Episode 166: Transcript
Episode: 166: Manufacturing Loneliness
Transcription by Alexander
Annalee: [00:00:00] So, I have kind of a galaxy brain question. Are you ready?
Charlie Jane: [00:00:05] I am ready, yes.
Annalee: [00:00:07] So, what is the difference between being alone and being lonely?
Charlie Jane: [00:00:12] Oh, man. I mean, I actually almost think that they're two unrelated concepts in a way, because, like, there is that thing of being lonely in a crowd, which I've experienced so many times. Like, I never feel lonelier than, like, say, if I go to a party where I don't know anybody, and it's not one of those parties where people are, like, friendly and want to be like, “Hey, I've never met you, let's hang out.” But it's a party where, like, everybody is, like, friends with everybody else, and you're just sitting in the corner, like, “I guess I just am going to leave soon, because, like, I got all dressed up, and now people aren't talking to me, and I guess I'm just going to leave.”
[00:00:47] That's the loneliest I've ever felt. And, like, honestly, I'm personally somebody who could spend a lot of time by myself and be perfectly happy. Like, if I spent, like, three or four days alone without talking to another person, I do start to get a little bit, like, twitchy. But at the same time, I feel much lonelier when I'm in social situations where I'm being kind of not included. So I think that they're related, but they're separate concepts for sure. What do you think, Annalee?
Annalee: [00:01:11] Yeah, I think that's really true. And it's funny that we always lump them together, because I guess I think of being alone as kind of like the state of having privacy. It's like a place, like it's a physical place away from other people's opinions. And I think it can be really generative or like a healing experience to have that kind of aloneness. And it doesn't mean that you actually have to lock yourself in a little room or whatever. It just means like being in a space where you just feel like you don't have to worry about other people's opinions about you.
[00:01:44] And then I think like being lonely, like you were saying, it really doesn't have anything to do with being alone. In fact, being lonely is more like a feeling or a vibe. And it's like a sad, angry vibe where you're just like, “OK, there's a bunch of people around, but like they might as well be burning rocks for all I care because they're just like totally unpleasant to be around.” I don't know why I chose burning rocks. I guess I didn't want to like, you know, impugn any life forms. So I'm just like picking on rocks now. That's where I'm at.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:17] I think that's legit. We can burn some rocks.
Annalee: [00:02:19] Yeah, let's burn some rocks. Those are the worst. So I think like being alone is about having space and like being lonely is about feeling alienated.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:28] I mean, I also will miss a particular person like, you know, I miss you when we're not together.
Annalee: [00:02:34] Aw! I miss you, too.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:35] I miss other people in our lives who I care about. But, you know, we're talking to each other. We're not physically in the same space. I miss you when we're not together. I miss my cat when I'm not with him. I miss certain other humans a lot. So, you know, there are people I miss and there are people I carry on conversations with in my head if I'm not with them and actually able to speak to them using my mouth.
[00:02:56] I feel like especially the older I get, the less I want just human for the sake of humans. Like there are certain humans who I really like in certain communities that I really value. But it's like, would you rather be alone or be kind of in forced proximity with a group of people that you just have nothing in common with? I might just want to rather be alone, man.
Annalee: [00:03:15] Yeah. Well, today we're going to be talking about the experience of being alone and loneliness. You are listening to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction and the abrupt implosion of society.
[00:03:29] I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist and science fiction author. And my latest book is called Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. And boy, it's become annoyingly relevant, that book.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:46] Yeah, that psychological warfare just never seems to quite stop, unfortunately. I'm Charlie Jane Anders. My next book is called Lessons in Magic and Disaster. And it's about a young witch who teaches her mother how to do magic.
Annalee: [00:03:59] And it is amazing. So as I said earlier, we're going to be talking about loneliness today. We're going to talk about representations of being alone in science fiction, but especially common tropes about how being lonely or being alone makes you stronger or tears you apart. And later in the episode, I have an interview with Peter Pomerantsev, who's a researcher who studies authoritarianism and propaganda. And he is the author of a recent book called How to Win an Information War. And he has some really fascinating ideas about how loneliness helps to explain our current political moment in the United States.
[00:04:39] Also on our mini episode next week for patrons of the podcast, we will be answering questions that you asked us in Discord. And we have some extremely, extremely complex and sophisticated answers.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:54] So complex and sophisticated. Yeah, and by the way, we are fully listener-supported. Check us out at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. Now let's get lonely as a cloud.
[00:05:03] [OOAC theme plays. Science fiction synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]
Annalee: [00:05:36] We're in a loneliness epidemic right now, allegedly, in the United States. And this is something that has been part of a lot of trend pieces, really starting in like 2022. And it's based on the fact that over the past 10 years, there have been a number of surveys where people have self-reported experiencing loneliness more and more often.
[00:06:02] This is especially true for people between 18 and 25 and teenagers as well. The numbers of people saying that they feel painfully lonely once a week or once a month have been steadily rising since before the pandemic. And it's really important to note that because I think a lot of people say, “Oh, the loneliness epidemic is really because of shutdowns and lockdowns.” But in fact, these numbers really started to rise in 2017, 2018. So that's kind of the backdrop for why I got interested in this is because people have continued to talk in the media about like, how does this loneliness epidemic affect public health and how is it affecting all kinds of other parts of our lives?
[00:06:47] And it's interesting because our pop culture and especially science fiction have for a really long time focused on this idea of being alone or feeling lonely. It crops up a lot going way back, especially if you think about science fiction as growing out of basically adventure stories.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:09] Oh, yeah.
Annalee: [00:07:10] One of the really popular early adventure stories from 1719, early 18th century, is Robinson Caruso, which is about a guy who is shipwrecked on a Caribbean island and has to use his scientific rationality to build a bunch of gizmos and to survive. And of course, as many, many people have pointed out, including anyone who's ever read the book, it's sort of treated as a book about this lonely guy on an island, but he immediately meets a local guy named Friday, who he names Friday, who lives on the island who's black. And he kind of enlists Friday to become his manservant. So a lot of his ingenuity is really offloaded onto his Caribbean manservant.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:56] I have no one to rely on except for my manservant.
Annalee: [00:07:59] Who just happens to be a black guy. And this is, of course, again, the 18th century. So it's kind of the height of the slave trade in the Caribbean.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:06] What is he paying Friday?
Annalee: [00:08:07] He's like…
Charlie Jane: [00:08:08] What is Friday's salary?
Annalee: [00:08:09] He's giving him enlightenment. He's teaching him English, Christianity.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:13] He's explaining like John Locke. And like, you know…
Annalee: [00:08:21] He's giving him good, honest work. Just the sort of thing. I think Robinson Caruso, of course, is a figure who comes up all the time in science fiction. And people are always kind of referencing Robinson Caruso.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:35] I think he's a seminal figure.
Annalee: [00:08:36] Even like, say, a modern story like The Martian, which was a hugely popular novel and became a popular film, pretty much is a retelling of Robinson Caruso without the black manservant this time. I think a big part of science fiction is obsessed with what we call competence porn now, which is to say stories about people who use their individual ingenuity to get out of a scrape.
[00:09:02] You get everything from stranded people to really weird scenarios in science fiction where somehow people find themselves like inside of a giant invisible dome and they're all by themselves. Or somehow the physics of the universe transforms and like you're all alone on the planet. There's a movie called The Quiet Earth, which deals with that. There's an Austrian movie from 2012 called The Wall where like a woman just kind of goes out into the countryside and finds herself suddenly trapped behind a giant invisible wall with her friend's dog. It's actually a really upsetting movie that haunts me all the time.
[00:09:39] So I think there's this urge to see aloneness in science fiction as being this like virtue or something.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:47] Yeah. I mean, it goes back to what we talked about in our rugged individualism episode. It is part of the myth of like the frontier of like, it's not just American, but it's a very American idea of like one person who's if they're really strong, if they're really clever, if they're really resourceful, can survive on their own. And that is 100% the fantasy that underlies The Martian and like countless other similar stories.
[00:10:12] It is this weird, you know, notion of just being so awesome that you don't need other people. And then, you know, inevitably other people show up and there's like, how do you deal with other people? But you know, I think that it is this thing that we dream about this idea that we won't need other people because needing other people can be really inconvenient. It can be really difficult. Other people expect stuff from you. They place obligations on you. And yeah, I think that the notion of the explorer, which is a huge thing in science fiction is sort of inseparable from this idea of being on your own or being in a small group and like making your way through a potentially hostile situation.
Annalee: [00:10:54] Yeah, there's a couple of other ways that science fiction stories get at this. One of them is the idea, not that you're alone and competent, but that you've actually been abandoned and that you're kind of just like stumbling your way through this. And it's a really horrific, like I was thinking of the album by Clipping called Splendor and Misery, which is about a guy who he's been enslaved. He's on a spaceship. It's a generation ship. He wakes up and he murders the crew as you do when you're enslaved and you find out that you're trapped on a ship with a bunch of slave masters.
[00:11:34] And then the whole album is sort of about what happens to him while he's alone on the ship with the AI. And kind of facing himself, but not from a position of power. He's not Robinson Crusoe.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:46] It's such a great album. I love that album. I've listened to it so many times. Yeah, and I feel like this is this interesting sort of intersection between a few different science fictional tropes or ideas. So, Annalee, do you think that it matters if people have like chosen to be alone? Like they've gone on a voyage of exploration. They've decided to kind of separate themselves from humanity versus like being forced to be alone by circumstances.
Annalee: [00:12:11] I mean, I think that's the difference between something like Splendor and Misery, the album, or say a show like Scavengers Reign that we've talked about a lot where a group of people crash land on a hostile alien planet and are just, again, kind of stumbling around like the opposite of Robinson Crusoe. They're being kind of victimized by their surroundings. So there's that. And then I think there's this other model of choosing to be alone, which I think one of the most iconic stories in that vein is a 1970s movie called Silent Running, which is about how Earth has suffered a horrific environmental disaster. Basically, there's no more nature…
Charlie Jane: [00:12:55] There’s been a collapse.
Annalee: [00:12:55] Yeah, there's been a total collapse. There's no more nature left. So a spaceship has been launched that has four ecosystems in it, these four bubbles that contain the last remaining ecosystems of Earth and a human and a bunch of robots are taking care of the ecosystems. And then I think there's like budget cuts or anyway, or maybe they run out of energy. It's some horrible and deeply believable thing. And basically, they're told the guy running the spaceship is told you have to jettison all of these ecosystems into space. We can't take care of them anymore. And so he chooses to jettison himself along with the robots in one of the ecosystems that he loves the most. And so he's going to be alone for the rest of his days with these caretaker robots just with this ecosystem and it's bleak, but also kind of weirdly beautiful at the same time.
[00:13:50] And I feel like there's a really strong theme in all of these stories about being alone, where humans are kind of bonding with nature and like nature becomes more of a friend than other humans. I mean, not that humans aren't part of nature, but like non-human nature becomes another part of that. So there's something kind of almost cozy or beautiful about it.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:14] But kind of melancholy at the same time.
Annalee: [00:14:17] It is melancholy. It's its own kind of subgenre of the alone trope, because, you know, this is someone who's like, yeah, I'd rather be by myself than be around people who've rejected nature. So it's not like I crash landed on a planet, you know?
Charlie Jane: [00:14:38] I feel like the late 60s and early 70s are like this heyday of stories about a person who's alone, either in space or a post-apocalyptic world. You know, you have like all these Charlton Heston movies where he's the only guy left in a world full of apes or a world full of zombies or like blah, blah, blah. You have like Logan's Run. You have Silent Running. You have 2001, where there's a lot of loneliness in space. There's just a lot of like people who are kind of alone in like harsh, very sterile situations where nature is this thing they’ve never tried to connect to, and they've been isolated from other humans.
[00:15:14] And then I feel like that goes away in the midst of late 70s when you start to see the rise of like movies like Star Wars and Close Encounters and stuff where it's more just like awe and like fun and the big blockbuster movie begins as we know it. And then when you see people who are on their own in like 80s movies, I feel like it's much more of like an action movie thing where it's like one guy alone who's like the super tough guy who's like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone or, you know, Bruce Willis, I guess, in Die Hard, who's like the one guy who's going to like survive in a tough situation because he's so smart.
Annalee: [00:15:48] It gets back to the competence porn.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:50] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:15:50] I was going to note you mentioned, you know, Close Encounters, which the tagline is “We are not alone”.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:57] Right.
Annalee: [00:15:58] So, you know, it's very much about like, you know, we're not alone anymore. I want to shift gears to talk about science fiction that's explicitly about being lonely. I feel like you were sort of touching on that by mentioning some of those apocalyptic stories, because I think generally when you have an apocalypse, that is something associated more with the pain of loneliness as opposed to the kind of rugged individualist competence of being alone.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:27] Right.
Annalee: [00:16:27] And I think, you know, a movie like I Am Legend with Will Smith is really a great example of that kind of loneliness because it's not about everybody being gone. It's about the fact that he is the only one of the only humans left in a world full of zombies. And you see this in something like the show The Last of Us where, you know, yeah, there's humans around, but a lot of the humans have gone feral. And then the vast majority of humans have become a giant underground, like fungus creature. And so again, there's like, it's not just being alone. You're like surrounded by sentient life. It's just that you can't connect with any of it.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:15] Right.
Annalee: [00:17:16] And I think this is when people talk about the loneliness epidemic. I think this is really the core of it is that there's a ton of people out there, but I don't relate to any of them because either they're a giant fungus or they're just not good enough to understand me.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:33] Sure. I mean, I think the chosen one trope in general is about kind of a type of loneliness where you've been singled out.
Annalee: [00:17:39] Oh, interesting.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:40] And you're like the most special and you're the most perfect. But at the same time, no one can understand your burden. And like, I hate to bring up Harry Potter because like, you know, fuck Harry Potter. But the amount of angst that you see in Harry Potter, the amount of like caps lock yelling, especially as the series goes on where like Harry is just like “Nobody understands the burden I carry. Nobody understands me.” You know, and they're camping in the middle of nowhere in the final book and like everything is bad and they're freaking out.
[00:18:10] It's this thing of like when you're like the most wonderful, the most special, nobody can possibly understand how hard it is. And so you are kind of isolated in this very specific way because you're just too awesome.
Annalee: [00:18:22] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:22] It's just you're too awesome and nobody can handle how awesome you are. You know?
Annalee: [00:18:26] People often talk about how the novel Slan by A.E. Van Vogt, which came out in 1940, is kind of the first example of that about like super powered mutants who are also kind of nerds, you know, and so it became this, I guess, war cry of nerds in the mid 20th century that “Slan is fan”, meaning like fandom itself, this world of dorky people who love spaceships and science are actually super powered and like the mutants. Obviously, the X-Men are another version of that.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:59] Yeah. I'd also bring up More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon.
Annalee: [00:19:02] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:03] We started out by talking about male loneliness, and I kind of want to bring it back to that because I feel like there is a gendered component to this and like you do occasionally see stories about women who are isolated in this way or who are lonely or but I think that the idea that you can surmount overcome loneliness through like vigor and like inventiveness and like survival skills is a very male idea. It's a thing that's like very gendered in pop culture and science fiction.
[00:19:33] And like you see counter examples that are fairly recent, like I would bring up Gravity, the movie starring Sandra Bullock.
Annalee: [00:19:40] Such a good example.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:40] Where she's alone in space. She's so lonesome and messed up that, spoiler alert, she hallucinates George Clooney showing up to like keep her company. Like there's a whole section of the movie where she has a George Clooney hallucination, which we've all been there.
Annalee: [00:19:57] Yeah, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:57] I've hallucinated George Clooney many times. Sometimes I think my cat is George Clooney. Sometimes my cat thinks he's George Clooney too.
Annalee: [00:20:04] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:04] And she gets to be kind of the Martian. She gets to be like the hyper competent kind of person. But she also has to grapple with loneliness. She has the kind of two sides of that dichotomy. But I'm actually racking my brains to think of, especially in movies and TV, other storylines where you see a woman in that situation or someone who's not a cis man.
Annalee: [00:20:23] Yeah. I mean, the movie that I mentioned earlier, The Wall, which is this Austrian movie from 2012, it is about a woman who is alone. And like I said, I mean, it's a great movie, but I would not recommend it right now. It is so incredibly upsetting. And she actually, again, spoilers for a movie that came out a long time ago. She does actually run across eventually a guy and has to get rid of him because he's terrible.
[00:20:44] And I was going to say, like, I didn't mention this at the top, but one of the things about the loneliness epidemic, as you said, is that it seems to strike men more often than women. And so it makes sense that we have all these stories about the different ways that men become lonely. One that really sticks out to me, partly because we have to talk about Doctor Who at least once per episode, is that there's a trope of being unstuck time and that creating loneliness. And I think about the main character in Slaughterhouse-Five, who's literally drifting through time as a result of trauma. But then there's the Doctor in Doctor Who, who part of his burden or part of her burden is that they never can be in one time for any length of time, except for that one moment in the early seventies with Unit, but blah, blah, blah.
[00:21:35] The point is that being out of time, being unstuck from time has a really interesting, like, political undercurrent to it. It's a way of saying, like, it can sometimes mean “I'm from the past and I don't relate to you modern whippersnappers”, or it can be “I'm from the future and you guys are so backwards that I can't possibly relate to you.” And either way, it leads to this kind of sense of superiority and alienation because, like, “I'm in this world that can't catch up to me or that has gone too far.”
Charlie Jane: [00:22:06] Right. Yeah. Or, you know, think of the savage in Brave New World. I mean, the guy who is, like, in a society but rejects that society or is rejected by that society or can't understand the society because it's so backward and weird, like John Carter is another one, like Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I feel like this is woven into the DNA of science fiction. And again, it is usually male coded heroes. Occasionally you get a female coded hero who this happens to, but it's usually a male coded hero who is dropped into a society that is so foreign and so illogical like Gulliver's Travels that, you know, he is just unable to relate to people. And so he's functionally alone, even though he's in this society. I think that that's a very common trope.
Annalee: [00:22:52] We do have the example of Star Trek: Discovery.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:54] Sure.
Annalee: [00:22:54] Where we have, you know, a ship that is out of time, a whole ship full of people led by a woman, and they're having to cope with being in this futuristic time. So that's a really good example because I think Burnham, the captain of Discovery, we see all these different things that she has to do to survive in a future that's completely... So it's like hundreds of years in the future.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:18] Right.
Annalee: [00:23:18] There's also Connie Willis's novel, The Doomsday Book, which is also about someone who's unstuck from time, someone from the future who travels back to the 14th century plague era.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:29] I love that book.
Annalee: [00:23:30] It's fantastic. I mean, it's obviously one of her classic books, but the main character does have to... There's a bit of competence porn where she has to rapidly acclimate to her surroundings, but there's also an element of loneliness because she's in a village where everyone is dying of the plague and there's nothing she can do.
[00:23:48] Speaking of the plague, one other thing I want to mention before we wind up is that another trope in loneliness stories with men often is that there's been a genocide.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:01] Sure.
Annalee: [00:24:01] And this is the case with the new Doctor and Doctor Who, all of their...
Charlie Jane: [00:24:06] All the Time Lords are dead.
Annalee: [00:24:07] Yeah. Yeah. Gallifrey has been destroyed. This is something in the new timeline of Star Trek where Vulcan has been destroyed and Spock is alone. And we see it actually in Discovery where Booker, who is Burnham's partner, loses his planet and he's alone except for maybe one other person.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:29] The last of their kind. It's like a huge thing.
Annalee: [00:24:31] Yeah. And I think it's especially... It comes up again and again in science fiction, not surprisingly starting in the mid 20th century, where genocide becomes a big part of warfare. I mean, not that it wasn't before that, but it sort of re-enters Western science fiction at that time. And I think it's still a huge part of how we think about loneliness.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:56] Yeah. I guess I have a final thought, which is that, you know, in the real world, when you think about loneliness, my mind keeps going back to these debates that we were having like 10, 15 years ago about basically social media, but we weren't calling it that back then.
[00:25:11] About like whether people were becoming more isolated by technology and whether the fact that everybody was looking at their phones, once we got smartphones in 2007 or whatever, everybody was like spending more and more time on the computer or whatever.
Annalee: [00:25:23] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:23] And less and less time, you know, going bowling or, you know, whatever.
Annalee: [00:25:27] Going to church.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:28] Going to church, you know, whatever. And on the one hand, you had a lot of people in like big major publications who were saying, this is isolating people. People are not forming the relationships that they need to form. And on the other side, there were people, I think, including us, who were like, “No, people are socializing on the internet. People are socializing through their phones. When you see someone staring at their phone, they're socializing.”
[00:25:50] And I think that in the end, both sides ended up being right and wrong because part of what happened is that as the sort of rise of algorithmic, you know, systems kind of took over social media and as our conversation on social media became much more about like winning or losing an interaction rather than like making connections with people. For me, at least, that's when it became more lonely and more isolating.
[00:26:15] And I actually, I'm really glad I'm no longer on Twitter because I think Twitter made me feel incredibly lonely when I was on it because I felt like I couldn't communicate with people on there because of the way that communication had to happen on there where everything had to be like a chance to attack someone. If you could spot an opening, you could pounce and attack them and tear them apart. And that was the kind of the gamification of that system.
Annalee: [00:26:35] Yeah. Your point about algorithmic shaping is so important. Because I think we tend to want to blame the technology as opposed to how the technology is being run by the people who own it. And what algorithms do is they're literally loneliness machines because when you join a social network that is algorithmically shaped, even if you try to reach out to your friends and make connections with them, those aren't the posts that you'll see because you're seeing whatever the algorithm wants to surface.
[00:27:10] And so you get the illusion that your friends have disappeared and you're surrounded by strangers who are yelling about random shit that you don't care about. And so that can be an addictive experience for people because then they're like, “But where are my friends? How can I find my friends?”
Charlie Jane: [00:27:25] “And how can I win these arguments that I didn't care about an hour ago?”
Annalee: [00:27:28] Right. Well, there's that too, which is a whole other discussion. But I think that if we want to understand why social media makes people lonely, it's not because the nature of the media, it's the nature of these algorithms. If we had kind of social media that is unshaped by algorithms, then you see your friends talking. And I think that's why people are excited about Bluesky right now, because there is no algorithmic shaping. If you sign up to follow people, you actually see them and you like form friendships. It's wild.
[00:28:00] I want to return briefly to the formulation I started with, which is that there's science fiction about being alone, where it's kind of viewed as positive, where it's like a chance to be competent. It's a chance to adventure and discover new things. And then there's stories about loneliness, where it's all about how you're surrounded by toxic people who don't understand you. You're unstuck in time. Your whole world has been destroyed by genocide. These are very polarizing ways of looking at it. And I want to ask you if you think that we're kind of getting it wrong by having all these stories about aloneness being positive and loneliness being toxic.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:39] I think there's a reason why so much of our most popular speculative fiction of the last few years has been, quote unquote, cozy stuff, which tends to focus on community more, tends to focus on people forming connections, people finding meaning from each other. But also part of what we do have to do is when we see something that kind of like valorizes the individual who is alone and thriving, you should just like look for the manservant, like look for the manservant.
Annalee: [00:29:06] Where is his man, Friday?
Charlie Jane: [00:29:09] There's always a fucking manservant. Just pull the camera over a little bit and be like, look over here, this guy's doing all the dishes. Always find the manservant. That's my final thought, I guess.
Annalee: [00:29:20] Yeah. And remember that loneliness is something that's done to us. All of these scenarios that we see of loneliness are about things like, I said, genocide or people deciding that the society around them is inferior to them. That's not something that is inherent. It's not like you've been washed up on an island. And so look for the cozy stuff for community and try to reject that toxic masculinity, basically.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:51] Basically. Yep. Always a good rule of thumb.
Annalee: [00:29:54] OK, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, I'll be talking with Peter Pomerantsev about loneliness and authoritarianism.
[00:30:02] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
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[00:31:09] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:31:12] Peter Pomerantseff is a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University. He's the award winning author of several books on propaganda and his most recent is How to Win an Information War, which came out this year. It is an incredible book. Welcome to the show, Peter.
Peter: [00:31:27] Thank you for having me.
Annalee: [00:31:29] So this is a book about fighting fascist propaganda during World War II. And you begin by talking about the allure of fascism. Basically, why would people be pulled into it? And one of the reasons you talk about is loneliness, which I thought was such a powerful observation. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how loneliness might radicalize people into being fascists.
Peter: [00:31:55] So I mean, the line is worth taking a step back for a second. So the line, “Propaganda is the cure for loneliness” is a line from Jacques Ellul, who's one of my favorite philosophers who looks at propaganda more generally. And he's not talking about fascism. He's just talking about modernity, you know, really the start of the 20th century or the end of the 19th century. And as people leave the kind of more familiar surroundings of the village and come to huge cities and you have industrialization, people become very atomized. They no longer have the old bonds and communities they had.
[00:32:31] And in what he calls this technological age, propaganda becomes the only thing that can bind people. You know, it's the only... It replaces the community of the village with the community of the myth and the story. That's what he's talking about. He's talking about propaganda being the inevitable glue that bonds people in a time of atomization. He's not talking about fascism per se. He's talking about the state of modern man, so to speak.
Annalee: [00:33:01] So in the book, you sort of tie this into why, especially during the rise of Nazism and that sort of brand of fascism, why that kind of propaganda would have appealed to people who were lonely. Do you think there's something there, like, that loneliness might drive people toward authoritarianism? Or are you more interested in the idea that anyone who's lonely is vulnerable to propaganda of whatever kind?
Peter: [00:33:28] Yeah, I don't think we're talking about individual loneliness. I think, you know, we're all lonely. But look, I think it creates the space within which all sorts of propaganda are possible, but potentially an authoritarian one. I mean, the main thing that I'm thinking about in the book and I think is relevant today and definitely relevant to Germany of the 1920s was that a time of, like, vast social change where old identities, you know, are being disturbed, where forms of life, sort of economic models are being disturbed, where, you know, notions of class are being disrupted. So in that kind of flux and that chaos, people feel very disorientated.
[00:34:12] And a propaganda that creates common identity is particularly powerful. You know, the manipulator propagandists can step in and do all sorts of nasty things. So in that case, I do think there's a parallel. I mean, I think COVID is a very interesting moment. You know, people were feeling very atomized during COVID, obviously, sort of all locked away. And that's a point where kind of things like QAnon get turbocharged.
[00:34:39] People lean towards conspiracy theories, which are, you know, out of the many functions they serve, but a way of defining an “us”, defining a community. They're very good at that. They sort of get turbocharged during something like COVID.
[00:34:55] But this is happening all across the world, you know, as we go through massive technological, social, economic change, there is a weakening of common identities. And that provides a space for all sorts of nasty things.
Annalee: [00:35:08] Yeah, I mean…There's a discussion right now in sort of public health and in the media about how there's a kind of loneliness epidemic, especially among young people in the States, but I think also globally. And I wonder if that's also kind of playing into that dynamic that you're talking about.
Peter: [00:35:26] What Ellul described very powerfully was kind of like the phenomenon of being in this kind of in the vast crowd of the city, where you're kind of swept along and you feel completely powerless and you have no control over your life. You're just a slave to these huge kind of like economic headwinds and industrial headwinds and lots of theory there about like even your job, you're not really in charge of what you do. You're just like, you know, one little spigot in a larger chain of economic production. And you feel completely sort of like you feel you have no control, basically.
[00:35:58] And in that lack of control, the magic of propaganda will both give you a place and a meaning and will give you a fake sense of empowerment. It will replace your sense of a lack of control with a sense of you know, that you can experience power through the leader or through the group. And I wonder whether a bit of that is happening today. People feel increasingly, you know, when you look at various sort of bits of sociology, that they have no control. The world is chaotic, that everything's changing, that they don't matter. They can't predict the future. And in that context, a propaganda that promises you to feel power through a leader becomes particularly seductive.
Annalee: [00:36:41] Yeah, through and through a group of people who are following that leader. So you're like, you automatically get some buddies, plus you get like a big daddy figure to like lead you and your buddies. It's like a great way to feel connected.
Peter: [00:36:54] Yeah, totally, totally.
Annalee: [00:36:55] So, okay, I want to talk a little bit about fighting fascist propaganda. And obviously, you've studied this a lot. And in your new book, How to Win an Information War, you have this incredible story of Sefton Delmer, who basically uses satire to fight Hitler. I know it's more complicated than that. So can you tell us his story and how he went about his fight against fascist propaganda?
Peter: [00:37:22] Yeah, I mean, I'd be careful calling it satire. That's not quite what he's doing. I mean, the BBC German service had satirical programs, like, you know, they had like a satirical Nazi character that you were meant to laugh at. Delmer wasn't doing that. Delmer created actually, you know, what we today would call what looks like fake news. He created all these sort of radio stations that pretended to be Nazi radio stations, but would have like the Nazi news on them and speeches by Goebbels. And then right next to them, very well researched, gritty detail about the lives of ordinary soldiers, which compromised the Nazis and made them look terrible. And these kind of invectives by, you know, angry soldiers who would be, you know, on the surface Nazi, but railing against the corruption of Nazi officials.
[00:38:10] So in that sense, he was doing something that, you know, the Russians do in America all the time, you know, setting up these fake Twitter handles which pretend to be American, but then kind of complain about corruption in the US or something. But what made it interesting was that he wanted Germans to know that these are the British, well, cosplaying Nazis. And he wanted them to know it, to kind of go, “look, we can imitate Nazis so convincingly, doesn't that undermine the reality of what the Nazis are doing? If we can imitate them and parody them so accurately, do you actually need to be emotionally attached to the Nazis?”
[00:38:48] So in the sense, yes, he is working in parody, but not quite in satire. It's closer to what Brecht would call alienation. You know, when you're kind of echoing something and mirroring something to the extent that you're undermining the power of the former. It's almost like standing next to somebody and repeating what they're saying in a slightly distorted way to undermine them.
Annalee: [00:39:10] So these were radio broadcasts and they were aimed at Germans, right?
Peter: [00:39:15] Yeah, they were in German.
Annalee: [00:39:16] So they're in German. They're aimed at Germans. So people in Nazi Germany are picking up these radio shows. And so at first, it might seem like real news because they're getting, you know, actual information like they would get from Deutsche Welle. But then it's suddenly there's this other stuff going on where they're pretending to be grumpy soldiers. What kinds of stuff would they say when they were pretending to be Nazi soldiers?
Peter: [00:39:42] So it was incredibly well researched. So just to be clear, there were dozens of these stations. Around half of German soldiers listened to them. They were among the most popular stations in Germany. The SS were constantly freaking out about them. So this wasn't like a small psy-op. These were a huge counter propaganda push which really burst the Nazi echo chamber. So this is not something small. This was something really rather at scale. Delmer was working with a staff of hundreds in a country house outside London. They had the most powerful radio transmitter in the world, which they bought off the Americans. And a lot of people from the German cabaret scene were working there, playing these soldiers. A lot of German POWs, a lot of famous novelists. Ian Fleming, the author of James Bond, kind of made the whole thing possible. He was working very closely with it from Naval Intelligence.
[00:40:33] This is a vast undertaking. And with like live music and live news, like almost 24-hour or I think eight hour sort of like non-stop radio. It was incredibly well-researched. Through a whole bunch of means, Delmer had incredible detail about the corruption of mid-level Nazi officials, of what life was like for the soldier on the front, what life was like in medium-sized German cities. There was a lot of pornography as well. There was hugely detailed scenes of the sexual lives of corrupt Nazi officials, sort of these descriptions of orgies that you were meant to be outraged by, but actually were just meant to kind of like make you lose faith in the moral leadership of the Nazis.
[00:41:18] It would have sounded a lot like, I don't know, Rush Limbaugh. It would have sounded a lot like sort of talk radio. “And here's Hans, you know, the listener from Queens, talking about how pissed off he is about like how the local Nazi housing officials are, you know, raising the rents on properties and giving them to their chums instead of letting goods soldiers who just come back from the front use them.”
[00:41:42] Or incredibly detailed descriptions of how bad the food was on the front. I mean, that sort of stuff. The voice of the soldier and the voice of the citizen.
Annalee: [00:41:51] Yeah, appealing to regular people who were tuning in. And so you were saying also it was and it was based on intelligence, right? Like they were getting stuff from spies or from people who were...
Peter: [00:42:00] Incredible detail. I mean, and that's like the huge push that he was doing. He was getting stuff from partisans. So you have like French partisans would be tasked to find out, you know, what car is the local Nazi official in Calais driving and where did he get the money from? They'd go to bars and brothels with German soldiers hung out, find out who are people complaining about? What's the latest jokes? What are people pissed off about?
[00:42:23] Also, the British put, well, famously, they put sort of secret microphones in prisoner of war camps. This was to gain intelligence. But they'd then give Delmer these transcripts or give his team these transcripts. And he would go through them finding out, you know, what is the latest slang? What are the latest jokes? What are the latest rumours around?
Annalee: [00:42:43] They were getting the latest memes, yeah.
Peter: [00:42:44] Getting the latest... He was obsessed with language. And the latest info, the latest gossip. So it felt as if it was coming from people's lives and people listening to it were going to go, “Oh, my God, this is the British doing a station, which sounds just like a Nazi station, but it's kind of anti-Nazi - knowing details about my life that the Nazis don't know.” You know, it's this incredible exercise saying like we can imitate Nazi language as well as the Nazis.We can give you details about your life which are better than the Nazis. Do you really need to follow these guys? Do you really need to associate yourselves with these guys in this time of loneliness where the Nazi propaganda had given you a home and given you an empowerment?
[00:43:26] They were sort of saying, well, we can do this too. We can do it better. And ultimately, Delmer's media was actually all about getting people to take control themselves and have agency themselves. So the ultimate mission of it was to get people to go, “Okay, I don't need to follow the leader. I don't need to follow the group. I can look out for myself.” And it was full of these tips about how to sabotage U-boats, for example, all done with great outrage. Like, isn't it shocking that dastardly German traitors have been learning how to sabotage their own U-boats and not go to sea and thus avoid dying? We are appalled by this news and then give you the details how to do it and give you the details of how to fake various types of pretty gross illnesses that get sent home from the front or just generally with great outrage tell about the black market economy to encourage people to use it.
[00:44:17] So constantly encouraging people to take a step away from this group identity that the Nazis have developed for you and strike out for your own, look after yourself, take back control, have agency, but at the same time, also stressing your other bonds, the bonds of family, the bonds of religion, the bonds of region as a counterbalance to the Nazi common identity, the folk. That was the great Nazi project to create this sort of idea of the people led by the leader.
[00:44:48] So that's what Delmer was doing. He was sort of undermining the Nazi propaganda model while giving people an alternative common identity, encouraging them to recover their agency and breaking the Nazi monopoly on strong feelings. He was very aware. He'd seen the growth of Nazi propaganda close up. He'd lived in Germany a lot. He was very aware how one of the great attractions of Nazi propaganda is that it let ordinary middle class Germans, who are usually quite reserved, let out all their most powerful, aggressive feelings.
[00:45:25] He describes in great detail the sight of these sort of middle class citizens at a Nazi rally, sort of just being full of the orgy of aggression that it allowed them to experience. And he was very clear that you had to go there. You couldn't do this sort of prissy media that just preached democracy to people. You had to tap into those emotions, embrace sex and aggression, basically, but then take them to a very different place than the Nazis were.
Annalee: [00:45:55] Yeah, that's so interesting. It was making me think about recently the satirical American paper The Onion was bought by Ben Collins, who used to be a disinformation reporter in regular media, non-satirical media. And he just bought the Infowars website.
Peter: [00:46:13] Yes, I saw that.
Annalee: [00:46:13] Yeah, which previously was owned by the conspiracy influencer Alex Jones, who was sued into oblivion. And so now The Onion is planning to turn the website, the Infowars website, into a satire site. And I wonder, do you think that's a little bit Sefton Delmer-y? Or is that some other kind of operation?
Peter: [00:46:37] Look, it depends what you're doing. So satire is a very broad thing. So there's a lot of satire, which is just about making us feel good about ourselves. I don't think it does anything to disrupt the relationship between authoritarian propaganda and its followers. Delmer was doing something different. Delmer wasn't trying to make German liberals feel good about themselves. He was kind of scathing about most of the opposition German media and the German service at the BBC. He basically said, well, in today's language, you'd say “you are stuck in your echo chamber talking to yourself.”
[00:47:12] So, he was like, you've got to dive in and understand the relationship between the leader and his followers. And you've got to start disrupting that. You've got to break their echo chamber. That's what he was trying to do.
[00:47:23] So is satire one of the things you can use? Sure. But I don't think the sort of, you know, John Oliver, that type of liberal satire, which makes us feel great about ourselves, has any role in that at all. If anything, it can put people down. I mean, if you're humiliating people, for their habits, you're probably not going to win them over.
[00:47:44] So Delmer was doing something way more subversive, just much cleverer psychologically and much, much, much more trickster. He often used to talk of himself as a kind of trickster. I mean, I have no idea what they want to do with Infowars. But now it would be something else. It's not about being deceptive. I don't think there's any need to be deceptive. But it would be like having a sort of like a comedian, a bro comedian who is actually taking you into, you know, along the manosphere line and at the last minute, veering off and turning it against or turning you away from the Hegseth’s of this world.
[00:48:22] I mean, I have absolutely nothing against the satire that makes us feel good. But we just have to be very aware that it's a sort of therapy for us.
Annalee: [00:48:30] That's an interesting distinction.
Peter: [00:48:32] I mean, I'd love to know what he's aiming to do. There's also like a huge middle audience. I mean, I think Delmer, like anybody else who really thinks about political competition was adopting what we would call an audience centric approach. You know, you don't start with what we like. You start with here is the audience that we want to get to. Here is what we want to get out of this relationship. And here's how we move towards it.
[00:48:57] The moment you start thinking in that way, you are no longer thinking like classic media, which is based on something else. You are thinking in terms of call it strategic communications or Delmer would have called what he did propaganda. He had no problem with that. You are talking about something else. You are talking about political warfare, if you want to call it that.
[00:49:16] So that is not the job of regular media. That is not the job of regular satire. You know, that is a very specific mission. But the question we have to ask ourselves as democracies is, do we want to start thinking like that?
Annalee: [00:49:30] Yeah, that's actually a really good question. And I'd love to talk to you a little bit more about that. I know you're studying contemporary information wars that are happening right now. What are you seeing right now? How are these information wars going? Are there strategies and tactics that you find interesting and maybe useful for, say, people in a country that is sliding toward authoritarianism?
Peter: [00:49:56] Well, firstly, it's a very long slide. People always ask me, like, “What lesson do you have from your time in Russia and Ukraine and looking at these countries that have turned authoritarian or tried to?” And I spent a little of my time in countries like that, focused on Eastern Europe, but also looked at sort of Latin America. You know, if we talk about the tactics of an early Putin, you know, the Putin of 2000, when Russia is still some sort of democracy.
[00:50:22] These are all tactics based on polarization. Bolsonaro does the same thing and Orban, you know, they don't control the whole media. They don't try to control the whole media to start off with. Their job is to divide society in a way that means that the majority is on their side.
[00:50:37] Look, Huey Long did this in Louisiana in the 1930s. It's not as if, like, America hasn't had its own, should we call them, liberal Democrats before? This is what Orban has done. This is the classic textbook. In a world where it's very hard to control all of the media, you know, it took Putin a long time to control the whole of the media, like, a good eight years.
[00:50:58] For the first bit, you've got to polarize. And what I've seen over and over and over again is the people who say that they want to support democracy allow that to happen and end up actually helping it. So as long as you're stuck in your own echo chamber and that echo chamber is smaller than the coalition that the illiberal leader is setting up, you're actually helping them. Your number one mission is to overcome that polarization and break their coalition.
Annalee: [00:51:27] Right. Well, break their echo chamber, right? Because it's kind of echo chamber versus echo chamber at that point.
Peter: [00:51:32] Exactly. But they've calculated. They've made a calculation that their echo chamber is always going to win electorally.
Annalee: [00:51:37] Right.
Peter: [00:51:37] And they're quite happy for you to sit in your one. But it always happens too late. I mean, in Russia, it didn't happen. And then the guy who tried to do something about it was Alexei Navalny. And I think that's when finally Putin decided to kill him because, you know, Putin allowed Navalny, for those who don't know, he was the only viable sort of bottom-up movement against Putin that Putin had killed. Killed him last year. Was it this year? I can't remember now, but...
Annalee: [00:52:00] Tried a couple of times to kill him before that.
Peter: [00:52:01] Yeah, yeah. But the moment that he tries to kill him is very interesting. It's when Navalny decides to leave Moscow and go to middle-class cities for resentment against government corruption and tries to build up an all-national coalition.
[00:52:15] So as long as he sat in Moscow and was a YouTube hero to Muscovites, he wasn't deemed worthy of killing. The moment he tries to build up a coalition that's bigger than that, that's when he's killed. Now, I don't know if that's why Putin decided to kill him. I mean, but that is what happened. That's the order things happened in.
[00:52:32] So you would want to have a look at the movement in Brazil against Bolsonaro, where there was this incredible effort made towards winning over lower middle-class voters in the coalition against Bolsonaro. So look, if I was working in America today, I would not be creating a bunch of liberal influencers, which seems to be the conversation. That seems to be just talking to oneself again. Maybe that's important to get out the vote. I don't know, but that's not what I would be doing.
[00:53:00] I would be creating a bunch of tabloid websites or WhatsApp groups or whatever the medium is these days that mix tabloid content, a real understanding of people's sufferings and unhappinesses in the forgotten bits of America, which are many, which have sort of been left abandoned to Sinclair media and really pointed very evidence-grounded criticism of government failure and how you can change that.
[00:53:31] I didn't see a lot of that in America. That's what Delmer would be doing, I think, as well. His background, by the way, was in tabloids. He was an Oxford-educated tabloid journalist. He was writing for the lower middle class and the working class during non-war time. And he understood how you reach real people. I don't like the word ordinary people.
Annalee: [00:53:51] So what you're saying is we need sleazy, sensationalist media and some porn, and then we kind of invite people in to enjoy this delightful mix, and slowly we kind of weave in true stories about how, say, the Trump regime is corrupt and they're taking all the money for themselves. And is your small community suffering? Well, here's some porn, but also here's some ideas about how you could join the city council and prevent people from sucking all the money out of your community.
Peter: [00:54:23] Totally. It's just that I think also he understood what's very interesting. If you look at the minutiae of the Delmer shows, doing stuff about the top is too far away for people. It's like doing something about Putin and Russia. It's so far away. What you want to do is not just the top. The top is like they live on Olympus. No, you want to show how the top is enabling the local official. Delmer's media was about the local. It was a little bit about, I don't know, Göring, the head of the Luftwaffe. But it was actually about the local commander and how he was stealing your sardines. It was much more pointed and much more related to a universe people could feel.
[00:55:01] So yeah, there'd be a story about Göring's famous corruption. But much more important was describing people's local lives. So yeah, it would be relating those things. What you're talking about is reconnecting cause and effect. What these leaders across the world are very good at is fucking up the country and then blaming it on somebody else. Putin blames it on the foreigners who are, for some reason, keeping rural Russia super poor instead of the obvious finality of the system. Or you blame it all on immigrants who are doing some sort of nefarious thing rather than the failures of local economic development. So you're reconnecting cause and effect. You're like, where is your real problems coming from? You're giving people a way of changing it and something to do. I think that's the big difference.
Annalee: [00:55:51] And also, I liked what you were saying about how part of the goal was to connect people to their communities again. To say like, “Actually, don't be part of the folk. Don't be part of, you know, MAGA, say, in this country. Why don't you be part of your neighborhood? You know, how about finding out what's actually happening to your neighbors and how the local whatever, the local planning department is screwing over your neighbors.”
Peter: [00:56:14] Yeah. Yes, it is. I mean, actually, British tabloids have tended to be quite good at this. And, you know, I don't have a full picture of what's going on in American media, but my sense is that there's like, beyond this, like, you know, there's the New York tabloids who do a bit of this. There isn't enough of this. And look, everything we're talking about, you know, tabloid. I mean, you say porn, but, you know, we can laugh at that. But actually, you know...
Annalee: [00:56:35] No, no, we're very pro-porn on this show.
Peter: [00:56:38] You know, there's a reason, like, you know, that all these movements are thinking about how you tap into libido, let's call it libido, and anger. So all these things are very important. So you have people who do that very well in America. And then you have people who do nice local online initiatives, you know, create online platforms to help you improve stuff in your community.
[00:57:01] But those are very different people. And it tends to be very kind of like, you know, friendly and fluffy. And then you have people somewhere else who do great investigations. And then you have, you know, a growing movement of what's called engagement journalism, which is looking at journalism as a social service rather than a purveyor of information, which I think is very important going forward. But nobody is putting them together.
Annalee: [00:57:22] Yeah.
Peter: [00:57:22] If you look at it in America, all the ingredients are there. We've got to put them together. And then you've got a really, really heady cocktail. Then it's all part of something which has got a bit of magnetism and something that feels responsive.
Annalee: [00:57:38] Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much for speaking with us today and giving us lots of ideas of…
Peter: [00:57:45] Everything from Moses to pornography. I'm here for you.
Annalee: [00:57:47] I mean, that's I love that coalition. I mean, it's a great those are great bedfellows. Where can people find your stuff online or in the world?
Peter: [00:57:57] I write a lot for the Guardian, but the books are what matters. So How to Win an Information War is latest one came out this year. Probably my most famous one is called Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, which came out like a decade ago, which is all about the rise of Putin's Russia.
Annalee: [00:58:11] Awesome. All right. Thanks again.
Peter: [00:58:13] All right. Ciao.
[00:58:15] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:58:17] Thank you so much for listening. You have been here with Our Opinions Are Correct. If you somehow stumbled across us and didn’t hear our introduction, well, now I’m telling you again. You can find us on Mastadon, on Instagram, Bluesky. Usually, we’re just Our Opinions or Our Opinions Are Correct. You can also find us on Patreon because that's how we support ourselves. So we're patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. Thank you so much to our amazing producer and engineer, Niah Harmon. Thanks to Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez Nichols for the music. And thank you for listening. We'll talk to you later. And if you're a patron, we'll see you on Discord.
Both: [00:59:01] Bye.
[00:59:03] [OOAC theme plays. Science fiction synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]