In this pathbreaking work, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky show that, contrary to the usual image of the news media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and defense of justice, in their actual practice they defend the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate domestic society, the state, and the global order.

Based on a series of case studies--including the media's dichotomous treatment of worthy versus unworthy victims, legitimizing and meaningless Third World elections, and devastating critiques of media coverage of the U.S. wars against Indochina--Herman and Chomsky draw on decades of criticism and research to propose a Propaganda Model to explain the media's behavior and performance.

Their new introduction updates the Propaganda Model and the earlier case studies, and it discusses several other applications. These include the manner in which the media covered the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and subsequent Mexican financial meltdown of 1994-1995, the media's handling of the protests against the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund in 1999 and 2000, and the media's treatment of the chemical industry and its regulation. What emerges from this work is a powerful assessment of how propagandistic the U.S. mass media are, how they systematically fail to live up to their self-image as providers of the kind of information that people need to make sense of the world, and how we can understand their function in a radically new way.

2024 Reprint of the 1928 Edition. Propaganda, an influential book written by Bernays in 1928, incorporated the literature from social science and psychological manipulation into an examination of the techniques of public communication. Bernays wrote the book in response to the success of some of his earlier works such as Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and A Public Relations Counsel (1927). Propaganda explored the psychology behind manipulating masses and the ability to use symbolic action and propaganda to influence politics, consumer choices and corporate image, which we now call branding. Walter Lippmann was Bernays' unacknowledged American mentor and his work The Phantom Public greatly influenced the ideas expressed in Propaganda a year later. The work propelled Bernays into media historians' view of him as the father of public relations.

Bernay's manual of mass manipulation provides a detailed examination of how public discourse and opinion are shaped and controlled in politics, business, art, education, and science. In a world dominated by political spin and media manipulation, Propaganda is an essential read for all who wish to understand how power is used by the ruling elite of our society.

The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays (1891-1995) pioneered the scientific technique of shaping and manipulating public opinion, which he called engineering of consent.' During World War I, he was an integral part--along with Walter Lippmann--of the U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI), a powerful propaganda machine that advertised and sold the war to the American people as one that would Make the World Safe for Democracy. The marketing strategies for all future wars would be based on the CPI model. Over the next half century, Bernays, combining the techniques he had learned in the CPI with the ideas of Lippmann and Freud, fashioned a career as an outspoken proponent of the engineering of consent for political and corporate influence of the population, earning the moniker father of public relations. Among his powerful clients were President Calvin Coolidge, Procter & Gamble, CBS, the American Tobacco Company, and General Electric, and the United Fruit Company.

At the turn of the millennium, digital technologies seemed to have immense promise for transforming our society. With these powerful new tools, the thinking went, we would be free to live our best lives, connected to our communities in ways full of infinite potential.

A quarter of a century on, this form of utopianism seems like a cruel mirage. Our lives are more fragmented and pressure-filled as ever, as we race to keep up with technologies that manipulate, command, and drain us at every turn.

So what happened? In Against Platforms, technologist and creator Mike Pepi lays out an explanation of what went wrong - and a manifesto for putting it right.

The key, says Pepi, is that we have been taught that digital technologies are neutral tools, transparent, easily understood, and here to serve us. The reality, Pepi says, is that they are laden with assumptions and collateral consequences - ideology, in other words. And it is this hidden ideology that must be dismantled if we are to harness technology for the fullest expression of our humanity.

Award-winning investigative journalist Liz Collin sets the record straight. She uncovers what really happened on a street in Minneapolis that set off the riots, the demands to defund the police, and skyrocketing crime across the country.

Based on conversations with those who were there-including Derek Chauvin, Thomas Lane, and other Minneapolis police officers who've never spoken out before-Liz exposes how the media and the Left manipulated the facts to dupe and divide America.

In between, she explains how her life was turned upside down. Liz was a familiar face on the news in the Twin Cities. Her husband, Lt. Bob Kroll, president of the Minneapolis police union, was personally blamed for the rioting by the ACLU, Mayor Jacob Frey, and so many others. Liz and Bob were attacked by social media mobs and cancel-culture vultures. Amid all the chaos, she watched so-called civil-rights leaders, politicians, and activists protest on her front lawn.

This book also reveals some of the collusion, cover-ups, and hidden political connections in Minneapolis. It points out those who turned Minnesota nice into Minnesota naïve-and the leaders who could have stopped the insanity and given civility a chance. But most of all, it tells the truth about how the media and the Left have been lying to us all...

A brilliant, clear-eyed consideration of the visual representation of violence in our culture--its ubiquity, meanings, and effects.

Considered one of the greatest critics of her generation, Susan Sontag followed up her monumental On Photography with an extended study of human violence, reflecting on a question first posed by Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas: How in your opinion are we to prevent war?

For a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war.

One of the distinguishing features of modern life is that it supplies countless opportunities for regarding (at a distance, through the medium of photography) horrors taking place throughout the world. But are viewers inured--or incited--to violence by the depiction of cruelty? Is the viewer's perception of reality eroded by the daily barrage of such images? What does it mean to care about the suffering of others far away?

First published more than twenty years after her now-classic book On Photography, which changed how we understand the very condition of being modern, Regarding the Pain of Others challenges our thinking not only about the uses and means of images, but about how war itself is waged (and understood) in our time, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience.

One of the most mesmerizing and important books I've read in quite some time. Alter brilliantly illuminates the new obsessions that are controlling our lives and offers the tools we need to rescue our businesses, our families, and our sanity. --Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Originals and Give and Take

Welcome to the age of behavioral addiction--an age in which half of the American population is addicted to at least one behavior. We obsess over our emails, Instagram likes, and Facebook feeds; we binge on TV episodes and YouTube videos; we work longer hours each year; and we spend an average of three hours each day using our smartphones. Half of us would rather suffer a broken bone than a broken phone, and Millennial kids spend so much time in front of screens that they struggle to interact with real, live humans.

In this revolutionary book, Adam Alter, a professor of psychology and marketing at NYU, tracks the rise of behavioral addiction, and explains why so many of today's products are irresistible. Though these miraculous products melt the miles that separate people across the globe, their extraordinary and sometimes damaging magnetism is no accident. The companies that design these products tweak them over time until they become almost impossible to resist.

By reverse engineering behavioral addiction, Alter explains how we can harness addictive products for the good--to improve how we communicate with each other, spend and save our money, and set boundaries between work and play--and how we can mitigate their most damaging effects on our well-being, and the health and happiness of our children.

Adam Alter's previous book, Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave is available in paperback from Penguin.

Originally published in 1974, Origins of Marvel Comics features the first appearance of characters who have dominated the pantheon of Marvel's modern storytelling mythology--Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Thor, and Doctor Strange--along with a second Silver Age tale featuring these special heroes, all hand-picked and introduced by the one and only Stan Lee, and serving as an essential showcase for writers and artists such as Stan himself, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, John Romita, and Marie Severin. Whether viewed as a historical artifact that launched an industry of presenting Marvel Comics to a broad audience of fans or a collection of the best in Silver Age comics by many of the greatest creators to ever put pencil to paper, Origins of Marvel Comics highlights both the lasting greatness of these iconic characters as well as the monumental contributions of the talented creators who launched an entire storytelling universe.

El premiado filósofo, conferenciante internacional y académico Dr. Pablo Muñoz Iturrieta nos trae un manifiesto filosófico que pretende animar a los lectores a aprender a pensar por sí mismos y no permitir que la tecnología domine y controle su vida.

En un mundo de servicios de streaming a la carta y de interminables contenidos de TikTok, no es ningún secreto que la tecnología está dominando nuestras mentes y comportamiento, lo que en última instancia conducirá a una dominación social y del pensamiento mundial. Eso, si no lo detenemos ahora. Apaga el celular y enciende tu cerebro es una llamada a vivir la realidad como los seres humanos de pensamiento libre que somos y a evitar caer en el engaño de un mundo virtual que se muestra como una vía de escape fácil de las dificultades de la experiencia humana.

En este libro, el Dr. Pablo Muñoz Iturrieta presenta los problemas, la gravedad y los efectos de estar dominado cerebralmente por la tecnología, a la vez que presenta como solución un mundo en el que estos problemas se evitan mediante el control personal sobre la tecnología y la mente.

Este libro aborda temas como:

• Cómo sobrevivir sin tecnología en un mundo tecnológico
• Cómo afectan las pantallas al comportamiento
• La digitalización de la realidad
• Los peligros del metaverso y las comunidades virtuales como vía de escape de la realidad
• El rechazo a la tecnología en los debates contemporáneos
• Cómo podemos recuperar el control sobre nuestros pensamientos, nuestras vidas y nuestra familia

Debemos condicionar la tecnología, no dejar que la tecnología condicione nuestras vidas. Es hora de recuperar el control de tu vida y de tu familia.

Turn off Your Phone and Turn on Your Brain

Award-winning philosopher, international speaker, and scholar Dr. Pablo Muñoz Iturrieta brings us a philosophical manifesto that aims to encourage the readers learn to think for themselves and not allow technology to dominate and control their lives.

In a world of on-demand streaming services and never-ending TikTok content, it is no secret that technology is dominating our minds and behaviors, ultimately leading to world-wide social and thought domination. That's if we don't stop it in its tracks right now. Turn off Your Phone and Turn on Your Brain is a call to live reality as the free-thinking human beings we are and avoid falling into the deception of a virtual world that is shown as an easy escape from the difficulties of the human experience.

In this book, Dr. Pablo Muñoz Iturrieta presents the problems, severity, and effects of being cerebrally dominated by technology, while at the same time presenting as a solution a world in which these problems are avoided through personal control over technology and the mind.

This book addresses topics such as:

• How to survive without technology in a technological world
• How screens affect behavior
• The digitalization of reality
• The dangers of the metaverse and virtual communities as an escape route from reality
• The rejection of technology in contemporary discussions
• How we can regain control over our thoughts, our lives, and our family

We must condition technology, not let technology condition our lives. It is time to take back control of your life and your family.

Much history and theory is uncovered here in the first comprehensive study of zine publishing. From their origins in early 20th century science fiction cults, their more proximate roots in 1960s counter-culture and their rapid proliferation in the wake of punk rock, Stephen Duncombe pays full due to the political importance of zines as a vital network of popular culture. He also analyzes how zines measure up to their utopian and escapist outlook in achieving fundamental social change. Packed with extracts and illustrations, he provides a useful overview of the contemporary underground in all its splendor and misery.

Lessons in creative labor, solidarity, and inclusion under precarious economic conditions

As writers, musicians, online content creators, and other independent workers fight for better labor terms, romance authors offer a powerful example--and a cautionary tale--about self-organization and mutual aid in the digital economy. In Love in the Time of Self-Publishing, Christine Larson traces the forty-year history of Romancelandia, a sprawling network of romance authors, readers, editors, and others, who formed a unique community based on openness and collective support. Empowered by solidarity, American romance writers--once disparaged literary outcasts--became digital publishing's most innovative and successful authors. Meanwhile, a new surge of social media activism called attention to Romancelandia's historic exclusion of romance authors of color and LGBTQ+ writers, forcing a long-overdue cultural reckoning.

Drawing on the largest-known survey of any literary genre as well as interviews and archival research, Larson shows how romance writers became the only authors in America to make money from the rise of ebooks--increasing their median income by 73 percent while other authors' plunged by 40 percent. The success of romance writers, Larson argues, demonstrates the power of alternative forms of organizing influenced by gendered working patterns. It also shows how networks of relationships can amplify--or mute--certain voices.

Romancelandia's experience, Larson says, offers crucial lessons about solidarity for creators and other isolated workers in an increasingly risky employment world. Romancelandia's rise and near-meltdown shows that gaining fair treatment from platforms depends on creator solidarity--but creator solidarity, in turn, depends on fair treatment of all members.

The Gutenberg Galaxy catapulted Marshall McLuhan to fame as a media theorist and, in time, a new media prognosticator. Fifty years after its initial publication, this landmark text is more significant than ever before.

Readers will be amazed by McLuhan's prescience, unmatched by anyone since, predicting as he did the dramatic technological innovations that have fundamentally changed how we communicate. The Gutenberg Galaxy foresaw the networked, compressed 'global village' that would emerge in the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries -- despite having been written when black-and-white television was ubiquitous.

This new edition of The Gutenberg Galaxy celebrates both the centennial of McLuhan's birth and the fifty-year anniversary of the book's publication. A new interior design updates The Gutenberg Galaxy for twenty-first-century readers, while honouring the innovative, avant-garde spirit of the original. This edition also includes new introductory essays that illuminate McLuhan's lasting effect on a variety of scholarly fields and popular culture.

A must-read for those who inhabit today's global village, The Gutenberg Galaxy is an indispensable road map for our evolving communication landscape.

Are we living in a post-truth world, where alternative facts replace actual facts and feelings have more weight than evidence? How did we get here? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Lee McIntyre traces the development of the post-truth phenomenon from science denial through the rise of fake news, from our psychological blind spots to the public's retreat into information silos.

What, exactly, is post-truth? Is it wishful thinking, political spin, mass delusion, bold-faced lying? McIntyre analyzes recent examples--claims about inauguration crowd size, crime statistics, and the popular vote--and finds that post-truth is an assertion of ideological supremacy by which its practitioners try to compel someone to believe something regardless of the evidence. Yet post-truth didn't begin with the 2016 election; the denial of scientific facts about smoking, evolution, vaccines, and climate change offers a road map for more widespread fact denial. Add to this the wired-in cognitive biases that make us feel that our conclusions are based on good reasoning even when they are not, the decline of traditional media and the rise of social media, and the emergence of fake news as a political tool, and we have the ideal conditions for post-truth. McIntyre also argues provocatively that the right wing borrowed from postmodernism--specifically, the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth--in its attacks on science and facts.

McIntyre argues that we can fight post-truth, and that the first step in fighting post-truth is to understand it.

Charts the myth of the good guy with a gun, connecting America's frontier beginnings with visions of the end of the world

In the midst of widespread mass shootings in America, a common motif stands out: the perpetrators of these attacks often view themselves as vigilante saviors, whose job it is to regulate society in a way that exterminates their enemies.

In this fascinating critique, Rachel Wagner makes the case that this unfortunate phenomenon is best understood through the idea of the cowboy apocalypse. She shows that across much US media, from video games and blockbuster movies to novels and TV, a story arc has been created that provides a complete myth about the end of the world and the future after that. In these stories, the cowboy messiah is envisioned as a good guy with a gun. But he doesn't save the world. He just saves his world: he protects his family and others he deems worthy while embracing the chance to wipe the global slate clean and start fresh, with survivors testing their mettle on a new frontier.

Wagner illuminates the links between Christian apocalypticism, American gun culture, and the romanticization of the white male-dominated American frontier, showing how the vigilante has come to be regarded as a new savior figure, out to protect the world for white supremacy and patriarchy. She also offers ways to respond with other powerful cultural myths, making use of media to tell other stories. Cowboy Apocalypse offers a new means of making sense of how guns profoundly shape American life, and how we might engage with them otherwise.

From WORDLE to SPELLING BEE, we live in a time of word game mania. Crosswords, in particular, gained renewed popularity during the Covid-19 lockdown, when games became another kind of refuge. Today, 36 million Americans solve crosswords once a week or more, and nearly 23 million solve them daily. Yet, as longtime New Yorker crossword contributor Natan Last will tell you, the seemingly apolitical puzzle has never been more controversial.

In recent years, popular puzzle makers like The New York Times--the original and still the gold standard for word games--have been challenged for the way they prioritize certain cultures and perspectives as either the norm (read: white and male) or obscure (everyone else). At the same time, the crossword has never been more democratic. A larger, younger, more tech-savvy, and solidaristic group of people have fallen in love with puzzle solving, ushering in a more inclusive rise to the kinds of people constructing them, challenging the very idea of them and, in fact, what normal actually is.

With a critical eye toward its history, Natan Last explores the debates about the future of the crossword and investigates those who want the puzzle to transform into a tool of progressivism; ultimately, asking if the crossword can help us reshape the world. Across the Universe interrogates all the ways words--and the games we make using those words--change our culture while bringing us into the worlds of those pushing for the crosswords' much-needed evolution.

An instant bestseller, Empire of Illusion is a striking and unsettling exploration of illusion and fantasy in contemporary American culture. Traveling to the ringside of professional wrestling bouts at Madison Square Garden, to Las Vegas to write about the pornographic film industry, and to academic conferences held by positive psychologists who claim to be able to engineer happiness, Hedges chronicles our flight from an ever-worsening reality.

The cultural embrace of illusion and celebrity culture have accompanied a growing system of casino capitalism, which creates vast wealth for elites. Corporations have ruthlessly dismantled and destroyed our manufacturing base and impoverished our working class. Hedges exposes the mechanisms that undermine our democracy and divert us from the economic, environmental, political, and moral collapse around us. A culture that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion dies, Hedges argues, and we are dying now.

From Munchausen by Tiktok to wellness apps to online communities to AI, the DISCO Network explores the possibilities that technoskepticism can create.

This is a book about possibility and refusal in relation to new technologies. Though refusal is an especially powerful mode--particularly for those who have historically not been given the option to say no--people of color and disabled people have long navigated the space between saying yes and saying no to the newest technologies. Technoskepticism relates some of these stories to reveal the possibilities skepticism can create.

The case for technoskepticism unfolds across three sections: the first focused on disability, the creative use of wellness apps, and the desire for diagnosis; the second on digital nostalgia and home for Black and Asian users who produced communities online before home pages gave way to profiles; and the third focused on the violence inherent in A.I.-generated Black bodies and the possibilities for Black style in the age of A.I. Acknowledging how the urge to refuse new technologies emerges from specific racialized histories, the authors also emphasize how care can look like an exuberant embrace of the new.

2024 Hardcover Reprint of the 1928 Edition. Propaganda, an influential book written by Bernays in 1928, incorporated the literature from social science and psychological manipulation into an examination of the techniques of public communication. Bernays wrote the book in response to the success of some of his earlier works such as Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and A Public Relations Counsel (1927). Propaganda explored the psychology behind manipulating masses and the ability to use symbolic action and propaganda to influence politics, consumer choices and corporate image, which we now call branding. Walter Lippmann was Bernays' unacknowledged American mentor and his work The Phantom Public greatly influenced the ideas expressed in Propaganda a year later. The work propelled Bernays into media historians' view of him as the father of public relations. Bernay's manual of mass manipulation provides a detailed examination of how public discourse and opinion are shaped and controlled in politics, business, art, education, and science. In a world dominated by political spin and media manipulation, Propaganda is an essential read for all who wish to understand how power is used by the ruling elite of our society. The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays (1891-1995) pioneered the scientific technique of shaping and manipulating public opinion, which he called engineering of consent.' During World War I, he was an integral part--along with Walter Lippmann--of the U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI), a powerful propaganda machine that advertised and sold the war to the American people as one that would Make the World Safe for Democracy. The marketing strategies for all future wars would be based on the CPI model. Over the next half century, Bernays, combining the techniques he had learned in the CPI with the ideas of Lippmann and Freud, fashioned a career as an outspoken proponent of the engineering of consent for political and corporate influence of the population, earning the moniker father of public relations. Among his powerful clients were President Calvin Coolidge, Procter & Gamble, CBS, the American Tobacco Company, and General Electric, and the United Fruit Company.

4D Warfare: A Doctrine for a New Generation of Politics is a revolutionary guide to applying the basic principles of military intelligence to social media, written by a proven master of the information space. In 4D Warfare, author Jack Posobiec explains how the social media narrative is established and the way it is influenced over time by competing parties.

Through utilizing the concepts of effective information management, intelligence, deception, misdirection, and research explained in the book, those who understand and practice the principles of 4DW will be able to obtain and maintain social media superiority in an age of increasingly heated cultural war.

Jack Posobiec is a former U.S. Navy intelligence officer who deployed with the DIA to Guantanamo Bay and around the world with the Office of Naval Intelligence. He is one of the most effective right-wing activists on social media and is followed by hundreds of thousands of people on Facebook and Twitter. He is the author of Citizens for Trump: The Inside Story of People's Movement to Take Back America.