REBROADCAST: Author Annalee Newitz on new book, ‘Stories Are Weapons’

Looking at the history of psychological operations, “Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind” is the latest book by author and journalist Annalee Newitz.

It explores misinformation, propaganda and how the stories we hear can manipulate us. The book also features a chapter on the work the Coquille Indian Tribe has done to undo the damage these operations did to some Oregon tribes in the past.

“Think Out Loud” host Dave Miller spoke with Newitz in front of an audience at a Powell’s Books event on June 4, 2024.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. “Stories Are Weapons” – that’s the name of the new book from the journalist and science fiction writer, Annalee Newitz. Newitz charted the origins of psychological warfare and explored how it’s conducted today. Their book is a deep dive into propaganda, misinformation and fake news, and an urgent call for all of us to learn how to push back against stories that are intended to harm us. We talked recently in front of an audience at Powell’s Books in downtown Portland. I started by asking if Newitz could tell us about the confusing social media saga that led them to start working on this book.

Annalee Newitz: Yeah, so it really was kind of the germ of this book. Like many people, I was at home following a lot of the Black Lives Matter protests on Twitter – at the time, now X. And one night during the height of protests in Washington D.C., a lot of people on Twitter started to notice a hashtag that was just #DCBlackout, and people who were posting with this hashtag claimed that the government had shut down all phone signals, all communications out of D.C. to prevent any one from communicating about what was happening there. And very quickly, a bunch of journalists, people at NPR and elsewhere started broadcasting from their phones saying, “here we are in the middle of D.C. and we’re coming to you live from our devices.” So obviously, there hasn’t been a blackout.

And then about halfway through the night, you started to see a new set of people posting all the same message claiming that the DCBlackout hashtag was fake. And all of these messages saying that the DCBlackout hashtag was fake, like I said, they used almost the same wording. And what it was, was basically a two part influence campaign that started out from just a few sources on Twitter that got amplified by kind of super spreaders, as they’re called in the influence studies area. And once people began to question the DCBlackout, then this campaign evolved to make the people who were debunking DCBlackout seem as if they were participating in a new round of PSYOPs (psychological operations) and influence, right?

And so what happened was it just created complete confusion and chaos because whoever was behind this campaign … and I never found out and I kept asking people as I was working on the book. All I know was that it was like reading literature. I was just so amazed at how complex it was and that someone had had to think about, OK, first, we’re going to deploy this hashtag, then we’re going to deploy a bunch of PSYOPs to make that hashtag look illegitimate and therefore make anyone debunking the hashtag look illegitimate. And then where do you go from there? You don’t trust anyone.

So I think it was partly because it was so multi-layered and creative that I realized, there’s human beings who are designing these things, who are actually really smart and they’re using the tools of storytelling to do it. And that really got me sucked in.

Miller: What happens when the floor beneath us sort of gets ripped away, the floor that we thought we could believe in? Because in a sense that’s what’s happening here in a kind of digital way, that if you were paying attention to the first hashtag and the second, at a certain point, as you note, it’s chaos. What follows from that?

Newitz: So what follows is complete paralysis. And this is the goal of a lot of influence campaigns, particularly right now, when you’re talking about influence campaigns around U.S. politics online. The goal is not to convince you of something. A lot of us have an old fashioned idea of how propaganda works, which is that it’s sort of strong-faced men trying to convince you to vote a certain way or believe in a certain political party. But there’s a style of influence which is aimed at making us feel as if the world is coming to an end and there’s no one we can trust. And the way that those kinds of influence campaigns and propaganda work is that they just, as Steve Bannon puts it, they flood the zone with all kinds of contradictory information.

Miller: Is it easier at this point to get someone to believe in nothing, to get a kind of cynical point of view that everything is fake, everything is rigged, than it is to get somebody to believe in a specific positive thing?

Newitz: Apparently, that’s always been true, that it’s easier to do that. And a lot of people who I interviewed, who study propaganda and PSYOPs and influence campaigns, talk about the fact that it’s always easier to convince people that nothing is real than to say, why don’t we build something new? Why don’t we try to believe in something different? Why don’t we try to repair our broken political system? All of that stuff is very hard. Because of course, once you want someone to believe in something, you have to explain what it is, you have to explain the steps you’re going to take to get somewhere else. But saying believe in nothing, it’s like a great dystopian sci-fi story, right? Oh, just blow everything up. That’s easy.

Miller: I started by zooming in on this one story, but it is just one piece of, broadly, what you call psychological warfare, you and plenty of other people. What’s your best definition of psychological warfare? What is included in it?

Newitz: That’s a really great question. So, the idea of psychological warfare of course, originates with the military and governments, state operators. It describes any kind of image or story or message that’s aimed at undermining the morale of a foreign adversary, convincing a foreign adversary to surrender or to come around to your point of view. But over time, and particularly after the Cold War in the United States, we see a kind of weapons transfer program where a lot of these weaponized stories begin to enter into domestic debates. So we start to see culture war resembling total warfare that involves psychological warfare. And one more thing I’ll add is that psychological warfare always involves some element of lies, misdirection and violent threats.

Miller: At one point you described Jim Crow laws which codified second class citizenship for Black people into American law. You say those are PSYOPs, psychological operations, a version of psychological warfare. It was a really surprising sentence for me to read because it was a broader conception of psychological warfare. This is law. So how is that psychological warfare?

Newitz: Yeah. So, remember, psychological warfare is something that we are supposed to launch against a foreign enemy. And one of the things that we’ve seen in the United States, especially during the 20th century, is that these kinds of programs are, as I said, being launched against Americans. Well, the way that you can convince other Americans to engage in cultural warfare against their fellow citizens is to say, well, certain citizens aren’t really citizens. And one of the things that Jim Crow laws do is they force Black people to use different facilities from white people, substandard facilities almost always, to live in different places. I mean, redlining is another consequence of Jim Crow.

So what happens over time is that Jim Crow laws make Black people into almost citizens of another nation within the United States. And the great science fiction writer N.K. Jemisin remarked once that white supremacy is a PSYOP because it grows out of this practice. So it’s a practice of foreignizing groups of American citizens.

Miller: It does seem that there’s something circular and porous about this though, that laws become stories or narratives, narratives can make certain laws more likely, right? I mean, these things blend together.

Newitz: That’s right. And of course, many of our laws are based on just-so stories and we know from watching the Supreme Court kind of unravel, particularly over the past couple of years, that propaganda is part of our legal system and PSYOPs are part of it too. And so it is a circular logic where we use law to reinforce stories. And I think that’s exactly what happens with Jim Crow and with lots of other laws that turn certain groups of Americans, like transgender people, into second class citizens, and subject them to rules and laws that other Americans don’t ever have to worry about.

Miller: I’m curious how you think about responses to these pushes, these stories? If stories meant to dehumanize People of Color or LGBTQ people are examples of psychological warfare, is pushback to this or stories that seek to humanize these same groups, is that psychological warfare?

Newitz: I call it undoing PSYOPs because I think there’s a difference between going to war and trying to reach disarmament or trying to reach a cease fire. And I see the creation of alternate stories coming from groups who have been marginalized, for example, as being a changing of the conversation. These are stories that say quite frequently, not always – sometimes these stories are bombs on their own – but oftentimes they’re about, let’s put down our weapons. Let’s start telling different stories, evidence-based stories, stories with historical receipts that are truer to the experience of people who are being demonized by our laws, being demonized by political leaders.

Miller: That’s somewhere where I want to get to before we’re done with this conversation. But I’m curious as you were talking to experts and as you were just subsuming yourself and thinking about stories as weapons and the history of using stories as weapons, did it change the way you thought about the fiction that you write? Because you’re both a nonfiction writer, a journalist, podcaster and a fiction writer.

Newitz: Yeah.

Miller: Did you look back on your own work and see it in any different way?

Newitz: I didn’t look at my work differently because I’ve always been very conscious of the fact that my fiction is, in part, to persuade people into seeing the world differently. And I think a lot of fiction writers feel that way, not all, but I really do hope that people come away from my stories and perceive things that they hadn’t before about real life.

One of my ways into this whole project was through a science fiction writer whose work I’ve been really fascinated with for a long time. His name is Cordwainer Smith and he was writing just wild stories in the ‘50s and ‘60s, so weird that science fiction fans often thought that maybe he was actually a time traveler. It was kind of a meme about him, how could he have come up with such bizarre stuff? And the way he did it was that in his other life, he was this military intelligence expert named Paul Linebarger, who wrote the very first U.S. Army manual on psychological warfare.

And in his process of coming up with how to wage warfare, he brought storytelling into it a lot. The idea that we should use the tactics of storytelling to immerse people, to get them excited about propaganda, to make propaganda not just persuasive but fun. That was something that he really believed was that good propaganda, it should make you laugh, it should make you excited. It should be like an action movie or a comedy, or a science fiction story.

So I think that it makes perfect sense to me that storytelling and psychological warfare are part of the same project. One is to convince you through allegory and one is to convince you through threats and lies.

Miller: Linebarger is a fascinating character in your portrayal of him. Can you describe just an absolutely bonkers story he wrote called “Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons”? And none of those words are spelled the way you think. “Mother” is spelled correctly, everything else is just weird.

Newitz: And actually the name of the story, “Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons,” the misspelling of it is important to the story because it’s a secret code. And so if you put in this misspelled version of the words kittens and hitton and all these other words, then you can kind of bypass a bunch of security.

I love this story because this is a sci-fi story he wrote that I think is his effort to talk about what a good PSYOP does to people. So here’s the story, I’m gonna boil it down. There’s a guy who’s trying to steal a thing from a future version of Australia, which is called Norstrilia. The thing he’s trying to steal is actually a life extending drug and he can’t get it anywhere else. So he’s going to try to steal all of this drug from Norstrilia. But little does he know that Norstilia has an incredible enemy deterrence system. He’s from space. It’s a sci-fi story. So he’s coming into the solar system, he’s heading to earth. He’s getting into orbit. He sees Norstrilia. It’s in his sights. He has the code, the “mother hittons littul kittons” code. So he knows he’s gonna bypass the security, he’s gonna get in, he’s gonna steal the stuff.

But then he triggers this weapon that Norstrilia has developed. And it is, I would say, a psychological atomic bomb. And this is what it is. The people of Norstrilia have spent generations breeding the angriest, most violent minks ever. Mink, like the creatures whose fur gets used in coats. So they have a huge warehouse of these minks who are so angry, so mean, that all they want to do is just bite each other’s faces off. But they are being kept in a deep sleep so that they don’t do this unless someone is trying to come in and steal this drug. And at that moment, Norstrilia awakens every single evil mink in their warehouse, attaches their brains to this amplifier, gets all of their thoughts together into a giant beam of angry, angry mink energy and beams it into the brain of this poor guy who’s just trying to steal this longevity drug.

Suddenly his brain is filled with the thoughts of millions of angry minks and he eats himself to death in his spaceship. He just starts gnawing … it’s actually like, it’s funny and I agree, it’s very funny, but it’s a really gross scene. Cordwainer Smith/Paul Linebarger did not shy away from wanting to hurt people with his words. I mean, that was his job was to hurt people.

Miller: You heard that from his daughter too, that he would just tell her about how bad the world was when she was a little kid.

Newitz: Yeah, I interviewed his daughter while I was working on this book, who is a lovely person and hopefully is writing her own memoir. She talks about how, when she was a kid, she went to Mexico with her dad and he was like, now let me tell you about how this group of people tortured this other group of people to death. And you should know that the Indigenous people here were slaughtered in incredible numbers and here’s where they were slaughtered. And she said to me, it’s the kind of thing that no child should have to hear.

Miller: But back to the man with the angry ferret brain, who eats himself. What is it about this story that, in a meta way, tells us about what Linebarger thought about stories?

Newitz: Yeah. Like I said, this is a story that, like actually many Cordwainer Smith stories, it has elements of horror, body horror. It’s meant to disturb you as a reader. I think that what it tells us is that he knew very well that language had the power to arouse our fear and disgust and anguish. And he felt that those were legitimate weapons to be used in war. He had grown up partly in Shanghai and he was a student of Chinese history and spoke Mandarin. He studied Sun Tzu, who wrote “The Art of War,” which is many thousands of years old. And he had taken from that book Sun’s thesis, [which] is partly that you want to use trickery and ideas to fight because that’s always better than fighting with weapons. You’d always rather have a war of ideas than a war to the death.

And that was really what Linebarger believed. And so he felt that we could use these weaponized words instead of using the bomb. So that was what I thought was so interesting about that story was, it’s a way of imagining a weapon that is not destructive to anyone but the mind of the person that it’s trying to attack. But it’s kind of an atomic bomb, because that’s a lot of minks. You could imagine that beam being aimed at like an army, not just one guy in a spaceship.

Miller: Another one of his ideas was that instead of telling explicit stories, “an effective PSYOP operation,” he said, “would plant the seeds of stories and encourage the enemy to create their own myths.” What’s an example of that now, do you think?

Newitz: I mean right now, I think the best example we have are conspiracies that are spreading … a lot of them spreading online, but also spreading the old fashioned way through people Xeroxing things and that kind of stuff. I think obviously QAnon is a great way to conceive of this, where QAnon will do basically lore drops, just sort of like here’s a little bit of information, make of it what you will. And that is a really great way to inspire people to start buying into a fantasy because then they are, themselves, filling in the details. It’s a little bit like playing a video game where because you’re interacting with the story, you feel more engaged in it and more immersed.

Miller: You’re the world builder.

Newitz: Yeah, you’re partly the world builder. You’re making your way through the world. It’s not just being shoved down your throat. You’re not being sat down and shown a propaganda movie. You’re given just a little hint and then you go out and do your own research and you go talk to your friends about it and you try to figure out, what did Q mean by this? And of course, during World War II, they had other ways of kind of sparking that conspiratorial urge, but it’s the same urge. It’s the urge to know more and to keep building the world and make the fantasy last.

Miller [narrating]: Newitz wrote about a class they took from an army PSYOPs instructor. I asked if that’s something anyone can do.

Newitz: I don’t think so. I had to do a lot of work to find someone who would talk to me about this. And indeed, I had to use a fake name for him in the book. So I called him Han Solo. And I asked his permission. I was like, is it OK if I call you Han Solo? Because he kind of had a similar sense of humor and kind of reminded me of Han Solo.

Miller: Did he say, absolutely, it’ll make me sound cooler?

Newitz: [Laughter] He didn’t. And I later found out that he was actually very Spock identified. So I felt kind of bad because I was like, oh, I could have called you Spock, but I didn’t know him well enough at the time to know that.

Miller: What did you learn from him that surprised you?

Newitz: I think there were a couple of things that really surprised me. One was, he had been teaching PSYOPs to people in the army group devoted to PSYOPs special operations for many years. So he gave me a version of the textbooks that they used to teach. And one of the things that really stands out when you go through these textbooks is they’re written like a manual for people learning how to do marketing and advertising, because the way a PSYOP is designed is you find a target audience just like a target market. You workshop your PSYOP – your PSYOP is referred to as a product – and that product, you will find a small group of people from your target audience. You’ll workshop it with them. You’ll find out if there’s things that don’t kind of scan right. And you go through this process of honing and shaping this in order to really get people to buy into it. So a lot of it will be very familiar to anyone who took a marketing class. The other thing …

Miller: Or who has experienced life in capitalist society.

Newitz: Life in capitalism, yeah, exactly. And so it felt very mundane in that way. The other thing though, that really stuck with me from that class was how willing he was to say that American politicians are doing it wrong and that PSYOPs are supposed to be used against a foreign adversary in war. And he’s like, look, I see all around us that politicians are propagandizing the American people and he’s like, we would never, ever do that in the military. That is against the rules, it’s a hard bright line.

Miller: What was his reason for that? I mean, why was that an important bright line?

Newitz: It’s part of military doctrine. It’s part of how psychological warfare has been codified by the military. And also there’s a practical side to that too. I mean, obviously, of course, in war you only want to target the enemy. Remember your target market is the enemy and you don’t wanna blow up your own people. And unlike a bomb or a gun, a PSYOP can take on a life of its own, kind of like these conspiracy theories we’ve been talking about. So he and his colleagues worry a lot about blowback and kind of second and third order effects. If you unleash a PSYOP and you start undermining people’s faith in their leaders, that can spread in ways that you don’t intend because of virality, because just people talk, through gossip. And so I think that’s a big part of it, is that these are very dangerous weapons that spread very easily.

Miller: That ties us to where we started. The problems of so destabilizing an entire society’s understanding of reality, that they become cynical or mistrustful. They start to think everything is fake. On some level, it seems like that’s the way people in totalitarian societies, as a kind of a survival mechanism, came to understand all the information coming from their government, so that nothing could be trusted. How do you come back from that? How do you rebuild a shared conception of reality?

Newitz: I mean, it’s hard, but it can be done. It’s been done over and over historically and part of it involves reconceiving of the public sphere. Here we are talking about a psychological problem, right? So this is a psychological problem. It has a psychological solution. This is about building new mental models for how we interact with each other and how we communicate with each other. And right now, if you think about how our public sphere feels, oftentimes we’ve talked about social media as being kind of the public sphere or the Town Square.

Something like Twitter, now X, is a great example of a place where people felt like they could exchange ideas relatively openly and reach consensus or at least argue, with a kind of trust in each other. And over time, of course, it’s been taken over and it’s become extremely politicized. It’s now run by basically the United States version of a right wing oligarch who’s really changed the shape of the way people can speak to each other there. Of course, it’s been flooded with bots and misinformation. So we can no longer have that kind of communication; however, we can build new spaces. I mean, we’ve witnessed how Twitter could go from being a space where we do kind of have discussions to one where we can’t. We can imagine building a space, a different space where people are able to communicate.

The mental model that I use in this book and that a lot of people who I interviewed liked, was the idea of the library and thinking of the library as a model for how we want our public sphere to work. Because in the library, you go in with a question, you can talk to a librarian and they will offer you several ideas for where you could go to learn enough to make up your own mind. You don’t go up to the librarian and say, “I’m trying to figure out why it is that humans and dogs have been such good friends for so long.” The librarian doesn’t turn into like Google’s AI assistant and say, “Well, let me tell you the answer.” They say, “Here’s five books and a couple of movies and maybe a podcast that you can listen to on our library system, and go find out why it is that humans and dogs have been so close for so long.”

When you go into the stacks of a library, to continue the metaphor, and you pull a book off the shelf, you don’t get 10 other books smacking you in the face and saying, “If you like that book, wait, maybe try this book, why don’t you try this book?” And if you do read the book and you start to say, “I think this book feels like propaganda, it feels like too biased, I’m gonna put this book back.” The book does fly off the shelf again, five minutes later and smack you in the head and say, “But wait, don’t you want to learn more about this crappy propaganda, anti-dog propaganda? It’s all about cats, you guys.”

But that is what our public sphere has become online. So I think that the library, where each book is given its own space, [where] many kinds of voices are permitted to exist, voices from history, voices from many places, voices that range from possibly very dangerous propaganda to just really evidence-based science and history. All of those things are together and none of them is allowed to drown the other out. And that’s what’s really important.

My final thing that I would say about that is that a library is a place where you can listen. And I feel like when we think about free speech in this country, we always forget that you can’t have free speech without listening, without the ability to hear people. And when people are being drowned out by spam, by ads, by grandstanding, by people who take up more space and drive out all of the people who disagree with them, you’re not truly gaining access to all the points of view.

Miller: So you’re getting to my next question, which is how do you go from that physical metaphor of a library to the largely or at least partly online world that we’re most likely going to keep living in?

Newitz: So, like I said, it’s about having the library as a mental model. Right now, I think our public sphere is operating on the mental model of warfare, where the goal of any given exchange, particularly between leaders, is to have a winner and a loser, or to have someone who talks really loud and a bunch of people who are sent out of the room. And I think the library model lends itself well to thinking about – I’ll take social media as an example – how we might want to rebuild social media to be a place where you can actually hear other people.

One of the things that is really important in any social space is having trust and safety, having the ability to know that if you speak your mind, people aren’t going to attack you or go to your house late at night and break the windows, or look up your uncle and call him on the phone. And these are all things that happen to people who speak their mind on social media. The police are called to their house, they’re sent death threats. And in the world of social media, there is a category of worker called trust and safety, or sometimes they’re called abuse, they’re an abuse team. And their job is to prevent that kind of abuse from happening.

And one of the, I think, positive signs that we’ve seen is that just the mere act of labeling certain kinds of information online as misinformation or even saying, “Here’s a link to more information about this post,” for example, that really helps people navigate the space and figure out what they want to listen to. There were several efforts during the 2020 election to try to make sure that, on social media, people could get clear and accurate information about where and how to vote. Just that. Not information about who to vote for, not what you should believe about your representatives, just literally how do you mail in your ballot? And, for example, can you use a sharpie? And those kinds of efforts coordinated between civic organizations, academics, local governments, really helped people figure out how to vote during that time.

So I think that that’s the ethos of the library, because it’s about clearing a space where people can hear the information they want to get.

Miller: Despite so many proven domestic or foreign threats in terms of elections or other things over the last eight years, the sense I get is that social media companies now are actually less inclined to police what’s written on their sites than they were in 2020 or 2016. I mean, it seems like we’re going in the reverse direction from what you’re calling for, or do you have a different reading?

Newitz: We definitely are. And I mean, part of that is due to various lawsuits in different states … that, in fact, there is a lawsuit, there is a case in front of the Supreme Court right now about this very question. Those of you who’ve been following the minutia of the Supreme Court know it as “the jawboning case.” And a couple of different state Attorneys General brought this case claiming that these efforts in 2020 to make sure that truthful election information was available, the claim is that this was the government forcing social media companies to shape the speech on their platform. So in other words, the argument is it’s a First Amendment right to spread election misinformation or disinformation.

That is part of the reason why we’ve seen a rollback in some of these practices on social media sites. But I will say we’re also seeing a flowering of new sites where people are gathering and talking, getting away from Facebook, which many people will call a spam cage now, getting away from X. I have a lot of hope for places like Mastodon, which is a sort of a federated model of media.

Miller: Have you gotten the sense that any of them are taking off? I mean, I should say in my sense, when Twitter was bleeding advertisers and users, that folks were thinking about migrating or migrating to various places, but then many of them just stopped going anywhere. They didn’t go in large numbers, it seems, to any other site. They’ve just stopped going to Twitter.

Newitz: People are going to a lot of smaller sites. I mean, I think this is one of the things that’s been really interesting is like the Facebook model, of just having everybody on the platform, maybe that doesn’t work. And there’s a lot of folks that I actually talked to for this book who believe that that’s not the right way to construct the public sphere, that social media with its instant virality, the temptation to pass along stories that you haven’t read, that that may be antisocial. We call it social media, but maybe it’s antisocial media.

So what I’ve seen, and I do spend a lot of time, I’m somewhat online, is that people are going to these smaller sites. So they’re going to Mastodon, like I said, and of course, Mastodon is made up of many different servers – they’re called instances – that are all federated with each other and agree to speak to each other. If a server turns out to be full of spammers or ideologues, you can deferate from them and just not deal with their [bleep]. There’s also Blue Sky which is kind of a Twitter clone, which is also a federated model. There are people, for example, now who I think only hang out in Discord, and Discord is also that model of having smaller servers where you have a community of people that are like-minded in one server and then you can hop over to another server. Like I have a server I go to for Dungeons and Dragons and then I have another server that I go to to talk about science.

Miller: One of the points that you make about a number of these sites, one of the features that I think, not too long ago, we would have seen as a bug, is that they’re slower, is that stuff doesn’t go necessarily immediately all over the place. Why is that perhaps better?

Newitz: Well, one of the ideas that’s being floated is that maybe we should have a kind of turn towards slow media and kind of like the slow food movement.

Miller: Like mailing a letter.

Newitz: Like mailing a letter or like posting something on your profile and not expecting it to go viral in 30 seconds like it does on TikTok. Like maybe if you … for example, I talked to one expert who said maybe what you could do is if you want to share something you have to wait 24 hours before it gets shared, just to think about it. Like, do you really want to share this? Are you sure?

Miller: To me, one of the interesting things about this is the extent to which we’re talking about changing the architecture, the digital architecture, I suppose, of our lives in ways that we hope will make our lives better and how much we’re talking about just making our own decisions for ourselves to kind of armor ourselves against the kind of psychological warfare you’re talking about. How do you think about … because those are two different and they’re not mutually exclusive, but they’re different spheres of responding to what we’re being bombarded with.

Newitz: That’s right. And I think that that’s one of the things that’s interesting about psychological war as a tool to think with because there are kinds of technical fixes, there are regulatory fixes that we can do. But there’s also the fact that PSYOPs are intended to traumatize us, so many of us are walking around in a kind of half traumatized state from doom scrolling, from having invective and hate aimed at you every day online or every day at work. I just was reading an amazing collection by librarians of stories from librarians who’ve been hounded out of their jobs and given death threats. I mean, that’s a very personal, terrifying, emotional kind of state to be in.

Part of what I advocate for in the book is ways of trying to heal, like ways of trying to reconcile with each other psychologically as a way of getting out of this situation. And the first step is acknowledging that we’re being traumatized and not trying to pretend like, oh, it’s all free speech, doesn’t bother me. That’s [bleep]. It hurts.

Miller: We haven’t talked about AI yet, but it seems like it does enter into this conversation. Every day, AI is getting better and better at fooling us humans in terms of sound, pictures, videos. Just this week, there were a number of stories about election related videos in India and other places that seem pretty realistic. How does that affect the way you think about psychological warfare and misinformation, if now or soon, we can’t even trust these basic senses? I mean, throughout my life, I’ve more or less assumed that if I saw a video of something, I could trust it. I could believe it. I think probably if I’m being rational, I should no longer think that way.

Newitz: It’s true. And I guess, for me, as someone who is very interested in history – and of course, I’ve traced the stuff back in this book, over 200 years – we see that pattern emerging every time there’s a new technology, which is very interesting. So I talk in the book about how Benjamin Franklin created a fake newspaper during the Revolutionary War. And it was a really great deep fake, because he was of course a newspaper man and he knew what newspapers looked like. He had a printing press, he could do it on his own. He gave the newspaper this incredible name, which is the perfect PSYOP name, which was “The Supplement to the Boston Evening Herald.” Doesn’t that sound like a real newspaper?

He printed up a bunch of copies with fake stories about war atrocities that the Seneca army was allegedly perpetrating on behalf of the British. He was trying to undermine faith in the British cause. He printed up the newspaper and had it distributed in England. The English bought it, they thought it was real. And then American papers caught onto it and started reprinting stories from it. All of the stories were fake, all written by Ben Franklin. That was a very Ben Franklin moment. And that’s really in some sense, the first deep fake in U.S. politics.

We see similar things happening with radio during World War II, creating fake radio stations, fake people on these radio stations trying to propagandize on behalf of the fascists. So I see AI as being just the next step, like we have a new technology and one of the very first things that people do with technology is use it to lie and manipulate each other – I mean, after porn. [Laughter] And then you get to the PSYOPs.

Miller: And they’re tied together at this point, I think.

Newitz: Because it’s about eliciting an emotional response.

Miller: OK, I take your point that this, it’s not fully new. But do you think that there’s anything that is that is importantly new about this, about AI, or is it just a continuation of humans using technology to fool each other?

Newitz: I think there’s a couple of things that are different. One is that AI allows you to do this kind of lying fast at scale, right? And with each of these technological innovations – newspaper, radio – that was the kind of killer app, that, wow, now we can propagandize to 100,000 people. Now, to a million people. Now, like 400 million people. And that’s what AI is allowing us to do, is create PSYOP really, really fast. Now, remember, in order to do a really effective PSYOP, the military knows that you need to workshop it and have a target market. So those AI-created PSYOP might really suck. People might not fall for them as much as they do for like a human, a handcrafted PSYOP.

Miller: Unless the overall point is not to get us to go back to what we were saying earlier, to believe in something, but just to believe nothing.

Newitz: Exactly. And that was the other point I was going to make is that I think AI will be really good at that particular type of PSYOP, the what I call the disenfranchisement PSYOP, to just make you feel like you can’t engage in the public sphere at all. And again, doing it at scale.

Miller: It does make me think that maybe we’ll care more about being in person though, that’ll be the last frontier that we can trust. That doesn’t scale though.

Newitz: That’s exactly right. And I think being in person is something that we are going to be embracing again. Again, what I was getting at earlier with social media kind of becoming smaller, people going to a Discord server instead of to Facebook or even being in your group chat instead of being on Twitter. I think we are going back to appreciating smaller and slower forms of communication.

Miller: Near the end of your book, you take us to Oregon, to what’s now Southwest Oregon. And you talked to the current tribal chief and an anthropologist at the University of Oregon, Jason Younker. Can you give us a sense for why you went there and why you wanted to talk to him?

Newitz: So I had been reading a lot about Jason Younkers’ work. He’s the chief of the Coquille Tribe in Southwestern Oregon. And it was part of my interest in libraries, as I was mentioning earlier, I think of the library as a really interesting model for reimagining the public sphere. And I read an article about this amazing archive at the University of Oregon, at Eugene. It has the astonishing title of SORP, which stands for Southwest Oregon Research Project. And it’s an archive open to the public, which is devoted to chronicling all of the documentation of the Coquille Tribe and several other neighbor tribes in the area; the Coos, the Umpqua, and there’s a number of other tribes represented.

It chronicles their history since the arrival of white settlers. The way that that archive came about was really incredible and really, to me, illustrates how a PSYOP can be undone. Because during the 19th century Indian Wars, when the West was being conquered by white settlers who were going to war with tribes and nations who were here, including here in Oregon, one of the ways that PSYOPs came into those wars was there was a lot of popular fiction and popular history which claimed that Indigenous tribes and nations were naturally dying out. It was a kind of a social Darwinist idea, that it wasn’t because of white settlement. It was just a kind of a natural evolutionary process. This had the effect of allowing white settlers to feel not very guilty about coming to settle the West because it was just natural that they should go. But also, it had the effect of leading to laws around the termination of tribes, the termination of their sovereignty and their status as nations in relation to the U.S. government.

Jason Younker is actually of the generation of the Coquille where he has lived through termination and recognition in one lifetime. His tribe was terminated in the ‘50s, and in the ‘80s was recognized again. And shortly after it was recognized, when he was a scrappy young grad student, he and a group of his cohorts went to Washington D.C. to visit the Smithsonian and the National Archive, to try to find documentation of the history of their tribe. Because one of the reasons they had been terminated was that there was a map that had been made by the war department showing where the Coquille had had their traditional lands. And the map was lost. Younker told me that he grew up hearing from elders in the tribe, there was a map and they lost it, and that’s why we’re not Coquille anymore. That’s why we aren’t who we believe we are, which is quite a PSYOP, to be told that you aren’t who you are.

They get out there and the Smithsonian says to the students, you know what, you’re probably not going to find anything but anything you find, we’ll Xerox it for free. So they go into the archive and they come back with 60,000 documents. This is in the 1990s. So Xeroxing this stuff is kind of expensive, including the map. They found the freaking map and it’s huge, so Xeroxing it was a pain in the butt. And they brought it back and eventually had a potlatch ceremony and gave this archive to the University of Oregon. They kept their own copy of course.

It was an incredibly symbolic venture because what they were doing was reclaiming all the historical receipts proving what had been done to their tribe, proving that it had been an actual deliberate act of warfare, psychological warfare, deprivation, and now they had the map to prove where they are from. So if they ever are threatened with termination again, they can be like, excuse us, but we do have the receipts in our possession and at the university. And on top of that, the way that they gave it to the university with this potlatch ceremony, was the first potlatch that their tribe had had in over a century. And actually potlatches were outlawed in various parts of the country.

So it was incredibly symmetrical. It was an undoing of a PSYOP. It was a small thing, but it was also incredibly meaningful. And I think that’s part of the kind of repair work that we can do with storytelling, with even archiving, that can help us see our way past this current moment of chaos and confusion.

Miller: You write near the end of the book that “the most fundamental defense we have against PSYOPs is the realization that our minds belong to us.” Can you elaborate on that?

Newitz: Yeah, I mean, the fact that we can claim our stories as our own, the fact that we can kind of declare sovereignty over our identities. It kind of flows out of this story that I was just telling about the Coquille, where having that documentation allows this one tribe to say like, yeah, we exist and we have this history, not only did we tell the … they already knew their own history but they have documents from the U.S. War Department, acknowledging it. So those are great receipts, especially if you’re trying to go up against the U.S. government.

But a lot of PSYOPs are based on fundamentally a kind of gaslighting, telling us that we aren’t who we think we are, telling us that we can’t be the people who we know that we are, whether that’s because we come from a culture that’s been marginalized or we have a sexual orientation or a gender identity that is outlawed in various parts of the country, that the fundamental defense is at that level of saying like, no, I know who I am and I have the receipts and you can tell me I’m crazy. You can tell me I’m stupid. You can tell me I’m evil. But that’s just a story you’re telling, like I know who I really am. I’m actually kind of cool and I’m gonna go watch Star Trek later and you know, it’s all chill.

Miller: Annalee Newitz, thanks very much.

Newitz: Thank you very much.

[Audience applause]

Miller: That was Annalee Newitz in conversation at an event at Powell’s Books in downtown Portland. Their new book is called “Stories are Weapons.”

After we talked, Newitz emailed me with a small correction. It turns out they misremembered the name of the fake newspaper that Benjamin Franklin created. It was actually called “The Supplement to the Boston Independent Chronicle.” No fake news, no matter how small, from Annalee.

Contact “Think Out Loud®”

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.