- Feb 5, 2022
Percy: Welcome to the second episode in our podcast, the live front-end to our experiment into decoding the alphabetic illusion. Here we introduce the decoding toolbox v a recent propaganda campaign.
Everything starts on the Screen, the flat surface that projects public information to the masses.
Red: You may want to read how Percy introduced me to his conceptualization of the Screen, via a dialogue with that famous skeptic of writing, Socrates. As Percy has drilled into me incessantly, when you initiate a decoding project, the Screen must be blank.
Percy: And on that blank Screen we set-up a basic Concept/Object dialectic. The Concept is a propaganda campaign within the Anglo-American Empire. The Object in the dialectic is the infrastructure of petroleum, the most valuable commodity today and the underpinning of the U.S.-dominated global trading system. The first step is identifying a suitable propaganda campaign. It's important to distinguish between a propaganda system and a propaganda campaign. We live in a propaganda system. It envelops us. Propaganda campaigns are focused operations within this system, designed to achieve a specific objective. And because campaigns are planned, we can reverse engineer them to determine the motivations of the actors who launched them. We are interested in spectacular campaigns -- those that dominates the news agenda for weeks, even months -- linked directly to the trade in petroleum. To open a portal, it doesn't need to be live. But must be recent so we can identify links to events on today's Screen. For the U.S., my rule of thumb is no more than two presidential elections back.
Red: So this is February 2022, meaning we can jump back through the 2020 vote to 2016? By the way, I should add that at this point I am running blind. Percy has prepared everything in advance, and my role is to ask questions and seek clarifications.
Percy: And the campaign I've identified won't surprise you: the 2019 impeachment of President Donald J. Trump.
Red: Yeah. I kinda expected this. You worked on that for a client, didn't you?
Percy: Indeed I did. An American petroleum company with interests in Ukraine. I was busy finishing my book and it was refreshing to re-enter the information warfare game after a few years out. That experience ultimately led me to rip apart the book and turn it into this online experiment. So let's begin. First we need to see if the Impeachment ticks the five criteria of the Propaganda Portal. What do you think, Red? And, by the way, we will be putting the graphics in the transcripts, so you can assume the audience can see them.
Red: O.K. Number 1. Clearly the Impeachment was a live binary story that attempted to change the management of America's legal superstructure. Number 2 works: it is a concept that doesn't require a complete sentence for meaning. Only two words -- Trump Impeachment -- is enough to boil blood in many areas of the country.
Percy: That satisfies Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. We have meaning without grammar, which allows us to plot coordinates on the system of writing without relying on its rules. And Number 3, the Concept/Object frame?
Red: Well the campaign is the Concept. But I am not clear on the Object? Does it have to be tangible?
Percy: Most propaganda Objects, in my experience, are abstractions that people mistake for tangible reality. In this case the Object is American Democracy. And that means the Concept of the campaign is more precise than the Object of Democracy. So, as per Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, we can build an inertial frame of reference to measure the abstract energy spinning around this event.
Red: A reminder to the audience, we cover the science of decoding in Room 2 of the The Perception Perimeter Torus, which Percy derived from John Boyd's Destruction and Creation.
Percy: Good point. Next, Number 4. Do we have a narrative of change in the Object of American Democracy over time?
Red: Yeah. The Democratic Party narrative from the moment Trump was nominated the GOP candidate in 2016 was that he threatened American Democracy. Specifically collusion with Vladimir Putin's Kremlin. And the Impeachment campaign was framed as essential to preserving its integrity.
Percy: So that leaves us with the fifth and final: can the propaganda campaign be deconstructed into smaller components for testing with the Ground Truth Dialectical Engine?
Red: And of course it can, just like any drama.
Percy: Which means we can deconstruct it with our first tool: the Propaganda Frame, my adaptation of Kenneth Burke's Dramatistic Pentad. It identifies the five components that every propaganda campaign should have: Premise, Spectacles, Goals/Means, Actors and Setting. Red, want to run through them?
Red: So the Premise is a question posed by an Instigator. If the intended Target answers, the Frame is created and the drama unfolds within its confines.
Percy: In this case, Congressional Democrats instigated the campaign with the question: Did Trump Pressure the Ukrainian government for dirt on Hunter Biden in exchange for military assistance in Kyiv's confrontation with Moscow? Trump's team were forced to answer because the Premise came as part of official Congressional proceedings. And next is...
Red: Next up is the Spectacles, the dramatic events that prompt questions of causality, and give the story the depth of a narrative arc. There are three types. The Establishing Spectacle is the campaign's trigger. Think 9/11. The Hypothetical Spectacle is the future event that the campaign seeks to either achieve or, more often, prevent.
Percy: The campaign's Establishing Spectacle was an anonymous government whistleblower complaint submitted to Congress that alleged Trump's abuse of office. The Hypothetical Spectacle was the end of American Democracy as we know it. Which brings us to the Goal and Means.
Red: The Goal is the decision the campaign seeks to achieve, and the Means is how it's reached.
Percy: The Goal of the campaign was removal of Trump from office by the Means of a Senate impeachment trial. Red: And every drama needs its Actors, which is Number 4.
Percy: Yep. The Instigator was the leader of the House Democrats, Nancy Pelosi, and the Target was Trump and his White House advisors.
Red: Finally, we have the Setting. The place where the drama unfolds.
Percy: And that's Congress. The House votes on the articles of impeachment, then the Senate conducts the trial. Red: So we have our deconstructed components. Is it time for the Quadrant and Matrix?
Percy: Yep.
Red: So the Navigational Quadrant is like the old maritime instrument, we use it to orient within voids of Abstract Space. It identifies how the propaganda campaign connects to three fundamental structures of the state: government, laws and trade. Again, it's covered in detail on the website. And out of the Quadrant we build our mapping tools. The first is the Propaganda Matrix, which is a grid created from the Frame's components. And I see you've divided up the components per usual. Instigator and Target bookends. And Goal separated from Means.
Percy: Yep. And then we look for connections, starting up top. Each component, by definition, connects to the campaign on the Screen. That's the light-blue line. And because the Impeachment sought to change the head of government, they also connect to the dark blue Governing Interface. There was no attempt to change a law, so no connection to the orange Superstructure level. Which brings us to the Trade Infrastructure level. Here we look for any direct connection to petroleum trade among the Frame components. And that connection is obvious: Ukraine -- specifically the massive pipeline that connects Russian natural gas fields in Siberia to European markets. The Establishing Spectacle connects: the whistleblower alerted about alleged Trump pressure on Kyiv. And that, by definition connects the Instigator and Target: they are both arguing about their opponent's actions in Ukraine. So the pipeline transit corridor of Ukraine is our infrastructure anchor.
Red: These coordinates identify connections in the propaganda campaign across space. Now it's time to punch through the Screen and add the dimension of time to the Quadrant. Or what we call its Depth-of-Field, which plots connected events at each level. You set the initial Depth-of-Field at 2012. Why?
Percy: We calculate based on changes in the Infrastructure Anchor. In this case, the changes were in pipelines to divert Russian natgas from Ukrainian transit. And the first of these changes came with the opening of the Nordstream Pipeline under the Baltic to Germany in 2012. That was followed by the opening of the Turkstream pipeline to Turkey and the construction of a second pipeline alongside Nordstream, which has yet to open. Note this is just baseline plotting, which can always be adjusted based on what we find.
Red: Got it. So once the time-frame is established on the infrastructure level, we move up the levels of the Quadrant.
Percy: Yep. So on the orange Superstructure level we find a series of new laws that sanction Russia for its seizure of Ukrainian territory in 2014. And there's also one that was passed in late 2019, during the Impeachment, directed specifically at Nordstream 2. From there we move to Governing Interface. When plotting coordinates within the American propaganda system we always note when the White House, Senate or House changed hands. Useful markers for orientation. Then we jump to upper-most level, the propaganda campaigns on the Screen. Here we only looking for campaigns connected to Ukraine -- and by extension Russia's involvement there. They factored into the 2016 and 2018 campaigns, as well as the 2020 one -- which was already in full swing with party primaries when the House Democrats launched the impeachment. Finally, we note any objective events on the ground. Which usually means conflict. We find these events in 2014. A popular uprising against Ukraine's pro-Moscow president, followed by the dramatic seizure of Crimea and eastern Ukraine by Russia.
Red: The next step is combining the Matrix and Depth-of-Field to create our 3D mapping tool, the Tessera.
Percy: Yep. By stretching out those Frame components across each Depth-of-Field coordinate, which lights up the network behind the Screen. Then we look for patterns and anomalies.
Red: I see you've identified three inflection points. The spate of abstract and physical events in 2014. The impact of Ukraine and Russia on three U.S. elections -- 2016, 2018 and 2020. And the sanctions law against Nordstream 2 passed in late 2019, at the height of the impeachment campaign.
Percy: We've dissolved the Screen's spatial and temporal linearity, and opened up a three-dimensional perspective of Abstract Space. Now we can start building a picture of the networks of abstract energy linked to Ukraine, and how they flow from the past to the present and into the future. The next episode sets up the monitoring. Thanks for reading.