The Demand Side of Disinformation
Propaganda is a consumer product, and demand is high. Why?
When we think of propaganda, we think of totalitarian governments piping obvious lies to a subjugated population. We think of the propagandized as either tuning out the nonsense or being actively aware of the display of power. We think of Solzhenitsyn: “We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying.”
But we should also think of the propagandists who are not doing it “intentionally,” because they are simply responding to market forces. They are giving the people what they want. And, as an example, today they want vivid speculative fiction dressed up as financial analysis that proves AI is going to destroy the economy as we know it.
So that’s what we get, in the form of Citrini Research’s The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis post on Substack. It opens with a caveat—“a scenario, not a prediction”—then immediately abandons that framing. The piece is written as a retrospective macro memo from June 2028, complete with fabricated Bloomberg headlines, fake JOLTS prints, and invented earnings reports. It’s immersive fiction engineered to produce the phenomenological experience of reading a post-mortem on a crisis that already happened. You are dropped into the story and feel what it would be like if it were true.
The post escaped containment. Fortune, Barron’s, TBPN, CNBC all covered it. Several stocks explicitly mentioned—DoorDash, American Express, Blackstone—all slumped more than 8%.
All because of a piece of speculative fiction.
Nevermind that the core arguments of the piece were debunked in near real time. People pointed out that the timeline was ahistorical, requiring the complete unwinding of the white-collar services economy in roughly thirty months, ignoring the fact that real estate brokers still collect six percent commissions two decades after Zillow made their value proposition obsolete. Nevermind that the core logic of the piece was debunked a month before it was even published, also on Substack. Alex Imas showed the conditions required for actual negative GDP growth were extreme and almost certainly unrealistic. Its scenario required every institutional circuit breaker—regulators, the Fed, Congress—to fail simultaneously, contradicting the historical record from the Fed’s balance sheet explosion in 2008 to CARES Act checks arriving within weeks in 2020.
None of that mattered. None of those debunking pieces got any press or viral distribution. The Citrini piece went viral because it told people what they already felt, and it was shared widely by people who want it to be true: political and economic opponents of AI. For the AI-skeptical, it validated the intuition that this technology would hurt regular people. For the bearish investor, it provided a roadmap for a short thesis. For the populist, it confirmed that elites were extracting wealth while everyone else suffered.
It didn’t matter that the piece was wrong, so long as it felt right to the right people, the consumers of disinformation.
Wherever someone has something they’re willing to sell, wherever someone wants something they’re willing to buy, there’s a market. Every market has two sides, supply and demand. They feed each other. Suppliers bring things to market, creating demand in people who may not have had it before; consumers signal their demands to the market, and entrepreneurial suppliers compete to satisfy that demand.
The supply side of disinformation is well-documented. We have plenty of journalists and politicians eager to tell us useful lies.
The interesting question is the demand side of disinformation. Why do people eagerly and jealously consume propaganda?
There is, of course, also a market for facts and truth. It’s just smaller. And the first thing anyone in that market needs to understand is that most people don’t care for facts. They don’t want the truth. It’s a niche market, filled mostly with hobbyists and weirdos. If you buy some shiny new facts and try to show them to normal people, you’ll find they’re either disinterested or they get upset.
Because when people go out shopping for information, truth is a secondary concern. What matters most is that the information is useful. And propaganda, it turns out, is useful—especially now, in a world perceived to be incoherent, meaningless, chaotic, and full of alien groups with incompatible worldviews. It provides something more important than truth. It provides psychological safety, the reassurance that the narrative as you understand it is coherent, and that people are out there who see things just as you do.
Truth, on the other hand, is very often useless. The worst kind of truth, though, is not just useless but contradictory. That kind of truth causes us literal pain in the form of cognitive dissonance. When you encounter information that threatens the coherence of your worldview, you rightfully register it as a threat, and you react accordingly. The psychological unease of holding contradictory beliefs is so acute that people will actively seek confirming information and reject challenging information because the pain of reconsideration is worse than the comfort of ignorance.
Journalists and politicians may not consciously understand this (though some clearly do), but they respond to incentives like anyone else. They are in the business of supplying narrative coherence. There may have been a time when the best way to do that was by supplying objective facts to a discerning, educated voting public who needed those facts to engage in civil life and democratic self-government. But demand for their product dried up, and so the suppliers of investigative journalism largely went out of business.
In the business of narrative coherence, facts drive value only if they’re useful. The key value drivers are more in how those facts are packaged—who said what, how, and what it means for the story. The people demand narrative coherence, and they frustrated with their suppliers when they don’t get it, and they start to look elsewhere until they find it.
On election night 2020, Fox News’s Decision Desk correctly called Arizona for Joe Biden. The call was accurate. It was true. It was also, from the audience’s perspective, unforgivable. Viewers fled to Newsmax, whose prime-time audience exploded from 58,000 the week before the election to 568,000 the week after. Fox dropped from first to third in cable news ratings. Internally, anchor Bret Baier emailed executives urging them to retract the call: “It’s hurting us.” Tucker Carlson warned that “an alternative like Newsmax could be devastating.” The CEO proposed not calling any more states until results were formally certified, weeks later. The network ultimately pushed out the Decision Desk director and the political editor who made the correct call. A correct call. But their consumers didn’t want a correct call. They wanted a satisfying story.
Months earlier, In June 2020, the New York Times experienced the mirror image. They published an op-ed by GOP Senator Tom Cotton arguing for the deployment of federal troops to quell riots following George Floyd’s death. The piece was conventional opinion journalism: a sitting senator articulating a policy position that had the support of the White House and a majority of the Senate. Their consumers hated it. Subscribers canceled in record numbers—more than two hundred in a single hour, the highest rate the paper had ever recorded. Editorial page editor James Bennet was forced to resign within days. A month later, opinion writer Bari Weiss resigned with a public letter alleging that colleagues had called her a Nazi, posted axe emojis next to her name in company Slack channels, and that the paper had become “a kind of performance space” where “stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences.” She had been hired specifically to broaden the paper’s ideological range after it failed to anticipate the 2016 election. But their consumers didn’t want that. They wanted narrative coherence.
This is the demand side of disinformation. The Fox audience demands a conservative narrative; when the network violates that demand, it loses viewers to competitors willing to sell them what they want. The audiences are not passive victims of media manipulation. The Times audience demands a liberal narrative; when the paper violates that demand, it loses subscribers, staff, and editors. They are active consumers enforcing quality control on their preferred fictions.
Maybe that’s the reason truthseekers often wrap themselves in esoteric language and hide away in monasteries, universities, and other ivory towers: because people don’t want to be disturbed by truth, not until it is filtered down and made digestible within their worldviews. No one likes to be violently awoken.
People have always been this way. There’s always been a market for propaganda. Echo chambers are not imposed from above, they are demanded from below. The audience builds its own bubble then hires talking heads to furnish it and politicians to protect it.
The Citrini piece will be forgotten in six months. But the appetite that made it go viral won’t be. The supply side will always exist. There will always be someone willing to sell you coherent falsehoods as knock-off truth.
And maybe I’m one of them. After all, I tried hard to make this piece both accurate in fact and in feeling. I wanted it to *feel* right. It welcomes you into my coherent narrative. The only honest thing a purveyor in the truth market can tell you is that the product is uncomfortable, the returns are inconsistent, and the customer base is small. But, the selling point is that you get to keep your sanity, even if you seem insane to everyone else. Whether that’s a selling point depends entirely on how much you enjoy the company.