ANNALEE NEWITZ presents STORIES ARE WEAPONS:
PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE & THE AMERICAN MIND
In conversation with ED YONG
Tuesday, June 18, 2024, 7pm PDT
Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar Street, Berkeley
Tickets are on sale now!
In Stories Are Weapons, best-selling author Annalee Newitz traces the way disinformation, propaganda, and violent threats—the essential tool kit for psychological warfare—have evolved from military weapons deployed against foreign adversaries into tools in domestic culture wars. Newitz delves into America’s deep-rooted history with psychological operations, beginning with Benjamin Franklin’s Revolutionary War–era fake newspaper and nineteenth-century wars on Indigenous nations, and reaching its apotheosis with the Cold War and twenty-first-century influence campaigns online. America’s secret weapon has long been coercive storytelling. And there’s a reason for that: operatives who shaped modern psychological warfare drew on their experiences as science fiction writers and in the advertising industry.
Now, through a weapons-transfer program long unacknowledged, psyops have found their way into the hands of culture warriors, transforming democratic debates into toxic wars over American identity. Newitz zeroes in on conflicts over race and intelligence, school board fights over LGBT students, and campaigns against feminist viewpoints, revealing how, in each case, specific groups of Americans are singled out and treated as enemies of the state. Crucially, Newitz delivers a powerful counternarrative, speaking with the researchers and activists who are outlining a pathway to achieving psychological disarmament and cultural peace.
Incisive and essential, Stories are Weapons reveals how our minds have been turned into blood-soaked battlegrounds—and how we can put down our weapons to build something better.
PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE & THE AMERICAN MIND
In conversation with ED YONG
Tuesday, June 18, 2024, 7pm PDT
Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar Street, Berkeley
Tickets are on sale now!
In Stories Are Weapons, best-selling author Annalee Newitz traces the way disinformation, propaganda, and violent threats—the essential tool kit for psychological warfare—have evolved from military weapons deployed against foreign adversaries into tools in domestic culture wars. Newitz delves into America’s deep-rooted history with psychological operations, beginning with Benjamin Franklin’s Revolutionary War–era fake newspaper and nineteenth-century wars on Indigenous nations, and reaching its apotheosis with the Cold War and twenty-first-century influence campaigns online. America’s secret weapon has long been coercive storytelling. And there’s a reason for that: operatives who shaped modern psychological warfare drew on their experiences as science fiction writers and in the advertising industry.
Now, through a weapons-transfer program long unacknowledged, psyops have found their way into the hands of culture warriors, transforming democratic debates into toxic wars over American identity. Newitz zeroes in on conflicts over race and intelligence, school board fights over LGBT students, and campaigns against feminist viewpoints, revealing how, in each case, specific groups of Americans are singled out and treated as enemies of the state. Crucially, Newitz delivers a powerful counternarrative, speaking with the researchers and activists who are outlining a pathway to achieving psychological disarmament and cultural peace.
Incisive and essential, Stories are Weapons reveals how our minds have been turned into blood-soaked battlegrounds—and how we can put down our weapons to build something better.
Annalee Newitz is a journalist and author of science fiction and nonfiction, including the national best-seller Four Lost Cities. They write for the New York Times and New Scientist and co-host the Hugo Award–winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. They live in San Francisco. Photo by A Klass.
Ed Yong is an award-winning science writer who until recently was a staff writer at The Atlantic. His writing has also appeared in National Geographic, the New Yorker, Wired, the New York Times, Nature, New Scientist, Scientific American, and more. He talked about mind-controlling parasites at the TED2014 conference, and his talk has been viewed more than 1.4 million times. He is the winner of the Byron H. Waksman Award for Excellence in the Public Communication of Life Sciences (2016), the Michael E. DeBakey Journalism Award (2016), a National Academies Keck Science Communication Award (2010) and awards from the Association of British Science Writers for Best Science Blog (2014) and Best Communication of Science in a Non-Science Context (2012). Photo by Urszula Soltys.