The phrase has had a strange career. Steve Bannon, in a 2018 conversation with Michael Lewis, said the line that has since been quoted into the ground: the Democrats don't matter, the real opposition is the media, and the way to deal with the media is to flood the zone with shit. The vulgar half of the sentence is the one that gets repeated. The strategic half is the one that has reorganized the practice of politics.
I want to spend this post on the strategic half, because the argument of the book turns on a distinction that gets blurred every time the line is quoted as a kind of dark joke. "Flooding the zone" names a method. It has inputs, outputs, a budget, and an intended effect. It can be done well or badly. It can be defended against, though the defenses are weaker than most people who study them in public are willing to say.
Flooding the zone is plumbing that someone has to pay to run.
The method, stripped to its mechanics, is this. Produce more claims, faster, across more channels, than any responsible actor can verify, contextualize, or refute inside the window in which those claims are politically useful. The goal is to occupy the space in which belief would otherwise form, and occupying it does not require being believed. If a reader, a voter, a regulator, or a reporter spends their finite attention sorting through the flood, they are not spending it on the underlying question.
Three things follow from that definition, and each one matters more than the Bannon quote.
First, the strategy is older than the people most commonly credited with it. The Soviet active-measures apparatus operated on a recognizable version of the same logic from the 1920s through the dissolution of the USSR, and the Russian services that inherited it never stopped iterating. The underlying move (saturate, confuse, exhaust) has survived every change of name. Bannon did not invent it. He said it out loud.
Second, the strategy is bipartisan in a way that makes a certain kind of reader uncomfortable. Once a method works, it is adopted. I have watched it deployed by parties of the left and parties of the right, and by single-issue movements with no clear ideological home. The technique does not care about the ideology of the operator. It cares about the operator's willingness to use it.
Third, and this is the load-bearing claim of the whole book, the strategy works because the defenses against it are built for a different problem. Fact-checking, media literacy, platform moderation, even libel law: each of these was designed for a world in which the cost of producing a false claim was greater than the cost of correcting one. That world is gone. The cost curves have inverted. A defense built for the old asymmetry will not hold against the new one, no matter how earnestly it is administered.
That is the diagnosis. The rest of the column, over the next twenty-two notes, is what follows from taking it seriously. Next week I'll lay out the seven variables that make up the FTSeffect equation, in plain English, without the math. I want you to be able to use the rubric on a news cycle before I ask you to trust the score it produces.
For now, the sentence I want on the record is this. The next time you find yourself overwhelmed by a story, ask whether the overwhelm is incidental or designed. Usually it was designed. Somebody chose the volume, and the choice has a name on it somewhere.
— J.W.B.
Note 02 of 24