Anatomy of a climate troll ??

In a week that has seen BlackRock's Larry Fink of calling for a fundamental reshaping of finance to account for climate risk, James Murdoch breaking ranks on denialism at News Corp and Microsoft announcing it will be carbon negative by 2030, thought I would put that fascinating creature the climate troll on the slab and take a look inside.

I first encountered climate denialism through exposure to Fox News, the comments sections of news sites, social media, I've even met a few. The first time I saw it I was shocked: bare-faced propaganda on such an important topic made my head spin and stomach turn. Then I read Robert Greene's 48 Laws of Power, Sun Tzu, and it started to make sense. In a distracting world of beliefs and ideas we are all at war.

Under threat: the carbon economy's cultural web

The Johnson and Scholes Cultural Web model from 1988 was originally designed to aid the analysis of a culture or paradigm within an organisation undergoing change. The carbon economy is perhaps a meta-organisation but the model seems to hold out well.

Stories

• That carbon economy and unbridled exploitation of the earth's resources is virtuous and patriotic and those not supporting this are communists and traitors
• That scientists are driven by political ideology and material gain
• Heroes (Trump, free market exponents, Scott Morrison) and Villains (George Soros, Greta Thunberg, Vegans)

Symbols

• Patriotic, tying these to lifestyle and attitudes of a particular group
• In the US at least, symbols of social conservatism including gun ownership

Rituals and routines

• Fill the car with petrol
• Consume electricity
• Buy goods
• Eat food

And all this without too much care for the consequences of their purchasing decisions, guilt-free consumption as an inalienable right.

Power structures

• Global financial systems, carbon asset holders including the Koch family, Russia, OPEC, market-friendly political players and their media backers

Organisational structure

• The global market

Controls

• The global market
• The infotainment sphere
• People's propensity to consume without considering the bigger picture

This quote sums up the imperative of denialism nicely:

"To an investor, it was worse than perversion, worse even than murder: it was bad for business."-- Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix 1985

How the troll operation works to defend it

Right out of the Roy Cohn playbook:

1. Create powerfully distracting counter-narratives associating an alternative view with the breakdown of societal norms
2. Ad hominem attacks and intimidation against individuals and organisations seen as the enemy
3. Compile list of targets, people, phrases. A playbook
4. Industrialise with bots, AI, fake accounts on social media, shady organisations and troll armies
5. Magnify through sympathetic media outlets, radicalising the audience

A worrying trend is the orchestrated attacks on young people expressing themselves online:

Radicalisation, playbooks, targets. There are obvious parallels with Islamic extremism and hacktivist groups here. It's about numbers and impact. With falsehoods being more readily available than facts, and the more bare-faced the greater the impact, all that is required to operate is a strong sense of amorality, and/or a conviction that one is doing the right thing to protect that which is under threat.

Disinformation a theme here:

This quote by David Barsamian:

Corporate media are largely weapons of mass distraction. Language is manipulated to manufacture consent and to limit the bounds of permissible thought. A golden Rolodex of so-called experts produces a mono-chromatic one-note samba of drivel. That’s one reason I started Alternative Radio out of my house many years ago. You can’t simply whine and complain. You need to come up with positive alternatives that give people hope. ---David Barsamian.

While David is considered a left wing commentator, In my view we can run a circular, regenerative economy on renewable energy even better than the current one Capitalism 2.0. The issue is there will inevitably be winners and losers. Hence the problem.

The Jenga tower of belief

The human psyche with its id, ego, superego, is made up of a shaky set of beliefs that bootstrap us into being like a big stack of Jenga.

We're all like that: denialist beneficiary, troll operator, troll, you, me alike.

What is learnt rather than what is true makes up the stack, beliefs as heuristics that guide daily life. And when people reach a level where their needs are met they stop learning.

And like Jenga, once we start moving those blocks around, particularly near the bottom, we risk the whole stack coming crashing down like a wooden ponzi scheme.

So we start with the assumption that we are right and some other group is wrong, we cast aspersions. And as this progresses the odds escalate, bets are doubled-down, exaggerations and denials become bare-faced lies and propaganda, criticism becomes attack. And the further we get downstream then harder it is to row back from. Fast-forward and now to change is very high risk and so much harder than settling into the relative psychological safety of confirmation and other biases.

There is no golden bridge to retreat across, no choice but to tough it out.

“Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across.” ― Sun Tzu

Indeed the troll operator tactic seems to be to burn such golden bridges for their charges. Philip II of Macedon's Divide and rule perhaps.

We are hard-wired to dismiss facts damaging to our ideology--a remnant group survival strategy perhaps as this article suggests:

At the end of the day, it's not just about protecting an ideology but resistance to change. It's about transformation. And we all know how hard that is:

Motivation for the denialist beneficiaries

The motivation here is self-interest: protecting assets, wealth, status. They can do this by using their influence to attempt to control the public debate and political climate. And in democracies as with markets it's a numbers game.

This recent quote (article):

“Right now, we have a market that is governed by rules that were written by the carbon incumbents to reward the dirtiest, filthiest, most poisonous, most toxic, most war-mongering fields from hell, rather than the cheap, clean, green, wholesome and patriotic fields from heaven,” Robert Kennedy Jr.

More propagandised romanticism perhaps, this time for the other side, but in my view he's right about the authors of the rulebook. The equivalent of horse studs fighting the introduction of the motor car in the 1800's.

Motivation for the troll operators

Rupert Murdoch appears to be climate troll operator-in-chief. His expertise, expressed through his media empire: tapping-into/hacking the human psyche on a mass scale. It brings him wealth, power, and at the age of eighty-eight some tattered shreds of retained virility.

UPDATE AS OF 11/103/2020: MURDOCH PRESS CHANGES TUNE:

Motivation for the trolls

For the trolls, the ground troops in these power games, their cultural web is at stake--or that is what they are being led to believe. Tribal identity politics. Mine vs. yours. Everything you do is attacked because your Jenga tower is built using different foundational narrative blocks than mine. Your unique blocks threaten my identity. Some may be of an older demographic, set in their ways, too much invested in the cultural web of carbon market hegemony. All get to be the hero play their part on the defence against real and imagines enemies, be patriotic, enjoy the benefits of group membership. And they get an easy playbook that doesn't tax the mind.

Systems thinking replaced with the simpler discipline of conspiracy theorism.

In the spirit of Arlie Russell Hochschild ...

... I offer this fictitious deep narrative of the "line holder" that explains the mindset and hopefully why it is heartfelt:

"I am man, I am alpha. I was born to lead and this is my duty. I fought my way to the top and my privileges are expected according to my status as they enhance my standing. When I talk people listen. But my world is not growing like it should: Greta, Wuhan virus, competitors, China at my heels, technology, kids that don't want to. And now new-fangled theories of everyone be nice to each other and work it out themselves. People need order, discipline, leadership: to think otherwise is bad for business. But I'm ready for them. I will not falter and will do my patriotic duty. I won't let these climate hoax hippies tear down the country I love.

I WILL HOLD THE LINE."

Why this strategy is successful in the short-term

• Intimidation of rivals to suppress their activities
• Sowing disinformation that needs to be counteracted and defended against. One could argue the BBC's early pluralist approach was much at fault here. Hoisted by their own petard
• Buying time for: Freudian ego defence including closed-minded Denial, thinking and decision-making, divestment from stranded assets, counter-attacks including further stonewalling and diversionary tactics, imagined reinforcements to arrive

This serves as a great distraction, reducing the size of the opponent's forces through suppression of burning-up useful opponent energy in defensive actions. Classic Musashi:

“The important thing in strategy is to suppress the enemy's useful actions but allow his useless actions”

― Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings: The Classic Guide to Strategy

This is why it is important not to feed the trolls: you can't win.

This quote:

“Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.”--Mark Twain

And why it isn't in the long-term

Because, friends, it's a grandiose tactic not a strategy. Predicated on delaying the inevitable, holding the line for as long as possible. And the game is up.

Extract from BlackRock's Larry Fink's letter to shareholders, titled A Fundamental Reshaping of Finance:

Climate change has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects. Last September, when millions of people took to the streets to demand action on climate change, many of them emphasized the significant and lasting impact that it will have on economic growth and prosperity – a risk that markets to date have been slower to reflect. But awareness is rapidly changing, and I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance.

The evidence on climate risk is compelling investors to reassess core assumptions about modern finance. Research from a wide range of organizations – including the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the BlackRock Investment Institute, and many others, including new studies from McKinsey on the socioeconomic implications of physical climate risk – is deepening our understanding of how climate risk will impact both our physical world and the global system that finances economic growth.

And this from the global risks report 2020:

And this from Disney, considering the Fox brand now toxic:

How this might play-out

As the climate emergency escalates, I worry about many thing: the impacts to people most affected, our ways of life, the natural world. But I also worry how might this play-out for the protagonists in the troll game:

• Beneficiaries will re-balance their portfolio and switch allegiances to maximise their position. Some may even act from a moral basis, particularly if they are rewarded for it. It was about the money for them. They will move on
• Small scale troll operators will pack-up shop while Rupert will be defiant to the end even as his empire (and perhaps family) continues to crumble around him
• Climate trolls may experience deeps psychological impacts as foundational pieces of their identity continue to get ripped from under them as troll operators inevitably change their tune. It's going to be like leaving a cult. My guess is some will persist, dogged but emasculated as their sources of sustenance dry up, others will move on, while a few might see the error of their ways and get with the program.

We could all do with the help.

??

“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.”

― Jonathan Swift

Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey in conversation about improving technology for stamping out bots and troll armies:

This on the economics of fake news (lies are profitable and comfortable):

An exposé article on this topic:

https://cms.megaphone.fm/channel/CFQY2291772395

Homophily and bad contagion (disinformation) in a network with Valdis Krebs: