Stats for nerds
3recommend
4mentions
4people
2016–2023years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Legacy corporate media outfit bemoans loss of organized narrative control due to rise of uncontrolled unmonitored information sources, fears future without panoptic observation of popular opinion trends:
> "This might sound overdramatic, but without an innate sense of what other people are doing, we might be losing a way to measure and evaluate ourselves. We’re left shadowboxing one another and arguing in the dark about problems, the size of which we can’t identify."
Suggested reading: > "The detailed and engrossing 2008 book, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, by Hugh Wilford investigates the CIA’s ideological struggle from 1947 to 1967 to win “hearts and minds” for US capitalism and to prosecute the Cold War."
That effort to control the media narratives being fed to the American public did not end in 1967 of course, it's alive and well today (although the organizations responsible are more nebulous, ranging from government bureaucracies to non-profit foundations to corporate ownership umbrellas).
It's true that the siloing of information due to the self-reinforcing effects of social media optimization algorithms (related to the desire to generate captive audiences for targeted advertising) is a problem, but having multiple independent social media accounts devoted to different topics is one way around it.
- Talbot's book is top notch, if you've read it you have a huge head start. I haven't read "The Mighty Wurlitzer", so thank you for the addition to the "to read" list. I would probably suggest Fletcher Prouty's "The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World". Another more superficial but still useful one is "The Brothers". To understand the OSS-MI6 connection, I like to suggest Carrol Quigleys "The Anglo-American Establishment", and for particulars about things you devolve into certain authors, the list is long, but an example would be Doug Valentine's work about Operation Phoenix. For a more unorthodox look into the Bush connection, the Unauthorized Biography of George Bush by Webster Tarpley is quite illuminating about the Brown Brothers Harriman stuff.
The point I made previously still stands though. Some of these are really good books (and we just barely scratched the surface) but I have found that there is no "one great book" that explains the history or current state of things.
I tend to lean these days towards thinking much of the abuses are due to the 1947 NatSec act. For the other commenter, I would like to specify that my point is that the compartmentalization is abused just to that purpose (so that the middle men who have good intentions can be used in ways beyond their understanding that they would not like if they understood), combined with a top down series of compromise operations... that's the main weakness in such a compartmentalized but centralized structure.
- Odd that piece didn't actually mention more of the scholarship around this, especially since they reference the "wurlizter" line. The book by Hugh Wilford on exactly that topic was excellent and the bibliography in the back was a gold mine on art, intellectuals, labor fronts, etc. www.amazon.com/The-Mighty-Wurlitzer-Played-America/dp/067403256X/
The Cultural Cold War by Saunders is, as far as I know, the best main stream scholarship on specifically the art scene.
EDIT: ....and I'm an idiot. Saunders is the author of that article. Jesus. Nice find OP.
- "The Devil's Chessboard" and "The Mighty Wurlitzer" are the two books I'm most familiar with on this topic, but I'd be curious to hear any specific recommendations you have as well.
