{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "description": "Topical, well-researched, compelling, concise. Framing recent campaigns, memes, psyops — whatever you'd like to call them as propaganda and weaponry feels both novel and accurate. It's a helpful framing for the moment we've found ourselves in. Everyone, everywhere lobbing ideological grenades at anyone they identify as different from them. Often the most readily available information isn't the correction information. That rapid relay doesn't allow for thoughtful analysis and a commitment to accuracy. Giving everyone a platform, catering to the viral spread of said information simply compounds this. It's an epistemological crisis of our own making and one we've committed to accelerating by making social media pervasive and now flooding it with knowingly fictitious, deceptive AI slop. It's a culture of manipulation, deception and paranoia that's grown out of American institutions in the FBI and other agencies, from advertising, from a strangling of institutions intended to uncover the truth and prevent it in an unbiased fashion. It's ignorance as a virtue and it's a slow-motion societal collapse driven by our commitment to live as though the narrative of our choosing is truth. Stories are weapons and we live in a failing information ecosystem where all we have is the stories we tell ourselves and tell others. We wall ourselves off, stockpile our ideological weapons with like-minded individuals and wait for someone to lob them at. Truth doesn't matter. Facts don't matter. A righteous commitment to our beliefs — wrong or right — toxic and otherwise is what we've been reduced to.",
  "path": "/reading/books/9780393881516/stories-are-weapons",
  "publishedAt": "2025-06-11T00:00:00Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:sttgf52vkk46f6yuknvqxvgh/site.standard.publication/self",
  "tags": [
    "politics",
    "history",
    "nonfiction"
  ],
  "title": "Stories Are Weapons"
}