The Rise of Weaponized Flak in the New Media Era. Brian Michael Goss

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СКАЧАТЬ this vein, in the Watts up with that? comment section discourse, vox pop participants rally to Monckton—and he is enabled to have it both ways. Monckton is constructed as the erudite answer man who furnishes exhaustive one-stop shopping for factoids, couched in “intellectual authority” to which vox pop flaksters defer; and Monckton is simultaneously construed as pure of university affiliation, a man of “the peeps” notwithstanding the elitist class background about which he ostentatiously reminds all. Ideological alchemy collapses the paradoxes of boutique and vox pop flak toward climate science.

      What Flak Is Not

      Having sketched out what characterizes flak and its subtypes, I will now return to differentiating it from other (better-known) terms; to wit, fake news, conspiracy theory, and activism.

      The term “fake news” has spiked in usage in recent years and is up first for consideration. Throughout this volume I will eschew use of this term since ←43 | 44→its usefulness has been placed into doubt by its sheer vagueness. In July 2018, the United Kingdom’s House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee published Disinformation and Fake News. The committee reached what seems at first blush to be a surprising conclusion about the report’s titular topic. Specifically, the Committee concluded that, “There is no agreed definition of the term ‘fake news’” (2018, p. 7). Fake news can implicate satire and parody such as The Onion or Colbert Report that—in irreducible contrast to flak—often make laudable contributions to public discourse. In turn, fake news may also signify accurate stories with misleading click-bite titles—or it may point to entirely fabricated content. In the light of these and other forms of “news” discourse that could be called fake, the Committee concludes, “we cannot start thinking about regulation and we cannot start talking about interventions, if we are not clear about what we mean” (2018, p. 7). The Committee advises “that the Government rejects the term ‘fake news’ and instead puts forward an agreed definition of ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation,’” that are generally understood to signify, respectively, deliberately or inadvertently wrong information (2018, p. 8).

      Flak may also be taken as making contact with conspiracy theory. My posture toward conspiracies takes them as far less exotic and edgy than is often posited in discourses on them. At the same time, I concede that dedicated flak audiences may behave like the conspiracy-minded in adopting an infinite regress of suspicion toward evidence that proves their assumptions wrong (Bratich, 2008). That said, I am assaying to take conspiracy out of the grassy knoll and make it mundane in positing there is nothing “special” about conspiracy. It is, after all, a legal term that is vital in describing some forms of crime. In Robert Mueller’s indictment of 12 Russian intelligence operators (Mueller, 2018), the term “conspirators” is employed throughout the text to collectively describe the 12 defendants. Conspiracies exist: ergo, let us get over it. In this view, a conspiracy theory is like, any other theory, subject to empirical support that (in some lesser or greater measure) provides convincing evidence or not. That (some, many, most) theories of conspiracy can be proven wrong makes them like other theories. Moreover, I am assuming a structuralist approach, such as that which Herman and Chomsky bring to the propaganda model. In this view, analysis of deep structures, such as the dynamics of capitalism, illuminates more of how the social order functions than even an empirically proven conspiracy. For this reason, I am constructing flak as structurally-grounded concept with origins in the propaganda model, with scant further reference to conspiracies or conspiracy theory.

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      Doing the Right Thing: Flak Versus Activism

      I have been arguing that flak serves the public badly. At the same time, one may quite reasonably wonder what to make of citizens who have composed letters of complaint, or convened demonstrations, or boycotts for pro-social ends. In this vein, Amnesty International innovated methods of confronting authority via mass letter-writing campaigns, an advancement for human rights advocacy that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977. Among other examples, Amnesty’s principle method of inspiring mass letter-writing begs the question of whether it is a flak mill and whether flak may present pro-social functions. The short answer is: emphatically no. I am defining “pro-social flak” as an oxymoron. Instead, I advocate the term activism to signify pro-social actions against powerful interests and to differentiate it from flak.

      Whether enacted against people who hold authority (e.g., Clinton or Dilma) or against people who demonstrably do not, a defining feature of flak is that it emanates from a position backed with substantial power. Activism, by contrast, presents guerilla-style tactics of necessity for weaker parties against stronger ones in order to leverage whatever advantage they can. Citizen numbers present that advantage where letter-writing, boycotts, or demonstrations are concerned.

      Flak has on occasion been genetically modified in order to assume the veneer of activism. Campaigns for elite interests can be camouflaged as activism in what have been called AstroTurf (fake grassroots) campaigns. When AstroTurfing, industries shepherd citizens into front groups to act (even unwittingly) as their public face. For example, “smokers’ rights campaigns” have enshrouded corporate interests in smoke (Stauber & Rampton, 1995, pp. 14, 30). Flak is doused with power—and so it may necessitate the concealment of that power. Moreover, convening front groups is now easier than ever with the rise of computational propaganda. Bots may not be as loud and colorful as a crowd of citizens; but they can be tirelessly enlisted in unlimited numbers to flood the zone of online discourse as needed.

      Case Study: Activist Students in a Flak Storm

      It is heart-wrenching to repeat the facts: on February 14, 2018, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida was the site of the most lethal mass shooting yet at a U.S. high school. The massacre claimed the lives of 17 students and injured 17 more. Following other shootings of staggering ←45 | 46→scale, the Parkland students commandeered the public discourse toward advocacy for stronger gun laws. A month later in the District of Columbia, Parkland students led the March for Our Lives, a name too chillingly literal in the light of the ongoing cascade of school shootings.

      The students’ actions readily qualify as activism, regardless of whether their families are affluent. As teens yet to graduate high school, they control no appreciable assets of their own beyond assuming the high moral ground. Moreover, the students’ actions can be called activism when compared with the resources at the disposal of the gun industry and its aggressive lobby. Although the activist encounter was asymmetric in power terms, the Parkland students’ registered material victories. Notably, a gun-friendly Florida governor signed restrictions into law in short order (Drobnic Holan & Sherman, 2018).

      The students’ articulate, uncontrived passion overwhelming impressed observers; just not all observers as the students were also subject to shockingly crass flak. InfoWars, Gateway Pundit, Breitbart, Russia-linked Twitter accounts, as well as Republican Party congressperson Steve King reported for flak duty against the students (Drobnic Holan & Sherman, 2018; Lopez, 2018). Trump-pardoned felon Dinesh D’Souza merits special mention for his rapid efforts to dismiss the students by cuing deranged flak mood music. D’Souza tweeted a photo of the shell-shocked victims in the immediate aftermath of the massacre with the caption: “Worst news since their parents told them to get summer jobs” (quoted in Nakamuta, para. 2).

      Then, the flak got uglier. As noted, flak-in-discourse often takes the form of delegitimization in part through denigration and belittlement. The students’ authenticity as students was demeaned, as they were accused of being “crisis actors” and deep-state plants reading an anti-gun script. The flak memes lingered even at the epicenter of the massacre. One Parkland teacher told Politifact, “I had legitimate friends asking if [student activist] David Hogg is a real person—it was crazy” (quoted in Drobnic Holan & Sherman, 2018, para. 33).

      Flak at the teenagers got personalized indeed. Emma Gonzalez was derided by a Republican Party candidate for Maine’s State House as a СКАЧАТЬ