Populism, or when fairytales are sold as facts and (almost) everyone buys them
I have a bit of an odd hobby or maybe I should call it a passion. I love reading spy novels about the cold war era, especially when they are (co-)written by former intelligence officers. Intriguing moves on a big chess board where nobody knows the rules and even if there are rules, nobody is following them. There are no real Kings and Queens, just a lot of pawns trying to outsmart the others.
A lot of technology we use today is the result of these efforts to be smarter than the others. Cryptography was pushed forward as a matter of life and death, and so was the ability to decipher what the other side(s) had encrypted. Constant training to improve skills. And yet most failed operations failed due to small mistakes or overseen details which only in hindsight make sense but not in the heat of the moment. Yes, I love those books.
Some people consider me to be a workaholic and after many years of trying to deny that, I finally admit it. So, I take details from the books I read as a hobby and do research on them. In most cases I do research to find out if there is any confirmation of a particular incident. Please do not think this is as simple as typing a date or a name in your favorite search engine. No, you have to sift to tons of details and reports. Newspaper clips and press statements, annotations, and references in other publications and much more. And you also have to keep in mind that the other side will have an entirely different view on the events and as a result will describe it entirely different.
Being able to connect the dots is just as important as learning to identify opinions and facts, and the same applies to my work as analyst and strategist. So, this little hobby of mine is in reality a training field to constantly improve my research skills and discover new sources. If there is something that I have learned over the years, it is that even if the author has gone far beyond the actual events and applied creative freedom to the maximum there will still be some “bleeps on the radar screen” when the story is based on real events.
When Edward Snowden started to publish details about the extent of global intrusive surveillance by U.S. intelligence agencies, there were a lot of bleeps on the radar. Each and every detail he brought into the daylight for the world to see led to at least a dozen confirmations prior to his publications. Technicians who had identified broadcasts of data to unidentified servers. Researchers who could not help but wondering why that critical vulnerability in a random seed engine for encryption was never fixed, especially because it was the recommended engine by the U.S. government and agencies…
Network administrators who had reported unauthorized access to their core-switches which they simply were not able to block finally found their confirmation in the fact that U.S. intelligence agencies had either implemented backdoors themselves and in some cases even had the supplier place these in full collaboration with them. Yes, even Internet Service Providers finally got the confirmation that their traffic was being tapped at the core of the transatlantic connections, through which coincidently almost all traffic is routed.
The confirmations of the claims by Edward Snowden were all over the place and all of them before he published his revelations, followed by a lot of confirmations after the fact by experts who kept digging up new incidents and evidence of intrusive surveillance. All these confirmations full of technical facts and data vaporized any thinkable doubt about the Snowden Files.
Fast forward to 2021. My tie-in between work and passion, and the efforts I make to validate rumors, opinion, policies, and most of all political slogans go a bit far, I admit that. But I am nevertheless flabbergasted by how many people echo false claims by the populists among the politicians without even the slightest attempt to fact-check them. Those are not isolated incidents where people might lose their capability to think for themselves for just a moment in the “heat of the battle”.
No, this is a growing trend, and it keeps spreading. Populism is popular, and so is following the slogans of populists. Research shows that false claims get more attention and spread faster on social media than facts. Research also shows that more people and organizations are involved in spreading populist messages on social media than any other interest group.
Populism and doing what is popular for the sake of popularity sets the tone on social media and has taken a strong foothold in all forms of media. Maybe it is time we ask ourselves how long we will allow populism to determine our political agendas, our governments, our lives. What if one day we find ourselves at the other side of whatever it is that populism prefers? Have we thought about that?
