The Rise of Weaponized Flak in the New Media Era. Brian Michael Goss
the meta-ideological flak front, Monckton delivers again in 2014 address in Australia:
This [environmental treaty] process has nothing to do with the weather. It has nothing to do with man’s impact on the weather. It has everything to do with establishing the socialist international at the heart of the UN and making every nation bow the knee to this new dictatorship, and the climate is merely a fig leaf to cover what they are trying to do. (emphasis added; quoted in Smith & Jalsevac, 2015, para. 7)
The Life Site reporters solemnly aver that Monckton has—apparently by the sheer force of rhetoric—discovered a “concealed push for a one-world government” that is further asserted to be proceeding to hard-left specifications. To summarize, a person (e.g., Abraham), an issue (climate change), or a meta-ideology (right-wing ideology opposed to regulated capitalism and multilateral climate amelioration) may all stack up on each other in different levels of the same flak discourse.
Flak from the Boutique/Flak from the Street Corner
The Monckton discourse also illustrates a distinction between what I am naming as boutique flak and vox pop flak. Boutique flak is conceptualized as flak that presents the look and feel of discourse that is high-brow, scholarly, supported with evidence, fashioned by credentialed and seasoned experts, backed by prestige institutions dedicated to quality control of their products. Monckton’s response to Abraham is ensconced in an aura of pomp and gravity on the Watts up with that? website as a glossy, if wince-inducing pamphlet (Watts, 2010). Vox pop flak, by contrast, emanates from the grass roots, or the ←42 | 43→internet equivalent of the street corner, and speaks in the vernacular. By its nature, vox pop flak can be more plentiful. It may animate, for example, mass letter-writing via email, trending Twitter campaigns, or high-volume comment threads on web pages.
Having offered a distinction between boutique and vox pop flak, I will now complicate it. To begin, boutique flak is effectively an oxymoron. Flak does not readily lend itself to high-quality research given that it serves instrumental purposes in sociopolitical conflicts. To finesse this problem and generate information that is locked-and-loaded to be weaponized but that looks smart, think tanks of dubious-to-abysmal quality have long been concocted by elite backers (Soley, 1995). When flak disguised as scholarship is the core mission of such an organization it may be called a flak mill or, equivalently, a flak factory. In this vein, I have previously discussed think tank discourse that frequently lacks recognizable methodology or external review of its ideologically-loaded products that unambiguously reason backwards from tendentious conclusions (Goss, 2006).
However, boutique and vox pop flak can be construed as co-dependent. Boutique flak’s project is to furnish the guy on the street—or the guy up all night in stained pajamas in the flickering aura of his laptop—with putatively wise factoids and phrases in which to express flak talking points. Vox pop flak’s foot soldiers can thusly proceed with confidence that they have “prestige” backing, as they descend upon the comment section.
In this vein, in the Watts up with that? comment section discourse, vox pop participants rally to Monckton—and he is enabled to have it both ways. Monckton is constructed as the erudite answer man who furnishes exhaustive one-stop shopping for factoids, couched in “intellectual authority” to which vox pop flaksters defer; and Monckton is simultaneously construed as pure of university affiliation, a man of “the peeps” notwithstanding the elitist class background about which he ostentatiously reminds all. Ideological alchemy collapses the paradoxes of boutique and vox pop flak toward climate science.
What Flak Is Not
Having sketched out what characterizes flak and its subtypes, I will now return to differentiating it from other (better-known) terms; to wit, fake news, conspiracy theory, and activism.
The term “fake news” has spiked in usage in recent years and is up first for consideration. Throughout this volume I will eschew use of this term since ←43 | 44→its usefulness has been placed into doubt by its sheer vagueness. In July 2018, the United Kingdom’s House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee published Disinformation and Fake News. The committee reached what seems at first blush to be a surprising conclusion about the report’s titular topic. Specifically, the Committee concluded that, “There is no agreed definition of the term ‘fake news’” (2018, p. 7). Fake news can implicate satire and parody such as The Onion or Colbert Report that—in irreducible contrast to flak—often make laudable contributions to public discourse. In turn, fake news may also signify accurate stories with misleading click-bite titles—or it may point to entirely fabricated content. In the light of these and other forms of “news” discourse that could be called fake, the Committee concludes, “we cannot start thinking about regulation and we cannot start talking about interventions, if we are not clear about what we mean” (2018, p. 7). The Committee advises “that the Government rejects the term ‘fake news’ and instead puts forward an agreed definition of ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation,’” that are generally understood to signify, respectively, deliberately or inadvertently wrong information (2018, p. 8).
Flak may also be taken as making contact with conspiracy theory. My posture toward conspiracies takes them as far less exotic and edgy than is often posited in discourses on them. At the same time, I concede that dedicated flak audiences may behave like the conspiracy-minded in adopting an infinite regress of suspicion toward evidence that proves their assumptions wrong (Bratich, 2008). That said, I am assaying to take conspiracy out of the grassy knoll and make it mundane in positing there is nothing “special” about conspiracy. It is, after all, a legal term that is vital in describing some forms of crime. In Robert Mueller’s indictment of 12 Russian intelligence operators (Mueller, 2018), the term “conspirators” is employed throughout the text to collectively describe the 12 defendants. Conspiracies exist: ergo, let us get over it. In this view, a conspiracy theory is like, any other theory, subject to empirical support that (in some lesser or greater measure) provides convincing evidence or not. That (some, many, most) theories of conspiracy can be proven wrong makes them like other theories. Moreover, I am assuming a structuralist approach, such as that which Herman and Chomsky bring to the propaganda model. In this view, analysis of deep structures, such as the dynamics of capitalism, illuminates more of how the social order functions than even an empirically proven conspiracy. For this reason, I am constructing flak as structurally-grounded concept with origins in the propaganda model, with scant further reference to conspiracies or conspiracy theory.
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Doing the Right Thing: Flak Versus Activism
I have been arguing that flak serves the public badly. At the same time, one may quite reasonably wonder what to make of citizens who have composed letters of complaint, or convened demonstrations, or boycotts for pro-social ends. In this vein, Amnesty International innovated methods of confronting authority via mass letter-writing campaigns, an advancement for human rights advocacy that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977. Among other examples, Amnesty’s principle method of inspiring mass letter-writing begs the question of whether it is a flak mill and whether flak may present pro-social functions. The short answer is: emphatically no. I am defining “pro-social flak” as an oxymoron. Instead, I advocate the term activism to signify pro-social actions against powerful interests and to differentiate it from flak.
Whether enacted against people who hold authority (e.g., Clinton or Dilma) or against people who demonstrably do not, a defining feature of flak is that it emanates from a position backed with substantial power. Activism, by contrast, presents guerilla-style tactics of necessity for weaker parties against stronger ones in order to leverage whatever advantage they can. Citizen numbers present that advantage where letter-writing, boycotts, or demonstrations are concerned.
Flak has on occasion been genetically modified in order to assume the veneer of activism. Campaigns for elite interests can be camouflaged as activism in what have been called AstroTurf (fake grassroots) campaigns. When AstroTurfing, industries shepherd citizens into front groups to act (even unwittingly) as their public face. For example, “smokers’ rights campaigns” have enshrouded corporate interests in smoke (Stauber & Rampton, 1995, pp. 14, 30). Flak is doused with power—and so it may necessitate the concealment of that power. Moreover, convening front groups is now easier than ever with