Desperation: GOP Escalates from Zone-Flooding to Signal Jamming

[TygrBright]

Last edited Fri Nov 4, 2022, 09:14 PM - Edit history (1)

"Flooding the Zone" has long been a recognized propaganda technique. To "flood a zone" is to pump out multiple, constant streams of items into every communication channel - opinion pieces, letters to the editor, news releases, announcements, advertisements, interviews, analysis, summaries of all descriptions in all types of media.

In the old days this was newspapers, radio, television, outdoor advertising, mass mailing, and eventually robocalling. With the advent of the Internet, additional channels and media opened up for flooding - podcasts, social media, websites, streaming services, etc.

By "flooding the zone" propagandists achieve several goals - they overwhelm the channels that would otherwise carry communications from a variety of sources with similarly varying content with their own material. Successfully doing this often involves using proxies, subverting gatekeepers, etc., so that the flood appears a natural outcome of legitimate concern from many sources, rather than a targeted propaganda barrage. This interferes with information consumers' conscious or unconscious perceptions of importance and rankings of issues, and often 'overwrites' immediate and short-term memory of conflicting information/events/etc.

The GOP has been skillfully and successfully zone-flooding for nearly three decades.

They have to do this, as a combination of demographic realities, lack of accomplishments or ideas, and their own natural hostility to change is in the process of dooming them to permanent electoral irrelevance.

Every election, every year, even every news cycle, they have to increase the volume and intensity of the flood, to survive.

But recently they have escalated to a next-level tactic: Signal Jamming. Not a literal frequency jam, but the employment of vast amounts of noise on every conceivable channel, to degrade the signal/noise ratio beyond any useful carrying capacity.

Zone-flooding requires providing actual content with some minimal level of coherence and/or coordination in service of a specific propaganda goal or agenda. Signal jamming requires only noise, large quantities of it, with no requirements as to coherence or even comprehensible content. The signal jammer doesn't even need to use proxies or subvert sources, only to prevent any kind of frequency modulation or content moderation that would filter out noise. And to constantly escalate both the volume (both flow volume and auditory volume) and the number of source points for the noise.

In addition to the kind of 'blind spot induction' that zone flooding produces, signal jamming induces another level of interference with information consumers' brain function. Long-term exposure to loud, meaningless noise from multiple sources overwhelms the auditory processing centers of the brain. Long-term exposure to signal jamming has similar effects on the brain's ability to process information.

Overwhelming the brain's ability to process information has many secondary effects, including fatigue and depression.

When better to "peak" this effect than in the week before an election they cannot possibly win without massive efforts to suppress voting?

And that's the way it is, Friday, November 4th, 2022.

somberly,
Bright

[TygrBright]

1. Pathetic self-response to kick for evening crowd... n/t