Cleantech Needs A Defense From Burial In Bullshit – CleanTechnica

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The last couple of weeks has been a whirlwind. Fortunately, at least for my own mental health, I was taking some time off to prep an older truck for transportation duty while I started the long process of building an electric Suburban. But, that doesn’t mean I wasn’t checking in on the latest news during bathroom breaks and at the end of the day. This allowed me to see things happen a bite at a time instead of seeing the continuous 24-hour news cycle that overwhelms.

Seeing a bit here and a bit there allowed me to see how ridiculous Trump’s strategy has been so far.

The obvious, surface-level strategy he employs is the “blitzkrieg.” Instead of winning one small victory at a time to advance the Project 2025 agenda, the plan was instead to move in quickly with overwhelming force. This rapid-fire approach to executive orders and behind-the-scenes action (often by Elon Musk’s people) was initially successful, leaving no time for people to respond and concentrate efforts on any one thing before the next one.

But, going fast can only get you so far. Eventually, people choose their most important issues and you have to defend any ground you’ve gained, which keeps you from being able to grab much more. Reporting is starting to lift the fog at USAID, the Treasury, and the Department of Education. Lawsuits have been filed by the thousands. Protests have happened in all 50 states. Even some Trump voters are starting to become aware that he was lying when he said he wasn’t going to follow the Project 2025 plan.

The response to criticism has been particularly instructive, showing us the deeper strategy Trump is using. For example, when caught in a lie about spending $50M to provide condoms in Gaza, Trump doubled the lie to $100 million. When that lie was again debunked, Trump’s press secretary launched the equivalent of an MLRS of lies at the press, claiming that USAID had spent tens of millions on transgender plays, transgender comic books, and a “DEI musical” (whatever the F that even is). 

It might seem insane to see this kind of high volume compulsive lying, and to those who know lies are being told, it does nothing to convince. But, you have to remember that sophisticated, in-the-know people are not Trump’s target audience. To really understand what Trump’s people are up to, you have to compare it to an attack on a computer network.

When attackers want to stop a website or other web service, a quick way to do that would be a Denial of Service attack (DoS attack). By sending the server a bunch of garbage data and pointless requests, the computer can get so busy with nonsense that it can’t perform the task it’s supposed to perform (send data to real users). Trump does this in the real world by simply increasing the volume of nonsense when people are trying to determine what’s true and what’s false. If one lie, doesn’t do the trick, ten larger lies often does.

An easy way to stop a DoS attack is to cut off the connection with the offending IP address. For those of us who have decided that Trump is not a valid source of information, we’ve done the real world version of that. But, he knows what computer hackers do. He knows that you can expand the attack by sending bullshit from a multitude of sources. In the computing world, armies of infected computers (bot nets) are used to spread the bullshit (a Distributed DoS attack, or DDoS attack), but in the real world, it’s possible to get millions of real people to share the nonsense.

Social media has been a key part of this disinformation landscape. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter makes a lot more sense when you think of it as an attack on information networks. The need to control Facebook, Instagram, and Threads and remove restrictions on misinformation also makes more sense. Trump’s control over TikTok is another vital link in his efforts to bury people in bullshit.

The DDoS analogy has limits, though. In a computer network, you can do things to defend against distributed attacks. Rate limiting (limiting the number of requests per connection), blacklisting, and more advanced forms of traffic analysis all go together to cut off the computers serving bullshit data to cripple a network.

The human mind is a lot harder to protect, though.

The nature of Trump’s lies tells us a lot about how he gets past our mental defenses. Instead of trying to convince us that America cannot afford to feed the hungry or stabilize regions with strategic aid, he instead finds ways to bring out the worst in people. The lies center around transgender issues and DEI because he knows that will make the target audience angry and afraid. When affected by fear or anger, the human brain’s higher functions shut down to prepare for a fight to the death. This was a useful instinct 20,000 years ago, but it’s easily used against us in today’s world.

The only way to protect yourself from fear and anger-based messaging is to cut off everyone who uses it, similarly to how computer networks are defended. But, when you’re talking about social media and in person human relationships, that’s a lot easier said than done. Leaving Facebook sucks because we all have friends and family there. Leaving Twitter is hard because the EV community is largely there. Leaving toxic churches and cutting off Trumpist family members who can’t respect boundaries is far, far harder emotionally.

But, we have to do it and we have to get as many people as we can to follow us away from the fear and the rage. When people who care about seeing you notice your absence from venues that have been overwhelmed with lies and hatred, they’ll know that they don’t have your permission to engage in it. They’ll know that the cost of engaging with the bullshit farm is mounting, and that it’s becoming expensive to participate.

We won’t be able to reach everybody, and that’s OK. But, if we can reach enough people, we can get back to discourse that respects both truth and dignity. Only then can we move forward again as a society.