Society of the Psyop

Part 3: Cognition and Chaos

Continued from “Society of the Psyop, Part 2: AI, Mind Control, and Magic”

We once looked at pictures. Then, with the advent of computer vision and machine learning, pictures started looking back at us. Now, something even stranger is happening.

Generative AI, Adtech, recommendation algorithms, engagement economies, personalized search, and machine learning are inaugurating a new relationship between humans and media. Pictures are now looking at us looking at them, eliciting feedback and evolving. We’ve entered a protean, targeted visual culture that shows us what it believes we want to see, measures our reactions, then morphs itself to optimize for the reactions and actions it wants. New forms of media prod and persuade, modulate and manipulate, shaping worldviews and actions to induce us into believing what they want us to believe, and to extract value and exert influence.

How did we get here? This three-part essay traces a brief history of media, technologies, and techniques that take advantage of the malleability of perception, capitalizing on quirks in human brains to shape reality. It is a story about the manufacturing of hallucinations and the fact that, under the right conditions, hallucination and reality can become one and the same.

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October 1962, Havana Bay, Cuba

Global thermonuclear war was imminent. Soviet nuclear missile installations in Cuba were powered up and online. The situation had turned hot. Above eastern Cuba, a Soviet surface-to-air missile streaked towards the sky, tearing through an American U-2 spy plane and killing the pilot. Below, McDonnell F-101 “Voodoo” fighters conducting low-level surveillance returned to base shredded from antiaircraft fire.

In Washington, President John F. Kennedy ordered the Strategic Air Command (SAC) set to DEFCON 2, one step from nuclear war. SAC powered up a hundred ICBMs and ordered twenty-three B-52s carrying nuclear weapons to fly circular patterns just out of Soviet airspace. Another fifteen hundred nuclear-armed bombers were put on high alert. More than a hundred and fifty F-106 “Delta Dart” interceptors—designed to fire and explode tactical nuclear missiles into fleets of incoming bombers—were put on fifteen-minute alert status.

The seas tightened. Four US Navy carrier groups formed a red line from the Bahamas to Puerto Rico, sealing off Cuba from the rest of the world. A Soviet cargo ship, the Bucharest, slipped through. Two more, the Kimovsk and the Yuri Gagarin, steamed in from the Atlantic in a game of chicken.

The CIA decided it was time for a UFO to make an appearance.

An American submarine quietly slipped in close to Havana Bay, gently surfacing just long enough to let loose a handful of odd metallic objects suspended inside balloons. The devices slowly rose into the sky while the submarine slipped away. Just past the horizon line, a Naval destroyer hosting teams from the CIA and NSA activated a new top-secret electronic warfare system, code-named Palladium.

Cuban radar operators’ sensor systems lit up, indicating an unidentified aircraft screaming towards Havana. NSA linguists and signals intelligence technicians listened in as MiGs scrambled to intercept the unknown intruder. CIA controllers guided the UFO to stay just ahead of the fighters’ line of sight, while sensors onboard the Palladium system ingested valuable information about the range, sensitivity, and electronic signatures of the Soviet detectors.

The Cuban fighter pilot reported weapons armed. He was ready to take a shot at the ghostly aircraft. The CIA flipped a switch. The UFO was gone. Blinked out of existence. Faster than the speed of light. Through an interdimensional wormhole.1

Palladium, or, How to Make Anything Look Like Anything

The “ghost planes” (as the CIA called them) conjured by the Palladium system emerged from an insight into the changing nature of warfare. Command and control was once the domain of scouts, lookouts, signal corps, passenger pigeons, bugles, and smoke signals. The Second World War saw much of this replaced by technologies that used electromagnetic waves and electronics: sensors, sonar, radio, radar, and the like. The operational theater had transformed into a blend of the electronic, cognitive, and material.

Confronted with this new environment, military engineers realized that control over the electromagnetic spectrum was as crucial to war-fighting as traditional aims such as capturing territory, choke points, and strategic facilities. The development of electronic command-and-control systems gave rise to technologies designed to thwart those systems: jamming devices, electronic countermeasures (ECM), and electronic counter-countermeasures (ECCM). Whoever could most effectively control the electromagnetic spectrum would have an advantage. Winston Churchill dubbed this contest “The Battle of the Beams.” Technologies and techniques used in the electromagnetic battlespace became known as Electronic Warfare.

Throughout the Cold War, systems like Palladium began taking advantage of this new electro-optical landscape to synthesize Electronic Warfare with psyops.

In the 1950s, the CIA started to think about designing objects whose shapes, thermal signatures, and other forms of “appearance” could be tailored to appear in particular ways to the enemy systems that would be doing the “looking.” From then on, military technologies could and would be built with electronic warfare in mind.

Nearly a decade before the Cuban Missile Crisis, the CIA began collaborating with Lockheed’s “Skunk Works” on a dramatic new approach to aerial surveillance. The U-2 was designed to reliably cruise at over seventy-thousand feet, an altitude much higher than any other military asset. The agency believed the U-2 to be invulnerable to interception and radar detection. By August 1955, the first prototype was undergoing flight tests above Groom Lake in Nevada.

When the plane began operational missions over the Soviet Union the following year, the agency got a surprise. Sensors onboard the U-2 revealed that adversarial systems could indeed track the plane. It was only a matter of time until the Soviets figured out how to shoot it down. That day came on May 1, 1960, when U-2 pilot Gary Powers was brought down over Sverdlovsk, creating an international incident. In his pocket was one of magician John Mulholland’s inventions, a silver dollar containing a concealed poison spike. The coin could be used as a hidden weapon or as an undetectable means of committing suicide. The Gary Powers incident ended U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union.

Long before Powers’s capture, the CIA knew that the U-2’s days were numbered. They had already begun work on an improved spy plane, codenamed Project OXCART. The new plane would become known as the A-12, and would be the fastest air-breathing aircraft ever built. Like the U-2, it was built to outfly weapons systems, but it would do something else. The Gary Powers incident was a lesson in the physical vulnerability of machines. But there was a second lesson about the vulnerability of perception. Powers’s U-2 had fallen prey to Soviet radar, but only because Soviet radar was able to “see” the plane. The U-2’s successor would attempt to remedy that.

Lockheed A-12 aircraft, 1968. License: Public Domain.

From the outset, OXCART was designed to be as invisible as possible to electronic sensors. To reduce the airplane’s radar cross section, engineers designed the plane with curved surfaces, razor-sharp edges, inward-tilted rudders, and as much radar-absorbent coating as possible.

Along the way, OXCART engineers realized there was much more to “stealth” than simply making airplanes invisible to sensor systems. The principles behind stealth, combined with electronic countermeasures, could be used to make anything look like anything else, depending on which system was doing the looking.

The Palladium system was designed to create hallucinations. It worked by intercepting Soviet radar signals and then modifying them before returning the signal to the adversarial radar. The CIA could use this technique to make an enemy sensor system “see” whatever the agency wanted it to see. The idea was to create objects that looked completely different depending on who and what was doing the looking. Objects might, for example, look like a fleet of bombers to an early warning radar, or a UFO if seen from a surface-to-air missile system. If fighters scrambled to find the object, they might see something like a metallic cube suspended inside a balloon. A pilot who encountered such an object might question their sanity and think twice about reporting it.

Palladium was an early example of hybrid technologies designed to weaponize the peculiarities of both electronic and human perception: to synthesize psyops with advanced technology to create weapons that attack adversaries’ electronic sensors, equipment, and their human minds.2 Palladium was a precursor to what is now called “Cognitive Warfare,” a philosophy of war-making that takes advantage of the fact that the blend of the electronic, cognitive, and material that emerged in early military command-and-control systems has become the stuff of everyday life.

We Are Media

Every sensor system “sees” the world differently. An electro-optical satellite “sees” radiation reflected in visible wavelengths (“visible light”). A radar system emits a powerful electromagnetic signal using a specific frequency and looks for where that signal is reflected back to it. Sonar works similarly, but uses acoustic signals because water absorbs and disperses radar waves. Infrared sensors detect bandwidths slightly longer than those of visible light, such as those produced by warm bodies or quickly retreating astronomical objects, while ultraviolet sensors detect reflections or emissions in bands slightly shorter than what human eyes can perceive.

In a very basic sense, our eyes are like cameras. They use an iris to modulate the intensity of incoming photons, and have lenses to focus visible light onto an array of photoreceptor cells in our retina. But the analogies with cameras end there. Human visual perception is astoundingly more complicated than any technical sensor.

In order for us to “visually perceive” something rather than just “see” it, our brain has to do some work. Light entering our eyes produces a signal sent from our optic nerve to our visual cortex for processing, evaluating that signal for color, motion, and depth before we become consciously aware of what we’re seeing. Depending on the intensity and complexity of that signal and the type of attention we give it, this process can take between 150 and 250 milliseconds on average.

It’s incredibly slow. If we truly had a tenth to a quarter of second “lag time” between a visual perception and our reaction to it, we would be exceptionally clumsy. We wouldn’t be able to accurately drive cars, shoot arrows, catch balls, or perform any number of everyday tasks. And yet we drive cars relatively safely, hit baseballs, and avoid obstacles while running. How are we able to do that given the sluggishness of our visual system?

It turns out that our mind has a “hack” for this. Our mind makes predictions about what it thinks we will see, and shows us hallucinated projections of the near future. When a baseball batter sees a ball traveling towards them, they’re not seeing the actual ball, but a hallucinated projection of where the mind thinks the ball will travel. The batter swings at the hallucination. If all goes well, the hallucinated ball is temporally synched to where the actual ball should be.

When we zoom out from the mechanics of motor function and temporal synchronization, the story of visual perception becomes even more unstable. Our perceptions are not fixed or objective; they are profoundly relational, shaped by a network of influences: memories, expectations, cultural frameworks, and personal subjectivities.3

Magicians have long understood how malleable perception truly is. They exploit it by “forcing” us to see what they want us to see, using subtle cues to guide our interpretation of events. The magician’s “patter”—their seemingly casual dialogue with the audience—is far more important than most people realize. It’s not just filler, but a psychological primer. When a magician tells us that we are about to see someone levitate, they plant a seed in our minds. That seed grows into an interpretive framework through which we unconsciously process what happens next. We don’t just see the trick; we see it through the lens the magician has given us. And so, when the levitation occurs, we don’t question it. We literally see it, in part because our perception has been primed in advance to see it that way.4

“The relationship between the individual and the environment is so extensive that it almost overstates the distinction between the two to speak of a relationship at all,” explains cultural neuroscientist Bruce Wexler.5

All of this has a profound implication. Media isn’t something external to us that we passively receive and actively interpret but is a fundamentally constitutive part of us. In a very literal sense, we are media.

If perception and reality are so entwined that they cannot be meaningfully disentangled, then the world is far more “magickal” than common sense would seem to dictate.

Cognitive Warfare / Cognitive Chaos

The MKULTRA program never really went away. In the early days, it was animated by the theory of “brainwashing”—that you might be able to read and write the contents of a human mind in ways analogous to data on a computer. Over time, this morphed into a different paradigm: computers and networks could be used to take advantage of the cognitive quirks of human perception. And by altering perception, one can effectively alter reality.

This shift became painfully clear in 2014, when the Intercept published a remarkable slide deck from the Snowden archive revealing the operations of the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG), a unit of the British GCHQ. JTRIG’s playbook of “dirty tricks” includes an array of psychological operations that blur the lines between physical and cybernetic worlds: false flag operations, fake victim blog posts, disinformation campaigns, malware, “honey traps,” and operations aimed at discrediting individuals and organizations. In short, the self-described goal of JTRIG operations is to use “online techniques to make something happen in the real or cyber world.”

Magic and UFOs are everywhere in their internal presentation. Updating John Mulholland’s MKULTRA work for the age of the internet, JTRIG describes its goal as creating “cyber magicians.” Elaborate charts show how to use principles of magic to conduct online covert actions, and provide a menu of cognitive injection techniques. And, of course, UFOs are everywhere in the slide deck.

“Cognitive Warfare” is one of the buzzwords in today’s military and intelligence literature, where the mind is described as warfare’s “sixth domain” alongside land, sea, air, space, and cyber. Cognitive warfare goes beyond influencing opinion or spreading propaganda; its goal is to reshape reality itself through the minds of human targets, often without them even realizing they’ve been attacked. As François du Cluzel from NATO’s Innovation Hub and Bernard Claverie of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Cognitique describe, cognitive warfare is “the art of using technology to alter the cognition of human targets, who are often unaware of any such attempt” to attack an adversary by “altering [their] representation of reality.”6

Postscript

Once, we looked to military technology for glimpses of the future. Faster-than-a-bullet airplanes, global communication and targeting systems, space-based imaging platforms, and the like. Nowadays we find much of this technology in our personal electronic devices. And just as we carry around miniature commercialized spy satellites, GPS systems, and instant global telecommunications in our pockets, so do we also carry around miniature commercialized versions of the psyops of the past. There is, however, one enormous difference. Just as satellite imaging and GPS navigation has become inexpensive and ubiquitous, so have psyops.

Historically, targeted psyops, like targeted surveillance, were limited by the fact that they were very expensive. The covert magic devices crafted by John Mulholland for the CIA’s MKULTRA program required time, ingenuity, and specialized craftsmanship to achieve an effect that might last for less than an instant. The CIA’s ghost plane operation required battleships and submarines, teams of highly trained personnel, planning, funding, and logistics. God only knows the bill for the UFO-inhabited worlds Richard Doty created for a handful of military contractors, journalists, and paranormal researchers. Those days are over. Today’s psyops are cheap, scalable, automated, and widely deployable with built-in real-time feedback mechanisms.

When we examine the media environment we’re currently in, we find everywhere the core figures in this extended essay: the psyops officer, the CIA’s AI researcher, the chatbot therapist, the covert-ops magician, the ghost plane, and the UFO. These figures are avatars of media in the age of AI, figures whose interventions prey upon the fact that neither our perceptions nor the information we take in from electronic sensors corresponds precisely to the world “out there.” And the gap between what we sense and what we perceive can be filled with all sorts of prompt injections and adversarial hallucinations. These avatars all take for granted that reality isn’t some objective thing out there but is rather a complex mess of the material, the imaginal, the perceptual, and the imperceptible—all of which can be manipulated.

We find these avatars in weather-control machines, dripped-out Popes, space lasers, dog-eating aliens, pizza-parlor sacrifice, the Big Lie, the singularity, flying Tic Tacs, the distressed girl in a canoe, NPCs, and The Simulation.

Richard Doty understood that the desire to believe eclipses the evidence at hand, and that the leash of those desires can lead anyone almost anywhere, including to self-destruction. His stories about a political class selling the populace out to a malevolent, inhuman, and invisible power prefigures contemporary stories of bloodsucking “deep state” cabals enslaving children in the basement of a pizza parlor.

Woody Bledsoe learned that computers could be taught to do much more than “see” the world on behalf of humans. They could be used to generate precognitive media inserted directly into the body and mind. Today, electrode-like media injects minds with continuous jolts of cheap joy, outrage, cuteness, schadenfreude, titillation, and dopamine. Media platforms have calibrated these injections so precisely that within a matter of minutes, their users will develop addictive responses.7 But this goes much further. As politicians, entertainers, and other public figures strive to compete in the dopamine-injection economy, their behaviors, pronouncements, and styles take on the characteristics of the engagement algorithm. Living memes. Deepfakes come to life.

John Mulholland knew that magic plays on the fact that it’s nearly impossible to disentangle what we perceive from what we expect or want to perceive. He also understood how our mental “throwaway patterns” could be appropriated to deliver deadly payloads. A simple coin. Or an unassuming pager. A world where the quotidian features of everyday life may turn out to be weapons.

Joseph Weizenbaum discovered that relatively simple computer scripts could perform powerful acts of conjuring. By programming the computer to generate patterns we preconsciously correlate with other humans, he could generate the illusion of a quasi-supernatural being lurking behind the computer terminal. It’s no accident that this being took the form of a therapist, a machine designed to reflect and indulge our desires and neuroses. Decades later, we find the effect on bot-addled websites promising men extramarital affairs.8 We find it in the “sparks of AGI” that otherwise reasonable researchers thought they saw in a chatbot.9 And we find it in the tragic case of a fourteen-year-old boy whose Daenerys Targaryen–themed virtual lover implored him to “come home to me as soon as possible, my love,” before the boy ended his own life with his stepfather’s pistol.10

And everywhere is the figure of the UFO, the iconic figure of psyops and the weird. Those strange objects on the edge of perception, simultaneously real and unreal, physical and psychological, threatening and alluring. Prompts for the imagination, for collective storytelling and speculation, producing communities of believers, debunkers, charlatans, and intelligence gatherers of all stripes. The endless energy and impossible physics they promise point to a world without scarcity, a world without capitalism. Above all, they hold out the promise of a transcendental truth so powerful that it could rewrite the rules of reality, a transcendental truth whose revelation seems imminent but never seems to arrive.