pre-bunking the trend toward pre-bunking

missives from the annals of ironic self immolation

earlier this month, european commission president ursula von der leyn, (aka ursula von doom) had some interesting words to share at the copenhagen “democracy summit.”

and here’s the funny part: she’s 100% correct.

have a listen.

the problem here is not that her idea is wrong. it’s spot on. pre-bunking is 100% the way to go and FAR more effective than any kind of after action de-bunking which takes forever and is often too late and too slow to keep up with emerging trends.

knowing something is ridiculous when you’re being exposed to it prevents infection, and that’s far easier than fighting it off later.

even her analogy is excellent and an ounce of prevention really is worth pounds of cure.

the problem here is, of course, what’s going to be deemed “misinformation” or “disinformation” and the pretext this claim is going to provide for the organs and spokesfolks of the state to wade in and start telling everyone what they “need to believe” for “their own protection.” this is essentially a soup to nuts justification framework for informational manipulation. it’s an attempt to cast proselytizing propaganda as informational hygiene and claim pathogens are vitamins.

and we all know how that one goes…

it winds up in the truly nasty place of “we need to tell everyone what to think in order to save democracy” which rapidly turns into “a free press and free social media agora is the enemy of representative government.”

hard to see what could go wrong with a plan like THAT…

if irony were blue, this would be ultraviolet.

but, in even further irony, she’s literally laying out the roadmap to her own defeat because the reputation economy fixes this.

we saw it all covid.

we’re seeing it now in economics and politics and social issues.

people are setting their own credibility on fire and increasingly this ham handed and laughably blatant attempt to pre-bunk and pre-frame boomerangs upon the would be practitioner and winds up creating a forensically accurate roadmap of the manipulations and bull excrement to come.

it’s like watching murderers not only stare at the floorboards where the body is buried but actually draw you a map to the house in which the floor resides while endlessly opining online that “jeez i sure hope no one goes looking for anything amiss. at 127 maple court. in copenhagen. in the back room. under that rug that’s not quite laid correctly. because we moved it. yup, that would be terrible!”

it’s so hilariously bad that one cannot help but wonder if these people have any self-awareness at all. you can near inevitably tell what the problem is by simply listening to what they tell you is “definitely for super sure not a problem.”

if they tell you the economy is great, you generally know it’s bad. they’re just trying to “pre-bunk” your actual experience.

if they tell you to be afraid, it’s a bugbear.

if they tell you there’s nothing to be scared of, maybe get worried.

this pre-bunking game rapidly turns silly and starts chasing its own tail until you wind up in the land of trying to figure out if this is reverse psychology or reverse reverse psychology or even the dreaded reverse reverse reverse psychology. that way lies impenetrable farce.

but the basic heuristic that “if they keep telling you about something that you never asked about and that seems oddly off topic, they’re generally trying to manipulate you” remains sound.

and europe is definitely the canary in the coal mine here.

this is information war waged by a group that is losing the zeitgeist and simply cannot believe it because their world view is rooted in an unflappable sense of their own rightness and that anyone who disagrees with them does so because they are somehow benighted and stupid or because they, the enlightened elites, simply have not made the case well enough and you poor gullible fools have come under the sway of bad influences (and perhaps bad cats) and that they must protect you from being led further astray by messaging you harder and silencing dissent.

there is also another technique used here where they take the idea of “don’t think of an elephant” and use it as a sort of cognitive anchor along the lines of “every time you think of an elephant, it means X” and then they flood the box with pachyderm propaganda and obsessively mention all things elephantine. it just gets added like a tag to whatever else is being discussed. both sides do it and media loves it because it’s clickbait/doomscrolling gold.

it’s not even a plan so much as an emergent property, but politicians and pundits have learned to use it.

it works like this:

you focus on this message,

“Head of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde: "Climate change" requires a complete overhaul of the entire economy and financial system, in line with the "green transition"—including the need to "reduce our carbon footprint in everything we do, from banknotes to how we supervise banks."“

but you miss the embedding

“floods, droughts, and wildfires last year were just a preview…”

and that’s the important bit. it’s a presumptive false linkage to all manner of unrelated and unproven facts that turns the everyday occurrence of simple events that are always going on somewhere into “proof” that whatever crisis is currently being flogged is real and that whatever “solutions” to it are being sold are needed and crucial until every time you hear an ambulance siren it’s evidence that covid is killing us in wholesale droves and the empty hospitals full of tiktok nurses are dying of overcrowding and strain. they just repeat it over and over until is just seems like a “known thing” and it wears you down.

every time you see “wildfire” in the headlines, you think “gee, maybe there really is global warming, perhaps they are right.” it happens subconsciously even if you don’t believe this. anchoring and repetition are a powerful combo even if, for example, you happen to know that this is really just bad forestry policy.

the folks who figure these playbooks out wind up looking prescient because they’ve programmed the populace to see what they wanted them to. some of them are just lucky parrots who chanced onto messages of high virulence and imprinting, but the more sophisticated know exactly what they are doing. it’s a 101 class for psyops and marketing teams alike.

it’s for your own good.

and they are sure they are right and justified to do it.

it’s less about being “evil” than about being narcissistic, self-absorbed, egotistical, and dogmatic to the point where it essentially expresses the same way. they really do think they are the good guys and that they are helping you by making sure you get only the “right” facts and are spared from all this wrongthink.

but the reality is that they are pushing bad ideas that are rapidly falling out of favor and as the online playing field and the society as a whole are reverting to something far less manipulated and manipulable. all this pre-bunking and informational hygiene becomes a signal itself and it’s very predictability helps us build the very societal immune system that they are trying to inculcate, but with them as the pathogen rather than the phagocyte.

it’s wonderfully self-defeating in this regard.

all we need do to make this trend a positive for us is pre-bunk it. knowing what to expect flips it into being a roadmap of the pitfalls to navigate around.

sometimes the very people trying to fool you wind up doing you a favor.