Janine Wedel - Shadow Elite - How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market

Developments in technology and media support this trend. Distributing news no longer requires starting a newspaper or television program. Anyone with access to a computer can create his own space to “report” or comment on daily events for an Internet audience of who-knows-how-many. Consumers, for their part, can create their own “reality” cocoon: Almost as simply as walking down the street with one’s own headset listening to one’s own music, everyone can discern their own “truth” and find the supporting “facts” and news outlet to back them up.

Today’s mainstream journalism has evolved in its acceptance and adoption of truthiness. The attack on authority has permeated the institution. Expertise or qualifications as a journalist are no longer essential. Even Karl Rove can become one. Rove, George W. Bush’s former deputy chief of staff, mimicked George Stephanopolous’s move eleven years earlier from the Clinton White House to ABC News. The New York Times opined that Rove’s new role in the media “marks another step in the evolution of mainstream journalism, where opinion, straight news reporting and unmistakable spin increasingly mingle, especially on television.” Here, not only is reality performed, but, via juggling of roles and representations, actors can play one role off of others and few will notice or care, as we saw with the retired military officers cum television pundits discussed in Chapter 1. 42

Lest we think this phenomenon is confined to the United States, we can simply look at Poland. There, politicians have dismissed well-grounded allegations by the press by dubbing them “media facts” or “press facts.” Embedded in those notions is the idea that reality is being performed. Nor is the press immune from the flow of virtual reality. A highly regarded reporter for one of Poland’s most prominent media outlets was told by one of his editors: “A master journalist doesn’t merely report the facts, he creates them.” 43

Top players of the truthiness game, including flexians and flex nets, use media and its evolving technologies and culture with great proficiency. Unlike the specialists of earlier generations, with technical charts and graphs to build their case, today’s premier players are adept at selling their version of reality. They are all about appearances—the appearance of the moment, that is. For in a truth-is-what-you-make-it-based, rather than fact-based, world, empirical facts are trumped by the “reality” of the moment. 44

Flexians are expert at detecting what the public will find convincing. As jugglers of roles and representations, they are skilled at manipulating appearances—at showing up in different guises to achieve their ends, and flexing whichever of their roles gives them the most credibility at the moment. The truthiness society puts up with this legerdemain in part because of people’s demand to be “informed” with up-to-the-minute “news,” and the media’s constant need to fill the news slot and feed the public’s insatiable appetite. The diminishment of authority makes it harder for the public to assess the claims of today’s influencers.

The flexians, who thrust themselves to the fore, corner access and information previously in the hands of states and official bodies, or operate in new unregulated arenas. They use this access and information to wield their own influence and can spin it however they like because they are the ones “in the know.” They have more leeway than their almost-counterparts in recent history to self-regulate their activities and to circulate “talking points” that justify them. And in comparison with their communist almost-counterparts, they have an advantage: While the citizens of communist societies are inundated by propaganda, they school themselves in skepticism, reading between the lines and discerning the motives of players. The same cannot be said of a truthiness society. As Jon Stewart put it in reference to Vice President Dick Cheney’s numerous erroneous statements, “His clout is questioned, and, yet, his clout goes on.” These changes in society may well prove to be just as important for democracy as those brought about by privatization or complex technologies.

Frank Rich explains the danger inherent in truthiness. “It’s harmless if the stories are trivial, like if people want to believe that [the reality TV show] ‘Survivor’ really is about life-and-death survival. Where it becomes a problem is when it deals with stuff that affects people’s welfare, or the welfare of the country. It does damage to sell a country on a war based not just on faulty intelligence but the kind of hyping that went on with the rest of it.” In this vein, a New York Times reporter recounted a conversation he had with a senior adviser to President Bush. The adviser accused the journalist of being “‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from . . . judicious study of discernible reality.’” But “‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.’” 45

Clearly, truthiness enables today’s influencers—at the pinnacle, flexians—to exercise power and influence with new consequences. Flexians thrive on ambiguous identities, appearances, loyalties, and borders of practically all kinds. They thrive in an environment of improvised reality, in which the façade counts for a great deal and fiction can practically become reality if enough people believe it; in which appearances, self-presentations, and professed motivation are accepted pretty much at face value; in which a “company man” loyal to an institution is in vogue only if the man owns his own company; in which reinvention of self is common, even admired, and where track records often do not track.

If the citizens of a state cannot or are not willing to recognize these new players and their modus operandi, they cannot call for them to be accountable through democratic means. Ironically, perhaps, citizens in postcommunizing states, embracing nothing more secure than the promise of market democracy yet accustomed to reading between the lines, were the first to spot the new breed of players as they emerged in their own countries as well as on the world scene.

CHAPTER THREE

Flex Power in the Wild East

I MIGHT NEVER HAVE COME UP WITH THE NOTION OF FLEXIANS IF I hadn’t met the woman I came to call Mama. Mama headed the family I lived with in Warsaw beginning in early 1982. Mama was by no means a flexian herself, but through her dexterous self-presentations and shrewd ability to get the best out of her interlocutors—from sales clerks to the secret police—she gave me the first inklings of flex activity.

As a doctoral student in anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, I was lucky to win a Fulbright fellowship to study Polish society at a time when the Solidarity movement was making headlines around the world. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the stiff general in dark glasses, had declared martial law six weeks before I arrived, and the nation was suffering under bleak conditions. Communist authorities had crushed the independent labor union Solidarity, which had attracted the support of more than one-fourth of the nation’s population, and now it had been outlawed. The government imprisoned Lech Walesa and the movement’s other leaders, imposed curfews, and cut phone lines. The country was marked by travel restrictions, roadblocks, virtually closed borders, and, above all, an atmosphere of tension and austerity. Public life seemed bleak and frozen, its vitality squeezed out of existence. Yet over the coming years I would observe in Poland a complex, ingenious society quite different from the communist police state portrayed in Western media. It was a society whose members were adept at managing public self-presentation, and whose lifeblood—just beneath the surface—was vital information about anything ranging from where to obtain scarce meat to what bureaucrat might be approached to “arrange” a permit. Such information was circulated only among friends and trusted colleagues and was not publicly available.