Manufacturing Consensus: Understanding Propaganda in the Era of Automation and Anonymity (Samuel Woolley, Yale University Press, 2023)

    A colleague of mine usually tells me she “lives under a rock” when I’m telling her about whatever it is that has set me off in this news this week. There’s times when I speak with her or other people in my life that I feel like my views are out of synch with theirs. Somewhere, some machine has slipped a gear. There are many possible explanations for why each of us sees the world a little differently, and the nature of those misperceptions are part of what Samuel Woolley explores in Manufacturing Consensus: Understanding Propaganda in the Era of Automation and Anonymity. You may have heard the phrase manufactured consent and so you’re thinking this book is a new update on that idea, and you’d be correct. Woolley argues that the nature of what used to be known as mass media has changed significantly in the days since Herman and Chomsky gave a name to the idea of a small number of broadcasters being able to create wide support for certain ideas through one-way messaging. What’s different now is that we have devices with worldwide reach in our pockets and we can use them to remain anonymous while sharing our perspectives with each other directly. More than that, we can hide our perspective behind that of a bot that interacts with other users according to our programming instructions. As a result, Woolley contends that instead of manufacturing consent, we are instead involved in a process of manufacturing consensus; it may seem that the majority of people share the same viewpoints, even when that is not the case.

    The book’s cover communicates this idea beautifully. There are 28 dots on the cover that comprise shades from blue to red. Only the bottom three dots are completely red, and they also have shoulders attached to them that make them appear as generic social media avatars. What it seems to be saying is there is a diversity of voices available, but only the three voices that are fully red are taken as representing the whole group. It’s a biased sample. Our perception may be that three out of every three people agree with a certain perspective, but those three are from a population of 28 and they are in the minority. It’s easy to be confused in a context where those three voices dominate, even if you occasionally have evidence that the other 25 voices exist. You might feel that you live under a rock if one of those 25 voices speak to you, regardless of whether you agree with the perspective espoused by the three red voices.

    Woolley provides an operational definition for propaganda early in the text, writing that it describes “the use of politically biased information in considered attempts to manipulate or influence the opinions and actions of individuals and, more broadly, society” (p. 4). He goes on to state that the purpose of propaganda may not be to effect concrete changes in its targets’ behavior. It can be enough to seed certain emotions (anger, apathy) that result in a target taking no concrete actions or behavioral changes. Think about people who have convinced themselves that not voting is some kind of message. It’s not. Non-voters are telling candidates that their opinions can be safely ignored. Getting enough people to feel cynical about the process of elections or other social participation is the goal of some propaganda. It seems easier than ever to get people to sit home and rot these days, which is just what the propagandists want.

    Later in the first chapter, Woolley is explaining how powerful propaganda can be in the world of social media. He uses the case of Martha Coakley’s failed 2010 run for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts as an example of how social media users influenced the result of a race. Widely seen as an easy win for Coakley, the race went to her Republican opponent. Woolley explains how a small number of social media accounts were able to successfully pounce on Coakley’s gaffes and missteps, which helped to blunt her momentum and cost her the seat. More generally, Woolley uses a section of this chapter to explore the truism that “if you don’t know what the product is, the product is you” with regard to social media (p. 15). I was a little surprised to not see Shoshana Zuboff’s revision of this statement cited instead. She claims that its not “you,” but “your behavior” that is the product on social media. Her analysis dovetails nicely with Woolley’s because what is important is not just the social media user, but how propagandists can manipulate their behaviors through anonymity and automation that is important. So, what is key is not just the users on social media, but the behavior of the people that a small number of social media users manipulated to prevent Coakley from coasting to victory in her 2010 race.

    Further into the text, Woolley defines more clearly three levels of manufacturing consensus and how they interact. He describes them as “a kind of ouroboros of manipulative information” because of how they rely on each other (p. 55). Each level is based on different types of users. There are political-bot-, sockpuppet-, and partisan nanoinfluencer-based propagandists. Then there are social-media-algorithm-, recommendation-, and trend-based propagandists. Finally, there are news-media-based propagandists. Each level relies on and interacts with the others. The first type (bots and sockpuppets) give the illusion of wide support for marginal ideas. The second type (algorithms and trends) are taken as genuine public opinion polling, even though they can be manipulated or gamed. The third type (news media) gives an institutional sheen to the propaganda created by the other two and broadcasts it to wider audiences as they “reproduce, recreate, and further launder content” (p. 55). One of Woolley’s interview participants grasps these levels of manufacturing consensus with his rhetorical question, “Why would I focus on trying to change someone's mind with a bot barely capable of communication… when I could get the trending algorithm on a site to reprioritize and reshare the content I'm pushing with five thousand bots?” (p. 121). It’s clear that Woolley’s levels are grounded in the reality of social media users. This particular user (among his other interview participants) is able to articulate exactly how to move from the first to the second level of manufacturing consensus, and there is reason to believe that he could easily understand why getting the news media to cover his propaganda campaign would lend it further legitimacy.

    At this point, you yourself may be feeling there is no sense is fighting back against these interlocking systems because there is no way to undo all the damage propagandists have wrought. Woolley tells us later that “there are, sadly, no easy fixes” (p. 84). One that he proposes is based on the work of Joan Donovan and danah boyd, who argue for “strategic silence” from news media (p. 138). The attention the news media give to trends on social media amplifies, launders, and legitimizes propagandists’ campaigns, as Woolley has explained. (He uses 2016’s Pizzagate incident as an illustrative example of how this process unfolds.) So, part of the solution does rest on the shoulders of mass media. How and whether the local or national news covers certain trends has a large influence on whether it is seen as an idea with consensus.

    Woolley doesn’t let us down in the end with a despairing conclusion. One immediate change that would be helpful would be to replace the U.S.’s Section 230 with “legislation that takes account of the massive rise of social media” (p. 176). He also calls for interaction between the Federal Elections Commission, Federal Trade Commission, and Federal Communications Commission to “prevent manipulation via digital tools” (p. 176). That he cites a thirty-year-old law and three large governmental bodies that need to work together to solve this problem gives a sense of how immense the problem is. Both of these changes in regulation sound like excellent ideas. 

    Normally, about here is where I’d sign off with a comment like “well Trump won again after this book was published, so there’s no hope.” However, this past weekend’s comically mismanaged Great American State Fair shows just how little actual power these folks have. The consensus they appeared to wield is has been manufactured and their low level of support is undeniable. They’re outnumbered and we will win.

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Paper Airplane, Vol. 2 (edited by Nick Norlen, Paper Airplane Publishing, 2026)

    When I saw the notification last week that my issue of Paper Airplane, Vol. 3 was on its way to me, I realized I hadn’t looked through Vol. 2 yet. Ah, me! This oversight has more to do with the deluge of other demands on my time than it does my lack of desire to read the magazine itself. That’s right! This time, there is a physical edition to accompany the PDF version. There’s also a subscription service now, and you’d better believe I signed up for it right away. As I await the next quarterly installment of this periodical, let’s take a look at what makes its first printed edition such a joy.

    The cover illustration by Kaitlyn Brito depicts a person (the artist?) at a cafe table, sketching their view. We see that view from the artist’s perspective, complete with sketchbook and writing implements, croissant and kerchief, and cup and saucer. They are sketching a rough draft of what we would see if we were in their seat. If you look closely, there is a picture-within-a-picture element to the sketch. What’s more, we can see the artist’s reflection in the mirror across the cafe with the same accoutrements on the table as they are in her (our) view. It’s a trip.

    The contents of the issue are no less impressive. The editor’s note calls out the back cover as a consumable set of four postcards that are meant to be sent to friends just because. It’s a gentle invitation into the rest of the issue. Norlen asks us to “enjoy it with abandon,” which felt more pleasant than most imperative sentences should.

    In between the cover pages, I delighted in reading Sasha Nyary’s stories of fact-checking for Sports Illustrated and Life magazines in the time before the Internet. The stories are concise and demonstrate the cleverness and dedication it took to make sure facts were correct when only a few people in the world may have been able to make that determination. Well, that’s still true, but it is easier to get in touch with potential more knowledgeable others these days. Reading it made me appreciate how many hands a page has to go through before publication in major magazines. One gets the sense that Paper Airplane goes through a similarly robust editorial, design, and art revision process as well.

    A major feature in this issue is Jonny Teklit’s interview with Hanif Abdurraqib about his collection of vintage music shirts. I’ve read some of his books and essays, but I hadn’t heard of this passion of his before. I am also someone who has “a drawer full of band tees, like DIY band tees, and half the bands didn’t exist anymore,” so this part of the issue was right up my alley. I have much more anxiety around wearing and washing and caretaking my shirts. They are fine in their drawer. Who knows whether the next wash will be the last wash? It’s too much for me to think about. That’s why it’s refreshing to hear from someone who knows the shirts “aren’t meant to stay pristine forever. And to wear them out, eagerly, joyfully, is to—at least for me—form a relationship with the mortality of the item, so that I don’t think about any of it as too precious.” Maybe someday I’ll finally relax. Interviews such as this one might get me there.

    The set of four brief comics toward the middle of the issue are varied in their style and content but consistent in depicting small moments that connect us to family, ourselves, our animals, and each other. They’re on consecutive pages because they are the comic section of the issue, but they also seem to be addressing the same motifs from different angles. Each is lovely in its own way.

    Also lovely are the word nerd and puzzle pages that follow. I can’t bring myself to write in the actual magazine, so I’ll be printing the word spiral, escape page, and crossword pages myself. (I promise, I will get over my hang-up of not wanting to leave blemishes on the things I love.) Sadly, because I came to this issue too late, I have no current use for the Field Guide to Simple Pleasures: Winter section. In a couple months, I’ll pull this out again and enjoy checking off the list. Even though this is a periodical, I’m going to hold onto it for the long term because it’s just that much fun. Get yourself subscribed here.

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The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comic Books, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture by Robert Warshow

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The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comic Books, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (Robert Warshow, Harvard University Press, 2001)

    There’s a first time for everything. For all the other books, albums, games, episodes, singles, shows, and movies I’ve reviewed for this blog, I have always finished them. I feel like I owe it to you and to myself to be as informed as possible about whatever it is I’m discussing. Cutting corners feels like it would be cheating. Maybe it’s OK to “cheat” once in a while.

    Truth be told, I suppose this is not the kind of book one reads from cover to cover. It’s a collection of essays from the author and it spans 1946 to 1954. He died in 1955 and the original edition of the text dates to 1962. I wish I could tell you where and when I added it to my reading list. I can at least tell you why I did so. I was excited about the idea of reading a book about pop culture commentary from well before such a practice became commonplace. My impression when I learned about the book was that Warshow was one of the first to treat pop cultural artifacts with the respect they deserved. I took that to mean he was a fellow nerd. That he would have made a fanzine about comics or movies if he could have.

    That’s not the case.

    Turns out Warshow was an accomplished writer who just happened to focus his lens on the stage and the screen as well as the panels and gutters of the Sunday funnies. Even though The Immediate Experience is not what I thought I was signing up for, I’m still glad to have engaged with it. I do plan to finish it, mind you!

    Let’s start with a searing riff on the kind of pieces Warshow sees when he reads The New Yorker. He begins a review of E.B. White’s The Wild Flag (itself a collection of essays!) by claiming, “The New Yorker at its best provides the intelligent and cultured college graduate with the most comfortable and least compromising attitude he can assume toward capitalist society without being forced into actual conflict.” He then goes on to write, “The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it. This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately.” Can you imagine writing like that? It’s a dream of mine. That must be why I closed the book and went to sleep upon reading it. After having struggled through the author’s preface and the first essay on “The Legacy of the ‘30s” in film and culture, I was not sure this book would be for me. It was like I had given myself homework and I wasn’t liking it. The scintillating brilliance of Warshow’s words on White forced me to shut my eyes lest I go blind.

    I’m in no position to evaluate the truth value of his claim about what The New Yorker was publishing at the time. All the same, I’m able to recognize an accurate diagnosis. There is value in having the “right” opinion or attitude to have about a text borne not of engagement with it, but from consulting with trusted sources who may also not have engaged with it. Warshow is recognizing the bullshit artist by calling out the tricks of his trade. The idea of feeling “intelligent without thinking” (p. 75) is exactly what generative artificial intelligence’s large language models aim to do. To have the “right” take without any insight into why it is correct.

    Reading and re-reading the opening paragraphs of that essay was enough to motivate me hundreds of pages further into the book. I have little to no background knowledge of the media environment Warshow inhabited and he does not always do a great job of giving me as a reader enough information on the topics or subjects he’s discussing. That’s where my struggle to enjoy the text came from. I simply hadn’t seen (or read) the movies or plays he was analyzing. He did not give even a cursory summary of their plot or themes. I resigned myself to not being able to fully grasp the meaning of each essay while also being on the hunt for passages that might catch my attention in other ways. I cringe to think of what Warshow would say about how I’m reading him.

    Those who have read theories of reading surely know about Rosenblatt’s (1978) aesthetic and efferent stances toward a text. To oversimplify it, you are either reading to enjoy a text or to learn from it. Hold on, that’s too simple. You are likely somewhere between those two extremes when you read. When I select books to read for fun, I can calibrate my expectations based on those two factors. I incorrectly assumed that Warshow’s collected essays would provide a helpful framework for reading comics or watching movies in a new way; I had an efferent stance. Instead, I am finding that I am enjoying the writing as writing; I have switched to an aesthetic stance. I don’t need to make a list of all of the movies, plays, and comics he’s discussing and then go to the library and chase footnotes until I go dizzy. I don’t need to know every fact about every cultural artifact that has even existed. That’s OK. My goals as a reader can be modest.

    As a result, it’s perhaps unsurprising that I am taking some of Warshow’s insights in a different direction than he could have imagined. Take this one from an essay on Westerns and gangster films. In contrast to the heroes of Westerns, Warshow writes that “The gangster is lonely and melancholy, and can give the impression of a profound worldly wisdom. He appeals most to adolescents with their impatience and their feeling of being outsiders, but more generally he appeals to that side of all of us which refuses to believe in the ‘normal’ possibilities of happiness and achievement; the gangster is the ‘no’ to that great American ‘yes’ which is stamped so big over our official culture and yet has so little to do with the way we really feel about our lives” (p. 106). The way Warshow connects “the impression of a profound worldly wisdom” to adolescent impatience rings true. It’s another way of understanding the appeal of genAI LLMs, especially for gangsters such as the U.S. president—the kind of person who takes shortcuts to success and makes the rest of us suffer for the damage he leaves in his wake.

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I Am Not Good: The History of Cheating in Video Games (Nate Drake, Retro Game Books, 2026)

    It can be helpful to explore the difference between declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge of different daily activities. Doing so can help us understand what knowledge and skill are, which can lead to deeper discussions of what we mean when we use intelligence as a descriptor. For many of us, the knowledge of a best friend’s phone number from childhood might be committed to memory, even if we have not called it in decades. Reaching that same friend (or even a newer, but just as dear one) today might not even involve knowledge of area codes or local exchanges. Once a number is in your phone, you add a name and / or a face to it, and you know to press it if you want to speak to that person. Past you had declarative knowledge of a friend’s phone number; you had it memorized. Current you has procedural knowledge of a friend’s phone number; you may not have it memorized, but you know the sequence of steps that will result in a phone call to that person. Neither of these methods is any “better” than the other. They are simply different ways of achieving the same goal.

    Alternate routes to the same ending come to mind when reading Nate Drake’s I Am Not Good: The History of Cheating in Video Games because he explores the uses and purposes of cheat codes, easter eggs, and glitches in a variety of video games. He opens by explaining the book’s title. It is actually a passcode for Lemmings that allows a player to select levels and thus see more of the game than they could if they were limited to their own insights and coordination (p. 14). The code itself seems to be written with the intent of shaming the player, but Drake had and has no qualms about using it. Lemmings is a single-player game and he is not competing for prestige or money, so there’s no larger moral issue at play. He just wants to experience as much of the game as possible. He knows a procedure that will allow him that access, even if his declarative skills (i.e., gameplay prowess) have limited it.

    This framing of the use of cheats is instructive because it does not position them as having a negative connotation. The word itself, even outside of video games, is often associated with bad behavior. Framing it as a means of opening access and ability to games helped me to see cheating (if there’s no better word for it) as having a positive connotation. It’s not like I’ve never cheated in a video game before! These things cost a lot of money and it’s only reasonable to want to get plenty of satisfaction from them. If that means using a procedure that is written into the game’s code to do so, then so be it. I will take my 30 lives, my invincibility, my unlimited continues, and my infinite power-ups over dissatisfied frustration any day.

    With that orienting framework in mind, Drake then sets out to explain what might be considered some of the first cheats or easter eggs in video games. Some of them are notorious enough to have had full articles written and investigations done about them. From those stories, we learn that the Konami Code originally existed to help programmers debug the game they were coding (p. 22). Meaning, even the people who wrote the game had to make shortcuts for themselves so they could more easily experience specific parts of their games before releasing them to the world. No big deal to make use of something that’s already in the game if it can help you increase your enjoyment of it.

    Readers of a certain age will be familiar with devices such as the Game Genie, Pro Action Replay, or GameShark that allowed players to use predetermined codes to enable in-game behaviors that even the programmers may not have intended. In his explanation of these devices, Drake cites a court case that Nintendo lost against Galoob (the manufacturer of the Game Genie). In judge Fern M. Smith’s 1991 ruling, these kinds of temporary modifications to game code were allowable because actions like modifying board game rules or fast-forwarding movies are the same kind of temporary change that does not involve altering copyrighted material (p. 57). In that light, cheating is a series of mutually agreed-upon and temporary modifications that increase participation and joy.

    Drake spends some time discussing how codes come to public knowledge, from the way Nintendo Power used its “agents” to share “Classified Information,” such as the Konami Code itself, with players. Previous to that, early internet users could swap codes or passwords via Bulletin Board Systems (p. 75). Failing that, there would always be school or other social places where children gather. The rumor mill is not a reliable source for accurate video game information, but it can be a fun source of speculation. I’m remembering a time when I called a friend on the phone because I’d heard he had an issue of GamePro with a code that would unlock Goro as a playable character in Mortal Kombat for the SNES. He convincingly rustled some paper and did his best to recite what sounded like a legitimate sequence of button presses for me to execute. Needless to say, it didn’t work. It felt good to believe for a little while.

    During my time with the text, I thought about the ways that cheating in video games is about not just access or ease, but control. This thought came to mind at first during the explanation of Doom’s “God Mode,” where the player is invulnerable and does not consume ammunition as normal. It’s right there in the name of the cheat—you are playing God with the game. You are in full control. I thought again about the power of control in Drake’s section on Tomb Raider (p. 88). The desire for many horny players to see protagonist Lara Croft in the nude made for rampant rumor-mongering about a code that could supposedly make this possible. There was no such code, but that didn’t stop losers from making a website that depicted such nudity, against the wishes of the developers. The idea that the game does not allow players to have control over a woman’s appearance means that some of them had to create a website where they could is disgusting for many reasons. It also reveals the seedier side of cheating, which is the mentality behind making things work for you, no matter what. Compare that kind of participation in a game’s world with the narratively creative, social (and occasionally horny) practice of writing fanfiction.

    Later in the text, Drake discusses online multiplayer games and esports, where cheating has a far different reputation than in the single-player, no financial stakes games he played in his youth. In these realms, cheating is just as awful as it would be in a competitive sport being contested for any kind of prize. If advantages are available only to certain players and they have concealed those advantages, then the play is not fair. (I’m reminded of Adrienne Massanari’s explanation of dark play in her book Gaming Democracy: How Silicon Valley Leveled Up the Far Right, where bending the rules, or denying that a game is even being played, causes harmful outcomes.) So it seems a little unsurprising to learn that modern players, whose games are often multiplayer, online, or contested for prize money or status, are firmly against cheating. They’re not using the games as solely a means of recreation, so cheating in this kind of context breaks the social contract.

    As a result, many of the largest or most successful games do not feature or even allow cheating to occur, which means there is less of an incentive for programmers to include these features in their games. What has happened instead is much better. Drake explains in the book’s Epilogue that many games now come with accessibility options available from the start. These options can allow for modification of lives, chances, energy, and starting points, but they can also change the contrast of the display, the sound levels, the controller sensitivity, and the control scheme itself. These features would have been beyond the capabilities of programmers to include in the first decades of gaming due to storage issues on the games’ circuits. It’s a clever choice for Drake to have saved this discussion for the Epilogue because it seems like an area that would be interesting to continue learning about. Mia Consalvo’s Foreword also provides a possible place to start footnote chasing. Her book, Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames, seems a good a place as any to continue explorations of what cheating means in this context and how it can be distinguished from the accessibility features that make for considerate gameplay for all involved.

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