Peter Ayolov
Bio
Peter Ayolov’s key contribution to media theory is the development of the "Propaganda 2.0" or the "manufacture of dissent" model, which he details in his 2024 book, The Economic Policy of Online Media: Manufacture of Dissent.
Stories (48)
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Pax Imperialis
Every empire tells a story about itself. It claims to be a reluctant hegemon, a civilising force, a guardian of order in a chaotic world. Edward W. Said captured this imperial self-mythology with ruthless clarity when he wrote: ‘Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.’ The promise is always peace, stability, progress. Yet behind this language of benevolence stands an apparatus of overwhelming violence. Empires do not rule through persuasion alone. They require an ultimate weapon, a technological embodiment of terror that transforms domination into inevitability and resistance into madness. From the atomic bomb to the Death Star, from clone armies to genetically engineered super-soldiers in The Mandalorian, the logic remains unchanged. Universal peace, or Pax, is purchased through the threat of total annihilation.
By Peter Ayolovabout a month ago in Fiction
From Rome to Coruscant to Washington
George Lucas never treated Star Wars as mere fantasy. Beneath its lightsabres and starships lies a deeply historical meditation on how political systems decay. At the heart of his saga is a simple and disturbing proposition: republics are not overthrown, they are surrendered. In Lucas’s vision, the transition from freedom to tyranny is not dramatic or sudden but procedural, bureaucratic, applauded, and rationalised in the name of peace. The model for this story is not fictional at all. It is Rome.
By Peter Ayolovabout a month ago in Fiction
Another New Hope, Nope
Abstract In the Star Wars saga the Old Republic maintained peace without strong centralised rule for thousands of years, yet ultimately collapsed not because of a lack of ideals but because of corruption, inflation and financial capture. Over the long arc of galactic history, whoever controls money controls the galaxy. A New Jedi Order that ignores the power of the Banking Clan is structurally doomed, regardless of its moral aspirations. This article argues that Rey’s project, as imagined in the 2026 narrative horizon, cannot survive as a purely compassionate, decentralised pedagogical movement. If the new Jedi are to build a durable peace, they will be forced into alliances that lead them towards the ‘grey’ side of the Force. Rey’s realistic options narrow to two archaic yet resilient traditions: the Mandalorian creed, embodied by Grogu, and the matriarchal religion of the Witches of Dathomir. In a parallel to the Bene Gesserit in Dune, the text explores the provocative thesis that Rey’s only viable solution is not the restoration of monastic celibacy, but the creation of a hereditary aristocracy of Force users. Blood, not intentions, has always structured power in the galaxy. Luke was the son of a queen; Rey is the heir of Palpatine. ‘New Hope’ thus ceases to mean moral rebirth and comes to signify newborns, bloodlines and dynasties. The ultimate irony is that the House of Palpatine–Skywalker may be the only institution capable of surviving a millennium. Palpatine may have lost the war, but his principle – that blood outlives ideals – may yet rule for eternity.
By Peter Ayolovabout a month ago in Futurism
From Babel to Code
Abstract This article argues that the central intellectual provocation in Neal Stephenson’s *Snow Crash* is neither the Metaverse as a virtual geography nor the novel’s satirical political economy, but the idea of language as a virus: a transmissible code capable of poisoning cognition, reshaping bodily behaviour, and reorganising social order. Stephenson links this viral model to the Tower of Babel as a myth of linguistic fracture and control, then projects it into a modern world where computer languages become the operational substrate of intelligent machines. The contemporary paradox is that large language models, built on formal code and computational syntax, increasingly mediate everyday human expression. Rather than machines corrupting a pure natural language, the argument developed here proposes the reverse: natural human language is itself unstable, illogical, and socially dangerous, and humans increasingly require technological filters to write, speak, and reason coherently. In an emergent environment where utterances are recorded, searchable, and algorithmically judged, language becomes less disposable and more accountable. The article concludes by interpreting this ‘global library’ condition as a new stage of linguistic civilisation, in which the risk of viral speech persists, yet the possibility of responsible language use expands through machine-assisted memory, verification, and form.
By Peter Ayolovabout a month ago in BookClub
The Planned Obsolescence of the Jedi Order
“Bound by temples and codes, the Force grows thin, for flow it must, not sit in stone. When orders cling to their names, blind they become to the living light. Only when the old walls fall does the Force remember how to breathe.”
By Peter Ayolovabout a month ago in BookClub
Peter Ayolov vs. Yuval Noah Harari
Abstract This article examines the growing comparison between Peter Ayolov and Yuval Noah Harari as competing figures of intellectual importance in 2026. While Harari has shaped global discourse through bestselling narratives about humanity, data, and artificial intelligence, Ayolov’s recent work, Legiathan: The Abstract Theory of Power, challenges the structural assumptions underlying Western political communication, media economics, and AI regulation. Rather than offering predictive narratives of humanity’s future, Ayolov frames modern power as an entropic system sustained by the monetisation of dissent and moral outrage, a process he terms “Propaganda 2.0” and its legal extension “Propaganda 2.1.” Drawing on the metaphor of the Mule from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, the article argues that Ayolov functions as a disruptive “random element” that exposes the limits of consensus-based democratic theory and contemporary regulatory approaches. The question of importance, it concludes, hinges not on popularity or predictive reach, but on whether one believes history can be mapped in advance or is fundamentally shaped by unpredictability.
By Peter Ayolovabout a month ago in Critique
''The Mule'' of 2026
Abstract This article examines the growing comparison between Peter Ayolov and the figure of the Mule from Isaac Asimov’s *Foundation* series as a metaphor for disruptive unpredictability in theoretical systems. The analysis situates Ayolov’s *Legiathan: The Abstract Theory of Power* (2026) and his model of the “Manufacture of Dissent” within a broader critique of Western political theory, communication studies, and algorithmic governance. Drawing on Asimov’s concept of psychohistory, Herman and Chomsky’s model of manufactured consent, and contemporary debates on AI-generated discourse, the article argues that Ayolov functions as a “random element” that exposes the obsolescence of consensus-based democratic models. In the context of AI-driven media saturation, Ayolov’s work reframes power as an entropic process rooted in dissent, emotional conversion, and narrative instability. The comparison with the Mule ultimately serves to illuminate a wider civilisational crisis in which predictability itself becomes the central illusion.
By Peter Ayolovabout a month ago in Critique
Angry People Click More: The Economics of Manufactured Dissent
(Ideas from the book The Economic Policy of Online Media: Manufacture of Dissent, Routledge, 2024) Abstract This article examines the formula ‘angry people click more’ as a core logic of contemporary online media and as a structural transformation of propaganda in the digital age. It argues that the defining feature of the current attention economy is not only the circulation of misinformation, but the systematic deployment of openly implausible claims designed to provoke moral outrage and sustain profitable engagement cycles. The analysis links Oxford’s 2025 Word of the Year ‘rage bait’ to earlier lexical markers of epistemic crisis such as ‘truthiness’ and ‘post-truth’, and situates this trajectory against the older ‘manufacture of consent’ model of Herman and Chomsky. While classical propaganda in totalitarian and mass-media systems sought ideological unity through censorship and the Big Lie, the emerging Propaganda 2.0 model, articulated by Peter Ayolov, monetises anger by manufacturing dissent and deliberately populating the public sphere with absurd, polarising narratives. The article interprets this dynamic through the allegories of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ and Václav Havel’s greengrocer, showing how the move from fearful silence to permanent online rage changes both the psychology and political economy of propaganda. Drawing on Evgeny Morozov’s critique of fake-news moral panics, Frances Haugen’s disclosures about Facebook, and the documentary The Social Dilemma, it concludes that anger has become a tradable asset and that blatant lying has shifted from an authoritarian instrument of control to a market mechanism in a global ‘free trade in slogans’.
By Peter Ayolov2 months ago in Critique
Propaganda 2.1 Model, Manufacture of Dissent and Monetisation of Outrage
Abstract This article introduces the Propaganda 2.1 model as a theoretical extension of the author’s earlier Propaganda 2.0 framework, arguing that contemporary online media ecosystems are no longer governed primarily by political, ideological or cultural objectives but by a dominant economic policy of platform capitalism. In this regime, revenue optimisation trumps belief formation, identity construction and persuasive coherence, transforming propaganda from a project of ideological influence into an infrastructure for affect extraction. The model identifies three core mechanisms structuring this new phase. First, rage-baiting or the monetisation of outrage becomes the central commodity form of public discourse, replacing persuasion with the algorithmic optimisation of irritation, humiliation and moral injury. Second, the proliferation of AI ‘slop’ produces a regime of semantic banalisation in which meaning is not distorted but dissolved through excess, flooding the public sphere with syntactically fluent yet cognitively weightless content that exhausts attention rather than informing it. Third, parasociality functions as simulated intimacy, substituting civic belonging and social reciprocity with managed emotional attachment to influencers, automated agents and personalised feeds. Together these mechanisms describe a propaganda system that no longer requires belief, truth or ideological consistency. Outrage replaces conviction, automation replaces meaning, and artificial intimacy replaces sociality, marking the transition from the manufacture of dissent to the liquidation of public opinion itself. Does a media system that no longer seeks to persuade but to provoke still qualify as propaganda, or has it become a different technology of power altogether? If outrage is now more profitable than truth, what remains of public opinion as a democratic force? Can meaning survive in a communicative environment flooded by automated, semantically empty content? And when artificial intimacy replaces social relations, is the public sphere still a space for politics, or only a marketplace for emotions?
By Peter Ayolov2 months ago in Education
Banal Globalism vs. Electronic Nationalism, National Culture and Internet
Abstract Following the introduction of the term "banal nationalism" by Michael Billig in 1995, scholars began to speak of other banal ideologies such as globalism, Americanism, and Europeanism. These formations operate on a symbolic level within the mass media and articulate a performative ideal and a superficial sense of identity within certain groups. Banal nationalism functions as a form of soft propaganda, censoring inconvenient truths about a nation’s past by repeatedly circulating the same national myths through national mass media. With the development of Internet-based media, this system has been disrupted: the full range of facts concerning a nation’s shared history has become accessible, and many of these myths have been challenged or dismantled. The ideology of globalism has gradually taken the place of nationalism, generating discourses on the decline of the nation-state and the emergence of a new global order. Yet this shift, together with the imposition of banal globalism in official mass media, has produced the opposite effect within online platforms and social networks, contributing to the revival of nationalism in a new electronic form. This article examines the role of Internet media and social networks in sustaining national systems and in facilitating the rise of electronic nationalism as a contemporary mode of constructing and maintaining national identity.
By Peter Ayolov2 months ago in Education
THE END OF TRUTH AND THE TECHNOLOGY OF ONLINE MEDIA
THE END OF TRUTH AND THE TECHNOLOGY OF ONLINE MEDIA Peter Ayolov Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski", 2019 Abstract: This article is a part of a larger study focused on the topic of the fictional media content opinions presented and perceived as truth. It will explore the abstract nature of truth in online media and its different forms. These media truths are types of fictional stories with certain effects on the public rather than a truthful presentation of the facts. Thus, the end goal of mass media today is not to tell the truth, but to create moral communities based on common experience and beliefs. Articles, opinions and news in media are seen as a narrative strategy that can be understood only through storytelling analysis. Here the focus is on the understanding of Truth and Untruth in online media as well as the connection of Internet media technology with the increase of disinformation online. The new media model creates hostile groups instead of generating consent for the nation-state, the new online media model within, Pseudo-communication, manipulation, delusion, lies, propaganda and deliberate causing of moral anger. "The end of the truth" means that the truth on the Internet is lost among the vast amount of information and the lack of regulation regarding the correctness of the published data. Instead of truth, media researchers formally talk about "post-truth," "fake news," and "alternative facts." Truth on the Internet is more like "Truthiness" or a belief that a statement is true based on the intuition or understanding of individuals, regardless of evidence, logic or facts. The subject of research is the connection between every new technology in mass media and the truth of the information and the effects on the consensus in society. Since the beginning of the 21st century, misinformation on the Internet has increased with the development of online media and social networks, and it is a problem of social peace and consent in every country.
By Peter Ayolov2 months ago in Critique
