The Whisper Network Electrified: An Interview with “Mike Antenna”
“Mike Antenna” is our subject’s Pynchonesque pseudonym; he’s seated across from us in a modest green-and-brown flannel, in a small Maryland cafe near the Patuxent River. His posture is relaxed, but he isn’t interested in sharing his government name. He stirs milk and sugar into his coffee and politely orders a breakfast burrito.
We’re here to talk about Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman, and how his work lights a path through trash television, comedies of manners, and postmodernist lit. Throughout his career, Goffman is intensely preoccupied with the ways everyday social interaction begins to look like intelligence work, if you squint at it right.
Mike had reached out to us a couple years prior, after listening to an interview we’d run with Television Without Pity recapper Jacob Clifton. It turned out he was a massive fan of both Clifton and the Obama-era CW hit Gossip Girl, whose first season is the subject of Clifton’s forthcoming close-read Look How Good You Are. Mike had wanted to disabuse us of certain notions (were we really so naive as to take Dan’s performance at face value?) but also just talk shop: It wasn’t often he met someone who cared to analyze the minutiae of a van der Woodsen monologue, or the I-know-that-you-know recursive knowledge dynamics of a Chuck Bass bluff.
He’d apparently run a small blog in the aughts during grad school—seminars on sociology by day, and when the sun went down, analyzing the strategic dynamics of shows like GG, The OC, and Real Housewives, plus the layered kayfabe dynamics of professional wrestling. From there, he’d been hired as a culture and media analyst for an intelligence contractor. We stayed in touch—exchanging theories, white papers, journal articles, and Wayback’d Tumblr posts besieged by link rot—and in August, he snail-mailed a copy of Gary Jaworski’s new scholarly tract, Erving Goffman and the Cold War. This, he said, was a skeleton key—taking Goffman’s spy-game metaphors as more than just metaphors, contextualizing his ideas about surveillance, disclosure, and the information ecology of social life within a larger geopolitical context. By describing interaction as espionage-style information war, Goffman had managed to savvily characterize the dynamics of both. Might he meet up with us in person, to lay this out on the record? He would.
Over the years, Goffman continually evolved his vocabulary, but a few core ideas nonetheless run through his dozen-odd books. That to be a social creature is to be “ecologically huddled” and interdependent, so that others’ actions are of consequence to us, and vice-versa. That we spend much of our energy and attention reading others’ behavior, attempting to predict how they will behave next—and because we are watched and read in turn, we spend a great deal of energy “writing” to those around us, performing a “definition of self” (a “face,” or “front”) designed to reassure. Finally, that we are constantly attempting to unveil and unmask those with whom we are in conflict—constantly trying to know their “backstage truth”—while assisting in upholding our allies’ “frontstage” faces.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Suspended Reason & RIP DCB: Mike, thanks so much for meeting with us on your weekend. It’s great to finally chat face-to-face.
Mike Antenna: A pleasure. Everyday’s a Saturday for me now that I’m between things.
SR & RD: Your position was a unique one in the national security community. What can you tell us?
MA: My official position, from which I resigned in April, was in Popular Media Diagnostics, but I was really more of a close reader than anything. In my near-decade there, there were about fifteen of us at any given time, parsing through media of all kinds—local news coverage, art zines, AI cults, survivalist bug-out guides, Tumblr pronoun wars, trad lifestyle Substacks, and TikTok trauma healers. Each person has a medium and a decade; mine was network television, 1998–2012. What we’re generally looking for are “soft spots” in the American cultural psyche. Behavioral trends, shifting Overton windows, the evolution of worldview: pressure points that foreign agencies might use as fodder for psychological ops. From a natsec standpoint, what a culture consumes is just as telling of its psyche as the products it creates—at least, that’s what the sign said that hung over our screening room door.
I got into this line of work by accident maybe fifteen years ago; as a guilty pleasure, I’d been running a niche blog where I’d post (among other things) analyses of Gossip Girl episodes. They started out as schadenfreude-drenched diatribes comparing Serena to Daisy Miller, or breaking down Dan’s insufferable martyr complex. But it was when I got deep into Goffman during a PhD seminar that the project frame changed from dollar store gossip column to a proper sociological study.
GG is a host of different frames enmeshed: high school, high society, downtown, class conflict. The show is fundamentally concerned with, to borrow a phrase from Goffman’s Strategic Interaction, “the individual’s capacity to acquire, reveal and conceal information.” Each character is a double: Serena is an It Girl vying to be the golden girl, Nate the political brahmin turned class traitor, Dan Humphrey both pauper and puppet master. The main driver of conflict in GG is the unstable information ecosystem they inhabit—the gossip blog as it supercharges the whisper network of the Upper East Side. On the other hand the UES isn’t too far removed from the more traditional hunter-gatherer panopticon of Dunbar-sized villages, where everyone is ecologically huddled (to borrow another Goffman phrase), constantly watching, swapping information and comparing accounts, trying to get backstage info on everyone else. But also, the blog instrumentalizes and incentivizes a distinct Glass Age panopticon of mutually-assured surveillance that massively accelerates the pace at which gossip travels. Humphrey becomes architect and editor—rather than victim—of the entropic decentralized jungle that is the high (society) school rumor mill. His great American populist project throws into chaos each character’s relationship to each other and to themselves. All they know is duplicity and fabrication; every plan they hatch is aimed at revealing someone for who they are, and, in most cases, the ultimate reveal is tragic in turn, catching someone in the act just as that person is trying to finally turn a new page on who they’ve been.
SR & RD: Over the holidays, we watched Season Four to prep for this interview. After taking Jenny’s virginity and trying to trade Blair for his hotel business, Chuck tries to start a new life—get an honest job, leave New York society life behind, become a better man. He goes by a new name, Henry Prince, and buys a black-market passport. But New York society (personified by Blair) catches up to him, unveils his identity, and threatens to expose him.
MA: Right, and the more canonical example is from Season One, when Serena’s trying to leave her Parker Posey Party Girl days behind her—spend time in the library, go steady with (she thinks) a grounded, conventional “nice guy.” By the second episode, her sexual history has been made public over brunch. She’s been “sold out” by her supposed friends to the boy—Dan Humphrey—she’s putting on a front for.
Goffman chose espionage as a central metaphor of his work in the 1960s in part because it offers such a concentrated portfolio of high-stakes examples that, in their saturation, let us more clearly see similar, subtler dynamics in our own lives, and I think the same is true of the soapy palace politics on GG. The fundamental problem at the heart of the show, and at the heart of modern Western societies more generally, is that “people are ever on the verge of being discredited,” as Jaworski puts it. Everyone has schemes and agendas, everyone maintains a socially advantageous “front” or “face” that conceals less palatable or acceptable facets, and everyone is at risk of this face being unmasked. Those familiar with the show will remember Jenny’s casual revelation to Blair that Dan still sleeps with a childhood cabbage patch doll, and the way Blair (Dan’s social nemesis through the early seasons) latches onto this detail, saves it to later discredit him.
No one better personifies this problem than Dan Humphrey. The scholarship kid from Dumbo with the post-punk-turned-art-dealer father, he is the architect of the Gossip Girl blog, a project he starts as a way to get Serena’s attention. On the surface he’s an Austenian heroine: situationally mixed up with the gentry, romantically entangled with royalty despite being of a lower caste. But in actuality, he’s much more powerful—he’s an opportunistic entrepreneur who seizes on a gap in the social matrix in order to fulfill dreams that, pre-internet, would have become sublimated into a much humbler and fringer practice. Dan begins the show as the character for whom the stakes are highest: born on the outside peering in, his social credit isn't FDIC backed. To counter this, he rigs the information ecosystem such that everyone’s credibility is constantly under siege, not just his. Everyone becomes a spy under his regime—an informant, a double agent.
It’s not unreasonable to see journalism more broadly as an upper-middle class or bourgeois opposition strategy to the dominant class—a check, through public appeal and surveillance, on the power of the elites, just as it plays out in Gossip Girl (as well as in 1999’s much-forgotten series Popular). But it’s similar to how science works—if the structure of the game is rigged up right, with reputations, verification, etcetera, these underlying motivations and impulses can produce real insights into the world. The proper structure can help elevate self-interested, defensive intentions into a productive force. Or it can destroy lives and break apart relationships, as Dan well learns.
Speaking of Dan, my colleague, who works in downtown arts and cultural epicenters, has observed similar roles and dynamics: an informant or journalist making claim to the disclosure of a given scene’s backstage, while ultimately winding up complicit in the production of propaganda for that scene. Often it’s a desire for social recognition or class ascension that leads them to pull punches for the subculture they’re ostensibly charged with scrutinizing. And the same happens in many spheres of governmental oversight, and with the undercover agent who becomes personally involved with his objects of study. Shilling, and being compromised, are always matters of degree.
SR & RD: These are Goffman archetypes, right? The Shill, the Informant . . . and much more common and dynamic and diffuse—these are roles we ourselves constantly step into in our everyday lives. Goffman gives an example of the wife who appears interested by her husband’s dinner-party anecdote, and even feeds him appropriate cues, despite having heard the anecdote several times already. The wife in this case would be acting as his shill?
MA: Exactly. She performs as an interested party to influence the audience’s experience of the situation. Goffmanian archetypes are all over GG. Dan and Jenny shill whenever they react naively to a GG blog-blast in public—shaping the reception of the very information they’ve emitted. You never merely produce propaganda—you also ensure that it’s properly received; you have senators and media figures who make sure drops are framed as they should be. (Goffman, again, is the originator of all this frame language.)
The Informant, meanwhile, gains access to a performer’s backstage, then relays that information to some interested party—sells out the performers, so to speak. Think Juliet Sharp from Season Four, who infiltrates Serena’s social circle and relays information back to her brother. And of course, an Informant can in reality be a sort of Shill—can pretend to uncover or sell out the performers, while in fact presenting false information that protects the performers’ backstage. That’s what would be called a worked shoot in kayfabe, which is wrestling lingo for these layered deceptions.
Non-persons are another classic Goffmanian role, and you see them constantly in the show—they’re the limo drivers, caretakers, cooks, maids. They stand in the background of scenes, making up their faces to perform non-interest and non-noticing, as the main drama unfolds between the wealthy scions who pay their salaries. Of course, they’re not really non-persons—this is a role they play, and a way they’re perceived. Dorota, Blair’s maid, is suspected (by characters and viewers alike) to be Gossip Girl, indicating the privileged access non-persons maintain and the agency they possess behind the scenes while publicly performing non-agency.
One last thing I’ll say quickly on shills: Mimetic desire à la Girard is very hot right now in intelligence circles. As well as being a favorite of Thiel, who has exercised his own private parapolitical endeavors. Suffice it to say, if you consistently model certain kinds of responses for an audience, that response will spread mimetically. Having a vocal minority quite early on present a certain response with unanimity can be incredibly powerful in shaping the preference regimes that form. Not just, say, consumer preferences but sexual preferences. This is the lesson of, say, claqueurs [who are paid to applaud for theater and dance performances]. They’re usually seen as an outdated, abandoned practice of the past, but are in fact very much still a force across cultural and political fields. It’s relatively easy to manufacture a claqueur environment online, especially on anonymous boards and platforms.
SR & RD: This sort of description of human social life (Jaworski describes it as “espionage and counterespionage and counter-counterespionage”) can be really jarring to people, especially if it’s their first encounter with a strategic interaction frame—they look at their relationships with friends, family, loved ones, and they don’t see this kind of implicit hostility or subtle conflict at play.
MA: I think there’s a real tension between how we experience these relationships and how these relationships operate sociologically. Part of the problem is that we reflexively feel that certain things shouldn’t be defined—that when they are, analysis’ cold scalpel scares away the interpersonal magic of love and mutual respect. I’m sympathetic to that impulse, that desire to protect something sacred in a larger context that is fundamentally profane. But I don’t think it’s an especially radical or controversial claim at its core. All you need is something like the idea, which is expressed by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, that a person is a many-faceted diamond, and that there is a facet they polish and hold up for the world, and some facets that they try to keep away from the light. And with allies, people we’re in cahoots with, we try to help others preserve this front, this face, this facet. And with those we’re in conflict with, we try to unmask it, to see the hidden parts and possibly expose them to others. There’s as much cooperation in espionage as there is conflict—arguably more. These dynamics of front- and backstage hold for friends and foes alike; the goals just shift.
SR & RD: You’ve also researched Thomas Pynchon’s work. Having recently re-read his California novels, it strikes us that a lot of his characters—Doc, Oedipa, Frenesi, DL—work undercover at one point or another. Their primary form of social interaction is interrogation; with the sometime-exception of romantic relationships, nearly everyone they know is a “source.” Is there something about the sixties that brought this sort of metaphor out, made it particularly available or salient?
MA: One of my pet theories is that Goffman was reading Pynchon, or Pynchon was reading Goffman. There are some striking similarities. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Asylums, Behavior in Public Places, Stigma, and the collected essays of Interaction Ritual were all published prior to Crying of Lot 49. One of Goffman’s early concepts, which is discussed in Jaworski, is the notion of “dramaturgical loyalty,” whereby you pay lip service to some hegemonic ideological regime while covertly retaining agency and a broader sense of freedom. And the idea comes up repeatedly in Crying of Lot 49—that W.A.S.T.E. is being used by an underground to “truly” communicate, while “reserving their lies, recitations of routines . . . for the official government delivery system.” Tristero’s M.O. in the Americas emphasizes silence, impersonation, “opposition masquerading as allegiance.”
Oedipa, for her part, is a pretty skilled social operator, and some of her interactions or “interrogations,” as you call them, are described with minutely detailed play-by-play, the kind of action that microsociology spotlights, with Oedipa trying to play it cool, putting on false fronts, watching facial expressions and microgestures for tells. Again, the espionage narrative.
And then there’s their shared interest in enthymeme, the technique of implying a premise rather than articulating it. The enthymeme—with its allusive and syllogistic structure, it fits naturally with the kind of wink-and-nod communication styles we’ve been discussing.
SR & RD: There’s a really striking passage when Oedipa visits Yoyodyne, and interrogates an engineer there who she catches doodling the Tristero horn. She tries to bluff that she’s an insider to the whole W.A.S.T.E. operation, but then she pronounces it as a word, “Waste,” rather than as an acronym, “W-A-S-T-E.” The engineer immediately catches the error and ends the interaction; she doesn’t get any more info from him.
Exactly. She’s discredited or uncovered by her insufficient performance of face. It’s difficult to trace this directly to Goffman, because microsociological insights of this kind are a core part of the literary tradition—you could probably call novelists, particularly authors in the social-realist tradition that flourished in the nineteenth century, the first microsociologists. (Gossip Girl makes repeated reference to Austen, plus a Season One nod to Dan owning Lot 49.) But Goffman’s the one who makes it a proper discipline.
It’s hard for people outside of intelligence work—including myself, though I’ve learned a lot talking to agents—to understand just how difficult it is to maintain cover. There’s a hugely complex web of signals, from how you speak to how you dress to how you gesture and emote, that all have to be exactly right or people get suspicious. They might not be able to point to anything as obvious as the W.A.S.T.E. acronym, but they can easily get a bad feeling about someone. They’ll use very bodily metaphors, about the gut, or something not “smelling” right, not passing “the nose test.”
Oedipa finds herself dropped into an environment saturated with these kinds of signals. With her introduction to Inverarity’s backstage and his sprawling shadow network of real estate holdings, the whole world lights up with potential avenues of covert meaning, signs and gestures that point to a present but unrecoverable conspiracy. She’s a regular Joe who finds herself enmeshed in an espionage set piece; the deeper she delves into the labyrinth, the more she realizes she’s been lost in it all along.
Oedipa’s experience of the world as she comes to consciousness (or to paranoia, however you want to look at it) is a nice illustration of what Goffman calls the wide con, which he thinks characterizes the vulnerability inherent in all social life. He defines the wide con in contrast with the conventional con, which is rigidly structured around a set of opposites, such as corrupt vs. innocent, duper vs. duped. Someone disguises themselves to win the trust (“confidence,” hence the name) of someone else, and then uses the privileged access to take advantage of their mark. This is where Goffman started his career, with “Cooling the Mark Out.” David Mamet’s House of Games is a prime example of how the narrow con works. Many of the individual plots in Gossip Girl have a similar structure; but what makes them unique, and Lot 49’s narrative as well, is that their characters are enmeshed in a larger structure of vulnerability based, to quote Jaworski, “not on moral clarity about good guys and bad guys but on moral ambiguity . . . not on the construction of a temporary setting for the purpose of deception but on a setting that never comes down because it’s always there—and it’s always there because it’s everywhere. Under these conditions . . . deception deepens and recurs.”
SR & RD: Last question. Would you agree with the claim that all communication is manipulation? What does that mean to you?
Well, the part that resonates is the focus on the real-world effects and consequences of speech. The old view of intelligence work is that it’s about gathering information in order to understand what’s going on and to best prepare for what’s to come. The new view of intelligence work, which has been steadily increasing in role and influence since the mid-century, is all about creating information, about actively spreading and disrupting narratives. It’s no longer about keeping accurate records or models of the world; it’s about creating a world. You don’t track the truth so much as manufacture it.
SR & RD: Any suggestions for a title? We were thinking “Interaction as Espionage” or “The Global Village In The Glass Age.”
MA: What about “The Whisper Network Electrified”?
SR & RD: It’s good as done.