Wanted: professional sock puppets

Speaking of social media: Nick Fielding and Ian Cobain's Revealed: US Spy Operation That Manipulates Social Media appears in today's Guardian. Here's the deal:

A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with the US Central Command (Centcom) to develop what is described as an "online persona management service" that will allow one serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities at once.

The contract stipulates each persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details, and that up to 50 controllers must be able to operate false identities from their workstations "without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries".

The project has been likened by web experts to China's attempts to control and restrict free speech on the internet.

Centcom's contract requires the provision of one "virtual private server" in the United States and eight appearing to be outside the US to give the impression the fake personas are real people located in different parts of the world. It calls for "traffic mixing", blending the persona controllers' internet usage with the usage of people outside Centcom in a manner that must offer "excellent cover and powerful deniability".

Once developed the software could allow US service personnel, working around the clock in one location, to respond to emerging online conversations with a host of co-ordinated blogposts, tweets, retweets, chatroom posts and other interventions. Details of the contract suggest this location would be MacDill air force base near Tampa, Florida, home of US Special Operations Command.

Will sock puppeteering replace phone sales as the new job for the desperate? A science fiction writer would like to know.

At any rate, please do read this piece and then Phoebe Connolly's How Social Media Is Science Fiction. I'd be very interested to hear what you'all think.

Making it not so

In That Iraq Feeling, Paul Krugman reflects on the "virtual blackout" of US news media coverage of the on-going direct action in Madison, Wisconsin, including the rallying of more than 150,000 people on Saturday-- supported by tens of thousands of solidarity rallies across the US:

What that makes me think of is January-February 2003, when anyone watching cable news would have believed that only a few kooks were opposed to the imminent invasion of Iraq. It was quite spooky, realizing that hundreds of thousands of people could march through New York, and by tacit agreement be ignored by news networks whose headquarters were just a few blocks away.

And it’s even more spooky to see it happening all over again.

Krugman's post resonated, a bit, with Gary Younge's piece for the Guardian, Wisconsin Is Making the Battle Lines Clear in America's Hidden Class War, which suggests that the direct action is a result of reality having overthrown the dominance of perception for many people in the US. I first heard that the Reagan White House had an "Office of Perception Management" while reading the Tower Commission's book of Iran-Contra documents in the late 1980s. (As I recall, Oliver North's gang of thugs was heavily involved.) In the 25 years since then, perception management has become more extensive and effective than probably even those guys ever dreamed it could. (In the mid-80s, Fox News, obviously, couldn't have been even a glimmer in Oliver North's eye.) When 20 years later Donald Rumsfeld announced that the Bush administration wasn't bound by reality and facts, he was simply making the brazen assertion of the supremacy of perception management for legitimizing whatever he wanted to make happen.

Here's Younge on some of a few of the gaps between reality and perception that allow the Tea Party to get its way:

Polls last year showed that in the US 61% think the country spends too much on foreign aid. This makes sense once you understand that the average American is under the illusion that 25% of the federal budget goes on foreign aid (the real figure is 1%).

Similarly, a Mori poll in Britain in 2002 revealed that more than a third of the country thought there were too many immigrants. Little wonder. The mean estimate was that immigrants comprise 23% of the country; the actual number was about 4%.

Broadly speaking, these inconsistencies do not reflect malice or wilful ignorance but people's attempts to make sense of the world they experience through the distorting filters of media representation, popular prejudice and national myths. "The way we see things is affected by what we know and what we believe," wrote John Berger in Ways of Seeing. "The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled."

When it comes to class, Americans have long seen themselves as potentially rich and perpetually middling. A Pew survey in 2008 revealed that 91% believe they are either middle class, upper-middle class or lower-middle class. Relatively few claim to be working class or upper class, intimating more of a cultural aspiration than an economic relationship. Meanwhile, a Gallup poll in 2005 showed that while only 2% of Americans described themselves as "rich", 31% thought it very likely or somewhat likely they would "ever be rich".

But trends and ongoing events are forcing a reappraisal of that self-image. Social mobility has stalled; wages have been stagnant for a generation. It is in this light that the growing resistance to events in Wisconsin must be understood. The hardline Republican governor, Scott Walker, has pledged to remove collective bargaining rights from public sector unions and cut local government workers' health benefits and pension entitlements.

As the prospect of becoming rich diminishes, many are simply trying not to become poor. Inequality of income and wealth has been more readily accepted in the US because equality of opportunity has long been assumed. The absence of the latter raises serious questions about the existence of the former. This tension brought thousands to the streets in all 50 states to support the Wisconsin unions last weekend.

Of course we feminists have been aware of the gap between reality and perception for all our lives. Sometimes it feels like a losing battle. Ya know?