if you push technology onto a people, but if you don't upgrade the people, if you don't teach the people, if you don't give them the proper education of what it takes
11:21
to, you know, uh, to understand what these devices are and what data they're producing, then you're not helping the information gap at all. In fact, you might even be widening it. So what's it take to be information have and information have nots? What's that gap? Well, the information, to be an information have, it's not that hard. If you know what a tracking cookie is, if you, you know, you, you know why the
11:45
internet is making these people billions of dollars, if you know those things, if you know what an ad blocker is, you're already in the information haves. If you're one of the, if you're one of these fine, outstanding citizens that need stuff to just work out of the box, you're an information have not. And, um, to, uh, whoops, I guess I can go
12:20
to, uh, do we have any examples of information gaps today? Yeah, sorry. Um, I think so. I think one came up not too long ago. In the aftermath of, uh, the Orlando shootings, we had a talk, uh, a statement from Hillary Clinton. She promised, you know, from Silicon Valley to Boston, step up our game. Now, she, she then goes on to give,
12:45
like, the normal stump speech about intercepting ISIS's communications, tracking and analyzing their media posts, blah, blah, blah, blah. We already know that. There's already been plenty of discussion about that. But what I find interesting is this, as well as promoting credible voices who can provide alternatives to radicalization. She's
13:00
asking Silicon Valley to team up with them to promote credible voices, promote them, you know, whatever voice you deem necessary. Why do I think this is, uh, an example of the information gap? Because I don't think she could have got away with saying something like this. As president, I will work with our great, uh, New York Times and
13:22
its best seller list promoting credible books and authors who can provide alternative radicalization. And so, yeah, that's the question. It's like, why can, you know, why can a, um, um, what's the difference between, you know, Silicon Valley promoting stuff on their product and New York Times promoting books on their best seller, or
13:44
promoting books on their best seller list? It's one of those things where, um, you know, some people read this. They read about the government messing with their books and they go, hmm, no, I don't think so. You stop right there, government. But, um, uh, you know, why can we let the social media, you know, the
14:05
government, uh, talk about how she would like, uh, you know, private companies to help promote propaganda? And this wasn't a one-off thing either. We had this one story you might have seen. Uh, this was in, uh, Facebook and Twitter pledged to remove hate
14:21
speech within 24 hours. This was a story that was in Europe. And inside this article, we see the companies who also agreed to promote independent counter narratives to fight hate speech, including content promoting non-discrimination, tolerance and respect. So we have this, you know, we have movements where private, uh, companies are asked to,
14:42
you know, produce propaganda, you know, and, uh, are we okay with that? Alright. So, we have, uh, we have, like, we have this gap. Information haves, information have-nots. The best way to get information have-nots into the information haves class is for
15:01
education. Just educate, just educate an information have-not into information haves class and it's done. The problem is, is that this runs counter to what a lot of, you know, there's a lot of people that, you know, in their best interest are keeping information have-nots. You know, the, the more have-nots there are, the more ads, the better ads you
15:20
can sell or that target the people. And, um, you know, the more surveillance you can collect on people, you know, so there's interest in keeping the information have-nots. Now, you say, well, if we were to educate these people, what would it be? Thank you very much. That was a good transition to the next slide. So, I'm, I'm pulling this from, uh, uh,
15:44
uh, a lot of the, this, uh, uh, propaganda information from this book called Firewall, Firewall, propaganda's guide to self-defense. Jack Nolan was, uh, a PSYOP officer himself in the military and, um, if you don't know anything about the military, they have these things called field manuals and they are like the man
16:03
pages for war. If you, if you ever find yourself in apocalypse, you'll want to secure a volume. Now, um, he's basically going through the PSYOP, um, uh, uh, basically his training and he puts it all in this book. So, first off, let's go on, like, what's a propaganda steps? And we see here, it's mostly like, you know, a normal, uh, you
16:23
know, like a pen testing step. You know, you start off with ID the audience. You know, you want to do some footprinting on them. You want to, you know, determine what the audience's, uh, you know, limits are, what you can get them to do, what you can't get them to do. You also want to determine who their ringleaders are. In today's, you
16:44
know, in today's, you know, social networks, we have all these likes, we have followers. It's easy to tell who the ringleaders are, the end users. But also, you gotta remember that you can also target moderators, you can target sysadmins. A
17:02
you're gonna target a group of people or you can just target a mod who can censor everything for you if you want, if you can get them, you know, turned to your side. Uh, the next thing a propagandist wants to do after ID and his target audience, he needs to, you know, uh, determine a goal state. Most of the time, the goal state is to make
17:21
money. You know, it could be a lot, a lot of other things. The goal state could be, you know, to, uh, get people to hate the other people so you can go to war. But mostly it's make money. The next thing you want to do is scan for vulnerabilities on a society, on a group of people that you'd like to, uh, you'd like to, uh, change their behavior on. These are, you can tell what a society's vulnerabilities are. These are known
17:44
as hot button issues. If ever you, you're like, ooh, that's a hot button issue. That's a societal vulnerability. That is something that someone could always wedge in there, you know, wedge a wrench in there and try to exploit. This could be race, religion, gender, wealth, you know, these are, uh, you know, things that people are real sensitive
18:01
about. And, you know, it's upon the society, it's upon the society to really patch these. You can't, you know, if you're always going to leave this vulnerability open, it's, you know, it's, it, it, uh, it'll always be exploited. Choose the theme of the message. This is essentially the exploit of the, how are you, how are you going to exploit the vulnerability? Are you going to appear, appeal to fear? Are you going to appeal
18:24
to greed? In-group, out-group, that's very powerful. Like I said about people yearning to be a part of a crowd, uh, if you can get people feeling like they're an out-group, you know, you can get people feeling like they're an in-group because they continue to do what you want them to do, uh, these are all different, uh, uh, this is your
18:44
theme, this is the message that you want to run with, you want to appeal to something of your audience. Fear, greed, whatever. Next you want to plan for how to grab attention. This is essentially like your payload that you're going to be delivered.
19:02
You know, you're going to do TV commercials, you're going to do internet advertising, or many to choose from. Next you want to test the message, measure its impact, adjust the message as needed, repeat. In today's day and age, this is very easy to do, obviously. This is, um, you know, we get immediate feedback on the message and its
19:21
impact and, uh, you know, we can adjust it as needed, very quickly, repeat it and repeat it. So that's what a propagandist is going to do, that's his steps. What can a propaganda, uh, what can a person do to counter the propaganda? What kind of checklist can they, can they, can they use for themselves? A series of questions you
19:43
can ask is can the speaker gain anything from having me listen to them? You know, if you're talking to somebody and they, you know, you feel, you know, you feel like, yes, you know, if I listen to them, they have something that they can gain if, you know, if I, if I listen to them and, you know, believe what they say. Ask if the
20:07
source is verified. Alright. So, when you're reading articles, um, you know, pay attention to what, uh, um, you know, who's, you know, who is saying what. Sometimes you'll have an unidentified source, uh, uh, you know, these are good
20:23
clues. So, you know, white source. Is the source identified? This is like, you know, you know who the author is. You know, I'm the journalist, you know, Glenn Greenwald, I'm publishing this article, um, uh, you know, he's putting his name out there. If a source is unidentified, you'll see sometimes, like, uh, for instance, in,
20:45
uh, the coup that happened in Turkey, it was an unidentified source that was released, uh, you know, that, uh, the president or the prime minister, uh, was, you know, he had, he had sought asylum in Germany. That came from an unidentified source. And that's something that you could look into, I mean, that's
21:02
something that is a very good clue. If an unidentified leak, you know, happens and the government tries to chase them off to Russia, you know, you can tell that that was not a government, uh, you know, sponsored leak. Obviously they did not like that. However, if a source is in an article that is not identified and doesn't seem to be a big deal, you can
21:23
bet that that was a sponsored leak. Like, they, you know, the government was okay with that one. And black as a source is falsified. You know, some people like Donald Trump, they say stuff that's never happened before. That is a black, uh, uh, verification. That source is, it's a falsified source. He said something that no one
21:42
else has even said. You also want to ask if the source is credible. Has the source lied to you before? Usually when a journalist does something, like say that they, they, you know, they took, you know, rocket fire or they saw combat in an area, they're done. They're, they're no longer credible. There's no reason for you to believe them. So ask, you know, keep track of your source. Uh, you know, have they lied to you
22:10
before? Have they always been truthful? You know, that kind of thing. Ask if you've heard the message repeatedly. If the, repetition is key to propaganda. It's like their best
22:23
friend. I, I kind of feel, um, uh, kind of reminds me of like the Unix touch command. When you run touch first, it creates a new file, right? What happens when you run it again on a file? Modifies the M time, right? Modifies that modified time. And the way our brain works is that we rely heavily on modified time. When we go to search for
22:45
something, we like to go to stuff that has received activity recently. So when you build, when you send a message out repeatedly, you're building familiarity. We're, uh, you know, when we're, when we're, uh, humans, we love familiarity. You know, it means
23:02
that you're not a tiger that's here to eat me. You know, it, you know, it means that you're, uh, a friend, you know. And so that's why everyone's trying to push their label or their commercials or their propaganda on you all the time repeatedly. That's why it's a good sign. That's why it's a good clue. If you're seeing the
23:20
message repeatedly, you're like, why am I having to see this repeatedly? Think about every time you go into McDonald's, how many golden arches you see. They're trying to build a familiarity presence. Alright. Manufacture and consent. Uh, this is a book written by, uh, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, and it's coming from the
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hypothesis that the media mobilizes support for special interests that dominate state and private activity. Basically, the media is not the fourth estate, is what they're deciding. They're, uh, what they're hypothesizing. They're hypothesizing that the media is not this neutral thing, that they will perform, you know, to the, to the
24:01
needs of the special interests of the society. And to test this hypothesis, they just, they developed a propaganda model. And what's in this propaganda model? This, alright, one of the things you, first, propaganda filters. The size, concentration, ownership, uh, size, concentration of ownership, owner wealth, profit
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orientation of dominant mass media firms. So, in our beloved capitalist systems, uh, these media firms, you know, these businesses in general, they're allowed to grow, they're allowed to buy more, uh, uh, just everything around them. So you can buy more media
24:44
companies, you can, you know, that's, uh, you can buy more things that aren't media companies. And now you have, now you have, like, uh, you know, maybe something that's making money and you don't want your media firm to be, you know, to, uh, you know, to, it's, you know, you have a business that's shady, you don't want your media firm
25:01
bringing attention to it, you own both of them, that's great. You can just tell the media firm, hey, shut up about this. The media firm will be like, alright, you're the boss. Advertising as a main source of income, this is another thing. So, when, when media was just sold as a subscription only kind of a thing, uh, the governments,
25:25
you know, uh, publications were allowed to talk a lot of shit about governments and a lot of people in power. But, um, it was hypothesized, like, well, if we just turn it over to the market, and so, maybe, maybe the media will kind of sort itself out, it'll get back in line, you know, people won't be as, uh, anti-government. And it really
25:46
worked. And one of the ways, you know, as soon as advertising came in, it allowed for, you know, more rich people than, you know, the rest of the population to come in and, you know, uh, kind of sort of invest in these media companies, allowing them to grow bigger. And so, that's another way. If you can't own the media, what you can do is
26:06
you can own, you know, part of the advertising. That's a way that you can get your own kind of check and balance into, like, what message the media is putting out there. And then we have this idea of, like, reliance of media on information provided by
26:21
government experts funded by primary resources. This is where we get the idea of press conferences from. So we have 24 hour news, and, you know, we have, uh, or at least news that, you know, we have a newspaper every day, we have a news hour every day, and yeah, we do have 24 hour news. How do we, how do they have news to give? Well, this is where, you know, you know, very powerful entities such as governments and
26:45
corporations can set up a press conference. Like, oh, you want news? You can just come to this location at this time, there'll be coffee and donuts, you know, all you have to do is listen to us tell our side of the story. And that's very important, because now you have the media and the government just kind of working together. And, you know, you
27:03
kind of hear about it, you know, when, uh, you know, someone, you know, some journalist goes, you know, goes rogue and, you know, gets their, uh, gets their credentials pulled for being allowed into the, the, you know, the press conference. You know, so it gets, you know, journalists to, to kind of stay within bounds so they can
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stay getting news from these press conferences. And also, think about what this does, if, like, you're on the other side of the world and one of these big entities harms you in some way, you have to wait for a journalist to, like, fly over and stick a microphone in your face. Whereas in, with press conferences, by the time that
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journalist gets all cross C's to interview the victim, the, you know, and the home side, you know, the, the big entities, they'll have had their, uh, opinions in, uh, in, uh, you know, the public sphere for who knows how long. You know, so, uh, uh, press conferences are very beneficial. They're very beneficial to both the media and, you know, government
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and high power entities that can, you know, afford to do these press conferences for journalists. Flak. Flak is a way of disciplining the media. So, if ever the media does something bad, you have to have ways that you can, uh, uh, tell the media, you don't like that. Uh, one of the ways you can do this is, you know, you can have counter
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stories run, you can have, uh, you know, withdraw your advertising, this kind of thing. You just want to make life difficult for any media that dares say something bad about you. Another thing the propaganda model has is it has this thing called boogeyman, boogeyman enemies. When, uh, manufacturing consent was first came out, you
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know, communists were the boogeyman. And the way they wrote it, it's like they assumed the communists would be the boogeyman forever. We have terrorists as boogeyman today, another boogeyman we have as we've been going over before is hate speech. You know, hate speech is being used, you know, to get social media companies to help, uh, propagandize its users. Alright, so we learned some
29:06
things about propaganda. What can we do? Well, I decided to make a Reddit clone. Why did I make a Reddit clone? Well, because I'm addicted to Reddit, alright? And, um, you know, my friend told me, he's like, that's doing weird things to your brain, I didn't listen, and so now it's the only way I can solve problems. Because, well, I
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mean, the thing about Reddit though is it's a very organized website, and so if you can get rid of the people, it's very pleasant. And, you know, when you think about, like, I want to better my, my media consumption, you know, we're all familiar with this, you know, this concept of end-to-end encryption. We don't
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want things in the middle, we want, you know, end-to-end. So could we do the same thing to, uh, to, uh, our media consumption? Can we get as close as possible to the knowledge source without having, you know, all these grubby paws in there trying to change the message? Another thing that Reddit does, uh, yeah, get rid of mods and
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admins. This is huge, like, I, I don't know, Reddit has a lot of drama that gets kicked out because the mods and admins did something that was seen as censorship. Um, luckily I have not had to do any of that because I don't go to those weird subreddits, but, you know, they have a point. If, like, mods and admins can just
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choose to do stuff and, you know, against your, uh, against your will, is do you want that in a news source? Also, it's open source with a very easy install script. And it's got this, you know, Python, the Python pro module is a, is a very decent, uh, uh,
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module for, you know, scripting your Reddit bots. So, I just stood up this digital ocean droplet. It's running Ubuntu. This is, uh, the, the Reddit install script, I mean, it, uh, you can, you know, you can run it on, like, whatever version, you know, Ubuntu or whatever that can support it. If you're brave enough, you can
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tweak it to your harsh desires. But, like, if you want life easy and, you know, something like digital ocean and, uh, will make it that easy, you can just select whatever install Reddit shell is looking for and bam, within 15 minutes, you'll have a, uh, Reddit clone up and running. I wanted to leave the Reddit code alone. I was
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like, once I got it up and running, I was like, alright, that's fine. So then I just used pro and bottle. Anyone here, anyone here use bottle? It's a very lightweight Python, uh, uh, framework. It's like, it's very lightweight. It creates stupid simple API that I can just send commands at it and it'll just send commands at my Reddit clone. Also, I used this thing called summary API. Summary API
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was a life send because I had all my scrapers out. I had, you know, stuff like the natural language toolkit out and, you know, Parsi McParsface came out not too long ago, right? So I was like, wow, I can do all this stuff. But then, luckily, summary
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comes out. I was like, I do all that for you. Plus, um, you know, I don't have to, I mean, what it'll do, it'll go out, you can send it a link or you can send a text and it will run an analysis on it and pull out the important sentences. You know, this
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is literally, if you've ever seen like a too long, didn't read bot, it's probably using this exact site. It's, it's great at just taking the article and munching it down to however many sentences you want. You can munch it down to a tweet, you know, if you wanted to. So, yeah, I was very happy to, to know about these guys and I rely on them
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heavily. Also, look, I'm a slow reader. So, if I can just shorten articles, it's like, look, I'm either going to run a 10 sentence synopsis of this article or I'm not going to read it at all. So, thanks summary. Yeah, everyone ready for excited demo? Look, it's Reddit, don't get too excited. So, this is, yeah, so when I said it was very
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simple, that was a lie. Oh, can you guys not, uh, cause I killed some of my bots, but I have one bot up and running. So, yeah, it's, it's, uh, very simple, like,
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whatever, you know, whatever, um, you know, whatever domain, uh, the, uh, uh, uh, you know, the article came from, that's going to be the subreddit. Whatever author, uh, wrote it, that'll be the user. And so, you know, Reddit's a great way, you can select, you
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know, all the things that were published by the intercept, all the things that were published by that author and, you know, that, that part of the organization is done automatically. The next thing you can do is like, so let's take a look at this, uh, summary, because that's what we're looking at here. So, I just, I did away with
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titles. You know, the, the journalists aren't the ones who decide an article's title. That goes to the editor. The editor wants to, um, uh, you know, he wants people to click on it. He's going to make it click Beatty. So, let's get rid of it. Like I said, if we want end to end, why not just get rid of that? He's going to try to get you to click on
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it, so get rid of it. And so, what I have is just the top, the, the first 300 integers, or 300 characters, I mean, is read its limit. So, that's, you just, that's my title. So, I read the first, you know, first couple sentences, and then we're going to
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load it over. I thought I was on Def Con. No, no, no. Well, and I realize I'm
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all, you, you all are so, so kind. I'm already over, way over. Alright, real quick, let me just go over this. Tips for reading internet comments. Don't read internet comments. Alright? It's, first off, it's not doing good stuff for your health, alright?
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You get upset, you know, it's raising your blood pressure, you're using your free time or work time, you know, and, and probably someone on the other end is getting paid for that, alright? So, you're hurting yourself. Not only that, but, I mean, we're seeing more of this, you know, first off, if you're Russian, you're a troll, you know, but
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you're, you know, you're a Facebook warrior if you're British. That's some interesting propaganda in and of itself. But we're seeing more of these things called Ashoturfers or trolls or everyone, very many names. And that's very powerful. That's like, you know,
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you're, you're talking with somebody, like we were talking about, in your heterotopia, you're talking with someone and you think it's real, but they're not real. And so, also, I like this, it's like where, you know, Russia has the troll army, but, you know, if you're, you know, we're gonna go look at, we're gonna have an internet stranger tell me who I should vote for. That's above board. So, even if you
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think you're the best internet debater in the world, you don't have an incentive, you don't have a money incentive on the line. But that's not, I would argue that that's not the main reason you shouldn't argue with internet trolls. And the main reason, I think, comes from, to correct the record, this was Hillary Clinton's super PAC and
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they were talking about, like, yeah, we AstroTurf people. In the statement, lessons learned from online engagement with Bernie Bros during the Democratic primary will be applied to the rest of the primary season and the general election. So, I mean, it's even if you think that, like, you're, you're, you're getting good
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ideas out there and you're throwing them out there, you're really not. You're just helping them. You're building their, their knowledge base. You know, you're helping them get better. It kind of reminds me of, like, uh, uh, like Rick and Morty when it comes to, like, those little micro-verses. You know, they're able, you know, you have, like, this internet and you're in your, your little thread and
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you're just, but really all you're doing is you're speeding up their testing. You're speeding up their, their knowledge of how to, uh, uh, uh, propagandize the rest of the population because as they, you know, come out of that, out of your thread, they come into the real world and they're like, oh, we have just the commercial for you. Alright, so just don't. However, alright, so if you do insist on reading internet
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comments or if you want to comment with somebody, take out the public part of it. Take out the vanity part of it, you know, whether it comes to upvotes or, uh, you know, retweets or any of that. Just take all that and go to DM or PM, you know, see about that. You know, I think most people, you know, they've been most, they've been, um,
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accepting. They'll talk to you on DM and then DL. So, I mean, if you want, if you're interested, some documentaries I recommend, Manufacturing of Consent. It's about three hours long. Uh, that, this is a documentary on, uh, uh, Noam Chomsky and he goes
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over a lot of his theories on propaganda. Century of Self is about Edward Bernays. This is the movement from, like, alright, we just kicked ass in a war. Now what we can do? We can make a lot of money. That's what we can do. And that's what Century of Self's about. It's about turning, like, propaganda onto the, uh, private sector. Uh, some books, again, Manufacturing of Consent and propaganda by
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the same people. Firewall, uh, that was made by Jack Nolan. I don't know why I didn't put his name. Now, some sites. Alright, so I didn't mention fair.org and I didn't mention On the Media podcast. Uh, fair.org, you know, they had fairness and accuracy in reporting. They do a lot of newsletters on how to, um, on just some
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bullshit that the media does. On the Media podcast, uh, you know, it's about, uh, if you like Radiolab, it's kind of the same, kind of the same kind of production value. They give, like, fifteen to fifty minute podcasts and, uh, they do some interesting topics on how the media is treating various different subjects. Alright, thank you for
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coming. You've been too kind. Alright, hold up, hold up. So if you wanted to see,
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yeah, this is a summary. I've got, like, little ten sentence summaries. You can come through and you can read the article very quickly if you wanted to. And if you, and, you know, I always include a link. So, you can go see the real thing if you wanted to. Anyways, alright, now I'm done.