The indirect funding of promoting products, politics, and propaganda against public health.
On The Majority Report they mentioned how the guys on The Vanguard Podcast said when the pandemic hit they were getting a few thousand dollars on their Patreon, but that dried up for them when they came out and supported a public health response to the pandemic. I’ve heard several stories like this before. The big money, the dark money has always been against public health, right from the get go. And content creators are very sensitive to their stats. All these platforms have ways that track things, and you get feedback. This obviously sometimes leads to audience capture, and a feedback loop. There is money pulling strings, and often people don’t even know who they’re working for, I notice this lots.Â
The recent news of how Tim Poole and Dave Rubin have made large sums of money for their shows that have been found to come from Russian sources. I recommend listening to the entire segment on The Majority Report on the Tim Poole story, not because anyone cares about Tim Poole, but because Matt Binder, Brandon Sutton, Emma Vigeland, and Matt Lech, do a good job there talking about the reality of how this economic media landscape works, and there’s plenty of evidence. How and why people aren’t fully aware of who’s paying for what, and even requiring people to disclose conflicts of interest, while very important, doesn’t completely fix it even if it were better enforced. Because many people who just wouldn’t be put in a position to have a microphone or a platform to reach a lot of people if they didn’t already have particular interests. A lot that people have a hard time grasping the idea that a lot of popular pundits and influencers themselves don’t truly understand why they’re popular. Most people in such a position will assume they must be great and people like them, who wouldn’t be tempted to believe that? But there’s a lot of money sloshing around to boost people indirectly, it’s inauthentic. Often people just hit upon saying the right things, and in comes the money.
One thing Matt Binder keeps bringing up is how the report says that someone was issuing invoices via a discord server. Nothing’s really too petty or halfass to be part of a well funded operation in the gig economy.
The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War by Mark Galeotti - Feb 2023 Outsourcing goes beyond direct warfare and into non-kinetic contests. This century has also seen the explosion of the gig economy. Individual freelancers and temporary workers sometimes recruited directly, sometimes through online platforms or third party matchmakers. It may seem ridiculous to draw comparisons with the cycle courier that brings you your pizza. But this is less fanciful than might appear in an age when conflicts may be fought through the medium of carefully curated newspaper articles highlighting a grievance or attacking a government. And when online influencers can pivot from hyping a hair product to pushing a political cause. This may be the age of multinational corporations, mass social movements, and powerful governments, but a coincidence of technological, social, and political change means that it is also the age of the individual, and many of them are for hire. Suddenly the world is full of people who seem to be doing the work of states. Yet not as direct employees, nor even out of ideological commitment or patriotic passion. Journalists hired to write hit pieces. Scholars saying the right things for a grant. Think tanks producing recommendations to order. There may be no geopolitical equivalent of Uber yet, but lobbying, strategic communications - were I a cynic I would suggest this is what we call propaganda when we do it ourselves - and similar consultancy and service companies often act as the middlemen.Â
