"Truth Making" Recommended Preface - Zhang Jieping: 20 years of attention economy, what have we lost?

Author◎Zhang Jieping／Founder of Matters.news @张杰平

"This line of business is a 'virus', testing the anti-virus ability of democracy and forcing a democratic society to grow 'antibodies'."

In the days of the spread of the new crown epidemic, when I read this sentence in Zhixin's manuscript, I broke out in a cold sweat in an air-conditioned isolation room. This book is not about the plague, but when it comes to the impact on society and the soul, the subject it writes may have a far-reaching impact on mankind than the plague.

Described in the most fashionable words these days, the theme of this book is "cognitive warfare". The opening sentence is a quote from the author's interview with businessman Du Yuanfu, describing the data analysis-based campaign service he provided. He successively founded the companies QSearch (Taiwan) and AutoPolitic (Singapore), focusing on political customers in Asian countries, providing social data monitoring and analysis, information delivery strategies and other services to help customers increase their voice among voters and win the election battle.

Data, monitoring, analysis, delivery, volume, campaign... These terms describe business, which sound neutral and professional. But if you look closely, behind every word is the era of the attention economy, in exchange for squeezing attention from shallow to deep - to provoke people's hearts, to attract desires, to incite emotions, and then - to shape identity and change choices. The action itself is reasonable and legal, but the information smuggled in the process may not be true, the idea may hide hatred, and there are gray areas everywhere, but we can't do anything, because we just entered an industrial age of "reason" and "law" A new battlefield in the information age that cannot be fully understood, let alone responded to.

Today, on the one hand, the popularization of information technology, platform giants monopolize and formulate rules, pay attention to economic domination and bring great benefits; on the other hand, the traditional government and the rule of law system are slow to respond, and they also step into the deep waters of political ethics between freedom and regulation, privacy and security. Area. This "battlefield" has spread all over the world and penetrated into every corner of our lives long before people realize it and have the ability to get rid of it.

The Shape of "Cognitive Operations" Around the World

Reporter Liu Zhixin has been conducting interviews around the world since 2016, capturing the shape of different factions relying on social networks to launch "cognitive warfare" in Belgium, France, Germany, Indonesia, North Macedonia, China, North Malaysia, and Taiwan. The different roles of:

The first party who entrusts data service and marketing companies and establishes the cyber army department is usually an alternative, minority and extremist force in the traditional political world, and a mainstream ruling force defending the existing power;

Aiming at huge business opportunities, intermediaries that provide data monitoring, analysis, strategy, and even execution services are also the most vigorous advocates of "cognitive warfare". Whether it is self-reflection or self-bragging, they all describe it as amazing. skill;

Take the lead in organizing the Internet Army, establish countless real and fake IDs, and hide in front-line executives who make money from keyboard careers and role-playing all over the world;

Feel depressed or marginalized in reality, and sincerely devote yourself to supporting an alternative and breakout political discourse advocate, but more or less step into the stratospheric trap composed of a large number of guiding messages and intensifying hostile messages. Voters who consciously move towards closure and polarization.

After reading every true story, the biggest feeling is the amazing familiarity. No matter what color the protagonist is, what language he speaks, what country he is in, or what political spectrum, you can almost find similar examples around you or even yourself. .

For example, look at this passage:

Just enter a keyword, and the screen will immediately find relevant posts from the 150 million social content monitored at any time, according to the background, location, language of the speaker, etc., plus sorting, just a few mouse clicks You can find the most active accounts, the most popular posts, and catch the most discussed topics at the moment. According to these data, candidates can not only know what people are discussing, but also see the current focus of voters of different age groups and different regions, and can also find the most influential online opinion leaders among them. Adjust the strategy and the delivery of online advertising. Each camp decides the next step according to the reactions of social networking sites.

Where do you think this is talking? U.S? Indonesia? Or the Taiwan we are familiar with? This is the French election in 2017, with the rise of Le Pen. The reporter interviewed Fodillo, the founder of Linkfluence, a French social networking site public opinion analysis company that cooperated with at least two camps in the election campaign. He described the online exchange of fire in this election as an "arms race". In each candidate camp, there are thousands of people in the cyber army.

Such an arms race is ubiquitous. The "public arena" conceived by intellectuals in the last century and playing the most important role in a democratic society is rapidly disintegrating from a rational debate field that enhances communication, builds trust, and forms consensus to communication. Conspiracy theories and false information, spawn hatred, and capture the original cracks and inequalities of society, and accelerate the tearing cognitive battlefield.

Why are far-right forces in France, Germany, and the United States able to quickly conquer cities and loot, and enter the mainstream from the fringe?

Why can Russia's "foreign forces" easily influence other countries' democratic elections?

Why do open democracies seem vulnerable to fake news?

Why won't tech giants change their all-encompassing grasp of personal information and stop the addiction mechanism?

The most extreme example of the many of these issues that unfolds in this book through the stories of those who have experienced it is terrorism.

Why is ISIS able to attract more than 30,000 people from more than 100 countries to join them through the Internet?

This is the question of Ban Airi, a second-generation Tunisian immigrant living in Belgium. Her nineteen-year-old son left home in 2013 without saying goodbye. A few months later, the family received an unfamiliar phone call from Syria, only to learn that their son had joined ISIS as a jihadist and had died!

In great grief, the mother began to carefully track how her son connected with ISIS on social networks, what kind of information was attracted, the step-by-step trajectory, and the motive and underlying reasons for the final decision. "I had to find out," she said in an interview with the book's author. "This is my 'holy war', and this is the real holy war."

If the owl that delivered the letter could read minds

Using language to deceive people, using communication technology to spread, and using rumors, suspicion, and hatred as the fire, these are never new. What has changed today? The popularity of information technology, the monopoly of platform companies, and the dominance of the attention economy, what do they mean?

Imagine you have an owl that delivers a letter. Yes, the one from Harry Potter.

You rely on it to get information about the outside world. Someone will send you newspapers through it, and possibly flyers. Previously, only a few people had the ability to send letters, hiring owls. The owl is neutral, just point to point to complete the task, no matter who the sender is or who the recipient is. Now, things are different. First of all, everyone can send a letter, and the owl is always there. Second, it learned to read minds! And it will share the secrets of reading with other owls, strung together into a huge secret network of recipients, it also understands the truth that secrets can be sold for money, and will sell your secrets to the messenger, let them according to your heart. Secret, adjust the content of the message at any time. The most terrible thing is that you don't know all of this, you sometimes forget that the letter you received has no "authoritative guarantee", and even think that the owl is still more than ten years ago, innocent, neutral, and knows nothing but The way it performs the mission of the tool.

This is probably what it will look like when social platforms replace newspapers and flyers as our first source of information. The social platform is the owl group of the new era. In the past, no one knew who took the flyer, and no one knew whether the person who got the flyer put it in a lunch box, or tore it up, read it carefully, or even hung it on the wall carefully. Now the owls know it. Your every behavior will be recorded, and your preferences can be inferred from these long-term behavioral parameters, better than any kind of mind reading.

In this case, if you are the person writing the flyer, you will still concentrate on writing what you want to say, and leave it to the owl? I'm afraid not. You'll ask the owl carefully what the recipient wants to see, and you'll do what you want, making him want to see you more and more, relying on your flyer. Not to mention, if you want to come out of nowhere and fight an election, the owl is your best partner.

The owl's sudden ability to read minds and democratize the delivery of mail services to everyone is the result of the development of information technology in our age. And the longer you read the flyers, the more secrets you will reveal. These secrets can be sold for money. This core business model is the essence of the attention economy. It is also the core driving force for owl groups to form monopoly groups - so that they can reduce internal communication costs, obtain the largest human secrets in the most efficient way, and put them into market transactions to reap benefits.

Owls have been learning to read minds for more than two decades, and this whole model of the attention economy has captured everyone. Under the birth of this whole set of models, passing information has become "competition" rather than "communication". The next step in the competition is war, and as the author of this book puts it, the recipient “once likes it, enters the comfort zone created by the algorithm and further initiates the process of extremification.”

It is also in this mechanism that false information is created and spread like never before. For example, Ben Nimmo, research director of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Laboratory, analyzed in an interview with the author: the popularity of digital publishing technology has made it easier to "create" false content; the Internet has made "publish" false content. Content made easier; social media made it easier to "disseminate" false content.

what should we do

In the face of such an owl, what should we do? The most instinctive answer, it seems, is to close the mind and stop being read by it. Or refuse letters from now on to avoid the bombardment. But the former is unrealistic, just think about how hard it is for you to close Facebook; the latter is just escapism, and cannot stop your parents, brothers, classmates, teachers, sons, and grandchildren, who are exposed to such information flow every day.

The book also delves into the answer to "how", interviewing civic organizations, fact-checking centers, researchers, and watchdogs around the world. But interestingly, the most insightful answers mentioned in the book often come from the owl himself.

Three pieces of advice for readers from the Nets coach from North Macedonia:

1. The truth is not black and white, and you need to be suspicious of everything.
2. Make sure to diversify your sources of information and don't overindulge in news.
3. Read more, focus on what you really love, and make yourself the best person in the field.

And journalists and opposition leaders from Russia advised the democratic world to look at the destruction of "foreign forces":

"The totalitarian government suddenly discovered that as long as it developed some tools, it could use the products of the free world (the Internet, social networking sites) to control the world, it could not conduct censorship in other places, but it could create prejudice to restrict people knowledge and shaping people’s perceptions.” However, “the most powerful counterattack of a democracy is to fundamentally rebuild the capacity of public discourse, to thoroughly examine the causes of democracy’s failure, and to progress through self-reflection and self-correction.”

"For the influence of foreign forces to be effective, the premise is that a country's democracy fails. Without resistance, the virus can invade."