I suppose it’s fitting that our era’s most important book on propaganda should come disguised as a teacher’s guide to the subject. After all, this is the era of insiders. We all see behind the curtain, all the time. We are no longer mere consumers or voters; we are amateur product spokespeople and political commentators. We don’t simply read the headlines or watch television; we tweet captions and make YouTube videos.

You may think that in this context, to read a book about propaganda would be almost pointless. A purely academic exercise. It may have sufficed in era when propaganda was a form of media content—something we could deconstruct in order to neutralize. But what about when propaganda is no longer relegated to the content of media, but becomes the context itself? Books, radio, and television offered us mostly self-contained universes we entered voluntarily. A TV show or news report could influence us, but it did so largely through storytelling. The sentencing of a criminal at the end of Dragnet or Law & Order taught us that crime doesn’t pay. The editing of war footage into narratives let broadcasters choose which side we should root for.

We ended up living in a world of stories, each of which is fed back into reality. Everything we saw on TV influenced our behavior, which in turn influenced what happened in the real world. If local news stories convinced us that the streets were dangerous, we stayed inside at night, making the streets more empty and dangerous. If a public relations professional could convince us that holding a cigarette was a symbol of female power, more women would actually choose to smoke in public, abolishing a former stigma.

But this sort of public relations always depended on elite media professionals capable of crafting a story and then delivering it to us through newspapers, movies, or TV. This was the province of Woodrow Wilson and FDR, William Randolph Hearst and Rupert Murdoch, or Ed Bernays and Howard Rubinstein. And all we really had to do in order to defuse the power of stories, from Triumph of Will to Top Gun, was to analyze the content and maybe look at the companies behind the scenes.

Today, the story behind the scenes is the story. In reality TV, the story is inconsequential—it’s the setup that matters. The context. Cops isn’t about any particular arrest, but the nature of law enforcement in working-class America. (What you gonna do when they come for you?) American Idol doesn’t highlight its individual performers so much as the primacy of corporate pop and the willingness of artists to surrender to the judges and remake themselves in more commercial packages. Survivor epitomizes the cutthroat ethos of the competitive marketplace. And reality television, as a genre, promotes the notion that getting on TV—by any means necessary—is worth the humiliation and self-degradation. The footage may be real, but the producers get to assemble whatever reality they choose from it. It’s like the news, except with no obligation to the truth.

Our collective ignorance of how this new propaganda landscape functions matters. It’s why we elected a reality television star as president: we mistook Cops for America, American Idol’s popularity contest for democracy, and the star of The Apprentice for a successful businessman.

Media literacy used to mean being able to read the media, deconstruct the story, and decode what “they” mean for us to believe or do. But in a digital environment, media literacy means being able to engage with the environment, tools, and platforms of media itself.

When you watch a YouTube video, the content of that clip is only one small part of its influence over you. Less recognized but equally influential are its number of views, search ranking, description, and comments. YouTube exercises its propagandistic pull less through individual videos than through the sequence of videos recommended by its algorithms. Those algorithms are watching us much more intently than we’re watching the videos. And their sole objective is to get us to click on more.

Likewise, where we may have once valued our ability to look at a Facebook post and understand its rhetorical power, that is no longer sufficient. Facebook is not like a TV channel or newspaper; it is an entire environment, designed to change the way we think and act. Only an analysis of the platform as propaganda will reveal to us the way Facebook really works. The network uses data we leave behind in order to put us into statistical buckets of people who are likely to behave in a certain way. Then, they use everything at their disposal to make sure we behave true to our algorithmically derived statistical profiles.

So, say Facebook determines that you are in a group of people who have an 80% likelihood of going on a diet in the next three weeks. The next thing you know, you’ll begin seeing particular kinds of posts fill your newsfeed—articles about people who have died from obesity or clogged arteries, posts from friends of friends who went on a successful diet, and so on. The objective is not simply to advertise a particular marketer’s diet products, but to increase the accuracy of their predictions—by whittling down the 20% of people who may have done something other than going on a diet. The platform means to increase our predictability. Or compare your Google search results to those of your best friend or your parents. Search for the same words and see how differently Google responds. Better yet, log in through an IP address in a different neighborhood or country. Take a look at the difference between the Google search results for the word “Jew” in America, Europe, and Jordan. Those are the sorts of experiences that change your understanding of the media architecture we are inhabiting. And they’re the sorts of experiences Renee Hobbs offers us, our students, and our children in this book. Media is no longer something we watch; it is something we do. The only way for us to have a fighting chance at autonomy in such a constructed reality is to gain our bearings through experiential learning. There is no map; there is only territory. You have to walk it to know it.

And when you do, you’ll be rather surprised to find out that there may not really be anyone in charge. There’s no Big Brother at the top of the media hierarchy, crafting messages to trickle down through the mass media we consume. No, there’s no one at the wheel. The companies responsible for mediating and representing our reality are run largely by people who have no aim other than to collect our data and get us to click on more stuff. And they’ve relinquished authority over their networks and content to the algorithms, which are just doing whatever they can to trigger our brain stems and get us to click. Whether that means showing us a shark attack, a racist diatribe, or fake news from Russia, it doesn’t matter. We’re no longer living in a world where propaganda is being used against us, so much as one made of propaganda itself.

That’s why this book is so important. This is the first step toward regaining human comprehension and control over the tools and platforms that comprise our shared communication space. It is at once an engaging chronicle of how we got here, a handbook for understanding propaganda, a course in experiential learning, and a collection of ways to discuss and confront the greatest challenges to human flourishing in the coming century. Reading Mind Over Media should convince you that it’s not too late to take back control—not just of the media but also of our own thought processes. The power to change everything is in your hands right now.

Douglas Rushkoff
New York, 2019