Narrative Control with Matt Stroud

The concept is pretty simple: There's this phrase/cliché—controlling the narrative—that gets thrown around constantly. Politicians use it. Celebrities deploy it when they're in hot water. Corporations lean on it when their products harm people or fail or disappoint us. Don Draper basically made a career out of it in Mad Men. It's everywhere, but we rarely talk about what it actually means or how it works.

So that's what this show is about. I'm Matt, your humble host and narrator.

Here's what the AI bots came up with for art:

I'm not sure about the flaming newspaper.

Here's the gist though: We're living in an attention economy where everyone needs their own narrative just to exist. Every piece of that economy is a story somebody's trying to tell, and understanding how those stories get constructed is kind of essential to navigating the world right now.

The idea of "narrative control" has this whole evolution—from postmodern philosophers like Lyotard and Foucault dismantling the concept of universal truth in the '70s and '80s, to political operatives in the '90s professionalizing the art of spin, to today's algorithmic warfare where narratives get manufactured and amplified through social media at machine speed. What started as a literary term became a prescriptive doctrine of political warfare. The management of perception is now as critical as the management of actual resources.

I want to dig into all of that—the mechanics of how political narratives get performed, how journalism tries (and often fails) to counter narrative dominance, and how this stuff trickles down to personal identity. How do people construct their own narratives? Why does it matter what you call yourself or your project? How do you think about your own story when you're building something independently?

I'm doing this mostly on my own, figuring it out as I go, which I think is part of the point. We're surrounded by sophisticated propaganda techniques deployed in well-trodden ways, and I think it's to our collective detriment that most of us don't recognize the patterns. This show is about learning to see them—and maybe understanding our own narratives a little better in the process.

Have something to say? Wanna be on the show? Email me:
matt AT amphibian DOT media