The dissemination of mis- and disinformation in the United States is a result of increased perceptions of powerlessness and despair on all fronts. Further control of the information environment, as advocated by the national security state (NSS) and supports, would not alleviate our societal structure’s moral decay, but more likely exacerbate it. This paper is not an argument for or against controlling our information environment, but rather it argues that information is already controlled enough, and it draws a causal correlation showing how control is preventing our innate human needs from being met in a morally bankrupt liberalist system.

In a recently published book titled the Declassification Engine, Matthew Connolly argues that the growing NSS impedes government transparency, access to information, and prevents the public’s capacity to check power. He argues the creation of permanent bureaucratic intelligence agencies and their pervasive expansion throughout the 20th century and beyond is a betrayal of the United States’ founding principles of “radical transparency”, where prior to their creation accountability was linked to publicly accessible records archives. Before World War II, espionage and state secrecy were only practices during wartime, but with the entrenchment of a permanent NSS and military industrial complex came the institutionalization of secrecy and classification of information during peacetime. Classification of information is an exertion of power and as such it is often motivated not by the need to protect national security but by considerations of political and bureaucratic leverage. If records continue to be held indefinitely and without automated declassification processes, then the U.S. government controls the historical narrative, and they won’t be accountable to anyone.

Existing in a shroud of secrecy makes us all prone to misinformation and inaccurate historical accounts. As more government misbehavior and information over the last century became less transparent democratic accountability has causally been undermined. The ability to classify information has become a core tenet of government power, used by leaders to ward off accountability and criticism. We have the means to de-bureaucratize the NSS and we have the technological tools and data to redact truly sensitive information and declassify existing documents to allow for greater public accountability.

The most striking recent example of the evolving state-led efforts toward further information control stems from disclosures by the social media firm, Twitter, that shows U.S. intelligence agencies were actively coordinating with the firm’s executives to create channels with which their operatives could flag content at will. The FBI/DHS used their influence over Twitter to bombard the company with censorship requests on the grounds of combating “large-scale foreign disinformation campaigns” which largely didn’t exist. Exempt from the anti-misinformation campaigns were U.S. officials and government account’s capacities to disseminate their own propaganda. While Twitter employees were largely ambivalent toward the FBI’s “keyword” censorship requests and their apparent biases, in many cases they obliged the state’s requests. During the George Floyd protests in 2020 the FBI flagged tweets that supported people’s participation on the false claims that such calls to action stemmed from “foreign-controlled bots”. This is just one of many examples, others include but are not limited to election interference by U.S. intelligence agencies, such as during Brazil’s most recent election.

Although Twitter was overwhelmed by increasingly aggressive government partners and could not fulfill nearly half of their requests, we need not look further than the FBI’s history of surveillance and targeting of the left (COINTELPRO) to see where their censorship regime might lead if allowed to proliferate. Twitter is only one example of this veiled expansion of the NSS into private social media firms and developing technologies. The bureaucratic intelligence agencies aren’t inclined to give up their growing power and we aren’t collectively thinking about how a censorship regime could be misused. We shouldn’t rely on benevolent billionaires or private firms to unveil the enmeshment of big tech with the NSS, rather, we should push for reform and nationalization (or public control) over our social media public squares that are increasingly being seen as an essential societal and public utility.

The interweaving of the NSS into privately owned big tech social media platforms is a dangerous function; it’s steering public opinion by hiding stories and opinions that people ought to view and talk about to hold our governments to account. While no direct line could be drawn between proponents of an expansive NSS and one individual’s ideas, the influential policy advisor turned corporate propagandist, Edward Bernays, who was quite blunt about his distaste for transparency in government, comes to mind as a potential link. In the 1920’s he stressed in writing and media at large that, “…conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses…” was an important element for a democratic society. His views on democracy, however, were quite questionable. He saw democracy not as a self-governing society, but as a society that had to be managed by an invisible government. He believed that people are too driven by human nature and too dumb to think for themselves except for in the narrow confines of an election between 2 or 3 candidates. The rest of the time, he argued, people needed to be policed and nudged from the top down for our system to function well. To effectively police our system the NSS found willing partners in privately owned media companies.

Corporate ownership in media is used to silence dissent, evade criticism, and keep their money machine moving. Gatekeeping in media is enabled by a concentrated ownership of legacy outlets by corporate and elite power. If reigning in these structures constitutes a measured control of information, then yes, we should advocate for measures of third-party oversight of the media environment as well as public ownership and funding. Solutions along these lines of thinking could help rebalance the narrative control from a top-down bourgeois dissemination of information to one that is bottom-up and more democratically controlled. If our capacity to rebalance the media narrative isn’t able to be met by collectively confronting power or withholding our attention from legacy media outlets then we need to give people the proper guardrails to be hyper-aware of corporate bias and narratives by bolstering their critical thinking skills. This solution is proposed by Jonathon Haidt and Greg Lukianoff in their 2018 book, the Coddling of the American Mind. They claim that we ought to get our public education system realigned with some basic psychological principles to ensure that our youth are better equiped to navigate a complicated information environment. A few of those principles they focus on are teaching people at all stages of education to be critical thinkers, to be hyper-aware of their own cognitive distortions, to question their first interpretations, to look for evidence, and to better navigate tribalism and/or manichaean narratives. Other social scientists such as Robert Putnam focus on societal measures of declining social cohesion.

In Putnam’s 1995 article titled, Bowling Alone, originally printed in the Journal for Democracy, he investigates evidence that points to the erosion of networks of civic engagement in the U.S. Civic engagement, he argues, is an essential prerequisite to founding norms of reciprocity and building social trust in society. The networks that bolstered social cohesion and engagement have been eroded by new technologies and urban sprawl. Putnam’s conclusion remains relevant three decades on as we watch society become more withdrawn and isolated from other people. He points to a direct and psychological disengagement in politics and government between 1960 and 1990, with declining electoral participation and a reduction in people’s attendance in community gatherings. At the same time the amount of Americans who claim to “trust the government in Washington” either “only sometimes” or “almost never” has increased from around 30 percent in 1966 to 75 percent by 1992.

Putnam also shows that American spirituality is trending toward more self-definition and is less tied to institutions. While secularization of society could be touted positively in some arguments, the loss of the third space (as it’s known) has deeply affected our sense of community and belonging. Union membership (the organizational affiliation based on solidarity and comradery) has also declined significantly since the 1970’s. Of the many reasons Putnam elaborates on and associates with social cohesion’s decline is how new technologies have captivated our attention and leisure time while detracting from our time outside, with other people, and in public spaces.

Within a hyper-individualized society that lacks organic communities and social cohesion, life and our identities become a matter of consumer preference. Amid the vast meaninglessness of a society in decay people forge new identities for themselves. As we spend more time with technology than with other humans our identities are shaped more by algorithms, written by corporations, that encourage us to buy things we don’t need and create virtual communities that are a poor substitute for real physical human companionship. These substitutes only accelerate the rates of loneliness, atomization, and depression. Compounding this problem is our attempt to solve it with western style medicine to alleviate individual symptoms for our misdiagnosed societal problem. Human community is actively being destroyed and neglected by our new, evolving, and increasingly “big tech” oriented lives. Our innate human need for community, love, and friendship needs to be organically met, not synthetically.

A study on the “psychological drivers of misinformation belief” in the journal, Nature Briefing, shows that there are certain emotional states-of-being that can either heighten our awareness or lower our cognitive defenses against misinformation endorsement. Among the moods that may positively corelate with people’s deception or susceptibility to misinforming content are anger, anxiety, impaired-ness, and happiness. Likewise, sources of information that utilize feelings or significant “emotional appeal” strategies encourage people to similarly rely on their own emotions when consuming content on big tech platforms which can make them vulnerable to misinformation.

A lot of the proposed solutions to the problem of rage-fueling algorithms and their propensity to funnel people into insular echo chambers or disseminate misinformation has been advocacy toward censorship, flagging information, fact-checking, and control that is largely operated by the perpetrators of the problem: the multinational tech companies and their intelligence agency partners. Such a response lacks imagination, upholds corporate capitalist bias, and neglects the real solutions which are to abandon the business model. If the algorithms and the models of big tech social media tilt our “public squares” toward insanity, then the solution lies in stopping the tilting mechanism and re-envisioning the public square.

The business model as it currently operates could also be described as “surveillance capitalism” in that it enables multinational corporations, or governments, to track our attention(s) and then turn around and sell it to the highest bidder. The solution to this problem requires a degrowth strategy along with a public subscription model where users pay a small fee or tax (just as we do with other forms of leisure and content) to access the public square while also implementing verification that those on the platforms are real humans. Consider how civilizations once realized the problem with human waste and sewage disposal upon realizing its association with disease and unsanitary public spaces. Their solution was to round up public funds to build sewage pipelines. We need to tap into a similar line of thinking to clean up our contemporary information and content pipelines. We cannot rely on good faith virtues to magically appear from Meta and other big tech companies; we must force them and regulate them. We need an attention movement, a “mental liberation front”, to reclaim our minds and focus. Our focus did not collapse, it was stolen, and if we do not take it back as Tristan Harris, an outspoken former engineer at Google warns, we will have downgraded humanity beyond repair, “…stripping ourselves of our attention at the very time when we face big collective crises that require it more than ever."

Further entrenching our societal ails is the fact that the hegemonic neo-liberalism of the unipolar moment has hardly offered either the utopian “End of History?” vision supposed by Fukuyama-ists nor has the ideology or the structures it upholds been able to satiate innate human needs such as connection and meaning. The individualistic ethos of today’s neoliberal capitalism contrasts with the fraternal-istic one of the 20th century communist international project(s). Within the communist project there was a “grand vision” (on paper, but not always in practice) of global solidarity and sacrifice for one another, and people cooperated to bring about social good will. Liberalism seems to only inspire fraternalism and similar associations when engaged in an ideological battle with an inflated “existentialist” enemy. Even Fukuyama himself foresaw this dilemma unfolding for liberalism. Without “worldwide ideological struggle” liberalism is reduced to economic calculations that satiate markets and is inept to meet human yearning for meaning and connection. If anything has been proven over the last 30 years it’s that liberal capitalist states are not necessary to produce efficient societal structures and efficient modes of capitalist economy. People are currently and should be further enabled to observe different methods and systems working to build solutions to our structure that is suffering from moral decay. Rather than emulate more functional and efficient capitalist systems that function with greater controlled information spaces we must imagine a greater, freer, more transparent, and cooperative system.

Proponents of information control would have us believe that enabling government agencies to enmesh with private corporations is virtuous and necessary to protect the public, but they are blind to the capacity of the censorship regime’s intention to discredit and veil criticism of our decaying social system while boosting content that narrows the accepted narrative. To combat this, we must advocate for and enable an information environment that allows us to expand our political imaginary and conceive of now unthinkable ideas to altruistically “restart history”, rather than continue persisting in the delusion that our current system is virtuous and not defined by anomie. The rampant spread of dis- and misinformation in our content environments coincides with a world that is struggling to be born. There is nothing impossible about a new world order: we can imagine it and we can create it, but only if we reject passivity and incrementalism to boldly stride forward together. The current political climate is perceived to be increasingly immovable, either through active participation in democracy or by protest. That must change. Incremental reform is not enough. The longer we fail to allow democracy to prosper and deliver on its blessings the more dysfunctional and tragic our system’s collapse will be.

“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”  – John F. Kennedy

Brandon Parker is a student of political science at the University of Minnesota Duluth.