Unless you’ve managed, miraculously, to avoid the Kony 2012 video, you’ll understand now why the US military is investing in technology to create fake online identities with the aim of influencing social media. At least one of the armies of the future is made up of sock puppets.
Sock puppets aren’t much good for hunting warlords, of course, but they can potentially be very effective at manipulating tens of thousands or, in this case, millions of people, to support sending in real troops — supposedly even though Westerners are sick of failed military interventions.
The Kony video is an amalgam of every manipulative social media cliché and cyber-utopian stereotype (ruthlessly nailed in the Kony drinking game): the white paternalism, the Hollywood stars, the tightly edited graphics and edgy images (graffiti! face masks!), the earnest narration, the message that social media can change the world, the solipsism that nothing is quite real until white middle-class Westerners know about it, all in the name of justifying unilateral US intervention in Uganda.
Oh, which has a lot of oil, by the way, by the way, but we won’t indulge some of the more lurid conspiracy theories circulating online. Nor dwell on the gratuitous errors and omissions that litter the video. It’s not as if there hasn’t been an inaccurate internet yarn before, going right back to the days of the Neiman-Marcus cookie story.
