Alternative Propaganda
The hysteria of French 'alternative' media over issues like the DSA and digital ID makes them the very useful idiots of official propagandists.
Are French ‘alternative’ media truly alternative? They position themselves as opposed to, or even diametrically opposed to, the mainstream media. But can that really be called an alternative, when in practice the mainstream media define their stance and positioning? Are they not simply the other side of the same coin? Might they be, unwittingly, agents of propaganda—playing an essential role in the balance and survival of the ‘system,’ whose propaganda could not be credible without some carefully managed form of contradiction?
When it come France and its sophiscated censorship complex, refer to the Twitter Files France, a report by Thomas Fazi and Pascal Clérotte, edited by Alexandra Gutentag and Michael Shellenberger and published by Civilization Works.
We will consider two examples to show how alternative media, often against their own intentions, end up serving as instruments of propaganda.
The powers that be—the establishment, the deep state, the transatlantic caste, the globalists, call them what you like—are now compelled to meddle openly in elections to block the people’s will from ever becoming reality.
Consider Emmanuel Macron. Propped up by France’s oligarchs and their media—showered with more than a hundred glowing covers between 2014 and April 2017—by the senior civil service, the banks, and even foreign powers, he was still languishing at 17% in the polls in January 2016, while François Fillon was riding high with double that score. It took nothing less than the heavy hand of the high judiciary to drag Macron across the finish line—what can only be called a judicial coup d’Etat: the Fillon affair, the front runner endictement for misappropriation subesquently to one of France’s history swiftest investigation in such a matter.
And look no further than Romania and Moldova, those “great democracies” where justice, whipped into line by foreign influence, trampled legality. In Romania, presidential elections were annulled out of thin air; in Moldova, supposedly pro-Russian opposition parties were struck from the ballot just forty-eight hours before the vote. All of it greased with torrents of EU money—schemes ultimately paid for by German and French taxpayers.
Jacques Ellul was one of the philosophers who best described the phenomenon of propaganda.
The fundamental difference between television and social media is that the latter demand active use: you must read and write to post, which reopens the space of thought—without which neither reading nor, above all, writing is possible. You have to make an effort, even to produce the most idiotic nonsense, because that nonsense had to be thought before being written. In front of the TV, there is no such effort. You do not think; you are nothing but a passive receiver. Shut up already—I’m watching the news!
Many people, in their naïveté, believe they are immune to propaganda thanks to their education and cultural background. Convinced they stand above the fray, they become instead prime targets for propagandists—and like everyone else, they find it nearly impossible to backtrack once they realize they have been manipulated. To do so would mean questioning not just a single opinion, but the entire pattern of their past actions and behaviors.
Take COVID and the war in Ukraine, and watch the political-media class gorge on its own propaganda, so intoxicated it cannot admit its lies even when exposed. It’s far easier—and far less humiliating—to smear everyone else as conspiracy theorists.
“Regardless of the country or the methods employed, all propaganda efforts share a single defining trait: an obsession with effectiveness. Propaganda exists primarily as a tool of action, designed to arm political power efficiently and to give its decisions an almost irresistible momentum. (…) Propaganda that fails is not propaganda at all. Propaganda belongs to the realm of technique, embodies its logic, and is inseparably bound to it.” Jacques Ellul, Propagandes, 1962.
Consider the DSA and digital ID. On paper, both are horrendous: they aim to impose norms that could very well end liberal democracy. Yet for now, they are technically unworkable—and will remain so for a long time. Can we then say that, at this stage, the DSA and digital ID exist mostly as propaganda?
The DSA will unleash such a torrent of reports, with penalties so draconian, that no platform will be able to handle them without bleeding money on administrative costs. The only solution will be algorithmic monitoring—an approach guaranteed to trigger even more waves of extra-judicial and judicial complaints. Suspend an account, remove content, and the DSA insists users have the right to demand detailed explanations under Articles 6 and 7 of the GDPR—answers that platforms must provide formally. Mountains of paperwork, armies of staff, and yet no automation can solve it: every single case is unique. The DSA is thus a bureaucratic trap, designed less to protect users than to crush platforms under the weight of its own absurdity.
Similarly, urgent injunctions—emergency proceedings meant to be resolved as quickly as possible, usually within fifteen days—demanding platforms restore accounts or content will skyrocket, along with the associated costs: lawyer fees, court fees, and all the administrative overhead. For the user, no lawyer is even necessary. Just feed an AI a few prompts, and it will draft the entire petition.
No platform actually respects the law. They suspend service contracts without formal notice, creating blacklists and graylists at will, tipping in effect the scales entirely in their favor because they’re left with no other choice. Users will glide through courts winning, invoking consumer protection clauses under Articles L. 212-1 et seq. of the French Consumer Code. Picture the chaos this will unleash in already clogged courtrooms.
This is why the DSA can only police speech by going after the individuals or organizations already suspected of wrongthink. Enter the “trusted third parties”—activist organizations tasked with the work of monitoring and demadinf moderation. But even here, platforms remain on the hook: they can be sued using the exact same mechanisms described above, and will shoulder all responsibility, since they still have the power to reject the suspensions demanded by these third parties yet the contractual obligations remain theirs.
The DSA is nothing less than a monstrous bureaucratic machine. Far from fostering a “safe” online space, it will expand the battlefield , ensnaring platforms and users alike in a Kafkaesque trap of endless obligations.
Now, digital identity. Its realization hinges on three conditions: one legal, two technical—and the hurdles are just as nightmarish.
The legal condition is the repeal of the European GDPR and, in France, the Data Protection Act, which currently forbid cross-referencing databases. If the goal is to store civil registry information, digital identity proofs, biometric data, banking records (including the digital euro), health data, social benefits, and associated rights—all in a single repository—these datasets, each residing in separate databases, would have to be extracted and consolidated. In other words, cross-referenced. At present, this is legally impossible. Achieving it would require a radical societal overhaul—the very transformation sought by the architects of what is nothing less than an ideology: the World Economic Forum, the Atlantic Council, and certain Big Tech giants like Palantir, Oracle, and Microsoft—who we will collectively call the technofascists.
The first technical condition is having the capacity to cross-reference these databases on a massive scale, consolidating them into individual repositories for every citizen, with perfect accuracy and zero errors. Contrary to popular misconception, Palantir is not a surveillance company. Palantir is a software firm that enables such consolidation and has developed engines to analyze highly heterogeneous data—differing in type, origin, format, and structure. But even Palantir’s software cannot handle this at the scale of an entire country, or even a large city. That is why their applications are highly specialized: limiting the scope of data makes consolidation and analysis feasible.
Even if Palantir’s software—or that of its competitors—could consolidate data at a national scale, no one possesses the physical infrastructure to run the mess. Software alone doesn’t run without hardware. For a country like France, the processing capacity required would be nearly ten times greater than that used to operate all cryptocurrencies worldwide.
The second technical condition is security — a problem that is today unsolved and, most likely, will never be solved. First, because to process data it must be in the clear: encryption only covers storage and transmission. Encrypted data that is copied or intercepted can be decrypted. The endless leaks of enormous datasets — the most recent being an alleged leak of civil registry information for some 13 million French citizens from the French National Agency for Secure Documents (you read that right) — remind us that information‑system security is always relative. There is no vault that cannot be opened: it’s a question of resources for a physical safe, a question of skill for a digital one.
Worse, the ideologues pushing these solutions do so through contradictory mandates for base financial motives — huge public contracts. Imagine your digital identity stored on your smartphone, subjected to “ChatControl,” which imposes backdoors. The moment a backdoor exists, anyone can force it open, pick the lock, or steal the key. And because those backdoors will be identical across all devices of the same type, all you need is the one key of the gatekeeper…
When we take the time to reflect, it becomes clear that a total surveillance society is not around the corner. That does not mean we shouldn’t be concerned—but concern is not the same as hysteria.
Alternative media reproduce the exact same model as mainstream media. They trade in fear; they pull the same levers; they appeal to emotion, not reason; they portray the future as inevitably dystopian; they promise an impending dictatorship and hammer home their own solutions for survival. Like the very powers they claim to oppose, they trap themselves in a narrative they can no longer escape, having spent their time crying wolf to generate clicks, audiences, and ultimately, revenue.
In reality, they are instruments of official propagandists, among their most effective agents—applying the old judo principle of using an opponent’s weight against them. By spreading the idea that we will all be surveilled and policed, that our ability to spend money freely or access certain services will be restricted based on behavior—the so-called “Chinese-style social control,” which doesn’t actually exist in China—they instill fear and cement the population’s belief in something that will not happen anytime soon.
The reaction of the overwhelming majority to this belief in omnipresent policing will not be resistance but compliance—as seen during COVID with exit permits and vaccination passes. Alternative media, then, become the most powerful levers of the system’s propagandists: a system that knows it has little time left, whose survival depends on quickly modifying mass behavior, as social medias have reopened the space of thought—and therefore freedom—for billions.
The solution is to step back from hysteria, to ignore anxious alternative-media pundits whose daily bread is painting a bleak future. It is to keep a cool head and remember that, since we are being forced to accept norms that are not ours but those of a few, this is ultimately a highly political and civilizational struggle.
“Technique presupposes the creation of a new kind of morality. [...] This “technical morality” has two closely intertwined traits: first, it is a morality of behavior; second, it excludes any moral questioning. A morality of behavior means that questions of intention, feeling, ideals, or conscience are irrelevant. [...] And the behavior itself must be defined according to precise technical rules. [...] This fundamentally upends the problem of choosing between good and evil, of individual judgment, of subjective morality: there is no real choice left, because the “right” action is simply whatever technique demands and enables.” Jacques Ellul, Le vouloir et le faire, 1964.