The story of the twenty-first century media landscape thus far is the story of the left’s own tools being used against it, more effectively than they had previously been used. ‘Fake news’ is the currently-popular term, but we’re really talking about disinformation (from the Russian Дисинформатся), a particular variant of propaganda. More specifically, we are talking about culture jamming — a set of techniques intended to disrupt, subvert, or complicate existing unconsidered ideological positions using non-rational or pre-rational mechanisms.
Culture jamming has its origins in the Situationist movement’s idea of detournment and in the Discordian religion’s idea of Operation Mindfuck. Detournment is the remixing and recontextualization of some existing sign, subverting its meaning and demonstrating its underlying absurdity: a common version of this among Situationists is to substitute the dialogue bubbles in comics or subtitles in foreign films with surreal slogans that contradict or poke fun at the original work (and such classic detournment is a stable of modern internet culture). The Situationists thought that scrambling the message of centralized corporate-capitalist media was necessarily good — that only in this way could the progress of consumerism (the “Spectacle”, an attitude wherein things are only important to the extent that they participate in an economy of conspicuous consumption) be slowed. Among Discordians, all strongly-held beliefs are considered suspect, and until recently it’s been mostly held as obvious that the creation of any kind of…