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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30112 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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Don’t Russia China Iran etc rely much more on information control by the elites than we do?

All elites do to some degree, but China and Iran have hard power to lean back on that they have proven they are not afraid to use.

Russia is more fox like, but you do start mysteriously playing with grenades on your plane if you oppose the regime too overtly.

Meanwhile, the West is a lot more dominated by narrative management. Look at how the UK dealt with its local trouble recently for instance, it was mostly playing through the media and setting up frames rather than bluntly bashing the locals, though bashing there was.

Another thing to consider is how secure a particular elite is vis-à-vis the people who would benefit from technological advancement. Chinese corporations are solidly loyal to the party and integrated into the power structure, when western tech is basically a counter-elite at this point.

I mean you do have a point that China, Iran, and Venezuela use hard power internally to a degree that the US at least is probably incapable of doing. On the other hand, Chinese and Iranian censorship is legendary.

I'd argue it's amateurish actually. It looks extremely blunt compared to the refined techniques of narrative control the US developed through the study of social psychology in the cold war. Now granted, the mask has been slipping and US psychological operations have become pretty bad as of late, but the base level is still very sophisticated compared to Iranian methods.

I find China harder to evaluate. I don't know enough about how they do their internal propaganda. I know their diplomatic efforts have been a bit difficult but that doesn't necessarily correlate.

I don't know enough about how they do their internal propaganda.

TTBOMK it's not great, but it still works, because people don't get exposed to alternatives easily - the media and education system are held in an iron fist and almost every plausible back-channel is surveilled, plus foreign perspectives are largely negated by the Great Firewall. You don't need to be super-compelling if you can block people from encountering anything more compelling than your slop until they've long since internalised it.

Of course, this model is useless for external propaganda, which is part of why theirs is so memetically bad.

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