War Culture

Enough talk about the Culture War. Let's look at the military-entertainment-industrial complex.

(from the movie Wargames)

AI has been the center of many discussions online, from entertainment to medicine to work to mortality. The roots are rarely discussed. You may hear about the first chatbot, ELIZA. The name “Turing” bubbles up. The Turing Test, anyway. But Alan Turing himself is not mentioned. AI invented by a gay pioneer? What an origin story! You mean there isn’t even a look back at The Imitation Game?

This is for the same reason you don’t hear too often about how video games and the Internet were both invented by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA); the public may be alarmed by how much their personal lives, their social lives, even their sex lives are controlled and harvested by the military-industrial complex.

War and culture were always inseparable. All songs were for God and country. The assumption was always that these songs, plays, etc. were played in their native countries. If you heard military songs from another nation in your country, that meant they took over. During WWI, the US’s delayed intervention meant Hollywood, unlike France (where film was invented), did not need to stop producing and releasing films that the world still enjoyed. This seemingly minor discrepancy is the primary reason why, to this day, the US is the leading exporter of culture.

Because of this unprecedented advantage, by World War II, Hollywood pro-US propaganda films were the only films everyone in the world enjoyed regardless of whether they were occupied by the US or not. The Germans, who had their own formidable radio networks, may have lost more cultural ground to Hollywood during the war than actual ground to anyone.

After the war, the US military focused on soldiers coming home. Home ownership incentives and the GI Bill helped returning soldiers build families in suburbia and go to college even. But many were traumatized by all the horrors they were involved with, so therapy was offered free of charge as well to veterans. European psychoanalysts were flown in and found that many soldiers had the seeds of fascism within because of how they were brought up. Bigger dilemma; turns out American culture itself was full of latent fascist tropes. So experts and thought leaders in general, not trusting Americans to think for themselves on this issue, needed a more subliminal propaganda. Counterintelligence ops were born.

One such op was Abstract Expressionism. Without Pollock or DeKooning knowing, their paintings were trotted around the globe by CIA-run cultural collectives and ambassadors to promote freedom of expression (unlike in Communist countries, say). Speaking of Communism, Russian propaganda would constantly paint the Americans as backwards bigots that owned slaves.

From The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters:

The problem of race relations in America was much exploited by Soviet propaganda and left many Europeans uneasy about America’s ability to practice the democracy she now claimed to be offering the world. It was therefore reasoned that the exporting of African Americans to perform in Europe would dispel such damaging perceptions. An American military government report of March 1947 revealed plans “to have top-rank American negro vocalists give concerts in Germany. . . . Marian Anderson or Dorothy Maynor appearances before German audiences would be of great importance.” The promotion of black artists was to become an urgent priority for American cultural Cold Warriors.

This is, of course, what has been revealed. What has been substantiated. Is it really too crazy to deduce that every progressive cause in the arts (besides communism of course) was allowed to flourish and reach its most transgressive peaks because it was also unwittingly spreading the message that Americans were free?

The antiwar movement in the ‘60s was a challenge to the complex. But it wasn’t such a challenge that it was impossible to defeat. A clear antiwar message devolved into mindless, harmless quasi-Christian drivel shucking love and peace, thanks to the advanced CIA counterintelligence of the ‘60s (including ARPANET of course). The true opponents that actually attacked the efforts of the Vietnam War specifically were either in jail or grew so caustically bitter and odious that they were unapproachable. Some even praised Manson for killing those fat Hollywood pigs.

The ‘70s and ‘80s proved to be a golden age of pro-military cultural ops. Hard rock took the messaging out and left the propulsive militaristic rhythms and the screeching missile guitars. Southern Rock helped tie the psychedelic guitar noodling to down-home American family values. In 1972, future Internet cyberutopian guru Stewart Brand would praise the video game Space War and all the other cool things he witnessed at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. Things like ARPANET. This article was widely read and cited, much to the chagrin of Stanford antiwar activists that abhorred the lab.

With military films and Westerns on the decline, a new type of macho blockbuster was created with Dirty Harry, the tough Irish rogue dirty cop that was raring to restore San Francisco’s filthy streets to its pre-hippie normalcy. Then came Star Wars and countless other soft power pro-war ops like Top Gun and Predator.

The introduction of the Internet to the public in the ‘90s was the final piece of the puzzle. Now the government could see what someone in Des Moines desired through their Internet searches. Any anti-military messaging that a major publication released could now be countered by anyone (operative or otherwise) who disagreed. By the ‘00s, with the Patriot Act and social media, our phones were spying on us, we were telling our deepest secrets to the world knowing the Feds may be watching, and we were spying on each other. For good, for bad; it was all data.

But what was all that data used for? To track enemy insurgents. And to help build artificial intelligence. Since the ‘50s, there has been an AI race comparable to the space race and the arms race. We didn’t hear of it because the advances were so slow. In 2016, we had our Sputnik moment when Trump won through a formidable AI disinformation campaign from the Russians (as well as election tampering of course). Even these were simple bots, not generative AI. Then in 2020, Chinese-owned TikTok took over the world. For the first time ever, there was a serious contender for the cultural capital of the world. Sure the stars may mostly be American, but the Chinese had all the data. The TikTok data anyway. But, up until recently, that was all that mattered.

Then ChatGPT came along. Currently, the Chinese government is trying to crack down on the app because of fears that its answers might undermine Chinese propaganda.

And the band played on.