Phantom Power
The Anthropology Behind Disinformation and Manipulation
If someone tries to persuade you that the cobra in front of you is just a rubber toy, this is not disinformation; this is attempted murder.
Discussion about truth, knowledge, and reality has never left the center-stage of human inquisitiveness, keeping it all the time overpopulated by colorful to exotic interpretations still fighting who to play the main character. Counter to seemingly logical expectations, modern science, abundantly assisted by edge technologies, does not streamline or make the discussion on truth less controversial. On the contrary: contemporary cognitive science recently joined hands with quantum physics and the relativity theory to defend one of most bizarre notions on truth: the one that realism is false. Human species, however, survive and advance while solving the above issues on less abstract and more pragmatic information-processing tools that enable adequate responses and efficient adaptation to the processes that take place in our environment. Human interest in the nature of truth is profoundly rooted in the reality that knowledge about our relevant environment determines the decisions we make, and has the power to make the difference between success and failure, or survival and death.
With its unsurpassed capabilities to generate remarkably efficient behavior in interacting with its immediate environment, the human brain is evolution’s incontestable masterpiece. It functions on relentless modeling its environment through recognition of images in space, and recognition of patterns of sound in time. If frequent enough, the images of all components present in our environment that are important to us in terms of survival and advantage, with time get conceptualized in the brain. This was how in the Paleolithic era our ancestors were able to recognize and distinguish things like “apple”, “river”, “snake”, etc. On a higher level of the brain’s neocortex hierarchy those concepts are categorized into more general meanings such as “food”, “water” or “danger”. Then, in real time, in case an apple is around, the brain processes the information from the body sensors — the retina and olfactory nose, for example, identifies it as food, “consults” the internal organs if hungry, and if yes, sends command to the muscles of the hand to take it. Or, if a snake was identified, respectively a command “run away” would have been sent to the skeleton-muscles actuators. Within the imperatives of evolution and with regard to the anatomical and physiological characteristics of Homo sapiens, “food”, “water” or “danger” are crucially relevant to its survival and advance, so these categories were constituted as components of Homo sapiens relevant environment. That means constant monitoring of the immediate environment and looking for anything there that could be identified as a component of the relevant environment. Otherwise, our species wouldn’t have survived.
The point in time when Homo sapiens emerged — some 300 000 years ago, however, was
the only moment in history when the human brain was fully adequate to accomplish its evolutionary mission: at that time Truth was functioning as component of a relevant environment that was present within the range of our anatomical receptors.
You have some photons being sprayed onto the retina of your eye directly from the apple, the river, or the snake, and some molecules coming directly from the apple to interact with the olfactory sensors of your nose and make you experience the smell of an apple, with practically no third-party agency active in the space between you and the relevant component. Ever since that point of time, the accuracy of the primary information about the relevant environment kept declining, causing distortions within the decision-making process, wrong conclusions, and inadequate responses. Because, yes,
Human brain is the intelligence machine that has guided the survival and the advance of Homo sapiens from their life in the caves into the current Anthropocene, but Anthropocene comes with a new type of sophisticated high-tech based relevant environment, which is by orders more difficult to decipher by using our old model of brain, the anatomy and physiology of which were designed even before our life in the caves, and haven’t changed a lot since. As Albert Szent-Györgyi noted, “Here we stand in the middle of this new world with our primitive brain, attuned to the simple cave life, with terrific forces at our disposal, which we are clever enough to release, but whose consequences we cannot comprehend.”
Among the other fundamental changes which “this new world” brought in the way Homo sapiens exists, however, there is one of particular importance:
Anthropocene removed most of the essential components of our relevant environment beyond the range of our anatomical receptors, and doing so, Anthropocene rendered the original human paradigm of Truth dysfunctional.
In today’s globalized and intensely interconnected world there are numerous objects and processes that are important enough to be constituted as components of an individual relevant environment, notwithstanding the reality that they exist or take place beyond her brain’s anthropologic operational range — in terms of time, geographic distance, selection, semantics or conceptualization.
Those changes have created intermediate zones between our individual anatomical receptors and the things that are important to us.
Everyday life items, such as food, dresses, cars, electronic goods, medicines, but also news, knowledge, and information, come to us through those intermediate zones where third party agents accidentally — as a noise, or intentionally — by following their own agendas, can change the meaning of our relevant environment. Any interference, intentionally or accidentally executed in the space between your retina and a component of your relevant environment is consequential to the decision-making processes in your brain — it can feed wrong primary information or influence the assessment set of criteria, or both. And because within a modern complex system with active intermediate zones our tool — that “primitive brain, attuned to the simple cave life” can only react to its perception of reality, but not to the reality itself, in any case such an intervention will ultimately result in inadequate response and manipulated behavior. In this way, the anthropologic intermediate zones, by distorting the meaning of the original reality, provide for third-party agents opportunities to aggressively intervene and to massively influence to their own benefit the behavior of huge numbers of human individuals. This is a real “gold mine” largely exploited in advertising, propaganda, indoctrination, disinformation, and manipulation to boost their efficiency. The outcome of such developments is similar to driving a car with navigation running on forged maps: when you hear “You have reached your destination”, you will actually find yourself at the destination someone else wanted you to be.
Contemporary digital technologies already have the capacity to create even more convincing images and videos of non-existing objects, people and events, with DeepFake and FakeNude examples of their latest achievements.
And now imagine a hybrid entity, composed of a narrow group of people with similar political interests, a social media of the size, scale and database of Facebook, and a highly advanced artificial intelligence agency, the latter programmed to design for each of the millions individual social media accounts a separate tailor-made image of a presidential candidate, satisfying that individual’s intrinsic set of political criteria. Then the artificial intelligence agency could, in a jigsaw mode, cut each individually tailor-made image into let’s say a hundred pieces, and some three months before the election the program can start re-assembling it by adding one piece every day into that individual social media account. In this way, just before the elections, every single social media account, thus activated as an intermediate zone of an individual relevant environment, will gradually get their clear-cut choice finalized. With all millions of individual images bearing one and the same face of a real person — that of the desired next president.
This would be the point of time when the non-material Phantom Power, grown individually in the intermediate zones of each voter, and exercised on the election day by their free choice, will be legitimately transfigured into the real power of a real president governing a real country.
But all the above happening could also be just the beginning of a new era of Power.
