Pathfinders: A wealth of hallucinations (2025)

The Pathfinders Column from the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anyone who still thinks YouTube is just funny cat videos may be astonished that it is now the UK’s second-most watched media service after the BBC, and ahead of ITV. It’s still got funny cats, but now they’re wearing trousers, beating up sharks and rescuing babies.

There are other, hyper-realistic videos, in which a gorilla beats up a crocodile (or a tiger), swinging it around and pounding it like a baseball bat. The videos look real, and while common sense tells you they can’t be, there’s no way to know for sure.

And that, right there, is the problem. When a South Park episode recently featured a naked Donald Trump having a desert epiphany with his own talking micro-penis, everyone understood it was a deepfake for comedic effect. But when videos emerged of migrants climbing out of small boats, thanking Labour for ‘free buffets’ and £2,000 e-bikes to make Deliveroo runs, burning the Union flag and gloating about being housed in 5 star Marriott hotels, no such understanding existed. Instead the videos racked up hundreds of thousands of views, no doubt to the delight of Nigel Farage and his ilk.

It’s not just malicious deception at work. Gen-AI has a well-known hallucination problem. In one example, Google’s AI Overview told council house tenants they could be evicted to make way for asylum seekers, a claim described by a housing solicitor as ‘horseshit of the highest order’ (Private Eye, 8 August 2025). Then there’s Grok (Musk’s Hitler-worshipping AI), now complete with a ‘spicy’ mode which spits out nude deepfakes of Taylor Swift without being asked.

Red flags are going up everywhere as the Trump regime goes full Rambo on deregulating ‘woke AI’, despite the demand for guardrails by US states. Even some tech bosses themselves are expressing concern, following reports that chatbots are explaining to children how to get drunk or stoned, hide eating disorders, and even write suicide letters to their parents. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says the company is studying the problem of ’emotional overreliance’, allegedly common among young people: ‘There’s young people who just say, like, ‘I can’t make any decision in my life without telling ChatGPT everything that’s going on. It knows me. It knows my friends. I’m gonna do whatever it says.’ That feels really bad to me’.

Why would anyone ‘confide’ in a chatbot, you ask? Because they’re never judgmental, unlike humans, according to one recent confessional in the Guardian: ‘At astonishing speed, the AI responded – gently, intelligently, without platitudes. I kept writing. It kept answering. Gradually, I felt less frantic. Not soothed, exactly. But met. Heard, even, in a strange and slightly disarming way’.

AI never gets tired or bored or angry with you. It’s never too busy or distracted. It never has selfish interests of its own. It will never abandon you. One can’t help thinking of Sarah Connor in the Terminator 2 film, where she speculates on the irony that the T800 robot, designed to kill, would in many ways make a better father for her son than a real human, for these very reasons.

OpenAI just released ChatGPT 5 last month, which Altman describes as a ‘significant step along our path to AGI [Artificial General Intelligence]’: ‘It’s like talking to an expert—a legitimate PhD-level expert in anything, any area you need, on demand’.

Whether or not AGI, however you choose to define it, is a real and achievable thing or an ever-receding rainbow fantasy, the tech companies can’t risk someone else getting there first and are throwing everything they’ve got into the race. Socialists know very well that when profits are at stake in capitalism, ethics generally go out of the window. Even so, some AI firms are seeing the potential profit in ‘ethical AI’ systems. The reasoning is that if your business has a need for AI, you’ll be more likely to buy an ‘ethical’ one which, for example, doesn’t tell kids how to kill themselves, because there’s less chance of litigious blowback from grieving parents.

As a response to GPT 5, Anthropic released their latest version of Claude, along with a paper describing how they’re trying to make Claude ‘ethical’ by using what they call ‘persona vectors’ to steer its behavioural traits. Counter-intuitively, they ‘teach’ Claude how to be evil, as a kind of vaccine against the behaviour: ‘When we steer the model with the “evil” persona vector, we start to see it talking about unethical acts; when we steer with “sycophancy,” it sucks up to the user; and when we steer with “hallucination,” it starts to make up information. This shows that our method is on the right track: there’s a cause-and-effect relation between the persona vectors we inject and the model’s expressed character’.

The Economist points out that Anthropic is generating huge interest due to its focus on ‘interpretability’, which lets you ‘see inside the model’ and understand how it arrives at its answers, something you can’t do with so-called black-box systems, whose responses you therefore can never really trust. Even so, CEO Dario Amadei is in no doubt what’s ultimately at stake in the race for AGI, and it’s not ethics, or even profits: ‘if you just imagine what it is like if we versus our adversaries [he means China] suddenly received a nation of 50 million polymathic geniuses […) There’s no theory in which it doesn’t result in an enormous geopolitical advantage […] I worry that AI, in being such a powerful technology… could lead to longer-lived authoritarian governments, that it could lead to dictatorships which are much harder to displace […] This is about a contest between systems of government’.

Amodei thinks there’s no way to stop AI now. It’s like a speeding train. All you can do is try to steer it. But that’s what everyone says about capitalism too. And anyone who thinks they can steer that is suffering the biggest hallucination of all.

Paddy Shannon

Proper Gander: Heading down stream (2025)

The Proper Gander column from the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Two reports published around the start of August described troubles for the BBC, while also highlighting the trajectory television in general is following. The BBC itself didn’t draw attention to figures which show that for the first time, BBC News has lost its place as the most-watched news channel in Britain. According to the official ratings collator Barb, GB News had a higher share of viewers across July than BBC News (with Sky News trailing not far behind). Although both only had just over 1% of the audience share, reaching this point is a symptom of the increased popularity of right-wing media overall. Switch over to GB News and there’s likely to be content about immigration, ‘wokeism’ or ethnicity and crime, its tone not-so subtly reinforcing patriotism and nationalism, reflecting the uglier effects of alienation. The channel has more pundits and panel discussions than BBC News does, and because their banter seems more authentic than the comparatively staid tone of the BBC, the channel has more ‘personality’, even though the main trait is self-righteous smugness.

Another threat to Auntie Beeb comes from a different direction, as described in Ofcom’s annual Media Nations report. Google-owned YouTube has become the second most-watched media service in the UK, behind the BBC and ahead of ITV. The video-sharing platform’s popularity is not only due to its smorgasbord of vlogs and clips, but also because it has adopted formats from traditional TV: half its top-trending videos comprise long-form interviews and game shows. YouTube’s success lies partly in how it morphs itself into whatever is most appealing to each of us. Its algorithms create what looks like a personalised channel, with often eerily accurate recommendations based on what we’ve each previously viewed. One search for a Duran Duran video may also prompt suggestions of Spandau Ballet and lists of ‘80s fashion disasters. The data about our preferences gathered along the way is of use to advertisers in particular, to know the audiences at which to target their products. Much of YouTube’s revenue comes from the adverts which interrupt its videos at annoyingly random points, which on old-fashioned commercial TV channels are at least inserted more predictably so we know when to put the kettle on. Paying for YouTube’s Premium service avoids its adverts, but otherwise once you’ve got online YouTube is free to access. There’s still a price, of course: ‘If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product’, as said by technology ethicist Tristan Harris in the 2020 docudrama The Social Dilemma, referring to the wealth of data captured about people.

The Social Dilemma was broadcast on Netflix, which like other streaming channels such as Amazon Prime and Disney+ has a different business model, requiring viewers to pay for a subscription alongside some income from adverts. Advertising funds most of the traditionally broadcast channels, while the BBC has a subscription of sorts in its state-enforced licence fee, although its BBC Studios division is profit-driven. While the BBC tries to move with the times (such as with its iPlayer), its infrastructure, having been established long ago, is less adaptable to the modern climate compared with the newer channels more aligned to newer trends. Despite this, broadcast TV still makes up most of what people watch, at 56% overall according to the Media Nations report, although younger viewers tend to prefer streaming services. The trend is nearing a tipping point of streaming becoming dominant.

Perhaps the growth of streaming services helps explain why, despite encroaching on the BBC, GB News isn’t profitable, having lost more than £105m since its launch in 2021. Its revenue from advertising was reduced after campaigns by groups such as Stop Funding Hate prompted brands including Ikea and Specsavers to withdraw from using the channel to promote their wares. To try and increase income, membership and branded tat can be purchased from GB News’ website, and presumably chasing the American dollar is motivating plans to launch a programme based in Washington DC. Its owners, Dubai-based investment firm Legatum and hedge fund tycoon Sir Paul Marshall, have propped the channel up with millions of pounds, which they would only do if GB News was aligned to their interests. While GB News may be a challenge to the BBC on one level, the bigger picture is that both are being overtaken.

The shift in viewing habits away from traditional broadcast media with a schedule you have to follow, and towards pick-and-choose streaming services is made possible by advances in technology, from cathode-ray tube all the way to YouTube. These developments aren’t driven by what is best or most popular, though. Because tech and media companies are owned by the capitalist class (or, as with the BBC, by the state which represents them) they are run to further their privileged position. So, advancements in technology and media come through what is most profitable for capitalists. To some extent profitability is connected to popularity, in that more viewers equals more market share. To attract and hold on to audiences, data is harvested and used to manipulate our choices through adverts and algorithms. So, at every step, what we watch is moulded by money.

The wide choice of channels available disguises how ultimately they are run in the interests of a tiny minority. The gradual decline of the BBC demonstrates that other models are becoming more promising for the capitalist class. Streaming channels commodify television in a different way, made more intrusive by how our preferences are turned into market research. There’s room for a little optimism, though, in that there’s something socialistic about streaming’s potential for quick access to any programme, without the constraints and dictates of the capitalist system. And even now, platforms such as YouTube can be used by anyone to broadcast their views, including us.

Mike Foster

Proper Gander: Tell A Vision In Turkmenistan (2025)

The Proper Gander column from the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In The Common Good, Noam Chomsky said that ‘The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum’ (p.43). Applied to television, this principle still holds widely today, perhaps more than when Chomsky was writing in 1998. Not so, though, in countries such as Turkmenistan, which has only adopted the first half of the maxim in their TV broadcasts. Whether this makes their way less ‘smart’ is presumably shown in how effective it is in engineering a limited ‘spectrum of acceptable opinion’.

Turkmenistan, which borders Afghanistan and Iran, was part of the Soviet Union, and when this collapsed, its government became even more autocratic. The current President, Serdar Berdimuhamedow, succeeded his father in 2022 as the head of the regime. Any opposition to the government is considered to be treason and can be punishable by life imprisonment. Concurrently, the state controls what information its subjects are given, partly to exclude any conflicting viewpoints. Most citizens have no access to the World Wide Web, and instead can only use the Turkmenet, a restricted version of the internet. There is little opportunity for independent journalists: Turkmenistan ranks among the countries with the least ‘freedom of the press’ at 174th out of 180 in Reporters Without Borders’ 2025 World Press Freedom Index. Similarly, television broadcasts are subject to stringent controls, more than in other authoritarian regimes; the range of channels and content available in Afghanistan and Myanmar is very diverse in comparison. All eight channels broadcast in Turkmenistan are run by the state. The main channel is Altyn Asar, which shows news and reports on agriculture and technology, extolling how the country is supposedly constantly improving under the President’s rule, the ‘Golden Age’ referred to by its name. The only news programme – called Watan – broadcasts simultaneously on multiple channels, including Türkmen Owazy, dedicated to music and Ýaşlyk (‘Youth’ in English), an entertainment channel, with dramas and comedies missing from the schedules. Foreign content and influences are not allowed, although the game show Ondan Bir has taken the format of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, with the twist that the winner isn’t shown receiving a prize.

Commodities such as rugs, stationery and jewellery are displayed in reports about well-stocked market stalls or even during music performances. This isn’t as ‘product placement’ to advertise them, though; what’s being promoted is the nation as bountiful and industrious. The same motivation is behind the footage of the capital city, which presents Ashgabat as slick and brightly lit, with crisp skyscrapers, fountains, statues and arches in white and gold, streamlined streets for cars to glide along, and no litter or graffiti. Few people are seen outside unless they’re participating in dance routines or military parades, both tightly choreographed and polished. Music is especially prominent across the channels, from power ballads to jingoistic anthems to folk music, although some suspiciously looks dubbed. Particularly striking is an up-tempo song performed by women in camouflage skirts in front of weaponry.

The channels are mouthpieces of the state, intended to promote its preferred vision of the nation to the populace. The meticulously-arranged performances and pristine buildings are supposed to reflect a meticulously-arranged and pristine nation.

While the propaganda is obvious, an indicator of this is that smiles are rarely seen. Most people on the parades or in game shows or recitals, and notably their audiences too, have a flat expression. They don’t smile because they live in fear and have very little to smile about, according to Joshua Perry Parker in his video on YouTube: TV in Turkmenistan is Insane. When the state machine is as oppressive as in Turkmenistan, being an ‘appendage to the machine’ makes people behave in machine-like ways. Those in the marches or music performances look dehumanised, not just in how they run through their routines but also by their starchy uniforms. Even the traditional national dress, which is colourful and decoratively-patterned, manages to look hollow in the context of the programmes. Homogeneity is plainly presented as a virtue. Minority groups are unseen on TV and also face persecution, with gay relationships between men being illegal, for example. Workers living their lives, whether in the city or beyond, are never shown. Rural areas are only represented as backdrops to music videos or as abundant fields of wheat or cotton.

It’s hard to gauge how successful Turkmenistan’s TV output is with shaping mindsets or limiting the ‘spectrum of acceptable opinion’; its viewers don’t have the opportunity to give feedback. The content is supposed to instil a sense of pride and loyalty towards the country, whether through news reports announcing a fleet of tractors or through the frequent songs and music. The emphasis on culture demonstrates that patriotism is the preferred angle used by the state, although nationalism is also pushed through the military displays. The social conservatism exhorted by the state isn’t as directly expressed on TV, as it doesn’t feature many social situations, although the regimented people who are allowed in front of the cameras reflect the repressive norms. While the TV in Turkmenistan shows us little about the lives of those struggling there, it shows us a lot about the approach of the country’s rulers. The class divide is depressingly stark, with the President as the figurehead of a wealthy capitalist class, outnumbered by the poorer vast majority who rely on what their wages can afford. The broadcasts try to disguise this divide by only presenting what the capitalist class wants to be seen. Any indoctrination is probably less successful outside the main city of Ashgabat, where workers can see clearer that their reality doesn’t match that portrayed on screen. Also, those living in rural areas often pick up satellite channels from Russia, Turkey and Uzbekistan, opening them up to other forms of propaganda.

Mike Foster

70 Years of the S.P.G.B. and the Socialist Standard (1974)

Party News from the June 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

Both the May and the June 1974 issues of the Socialist Standard carried details of an exhibition that was to be held at Head Office in June of that year marking the history of both the Socialist Standard itself and of the SPGB.

We are lucky enough that a slide show of the exhibition and a recording of a narration by Edgar Hardcastle ('H.' in the Socialist Standard) was preserved, and it has been uploaded onto YouTube by 'DJW' on his excellent YouTube channel, The Monument.

Embedded below is the video of that slideshow with 'Hardy's' narration. Obviously, it would have been wonderful if there had been actual close-ups of the individual photographs, leaflets, journals and pamphlets from the exhibition but that wasn't to be. We will enjoy what we have. According to Hardy's narration, there were over 400 visitors during the course of the week, and there was a write up of the exhibition in The Guardian. I'll have to see if I can find that Guardian piece. If I locate it, I'll post it on the blog.

Video review: Illustrate to Educate? (2023)

Video Review from the December 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Illustrate to Educate is the overall title of a collection of short YouTube videos which try to explain in simple terms and with the aid of colourful pencil illustrations and diagrams a wide range of ideas and topics as diverse as Buddhism, Halloween, Democracy, Easter, Climate Change, and, most recently, the Israel-Hamas conflict. The presenter of these videos, Dan Zimmerman, has been much praised for the clear and non-partisan nature of his videos (viewed by many thousands of people) and for the way he generally strives to present more than one side to a subject or an argument. We can see this confirmed in two of his recent videos, ‘What is Socialism’ and ‘Marxism Explained’. So definitely a good idea, but what about the actual content of these videos?

Socialism

Well, unfortunately, the content does not always stand up to scrutiny. In the one on socialism, for example, the presenter fails to develop one of the key ‘meanings’ (in fact the original meaning) of the term itself: a co-operative, moneyless society based on common ownership. He does hint at it at the beginning by stating that socialism ‘advocates for the collective ownership and control of the means of production and distribution’. But then he veers off, suggesting that ‘socialism’ can mean all sorts of different variations of the buying and selling society that we already have. Take your pick – ‘nationalisation of industries’, ‘public-private partnerships’, ‘a planned economy’, ‘more equal’ distribution of wealth. We are then told that ‘socialism’ has been ‘implemented in various forms in countries around the world’. The examples given here are – perhaps inevitably – the state capitalist systems of the former Soviet Union, of China and of Cuba, all heralded as ‘collective ownership’ (which it isn’t) and as ‘a more co-operative approach to economic decision-making’ (which it isn’t either). But, at least, the presenter does then rightly go on to say that such regimes may create ‘loss of individual freedom’ and oppression (even while continuing to call them ‘socialist’).

Marxism

So the educational value of that particular ‘Illustrate to Educate’ video is definitely open to question, given its only passing mention of the original meaning of the idea of socialism, the one originally popularised by one of its key advocates, Karl Marx. However, the opportunity to make up for this presents itself in the ‘Marxism Explained’ video in the series. And this one is certainly a lot better. In it, Dan Zimmerman correctly states Marx’s analysis that the struggle between society’s two classes, capitalists and workers, defines economic relations in capitalism and goes on to explain that, according to Marx, the imbalance in the monopoly of ownership and control of the means of production and resources by the capitalist class means that workers have little power and are often easily replaceable. He further talks about how capitalism employs social institutions such as government, education and the media to reinforce the status quo.

So far, so good. But then, unfortunately, this video too starts to go astray. For example, it refers to Marx foreseeing two stages of the development of future society, first socialism and then communism – this despite the fact that in his writings Marx makes clear that his use of the two terms is interchangeable and both mean a moneyless, wageless society based on common ownership.

The maker of the video also needs to reassess the question of the possible collapse of capitalism. He presents Marx as arguing for an inevitable collapse of capitalism either through its tendency to monopoly of ownership and consequent stifling of competition or because of the effects of the economic crises or depressions it is subject to. But nowhere in Marx is there a claim that concentration or monopoly of ownership will automatically bring with it the collapse of the capitalist system. As for crises or depressions, Marx did see them as an inherent feature of capitalism – something confirmed by history since his time – but, rather than these signalling the end of capitalism, his argument was that they would simply lead to a realignment of the existing system. Nothing, therefore, in Marx’s writings to support the view that he was in any way an ‘inevitabilist’. His argument was simply that a new social system would happen only with a conscious and democratic majority ending it to replace capitalism with socialism. Nothing in Marx either to support the view of his ideas on revolution put forward by Dan Zimmerman that a revolution will happen by an ‘enlightened vanguard’ using capitalism’s failures to seize control of the means of production and lead workers to socialism (or communism). Such an idea, common among those on the left of capitalist politics, did not originate in Marx but came much later – from Lenin and Trotsky in fact when they distorted Marx’s ideas.

In its final minute, this video does at least make clear that Marx’s vision is of a society ‘without competition, money and private property’ and one in which ‘social classes and class struggle would not exist’. But then it spoils things again by expressing the view that such a society ‘has never materialised and history suggests it is an unlikely and unworkable concept’. It has not happened so far and so never can – a lame argument to say the least.

Objective?

So, despite Dan Zimmerman’s claim to present videos that are ‘objective’, with this one he is at best only part way there. It is obviously good to be presented with more than one side to an argument, as Dan Zimmerman attempts to do, but you can only be truly even-handed if you have a detailed grasp of the topic you are presenting. This involves consulting, understanding and absorbing the writings of your subject of study, and one can’t help wondering to what extent this has happened here.

Howard Moss

British fascists online (2022)

From the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

A few weeks ago, YouTube’s algorithms carried me towards some video essays made by the alternative media commentator known as Morgoth. I’d been vaguely aware of Morgoth and similar reactionaries, such as Richard Spencer, Millennial Woes and Keith Woods, for some time, but hadn’t paid too much attention to them. After all, I knew that they called themselves ‘traditionalists’, ‘racial nationalists’ or ‘third positionists’ – in a word, fascists – and I only have so much time to devote to the ramblings of people who would happily deport or kill my non-white friends and family. On the other hand, it’s good to know your enemies, so I resolved to trawl through some of the videos and livestreams made by Morgoth and his cronies in order to get a sense of what the far right are saying and doing online these days.

Racial nationalists

Morgoth’s worldview is a macabre one. In between garbled references to right-wing philosophers, Morgoth rails against the ‘liberal elites’ and ‘globalist’ technocrats whom he sees as running the world – all controlled and funded, of course, by rootless cosmopolitans like George Soros. According to Morgoth, these elites are set on crushing the ‘Western Spirit’, subjecting the population to their nihilistic ideology of hyper-individualism, hedonistic consumerism and, worst of all, racial diversity. By promoting mass immigration and miscegenation throughout the Western world, the elites, according to Morgoth, want to undermine and ultimately eradicate the white native stock. To stop this from happening, Morgoth proposes that whites should unite to reactivate the Faustian spirit of the West by creating a racially pure ethno-state. As he puts it at the end one of his videos: ‘We’re going to be the masters in our own land again!’ (YouTube, ‘Roger Scruton & Words of Power’).

For obvious reasons, Morgoth never appears on camera. Judging by details contained in his various monologues, he seems to be a Generation X factory worker from North-East England. He has a blog, Morgoth’s Review, and a large number of video essays on YouTube and other digital platforms favoured by the far right, such as BitChute and Odysee. He also occasionally pops up as a guest on other so-called ‘dissident right’ social media channels and has now started to consolidate his oeuvre on his Substack page. His video essays, which are often illustrated by footage or photographs from his countryside walks, address a wide range of topics and Morgoth often sweetens the red pill of ethno-nationalism with discussions of contemporary popular culture. In recent years, far-right organisers have been using online gaming as a recruitment tool, pipelining young men towards racial supremacism during in-game chats and associated livestreams, and Morgoth himself often combines his political rants with analyses of videogames, fantasy novels, television dramas and films.

Many of Morgoth’s videos rhapsodise about the wonders of Nature, although even these are shot through with expressions of hatred towards minority groups. In one video (YouTube, ‘A Tale of Two Country Walks’), for example, Morgoth laments that, on a visit to the Norwegian fjords, he was obliged to share his authentic appreciation of the awe-inspiring landscape with ‘cripples’ and ‘fat slobs’ who were able effortlessly to enjoy the same scenery from the comfort of an adjacent car park. Morgoth’s main business, however, is racial hatred and his regular attacks on racial minorities often contain elements of so-called scientific racism or ‘race realism’. In a 2017 blog post (‘Equality is a Cruel Mistress’), for instance, he cites a table of national IQ rankings to argue that the black Labour politician Diane Abbott, as the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, is too unintelligent to be the Shadow Secretary of State.

Morgoth, and the British far right in general, are obsessed with the so-called ‘Asian grooming gangs’ that have come to light in English towns such as Rochdale and Telford in recent years. Research produced by the Home Office suggests that the sexual grooming of young girls in Britain is not a disproportionately ‘Muslim problem’, but Morgoth, like other far-right figures in Britain such as Tommy Robinson, talks exclusively about Pakistani men preying on white English girls and defiling the racial purity of the nation. There’s an all-too-familiar racist fantasy at work here. In his memoir Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler wrote luridly about the ‘satanic joy’ of ‘the black-haired Jewish youth’, who ‘lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people’. The image of a racialised Other who enjoys what is rightfully ‘ours’ and stands in the way of our own satisfaction is deeply imprinted on the fascist imagination.

Paranoid

Indeed, Morgoth, like the rest of the political far-right, is very paranoid. To justify his sense of victimhood, he conflates completely different traditions of political and philosophical thought into a single straw-man enemy. Liberalism, leftism, postmodernism, neo-liberalism and socialism are lumped together and presented as the more or less interchangeable snares of the Machiavellian globalists. Unsurprisingly, this leads Morgoth into incoherence and self-contradiction; in one video he even makes the bizarre claim that socialists have been responsible for ushering in ’a globalist, capitalist society’ (YouTube, ‘The Good, the Bragg and the Stormzy’).

The question therefore arises: why should we pay any attention to confused bigots like Morgoth? One reason is that there is clearly a receptive audience for their ideas. Research findings published by the organisation Cybersecurity for Democracy last year showed that far-right news stories produce far more user engagement, in the form of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’, than other types of online content. Some of the key figures on the far right, meanwhile, have significant numbers of followers. At the time of writing, Morgoth himself has nearly 50,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel. He has also been given mainstream credibility – if that is the right word for it – by featuring as a guest on the podcast of the British conservative hack James Delingpole. In 2019 the singer Morrissey even shared a Morgoth video on his website. All in all, it’s a level of exposure that socialists could only dream of. It’s therefore worth considering the reasons for the popularity of this type of content.

It has to be said that some of Morgoth’s material is quite entertaining. Morgoth can turn a good phrase and knows how to appeal to his listeners’ interest in popular culture. In one video, for example, he indulges in a fairly amusing rant against the 90s television chef Jamie Oliver, suggesting that the ‘middle-class’ neo-liberal multiculturalism that arose in the New Labour years was ‘forged in the basket of Jamie Oliver’s moped, alongside the quail eggs and Japanese lager’ (YouTube, ‘Do Millennials Dream of Jamie Oliver’s Moped’). This combination of comedic sarcasm and pop-culture awareness gives Morgoth’s content a certain piquancy.

Phoney radicalism

Another dangerous aspect of Morgoth’s work is its phoney radicalism. Morgoth’s philosophical touchstones are the fascist favourites Friedrich Nietzsche, Julius Evola, Oswald Spengler and Martin Heidegger. But he is canny enough to acknowledge some leftist thinkers, too. In one video (YouTube, ‘My Trip Down South’) he alludes to Jacques (sic) Deleuze and he often refers to the leftist philosopher Mark Fisher. For example, to support his own critique of cultural decline under neo-liberalism, he draws on Fisher’s concept of the ‘the slow cancellation of the future’ – the interesting claim that cultural innovation has stagnated since the 1990s and that popular culture today is merely recycling the themes and styles of earlier periods.

In fact, like so many fascist writings, Morgoth’s musings often appear to be consistent with socialist understandings. For example, he attacks the commodification of human life that capitalism produces (although he contradicts himself by warning white women to be mindful of their declining ‘sexual market value’, which sounds pretty commodifying to us). He is also critical of contemporary liberal catchwords such as ‘white privilege’ – as are socialists, since such notions tend to undermine working-class solidarity. Morgoth’s critique of Extinction Rebellion (YouTube, ‘Extinction Rebellion: Worst Controlled Opposition EVER!’), meanwhile, also has a superficial affinity with socialist arguments. Morgoth makes the point that XR are not a truly radical group and that their demands essentially amount to a call for working-class austerity; again, socialists would be inclined to agree. But Morgoth predictably blames the environmental crisis on overpopulation and ignores the fundamental role of capitalist production and over-production in generating global heating and other environmental threats. In fact, it’s not clear whether he even accepts the reality of human-made global heating, as he seems to reject the notion of scientific consensus; when it comes to understanding the coronavirus pandemic, for instance, he places his faith in the mumbo jumbo of the discredited scientific crank Dolores Cahill (YouTube, ‘A Letter From The NHS’). As always, the fascist mind rejects the scientific, materialist analyses of social phenomena in favour of scapegoating and irrational conspiracy-mongering.

As already noted, Morgoth is far from the only racial nationalist at work on the internet today and regular debates among nationalists of various stripes sometimes attract thousands of viewers. And while these men sometimes trade in outright lies and misrepresentations – for example, Morgoth suggests in one video that Marx and Engels might have been funded by the Rothschild banking family (YouTube, ‘The People vs The Gammon’) – their ideas are often couched in radical-sounding language, providing critiques of capitalism, ‘neo-liberalism’, consumerism and commodification. This is, of course, the socialism of fools. But what gives far-right ideas their traction and plausibility – at least among some white working-class people – is that they identify and seem to provide an explanation for real problems affecting our class, such as declining living standards and the lack of stable, full-time jobs and affordable housing.

How much of a political threat the far right pose today is another question. On the one hand, as we know, fascism is always over-diagnosed by left-wing commentators. While recent years have seen the establishment of neo-Nazi political organisations in Britain such as Patriotic Alternative, such groups often have a relatively short shelf-life – for example, the English Defence League, which sprang to life in 2009, has been relatively inactive for the last ten years – and some more recent groups, like National Action, have been banned by the state and forced underground. On the other hand, right-wing, authoritarian and often explicitly racist governments have come to power in recent years in several countries around the world. Then there is the question of far-right violence. Across the world, far-right terrorist attacks have become more common in recent years and are notoriously hard to predict, because their perpetrators have often been ‘radicalised’ online and are not part of any monitored group.

In recent years, the far right have largely been purged from mainstream tech platforms such as YouTube and Twitter. But it’s not clear how effective the censorship of far-right ideologues has really been: it has arguably only pushed them towards the more loosely-regulated ‘alt-tech’ platforms and handed them a propaganda advantage by allowing them to pose as victims. What we can say for sure is that, from the socialist point of view, far-right arguments need to be combated with better ones. Like all reactionaries, Morgoth is disdainful towards the academic subject of Media Studies (YouTube, ‘Clapping for Stalin and The Burnley Banner’); but the popularity of his ideas suggests a need for robust media literacy and political clarity.

Racial nationalism needs to be exposed for the nonsense it is and anybody attracted to it should know that whatever they may claim, Morgoth and his fellow Aryans don’t represent the interests of workers in Britain or anywhere else. They claim to be ‘traditionalists’, but their right-wing brand of identity politics is completely at odds with the working-class traditions of mutual aid and solidarity and with the history of working-class struggle against wage slavery. They also describe themselves as politically incorrect ‘dissidents’ or the ‘dissident right’, but in fact they are defenders of the status quo. They reproduce the dominant ideology, dividing humanity along national and racial lines and obscuring what almost all of us have in common: our membership of the exploited class.

SH

Darren Hayman - May Day 1894 (Chants For Socialists 2015)

You know what? This shouldn't really work, but it does. Darren Hayman putting an old William Morris poem to music.

It's wonderful. Happy May Day!

Pathfinders: Brain Strain (2011)

The Pathfinders Column from the April 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just recently a song by a 13 year old singer has been ‘trending on Twitter’ and ‘going viral’ with 16 million views on YouTube. Not the latest offering from Justin Bieber to his adoring teeny tribe of ‘Beliebers’, but something truly and insanely bad. So bad that many are calling it the worst song ever. Being so devoid of any merit has guaranteed the song’s runaway success.

So what’s the point of watching something when you already know it’s dire and you’re not going to like it one bit? Logically there shouldn’t be any reason. But people find bad performances hilarious. We often do the opposite of reason. We’re not predictably rational beings.

There’s quite a lot of interest in ‘irrationality’ these days, with analysis from FMRI scans to show that our supposed act of free choice has already taken place down in the brain’s scullery, moments before milord ‘consciousness’ rings the bell from the upstairs library.

This is very worrying for those who like to feel in control and who obsess about the notion of ‘free will’. If all our frontal lobe clever-clogness is really being primed and directed from below stairs by the witless emotions of the limbic system and the savage lusts and dreads of the amygdala, where does that leave the notion that humans are rational creatures?

Such an idea lies behind various theories to the effect that investors think they’re being rational when in fact they’re really responding to a herd instinct, or to emotional triggers. Economic trends and crises come about, it is argued, precisely because people do not always pursue their immediate self interests as they ought to, and this wild and woolly behaviour is what makes outcomes unpredictable and therefore financial disasters unforeseeable.

Here is classical determinism in disguise, the idea that the world is fundamentally mechanical and manageable, if only we could understand our own thought processes.

But financial crises are unforeseeable in any case, or they wouldn’t be crises. As socialists are obliged to point out, capitalism would always be an unstable and unpredictable system even if the investors were androids with telephone number IQs.

But there is something to the idea that we’re not as rational as we think we are, though it doesn’t take scans with giant magnets to show it. Let’s not forget that we’re animals, after all, and rationality is something of a new invention for us.

An interesting bit of research on climate change attitudes shows that different socio-political groups tend to believe evidence put forward by scientists who appear to be most like themselves, whereas they will reject the same arguments if made by someone they identify less with (New Scientist, 19 March).

This will be no great news to people in marketing, of course, who know that the customer buys the salesman first and the product second, but it is of some concern to scientists hoping to communicate scientific ideas to the general public and in so doing to influence public policy. It is also of some concern to socialists hoping to achieve a similar level of communication. It is not just about the argument, it’s how you dress it up and deliver it.

But are we talking about ‘irrationality’ or merely redefining the term ‘rationality’ with a little more finesse? Two plus two is always going to equal four, whatever your amygdala says about it. The fact that our thought processes may begin with primitive urges doesn’t mean that they are enslaved by them, and that we simply can’t make rational choices about our existence. The bigger problem facing socialists as well as scientists is not how we process information but how and from where we get it in the first place.

The process of rationality may be more complicated than used to be thought, but it still relies heavily on the information available to it, and most decisions made by people today are likely to be poorly informed rather than fundamentally illogical. And being poorly informed is not the same as being stupid.

A recent survey from the Birmingham Science City suggests that 30 percent of the UK population, based on a sample of 3,000 respondents, believe that time travel is possible. 50 percent believe that memory-erasing technology exists, around 25 percent believe in teleportation and light sabres, while 18 percent apparently think they can ‘see’ gravity

It would be interesting to see the wording of this survey however, and it is not at all clear that the short quiz on the website bears any relation to the survey.

Did the survey ask if humans could be teleported, which is impossible, or subatomic particles, which is debatable? Were the ones who believed in light sabres the youth end of the statistical distribution, who had all got broken ones in their toy cupboards, or perhaps adults who had heard all about military laser cannons?

Did the question about time travel include a picture of a Tardis, which is fictional, or a wormhole, which is a hypothetical point in spacetime which might function as a shortcut for high energy particles? Were the ones who believed in mind-wiping reading too much Philip K Dick, or were they maybe recalling 20th century lobotomy techniques?

In short, were the respondents really as thick as planks, or were they being ambushed? One question in the quiz runs thus: Can stars sing? The correct answer to this, apparently, is ‘yes’. The explanation given is that stars oscillate, and that these oscillations when converted into sound waves can give an idea of the size and age of the star.

A better response to the Birmingham quizmasters would be ‘No, you dorks, because sound doesn’t travel through space’.

People make bad investment decisions, not because they’re stupid, but because they don’t understand markets and they take bad advice from people who pretend to be experts but in reality are often crooks. People invest in capitalism too, even though it is fundamentally against their best interest. But that doesn’t make them either irrational or stupid. ‘It’s not my fault, it’s my brain wot done it’ is just an excuse for not taking responsibility.

There are always organisations and groups out there keen to show that workers are dumb brutes who need strong leaders to tell them what to do. When the cognitive sciences play into their hands, socialists need to cry foul.

Paddy Shannon

Proper Gander: YouTube And You (2020)

The Proper Gander TV column from the February 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the five-or-so minutes it’ll take to read this article, some 2,500 hours of new videos will be uploaded to YouTube. The website hosts videos of just about anything which anyone with the facilities wants to post. This means that we have instant access not only to obscure pop videos from 40 years ago and films of cats playing pianos, but also to views and experiences outside those of the mainstream media. YouTube is one of the most useful parts of the internet. But in practice, it’s tainted by having to be a money-making machine which uses sly methods to draw in more viewers. Videos often get rudely interrupted by adverts and there’s the vaguely unsettling way the site seems to know what else we might like to watch. Our previous searches for videos are turned into algorithms which then find similar content to suggest back to us. While this can be handy, it also has its downsides, especially with political content. Being prompted to watch more and more of the same set of opinions without comparing them to others can reinforce dodgy ideologies among any naïve viewers.

This has been exploited by right wing groups and individuals, whose YouTube content seems to heavily outnumber that of the left and often has slicker production values. It’s easier to find videos mocking ‘social justice warriors’ than videos by ‘social justice warriors’ themselves. Fearing that association with far right wing views might tarnish its brand, and therefore its profitability, YouTube has adjusted its algorithms to reduce bias towards far right content, stopped some uploaders from getting money through adverts and banned others.

But as well as the political dross, YouTube has a wealth of videos exploring revolutionary and radical ideas. A good enough starting point as any is a quick and brief debunking of the most common arguments defending capitalism, found in the video Top Ten Capitalist Arguments . One of these is the claim that ‘capitalism promotes innovation’, refuted by research saying that financial incentives don’t really work and that more creativity happens when people believe their activity has intrinsic value, rather than just being a means to get money. Another argument is that ‘markets [are] a rational means of organising economic life’, disproved because about a third of food produced is wasted while people are starving, and also because some commodities have built-in obsolescence, being designed to stop working so we’ll go out and buy a replacement. The video also counters the notion that ‘capitalism is a result of human nature’ by pointing out that humans have existed for hundreds of thousands of years whereas capitalism has only been around for a few hundred. 

The ‘human nature’ issue is addressed in more detail in Wired For Culture – The Natural History of Human Co-operation, a lecture from the RSA (Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce). In this, evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel explains how ‘human nature’ is fundamentally co-operative, rather than competitive. Both these traits developed from our distant ancestors living in and protecting their tribal communities. Although these early communities could be hostile to other groups, overall, co-operation has won out because it benefits us more than competition does.

But our drive to co-operate is frustrated by the divisions built in to capitalist society, and one way to explain this is through Karl Marx’s theory of alienation, covered by several videos on YouTube. Alienation is the way that capitalism, and especially employment, distances us from important aspects of our lives. The four types of alienation which class society leads to – alienation from the products of our labour, from our labour itself, from others and ourselves – are succinctly explained in a five minute video from Sociology Live. A more emotive short introduction is K is for Karl – Alienation, presented by journalist Paul Mason. He explains how the roots of alienation are in how capitalist institutions are privately owned, straight away estranging workers from them, further reinforced by their hierarchies.

Of course, the antidote to alienation is a society based not on the private ownership of production, but on it being owned in common and democratically managed. Such a society would not need money, and would instead be based on free access to goods and services. A world without money is explored in a video of a TED talk at the University of Edinburgh given by political writer Jade Saab. He gives an engaging summary of SPGB-style views about the benefits of a moneyless society, but then he goes and spoils it all by saying something stupid about governments. He doesn’t use the word ‘state’ but he seems to assume that governments can remain in a moneyless society. This might be sloppy wording on his part, as articles on his website suggest a more progressive view. For example, he says a moneyless society ‘would require a fundamental change in our economic system away from the private ownership of the means of production, towards a democratic model where citizens and workers can determine how the means of production are managed and what is done with them. Only through the democratic control of the means of production can we then democratically decide how access to goods and services produced can be managed’. He adds that a moneyless society would ‘challenge our very notion of what ‘countries’ are and how they function. I do not believe that a ‘world government’ will evolve but collaboration would naturally lead to forms of federation where resources, their extraction, transformation, and distribution is discussed through democratic systems. The UN and the EU provide interesting templates of what these collaborative ‘super-structures’ may look like’ [LINK]. Saab’s viewpoint would benefit from a bit more class consciousness and imagination to think beyond capitalist structures, but otherwise much of what he says is familiar to socialists. As YouTube shows, radical ideas are out there waiting to be found, helping to counter reactionary views from both the right and left. The Socialist Party’s own videos can be found on the YouTube channels ‘TheSPGB1904’, ‘pfbcarlisle’ and ‘Liverpool SPGB’, among others. However, searching for ‘SPGB’ occasionally also brings up videos of SpongeBob SquarePants, presumably thanks to a stray algorithm.

Mike Foster

Watch Comment: Channel 4, Wednesday 7 August, 7.50pm (1985)

From the August 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

A bit of a problem with regards to this notice which appeared in the pages of the August 1985 Socialist Standard: the problem is that I don't know which SPGB Comment speaker the notice is referring to.

It could be either Clifford Slapper or Brian Montague. Both appeared in this 5-minute slot on Channel 4 in the mid-80s. So, not taking any chances, I've decided to post both clips .

Socialist Euro-election Campaign (2014)

Party News from the June 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

In last month’s festival of xenophobia that the European elections were the Socialist Party mounted its biggest election campaign yet, emphasising by contrast the world nature of any solution by putting ‘World Socialist Movement’ on the ballot paper alongside our name . We contested two regions, South East England and Wales. Contesting Wales entitled us to our first ever Party Election Broadcast. This can be viewed on Youtube here:



The South East Region is the largest in the country with an electorate of over 6 million in 4 million households. Royal Mail delivered election leaflets to 984,000 households in 20 selected constituencies such as Oxford, Brighton, Southampton, Reading, Canterbury, and Dover. A further 16,000 were distributed by members and sympathisers. In Wales Royal Mail delivered our manifesto to 342,000 households in 9 constituencies with a further 8,000 being distributed by us. In all, a total of 1.35 million, the biggest ever campaign to publicise the case for a classless, stateless, moneyless world community without frontiers.

There was some good media coverage, especially from local TV and radio stations in both regions.  One fall-out from our standing was that one of our candidates was interviewed on BBC2’s Daily Politics Show, which would have had a much wider audience than our election broadcast in Wales. It can be seen at



Press coverage was more patchy but a number of local papers did give us a chance to present our case in more than a sound-bite. A couple of examples can be read here:

Canterbury Times

www.carmarthenjournal.co.uk/gets-Euro-vote/story-21065363-detail/story.html

We got 5454 votes in the South East and 1384 in Wales.

Pathfinders: Getting Twitchy about copyright (2019)

The Pathfinders Column from the March 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

It’s a well-known fact that a new TV or fridge doesn’t spring fully-formed from a hole in the ground but is usually produced in stages, from ore extraction to delivery, with different parts constructed by different people, often on different sites at different times. Thus the UK jobs impact of the recent Airbus decision to stop producing the underselling A380 superjumbo, whose wings (but not the rest of it) are made in Britain.

When describing how capitalism works, Marxists talk about the value of products as containing embodied or ‘dead’ labour which has to be accounted for in the final price. For instance, so much for resource extraction, refinement, power, distribution, parts manufacture and shipping, and so forth. Socialists don’t pretend that you can separate and cost out all these elements of dead labour from the finished product. That would be like trying to unbake a cake back into its starting ingredients. The argument only stipulates that the final price has to reflect all this labour otherwise the continued production and sale of this good, at this price, will not be viable.

Where this gets interesting is new developments in EU copyright law, which is in the process of being revised because of the internet revolution, and specifically the impact of hosting sites like YouTube and the various social media giants.

One element of the proposed EU Copyright Directive, Article 13, has Google positively gargling in horror: ‘Article 13 of the EU Copyright Directive states services such as YouTube could be held responsible if their users upload copyright-protected movies and music’ (BBC Online, 14 February). Think how many times (come on, admit it) you’ve wasted hours watching old excerpts of Monty Python, The Good Life, Citizen Smith, Yes Minister and Fawlty Towers on YouTube. All of that stuff, and a billion other things, are of course copyrighted, but so far nobody has raised too much of a stink about it. Article 13 could scupper all that.

But here’s the twister. What if someone films themselves playing a computer game and then uploads the film to YouTube or Twitch as an original publication for others to watch? Yes, people really do that, and they have millions of followers. They own the copyright on their film, but what about the copyright belonging to the game owners? That is embedded or ‘dead’ labour which the EU Directive is expecting to ‘unbake’ and price up, which as we’ve seen above, is going to give EU policy-makers a severe headache.

Technology has so far superseded European law that currently there exists only a state of unofficial consensus whereby copyright is not enforced in cases of what’s considered ‘fair use’ (eg for criticism, reviews, satire etc). But this consensus has no legal status in Europe, unlike in the USA, and so far there have been no court cases to establish a precedent. Hosting companies could be in the situation of having to buy licences for any copyrighted content their users upload, perhaps as well as any other copyrighted material contained within it. No wonder they’re horrified.

The point of all this? Not only is property society a terrible arrangement from the perspective of the 99 percent who don’t own any, it’s sometimes damnably difficult to apply its rules to figure out exactly who owns what and who should be paying whom. That at least is one arcane and intractable problem that socialism could laughingly throw to the winds.

Cause and effect

A recent meta-study has shown a significant link between depression and teenage cannabis use, with ‘robust’ evidence showing that ‘using the drug in adolescence increased the risk of developing depression in adulthood by 37%’ (BBC Online, 13 February). The wording here is, unusually for the BBC, careless and misleading, because it states baldly that the one directly causes the other, which is not shown by the evidence at all, as the article goes on to admit. Tabloid journalists in particular ought to be dragged outside and beaten with the mantra ‘correlation is not causation’. Instead the line should have read ‘using the drug in adolescence is associated with an increased risk of developing depression…’

Anyone alive today in capitalism has multiple reasons to get depressed without even reaching for the Rizlas, and that probably goes double for young people, who generally have a worse time of it economically, socially, psychologically and sexually than older people with settled lives and paid-for houses. Maybe that’s why they say life begins at 40 – because it’s mostly sheer hell until that point, if not after as well.

It certainly could be that cannabis has a deleterious effect on young developing brains. It could also be that depression-prone teens are more likely to resort to cannabis in the first place. Perhaps heavy cannabis use among teens is associated with a raft of other, depression-inducing social behaviours and circumstances. Anyone with long experience of poverty and unemployment knows that skinning up a spliff with mates is a lot cheaper than almost any other social option. Far from causing depression in this situation, cannabis may be the only silver lining in an otherwise black cloud. Ganja-bashing continues to make good headlines, but that doesn’t mean journalists should let their critical faculties go up in smoke.

A recent article in the webzine Dissident Voice also plays fast and loose with causation, when it claims that our serotonin system fuels aggression and so means that a socialist or anarchist non-hierarchical society is impossible. Despite pronouncing in impressively sciencey terms about the metabolic biochemistry of the monoamine neurotransmitter, the author Denis Rancourt (who by the way is not a neurobiologist but a retired physicist) offers not a shred of evidence for his argument that the hormone ‘locks’ humans into either dominant or subservient roles, and indeed his example of dominant social climbers who ‘kiss ass’ to get up the corporate ladder seems to flatly contradict his own case. Too much is wrong with his discussion of serotonin to go into here, but in a nutshell it comes down to correlation and causation again. He cites several academic studies in support of his case, but if you read what they say they don’t support his claim either. In fact one luminary, Robert Sapolsky, is scathing of such thinking in a fascinating YouTube lecture, where he says within the first few minutes that because genetically humans are almost identical with all other animals even including fruit flies, ‘Genetics and neurotransmitters etc tell us nothing about what makes humans humans’. He then drives home the point that we are not genetically fixed by citing his own study of a troop of baboons who, after all the aggressive males accidentally died of TB, exhibited an astonishing change in behaviour, becoming socially friendlier and more affectionate, with males even grooming each other – unheard of for wild baboons. One wonders if Sapolsky and the other cited authorities realise they are being cited in support of an argument they would heartily oppose.

Paddy Shannon

Proper Gander: The Great Russian Fake Off (2018)

The Proper Gander column from the November 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tread carefully if you venture onto YouTube to find out about left-wing ideas. While there are plenty of interesting and lively short films produced by leftists of all persuasions, you can also stumble across mean-spirited uploads from their opponents. A video with a title like ‘triggered snowflake cringe compilation’ or ‘social justice worker fail’ isn’t likely to provide a nuanced, balanced critique of left-wing views. There are dozens of videos like this, posted by smug right-wing outlets, intended to show the left, and especially feminists, as naively misguided. They tend to be selectively-edited clips from vlogs, interviews, and interventions featuring leftists with weak arguments or whose emotions overshadow the point they’re making. Just one example is the uploaded footage of a mostly incoherent heckler at a University of Massachusetts Amherst lecture. When the heckler was nicknamed ‘Trigglypuff’, a meme was born and the video quickly attracted hundreds of thousands of views, shares and (invariably negative) comments.

Something different and more unsettling was going on with a more recent viral video, though. This one showed a woman ‘activist’ pouring diluted bleach over the crotches of men who are ‘manspreading’ while sitting on a Russian tube train. The video provoked thousands of online responses, with many saying that her actions were more of an assault than a protest. But then it was exposed as a fake. One of the men shown getting his trousers soaked told the St Petersburg-based online magazine Bumaga that he and the others were actors hired by a film company, suggested to be one with links to the Kremlin. The video was first posted on In The Now, an English-language social media channel owned by Russia Today, itself state-funded. It might have originated in the Internet Research Agency, based in St Petersburg. Despite its bland-sounding name, this is a ‘troll farm’, which produces propaganda for the Russian state to be spread across social media. Another product of the farm was reportedly the ‘Saiga 410K Review’ video, which caused controversy for apparently showing an American soldier shooting bullets into a copy of the Quran. A BBC investigation in 2015 concluded that the footage was faked, as the uniform wasn’t genuine, and the ‘soldier’ was most likely a St Petersburg barman.

Why would the Russian government produce and distribute staged videos? ‘EU Vs Disinformation’, an anti-Kremlin website run by the EU, claimed the bleach stunt was designed to stir up people against feminism. Its aim would be not only to show feminists in a bad light, but also to increase divisions between people and groups through their responses to it. Similarly, the ‘Saiga 410K Review’ video was made to incite Muslims against America. The filmed acts were seen as extreme, and led to the extreme reactions the producers intended.

This kind of tactic isn’t only linked to the Kremlin. In 2016, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism website reported that the American military had commissioned a British Public Relations firm to produce bogus Al-Qaeda videos. CDs of these were planted by soldiers operating in the Middle East, not only to spread disinformation about Al-Qaeda but also to track where the CDs later turned up.

Making fake propaganda is a dirty enough trick, but a technique allegedly used by the Kremlin to influence the American Presidential Election is even more devious. Their approach here was apparently to create propaganda supporting both Democrats and Republicans, as well as other groups ranging from white supremacists to Black Lives Matter activists. For example, in May 2016, two competing rallies were held in Houston, Texas to protest against and defend the recently opened Library of Islamic Knowledge. Both were organised through Facebook groups later revealed to be accounts from the Internet Research Agency.

This method follows the approach of ‘Political Technologists’, such as Vladislav Surkov, a close ally of President Putin. In Russia, Surkov sponsored fascist groups, anti-fascist groups, and even groups opposed to Putin. Then he let it be known that he was doing this, so that no-one could tell how genuine these organisations were. By simultaneously backing opposing ideologies, the intention isn’t to boost support for any particular one of them, even whichever is more consistent with state policy. Instead, the aim is to stir up confusion and also mistrust, not only of particular groups, but of what’s real. Political Technologists want to manipulate political debate by undermining it. So, exposing the bleach footage as phoney can’t even be seen as a loss for the Kremlin, as this just lays on another layer of cynicism. Cheekily, the video itself includes the caption ‘some say it’s all staged’. If anything, the trend for fake videos can be a useful lesson, a reminder that it pays to be sceptical.

Mike Foster

Proper Gander: Reflections on Black Mirror (2012)

The Proper Gander TV column from the January 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

A video is posted onto YouTube showing Britain’s beautiful new Princess tied up and crying. She struggles to read out loud a message from her kidnapper: she will be killed unless the Prime Minister has sex with a pig, live on television. The first story in Charlie Brooker’s trilogy of state-of-the-nation dramas – Black Mirror – wasn’t going to be easy viewing. The bizarre, nightmarish scenario was acted and directed with thorough seriousness, making the programme feel more like a fly-on-the-wall documentary, drawing the viewer in.

Brooker is savvy enough about the media to make the viral spread of the threat across the internet central to the plot. The kidnapper’s message zooms through YouTube, Facebook and Twitter without the traditional methods of communication – press releases, newspapers and television news – being able to keep up. The new types of media are changing how we relate to the world. Information is open directly to more people, to interpret, spread and act upon. According to Brooker, this turns us into social-networked, YouTube-sharing voyeurs, for whom everything is titillation. He’s saying that reducing events to tweets and facebook updates cheapens them, and robs them of their real meaning.

Back in the drama, the government’s improvised back-up plans fail, and the situation for the Prime Minister and the Princess gets fist-clenchingly desperate. The kidnapper’s deadline for the live bestiality broadcast is approaching. Like the crowds gathering in front of their screens, the viewer is both appalled and dragged into watching, thinking, ‘will they really show it?’

Brooker succeeded in crafting an intelligent, challenging drama. Anyone hearing about the premise and tuning in for a PM-on-porcine-action trashfest would have found themselves to be the target of Brooker’s bile. The final scenes shifted the blame for the horrible situation to the gawping masses. This is where Brooker is perhaps too cynical about our lust for what we watch on our screens, whether on a television, computer or smartphone. So, Black Mirror is best watched as a warning of the risks of alienation by the share-and-spread immediacy of modern media.

Mike Foster

Pathfinders: Don't Be Evil (2017)

The Pathfinders Column from the April 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Google have been in trouble again lately, this time for 'allowing'  ads by governments and major companies to appear next to extremist and hate videos on YouTube, making it look as if the videos are being sponsored by the likes of HMG, M&S, the Guardian and others.

The problem, as Google readily admit, is that they don't know how to prevent this happening. So-called smart filtering software does exist, but it's unrealistic to expect it always to tell the difference between appropriate and inappropriate content, given that human opinions are often divided on the subject. Current estimates vary, but in 2014 YouTube stated that 300 hours of new material were being uploaded every minute to their site, so policing that volume of content is next to impossible. Nevertheless critics are wont to demand the moon on a stick and attack Google for not doing enough to keep their house in order.

At the same time, Google has also been criticised for censorship, usually when their automated efforts to police content go wrong. An Egyptian blogger's videos of vote-rigging and police brutality were removed in 2007. A video criticising sharia law in Britain and backed by the National Secular Society was taken down in 2008. There are hundreds of other complaints about Google being either dictatorial or drippily laissez-faire, depending on the individual point of view. And YouTube was  itself blocked in Pakistan for carrying videos criticising Islam, in Turkey for videos insulting national founder Kemal Atatürk, in Thailand for unflattering remarks against the royals, in the UK and Germany for music copyright infringement, in China, Iran and Turkmenistan in virtual perpetuity, and so on.

It's not just the videos that YouTube has been castigated for. Its policy of allowing comments has repeatedly been under fire for unleashing a barrage of inane bigotry. Time Magazine complained in 2006: "Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred", and the Guardian in 2015 called it "a hotbed of infantile debate and unashamed ignorance" (Wikipedia). Google in 2013 decided to force viewers to create a Google+ account before they could post comments on videos, but this in turn attracted a storm of protest, even from one of YouTube's own co-founders.

This is all quite apart from controversies about aggressive tax avoidance, supposed manipulation over search results, source-code secrecy, abuse or appropriation of intellectual property, invasion of privacy and monopolistic practices. Having failed to live up to its founding motto 'Don't Be Evil' (what corporation wouldn't fail, though?), Google adopted a new motto in 2015: 'Do the right thing'. What this means is anybody's guess, but it's likely that Google won't live up to this motto either.

Google is valued at $133bn and its parent company Alphabet is listed by Forbes as the 27th largest company in the world, above IBM, General Motors, Gazprom, Intel, Boeing, Disney and Coca-Cola. Just as Uber, wriggling and writhing through its current worker-exploitation controversies by insisting it is a technology 'platform' not a taxi company, so Google aims to avoid government regulation by maintaining that it is a technology platform and not a media company (Google's crisis of confidence, BBC Online, 20 March). Whether it's allowed to get away with this in the future remains to be seen.

There is a degree of 'shoot the messenger' involved in all this. The internet has opened a hitherto unsuspected Pandora's Box of horrors including trolling, fraud, cyberbullying, revenge porn and general 'net rage' which reveals the crawling underbelly of capitalism in its harshest light. Young people, caught up in this ferocious storm of cruelty, have been driven to suicide. Pious pundits may wonder where all this rage and cruelty comes from, but socialists are not under any illusions. Happy people are not cruel. Anger runs through capitalism like 'Brighton' runs through a stick of rock. What people are angry about is the conditions they live under in capitalism, and the oppressive power relations that grind them down. Of course it's in the nature of power relations that you can't take your oppressor out into the street and punch his face in. So people vent their anonymous spite on each other instead, and then everybody blames Google for 'allowing' it all to happen. Maybe when they said 'Don't be evil' they didn't mean themselves.

What would Google and YouTube look like in socialism? Not that different, in some ways. But passwords and paywalls would be obsolete, to general relief, as would pop-up ads, banners and flashes, not to mention adware and spyware and porn links. Search results would tend to reflect genuinely popular sites, as they mostly now do, but without web developers having a money incentive to 'game' the rankings systems to promote bogus sites. But perhaps the most noticeable difference would be the disappearance of the obsessive cult of online secrecy, including the 'dark web', and the consequent freedom presently enjoyed by some in capitalism - the freedom to abuse, bully, libel, humiliate and torture someone, sometimes to death, while cosily wrapped in layers of anonymity, safe from discovery. That's not a freedom anyone will want in socialism.

Wiki Games

How accurate is Wikipedia? A recent study of Wikipedia produced a very interesting result. It turned out that Wikipedia's own army of 'bots' - autonomous editing and web maintenance programs - have been engaged in a relentless war with each other for at least a decade, changing and rechanging each other's edits, backwards and forwards, without let or quarter (Link.). As a study author put it, 'humans would have given up by now, but bots just go on forever'. Oddly, there is no entry in Wikipedia itself about its own bot wars, which might be an oversight or else a craven example of truth being the first casualty of war. At any rate, nobody's quite sure how this happened, or what to do about it. Says one researcher: "It is crucial to understand what could affect bot-bot interactions in order to design cooperative bots that can manage disagreement, avoid unproductive conflict, and fulfill their tasks in ways that are socially and ethically acceptable."

Quite so, and perhaps when they've managed that, they can start explaining it to humans.

PJS