What the fuck do we do about all the propaganda

Genuinely, what the fuck do we do?

The UK has a mind-numbing propaganda problem and I don't think we can get anywhere without solving it.

The two most striking examples are the sustained campaigns agains trans people and immigrants. Immigrants have always been a punching bag for dipshits, a tide of mewling hatred that ebbs and flows and never really disappears. We take it for granted and we really shouldn't.

When you ask people what political problems face the country right now, immigration comes out on top. But when you ask people what problems they face in their own lives, immigration barely features. Stagnant wages, high energy bills, NHS waiting lists – those are the actual issues.

This is not new. When people are struggling they want comfort. It's comforting to blame someone. It's comforting to blame someone with less power than you. Blaming immigrants offers the false promise of a simple solution, we go back to it again and again.

But the propaganda against trans people, while not new exactly, has grown and morphed dramatically in a really short amount of time.

Ten years ago the conversation about trans people was predominantly about how they were still missing out after other LGBT rights gains. Still difficult for them to get married, still a demeaning and extended process to get a gender recognition certificate.

And then a bunch of largely white, largely middle class broadsheet columnists decided that they were going to make the fact that trans people gave them the ick everyone's problem and now everyone uses phrases like biological women and trans identifying as if they're normal.

Please note: putting a science work in a phrase does not make the phrase scientific. You know who I've never heard use the phrases biological women and biological men? Any biologists. Ever.

Biologists tend to get very boring about their being multiple biological sex markers. They'll talk about organs and hormones and DNA and other things I can never remember because honestly it's extremely boring. But they don't tend to commit to a clear definition of biological woman or biological man because, scientifically speaking, there isn't one

These are marketing terms not scientific terms. They are designed to appeal to your emotions, not your reason, to advance an assumption, not to provide clarity. They are a rejection of the actual scientific terms – cis and trans – and they are a deliberate attempt to make you second guess the lived experience of trans people and the medical consensus that trans people are fucking real, actually.

And they're winning.

It's almost funny. We could listen to an expert in trans healthcare with decades of experience, but I've got this columnist for The Telegraph here who vaguely remembers a sixth form biology module on genetics and I'm going to listen to her instead.

Now I'm just some dipshit, but I'm starting to think that propaganda is the single greatest obstacle to all of us in general having a nicer time.

It's used to point your attention towards a scapegoat and it's necessary because the scapegoat isn't the real cause of your problems. If it's not always created by the real cause of your problems, it's invariably promoted by them. It almost always encourages social division because a divided society is easy to manipulate.

The reality is that there is only one social division that matters: that between those of us who earn a living by our labour and those who's living comes from ownership. Traditionally it was easier to see because what was owned was land and the labour done was on that land.

Now, while parts of the ownership class are still bound up in land and buildings that the rest of us have to pay rent to use, many of them own companies instead. Stocks and shares and investments and what have you. And they don't so much live off what they own as they use it as collateral for cheap loans and they live off those because that means they don't have to pay tax.

They have all the money which means they have all the power. What they don't have is all the people. And if all the people realised that, then we would be able to take some of their money and their power.

Immigrants are not the problem. Trans people are not the problem. The problem is propaganda that serves the purpose of making us look away from the actual real issue, which is that the dumbest motherfuckers alive are somehow in charge of everything and make it all worse for everyone.

If we can solve propaganda we'll be a long way to solving everything but there, of course, is the rub, because how the fuck do we do that?

There's this weird thing that happens with channels of information. With advances in technology and access. It happened with the printing press – suddenly it was easier to create printed material so a bunch of newspapers sprang up containing pretty dubious stuff. Eventually we created the idea of an accredited press because at the end of the day people want reliable news.

But that then reinforces an establishment that keeps control of information in the hands of the powerful and, even in traditional media, we are still figuring out the best way to ethically do that. All news sources tend to bend towards the perspective of their owners or boards or whatever and because you have to have a lot of money to own a newspaper or be on the board of one, they bend towards wealth, towards power, towards establishment.

The other day I read an article about the fake virality of musicians' publicity campaigns. The go-to PR strategy is now paying for a bunch of sock puppet accounts to promote your musician, primarily by clipping up lots of little videos for TikTok and Instagram talking about how this song or whatever is the best ever. (The same strategy is used for general public image maintenance, Johnny Depp did this to make it seem like the whole of the internet was on his side in his law suit against Amber Heard.) It's illegal. Ads and sponsored content are supposed to be clearly marked as such. But it's so prolific now that no one's doing anything to combat it.

This is an old story. The establishment has all the money and all the power but want they don't have and what most people really value is authenticity. The only reliable marketing strategy is word of mouth, so the trick in marketing is to get people talking. But people really don't like being advertised to. We resist it, we look down at it.

So for all time, marketing departments have been trying to figure out how to feel real. To make people forget you're trying to sell them something. It's why celebrity endorsements are a thing, it's why the entire industry pivoted to influencers over the last 15 years. The only thing that's new about the current wave of online PR campaigns is that they persist in trying to seem organic – that's what makes them effective.

None of this is new, but what I find depressing about it is that the internet really was new. For a while it was this wild, ungovernable space where anyone could find an audience. It was incredible for independent artists. For a while.

But the more effective it was, the more the powerful wanted a slice of it, and once they got a little they wanted more so now, once again, the space is taken up by those who are able to pay for it, and everyone else is pushed to the sidelines.

New forms of information technology arise and for a while they're open to everyone. But their freedom makes them unreliable and their reach make them valuable and both of these things push the channels of information back into the hands of the ownership class.

And again and again and again, what the fuck do we do about that?

All we need are widely read news and entertainment sources that people trust and that are funded by something other than the rich and powerful but also somehow funded by something other than the state.

This is the great impossible problem.

What the fuck do we do?