It’s Not Just Israel

Poli sci professor Jennifer Murtazashvili in a Washington Post op-ed notes how divergent the narratives about the American and Israeli war against Iran are from her lived experience in Tel Aviv:

Something strange is in the air. I wake up every morning in Tel Aviv having survived another day. Sirens go off in the middle of the night; we go back to bed countless times. We wake to news that the Iron Dome intercepted the vast majority — 92 percent by official counts — of incoming rockets.

Here’s her observation about the sharp divergence between narratives and her experience:

We are living through the first alt-war: a conflict in which the war fought online and the war fought in reality have diverged so completely that they might as well be happening on different planets. It’s not that people lack information, it’s more that they are constructing an entirely different alternate reality — one that confirms what they already believe.

She is implicitly treating her lived experience as ground truth but lived experience is itself a narrow and filtered signal stream. Whether it’s actually objective, falsifiable reality is itself the problem she’s calling out.

To some degree what she’s observing has always been the case. Clausewitz wrote about the “fog of war”. Governments have always produced propaganda. Audiences have always necessarily filtered the accounts they hear through their own experience and priors. Today there is an important difference that I don’t believe Dr. Murtazashvili recognizes, at least not explicitly. The difference is not the existence of fog but its source: not too little information but too much of the wrong kind.

I would offer her this. Information is signal minus noise. The cost of producing signal has been reduced to near zero. Today there is an overwhelmingly large amount of signal and an even more daunting amount of noise. The lack of actual information is something I have complained about. The problem is not merely that people construct alternate realities, but that the ratio of noise to signal has become so unfavorable that doing otherwise is extraordinarily difficult.

After some discussion of the worried emails she receives on a daily basis from friends, family, and colleagues, she provides her analysis:

What worries me more than the fake videos are the people who cannot fathom that this war is going well for the United States, for Israel and maybe even for the long-suffering people of Iran. The strategic picture is more favorable than the online narrative suggests. Iranian options are narrowing to outcomes that all leave Israel better positioned than before, whether that is regime change in Tehran, a negotiated arrangement under American pressure or a ceasefire along the lines of the Houthi deal.

and concludes:

This is the defining feature of the alt-war. It is not that people lack information, but that the success of the war conflicts with their priors and so they have constructed an alternative war: one in which Tel Aviv is burning, Washington never heard of the Strait of Hormuz before last week and the whole enterprise is doomed. Because that is the only version they can psychologically accept.

I think there’s (at least) one additional source of what I would call “noise”: the Trump Administration. That narrative varies on a day-to-day basis, so wildly that identifying the information it contains becomes increasingly difficult. When official narratives are unstable, they themselves become a major source of noise, because they destroy the reliability of one of the few high-bandwidth signal channels available during wartime.

Meanwhile, I continue to try to separate signal from noise in an environment where both the volume of noise and the instability of primary sources are unusually high..