Thursday September 15, 2005

Spoofing Truth

I’ve attempted a few times before (probably unsuccessfully) to get at the exact nature of the Bush administration’s freewheeling attitude toward the truth. Is it a secret, and unexpected, endorsement of epistemological relativism? Is it some kind of kettle logic that hopes to aggregate a constituency out of several distinct, and perhaps mutually exclusive, constituencies?

After the administration’s handling of Katrina, however, I think I’ve finally hit on the correct analogy. The Bush White House’s practice of flooding every accusation with a scattershot of accounts and alibis is just like the record industry’s practice of “spoofing.” Only in this case, they’re spoofing the truth.

“Spoofing,” to recall, has been one of the industry’s more successful strategies for combatting file trading on P2P networks. Rather than trying to stop people from trading files, hired spoofers—like Overpeer and MediaDefender—simply flood P2P networks with decoy files that make finding actual songs frustrating and impractical. “It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack,” as spoof engine developer John Hale told Wired News last year.

In the same article, Hale—a computer science professor at the University of Tulsa—notes that the same principle might be used to protect sensitive material well beyond P2P networks. “If you have a secret that gets out there, how do you get the genie back in the bottle?” he says. “You make millions of clones of genies and hope that they won’t find the right one.”

Which leads back to Bush. In the wake of Katrina, the administration and its allies have provided a steady stream of alibis, which range from questionable to demonstrably false. In this non-exhaustive list compiled by Media Matters, Bush’s claim that no one expected the levees to break is in the first group, while the allegation that Governor Blanco did not declare a state of emergency is in the latter. The now debunked account of Bush pleading with Mayor Nagin to evacuate the city belongs there, too.

This makes members of the reality-based community, like myself, apoplectic. How could anyone believe a story with so many holes in it? (Or, rather, how could anyone simultaneously believe so many stories with so many holes in them?) That’s where spoofing comes in.

Remember, P2P spoofers don’t expect you to think that the 30 seconds of static you just downloaded actually is “Hollaback Girl.” That’s not their game. Rather, they hope that after downloading a dozen files full of static, you’ll simply abandon your search for “Hollaback Girl.”

Same thing with Bush’s PR strategy. The idea isn’t to get you to believe any of the administration’s various stories, but to get you to give up on the idea that you’ll ever find the true, unspun story. And once you’ve given up the search, you can only make judgments based on aesthetics and ideology.

As one pro-Bush blogger, whose idea of truth has been effectively spoofed away, asks, “Given that spin seems pretty much inevitable these days, would you rather have spin intended to lift our spirits and instill a positive, constructive attitude? Or spin geared toward making the situation worse in order to wallow in America-bashing and in hopes of scoring cheap political points?” Um, I’ll hold out for the truth.

Posted by jim at 04:18 PM ||