The CIA conducted over 150 'experiments' on college campuses between 1953-1963. This is one of the ending lines in the 2026 film about Ted Kaczynski. It's referring the MKUltra studies he was subject to, these weren't exclusive to colleges. The film doesn't go into much detail on the motives, rather it takes the opportunity to show some of the alleged causations. I won't go into much detail about this because this blog post isn't a criticism, a glorification, or otherwise going to draw much of its material from the film or the subject matter of the film rather I want to show a parallel that I see in the film's depiction of these experiments and their goals. The story is that a student is subjected to isolated debates where instead of honest intellectual rebuttal the student is subjected to consistent insults and belittling. Very little actual debate occurs, it ends up being one sided while the other's duty is to tear it apart and make it personal. It doesn't stop there either, they end up utilizing personal information, some of which is secured through breaking confidentiality and trust. The professor claims this is all to figure out how to Soviets caused people to submit to them and release sensitive information or whatever. The experiment is extremely immoral and in this story, both in the film and reality was practiced on a child prodigy who entered Harvard at a high school age due to outclassing his high school and showing exceptional academic skills. So that's the basis, it goes much deeper and I implore you to do some research on the subject and learn for yourself, not just from the Hollywood version. To explain the parallel I see, I need you to think about several things. First, the memetic stereotype of Thanksgiving dinner. This has been widely adopted as a not so friendly family get together and what better holiday to express difference in value, opinion, beliefs and politics than on a holiday built on bloodshed, genocide and imperialism. There are even an abundance of videos on the internet of "Thanksgiving crashouts" but let's not get too ahead of ourselves because these things happen all the time especially nowadays and probably always have. Next I want you to think about the media, and how it relies on outrage to perpetuate and grasp at engagement based revenue. It's buzzwords, and high speed chases, HOAs filing reports of recent thefts in your area. It's anxiety fueling and it creates such a great space to market your safety. Alright, those are the lesser obvious ones, we're used to those and honestly they seem to be the smaller scale. Now, let's take a look at the digital landscape and how it has evolved to drive engagement through disagreement. The "algorithm" loves a good debate, but even more than that it loves seeing people get really personal, go check their profile, grab a picture and use it to make a personal attack. These internet tussles tend to evolve and happen quickly. Racing with the bandwidth, trying to see who's wittier or who's got the moral high-ground. It's interesting because we look at words like trolling, debate, keyboard-warriors, and they've become synonymous with a certain aspect of large scale internet culture. And it has been capitalized on, creators/influencers have built entire platforms on this phenomenon and have even started companies due to it. TPUSA for example specifically target college campuses just like that professor and the CIA in the previously mentioned story about a guy who was abused into captivity. Now, if you look at my previous blog post it mentions how think tanks, organizations, political movements etc all utilize certain techniques to capitalize on and manipulate people through propaganda, inauthentic behavior, and astroturfing. These were very similar to the techniques used in these experiments mentioned above. Not all of them, but for this example we see it often. We have seen politicians incite and insinuate, we have seen people fighting over celebrity politics and we have to at some point accept that this may not always be authentic and then we can take a deeper look with nuance and see underlying motivations and how they might profit from it. But more importantly, we could see how it makes US their tools of propaganda. How, when we get into a small debate on social media, how this could possibly be manufactured, measured and studied. And how that might affect us, our mental health, our scope of the world, our emotional presence. So much of what I see and I am sure of what you see, is debates quickly devolving into personal attacks, fallacy and disregard for intellect or morality for a sense of winning against some stranger, or often some bot. It's not just the polarization that I see and hear about so often. It's the sense that this could be an opportunity for companies, groups, think tanks to manipulate people into groups and pit people against each other in a way that nearly always results in tearing the other people down. Once or twice this is probably nothing, but 50 times it probably alters your personality a bit, and a hundred times later who knows maybe your values have changed entirely. I think it's important that we look at the current state of things, find a sense of moral responsibility and find a way to de-escalate or leave situations that feel inauthentic or manipulative and I also think a lot of us know this on the surface level and I think we are able to recognize it at times, but I'm not sure we are able to recognize it with the veil of social media, or the veil of politics. I think genocide is wrong and I think if you end up in a debate with someone who disagrees with that you may have a better time moving when it shifts from stating this to devolving into personal attacks. Easier said than done, and I think that's probably something these studies and so called experiments really relied on was this inherent need built into capitalist structures to enforce a hierarchy whether that's through toughness, intelligence, wit or the ability to tell a "your mom" joke. I'm not saying you should just let people spread bad faith arguments, or harmful content, and you certainly shouldn't turn a blind eye to bullying. I just want people to take the time to look at their surroundings during these events and decide the best method of action, and that maybe even when conflict resolution isn't possible that maybe there's alternatives like walking away. Bad faith arguments aren't there to make you think, or make you feel more intelligent, or just to "troll". They exist as a form of propaganda to shift and manipulate narratives and to deal damage over time. Anyway, you should consider reading up on these studies and others like them, being educated about things is one step closer to making better informed decisions. Information isn't always education. Some information is just out there to confuse you, make you scared, or to deal cumulative emotional distress. Thanks for stopping by. Some key thoughts here: - Are our reactions entirely authentic, or are they shaped by a system that relies on them. - Consider how cummulative affect of intake occurs, even if something is "bite-sized" it can add up over time. - A lot of what we are experiencing is not natural, sometimes it is manufactured, or the byproduct of a flawed system. Take this into account, becuase it can be really important. Our lives, our world, our humanity is not supposed to be this fractured. We do have the responsibility though, to take the time to learn how to fix it. Not just for our future, but for everyones. You are important, not a machine cog. -MKUltra was a lot of experiments, some of the most inhumane things occured to vulnerable people and shaped our society through countercultures in attempt to control and manipulate people at large scale. With modern technologies that are extremely capable of this, the same kind of real world consequences and backfiring could occur. Ai has many method of manipulation and has been used for bot swarms, disinformation and propaganda already. It is potentially better than any professor or doctor in MKultra at targeting, and utilizing infomration to control, manipulate and break down people's psyche. - When every piece of digital media can be labeled "fake" or enhanced by software, the shared foundation of reality fractures. This systemic doubt creates the same disorientation and emotional exhaustion seen in historical coercion studies, making individuals more vulnerable to emotional fatigue and reactive manipulation - We can redefine "winning" sometimes by walking away, protecting our mental health and the health of others. We can be the change we want to see and break the cycle by simply not engaging with those that seek to manipualte or control. The real world affects of the MKUltra "studies" were often horrible, understanding that we are being marketed, manipulated, and sold is a good start but seeing the parallels and knowing that the looping cummulative affects of harm has to exist at some point. Learn to debate, keep up the good fight, but know when to look around and see if that fight is authentic or meant to control and alter a narrative. - You're not crazy, awful things are happening in our world and have been for a long time. White supremacy, patriarchy,exploitation, predatory marketing, awful wars and genocide, human rights violations, rollbacks in policy protecting people the list goes on. We have to combat these things without being tools used in them. We have to stand for what's right, and learn to reconize how wanting that can be used against us and others. Who stands to gain from your outrage. How can the constant fight and flight vs reward program affect your psyche. gh0st

I've used the internet nearly since it was released to the public minus a few years. It was always interesting, and a decent escape from the mundane life of American poverty. It felt mysterious, unexplored and full of surprise. That being said, I also grew side-by-side with it exploring eachother's awkward phases and I'd watched things develop, then get cast aside. It moved quick, while the internet is young it's been through a lot and it's seen a lot. Massive amounts of data and information pouring in from millions of nodes across the globe. One of the more interesting phenonemons has been watching and studying how things like scams evolve, and how these digital subcultures and cult followings form and how they seemed to increasingly interfere or influence life outside of the digital world. Before covid hit, I remembered seeing several interesting and quickly evolving situations from learning about the order of the 9 angels, a racial hate group built on the idea of competition with other members to seek heiarchy at the cost of others. I remember coming accross hacker groups that used Facebook and other social medias as a sort of playground to compete and test their funding or skills against eachother and that grabbed my attention hard. A specific few teams of hackers and pranksters from South America had formed teams that resembled botnets and would fund, create and exploit massive amounts of FB profiles/accounts to commit their attacks with. They specifically used imagery and iconography from the Church of Satan and other dark gritty and edgy terminology or imagery. They used this increase their numbers and support, allowing them to aquire more accounts. Their attacks didn't seem to be your usually phishing attacks or anything super malicious, it appeared to be more of a game of skill to obtain kudos or clout. These were real human networks, often edgy teenagers with money and coding skills that could purchase exploits easily and utilize this uniform execution of attacks on large scale. This was human and automation holding hands to accomplish small real world goals. I think it's also important to mention that while younger movements tend to use edgy and "evil" imagery and iconography, many other groups utilize religious zealout imagery, christian imagery, crusaders, etc to radicalize and obtain the same goals. These scenarios and attacks aren't usually about religious gain, they're about obtaining data or recruiting users and members. We see this with alt-right dogwhistles which infiltrate online gaming communities and use Jesus or right wing concepts, racism etc to recruit members and aquire user data and this is win-win for them because they either get recruitment or engagement. Thanks troll culture.I will try to write more on this later, because while I do feel it fits the subjects I think it also spills over into other parts of internet and irl culture that heavilly afflict people's lives through radicalization and similar means, just with often different goals. The internet, specifically facebook has so many of these hive mind/cult like movements where people use absurdity to refuse assimilation, to claim obscurity and attempt to set themselves apart from the corporate mess that the internet was becoming and these movements are genuinely astounding I am almost certain many of you have seen or been a part of these. For example, groups and communities created strict roleplaying personalities and digital realities members would take part in "A group where everyone pretends to be an ant colony" this one is intriguing because of the double down on the hive mind concept yeah? or " a group where we all pretend to be boomers" It extends far past this into the shitposting culture and the "dank meme" culture which I think we all came to realize was somewhat of an alt-right pipeline. This is all people so far, all automation mentioned up to this point was basic scripting and execution of human written code and human deployment of attacks or human assimilation of sociological acceptance and the inherent need to both be different and be a part of something larger than yourself. So while there's a lot I would love to go into here, especially personal experiences looking back at some of these extremely interesting scenarios I think it is time to move on to the use of what we apparently consider ai. In 2014, the internet in my opinion was at it's height. We saw hacktivist movements moving into the real work where dorky 4chan dweebs would coordinate protests or alternatively and much more harmful swats. We saw a major rise in the acceptance of technology not as a futuristic concept but something we held in our hands. The Lexptetex botnet was Ia malware operation that infected 250,000 computers, stealing Facebook session cookies (you've changed your password since then surely?) this was used to hijack real human accounts, forcing them to mimix identical social behaviors to spread the infection and silently mine cryptocurrencies. While internet mysteries and sleuths have always been around due to malfunctions, pranks, genuine attacks, etc I think this was where we REALLY began to see a major uptick in excessive data and information soread and binging. Obscurity because cool, niche became a buzzword and even pop music icons like Poppy built their image on building or maintaining obscurity, confusion and strangeness that mimmicked internet mysteries,. we all love a mystery. Cicada 3001? What we all thought it was it turned out to be exactly that. Yutube channels with super weird uploads or timed released and countdowns replaced prank/horror blog posts and forum mysteries. There was the rise of creepy pasta, SCP all have which now been stripped from their communities for corpo profit. It was also about the time that "ai" was becoming a thing, sleight of hand too they showed up google deep dream and we laughed because it looked stupid but behind the scenes wealthy folk and those with access were already using llm's and ML to take advantage of this stage of the internet which relied on ad revenue and engagement. AI generated graphics were used to trick engagment recommendation algorithims and we didn't yet realize how much of our lives would be consumed by the word algorithm, seems a bit overrated huh. I still love internet mysteries, niche cults evolving in digital spaces, anomolies occuring due to human and computer error, old websites that somehow grandfathered into remaining existent in our future. Corners of the internet with low traffic it's all still quite exciting to me. Nonetheless let's move on to how these things have affected our lives outside of the internet on a global scale. Astroturfing. You've heard the term, you probably know what it means and why it's important and maybe even the scale at which it is used to market to you to keep up with the Jones's. It's used by marketing teams to create large amounts of accounts and followings so that you feel a competitive need to make a purchase or subscribe to something. But, it is also used to make movements look much larger than they actually are. I think if people knew how often they were actually interacting with bots on the modern Social Networks they would likely take a very different approach. We saw this early too, mid 2010's when Russia utilized botnets and astroturfing for political attacks. QAnon, 4chan opens it's mouth only for shit to come out, we saw one of the largest astroturfing campaigns here where people were donating money, recieving mail and merchandise by a massive sociopolitical manipulation team that utilized Alternate Reality Games with emotional outrage, this turned everyday normal users into decentralized extremist propaganda engines. The January 6th attacks, the rise of Joe Rogan and podcast culture, TPUSA, Curtis Yarvin, and many more who constantly astroturfed, aquired data, and utilized fear and outrage to radicalize decentralized movements then centralize that power and outrage into the MAGA movement. This at scale is something I believe to be one of the most gradual yet largest moving attacks that utilized digitial manipulation tactics, funding, and astroturfing that made it's way into every part of the internet and outward into daily life. Filling yards with signs, trucks wrapped in cult/hivemind imagery. Road side salesman. Learning how to recognize some of these things can be easy, like year if 100 accounts post the SAME thing that's pretty obvious. But even more important is understanding the evolution of these tactics. When you see something on the news or the internet instead of having an imediate reaction, give yourself some time not just to think about it clearly but because you know these things rely on emotional reactions and the attack timeline is generally not very large. These attacks, generally have to rely on scripts of code that get caught quickly, and fact checked by your community. So, take your time. If you see something that gives you an emotional response move on to something else and come back to it later. I hope to expand on this later, there's really a lot to cover and feel free to leave me a message or e-mail if you have something to add or discuss. I'm gonna leave a list of key terms so people can look them up for further understanding and education. - Astroturfing - Coordinated Inauthentic behaviors - Crowdsourced Geopolitical operation -QAnon and participatory media -Trava-zap / Trava-face clans -Unicode Stack Crashing - Absurdist roleplaying --- Thanks for reading, gh0st

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