On Psy-Ops

Generally speaking, the purpose of gray propaganda has been to take advantage of existing biases ingrained in the dominant culture, as well as the particular traumas of marginalized communities, and to weaponize them against movements that were viewed as a threat to the established order. The goal has always been quite simple - divide and conquer.

With social media and news feed algorithms, the state does not need to produce most of its own propaganda, nor does it need to hire someone. (It can and often does that, but that's besides the point being made here.) It is much better to have authentic provenance among the millions of disaffected youth, and to simply elevate the 1 or 100 examples of bad faith discourse that emerge. The focus is less on content creation, and more on boosting, commenting, and creating the sensation that this is the thing we're all talking about right now. In addition to these deliberate efforts, there are emergent effects of the social media infrastructure itself, which are optimized for addiction. We could argue to what extent these discourses arise from government initiatives and to what extent they are the emergent property of stochastic processes optimized for business needs, but it's not really important. The bottom line is that the "authenticity" conversation itself is preempting another, deeper conversation we collectively avoid because of the uncomfortable prescriptions that may result - why do we keep doing this to each other?

In today's discourse, "it’s a psy-op” is no longer a meaningful critique. There is no actual community being warned - only an audience - and so the warning doesn’t and can't tell us what to do or where to go. It tells us to "be careful," like an anxious helicopter parent watching us on the playground, filling us with dread about consequences without any clarity about what a correct action would look like. It makes us feel of the present the way a time traveler would feel about the past, worried to make any move lest it alter the timeline irrevocably. It exhausts us and leads us to give up before we even start to fight in earnest. Meanwhile, corporations and the state are accumulating godlike powers for collecting and acting upon data, making dangerous, world-altering moves like they're placing a lunch order.

We absorb this zoomed-out perspective into our conversations. We don't ask if we are hurting someone, but rather if our "movements" made up of organizations we don't materially support and meetings we don't attend "should make room" for people we personally find annoying. We don't ask why we spend hours arguing with strangers on the internet, but rather whether the majority of them are really a complete stranger from the other side of the country or just a bot, as if one of those is worthy of retort. We pretend that we are fighting a war of words, only to acquiesce that we do not know the score or whether we are doing anything of importance, only to shrug it off and carry on out of compulsion. The fact that so many of us have the audacity to demand people "be normal" and condemn "mental illness" while engaging in this behavior - which any society before 2010 would have found absolutely bizarre - demonstrates exactly the profound lack of self-awareness that is endemic to the imperial core.

If we are serious about liberation, then we must ask ourselves hard questions:

“Why am I like this?”
"What do I need in order to change?"
“What do others need so that they can change, too?”

The surveillance state prevents us from sharing and metabolizing our collective rage. In such a condition, the only safe direction for our hostility is horizontal, at other marginalized and struggling people. Occasionally we may get the gratification of punching upward, but it is singular, hollow, and followed by intensified repression.

In the society of control, authority places limits and gives incentives in response to SURVEILLANCE. It groups people according to this surveillance to produce a discourse. This increases usage, delivers additional data, and even presents opportunities for manipulation.

It cannot be emphasized enough that a society of control doesn't demand or even want discipline. In fact, it delights in bounded undiscipline, a stochasticity that it can control through making predictions and tweaking the code.

Contrast this to a notion of democracy that uses DIALOGUE as a means of navigating relationships between peers and their shared worlds. This inverts the information asymmetry, producing a localized richness of information that is not captured by the surveilling apparatus. ("You had to be there.")

One of these advantages the oppressor, the other the oppressed. When you're using social media, ask yourself, "Is this really dialogue, or just surveillance with a dopamine loop?" When you avoid the gathering, ask yourself, "Have I been led away from dialogue? What would it take to get back?"

We need to see the relation between the belief that the world cannot get better, and the need to lash out against people trying just as hard as us to make it better. If we can’t do that, then solidarity is preempted, and there is no revolution to speak of.