Commission on Information Disorder
By Not Sure
27 August 2023
What values informed the Commission?
This is the
first question asked in the Final Report of the Aspen Institute’s Commission
on Information Disorder, compiled in November of 2021 by Aspen
Digital. The Commission was funded in
full by Craig Newmark, Craig Newmark Philanthropies. Newmark is the “Ah, shucks, I’m just a nerd
that started Craig’s List, made a billion dollars, and now I’m a philanthropist
with a special interest in military veterans and journalism.” He didn’t say that… One article describes donations he has given
for projects by citizen journalists (well-vetted citizens, I suspect,)
$1 million to the “progressive” [far left] magazine, Mother Jones,
$350,000 to the Feminist Majority Foundation and Ms. Magazine, $1
million to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), $20 million toward the startup of
a non-profit news publication called The Markup, and in 2020, $20
million to combat hunger.
Technical
advisors to the Commission come from Microsoft, Stanford University, Harvard
University, MITRE (worth a close look someday,) Meta (Facebook,)
Mozilla, Johns Hopkins University, Twitter, the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, and Google.
In this
first section on values, the use of technology to organize hate groups and
conspiracy theorists is bemoaned. Here’s
an excerpt:
“The
Commission sought to understand and address the impact of mis- and
disinformation across our society. We grounded our process, priorities, and
recommendations with a commitment to the rule of law, including a belief in the
vital importance of advancing...civil rights, human rights, and freedom of
speech...the democratic values that support a free and accountable press; and
every individual’s right to access reliable, trusted information (and to expect
to receive it from their institutions and leaders). We value the right and
responsibility to democratic engagement, including every individual’s
responsibility to think critically, carefully, and deliberately about matters
of public interest…The Commission was informed by evidence-based research and a
group of experts from academia, the news industry, and the online platforms, as
well as commissioners’ own areas of expertise.”
Convening a
panel of “experts” who will determine what is reliable, who can be trusted, and
what constitutes mis- and disinformation, makes a mockery of the right to free
speech. Yelling “fire” in a crowded
theater has long been the “exception” to free and unrestrained speech but
yelling “fire” is now to be the brush by which thousands of exceptions will be
painted. We all saw the narrow parameters
of accepted medical information during Operation Covid, and anything outside
those agreed-upon parameters, even if it came from physicians who were experts
in their fields but dissented from the party line, was deemed to be a danger to
public safety. It was simply not allowed
on many platforms, allowed on others with large banners warning the individual
to beware. “Warning, the WHO says. Warning! the CDC cautions. Warning, this way madness lies.”
dana boyd has come up before in my research and writing, but I
cannot pinpoint exactly how or when. When
I saw her listed as the technical advisor to the Commission from Microsoft, and
then went to her Wikipedia page, I recalled a few bits of trivia about her: she
stylizes her name lower-case and identifies as queer. You will find her weighing in as an expert on
topics such as the online spread of conspiracies and hate. Here is a snippet of an interview she did
with Public Broadcasting Service (PBS.)
“A group
of scholars and the term is coined by Robert Proctor and Iain Boal — coined a
term call called agnotology, which is the study of
ignorance. And the idea is that ignorance is not just what we don’t yet
know, ignorance is sometimes actively seated. It’s put out there to achieve a
particular agenda. And what they were looking at was climate denial. Right.
That all of these coordinated efforts to create, you
know, fake science to create doubt about climate or to create doubt about
vaccines or to create doubt about the relationship between tobacco and cancer.
And that of course is a political agenda that we’ve seen different governments
use a tactic of propaganda for a long time. It’s a lot easier to ask questions
of doubt than it is to actually try to provide
alternative facts. So you say well, maybe we don’t yet
know why that plane came down. Maybe we don’t yet know what happened then in
that election. And that seeding of doubt is so powerful because what it also
motivates is for the public then to go and self investigate,
to go see if there’s something real. So think about Pizzagate. Right. By having news rooms
all around the country talking about Pizzagate as a
conspiracy, well, people who don’t trust the news media felt the need to go and
self investigate. So what do
they do, they turn to Google. And what do they find, conspiracy all the way
down until we got to a point where people started visiting that pizza shop. And
as we know, one of them showed up with a gun. That’s a moment where the
amplification and the desire to self investigate is
the act of achieving ignorance in a coordinated and systematic way. And the
question is always who’s doing it, why, and why are news amplifiers; including
both formal news as well as social media platforms, why are they helping
amplify content that is designed intentionally to fragment knowledge.”
I like to
learn useful things, and it is useful to me to know that those who study ignorance
came up with a term for that field of study in 1992: Agnotology.
On the Wikipedia entry for
Agnotology, a 1980 quote from science fiction writer Isaac Asimov is included:
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there
has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread
winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false
notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your
knowledge.”
Asimov was
an author. AUTHORIZED. A science fiction writer, so part of the
futurists’ world, skilled in predictive programming. He was also a professor of Biochemistry at
Boston University, so he was in the world of academia, a world funded and
guided by foundation money and the aims promoted with that money.
I offer you my
rebuttal to his words. “There are
still people in the United States (and the rest of the world) who like to think
for themselves. They rely on common
sense and their own observations and experiences and are resistant to the fads
and whims foisted upon them by control freaks in academia and public
“service.” We are indeed
“anti-intellectual” because we intuitively understand that “intellectualism”
has been bought for a tidy sum and used for grotesque ends. It is corrupt and anti-human.”
Do you see what Ms. Boyd (“Ah,
shucks, I don’t capitalize my name because that comes from a system founded by
white, male privilege.” She didn’t
say that…) did in the above quote from her PBS interview? She has put all people who do not accept the
authorized consensus on man-made global warming under the classification of
“ignorant” and then grouped those “conspiracy theorists” with followers of the Pizzagate conspiracy.
Somewhere out there, is a lone gunman, so crazed in his climate-denial
hate, that he might just show up at the next United Nations Climate Change
Conference, or Conference of the Parties (COP) of the UNFCCC, which will be
COP28, November 30-December 12, 2023, in Dubai, United Emirates. Hey, crazy deniers! Don’t get any ideas from me to fuel your
ignorance. I don’t want the Commission
accusing me of spreading online hate. Funny,
dana boyd “stylizes” lower-case, but the Commission
merits a capital C. I’m surprised it
wasn’t known as The Commission.
Throughout
the list of technical advisors and panelists who created this document, one
finds the foundation “interlock” that Rene Wormser wrote about in Foundations:
Their Power and Influence. One also
finds the impenetrable web of the military-industrial complex. It’s especially vivid when one looks at the
advisor to the Commission, MITRE.
MITRE was
founded in 1958 as a military think tank, spun out from MIT’s Lincoln
Laboratory, which was formed to apply advanced technology to issues of national
security. This is how MITRE describes
itself:
“The
bedrock of any trusted relationship is integrity. For more than 65 years, MITRE
has proudly operated federally funded research and development centers, or
FFRDCs. We now operate six of the 42 FFRDCs in existence—a high honor.
Since our inception, MITRE has
consistently addressed the most complex whole-of-nation challenges that
threaten our country’s safety, security, and prosperity. Our mission-driven
teams bring technical expertise, objectivity, and an interdisciplinary approach
to drive innovation and accelerate solutions in the public interest.”
Have a look at some of MITRE’s board members
and you will see the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National
Security Agency (NSA,) et cetera.
***
This Redux 124 is from a long talk
that Alan Watt gave on August 30, 2020.
He begins by stating that we are living through the biggest exercise in
mind control and mental warfare on the whole population of the planet. Some players that were center stage in 2020,
like Antifa and Black Lives Matter, are in the wings again, awaiting their next
big scene. The revolution that employed
that exercise is still underway. Don’t
be breathing sighs of relief just yet; you’ll be contributing to CO2 emissions
and besides, Joe Biden just announced that he plans to ask Congress for funding
to develop a new COVID vaccine and may require the shot for all.
© Not Sure
Elite's
Working Complicity Toward Efficiency:
"Hear the Cries of Anarchy, Arson, Sedition,
Kissinger's New World Order Comes Into
View,
It's Said Bolshevik Hell is Just Repetition,
So Masses Can be Ruled by Technocratic Few."
©
Alan Watt Aug. 30, 2020
Additional
reading:
Aspen Institute Commission on Information Disorder - Final
Report, November 2021
Aspen Digital
https://www.aspeninstitute.org/programs/aspendigital/
Craig Newmark Philanthropies
https://craignewmarkphilanthropies.org/
Craig Newmark Philanthropies - Board Memberships
https://craignewmarkphilanthropies.org/about-us/board-memberships/
Danah Boyd on the Spread of Conspiracies and Hate Online
MITRE
Susan M. Gordon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_M._Gordon
Biden plans to ask Congress for funding to develop new COVID
vaccine, may require shot for all
https://www.foxnews.com/health/biden-plans-ask-congress-funding-develop-covid-vaccine-require-shot