Find this week's episode description below...

Join Eric's 'Truth, Disinformation & The 2024 Election' Class at The University of Chicago

It’s open to everyone via Zoom. It will discuss what’s going on in the coverage of the election, with a wonderful collection of guest speakers, educators, prominent political reporters and polling experts.

It will convene every Monday evening, Central US time, in the nine weeks leading up to the US election and one week afterwards. Don't miss out...

Register now: https://masterliberalarts.uchicago.edu/landing-page/noncredit/trust-and-media/


This week's episode

Today’s chaotic information environment is so hard to understand, so fundamentally disrupted, that many thoughtful people spend energy coming up with metaphors for it. Just to get our arms around it. It’s the familiar old gossip mill gone viral, for example. It’s traditional propaganda supercharged by social media.

Annalee Newitz, today’s guest, is an award-winning journalist and science fiction novelist who introduces an intriguing analogy in a new book, Stories are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind.

What we’re seeing, Annalee says, is a kind of psychological warfare operation, using the tools of military psyops in our culture wars, as a way to undermine the institutions of liberal democracy.

Annalee and Eric discuss the history of psyops and the stories that psyops weaponizes; the difference between Russian and American psyops; why flooding the zone with misinformation is so effective; how psychological disarmament can happen, and how creative visions of the future, including those expressed through science fiction, can help inspire positive change.

Let Eric know what you think of the episode at eric@ericschurenberg.com

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Produced by Sound Sapien
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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