Propaganda Hacker's Manifesto

A propaganda hacker is not a person who has set themselves against propaganda, but instead seeks to understand it through a systematic method and procedure by which they can see past the article of propaganda itself to view the intent and expected outcome of it's creators. A propaganda hacker, in a sense, is someone who attempts to see the future actions of the mass population being propagandized through recognizing past patterns and similarities in technique and reaction by the propagandists. What a propaganda hacker uses their information for is up to them. It can be imagined that this information is of great use to the people or the "mass man", as Edward Bernays likes to call them, leaning toward helping to release humanity of the bonds placed on the mind of it's capitulates. A propaganda hacker is a map-maker who realizes that all communication carries propaganda to someone's benefit and can place the inputs that he receives every day from hundreds of sources into concrete categories in order to further recognize emerging pattens in the system.

Propaganda hackers are truth-seekers and realists. They are not fatalists or conspiracy theorists. They understand the modalities and temporalities of propaganda and simply seek to be free of that propaganda with which they do not want to conform or congeal to. Propaganda hackers must be themselves free of the common ideas and tools used to separate the people through past propaganda techniques such as racism, nationalism, communism, capitalism, and prejudices in all forms. This is not a position, but a truth. For to be truly free of the mind-numbing and stagnating effects of the mass propaganda campaigns of the modern day, the hacker must put down his differences and see the reality that they are only tools to keep the mass man distracted and sedated into a stupor of unorganized and unfocused action on the basis of mass misinformation.

Is a propaganda hacker counter the Propagandist? No. The propaganda hacker realizes that in order to be of any help to his fellow human beings on earth, one of the best tools at his dispense is propaganda itself. If a propagandist were a programmer, a propaganda hacker would be the equivalent of a programmer who focuses on reverse engineering programs made by the former type. However, the hacker's use of propaganda is of a different type altogether. The hacker propagates information that is true, and not skewed, prejudiced or alarmist in any way. Pure objective information that serves only the point of noting observations and letting people come to their own free conclusions from what they are presented. This document and written effort counts as propaganda of that type. A propaganda hacker can even see through and analyze this document to discover the intentions behind it. All in all, the hacker should maintain transparency and consistency in how he analyzes and categorizes incoming propaganda.

I am proposing a community of Propaganda Hackers be started, and a Propaganda Hacker manifesto be forged in order to collectively explore and analyze the effects of the modernized, internet savy propaganda of today's world. I will be putting together a web site for this which includes this blog, as well as many other resources, tools, and exercises for propaganda hacking. I will continue to post to this blog with updated and relevant information while the site is in construction. I ask that you continue to share the information I have posted here, and continue to read past entries if you haven't already, as they are quite relevant to the conversation.

The propaganda hacking site will feature tools that read through, filter, and trend historical and incoming media communications, as well as conversational communications from websites such as twitter. It will feature analysis tools that use some of the methods we've discussed already, and new methods and categorizations I've been working on. It will be a community for propaganda hackers to share and create their ideas, theories, and analysis through a customized system focused on streamlining and standardizing the analytical process. If you have any ideas you'd wish to share for now, please comment.