Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
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My guest this week is Renée DiResta.
Renée DiResta’s work examines rumors and propaganda in the digital age. She has analyzed geopolitical campaigns created by foreign powers such as Russia, China, and Iran; voting‑related rumors that led to the January 6 insurrection; and health misinformation and conspiracy theories pushed by domestic influencers. She is a contributor at The Atlantic. Her bylined writing has appeared in Wired, Foreign Affairs, Columbia Journalism Review, New York Times, Washington Post, Yale Review, The Guardian, POLITICO, Slate, and Noema, as well as many academic journals.
DiResta was the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a cross-disciplinary program of research, teaching, and policy engagement for the study of abuse in information technologies. She has been a Presidential Leadership Scholar (a program run by the Presidents Bush, Clinton, and the LBJ Foundations); named an Emerson Fellow, a Truman National Security Project fellow, Mozilla Fellow in Media, Misinformation, and Trust, a Harvard Berkman-Klein affiliate, and a Council on Foreign Relations term member.
In 1988, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky published Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. In it, they argue that the mass media in the US serve propaganda on behalf of the government and corporate elites by presenting skewed and partial narratives, which foreground certain viewpoints while denying others. It was a powerful and illuminating framing for the relationship between policy, power, and the public in the dissemination of information, and continues to be a major touchpoint in media theory nearly 40 years later.
My guest today, Renée Diresta, is the author of a new book called Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality, which similarly seeks to document and analyze these entangled relationships. CNN had ushered in the era of 24-hour news less than a decade before Manufacturing Consent was published. For Invisible Rulers, the analog is the influencer era, brought on by the rise of social media platforms and recommendation algorithms.
Pick up your copy of Invisible Rulers here
Humans have long been a rumor-prone species, but how rumors can spread—and how influencers can become propagandists, knowingly or not—is a distinctly contemporary phenomenon. And understanding how and why it happens is vital for making sense of reality, especially in a heated election season that has already been marked by some wild conspiracy theories, such as the idea that the Democratic Party is intentionally seeding hurricanes to hit red states.
In fact, Renée experienced this firsthand, when she became the main character of conspiracy in the “fantasy-industrial complex”: that she was “CIA Renée.” But to get that story, go pick up Invisible Rulers, and in the meantime, please enjoy this conversation with Renée Diresta.
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Guests on Urgent Futures are experts across art, science, media, technology, philosophy, economics, mathematics, anthropology, and more. We live in complex times; these are the voices who will help you orient to emerging futures.
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CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures. Past conversations include Taylor Lorenz, Lia Halloran & Kip Thorne, Cherie Hu, Lisa Messeri, Legacy Russell, and more. Here is another recent episode with Professor & Beyond Policing author Philip V. McHarris:
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