By Simon McNeil
Stories are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind is a 2024 book by Annalee Newitz that holds as its premise that the condition of propaganda in the United States is a war, that psychological warfare is morally equivalent to “kinetic” war and that the United States needs to go through a process of disarmament and reconciliation in order to resolve core inequities at the heart of the country. I suppose it’s unsurprising that a science fiction author wrote a book like this. Stories are Weapons is a quintessentially science fictional book. This is a problem because it is marketed as non-fiction
Several significant flaws prevent this book from being a useful treatise on the American “culture wars.” The first is structural.
Stories are Weapons is a haphazard text that jumps almost at random between examples of propagandized discourses. The book discusses the destruction of indigenous culture via residential schools and then abruptly jumps to the genesis of the Comics Code in the 1950s. It will juxtapose an oddly complimentary discussion of cross-pollination between advertisers and the American espionage community with a decent, if incomplete, critique of the pseudoscience of the racist author of The Bell Curve and convicted cross-burner, Charles Murray.
More broadly, the book is loosely structured akin to a three-paragraph essay. There is a preface that introduces key themes, a collection of chapters that elucidates the book’s expansive definition of a psyop, a collection of chapters providing examples of the same, a collection of chapters discussing some rather vague solutions and then a brief conclusion.
Within each of these sub-sections, information is collated chaotically. For example, Newitz drops discussions of psychological warfare against Indigenous communities at the end of chapter five only to pick up again in chapter seven. The inclusion of a chapter about comic books between these two discussions of genocide is a rather befuddling choice.
The book’s sloppy citations, however, are a far deeper problem than its slapdash structure. Stories are Weapons gives single sources too much trust. An example of this failure in research best practices occurs early on when Newitz is discussing the career of Paul Linebarger, a CIA operative and science fiction author who wrote under the pseudonym Cordwainer Smith. Newitz describes Linebarger’s childhood in China, where his father was an American intelligence asset who supported Sun Yat-Sen, a military and political leader from the turn of the 20th century who is broadly regarded as the father of modern China. Newitz says, of Linebarger’s father and Sun, “The two men were so close that Sun became Linebarger’s godfather, inspiring in the little boy a fierce anti-communism.”
There’s a chronology problem here though. The source for these anecdotes is not precisely cited and appears to be from Linebarger’s private journals stored at the conservative Hoover Institution archives. A paragraph later Newitz quotes Linebarger’s journal from when he was 13 years old directly. Linebarger would have been 13 in 1926. Three years previous, when Linebarger was 10, Sun had invited the Communist International to meetings that led to an alliance between the Communist Party of China and the Kuomintang as part of his efforts to oust the warlords who controlled much of China throughout the early 20th century. One of Sun’s guiding “Three Principles of the People” was Mínshēng Zhǔyì – which was a system of socialist regulation of life necessities and of (never-realized) land reforms that would be familiar to most socialists. The KMT under Sun was organized according to Democratic Centralism and was supported by the Soviet Union as much as by the United States.
Far from being a committed anti-communist, Sun held the alliance between the KMT and the CPC together until his death in 1925, when Paul Linebarger was 12. The anti-communist turn of the KMT happened under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, after Sun’s death.
So we have a figure who was, historically, heavily influenced by socialism who was in contact with Linebarger in the period of time that he was most heavily engaged in trying to incorporate the communist movement into his overall nationalist revolutionary front, and this is the man that Newitz credits as having taught Linebarger anti-communist thought.
That’s an awful big stretch to hinge on precisely zero direct citations with a hint that the source is the private journals of the pre-teen child of an American diplomat stored at an archive appended to a conservative think tank.
Newitz continues to describe Linebarger as having, “spent his life fighting the Communists who he believed were wrecking the beloved China of his childhood.” What is even more alarming is the overall complimentary tone that Newitz takes regarding Linebarger who they variously describe as “progressive” and “utopian,” in his belief in the power of psychological warfare to reduce the risk of nuclear armageddon. Newitz treats Linebarger’s plots to air-drop counterfeit currency and fake IDs into socialist countries as “worldbuilding,” a term they anachronistically insert into his vocabulary absent any citation (although it’s put into quotation marks anyway), and says of these acts of warfare that they were structurally similar to the construction of Elvish language by Tolkien.
In the section devoted to solutions, Newitz talks in complimentary terms of the writing of Ruth Emrys Gordon, a cybersecurity researcher who writes fiction under the pseudonym of Ruthanna Emrys. After about a page of glowing praise for Gordon’s writing Newitz says, “Gordon’s work feels like a hopeful continuation of Linebarger’s.” This is an easy example of the alarming extent to which Newitz’s book situates the US intelligence apparatus in general, and the CIA and the US military in specific, as being forces for good in the world. However, the text is replete with such. This free PR work was likely a necessity considering that Newitz seems to have gained significant access to US military intelligence operatives throughout the research process for the book.
Now, despite their alignment with anti-communism and the US intelligence apparatus, Newitz does hold mainstream progressive political positions on gender, sexuality and race. This is great! But devotion to these (worthwhile) causes has the unintended effect of elucidating the next major problem with the text.
There is something of an alarming commonality with how Newitz addresses both the genocide of Indigenous nations throughout American history and their analysis of the work of aforementioned pseudoscientist Charles Murray. To wit, Newitz seems quite content to treat these issues as entirely being ones of ideas and words. Newitz frequently shies away from addressing the material conditions that underpin the conflicts they describe. This is bad enough when discussing racism in the context of American politics in the late 20th century but becomes flatly alarming when this treatment is applied to an ongoing genocide. At their most egregious, Newitz creates perverse equivalencies between discourse and warfare such as when they start chapter seven with the statement “We need to take the harm from psychological war as seriously as the damage from total war.”
Chapter seven is Newitz’s second attempt at addressing Indigenous genocide and is supposed to be plotting an example of an Indigenous victory. In it they focus on the founding of the Southwest Oregon Research Project (SWORP) and how the project managed to find and repatriate maps that had been lost by the US government about a century previous. The loss of the maps led to justification for the abrogation of treaty obligations, the loss of official status by the Coquille tribe and the forced relocation for many Coquille people. Newitz describes the repatriation of the map as a victory. They elide that, as recently as 2020, the US government was denying Coquille land claims based on historical treaty material. The victory, such as it is, remains a discursive one. In fact Newitz buries the lede a bit with one material victory that did come out of this – the SWORP revival of Potlatch. In Newitz’s version of events, “With the arrival of white settlers and their violent destruction of Indigenous communities, Coquille potlatches became small, private affairs. Eventually people stopped holding them altogether.” This glosses over the fact that the United States banned potlatch altogether in the 19th century and the ban wasn’t lifted until 1934. The reclamation of the Potlatch that SWORP facilitated was an actual material victory, a reactivation of a banned political and social custom of the Coquille nation. But as Newitz ignores the involvement of the state in ending Potlatch, instead treating it as a custom that simply fell out of use, they fail to address this material change.
It’s honestly not surprising that Newitz’s book is so uncomfortable discussing the material struggle of people who are the subjects of propaganda; after all this would tend to undercut Newitz’s message that propaganda itself is as significant a form of warfare as shooting guns and dropping bombs. Newitz must elevate discourse to being independently significant absent the material circumstances that surround it in order to serve this thesis. Newitz only mentions class once in the entire book. In passing.
This gets to the poorly answered question of who, exactly, all this propaganda serves.
Newitz presents the impression of America as a country in the middle of a psychological war. Their core concern is with the idea of the stochastic psyop – the idea that individuals within distributed networks are radicalized into creating propaganda tools in much the same manner as many politically-motivated spree killers are. But the only real beneficiary of this stochastic psyop situation, and the prime mover Newitz leans on most is Russia. Because Newitz refuses to engage with the power relations that underlie the material conflicts of racism, classism, homophobia and the other dividing faults within American society, because Newitz doesn’t identify class as a site of conflict at all, there’s very little discussion of what motivates this stochastic propaganda war nor any identification of the symmetries or asymmetries that occur. In fact Newitz falls very much into an information / disinformation binary that positions this conflict as one between Truth and Deception. There is no consideration for how power relations impact our epistemic frame nor any interrogation of who should ultimately arbitrate what is true. For Newitz, the problem of propaganda is that it tricks “sovereign minds” into believing untruths. Newitz believes the best solution is a political discourse of plain and unadorned fact but doesn’t have a clear epistemology as to how the public should adjudicate what is, in fact, plain fact.
This failure of epistemology is in part because Newitz, writing a book on psychology, seems not to have engaged with psychology much at all and seems to have a very poor idea of how minds actually work.
“It means acknowledging another’s right to be alive, in the United States, as sovereign minds that do not require cleansing disciplining or civilizing,” Newitz says, and I understand what they want to say here but the Cartesian ego as sovereign is a psychological structure a handful of centuries out of date.
In the early chapters Newitz brings up Freud by way of his relationship to American advertiser and propagandist Edward Bernays, most famous effectively founding the discipline of public relations. However Newitz’s gloss of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory elides a key idea that has persisted in psychology to this day – that of drives. Simply put, it’s not appropriate to treat the conscious mind as a sovereign guiding the body but rather it is a cacophony of wants, needs, and motivations. Anyone who has ever tried to quit smoking is perfectly aware that one can simultaneously want both to never have another cigarette and to have another cigarette right now. While Newitz’s idea of the unconscious as a veiled operator upon the ego is a reasonable single-sentence approximation of Freud’s basics, this disregards all discussions of the unconscious that come after. Particularly the Deleuzo-Guattarian idea of the machinic unconscious is relevant as much of Guattari’s work was actually adopted by clinical practices for its effectiveness. Deleuze and Guattari argued that the unconscious operated as a network of micro-influences both intrinsic and extrinsic to the body of the subject. All these tiny machines (defined as systems of breaks and flows) interface and break apart in varied ways depending on all kinds of varied stimuli. In this circumstance it becomes difficult to identify a sovereign ego at all. We are all a multitude.
But because Newitz provides an incomplete and weak interpretation of Freud and because they do so in order to support the idea of a sovereign ego as the seat of self-identity this means they miss a major weakness to the idea of true beliefs (fact) contrasted against deceptive false beliefs (psyop).
As Deleuze and Guattari say in Anti-Oedipus, “Psychoanalysis cannot become a rigorous discipline unless it accepts putting belief in parentheses, which is to say a materialist reduction of Oedipus as an ideological form. It is not a matter of saying that Oedipus is a false belief, but rather that belief is necessarily something false that diverts and suffocates effective production.“
Belief is necessarily something false that diverts and suffocates effective production is an effective critique of Freud; what’s more it’s a central refutation of the key idea that Stories are Weapons has of how propaganda works upon minds. Newitz seems to believe that, if only Americans believe the right things, they will be free. But belief is the real problem in and of itself. If one is going to write a book about psychological warfare, perhaps one would find their time better spent understanding psychology than interviewing comic book writers.
Now I do want to note one thing: the chapter about the comics code is actually one of the better chapters of Stories are Weapons when taken alone. Newitz seems at their most comfortable working in the realm of art criticism and this chapter suffers more from its position, sandwiched between two chapters about the genocide of Indigenous nations, than from any failing within it as a chapter. If I had a small quibble it is that Newitz falls into the old habit of trying to elevate fannish art to positions of ‘first’ that it never really held. In particular, Newitz treats the work of William Moulton Marston — best known as the creator of Wonder Woman — as being something uniquely produced, a work of counter-propaganda in direct discursive contact with the propaganda of the United States in the mid-century. This is a missed opportunity to demonstrate how Marston’s gendered politics aligns with that of previous artists such as Leopold von Sacher-Masoch upon whose work much of Marson’s world-view is obviously derived. But of course Masoch is an older writer who, despite arguably writing alternative history, is entirely outside the fandom structure. He is more known, in fact, for the Freudian co-option of his last name to describe a neurosis than for his utopian feminist socialism or his fascinating and incomplete fiction projects.
There is one final key problem with Newitz’s book that comes up quite clearly in the first paragraph of the preface, describing the psyop war in America as, “just words and images that are inflicting a form of psychological damage that is impossible to measure, impossible to prove.” Having started off the book deciding that it is impossible to measure or prove the impact of propaganda on an audience, Newitz makes precisely zero effort to demonstrate that any given propaganda campaign did anything at all to anyone at a psychological level. We are left with the naked assertion that this propaganda is effective, influences behavior and causes trauma absent any supporting evidence at all. Newitz demonstrates that propaganda can get media impressions and assumes that is the same thing as being successful propaganda. In fact, one example Newitz gives of a successful psyop is the Cambridge Analytica scandal. And we know that Cambridge Analytica significantly over-hyped their targeting algorithms and fabricated research. Newitz does not discuss that part of the story.
That, alone, should be sufficiently damning of a book that purports to speak to the characteristics of psychological warfare and to present solutions but this becomes just one strand in a tangled web of sub-standard scholarship and unproven claims. With a weak grasp on the beneficiaries of propaganda, an outdated theory of human psychology, an alarming level of support for the CIA and the US military and a tendency to elevate discourse above material circumstances, Newitz weaves a flawed perspective of the problem that their book revolves around. This comes out in some solutions that vary between the tedious and the alarming in the final section of their book.
Newitz’s first solution is improved social media algorithms.They raise an example of a study conducted by Mesyam Alizadeh at Princeton where they fed a training set of foreign-origin propaganda and random political posts (as a control) into an AI system and used it to predict when any given post was foreign propaganda. They claim a 74-92% success rate in this experiment. However, considering the tendency of AI systems to become less reliable when trained on inputs created by AI systems it is very likely that such algorithmic identification methods are unlikely to have a long lifespan.
Newitz then brings up the Election Integrity Projects’ ticketing system for political disinformation as a solution. This section crystalizes the odd position of Russia in Newitz’s narrative. Newitz tries and fails, several times, to square the idea that much of the “psyop” climate of America is caused by Russian intervention online with the argument that America is in a psyop-civil war. This runs counter to research that indicates “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.” Newitz provides no evidence that the EIP’s ticketing system had any more impact on public perceptions than the botfarms it targeted. They eventually describe the outcome of the EIP’s work by saying that, “After the presidential inauguration, the group wrote up their report, including basic guidelines to help social media companies deal with election misinformation in 2024 and beyond. Hopefully this report will make it easier for the public to recognize and interrupt operation kill chains next time.” (emphasis mine) Newitz is merely speculating about what the EIP’s work might do.
Later in the chapter Newitz brings up the work of Ruth Emrys Gordon (the one who is a successor to the anti-communist CIA SF author) and describes the social network imagined in the novel A Half-Built Garden, saying, “She imagines a democratic debate about how to care for a watershed as it blooms across the dandelion network [the name of the fictional social media system], calling upon only the people who live within the watershed or affect its health.
Newitz is arguing for more localized social media that is built to slow the rate at which third parties engage with communications that don’t affect their immediate circumstances but the thing is that the specific example, a geographically constrained social network built around the needs of people in an immediate region, exists. It’s called Nextdoor and it has a reputation for housing a remarkable amount of unhinged racist posting. Aside from Nextdoor, Newitz proposes the federated model of Mastodon is a better structure for social media.
After Ruth Emrys Gordon, Newitz brings up science fiction author Peter Singer and his Ghost Fleet books that imagine “how a future war with China might unfold kinetically and psychologically.” Newitz says that Singer and co-author August Cole set up a company called “Useful Fiction, which teaches military commanders to use tools borrowed from storytelling in order to imagine possible scenarios.” Between proposing a utopian version of Nextdoor in one section and then immediately following it with this it really seems like one of Newitz’s key takeaways is to make sure the Right Kind of Science Fiction authors are influential with the state as a principal solution.
Newitz ends their list of solutions to propaganda with the uncontroversial suggestion that libraries are good. This discussion elides how libraries have become points of political struggle in the United States and the power dynamics that underpin this struggle. Instead, Newitz just tells the audience to visit one because libraries are good. But there’s something missing Newitz’s universalist declarations of recognized self-sovereignty and wonkish assertions that we just need better analytical tools and that is the question of what to do about fascists. Frankly there isn’t a single mention in Newitz’s book about how to take the very real guns away from fascists. The book contains a quick gloss of The Authoritarian Personality but from the way it is cited I think Newitz interviewed an academic who had studied the book rather than actually reading it. And aside from this one source there’s very little actual exploration of the fascist psyche. There is no mention of Umberto Eco’s Ur Fascism nor of Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew (a particularly frustrating miss considering how Sartre specifically addresses how anti-semites manipulate discourse.) There is, of course, no mention of Anti-Oedipus or or Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended. There is no mention of The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Reich despite its significance to The Authoritarian Personality. Newitz seems uninterested in the minds of fascists at all but, with fascists largely in control of one of America’s two mainstream political parties, this seems like an alarming miss.
Newitz wants to fix fascism by revealing the false origins of the propaganda they seem to believe generates it without a good-faith reading of the preconditions for fascism. But Beauvoir has a perfect answer to this: “When a young sixteen-year old Nazi died crying, “Heil Hitler!” he was not guilty, and it was not he whom we hated but his masters. The desirable thing would be to re-educate this misled youth; it would be necessary to expose the mystification and to put the men who are its victims in the presence of their freedom. But the urgency of the struggle forbids this slow labor. We are obliged to destroy not only the oppressor but also those who serve him, whether they do so out of ignorance or out of constraint.”
I think this is the ultimate failure of Newitz’s book. They want to treat psychological warfare with all the gravity of actual warfare but don’t countenance that some people will not be persuaded to see the light, that these people have guns, and that, no matter how much you slow the spread of their propagandizing, they will find each other and they will do acts of real violence. The urgency of the struggle forbids this slow labor. Any real, material, solution to the American conflict will have to find a method of disarming and neutralizing fascism in America. We won’t get there by wonkishly tweaking social media algorithms or by trusting that elected officials will honestly communicate disinformation fed out of a ticketing system. We must crystalize the material conditions back out of the air of discourse and address them. And for that urgent task Newitz’s book is just another piece of opposing propaganda.
References:
- Laikwan, Pang (2024). One and All: The Logic of Chinese Sovereignty. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. doi:10.1515/9781503638822. ISBN 9781503638815.
- Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, Translated from the French by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, Anti-Oedipus, 1977 (trans. 1983), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, Pg. 104
- Eady, Gregory, Pashkhalis, Tom, et. al., “Exposure to the Russian Internet Research Agency foreign influence campaign on Twitter in the 2016 US election and its relationship to attitudes and voting behavior”, Nature Communications, Issue 14, Article 62 (2023), https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35576-9
- de Beauvoir, Simone, translated from the French by Bernard Frechtman, The Ethics of Ambiguity, Philosophical Library, New York, 1948, Pg. 98