Stories Are Weapons
Psychological Warfare and the American Mind
by Annalee Newitz
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Pub Date 4 Jun 2024 | Archive Date 31 May 2024
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Description
From the best-selling author of Four Lost Cities comes a sharp and timely book about the dark art of manipulation through weaponized storytelling.
In Stories Are Weapons, best-selling author Annalee Newitz traces the way disinformation, propaganda, and violent threats—the essential tool kit for psychological warfare—have evolved from military weapons deployed against foreign adversaries into tools in domestic culture wars. Newitz delves into America’s deep-rooted history with psychological operations, beginning with Benjamin Franklin’s Revolutionary War–era fake newspaper and reaching its apotheosis with misinformation during twenty-first-century elections. The nation’s secret weapon has long been coercive storytelling, fashioned by operatives who drew on their experiences in the ad industry and as science fiction writers. Now, through a weapons-transfer program long unacknowledged, it has found its way into the hands of culture warriors, in conflicts from school board fights over LGBT students to campaigns against feminist viewpoints. Stories Are Weapons delivers a powerful counter-narrative, as Newitz highlights the process of psychological disarmament, speaking with Indigenous archivists preserving their histories in new ways, activist storytellers, and technology experts transforming social media.
About the Author: Annalee Newitz is a journalist and author of science fiction and nonfiction, including the national bestseller Four Lost Cities. They write for the New York Times and New Scientist and cohost the Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.
Advance Praise
"Annalee Newitz always sees to the heart of complex systems and breaks them down with poetic ferocity." - N.K. Jemisin, author of the Broken Earth trilogy
"A brilliant historical deep-dive into psyops, military covert influence operations and the corporate attempts to conquer the mind. This will change the way you understand America." - Molly Crabapple, author of Drawing Blood
"Annalee Newitz explicates, with energy and intellectual rigor, contemporary culture wars and the danger posed to American discourse and democracy by the sort of psychological warfare tactics utilized by the military and aggressive marketers. Well-researched, accessible and grounded in history, the book is at once clarifying, terrifying and forward-looking. An important contribution to a particular moment in time when so many of us are desperate to try to understand the precarious societal moment and peril in which we find ourselves." - Anna Holmes, founding editor of Jezebel and author of The Book of Jezebel
"A penetrating, passionately-reasoned analysis of how propaganda and disinformation have been used as tactics of both hard and soft wars, and how we continue to be manipulated today. This is a storyteller’s account of the devastating force of storytelling." - Angela Saini, author of The Patriarchs and Superior
"Annalee Newitz shows how words can have more power than even bullets and bombs. A read very much worth your time, as much to make you rethink the world around you." - P.W. Singer, author of LikeWar
"These days, we all feel besieged by divisive and destructive messages. As Annalee Newitz expertly shows, that’s no accident. Illuminating and energizing, Stories Are Weapons can help us defuse the propaganda bombs going off all around us. It also shows how we can come together to tell different stories—stories to shed light in the darkness, make sense amid chaos, and forge hope and community instead of fear and isolation." - Astra Taylor, author of The Age of Insecurity and co-founder of The Debt Collective
"Amid countless books about why people are irrational, Stories Are Weapons unveils something more chilling and important—the people and powers who deliberately engineered many of the awful, ahistorical, and absurd beliefs that so many now hold. But Annalee Newitz’s thoroughly researched and masterfully crafted book also gives us something hopeful—a way to disarm the narratives that have been used against us and reclaim better ones." - Ed Yong, author of An Immense World
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9780393881516 |
| PRICE | US$27.99 (USD) |
| PAGES | 288 |
