Designed to Be Invisible

The Real Barriers between You and Reality

In Elze van Hamelen’s 2024 interview for Solari with author Michelle Stiles, they discussed Stiles’ deep-dive look at propaganda and how it works, elegantly summarized in her book, One Idea to Rule Them All: Reverse Engineering American Propaganda.

Stiles continues to study history and “untangle the intricate network of supercharged disinformation swirling around” at her Smartsheepe Substack and also explains her insights in occasional videos.

In her 10-minute Designed to Be Invisible video, Stiles argues that “learning to see … is the most practical thing a person can do right now,” but also explains why logic—that is, “more information, better fact-checking, and harder thinking”—will not accomplish that goal. In her view, there are five structural barriers, operating “below the threshold of conscious awareness,” that are working to prevent us from seeing reality:

1. The neutralized word (the disguising of powerful propaganda tools with “benign-sounding names”)
2. The infrastructure of belief (the shaping of beliefs through culture, language, experience, authority, and social pressure)
3. The megaphone effect (the steady amplification of narratives)
4. The spider’s web (suffusing messages with “the credibility of academia, media, government, and culture all at once”)
5. Engineered vulnerability (the mapping, targeting, and systematic exploitation of universal features of human psychology)

Elaborating on the megaphone effect, Stiles comments that “manufactured consensus feels like truth simply because it is loud”:

“When the same message is amplified through enough channels simultaneously, it stops feeling like a message and starts feeling like reality itself. The repetition isn’t accidental. The coordination isn’t accidental. And the result is that minority views, even correct ones, feel fringe simply because they are quieter.”

We have devoted considerable effort at Solari to helping our audience understand what Stiles calls the “information architecture” (see, for example, Joshua Stylman’s excellent presentation on “How Consciousness Became Programmable”) rather than get mired in fruitless debates. As Stiles concludes, “Seeing the architecture changes everything.”

Watch Designed to Be Invisible here.