Every day, we're reminded that there's something unsettling going on with men and boys.

In American politics, polling shows them breaking hard for Trump. In British politics, there's a substantial gap between men and women's support for Reform, especially among younger voters. On television, we watch dramas about young boys driven mad by the online ecosystem. Online, we read about a manosphere of misogynistic entrepreneurs, trying to turn male alienation into money. In school, we see boys perform worse than girls across pretty much every metric, with the sole exception of maths. After school, we find that boys are less likely to go into higher education than girls. In society, we discover that they're three times more likely than women to commit suicide. It goes on and on.

There's a small army of men who have capitalised on this phenomenon. On the more respectable end, there's Jordan B Peterson. I say respectable - he is, when you pay any degree of serious attention to what he's saying, almost completely insane - but in this context he is on the more urbane end of the spectrum. On the other end, we have figures like Andrew Tate, who unfortunately need no introduction. In the middle are the male influencer set, charging impossible amounts of money for insecure men to attend crash-courses on how to attract women.

As one of the 'alpha male boot camp' organisers told attendees: In the past, "low-status men got at least one girl that they could have sex with. Then, after birth control and the sexual revolution, we allowed people to choose more, and what women were choosing was the high-status men. Which is why you guys are here."

As you can tell by that quote, what's sold as a kind of men's self-help project is in fact an ideological programme grounded in hazy eugenics, Social Darwinism, latent anti-60s backlash and free market economics.

Under this worldview, human romantic and sexual attraction is interpreted as supply and demand, with people basically reduced to the status of goods traded on a network. If you see a prettier woman than the one you're dating, you trade in your old model and go for the updated one, the same way you would a phone. Women are expected to do the same. Everyone is a consumer - of human lives, as well as gadgets.

The basis by which the human consumers choose whether to rent or purchase each other is based on perceived social status. In men's case, this is denoted through strength, wealth, and confidence. The task for low status men is to either become, or to appear like, high status men. This makes up the vast majority of conversation on this topic online - a perpetual frenzied assessment of status. Incels supposedly have no sex and pick-up artists supposedly have lots of it, but they are entirely united by their basic world view.

This is a grim world. Humans are resources. High status humans are a scarce resource. You must become the strongest richest male, the dominant chimpanzee, to consume the best female resources. It is also a zero-sum world. It insists that to get what you want you must out-compete and exploit others. Everyone is out for themselves in the jungle. It has no social conscience. It is as self-concerned as it is self-involved.

Obviously, this is appalling. But more importantly, it is false. It is a lie. And because it is a lie, it will not actually get men what they want. It will not make them more desirable, in fact quite the opposite. It'll turn them into resentful, pathological crybaby freaks.

And where is the counter-narrative? The progressive left seemingly has no opinion on men getting laid. It has opinions on everything else. It has opinions on women getting laid (good for them), it has opinions on toxic masculinity (bad) and it has opinions on gender equality (there should be more of it). But it is completely silent on the subject of men getting laid - which, generally speaking, they are very interested in doing, and will continue to be interested in regardless of whether progressives want to talk about it. So the stage has been left entirely clear for the far-right to set the narrative, which it has done with devastating effect, monopolising young men's obsession with sex to spread a vicious fictitious storyline about power and identity.

What would a progressive narrative look like? First, it would not be motivated by fear and hatred of women. Second, it would consider masculinity healthy and valuable rather than being ashamed of it. Third, it would be comfortable talking about the fact that men want to get laid and offer advice for how they might do that if it's something they're struggling with. And finally, it would provide a true assessment of romance and attraction - one in which they were not societally zero-sum, but win-win.

That assessment would be grounded in the following truth: That the things which men can do to make themselves more attractive are things which actually improve society.

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Things are really intense when you're young. Sexual rejection is basically an existential experience. This is what makes young boys particularly vulnerable to bullshit artists online and it's why we're willing to erect whole ideological structures on the basis of someone just not being that into us.

It never occurs to you that someone simply didn't fancy you. Instead, their lack of interest is a rejection of your entire self. Not only is nothing about you valuable or attractive, nothing ever will be. Your character, your physique, your smell, your interests, your disposition, your life chances, your eyebrows - every one of these things have been refused in a take-it-or-leave-it bundle.

Early rejection therefore sting in a way that it will never sting again. It can plunge teenagers into a pit of self-hatred and savage, knife-wielding introspection. We watch the one we pined over go off with someone else and we feel a desperate sense of need and despair, a challenge not to our good fortune but to our whole sense of identity.

This doesn't necessarily get much better in our 20s. At this age, we often experience fierce sexual jealousy. The idea of your partner cheating on you can feel physically unbearable, because it is interpreted as a fundamental judgement on your adequacy as a man: physically, emotionally and socially, in terms of status.

This is the paranoia and insecurity that lies behind the whole dictionary of female cheating, from Chaucer's 'cuckold' to Twitter's 'cuck'. It establishes a rigidly hierarchical structure of male status and then insists that any unfortunate incident - she doesn't fancy you, she cheated on you - can only be explained by your low ranking within it.

None of this is true. It's all bullshit, invented by insecure men to make other men feel as petrified as they are.

The most important thing I ever read about dating was from a male writer who, upon being rejected one time, simply said: 'It's OK. I'm not for everyone.' This should be a mantra. It should, ideally, be accompanied with a shrug. Deeply internalising this sentiment will be the most liberating thing you can do.

This is the real reason why someone doesn't fancy you. It's not because you are unfanciable. It's not because you are fundamentally useless as a human being. It's not because you're minging. It's because you're not for everyone and as it happens you're not for this one. In the future, there will be women you are for: beautiful, funny, mischievous women. You just weren't for this one. And this one, incidentally, will have guys she's not for either.

People do not really cheat because they have found someone of a higher status and are unable to resist them. They cheat because they need the excitement of a fling to counteract the monotony of normal life, or their partner has started taking them for granted, or it had been too long since someone told them they were beautiful, or they're addicted to risk-taking, or their relationship is in a state of disrepair, or they need fresh sexual attention to alleviate their insecurity, or they just got pissed and fucked up.

As you get older, you begin to realise the boring, reassuring truth of all this. You don't have some great moment of revelation. You basically just increase the data set. With a data set of one, the teenager decides that a single rejection is a universal rejection for all time. With a much larger data set, the 30-year-old knows that other people will fancy them even if this one in particular doesn't. It sucks. But it sucks much less.

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Something else happens as you get older. Your idea of status becomes more complex and nuanced. In school, there are very clear frameworks for establishing success and high premiums on securing them. There is a particular emphasis on sport. There are only a set number of players for the team. There is one man of the match. There are winners and there are losers.

None of this suited me. I am very bad at nearly every activity which is coded as male. I am shit at every sport. I mean genuinely every single one. I have no sense of direction. I use my phone's maps function to navigate city streets I have lived in for a quarter of a century. My sense of spatial awareness is basically non-existent. I cannot drive. I failed my driving test five times. Indeed, I can't really be in charge of any vehicle, because I'll crash it. I actually hate all talk of vehicles - of car types, or brands, or horsepower, or - worst of all - routes. The entire subcategory of British male conversation based on routes - 'we got caught in a traffic jam on the M3', 'we took the Northern line then the overground to Kensal Rise' - drives me to despair. 'Who the fuck gives a fuck how you go here,' I think silently, 'you're here now and you're boring me to fucking tears.' I do not want to man the barbeque. I can't even comprehend what is going on in the minds of men when it comes to barbecues. You stare at them thinking: you're in insurance, you haven't become a hunter gatherer because you turned a sausage with a pair of tongs. I can't do DIY. I cannot open beer bottles by slamming them on the side of a table. My natural gestures are all camp. I could change them if I wanted to, but I don't want to. There's really almost no part of the traditional male world in which I am able to perform competently or even at all.

In school, this sort of thing is kind of a problem. The reason for that is that people keep making you do things you're evidently not good at and then evaluate your status on the basis of that performance. But after school, it stops. This is the thing, the crucial thing you must keep in mind throughout those years: eventually, it stops. If you don't like playing football you don't have to play football. If you don't like interpreting poems, you don't have to do that either. Your lifestyle starts to compliment your preferences, rather than rubbing up awkwardly against them. And the longer you spend in the world doing things you like and are good at, the more confident your demeanour becomes, the more natural you begin to feel in your skin.

Even if you struggle with all the standard definitions of masculinity - strength, confidence, sporting prowess - do not worry. There are other kinds of masculinity available to you that are just as attractive to women.

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The most dangerous and self-harming thing you can do as a man is to adopt the persona of the man you think you should be. That's what those bootcamps are really selling - an impersonation of masculinity, as understood through a rudimentary Social Darwinist frame. It's like thinking you can be an engineer because you bought a boiler suit and a spanner.

The key to real masculinity lies in the following point: It accomplishes social good. That sounds conscientious. It is. Proudly so. But it is also selfishly true. And these two things can coexist quite easily: your social conscience and your personal advantage.

The single most important masculine trait you can have is competence. Obviously, it isn't only men that have this trait and it isn't only women that find it attractive. But competence is much more often celebrated in masculinity than it is femininity. And, despite the fact that it is hardly ever mentioned in this type of discussion, it is probably the most desirable quality you can possess.

This comes in many forms. But in every single one of them, it can be learned.

There is the low-level daily type of competence: sorting the transport from the airport on holiday, dealing with the admin, booking where to eat, handling the insurance claim, making sure that damp problem in your hallway doesn't run out of control, clocking the bicycle that's going too fast and might hit someone you're with - taking care of the interminable daily chaff of life. This stuff is unimaginably boring, but it makes the people you're with feel protected.

Then there is the high-level professional type of competence: being good at whatever it is you have decided you want to do with your life, working hard to perfect the skills you possess, showing the discipline and work-ethic to accomplish it.

We all intuitively know this is attractive. This is partly the pleasure of action-films like John Wick - it's not just the presentation of the action, it is the joy of watching someone be terribly good at perpetrating it. It is the joy found in Aaron Sorkin dramas, or in watching professional sports, or in reality shows like Bake Off. It is simply very pleasant to watch someone do something very well.

Men get themselves into a terrible muddle when they become obsessed with securing female attention. It becomes a self-refuting prophecy. The more fixated they become, the more desperate they appear, and women can smell sexual desperation from the other side of the room. The best possible advice you can give to someone who is trying and failing to get this attention is to stop trying. If you run towards it, it will take a step away from you. If you turn your back on it, you will find it there in front of you.

Instead, dedicate yourself to your professional life or your personal interests. Whatever it is, paid or unpaid - a source of skill and accomplishment that you will seek to maximise through diligence and hard work. This will, in the end, make you much more attractive. You will present like what you have become: an impressive and talented person who cares about what they do, does it well, is in control of their life and can protect the people around them.

It will also, and this is not a bad corollary, do more good for the world. You will be operating in the most socially valuable way possible. You will have maximised your contribution.

You will make the world better. And by doing so you will improve yourself.

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You can see the same dynamic in the way you treat women. The key lesson here is very simple, although many men will never learn it: Don't objectify women, because it'll mess you up more than it messes them up.

I'm using this word in the old-school 1970s feminist way: turning a woman into an object. We don't deploy this phrase much anymore, I suppose because it became such a reflexive way of mocking feminism that people felt embarrassed to use it. In fact, it's a very helpful word.

How do the pick-up artists speak? As if a woman is a kind of safe, which requires the right code to access it. First you disparage her a bit, then make her laugh, then take your attention away: all this horrible manipulative gibberish. All of it completely useless. Even if you could sustain it, they would soon spot that there is something terribly wrong with you, as would most of the men you might want as friends. You will become a shell of a man, a character going through motions, while your inner life cascades towards complete personality failure.

There is a technique to talking to women which is far more effective. It is called: treat them like a fucking human being. Just actually talk to them. If you must, imagine that they are a man and then talk to them the way you would in that scenario. You will find that your status, if this is the key variable we're worrying about, has massively increased.

If you have a female friend on a dating site, ask her to do you a favour. Ask to see her inbox. It will be a highly revealing experience. There will be a lot of 'hey u ok?' There will be many obsequious introductions followed by suddenly aggressive responses if the woman doesn't reply. There will, of course, be unsolicited dick pics - less an appeal for approval than an attempted violation.

In short, there will be lots of messages from men who cannot really bring themselves to believe that these women have an internal life. They spent too much time watching the servile women of porn videos, or reading the crude IKEA-construction-guides of sexual attraction written by pick-up artists, or they simply view the whole enterprise like a maths puzzle where a certain number of introductions, no matter how redundant and lazy, will be able to trigger some sort of successful outcome.

Now consider how little warmth, humour and human authenticity it would take to stand out among these men. Shit, even the humour is often unnecessary. Simply being nice is enough. In fact, the importance of niceness is criminally underrated, both as a feature of humans in general and as a quality that attracts women. Nice guys do not finish last, except perhaps for in a few cut-throat industries. Generally speaking, they are the ones people want to work with, stay friends with, and spend time with. And people includes women.

Treating women like they are actual human beings will make you more attractive. It will also give you a richer, deeper life. We talk about the friendzone as if it was the worst thing that could happen to someone. Sometimes people will go further and tell you that men and women simply can never be friends. They will actively encourage you to impoverish your life in the same way they have theirs. In fact, life without friendships with the opposite sex is a barren, pointlessly stunted thing. There is probably no worse emotional punishment you can inflict on yourself.

Society is also improved by this approach. Men's treatment of women like objects isn't just about sexualisation - it's about making them into opaque things, objects of haunting indecipherable mystery which we cannot understand or therefore empathise with. That is where so many of our current problems come from - the chasm of incomprehension and the snarling vicious myths about status and power which are cultivated within it.

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This is one of the great privileges of being a man. The manosphere presents us with a zero-sum world in which the advantage of the individual comes at the cost of society. It places all of us under the yoke of a rigid social hierarchy.

There are some circumstances in which the net-zero analysis is correct. But generally we live in a world of mutual benefit, secured through decency and authenticity. The things you do which can make you more attractive are also the things which improve the society you live in.

You can have the life you want. And by pursuing it, you can make the world a better place. That seems a better story than the one of terror, insecurity and jealousy that we see play out online.

Odds and sods

You can hear this week's column as a podcast on Substack by clicking here.

Couple of pieces in the i paper this week. The first was on Starmer's plan to recognise Palestine and the second was on the attempt to bring influencers into government comms strategy. I'll be on BBC Radio 5 from 11am until noon today talking about the week in politics.

I've become obsessed with the new Skunk Anansie album, The Painful Truth. The 90s nostalgia of this summer is framed around Oasis, which is kind of disappointing given they're not releasing any new material and indeed haven't written a decent album since 1996. Other bands of the era are still churning out astonishingly good stuff - Blur, Pulp and Skunk Anansie in particular. The Painful truth is more mature than their early records, but if they released it in 1998 it would be considered a classic now. They are the same as they have ever been: angry, literate, expansive, eloquent, unafraid.

Skin is iconic. She is one of the last great rock stars. But there is something else which I want to briefly mention about her.

She recorded a video recently of an unsettling thing that happened to her while in a hotel. The thing that struck me was the quality of her voice when speaking. It has melody. It has these vast peaks and troughs, these rat-a-tat moments of speed followed by long stretches of leisurely pace.

I don't want to take this comparison too far, but the last time I felt this way was with Nina Simone. Her speech had that same sing-song quality, these incredible variations of pitch and rhythm. There is a good example of it here, in what might be my favourite interview of all time.

There are certain people who seem to vibrate musically, even when they are simply going about their daily life, who seem in contact with some kind of transcendent musicality even when chatting on a sofa or resting in bed. There aren't many contexts in which you can make valid comparisons with Simone. This is one of them.

Anyway, enough of that. See you next week.

U.S. president Donald Trump called Daylight Saving Time "very costly to our nation" and "inconvenient" in December. Today the Washington Post remembers he'd vowed his Republican party would use their "best efforts" to eliminate it. But it's still proving to be politically difficult... Polls have shown that most Americans oppose the time shifts but disagree on what should replace them... [U.S. political leaders] also say they are grappling with whether the nation should permanently move the clocks forward one hour, an idea championed by lawmakers on the coasts who say it would allow for more sunshine during the winter, or remain on year-round standard time, which is favored by neurologists who say it aligns with our circadian rhythms. That decision would rest with Congress, not the president. The split often reflects regional, not political, differences, based on where time zones fall; a year-round "spring forward" would mean winter sunrises that could creep past 9 a.m. in cities such as Indianapolis and Detroit, prompting many local lawmakers to oppose the idea... [A 2022 Senate vote to make Daylight Saving Time permanent] awoke a new lobbying effort from advocates such as the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, which warned that year-round daylight saving time would be unhealthy, citing risks such as higher rates of obesity or metabolic dysfunction. Some researchers warned of a condition dubbed "social jetlag," saying that internal body clocks and rhythms would be persistently misaligned if human clocks were permanently set forward an hour. The concerted resistance from the health groups — which some congressional aides jokingly referred to as "Big Sleep" — helped kill the measure in the House and has contributed to a stalemate over how to proceed... Today, roughly two-thirds of Americans want to end the clock changes, polls show. But even those Americans don't agree on what should come next. An October 2023 YouGov poll found that 33 percent of respondents wanted year-round daylight saving time, 23 percent wanted permanent standard time, and 9 percent had no preference. The remainder weren't sure or preferred to remain on the current system... The political fight is far from over, with Trump allies such as Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama) pledging to keep pushing for year-round daylight saving time. Some congressional Republicans also have privately called for a hearing in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, with hopes of advancing the Sunshine Protection Act.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists have long suspected a connection between the dust and poor respiratory health near the Salton Sea in California. But after years of research, recent findings have offered surprising new insights: The prime suspect is a naturally occurring toxin, embedded in the dust.

A previously unknown contributor to the popular open-source Android app store F-Droid repeatedly pressured its developers to push a code update that would have introduced a new vulnerability to the software, in what one of the developers described on Mastodon as a “similar kind of attempt as the Xz backdoor.” 

As the fallout of the Xz backdoor continues to rock the open source software community, people working on open source software are realizing (and reiterating) that a culture in which people often feel entitled to constant updates and additional features from volunteer coders presents a pretty large attack surface.

In the case of the Xz backdoor, a malicious actor was able to pressure the owner of a widely-used Linux compression utility called Xz Utils into making them a trusted maintainer of the project. They did this in part by arguing that the owner was letting the community of users down because they weren’t pushing new features and updates often enough, in the eyes of this malicious coder. You can read our full rundown here

Tuesday, Hans-Christoph Steiner, a longtime developer of F-Droid, explained that a very similar situation nearly led F-Droid to push an update that would have introduced a security vulnerability into the product three years ago: “Three years ago, F-Droid had a similar kind of attempt as the Xz backdoor,” he posted on Mastodon. “A new contributor submitted a merge request to improve the search, which was oft requested but the maintainers hadn't found time to work on.  There was also pressure from other random accounts to merge it. In the end, it became clear that it added a SQL injection vulnerability. In this case, we managed to catch it before it was merged.  Since similar tactics were used, I think it’s relevant now.”

Other open source developers and security experts have pointed to the dynamic of bullying and the general reliance on a small number of volunteer developers. They explained that it’s a problem across much of the open source software ecosystem, and is definitely a problem for the large tech companies and infrastructure who rely on these often volunteer-led projects to build their for-profit software on top of. 

Glyph, the founder of the Twisted python networking engine open source project, said the Xz Utils pressure campaign should “cause an industry-wide reckoning with the common practice of letting your entire goddamn product rest on the shoulders of one overworked person having a slow mental health crisis without financially or operationally supporting them whatsoever. I want everyone who has an open source dependency to read this message.” 

They then linked to an email in the Xz Utils listserv that shows a likely sockpuppet account arguing “Progress will not happen until there is new maintainer … The current maintainer lost interest or doesn't care to maintain anymore. It is sad to see for a repo like this.”

Meredith Whitaker, the president of Signal, said “I keep brooding on the way the xz backdoor was enabled in significant part via weaponizing the FOSS [free and open source software culture of shitty behavior and abuse.”

“What is striking is that the uncool, mean standards of FOSS conduct that many of us have decried for years, and that many defended as authentic, tough, etc., ended up not just being exclusionary loser behavior, but a significant attack surface.”

In the case of F-Droid, Steiner linked to the GitLab thread where a specific potential update was discussed. This thread shows how a pressure campaign can potentially compromise an open source project. 

In that thread, the now-banned developer who wanted to push code that would have added a vulnerability repeatedly demanded that their new feature be integrated into the live product immediately. As Steiner said, the new feature would have changed how people searched for apps on F-Droid. The potentially malicious user argued “the search results are pretty unusable currently,” and proposed new code. Over the course of months, that user kept writing things like “do we want to merge now?,” meaning push the code live and “I’d really like for this to get into the next release.” 

When other users, including Steiner, pointed out that they still needed to review the code, tweak it, or make adjustments to improve its functionality, the original user became angry, and other users backed the original poster. 

One other user, for example, argued “I’d like to get this merged for a release soon … is this perfect? No, but it doesn’t need to be. It just needs to be better than what we have now.” 

“The second big reason why I think this should be merged soon, is about encouraging new contributors,” the person arguing for inclusion added. “And not by saying ‘we welcome contributions’ and then never allowing any changes because they are not perfect. If people never get anything merged they'll most likely never spend any more time diving deeper into the codebase and tackling more complex tasks later on.”

The original poster wrote “at risk of sounding rude, I believe that this is a great change as it stands, and we have spent too long debating alternative implementations that I am not going to work on (I have a full-time job, and I will not spend my time on work that I believe to be worse than what I have already made). Please consider leaving new details to a future discussion or change and merging what we have now.”

Steiner argued that the code wasn’t ready to go, and that pushing it could “break things for many 10s of thousands of users.”

“I haven't seen any evidence that there is a sudden crisis caused by bad search. It’s been that way since the beginning. So we have time to get this right,” Steiner wrote.

The original poster continued to pressure Steiner and other maintainers of the code, and eventually wrote “nah man, I’m tired of this … I'm not coming back to this project until I see that contributions made in good faith are welcomed instead of fought every step of the way.”

When Steiner was finally able to audit the code, he found that it would have introduced a vulnerability that would have allowed for SQL injections, which is a very basic type of hack that could have crashed the app and would have also potentially introduced other problems. Steiner wrote at the time that he was unsure whether this was actively malicious or just sloppy, but noted that it was a “security risk” either way. 

“I wonder if this was an attempt to insert a SQL injection vuln? Or am I just paranoid?,” he wrote. “Anyone know anything about the original submitter?”

Steiner wrote this week that the original coder deleted their account as soon as F-Droid’s maintainers attempted to review the code, and that he thinks that the user’s behavior, as well as “all the attention from random new accounts” has led him to believe “it could be a deliberate attempt to insert the vuln.” 

In this case, the vulnerability ultimately wasn’t pushed to a live product, but it’s a very specific example of the types of pressures and culture that open source projects are constantly dealing with. (An aside: While on the F-Droid forum, I happened to also see two long threads in which a user said Steiner was acting with “scandal behavior” and deep bias because F-Droid had failed to properly implement official support for the constructed artificial language Esperanto into the app; Steiner repeatedly explained that Android itself did not support Esperanto and that was the issue.)

Regardless of intent, Steiner wrote that “clear communication definitely suffers when maintainers are overloaded, stressed out and feel ganged up on. I think that's another key takeaway from this current incident. For a well resourced actor, it is not too hard to social engineer themselves into a trusted position when projects get into that position. That happens all too often, unfortunately.”

In 2006, AP photographer Ben Curtis in 2006 took a photo of a Mickey Mouse doll laying on the ground in front an apartment building that had been blown up during Israel’s war against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Curtis was a war reporter and this image was one of nine images he transmitted that day. He’d traveled with a number of other reporters in a press pool as a way of insuring collective safety, and had limited time on the ground. He described the city as mostly empty, and the apartment building that had just been detonated as having been evacuated.

Soon after that, the photo’s success lead other photographers to start seeking out similar images of toys discarded beside exploded apartments. As more of these images started to get published, many began to ask questions as to whether these photos were being staged: had the photographers put these toys into the frames of these images?

Errol Morris talked to Curtis at length about the controversy surrounding that photo. Morris raises the point that the photo Curtis submitted didn’t say anything about victims. Nonetheless, readers could deduce, from the two symbols present in the image, that a child was killed in that building. Curtis notes that the caption describes only the known facts: it doesn’t say who the toy belonged to, doesn’t attempt to document casualties. Curtis didn’t know: the building was empty, many people had already fled the city.

Morris and Curtis walked through the details and documentation of that day, and I am confident Curtis found the doll where it was. But for the larger point of that image, no manipulation was needed. It said exactly what anyone wanted it to say.

It wasn’t the picture, it was the caption. The same image would be paired with commentary condemning Israel and editorials condemning Hezbollah. Some presented it as evidence of Israeli war crimes; others suggested it was evidence of Hezbollah’s use of human shields.

We are in the midst of a disinformation crisis. I didn’t select this example to make any kind of political point, as there are certainly people who could address that situation better than I could. I show it because 2006 marked a turning point in the history of digital manipulation. Because another Photoshopped image, found to be edited in manipulative ways, came to be circulated in major newspapers around the world.

Reuters photographer Adnan Hajj used the photoshop clone stamp tool to create and darken additional plumes of smoke. He submitted images where he copied and pasted fighter jets and added missile trails. Hajj has maintained that he was merely cleaning dust from the images. I don’t know Hajj’s motives. I can say that I have cleaned dust from images and it never introduced a fighter jet.

Today, similar imagery is being sold related to Gaza. This image of a teddy bear on the streets of a bombed city is presented when you search Adobe Stock photographs for pictures of Palestinians.

Adobe’s stock photo website is a marketplace where independent photographers and illustrators sell images. Adobe, which owns a generative AI tool called Firefly, has stated that AI generated images are fine to sell if creators label them correctly. This photo is labeled as “Generated with AI,” keeping in line with Adobe’s policies.

But the same photo has no restrictions on its use. Images of the bear could show up on news sites, blogs, or social media posts without any acknowledgement of its actual origins. This is already happening with many of these images. Adobe might argue that this is a computer-assisted illustration: a kind of hyperrealistic editorial cartoon. Most readers won’t see it that way. And other images would struggle to fit that definition, such as this one, which is labeled as a Palestinian refugee:

This refugee doesn’t exist. She is an amalgamation of a Western, English-language conception of refugees and of Gaza, rendered in a highly cinematic style. The always-brilliant Kelly Pendergrast put it this way on X:

Perhaps the creator of this image wanted to create compelling portraits of refugees in order to humanize the trauma of war. Or maybe they simply thought this image would sell. Perhaps they even thought to generate these images in order to muddy the waters of actual photojournalists and any horrors they might document. All of these have precedents long before AI or digital manipulation. And none of them matter. What matters is what these images do to channels of information.

They’re noise.

Noisy Channels

AI images are swept up into misinformation and disinformation. Those prefixes suggest the opposite of information, or it least, information that steers us astray. But maybe we should zoom out even further: what is information?

Claude Shannon was working at Bell Labs, the American telephone network where he did much of his work in the 1940s, when he sketched out a diagram of a communication system. It looked like this:

Information starts from a source. It moves from that source into a transmitter. Shannon was looking at telephones: you have something you want to say to your friend. You are the information source. You bring up a device — the telephone, an email, a passenger pigeon — and you use that device to transmit that message. Along the way this signal moves into the ether between the transmitter and the sender.

That’s when noise intervenes. Noise is the opposite of information, or the removal of information. In a message, it is the flipping of a symbol of communication in a way that distorts the original intention.

There are two sources of noise in this visualization. The first is noise from outside the system. The second is inside, when information breaks down in the transmission.

This could be a fog obscuring a flashing light meant to guide a pilot. There could be a degradation of signal, such as a glitched image occurring somewhere between the transmission from a digital camera into our hard drives. It started by understanding hiss over the telephone, but this was soon expanded to mean basically anything that interferes with the information source arriving intact to its destination.

Today, one of those things that changes the meaning of symbols is algorithms, ostensibly designed to remove noise from signal by amplifying things the receiver wants to see. In fact, they’re as much a form of interference with communication as a means of facilitating it.

Social media algorithms prioritize the wrong side of communication. They define noise as information that distracts the user from the platform. We tend to think these platforms are there to helps us share. If we don’t share, we think they are there to help us read what is shared.

None of that is the actual structure of the system. The system doesn’t show us what we sign up to see. It doesn’t share what we post to the people we want to see it.

The message in that system is advertising. Most of what we communicate on social media is considered noise which needs to be filtered out in order to facilitate the delivery of that advertising. We are the noise, and ads are the signal.

They de-prioritize content that brings people outside of the site, emphasize content that keeps us on. They amplify content that triggers engagement — be it rage or slamming the yes button — and reduce content that doesn’t excite, titillate, or move us.

It would be a mistake to treat synthetic images in isolation from their distribution channels. The famous AI photo of Donald Trump’s arrest is false information, a false depiction of a false event. The Trump images were shared with full transparency. As it moved through the network, noise was introduced: the caption was removed.

It isn’t just deepfakes that create noise in the channel. Labeling real images as deepfakes introduces noise, too. An early definition of disinformation — from Joshua Tucker & others in 2018, defined it as “the types of information that one could encounter online that could possibly lead to misperceptions about the actual state of the world.” It’s noise — and every AI generated image fits that category.

AI generated images are the opposite of information: they’re noise. The danger they pose isn’t so much what they depict. It’s that their existence has created a thin layer of noise over everything, because any image could be a fraud. To meet that goal — and it is a goal — they need the social media ecosystem to do their work.

Discourse Hacking

For about two years in San Francisco my research agenda included the rise of disinformation and misinformation: fake news. I came across the phrase “discourse hacking” out in the ether of policy discussions, but I can’t trace it back to a source. So, with apologies, here’s my attempt to define it.

Discourse Hacking is an arsenal of techniques that can be applied to disturb, or render impossible, meaningful political discourse and dialogue essential to the resolution of political disagreements. By undermining even the possibility of dialogue, you see a more alienated population, unable to resolve its conflicts through democratic means. This population is then more likely to withdraw from politics — toward apathy, or toward radicalization.

As an amplifying feedback loop, the more radicals you have, the harder politics becomes. The apathetic withdraw, the radicals drift deeper into entrenched positions, and dialogue becomes increasingly constrained. At its extreme, the feedback loop metastasizes into political violence or democratic collapse.

Fake news isn’t just lies, it’s lies in true contexts. It was real news clustered together alongside stories produced by propaganda outlets. Eventually, all reporting could be dismissed as fake news and cast it immediately into doubt. Another — (and this is perhaps where the term comes from) — was seeding fake documents into leaked archives of stolen documents, as happened with the Clinton campaign.

The intent of misinformation campaigns that were studied in 2016 was often misunderstood as a concentrated effort to move one side or another. But money flowed to right and left wing groups, and the goal was to create conflict between those groups, perhaps even violent conflict.

It was discourse hacking. Russian money and bot networks didn’t help, but it wasn’t necessary. The infrastructure of social media — “social mediation” — is oriented toward the amplification of conflict. We do it to ourselves. The algorithm is the noise, amplifying controversial and engaging content and minimizing nuance.

Expanding the Chasm

Anti-semitism and anti-Islamic online hate is framed as if there are two sides. However:

• Every individual person is a complex “side” and so there are millions

• Both Jews and Muslims are the targets of White Supremacist organizations.

The impossibility of dialogue between Gaza and Israel is not a result of technology companies. But the impossibility of dialogue between many of my friends absolutely is. Emotions are human, not technological. Our communication channels can only do so much, in the best of times, to address cycles of trauma and the politics they provoke.

Whenever we have the sensation that “there’s just no reasoning with these people,” we dehumanize them. We may find ourselves tempted to withdraw from dialogue. That withdrawal can lead to disempowerment or radicalization: either way, it’s a victory for the accelerationist politics of radical groups. Because even if they radicalize you against them, they’ve sped up the collapse. Diplomacy ends and wars begin when we convince ourselves that reasoning-with is impossible.

To be very clear, sometimes reasoning-with is impossible, and oftentimes that comes along with guns and fists or bombs. Violence comes when reason has been extinguished. For some, that’s the point — that’s the goal.

Meanwhile, clumping the goals and beliefs of everyday Israelis with Netanyahu and setting them together on “one” side, then lumping everyday Palestinians with Hamas on another, is one such radicalizing conflation. It expands the chasm in which reason and empathy for one another may still make a difference. The same kluge can be used to normalize anti-Semitism and shut down concerns for Palestinian civilians.

The goal of these efforts is not to spread lies. It’s to amplify noise. Social media is a very narrow channel: the bandwidth available to us is far too small for the burden of information we task it with carrying. Too often, we act as though the entire world should move through their wires. But the world cannot fit into these fiber optic networks. The systems reduce and compress that signal to manage. In reduction, information is lost. The world is compressed into symbols of yes or no: the possibly-maybe gets filtered, the hoping-for gets lost.

Social media is uniquely suited to produce this collapse of politics and to shave down our capacity for empathy. In minimizing the “boring” and mundane realities of our lives that bind us, in favor of the heated and exclamatory, the absurd and the frustrating, the orientations of these systems is closely aligned with the goals of discourse hacking. It’s baked in through technical means. It hardly matters if this is intentional or not — The Purpose of a System is What it Does.

Deep fakes are powerful not only because they can represent things that did not occur, but because they complicate events which almost certainly did. We don’t need to believe that a video is fake. If we decide that it is beyond the scope of determination, it can be dismissed as a shared point of reference for understanding the world and working toward a better one. It means one less thing we can agree on.

But people use images to tell the stories they want to tell, and they always have. Images — fake or real — don’t have to be believed as true in order to be believed. They simply have to suggest a truth, help us deny a truth, or allow a truth to be simplified.

Pictures do not have to be true to do this work. They only have to be useful.

(This is an extended version of a lecture on misinformation given to the Responsible AI program at ELISAVA Barcelona School of Design and Engineering on November 15, 2023.)