epistemic status:
ongoing
The word “propaganda” is somewhat an antiquity. The word brings to mine some combination of the following: Goebbels and the big lie, Cold War radio, leaflets behind enemy lines, bot farms, and troll farms. Each of these have common components. A sender, a message with intention to persuade, and a target audience. This is the antiquity I mean. The linearity of propaganda is outdated, possibly even totally wrong in 2026. Propaganda has inverted. Senders and audiences seem like they have dissolved into ephemeral feeds, algorithms, and platforms. Propaganda seems to surround.
Photograph and video were the buttress of reality. But now, images can be generated on demand, at near life like quality. Photos and videos were copies of what really happened. Now any media online must be parsed as is this plausible?
Propaganda seems to be evolving to exploit the gap between what media offered as proof, and what is now a question of plausibility.
Occult tradition has a name for ideas that feed on attention until they live, embodied, on their own. The egregore. Usually needing a mass of humanity and consciousness to manifest, an egregore can be generated and disseminated at scale. The industrial era of the meme is here.
I think the point of propaganda is less forceful belief, and more forceful suspension of belief. The egregores don’t compete in a war of ideas to live, they all find space to live as collective will weakens.