1. The mill and the machine

 The mill and the machine 

“There are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions.”

—Edward Bernays, Propaganda

ANTI-VACCINE ZEALOTS DOMINATING SOCIAL MEDIA and reawakening the measles virus in Southern California. Prominent politicians inveighing against kids using litter boxes in their school bathrooms. A growing number of people—including at least one famous athlete—avowing that the Earth is in fact flat, not round. A man attacking the Speaker of the House’s husband with a hammer—and his lawyer then arguing the internet made him do it.

Occurrences like these—unsettling, divisive, and often at odds with common sense—seem to be happening with increasing frequency. And they are deeply entwined with who shapes public opinion and how—something that has shifted significantly over the past decade.

The age-old pursuit of shaping public opinion is how leaders, institutions, rebels, and reformers attempt to deliberately and strategically exert their influence on society. Their aim is to mold their audiences’ attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors with regard to ideas, people, policies, and even social norms. The ultimate goal is to create consensus that advances their way of seeing the world… maybe to get a president elected or shift how people feel about a controversial topic. It can be a long, arduous, thorny process—and one with high stakes. Reaching consensus is how societies make decisions and move forward, and steering that process can transform the future.

Societies require consensus to function. Yet consensus today seems increasingly impossible. Polarizing topics are black-and-white and compromise unthinkable. Our political leadership is gridlocked. Our media feels toxic. And social media seems like a gladiatorial arena, a mess of vitriol. The culture war is everywhere. Handwringing about 'post-truth' and 'misinformation' dominates the diagnoses of one media ecosystem, while sneers about 'censorship' and 'woke totalitarianism' are the focus of another. Many of us feel that something has gone horribly wrong. Maybe tech is to blame, maybe the unraveling of the social fabric more broadly. Either way, we feel we are no longer able to speak with friends and family or to trust institutions.

It increasingly seems like we don’t live in the same reality. And that’s because, in a very critical way, we don’t. Consensus reality—our broad, shared understanding of what is real and true—has shattered, and we’re experiencing a Cambrian explosion of subjective, bespoke realities. A deluge of content, sorted by incentivized algorithms and shared instantaneously between aligned believers, has enabled us to immerse ourselves in environments tailored to our own beliefs and populated with our own preferred facts.

Who Says What to Whom

For centuries, people passed information to one another primarily through word of mouth. We still do, of course: talking with friends and family members, sharing stories, discussing the news, persuading them to our view about, say, which candidate to vote for. They, in turn, talk to other people, who do the same to others. The way that a message cascades through a community depends on how people are connected to each other—on who knows or talks to whom. That web of connections is a social network.

Small talk” spreads through a social network: how the kids are doing at school, why I love or hate that new restaurant. Other times, though, a different kind of information spreads: important and ambiguous information, like speculation about a brewing conflict, an outbreak of a novel disease, or a scandal involving a local official. These are rumors, unofficial information circulating in society, which are powerful precisely because they sometimes—but only sometimes—turn out to be true.

Rumors take “raw, confused facts” and attempt to explain them, to posit a reality based on a small amount of evidence. The community discusses the claims and tries to make sense of it all; the rumor is the consensus explanation they reach. If the facts are sparse, we rely on our imaginations to fill in the blanks, often drawing on community lore or popular tropes. We spread the rumor because we want to know the truth and want to participate in the community conversation—particularly when the facts involve an ambiguous or troubling incident with the potential to impact our lives. The intent isn’t to manipulate or even deliberately shape public opinion—rather, rumors spread because of the nature of human tendency to share information, especially if it’s intriguing or sensational. Yet the spreading whispers often do affect how individuals perceive events, sometimes introducing uncertainty and doubt—especially if the whispers conflict with the official story. We have a colloquial name for the way that rumors pass from person to person: the rumor mill.

The structure of a social network shapes how information or rumors spread: not all people are equally connected or persuasive. In a village nestled in, say, the north of England a thousand years ago, people would hear opinions and form perceptions based on conversations with their trusted friends and neighbors. But not everyone knows or regularly talks to the same people—and who has access to whom matters. The village gossip or pub owner might know everyone, while the blacksmith might only speak regularly with the small number of people he sees during the workday. The handful of highly connected, highly informed community members—those most equipped to make messages spread—have the potential to significantly impact the overall community’s perception of what’s happening in the world. The gossips will talk to twenty people each day and the blacksmith to only two or three (including the gossip). This means that a message or rumor can disperse across the town much faster if gossips get hold of it and decide it’s interesting. They can curate, or select, the most interesting piece of info from among the many things they hear. If they decide to share something, it has the potential to cascade, first reaching the gossip’s twenty connections, who then talk about it with their friends; and so on. If one gossip talks to another gossip—another highly connected speaker—the information or rumor has the potential to move even faster and to reach an even wider audience. The best connected have the potential to distort the people or shape public opinion by virtue of their reach.

There’s an interesting dynamic that can arise when some individuals are far better connected than most: their opinions begin to seem like the majority opinion. If the values were surveyed and 85 percent believed that the pubs should close at 5 p.m., but the gossips’ and pub owners’ opinions fell within that other 15 percent, their minority viewpoint would likely seem like the prevailing opinion to everyone else in town. Most people would hear about the debate from them, with their spin on it. This majority illusion can trick you into believing that a minority opinion is the dominant consensus present of view overall, when it’s truly the viewpoint of the loudest or best-connected members of a community.

Of course, the structure of the social network is only part of the story. The best-connected people may be popular because they’re particularly charismatic or compelling storytellers: the gossips are good at capturing their audience’s attention because they have an innate sense of what details to embellish, emphasize, or exclude. Their stories stir up emotions. A combination of being well connected and compelling increases the likelihood that people who hear the gossip’s spin on a topic pass it along.

It’s probably fair more interesting than the cold, hard facts.

Imagine a situation in which a few questions get asked after a night out at the King’s Arms Pub. Were they served bad ale, or was there an outbreak of a disease? Who knows. If a few people who feel ill chatter, the incident might stay within that area. But if a gossip who doesn’t like Geoffrey, the pub owner, spins the events into a spicy, insinuated-laden rumor, the whole village will hear about it, long before any official statements. If one gossip talks to many others, the information can spread quickly through the town and reach people far away.

From this example, we can see that the structure, speaker, and substance all play a role in shaping public opinion.

The rumor mill—unverified stories flowing across social networks, organized by interested people—has always existed in some form. How social networks are organized and how the facts, connections, and messages spread from person to person. Access to community, and thus potential for influence, was long determined by in-person relationships.

Yet, while important, this system for shaping public opinion has, since the fifteenth-century invention of the printing press, competed with a more centralized alternative for receiving information: mass media.

Who has access to whom can shift dramatically when communication technologies rearrange connections between people, which means that the character or flavor of the information we receive shifts dramatically as well. What happens if everyone has access to newspapers, radios, television—the internet? When communication goes from one-to-one to one-to-many?

More information will reach people, including from those with whom they have no personal connections. And that’s exactly what happened in a handful of pivotal transitions in history: an advance in communication technology changed the topology of human connections, creating new networks of influence by which small numbers of people could reach millions.

As with peer-to-peer chatter, mass media spreads plenty of benign and neutral information: the ups and downs of the stock market, a story about a tornado, an investigation of a corporate cover-up. Coverage that presents the basic facts, keeping the audience informed. But other times, media outlets spread information with an agenda: a nightly newscast that skews crime statistics or a front-page story that assails a political candidate with little cause. These stories often still contain facts—they’re not complete fabrications—but they’re spun so as to benefit a particular group that wants to move public consensus in a particular direction. This deliberate presentation of inflected information that attempts to further the agenda of those who create it is propaganda. The collection of powerful individuals and outlets who participate in systematic attempts to shape perception comprise the propaganda machine.

Propaganda shapes public opinion not by simple persuasion but rather by manipulating perceptions and constructing favored narratives to guide our views. It deliberately and systematically frames issues, emphasizing certain aspects while downplaying others, with the intent of building a specific worldview or gaining support for an agenda. There is usually a core grain of truth; propaganda is rarely built on outright lies. It strategically uses collective myths, emotional stories, and existing fears to appeal to deeply held values and beliefs. Propaganda often argues that a particular consensus already exists (but has been suppressed) and relies on repetition to normalize even extreme ideas. The propaganda machine adopts the stylings of the rumor mill at times, particularly while smearing targeted individuals, institutions, or ideologies via innuendo-laden whisper campaigns that aim to discredit them—but this is deliberate, not spontaneous and organic. Spread through mass media, propaganda can reach millions simultaneously.

In his 1928 book Propaganda, American social theorist and “father of public relations” Edward Bernays dubbed the people with the power to shape public opinion “invisible rulers.” “There are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions,” he wrote. “It is not generally realized to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by the shrewd persons operating behind the scenes.”

Bernays wasn’t referring to the visible rulers, like then US president Calvin Coolidge or the wildly popular 1920s American newspaper columnist Dorothy Dix. He was referring to the people behind the curtain: public relations experts, senior government aides, advertising executives, and propagandists with the know-how to shape the thoughts and behaviors of the public through messaging, psychological techniques, and the strategic presentation (or manipulation) of information. These were the individuals who wielded true influence—even over people like the president.

Bernays wasn’t being hyperbolic. Often these invisible rulers had the ability to ignite significant social or political upheaval. Consider Wayne Wheeler, a contemporary of Coolidge and Dix with a lower profile, unknown to many—but whose propaganda as head of the Anti-Saloon League led to the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment and thirteen years of Prohibition. Wheeler specialized in working the media to create a perception of widespread support for his positions (even before that support had materialized), then parlaying this exaggerated perception into real pressure on elected officials.

Advertisers and marketing professionals, Bernays offered, were invisible rulers who specialized in making people feel compelled to buy something—whether a product or an idea. Their job was to create the circumstances and feelings that led to purchaser demand or public buy-in, and the best way to do this was to address people both as individuals and as members of a group. Linking a group identity to a product or idea was immensely effective; Bernays himself worked to create the perception that would liberate women smoked cigarettes. The same approach could be applied to politics. People who advised sophisticated politicians, Bernays argued, needed to recognize that politics was also about creating demand; spectacle not policy, was what mattered, and it could be engineered to sell the public on candidates just as with products or ideas. Although “the voice of the people expresses the mind of the people,” Bernays pointed out, that mind was in fact made up for it by the leaders the public trusted—and therefore by the hidden individuals behind these leaders, who knew how to steer public opinion. 

Invisible rulers still possess these abilities, but there has been a dramatic shift in who—and nowadays what—they are.

The Infrastructure of Influence

In 1517, preacher and theologian Martin Luther posted a list of arguments challenging Catholic Church doctrine to the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. His “95 Theses,” reprinted as pamphlets across Germany, triggered a religious reformation. The technology used to print them, the Gutenberg printing press, triggered a media revolution, ushering in the era of mass communication and introducing a significant increase in public literacy. Without the printing press, Luther’s arguments about the church might have remained confined to his immediate locale or to his elite intellectual community of theologians and church authorities. Instead, they were translated and spread all over Europe, and the Protestant Reformation took off.

Luther was a prolific writer, described by scholars as “pithy” and “a master communicator with a growing cult of personality.” He had a brand, producing recognizable and digestible content covering the most interesting topics of the day (“Whether One May Flee from a Deadly Plague,” written in 1527), and far exceeded his Catholic opponents in popularity. He understood how to shape public opinion, writing in understandable ...

Luther was a prolific writer, described by scholars as “pithy” and “a master communicator with a growing cult of personality.” He had a brand, producing recognizable and digestible content covering the most interesting topics of the day (“Whether One May Flee from a Deadly Plague,” written in 1527), and far exceeded his Catholic opponents in popularity. He understood how to shape public opinion, writing in understandable ...

Luther was a prolific writer, described by scholars as “pithy” and “a master communicator with a growing cult of personality.” He had a brand, producing recognizable and digestible content covering the most interesting topics of the day (“Whether One May Flee from a Deadly Plague,” written in 1527), and far exceeded his Catholic opponents in popularity. He understood how to shape public opinion, writing in understandable  language, with illustrations, for a common audience, taking doctrinal debate down to the level of ordinary people. In doing so, he managed to generate a degree of support “unprecedented among prior heresies.”

The Catholic Church’s response to Luther’s provocations was to excommunicate him in 1521 and to undertake a significant influence effort of its own over the next century. By that time, the Catholic Church was struggling with a crisis of authority as a religious revolt spread across Europe. It was in a position of defending both doctrine and continued reliance on the Latin language of the far smaller, elite, educated population. The tension ushered in both a “pamphleteering war”—a battle for hearts and minds fought with paper booklets either praising or decrying certain religious opinions and leaders—and a real shooting war: the devastating Thirty Years’ War of 1618 to 1648.

As the war raged, in 1622, Pope Gregory XV created the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (Congregation for Propagation of the Faith), a body dedicated to coordinating missionary activity and ensuring the spread of the Catholic Church. Derived from the Latin word propagare, meaning to “spread” or to “propagate,” propaganda was a term for a process, emphasizing not the substance of the message but rather the imperative to disseminate it. In the Inscrutabili divinae providentiae arcano of June 1622, the pope exhorted his clergy to draw the public back to the one true faith—the one true reality—through the spread of persuasive information.

The Catholic Church ultimately did maintain its stature as a religious force and authority, but it was compelled to reform. The pamphlets enabled by Johannes Gutenberg’s technology continued to proliferate, permanently transforming the flow of information. Although each individual misinfo had limited distribution, together they achieved a kind of micro-virality at times: the German word for the pamphlets was flugscriften, or “flying writings,” which evoked the sense of speed. The new technology meant that anyone inclined to influence the public could stitch together some printed material—extending the reach of a message beyond the confines of immediate geography and peer-to-peer village chatter.

The flugschriften, sold by peddlers and passed around the community, were full of subversive images, often mocking authority or certain groups of people. The practice perhaps portended microblogging and meme-ing an analog precursor to the viral self-published content we can all create and spread today. Viral news of dubious authenticity, scandalous stories, attacks on authority, inflammatory headlines—rumors and propaganda abounded. The style quickly spread beyond Europe. In the eighteenth century it was adopted by the American Founding Fathers, a group of men looking to influence a nascent but growing public. They published flurries of fiery political pamphlets intended to persuade colonists to think a certain way about a Native American tribe or to unify behind a currency; some of the most famous, of course, were the Federalist Papers, which worked to shape public opinion around ratifying the Constitution of the United States.

The printing press reshaped the rumor mill, coupling its decentralized, bottom-up, peer-to-peer nature with the beginnings of mass media. But this coupling wasn’t permanent.

The heated battles of the pamphleteering wars fell away as the media began to centralize. By the 1700s, “broadsheet” newspapers, which covered and aggregated the stories (and rumors) relevant to a locale, gained in popularity. Like the pamphleteers, many of the earliest newspaper publishers were not constrained by a need for accuracy, focused as they were on opinion and often tied to political parties. However, gradually, reporting—previously a luxury paid for by businessmen interested in verifiable facts to inform their business decisions—became a core part of these publications, and journalism became a proper profession with ethics and best practices. By the 1830s, the public came to hold the expectation that print media should attempt to be accurate, and investigative journalism and reporting became the norm, although the business of sensationalism, fake news, and scare headlines did continue in the form of “yellow journalism” and the tabloid press.

This evolution in journalism led to the emergence of a professional media class, which, rather than simply self-publishing rumors, attempted to pursue an understanding of the facts—injecting friction into haphazard speculation. More importantly, perhaps, the professionalization of news production led to significant centralization and another reshaping of the networks of information flows. It cost money to operate a newspaper; there were printing expenses and reporters’ salaries to be paid. Now, too, there were standards. The people who controlled information gatekeepers, determining what showed up in papers and what didn’t. They set the agenda for what topics were covered, how stories were framed, what letters to the editor were written, and whether information was disseminated— or not. They controlled the technology by which information was disseminated, which gave them the power to shape public opinion.

The arc of print media—from pamphleteering to consolidated, professionalized journalism—is the first part of a story of democratized access to information, access to large audiences and the capacity to profit from both. The tension between upstart rebels and authority, the understanding that sensationalism and spectacle are innately appealing (a reality of human nature), the recognition that trusted speakers matter, and the awareness that audience demand and business incentives drive what is covered (and how), all predate our current media environment by centuries.

As journalism and its relationship with the public evolved, governments and institutional participation evolved too. Officials and experts served as sources for journalists and in turn leveraged newspapers to strategically release information to the public. Some governments established their own official media outlets, known today as “state media.” State media was funded by the state and often editorially controlled by it. These outlets might be pointed inward, at the citizenry, enabling the state to control the narrative within its borders. They might be outward, at the citizenry, or beyond, spreading messaging to foreign publics. Sometimes the state controlled individual journalists; other times agent-of-influence contributors could write for unwitting outlets, capitalizing on reputation and audience trust while putting out stories that weren’t quite what they seemed. Getting a message out was critical to amassing real-world power. Shaping public opinion mattered, and state propaganda was a means of making it happen.

The early operators of American state propaganda efforts felt this acutely. Bernays had worked during World War I for the U.S. government

public-influence effort known as the Committee on Public Information (CPI). Headed by journalist George Creel, the CPI aimed to generate support among Americans for World War I—to produce, as Creel put it, “not propaganda as the Germans defined it, but propaganda in the true sense of the word, meaning the ‘propagation of faith.’” In the organized strategic messaging campaigns of wartime, propaganda was a tool of influence operations—formalized efforts to weaken the resolve of the enemy or to create support and resilience on the home front. Bernays had come away from his work on the CPI convinced that crystallizing public opinion, shaping consensus via the strategic presentation of persuasive information, was in fact critical to democratic governance—even in peacetime. Much like the Catholic bishops, the twentieth-century heirs to the methods of the Propaganda Fide considered the propagation of messages a moral obligation, key to a successful democratic society. “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society,” Bernays wrote in Propaganda. He continued, “Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.

Today this sounds elitist, even borderline authoritarian. Propaganda as an ethical obligation? Indeed, by World War II, the term was becoming synonymous in the American mind not with propagating truth but with the manipulative messaging outputs of Nazis, fascists, and other malign forces. This was, in part, because Creel himself had worked to create that association to ensure that US audiences distrusted German media during World War II. However, even as that perception shift occurred, the idea that someone had to ensure that busy people were properly informed, so that they might fully participate as citizens in an effective democratic process, remained strong. So too did the idea that government and institutions should actively work with the media to communicate accessible, accurate information to the masses.

The next two significant technological shifts that followed print media—radio and then TV—again reshaped information networks, access to audiences, and the capacity to influence and shape public opinion. Notably, these two shifts further centralized the control of media. Unlike printing pamphlets, producing radio or TV content required more expensive equipment, more expertise, and coveted broadcast licenses from governments.

Manufacturing the Consent of the Governed

These three technological advances—the printing press, the radio, and the television—changed the structures along which information moved, reshaping networks and reallocating power. Those who controlled the means of information dissemination became a distinct class of professional media elite with the power to shape public opinion and influence consensus reality. Even as the public’s access to information increased, the power imbalance between the speaker and the audience grew. What the elites decided to publish was largely what the public saw—even as the public relations pros, the partisan insiders, and the other invisible rulers jockeyed to ensure that their messages made it out. The public were primarily recipients—targets—of the messages.

The question of how to reckon with the implications of this power evolved over time. A contemporary and sometime mentor of Bernays, Walter Lippmann, journalist and founder of the New Republic, was also sympathetic to the idea that propaganda should play a role in shaping public opinion. Lippmann’s book, Public Opinion, published in 1922, six years ahead of Bernays’s Propaganda, argued that individuals operated in personal, subjective realities that he called “pseudo-environments,” where they primarily, and quite rationally, paid attention to their own experiences, needs, and issues. Opposing groups in particular “live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones,” he wrote. To bridge these gaps and to create the sort of informed public that the Founding Fathers considered requisite for democratic governance, Lippmann argued, meant that a well-functioning society needed experts, institutions, and centralized media working in tandem—needed a propaganda machine. This technology-enabled elite would determine appropriate courses of action for particular social and policy issues to facilitate the " manufacture of consent" of the governed. ( Noam Chomsky would go on to make that phrase famous sixty years later, )

This process of persuasive influence—experts identifying solutions and presenting them to those in power, who then worked with the media to communicate them to the public—would create order out of chaos, both Lippmann and Bernays argued. It would eliminate the information distortions of our medieval village; it would bring people into a shared reality and generate the kind of social cohesion required for democratic consensus.

Of course, this presupposed a benevolent government of the honest. The mass media ecosystem that enabled the propaganda machine, if turned out, would also undermine it—by revealing just how naïve that assumption of benevolent honesty was. TV inadvertently exposed the complex relationship that had developed between government, institutions, and media gatekeepers and the public they supposedly served: people could observe, on their TV screens, stark differences between what was said at official press conferences and the footage the networks aired. This was particularly true in the coverage of the Vietnam War. Elites, it seemed, hadn’t been showing us the capital-T Truth; they had been showing us their cut-up, spun version of the truth. The obvious discrepancies generated outrage, precipitating protests about the war itself and eroding trust in government. This also sharply reduced trust in mainstream broadcast media.

The decline of confidence in “establishment” media channels inspired a resurgence of interest in independent, underground publications, including what were known as zines (short for fan magazine). These small, self-published print publications were produced by and for members of distinct communities: artists, activists, people with niche political beliefs. One was a small antiwar outlet, begun in 1965, that called itself The Fifth Estate. The title was an allusion to the Fourth Estate, a term for the institution of journalism with roots in eighteenth-century British political theory. The first three estates were those of the French ancien régime: the clergy, the aristocracy, and the commoners. That the press was the fourth reflected the gravity of its role as an independent force that could hold the others accountable. As the American people of the 1960s began to lose confidence in media, the phrase Fifth Estate came to refer to the independent voices that would hold media accountable. The independent outlets that sprang up to present a counterpoint to the dominant narratives about the Vietnam War were defiant­ly decentralized in the age of increasingly centralized and controlled media structures. They were, in a sense, a second coming of the flugschriften—a reversion to an unfiltered past that became popular among communities that had begun to feel that mass media were not reflecting their understanding of reality. Yet, much like their predecessor pamphlets, they spoke to niche audiences—capturing far less attention than the official narratives presented in mainstream print and broadcast media or press conferences.

The entrenched power of mass media, its massive reach and capacity for shaping opinion at a national level, and its role in the “manufacture of consent” of the governed became the focus of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s seminal 1988 Manufacturing Consent. Unlike Lippmann and Bernays, with their rosier view of propaganda, they argued that a system of incentives inherent in the mass media ecosystem skewed information to serve the media and the governing elite, not the public interest. While the agendas of official state-controlled media outlets were obvious, the propaganda that moved through mainstream, free channels was more insidious because the public was unaware of what was happening.

The system Chomsky and Herman identified had five underlying incentives, or “filters,” which shaped its output: ownership, advertising, sourcing, catching flak, and ideological orthodoxy (anticommunism at the time). Ownership in the age of mass media (before the internet) was an expensive proposition: broadcast license fees, printing presses, studio equipment. As a result, a small and wealthy enclave came to own the ecosystem. They were incentivized not to disrupt their other investments and entanglements. (Would a newspaper owner who also held significant stock in a pharmaceutical company allow reporting on a new drug’s dangerous side effects?) Advertising was the primary funding model for mass media, incentivizing the media both to placate advertisers and to attract the kind of audiences they wanted to reach. (If that same pharmaceutical company were a major advertiser, would a network run the risk of angering it by covering a story that portrayed the company negatively?

The remaining three filters had less to do with money and more to do with relationships and psychology. Sourcing—or access to newsmakers incentivized media to play with the powerful, lest they be denied a future scoop. Fear of catching flak like boycotts or lawsuits incentivized the media to avoid prickly topics or unpopular segments. And the human vs. human instinct—fear of other ideologies—incentivized the media to tell stories with “worthy” or “unworthy” victims. Nuance and complexity fell by the wayside.

These incentives, Chomsky and Herman argued, led the media to self-censor; to lie by omission; to prioritize the “right” narrative, not the accurate one; and ultimately to shape public opinion in a way that undermined—rather than bolstered—democratic society. In Chomsky and Herman’s view, the propaganda machine was for mass manipulation, not mass education; for false consensus, not true consensus.

As the twentieth century came to a close, events suggested Chomsky and Herman’s cynical take on the propaganda machine as a hegemonic tool was more accurate than their predecessors’ idealism about it as a mechanism for creating an informed public. The Iraq War of the early 2000s, with its yellowcake uranium and “weapons of mass destruction” stories, reinforced the idea of the press and government as unreliable, even manipulative. The public, meanwhile—the target—had little capacity for shaping messages through mass media and primarily made their voices heard by counter-speaking, protesting, writing letters to the editor, and voting.

The Mill Matters More?

And yet the view of the public as helpless naifs hopelessly misled by media liars also was not entirely accurate. There had been great interest throughout the twentieth century in understanding, to adapt a phrase from communications (and propaganda) theorist Harold Lasswell, “who says what to whom on which platform and to what effect.” The impact of propaganda on the outcome of World War II had been a matter of great concern to government leaders and academics alike; many felt deeply uncomfortable with it, even decades prior to Chomsky and Herman’s treatise. Scholars and experts had exposure to messages on radio and TV influenced people—they certainly seemed to. Propaganda slogans became memes: “Loose lips sink ships.” People do, indeed, think and feel a certain way as they move throughout the world; they obviously come to hold certain convictions. It certainly appeared that propaganda could persuade people or deepen their commitment to previously held beliefs.

But in the mid-1900s, some fascinating studies upended the idea that mass messaging to the public was effective in the way that government, media, and even some of the invisible rulers thought. Influence, it turned out, worked a bit differently than previously believed. Even in a time of nightly news programs and prolific radio content, human social networks and word-of-mouth interpretation still mattered—a lot.

In 1955, social science researchers Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld published Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications, a book that challenged conventional wisdom about whether and how media influenced the public. The pair had been inspired to investigate the role of mass media in society, noting that both its supporters and its detractors shared a foundational belief that mass communication was wildly effective for changing hearts and minds. Supporters saw mass media as a new dawn for democracy, full of informed, enlightened participants; detractors saw radio and TV as “powerful weapons able to rubber-stamp ideas upon the minds of defenseless readers and listeners” and argued that misleading propaganda had led the United States to enter World War II when it should have stayed out. Both camps assumed that people were being persuaded left and right by what they heard on the radio or saw on the television.

Yet an earlier study by Lazarsfeld, which looked at the formation of political opinions about candidates in the 1940 presidential election, had found that people who had changed their mind about whom to vote for in that contest reported that the greatest contributor to their shift was other people—not the media coverage they consumed. “The one source of influence that seemed to be far ahead of all the others in determining the way people made up their minds was personal influence,” Katz and  Lazarsfeld reflected. The individual, they argued, needed to be studied as “a communicator and as a relay point in the network of mass communications.”

Intrigued by this finding that individual contact was still the most influential factor in political decisionmaking despite mass media prevalence, Katz and Lazarsfeld set out to investigate the impact of mass media on opinion formation via a study conducted on a group of eight hundred seemingly influential women in Decatur, Illinois. The researchers observed this community and noted that the influential women processed the stories they heard in the media—whether reporting, persuasion, propaganda, or entertainment—and passed information on to their friends. As in our medieval village, some were more influential than others, and Katz and Lazarsfeld found that those individuals, whom they dubbed opinion leaders, were much more likely to report being influenced by the media themselves (even as they, too, also reported being influenced by friends).

Katz and Lazarsfeld’s pivotal observation was that “ideas often seemed to flow from radio and print to opinion leaders and from them to the less active sections of the population.” They found that some of the women in Decatur were monitoring the media very closely, watching news broadcasts, listening to the radio, and then communicating their opinions on what was said in the media to the rest of their network of friends. These opinion leaders shared several attributes: they were personable and likable, were perceived as knowledgeable and competent, and were well connected. They served as information intermediaries, interpreters, who informed their community of things they’d found out and, in doing so, served as opinion shapers for a trusting audience.

Influence through media, it turned out, was not a “hypodermic” process—people did not adopt new opinions as if by “injection” following the mere hearing of a claim on a mass media news broadcast. That idea, held by both supporters and detractors of mass media, was simply wrong. Rather, influence happened far more often by way of this process of intermediaries engaging directly with their communities.

Katz and Lazarsfeld called their model two-step flow. The work was revolutionary in the field of communications because it found that media for all its reach and ability to span massive networks of people, did not appear to influence the public directly. Although a given radio program or magazine might reach audiences of millions, it did not seem to impact them all uniformly or necessarily at all.

Katz and Lazarsfeld found that individuals were still far more likely to be influenced by personal contacts: their friends, family members, neighbors, members of their religious community. Even in 1955, Katz and Lazarsfeld summarized their work as a rediscovery—the empirical rediscovery of the primary group as a critical force in shaping public opinion. Even after all these seismic technological shifts and broadcast media advances and the formation of a propaganda machine with massive reach, people actually seemed to remain much more susceptible to that very old, original form of influence that powered the village network: messages from people they knew in real life. Communication technology changes around us, but human psychology remains largely the same.

The Mill and Machine Collide

Media is additive; it has never replaced these human connections. It has an impact of course: the women of Decatur were talking to their friends about things they heard on the radio, read in print, and saw in the movies. Bernays saw media as preeminent in molding the public mind, but he also recognized the power of individuals, particularly in their role as members or groups, as allies to be marshaled in the effort to shape consensus. He encouraged aspiring invisible rulers of public relations to find and turn opinion leaders into advocates for whatever product or idea they were promoting. Chomsky and Herman’s work laid out how the media heavily determines what stories are covered—what content we and our opinion leaders have available to us as the foundational basis for discussion. But for the process of coming to consensus—of both individually and collectively deciding what is true or false, what opinions to hold, what policies to adopt—the influence of peers remains key.

Never has this been more apparent than over the past two decades, as social media platforms connected humans on a scale never seen before, redefining the meaning of peer and reallocating the capacity to influence the masses and shape public opinion. This technological transformation created communication structures that eliminated human gatekeepers from the process of curation, reducing the power of media elites. It gave rise to an entire new class of speaker—influencers—and reorganized broadcasting from one-to-many to many-to-many. Mobile phones with cameras reinforced the shift as they became ubiquitous; any protest, military conflict, crisis, or petty disagreement between two people could be recorded, uploaded, or livestreamed by anyone for anyone else to see. This kind of content, shared to social media platforms, turned algorithms and crowds into curators and distributors and highlighted that the world was vaster, richer, and more complex than what old-guard media had chosen to convey. Audiences became direct participants in shaping and disseminating narratives.

But this did not put an end to propaganda. Quite the contrary: it put the power to create it into everyone’s hands.

The last revolution in communication technology caused the collision of the rumor mill and the propaganda machine. The rumor mill, that ever-turning wheel of speculation and innuendo, has long thrived on the human fascination with the unverified, the mysterious, and the tantalizingly possible. On the other hand, the propaganda machine is agenda driven, a calculated force, its humming machinery designed to strategically distribute carefully constructed narratives that sway opinions and manipulate emotions for the purposes of power or profit.

Now, as the propaganda machine and the rumor mill have violently smashed together like two ancient galaxies, something fiery and perilous has emerged. And what has emerged is still growing, even as we struggle to accurately define it.

These two distinct systems of influence—both of which shape consensus reality, yet are historically associated with different sources of power—have converged into one. The result fuses the reach of the propaganda machine with the norms and stylings of the rumor mill and harnesses the fervor of human curiosity while being guided by the invisible hands of those who seek control.

The propaganda machine refined narratives from the top down; it required control of communication technology, formerly the purview of political elites, governments, and mass media institutions. Now, a vast array of actors use the features and capabilities that platforms offer their users to influence public perception in service of their own agendas and to draw the audience into acts of direct participation.

The rumor mill was once a relatively local affair, associated with networks of neighbors and individuals. It spread unverified information, gossip, and speculation, thriving on the unquenchable thirst for the latest scoop, but stayed confined largely to those close by and paying attention. Now, it has transcended geographical boundaries; it is peer-to-peer but also global and vast. Gossip and speculation are seen by millions and then picked up by the propagandists of the new media ecosystem, who use the rumors to their own ends—because rumors, too, have the power to shift perception, mobilize groups, and challenge “official” narratives.

State actors, terrorists, ideologues, grassroots activists, and even ordinary people now compete against each other in a war of all against all to shape public opinion.

This collision, combined with social media’s restructuring of human social networks, has enabled something far more dangerous than Lippmann’s de facto pseudo-environments, something fundamentally at odds with consensus reality: it enables bespoke realities.

Bespoke realities are made for—and by—the individual. The collision of the propaganda machine and the rumor mill gave rise to a choose-your-own-adventure epistemology: some news outlet somewhere has written the story you want to believe; some influencer is touting the diet you want to live by or demonizing the group you also hate. Other people, wherever they may physically be, are visible on the internet expressing vocal support for each individual belief. Whereas consensus reality once required some deliberation with a broad swath of others, with a shared epistemology to bridge points of disagreement, bespoke reality comfortably supports a complete exit from that process. By selecting or manipulating information, experiences, or beliefs to align with personal preferences or biases, you can construct or curate a version of reality—one that can be tailored to fit whatever desires or agendas drive you. An algorithmic curator will helpfully reinforce your choices. This may lead to a subjective and distorted perception of the world. It may eventually result in a harsh confrontation with the laws of physics or biology. But in the day to day you may sit, comfortably ensconced, in the bespoke reality.

If the bespoke conflicts with the mainstream, the bespoke will win. Jon Askonas captured why in his essay “Reality Is Just a Game Now”.

A real-world event occurs that seems important to you, so you pay attention. With primary sources at your fingertips, or reported by those you trust online, you develop a narrative about the facts and meaning of the event. But the consensus media narrative is directly opposed to the one you’ve developed. The more you investigate, the more cynical you become about the consensus narrative. Suddenly, the mendacity of the whole “mainstream” media enterprise is laid bare before your anger. You will never really trust consensus reality again.

This splintering has profound implications. In the 1920s Lippmann was concerned about how to bind Americans into a common public, to create an ideal democracy. He recognized the importance of people coming together to make decisions about critical matters of public interest and thought—as paternalistic as it may sound—that a shared narrative informed by expertise and authority could improve democratic governance. Lippmann’s sparring partner on the topic, philosopher John Dewey, disagreed with his technocratic prescription—controlled narratives were wholly antidemocratic, he argued, reducing democracy to name only. Dewey believed that journalism alone, absent propaganda, could be enough. But each agreed on the need to bridge the pseudo-environments and ensure that people were operating in the same world, in service of the public interest.

Today, too, there are numerous critical matters of public interest. Some involve facets of reality that are wholly unconcerned with human consensus: a tornado does not care who believes in it. Neither does a contagious virus. “Tornado reality” is savagely indifferent to online rumors and the rantings of propagandists alike. Even as our confidence in experts, elites, and each other wanes, and as more individuals inhabit bespoke realities, challenges requiring collective solutions continue to mount.

However, in a world where no one possesses the moral authority to bridge the gaps in our factual understanding, we lose the ability to act collectively. Institutions that once contributed to our shared perception of the world, helping to bind it together—including through overarching national narratives—are in a state of decline. And yet, we seem to have given up on fixing them or rebuilding the bridges. Instead, targeting the legitimacy of institutions and leaders is fertile ground for modern propagandists who require a villain.

The art of manufacturing consent has undergone a remarkable transformation as the invisible rulers have changed. Gone are the days of a single, all-encompassing, propaganda machine. Now, a symphony of influencers, algorithms, and crowds work tirelessly to construct intricate belief systems, not across society but within their respective niches. The once-feared “hegemonic system” that Chomsky cautioned against is increasingly a relic. It wasn’t worthy of glorification or even restoration; it enabled colossal deceits and launched unjust wars.

But its replacement is even more formidable—and certainly not the “town square” of ethical journalism and deliberative debate that we hoped for.