Not really. The best US propaganda has always been looking strong, rich and real, if too glossy. Also being too different (it doesn’t stop to surprise me how people speaking English can be so different from British people that honestly I, living in Russia, feel more similar to the latter than Americans are ; and nobody notices that from culture and arts, it takes being exposed to many real Americans to see that this is not just in movies), thus seeming some magical other world where the impossible is possible.
(Plus a bit of the legacy of “give me your tired …” and “the new world” seeming like a place for those fleeing tyranny, like some new normal free life out there, even if not perfect ; it’s fascinating how this image hasn’t been true for more than 50 years, yet it lives on in books which much of the humanity still reads, and is perceived like real. This stopped being true when my grandma was younger than I am now.)
Also the lame anti-US propaganda had an effect of people subjected to it being ready to believe anything opposing it. Like much of Soviet propaganda about the West was honestly true, but it took another 20 years for the majority of ex-Soviet people to understand that, after they understood that Western propaganda about USSR was true as well.
While the arts working like that are a short period which coincided with a short explosion of the level of life in the West (followed by it falling again), decaying of the second world, loss of faith into any kind of bright future and socialism, thus turning to the past (things like “the American dream”, memory of times when USA was half the world GDP, trying to find good and nice in the stereotypical, demonized in the past, images).
And - important - the Internet, where the famous “network effect” works, and what is the network effect? The network effect means that the one starting something gets all the sprouts. 1 man creates a network and invites 99 people, each with their own culture, but in the network the culture of that 1 man will dominate, because they will come to that one man.
The conclusion is the same, though, poisoning the Internet with slop means slowly killing it. And slop is the opposite of what made the USA seem strong. It was “real” vs “fake”.
Soviet industries were “fake” - lots of stuff broken fresh from the factory, requiring some tinkering to make it work ; Soviet computers were “fake” - other than the previous point, rare and expensive, and a household didn’t have one ; Soviet economy was “fake” - imitating a real one with “funds” and “wooden” rubles, while having deficits ; Soviet politics were “fake” - one party, and in any democratic procedure if you’d diverge from the commonly accepted line, you’d have social problems (reminds you of anything?) ; Soviet ideology was “fake” - look, we’ve been building space communism for 30 years, and the result is that we have ICBMs and “Pravda” newspapers and canned “sea cabbage” in stores and Lenin worship, but don’t have normal toilet paper, sausages and jeans, and notably - no space communism ; and even Soviet culture was “fake” - those sour tones, that stoneface acting, that boredom, while there in the West they have rock-n-roll and action movies and magazines with naked women.
And the USA most of all seemed “how a superpower should really be”, except look at it now. It still is stronger, but it’s undergoing a similar transformation as the USSR, and the problem is that USA’s civilization offering was that it’s immune to that. And the USSR was internationalist, while the USA’s even official offering is “we are your masters and better than you, fuck you little bitch, and if you behave very well you might immigrate here in the future”. Somehow Soviet people thought USA was internationalist too, but the Internet broke that for most of the planet.
And it didn’t colonize Mars. And it didn’t unite the humanity in one republic with everyone equal in rights. And it didn’t fix war, hunger and barbarism. So just like USSR’s promise of space communism expiring, USA’s promise of space liberal capitalism expires now.
Basically USA’s elites were not content with the amount of power they had over their country and the world, and decided to expand it (via the Internet), thus removing their main strength.
Lastly propaganda campaigns is something that was best done with the old kind of connectivity, when they only had to influence the adversarial regimes (Soviet elites, for example), and those regimes would then influence their own population ; in the USSR the rosy picture of the USA was most of all produced by its elites trying to copy the USA or to get a piece of it in the form of jeans etc. The people who are going to design\train\direct the tools for these campaigns simply can’t understand all the complexity of another culture, to influence people living in it. They are deliberately choosing a far more complex task, when the easier one yielded good enough results. In the hope of achieving some sort of world domination by a shortcut instead of, well, fixing their economy and doing it the old-fashioned way.
Not really. The best US propaganda has always been looking strong, rich and real, if too glossy. Also being too different (it doesn’t stop to surprise me how people speaking English can be so different from British people that honestly I, living in Russia, feel more similar to the latter than Americans are ; and nobody notices that from culture and arts, it takes being exposed to many real Americans to see that this is not just in movies), thus seeming some magical other world where the impossible is possible.
(Plus a bit of the legacy of “give me your tired …” and “the new world” seeming like a place for those fleeing tyranny, like some new normal free life out there, even if not perfect ; it’s fascinating how this image hasn’t been true for more than 50 years, yet it lives on in books which much of the humanity still reads, and is perceived like real. This stopped being true when my grandma was younger than I am now.)
Also the lame anti-US propaganda had an effect of people subjected to it being ready to believe anything opposing it. Like much of Soviet propaganda about the West was honestly true, but it took another 20 years for the majority of ex-Soviet people to understand that, after they understood that Western propaganda about USSR was true as well.
While the arts working like that are a short period which coincided with a short explosion of the level of life in the West (followed by it falling again), decaying of the second world, loss of faith into any kind of bright future and socialism, thus turning to the past (things like “the American dream”, memory of times when USA was half the world GDP, trying to find good and nice in the stereotypical, demonized in the past, images).
And - important - the Internet, where the famous “network effect” works, and what is the network effect? The network effect means that the one starting something gets all the sprouts. 1 man creates a network and invites 99 people, each with their own culture, but in the network the culture of that 1 man will dominate, because they will come to that one man.
The conclusion is the same, though, poisoning the Internet with slop means slowly killing it. And slop is the opposite of what made the USA seem strong. It was “real” vs “fake”.
Soviet industries were “fake” - lots of stuff broken fresh from the factory, requiring some tinkering to make it work ; Soviet computers were “fake” - other than the previous point, rare and expensive, and a household didn’t have one ; Soviet economy was “fake” - imitating a real one with “funds” and “wooden” rubles, while having deficits ; Soviet politics were “fake” - one party, and in any democratic procedure if you’d diverge from the commonly accepted line, you’d have social problems (reminds you of anything?) ; Soviet ideology was “fake” - look, we’ve been building space communism for 30 years, and the result is that we have ICBMs and “Pravda” newspapers and canned “sea cabbage” in stores and Lenin worship, but don’t have normal toilet paper, sausages and jeans, and notably - no space communism ; and even Soviet culture was “fake” - those sour tones, that stoneface acting, that boredom, while there in the West they have rock-n-roll and action movies and magazines with naked women.
And the USA most of all seemed “how a superpower should really be”, except look at it now. It still is stronger, but it’s undergoing a similar transformation as the USSR, and the problem is that USA’s civilization offering was that it’s immune to that. And the USSR was internationalist, while the USA’s even official offering is “we are your masters and better than you, fuck you little bitch, and if you behave very well you might immigrate here in the future”. Somehow Soviet people thought USA was internationalist too, but the Internet broke that for most of the planet.
And it didn’t colonize Mars. And it didn’t unite the humanity in one republic with everyone equal in rights. And it didn’t fix war, hunger and barbarism. So just like USSR’s promise of space communism expiring, USA’s promise of space liberal capitalism expires now.
Basically USA’s elites were not content with the amount of power they had over their country and the world, and decided to expand it (via the Internet), thus removing their main strength.
Lastly propaganda campaigns is something that was best done with the old kind of connectivity, when they only had to influence the adversarial regimes (Soviet elites, for example), and those regimes would then influence their own population ; in the USSR the rosy picture of the USA was most of all produced by its elites trying to copy the USA or to get a piece of it in the form of jeans etc. The people who are going to design\train\direct the tools for these campaigns simply can’t understand all the complexity of another culture, to influence people living in it. They are deliberately choosing a far more complex task, when the easier one yielded good enough results. In the hope of achieving some sort of world domination by a shortcut instead of, well, fixing their economy and doing it the old-fashioned way.