Viva Brighton Issue #56 October 2017

DEBATE
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Operation Chaos
‘Fake news didn’t only
manifest last year’
How do we negotiate the blurring of fact and fiction
in the news? And is it a new phenomenon? At
Shoreham Wordfest this month, Guardian journalist
Rafael Behr will lead a debate on the subject,
with an introduction to the history of misinformation
by authors John Higgs and David Bramwell.
David explains that we’ve been here before.
What can we expect from your ‘introductory
romp through the history of misinformation’?
It’s a different angle on fake news. Fake
news didn’t only manifest last year. It’s always
been there. Spin and misinformation is not always
spread by the right. We’ll be talking about Operation
Chaos, or Operation Mindf**k, a counterculture
movement in the late 60s started by
Kerry Thornley and Robert Anton Wilson. They
decided the world was too uptight, too authoritarian
and orderly, and they needed to redress the
balance. Their icon was Eris, the goddess of chaos.
They gathered like-minded people in a campaign
to commit pranks, hoaxes and culture-jamming;
creating contradictory stories. The idea was to
bring about social change by getting people to
think and be more careful about what they believed.
They gathered a cult following.
Are you a political person? I am now. I would
have said no not very long ago, but then I became
friends with [People’s Peer and social-justice
campaigner] Victor Adebowale, and that changed
things. He’s passionate, with a big, socialist heart,
and made me aware that politics is at the heart of
nearly everything we do.
How did you meet? He came to listen to me and
John Higgs perform at the Wilderness Festival,
bought John’s book Stranger Than We Can Imagine
- an insightful look at trying to make sense of the
20th century - then got in touch with us.
You and John are friends... Yes, and we have a
shared optimism for the future. John talks about
the 2016-Brexit-Trump world as ‘a virus that
needs to work its way through the system’, and
says ‘pessimism is for lightweights’. I now ask
myself, “am I doing anything of use?” and I hope I
am, in a small way.
Tell us about your new book, ‘The Mysterium’.
The tagline is ‘Modern Mysteries for the Post-
Nessie Age’. I grew up loving Arthur C Clarke
and the Reader’s Digest Mysteries of the Unexplained.
These days, we can take photos so easily and debunk
mysteries. So I wondered, what are the new
mysteries, and do they hold up? I discovered that
there are plenty of bizarre things happening in the
world. Like the 12 human feet that have washed
up on the same British Columbian beach over ten
years. Emma Chaplin
Operation Chaos - A Debate on Fake News & Active
Citizenship. Wed 11th, Ropetackle Arts Centre,
7.30pm, £8. The Shoreham Wordfest runs until the
19th. shorehamwordfest.com
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