The government threw money at the arts in the mid-20th-century to show up the USSR and people are reading too much into it. If classicism had been the thing in the middle of the 20th century they would have funded that instead.
Is the popularity of reactive programming a Facebook psy-op? They certainly popularized it via React, but does that mean there was some deep agenda inside Facebook to popularize reactive programming to accomplish some mysterious occult goal? Or was it just that Facebook is big, happened to employ some good devs who liked reactive programming, and dumped a lot of money into it?
When big companies and governments throw money around they distort the market and whatever happens to be in the right place at the right time to grab that cash tends to get favored. That's usually all there is to it unless you can find concrete evidence that (for example) someone with authority in the CIA wanted to promote that specific type of art to achieve a specific societal outcome.
> The government threw money at the arts in the mid-20th-century to show up the USSR and people are reading too much into it. If classicism had been the thing in the middle of the 20th century they would have funded that instead.
I'm not so sure. Call it a conspiracy theory, but there is at least some evidence that modern art is a fantastic tool for money laundering. Now, this is also true of classical art and patents, but imagine if you are trying to send money with a stupid cover story. Make a piece of modern art in 15 minutes, have other person send $50,000 to "purchase" it...
Any high priced asset that's easy to move with few questions asked is a great tool for money laundering. One of the largest tools is real estate, which may be one reason you see a lot of unoccupied houses and condos in certain expensive cities.
The art doesn't have to be modern to work this way. It just has to be fungible art with an inflated price tag on it. Any style will do.
Other popular money laundering vehicles include: "investments" in totally hollow shell companies, fake customers to shell or cutout businesses (like the car wash in Breaking Bad), manipulating penny stocks (you basically run a pump and dump against yourself using dirty money to pump and extracting clean money on the other side), cryptocurrency and related things, other big assets like airplanes and boats, etc.
I don't think the CIA needs to clandestinely fund an entire art movement as a cover for money laundering, though. That seems a bit outlandish.
I'm as paranoid as the next guy but in this case I think the premise that the CIA funded artistic expression as a form of propaganda in its own right makes the most sense.
It's more like it's one way to funnel money to an asset or network without raising suspicions.
But you're right, it was mostly about the propaganda. And not even particularly covert. The bit that did it has since been carved out into other agencies (eg National Endowment for Democracy).
Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist who wrote about it in 2009, although the principle is much older.
"If the headline asks a question, try answering 'no'. Is This the True Face of Britain's Young? (Sensible reader: No.) Have We Found the Cure for AIDS? (No; or you wouldn't have put the question mark in.) Does This Map Provide the Key for Peace? (Probably not.) A headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or over-sold. It is often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece of reporting into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic. To a busy journalist hunting for real information a question mark means 'don't bother reading this bit'."
The React analogy doesn’t work, React is used because developers find it more productive to use. On the other hand people’s initial reaction to much modern art is “what the hell? you call this art?” so it is interesting to explore why it became very expensive and popular with elites despite the popular reaction.
Put another way, react would have probably gained a huge following without FB’s marketing (imagine if it was just a few hackers launching it as an open source project). Can we say that much modern art would have gained much fame if it wasn’t for certain critics promoting them or if they gained favourable attention from elites?
I don’t think it is much to do with some nefarious plan to defeat social realism so much as they funded talented artists and talented artists happened to be bored with old forms/find them irrelevant and they wanted to experiment with something new.
This seems more plausible than the more maximalist version of the claim where they were essentially shoving abstract expressionism down everyone's throats because of its uniquely counterrevolutionary nature.
> On the other hand people’s initial reaction to much modern art is “what the hell? you call this art?”
There's a lot of people who look at React and think "What the hell? You call this useable?" as well. The point of spending money on popularizing something is usually to popularize it with a specific crowd.
And if you are close to the art crowd, modern art is a) a stupid moniker, because it covers 1860-now, and b) a pretty logical evolution of what was before. You don't have to like it to understand what it's trying to do. The "what the hell" crowd is not the crowd targeted by the marketing.
Government wasn't just throwing money at art...Could be the other way around. Back then what was stopping the CIA from covertly laundering money through art? They've cleaned money with worse.
It's not just that modern art started well before the CIA existed, but the article also conveniently forgets to mention how modern art subverted communism.
It even can't explain how "Jackson Pollock’s gestural style [...] drew an effective counterpoint to Nazi [...] oppression," because by the time Pollock got anywhere near famous, WWII was over. Perhaps that sentence doesn't even mean anything. It's just fancy words, because a counterpoint is not an opposition, but a harmonically fitting independent voice. Style over substance, as usual.
The conspiratorial view is that people were numbed by meaningless abstract art when they could have been engaging with didactic social realist works that would have convinced them to become communist. Hard to falsify but I’m not sure how credible it is.
If it is generally agreed that soviets, fascists, nazis used modern art to pursue their ends (new objectivity etc) I find it implausible that US intelligence wouldn't respond in kind. Of course that doesn't mean that the manner of response detailed by this article is accurate.
It's not a mysterious occult goal. The web is now broken with JavaScript disabled, and Facebook has cemented a place in your browser to run their tracking code. It's pretty hard to believe that that was an intended consequence.
And Back to the Future, arguably the greatest movie/trilogy of all time and a distinctly American epic, which also featured several Huey Lewis and the News songs.
Yes! On Huey Lewis and the News they seemed a little too willing to cash in on the late seventies/early eighties taste for New Wave, and the album - though it's still a smashing debut - seems a little too stark, too punk.
Agreed. The whole album has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the songs a big boost. He's been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has a far more bitter, cynical sense of humor.
In '87, Huey released "Fore!", their most accomplished album. I think their undisputed masterpiece is "Hip To Be Square": a song so catchy, most people probably don't listen to the lyrics; but they should, because it's not just about the pleasures of conformity and the importance of trends -- it's also a personal statement about the band itself.
Yes and no. On one hand, my social class and upbringing almost command that I should find beauty in Van Gogh and Picasso's works. I defer to the masters on matters I do not understand, but it's not where my personal taste and love really lie.
I have. I do a lot of traveling and inevitably people want to go to art installations and museums and I'm always fine with going. Anways, there's not a lot of legendary art pieces (that are in public places) I haven't seen in person. Not a single one of them really inspire me. I'd go so far as to say I don't really understand how art became such a huge market to begin with. I literally wouldn't pay $100 for anything other than sculptures.
I wouldn't put most of the legendary pieces on my wall unless you paid me.
edit: it always tickles me the negative reactions I get when people hear my opinion on art. Doesn't seem to matter how I phrase it, it's always offensive to someone that I can't see the undeniable beauty in popular art. Putting time and effort into something is a prerequisite for me to be in awe, but it does not automatically interest me. Many professional athletes put in far more time and effort into their craft to play a decorative game and I similarly don't care about their mastery of their strictly decorative achievements.
I might already be there at 0, haha! I much prefer decorating my spaces with plants over art. I certainly wouldn't argue plants are objectively better than art, but for me the beauty of even the most common pothos far surpasses the majority of popular art.
I don't get houseplants. Inside they look stark, isolated, completely removed from their element. I love a good garden and outdoor flowers but houseplants seem ridiculous to me even excluding the ongoing maintenance and the inability to just leave home for a few weeks without having to setup someone to water. Why do I want to be physically tied down by my home decor? Or have the quality of my home decor dependant on the quality of my green thumb skills? Give me a Dali on the wall any day that invariably leads to a discussion on what a person sees in the scene.
I also enjoy playing with tech, which automated watering among other cool tech solutions to keeping up with indoor plants is fun for me. Always fun to hear about differing opinions and wonder about how we arrived at our opinions. I can't imagine ever caring what anyone saw in a dali. Having taken an elective art class in college I recall feeling quite uncomfortable having to listen to people who relished the opportunity to hear themselves speak on a subject that has no wrong answers.
Personally I have a hard time valuing questions that have no wrong answer. Seems like a polite ritual at best and a waste of time at worst.
Art is a financial instrument. The value of art is how much a wealthy person will pay for it.
That being said, there are lots of intense and pretty drawings and paintings that obviously took a lot of skill to create. No need to expect inspiration. A lot of the language around "art" is a reflection of the self-regard of the people who own it.
> edit: it always tickles me the negative reactions I get when people hear my opinion on art.
People want to fit in, it's a survival skill. Public negative opinions about Marvel movies will get you death threats and accusations of trying to destroy companies for the sake of other companies.
I think you're probably touching the root cause, but it still stands to question how exactly people feel they're more fitted by publicly disagreeing with an anonymous person on the internet. I guess it's just a learned action in meatspace that incidentally carries over to the internet where it has no benefit and only detriment? Human behavior is always interesting.
I actually love experimental and avant garde works but one problem is it feels like a lot of it is a bit of a dead end. Like 4’33” was an interesting idea once but there’s kind of nowhere you can take that. Once you get past the first presentation it’s not interesting to do a slight variation. Or, you know, Jackson Pollack, neat, but not like I need to see 10 more guys flinging paint at a canvas.
Picasso was a communist and his art was representational. His form of 'modernism' has nothing to do with the kind of actual nonsense that the CIA wanted to push.
Mondrian rules! In my youth I tiled the bathroom in my house in a Mondrian pattern. Mostly white, lowering the cost since white tiles were much cheaper than red yellow and blue.
Lots of programmers get bored of writing simple line-of-business code and find ways to make it more interesting for themselves. It doesn't generally lead to a program that's better for the end user though.
The contra to this nonsense was state-controlled and heavily censored - as much as I like Polish school of poster, or overall "tidyness" of communal spaces in post-communist areas, it was (to say it mildly) stifling creativity.
Modernism is ubiquitous. Likely your furniture, computers, cars, and home architecture are heavily modernist unless you explicitly seek out classical stuff.
Modernism is obsessed with truth and optimization, evolving toward an apex. Computing technology as a whole is modernist. Apple hardware design is a glaring example of a modernist pursuit (especially under Ive).
You misunderstood what they said. "Modernism is obsessed with truth and optimization" does not equal "modernism is truth." They were also talking about it conceptually, not as "their" preferred art.
Is this some defect in abstract thinking? No experience with philosophy? Whatever the case it appears to be bad faith or blatant misunderstanding the basics of a well-worn topic to me especially given how you tried to reframe it as a condemnation.
And the most modernist form of art now is AI generated art. Pure form and aesthetic, but no real meaning or intent, like a face in a mirror, something shaped like human meaning but utterly devoid of it, manufactured like so much else of our reality.
Which, ironically, makes it legitimately art. It's art because it's anti-art.
No, it's not. No more than other attempts, like assassinating Castro (man, that one is really a laughing stock if you read that one front to back) or their involvement in "war against drugs". Maybe they start it but had absolutely no control where it was going.
still not sure if it was related but in elementary school in the 90s I was put in a "gifted" program which involved, on at least one occasion, wearing headphones in a dimly-lit room and being tested with Zener cards. I've dug into local records and still to this day don't conclusively know what that was all about.
I've seen those threads too, years after I made the connection myself (by playing The World Ends With You and seeing the Zener card symbols on the top screen, before I knew what they were).
some of the things listed there apply to my experience, and others don't. the whole thing leaves me with more questions than answers.
Something the post-Boomer generations have been talking about more and more: the fact that the "tune in, turn on" movement wasn't coming from inside the house, so to speak. The old leftists still get very defensive of their drug overuse, in spite of the fact that their "counterculture" had set back effective policy by generations. They had ceded the field to reactionaries and identitarians (both allies of capital, of course), the effects of which we're dealing with to this day.
The American security state - Pinkerton, etc - was created to deal with labor, and it was nearly-constantly trying to end-run around democratic oversight using whatever means it could: poisoning students with military-grade chemicals, allying with Luciano, squamming loins with notorious non-state actors (including actual Nazis), hiring squadrons of prostitutes, and on occasion - maybe, possibly - making some US citizens go away more permanently. Without even mentioning its adventures in the Americas at large. It's the height of schadenfreude we're living through a golden age of conspiracism without eyeballs on the horribly, horribly real historical conspiracies, who was behind them, and who continues to be.
My guess is that OP did indeed mean "knocking boots" as a reference to Operation Paperclip, where the US government granted amnesty to a bunch of Nazi scientists in return for pivoting their research to US national security purposes.
when I was growing up "knocking boots" meant have sex? (there was a whole rap song with that title). Which is what I assumed "squamming loins" was some british english version of.
Whoops. I had thought it to be merely some unfortunate onomatopoeia. It's awesome that the word has so many actual meanings, if informal ones. But yes, "a thing involving 'mutual loins' that sounds like 'squam'"
Yes yes, it's a good thing according to good medical authority. But still, it's crassly dystopian too. Maybe we can thank "old leftist drug overuse" for normalizing us over that hump.
The classic work on this is "Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond" by Lee & Shain. The Chapter "In the Beginning There Was Madness" covers the crazy era of MK-ULTRA (and the Frank Olson case, in which the CIA fed LSD to MKULTRA collaborators in the biological warfare program, where Olson worked - he then had a breakdown of some sort and wanted to quit the program and perhaps go public, so the CIA hit him in the head with a hammer and threw him out of a high-rise (probably, anyway) and called it a suicide for several decades).
That event always seemed so weird to me. I’m not the biggest fan of disco (some of the old and new stuff is danceable) but isn’t blowing up a crate of records similar in spirit to book burning?
Or, if you consider recorded art - its creator's thoughts and feelings being shuttled into the future - as akin to that creator living on in perpetuity, perhaps it's also similar in spirit to the assassination of a "subversive."
The spirit was the thing was that: 1. explosions are fun, 2. this rock jock hated disco, 3. his fans and other people will pay money to go to a baseball game and see this at a time when not many people were going. It was more of a publicity stunt, than anything politically charged.
Something in the spirit of book burning today is more like banning books in public places, like schools or libraries, under penalty of prison.
What makes me suspicious is that disco never "died" in europe in the same way it did in the States...
(up until recently, covers of "I Will Survive" —one of which, sadly no longer available on YouTube, was even in drag— were featured annually in russian state-channel [Россия1] New Year's programming)
Disco didn't die in the states at all. It kept on going. As a mainstream genre, maybe, for a while. But it evolved into the various house and techno and the myriad of sub-genres that are still flourishing to this day.
The worst/most-impressive part is how difficult it is to even raise this subject without triggering everyone's thought-terminating partisan programming
I don't think I'm "triggered" when I think most of this stuff is just dumb. Like OK, Anderson Cooper was an intern at the CIA while in college. From that we're supposed to mentally jump through hundreds of hoops to get to "the CIA controls news media even though it's illegal and any patriotic employee could blow the whistle on the whole thing".
A lot of it is predicated on the "deep state" being completely evil anti-american people, which is so beyond my experience of federal law officers that it doesn't fit my world view. Look at the CIA's Bush-era legally-questionable torture program, there were tons of whistle blowers and media inquiry, it was not secret for very long at all. But somehow a clearly illegal program that controls the news media has been going undetected for decades? It's just not how the USA works.
There's a long, well documented history of the CIA injecting unknowing, innocent people with various drugs for tactical and experimental reasons. That seems pretty evil and anti-American (really, anti-human)!
> we're supposed to mentally jump through hundreds of hoops
No, I don't believe anything like that. In fact I think """Theorists""" are always wrong because it is always impossible to speak to other people's intent. It's hard to even trust a person to accurately tell you their own intent. The system selects for true believers, because there is no more effective mind control than what feels like one's own decisions. I would like to unironically suggest this piece by T. Kaczynski — please don't shoot the messenger :) https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-the-sy...
This is why there's so much overlap between the security state and the 20th Century development of advertising. Both rely on accurately predicting the public's reaction given some stimuli, then trying to inject the most effective stimuli. In advertising it's done in pursuit of profit. In statecraft it's done in pursuit of ?????. Remember that propaganda doesn't mean lies, it means idea-you-feel-compelled-to-share: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Informatio...
"[George] Creel urged [Woodrow] Wilson to create a government agency to coordinate “not propaganda as the Germans defined it, but propaganda in the true sense of the word, meaning the 'propagation of faith.'”. "Creel later published his memoirs of his service with the CPI, 'How We Advertised America', in which he wrote:
“In no degree was the Committee an agency of censorship, a machinery of concealment or repression. Its emphasis throughout was on the open and the positive. At no point did it seek or exercise authorities under those war laws that limited the freedom of speech and press. In all things, from first to last, without halt or change, it was a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world's greatest adventures in advertising… We did not call it propaganda, for that word, in German hands, had come to be associated with deceit and corruption. Our effort was educational and informative throughout, for we had such confidence in our case as to feel that no other argument was needed than the simple, straightforward presentation of the facts.”"
It’s how the dictators that spread that lie work. The CIA has definitely been responsible for coups and shit and they’re probably doing stuff in Russia and Ukraine that we won’t find out about for years, but they aren’t an evil shadowy cabal that controls everything
"look, these people are definitely responsible for coups, bringing down democratically elected governments, installing puppets, lying to the public, starting wars based on false premises, bombing thousands of innocent people. And yes, they might have flooded the streets with drugs and killed a few thousand more, but they aren’t an evil shadowy cabal that controls everything"
Being good at inciting chaos isn't the same thing as having control. The CIA has a demonstrable history of being good at the first, but much less so the second.
The most pop-culture conspiracy theories vastly overestimate the precision of the organization: they're more like painters than programmers. It's a whole lot of improv.
Not really. There was a real attack (provoked by the US) on Aug 2nd, and Johnson didn't want any evidence before escalating. Johnson even lied to Congress and the public about his plans before attacking. It's clear he would have used any excuse he could gin up.
Ed was at the end of his rope, an expression he detested. “There is no rope!”, he would scream at the laughing walls, “There is only the end. No hope; no rope.”
I recently came across a reference to this kind of thing going on in Europe, although it was more about controlling what music was popular based on some notion of what was 'safe' for the youth. The billionaire in question (Ukraine's second richest at one point) was a major behind-the-scenes actor in both pre- and post-2014 Ukraine, a backer of Zelensky at one point, but now safely on the official US/NATO-reviled list so we can talk about him:
> "As a Komsomol activist, Kolomoyskyi was involved in the so-called "disco movement" - an attempt by the authorities to promote an ideological safe alternative to the growing, underground, rebroadcast and performance of "Anglo-American" rock music including, in the 80s, heavy metal and punk."
I found this book pretty unconvincing, with way too few sources and way too many flimsy inferences.
However, there is a great book about CIA guys creeping around Laurel Canyon, called Chaos [0]. It's filled with sources, research, and mostly solid inferences.
We can see what our governments are encouraging towards other countries quite easily and openly today. For example in the UK you can see organisations like the British Council (The United Kingdom's international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities): https://www.britishcouncil.org/arts/news
Some on the left (and right I imagine) say these are an example of neo-colonialist neo-liberalist ideas and that does seem as conspiracyish as this article but if you imagine in 50 years time a politics article looking at the arts right now, then an archived series of these projects from our governments international arts organisations might well be included!
There's a book on this called The Cultural Cold War[1]. I tried reading it but (embarrassingly) I don't know enough about artistic and literary figures in the mid-20th century to follow along with all the names it drops. Seemed interesting, though.
by the same author. Makes it very clear that both sides were despotic in their own ways. The USSR used brute force and intimidation. The methods used in the US were more subtle and covert, but just as ideologically - as opposed to creatively - directed.
If you like this kind of question, I highly recommend the Wind of Change podcast, about whether The Scorpions song of the same name was written by the CIA. Super entertaining!
In Linebarger's book Psychological Warfare, he points out that asking propaganda men (in his defense, they probably were almost all men ca. 1947, and I suspect he may even have referred to specific men, eg Edward Bernays) about their work is highly unlikely to result in an unspun answer.
(then again, consider Epimenides: Linebarger is also a propaganda man)
I feel about this the way I feel about most so called conspiracy theories. I'm certain intelligence agencies are involved something similar to this. It would be really surprising if they didn't avail themselves of this huge means of influence. They spend all day wondering about how to influence. But I'm more skeptical that the conspiracy theorist actually managed to catch the intelligence agency's activity in this particular case.
If you spend any time on a sports forum like reddit, you quickly learn there are 32 teams in the NFL and 31 of them are dirty cheaters who bribe the refs.
Every game is probably exaggerated but I've watched enough sports as a kid. Even back then it was clear to me that big, especially international, events are highly orchestrated. Yes, including outcomes.
I've been watching F1 for several decades and some key races are jazzed up to the point that one must actively suspend their disbelief. Not to mention Bernie Ecclestone straight up saying who's going to be champion and who isn't ever going to be one. It's all fake, dude. Unless you really believe some countries are thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat much better at sports (and everything else) because they're just that awesome in every respect.
Yes, that's the picture they are trying to paint. Rather successfully it would seem.
Providing facilities, medics, dietitians, etc. does not hurt, of course. Makes for great PR. Having your guys in charge of testing for dope helps create the actual results, though.
That said, if you truly believe superhumans exist, that's fine too. Even if it strikes me as rather naive. It helps patriotism and whatnot. A man needs his pride
Occams razor: a much simpler explanation, not disproved by anything in this article, would be that CIA saw that sincere and powerful american and western art was already capturing hearts and minds for effectively, and decided to empower it, since this process aligned with its goals.
And in general, american hegemony roughly aligned with interests of humanity as a whole, because with all it's downfalls and atrocities and ugliness, its still much better than the alternative.
No, I didn't, but it's a silly argument. An option doesn't need need to be good in order to be best, just like a number doesn't need to be positive in order to be the maximum of the set.
Speaking out of my ass: my understanding was that certain branches of abstract expressionism were so, essentially, but it's difficult to apply the suspicion to ALL of modern/postmodern art, considering that so much of it was developed or influenced by artistic movements outside the temporal and geographic purview of the CIA (particularly pre-WWII European (post)modern art and its influences in Asian and African forms). Also, it wouldn't be the first time influential entities boosted controversial media in a successful bid for a sort of cultural engineering. (I know what you're probably thinking, and no, I'm actually referring to, "Woodrow Wilson screening 'Birth of a Nation' at the White House.")
(I'm purposely conflating modern and postmodern art because I imagine that many who see the term "modern art" make that mistake, and because Pollock et al. kind of bridge the two in eschewing representation while still using traditional media.)
This went along with tons of money to left-wing anticommunist/antisoviet writers and scholars (financing a bunch of elite literary journals that no one read, but looked good enough on resumes to get people into the NYRB, Guardian, etc..) If you're on the left, but not a Leninist, don't fall for the flattery of institutions. There are people spending the integrity of naive idealists in order to advance military and strategic goals.
The IDF reads the works of Deleueze and Guattari for inspiration on how to do urban warfare. I always laugh when critical theory influenced folks try to claim they're "anti-authoritarian".
Nope, if anything is a psyop, it's fashionable nonsense. Fashionable nonsense neuters academics who would be revolutionaries and turns them into academic hipsters.
Modern Art was not a CIA Psy-Op, because modern art is older than the CIA. Modern art started around the 1870s and was in full swing at the start of the 20th century. The CIA was founded in 1947.
Nobody is accusing them of coming up with the styles. They just found the emptiest artistic movements with the least to say and flooded them with money and positive criticism.
Regardless of what you think of this, there is a related idea worth considering: hegemony. Whether it is organic or confected, the idea that powerful groups within societies create and export ideas to other groups in society in a way that cements their own power or breaks a competing group's.. isn't new, and is fairly clearly the case whether we look at art, or tech, or media ownership.
Some people have reported CIA involvement in the Iowa Writers' Workshop, which had a great deal of influence on the direction that literary fiction took in post-WWII America. I'm inclined to believe that such projects were likely the playthings of a few dilettantes in high places--spymasters with subscriptions to Commentary and Partisan Review--rather than a serious attempt at stifling dissent, or discrediting socialism, or cultivating soft power, or whatever.
Well with the kind money that agency has, they can buy the whole world several times over. Amazon is good example. Just give them a gov contract, and all the sudden company don't have to be so profitable in their daily business anymore. And guess who will Amazon beholden to? their day to day customers whoever is giving the big contract?
Here are three things that well connected Old Money types like: collecting art, being on the boards of nonprofits, and serving in high-level government positions. Not surprising that a Rockefeller might do all three.
339 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 335 ms ] threadIs the popularity of reactive programming a Facebook psy-op? They certainly popularized it via React, but does that mean there was some deep agenda inside Facebook to popularize reactive programming to accomplish some mysterious occult goal? Or was it just that Facebook is big, happened to employ some good devs who liked reactive programming, and dumped a lot of money into it?
When big companies and governments throw money around they distort the market and whatever happens to be in the right place at the right time to grab that cash tends to get favored. That's usually all there is to it unless you can find concrete evidence that (for example) someone with authority in the CIA wanted to promote that specific type of art to achieve a specific societal outcome.
I'm not so sure. Call it a conspiracy theory, but there is at least some evidence that modern art is a fantastic tool for money laundering. Now, this is also true of classical art and patents, but imagine if you are trying to send money with a stupid cover story. Make a piece of modern art in 15 minutes, have other person send $50,000 to "purchase" it...
The art doesn't have to be modern to work this way. It just has to be fungible art with an inflated price tag on it. Any style will do.
Other popular money laundering vehicles include: "investments" in totally hollow shell companies, fake customers to shell or cutout businesses (like the car wash in Breaking Bad), manipulating penny stocks (you basically run a pump and dump against yourself using dirty money to pump and extracting clean money on the other side), cryptocurrency and related things, other big assets like airplanes and boats, etc.
I'm as paranoid as the next guy but in this case I think the premise that the CIA funded artistic expression as a form of propaganda in its own right makes the most sense.
Besides...the CIA makes more money running illegal drugs.
But you're right, it was mostly about the propaganda. And not even particularly covert. The bit that did it has since been carved out into other agencies (eg National Endowment for Democracy).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline....
Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist who wrote about it in 2009, although the principle is much older.
"If the headline asks a question, try answering 'no'. Is This the True Face of Britain's Young? (Sensible reader: No.) Have We Found the Cure for AIDS? (No; or you wouldn't have put the question mark in.) Does This Map Provide the Key for Peace? (Probably not.) A headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or over-sold. It is often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece of reporting into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic. To a busy journalist hunting for real information a question mark means 'don't bother reading this bit'."
Pretty much any article posted to HN with a “?” At the end that’s not a AskHN prefix should get that response.
Put another way, react would have probably gained a huge following without FB’s marketing (imagine if it was just a few hackers launching it as an open source project). Can we say that much modern art would have gained much fame if it wasn’t for certain critics promoting them or if they gained favourable attention from elites?
There was a lot more happening in art than AbEx. But only AbEx received official approval as an acceptable political metaphor for bold individualism.
Approval included canonisation by museums and galleries and think pieces by art critics.
https://www.artforum.com/print/197406/abstract-expressionism...
There's a lot of people who look at React and think "What the hell? You call this useable?" as well. The point of spending money on popularizing something is usually to popularize it with a specific crowd.
And if you are close to the art crowd, modern art is a) a stupid moniker, because it covers 1860-now, and b) a pretty logical evolution of what was before. You don't have to like it to understand what it's trying to do. The "what the hell" crowd is not the crowd targeted by the marketing.
It even can't explain how "Jackson Pollock’s gestural style [...] drew an effective counterpoint to Nazi [...] oppression," because by the time Pollock got anywhere near famous, WWII was over. Perhaps that sentence doesn't even mean anything. It's just fancy words, because a counterpoint is not an opposition, but a harmonically fitting independent voice. Style over substance, as usual.
The Nazis and USSR had eerily similar art. There’s a thesis that “totalitarian art” is a genre, if not a species, of art.
Most dictators don’t like people thinking for themselves. A bunch of pain blotches on canvas can mean “Stalin is terrible” as “Stalin is great.”
The vague “what does it mean” style of art asks the question “what does it mean?” Which is not a question dictators like having asked.
but we invented taco tuesday and family guy
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/taco-tuesday-trademark-t...
Or even Mondrian
I wouldn't put most of the legendary pieces on my wall unless you paid me.
edit: it always tickles me the negative reactions I get when people hear my opinion on art. Doesn't seem to matter how I phrase it, it's always offensive to someone that I can't see the undeniable beauty in popular art. Putting time and effort into something is a prerequisite for me to be in awe, but it does not automatically interest me. Many professional athletes put in far more time and effort into their craft to play a decorative game and I similarly don't care about their mastery of their strictly decorative achievements.
Personally I have a hard time valuing questions that have no wrong answer. Seems like a polite ritual at best and a waste of time at worst.
That being said, there are lots of intense and pretty drawings and paintings that obviously took a lot of skill to create. No need to expect inspiration. A lot of the language around "art" is a reflection of the self-regard of the people who own it.
> edit: it always tickles me the negative reactions I get when people hear my opinion on art.
People want to fit in, it's a survival skill. Public negative opinions about Marvel movies will get you death threats and accusations of trying to destroy companies for the sake of other companies.
I think you're probably touching the root cause, but it still stands to question how exactly people feel they're more fitted by publicly disagreeing with an anonymous person on the internet. I guess it's just a learned action in meatspace that incidentally carries over to the internet where it has no benefit and only detriment? Human behavior is always interesting.
Modernism is obsessed with truth and optimization, evolving toward an apex. Computing technology as a whole is modernist. Apple hardware design is a glaring example of a modernist pursuit (especially under Ive).
Which, ironically, makes it legitimately art. It's art because it's anti-art.
Also the beat poets, who were trying to write intent-free stream of consciousness texts, kind of like a token-prediction engine. :)
No, it's not. No more than other attempts, like assassinating Castro (man, that one is really a laughing stock if you read that one front to back) or their involvement in "war against drugs". Maybe they start it but had absolutely no control where it was going.
If a candidate is psychic, wouldn't that be good to know?
You need to testing for Larges, not Mediums.
Do you have episodes of unexplainable lost-time? Maybe try setting up a surveillance camera at home so you can see when they activate you.
some of the things listed there apply to my experience, and others don't. the whole thing leaves me with more questions than answers.
The American security state - Pinkerton, etc - was created to deal with labor, and it was nearly-constantly trying to end-run around democratic oversight using whatever means it could: poisoning students with military-grade chemicals, allying with Luciano, squamming loins with notorious non-state actors (including actual Nazis), hiring squadrons of prostitutes, and on occasion - maybe, possibly - making some US citizens go away more permanently. Without even mentioning its adventures in the Americas at large. It's the height of schadenfreude we're living through a golden age of conspiracism without eyeballs on the horribly, horribly real historical conspiracies, who was behind them, and who continues to be.
(Or any other "real conspiracies" for that matter.)
?!?! I looked it up, but there are too many definitions... https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Squam Is that a synonym for "knocking boots" ?!
edit: source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
Yes yes, it's a good thing according to good medical authority. But still, it's crassly dystopian too. Maybe we can thank "old leftist drug overuse" for normalizing us over that hump.
“Turn on, tune in, drop out”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_on,_tune_in,_drop_out
Just noting this because I wasn’t sure if this what was being referenced, so I looked it up . . .
But did people dislike the hippies because of their drug use, or did they dislike drug use because of the hippies?
https://spyscape.com/article/frank-olson-the-cias-secret-que...
Wait a minute.
Something in the spirit of book burning today is more like banning books in public places, like schools or libraries, under penalty of prison.
(up until recently, covers of "I Will Survive" —one of which, sadly no longer available on YouTube, was even in drag— were featured annually in russian state-channel [Россия1] New Year's programming)
> There's this guy from the CIA and he's creeping around Laurel Canyon
https://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/blog/feminist-was-spy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Carlson
https://theweek.com/speedreads/689969/tucker-carlson-tried-j...
A lot of it is predicated on the "deep state" being completely evil anti-american people, which is so beyond my experience of federal law officers that it doesn't fit my world view. Look at the CIA's Bush-era legally-questionable torture program, there were tons of whistle blowers and media inquiry, it was not secret for very long at all. But somehow a clearly illegal program that controls the news media has been going undetected for decades? It's just not how the USA works.
No, I don't believe anything like that. In fact I think """Theorists""" are always wrong because it is always impossible to speak to other people's intent. It's hard to even trust a person to accurately tell you their own intent. The system selects for true believers, because there is no more effective mind control than what feels like one's own decisions. I would like to unironically suggest this piece by T. Kaczynski — please don't shoot the messenger :) https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-the-sy...
This is why there's so much overlap between the security state and the 20th Century development of advertising. Both rely on accurately predicting the public's reaction given some stimuli, then trying to inject the most effective stimuli. In advertising it's done in pursuit of profit. In statecraft it's done in pursuit of ?????. Remember that propaganda doesn't mean lies, it means idea-you-feel-compelled-to-share: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Informatio...
"[George] Creel urged [Woodrow] Wilson to create a government agency to coordinate “not propaganda as the Germans defined it, but propaganda in the true sense of the word, meaning the 'propagation of faith.'”. "Creel later published his memoirs of his service with the CPI, 'How We Advertised America', in which he wrote:
“In no degree was the Committee an agency of censorship, a machinery of concealment or repression. Its emphasis throughout was on the open and the positive. At no point did it seek or exercise authorities under those war laws that limited the freedom of speech and press. In all things, from first to last, without halt or change, it was a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world's greatest adventures in advertising… We did not call it propaganda, for that word, in German hands, had come to be associated with deceit and corruption. Our effort was educational and informative throughout, for we had such confidence in our case as to feel that no other argument was needed than the simple, straightforward presentation of the facts.”"
This is coming from a commenter who believes brushing your teeth, and presumably oral hygiene in general, to be hype.
The most pop-culture conspiracy theories vastly overestimate the precision of the organization: they're more like painters than programmers. It's a whole lot of improv.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident
tldr: Jim Morrison's dad started the Vietnam War when he falsely claimed he was attacked off the coast of Vietnam by the North Vietnamese.
What is the takeaway?
This is definitely a fitting conspiracy theory for our increasingly fascist times though.
Ed was at the end of his rope, an expression he detested. “There is no rope!”, he would scream at the laughing walls, “There is only the end. No hope; no rope.”
> "As a Komsomol activist, Kolomoyskyi was involved in the so-called "disco movement" - an attempt by the authorities to promote an ideological safe alternative to the growing, underground, rebroadcast and performance of "Anglo-American" rock music including, in the 80s, heavy metal and punk."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ihor_Kolomoyskyi
However, there is a great book about CIA guys creeping around Laurel Canyon, called Chaos [0]. It's filled with sources, research, and mostly solid inferences.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHAOS:_Charles_Manson,_the_CIA...
Shit. Strike that from the record. How do you delete comments?
Unless the psyop was itself a psyop? Would they do that to their own people?
and towards China in particular: https://chinanow.britishcouncil.cn/
Some on the left (and right I imagine) say these are an example of neo-colonialist neo-liberalist ideas and that does seem as conspiracyish as this article but if you imagine in 50 years time a politics article looking at the arts right now, then an archived series of these projects from our governments international arts organisations might well be included!
[1] https://thenewpress.com/books/cultural-cold-war
https://www.amazon.com/Who-Paid-Piper-Cultural-Cold/dp/18620...
by the same author. Makes it very clear that both sides were despotic in their own ways. The USSR used brute force and intimidation. The methods used in the US were more subtle and covert, but just as ideologically - as opposed to creatively - directed.
And about as bloody, too.
https://crooked.com/podcast-series/wind-of-change/
(then again, consider Epimenides: Linebarger is also a propaganda man)
I've been watching F1 for several decades and some key races are jazzed up to the point that one must actively suspend their disbelief. Not to mention Bernie Ecclestone straight up saying who's going to be champion and who isn't ever going to be one. It's all fake, dude. Unless you really believe some countries are thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat much better at sports (and everything else) because they're just that awesome in every respect.
Providing facilities, medics, dietitians, etc. does not hurt, of course. Makes for great PR. Having your guys in charge of testing for dope helps create the actual results, though.
That said, if you truly believe superhumans exist, that's fine too. Even if it strikes me as rather naive. It helps patriotism and whatnot. A man needs his pride
And in general, american hegemony roughly aligned with interests of humanity as a whole, because with all it's downfalls and atrocities and ugliness, its still much better than the alternative.
lmao you flagged me for this?
(I'm purposely conflating modern and postmodern art because I imagine that many who see the term "modern art" make that mistake, and because Pollock et al. kind of bridge the two in eschewing representation while still using traditional media.)
Nope, if anything is a psyop, it's fashionable nonsense. Fashionable nonsense neuters academics who would be revolutionaries and turns them into academic hipsters.
So some unemployed painters tried their luck painting pictures a camera couldn't make.
Was Modern Art Really a CIA Psy-Op? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23525366 - June 2020 (7 comments)
Pretty sure there have been other threads, including on the Peter Matthiessen (Paris Review) connection - anybody want to find them?
Edit: there's this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10963429 - and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10964477 linking to https://www.salon.com/2012/05/27/exclusive_the_paris_review_....
Edit 2 - found some more:
During Cold War, CIA used ‘Doctor Zhivago’ as a tool to undermine Soviet Union - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7991903 - July 2014 (30 comments)
Abstract Expressionism was (in part) a covert CIA operation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1891222 - Nov 2010 (1 comment)
Others?
Did you ever posted how exactly do you find a similar posts despite them having a very different URIs?
https://www.google.com/search?q=cia+%22modern+art%22+site%3A...
https://www.openculture.com/2018/12/cia-helped-shaped-americ...