Society of the Psyop, Part 1: UFOs and the Future of Media

[EndtheMadnessNow]

After reading Trevor Paglen's Society of the Psyop brilliant essays I think he captures the spirit of the current moment better than anyone else I can think of so far.

Society of the Psyop, Part 1: UFOs and the Future of Media (excerpts):

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.

What does it mean to live in a media environment that knows our wants, needs, vulnerabilities, emotional ticks, kinks, and cognitive quirks far better than we do? That notices which kinds of stimulus induce what kinds of precognitive responses, and uses machine learning to develop, A/B test, and deploy custom-generated cognitive injections designed to manipulate us even further, all without us consciously perceiving what’s happening?

And what does it mean to live in a media environment where this is all-pervasive: not only news and websites, videos and movies, but driving assistants in cars, AI-generated customer service representatives, search engines and chatbots, virtual HR managers, gas-station pumps, smart houses and phones, and even washing machines … a media landscape where your refrigerator, vibrator, and toothbrush collude with insurance companies, advertisers, political campaigns, and big retailers, using computer vision, machine learning, and biometric feedback to influence your behavior and worldview?


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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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[excerpt from Part 2]

Magic

We can think of magic as a type of media. One that operates in the world of preconscious perception, playing with associations, expectations, symbols, and other forms of media to alter perception, to influence behavior, to affect the physical world, and to produce any number of other effects. To study magic is to study the quirks, foibles, and everyday hallucinations that characterize human perception, and to use those gaps between reality-as-it-is and reality-as-it-is-perceived as a vehicle for making supernatural-seeming interventions into perceived reality.

As a form of media, magic operates in a perceptual landscape of associations and forces that have little to do with reason or logical perception. Lionel Snell (a.k.a. Ramsey Dukes), an early progenitor of “chaos” and “postmodern” magic, observes that

    our brains have evolved a non-logical data processing facility which is, in its own way, every bit as useful and sophisticated as reason but which we tend to play down or analyze away because its casual connections seem so tenuous. This facility, which I called “feeling,” acts much faster than reason and seems to process vast amounts of data in parallel rather than sequentially like a logical thought.

Snell explains that what we call “feeling” or “intuition” is the result of our having unconsciously internalized and classified huge amounts of perpetual “patterns” with varying levels of abstraction and complexity. For example, we may have preconsciously learned that walking alone at night and seeing a group of loud drunken men in the distance “goes with” danger, that green meat “goes with” feelings of sickness, or that shuffling a deck of cards “goes with” randomness.

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The CIA’s staff magician was neither a spiritualist nor a postmodernist. John Mulholland (born John Wickizer) was a master illusionist, public intellectual, and stage magician. Born in Chicago in 1896, Mulholland’s fascination with magic began at the age of five when his mother took him to see a performance by the legendary Harry Kellar.

For Mulholland, magic had little to do with the supernatural. He was highly skeptical of claims about the paranormal. Far from involving some kind of otherworldly conjuring, for Mulholland, magic

    is the pretended performance of those things which cannot be done. The success of a magician’s simulation of doing the impossible depends upon misleading the minds of his audiences … A performance of magic is largely a demonstration of the universal reliability of certain facts of psychology.

One of Mulholland’s professional hobbies was using his knowledge of trickery and deception to question the claims of psychics, mediums, and charlatans purporting to have access to the supernatural. His 1938 book Beware Familiar Spirits set out to refute the extravagant claims of spiritualists and mediums. In 1952, he wrote an article for Popular Mechanics debunking the UFO phenomenon.

In early 1953, Mulholland disappeared from public life. He closed up shop at The Sphinx and canceled most of his professional commitments. On the record, Mulholland had concerns about his health. In reality, the magician had accepted a position in the CIA’s newly formed MKULTRA program.

(The security clearance process had gone slowly due to the agency’s nervousness about Mulholland’s “sexual proclivities.”) As he transitioned from public figure to clandestine operative, his income from performing and publishing was replaced by a stream of checks from an obscure organization with a mailbox at Southern Station, Washington D.C. named “ChemrophyI Associates.”

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Mulholland’s experience debunking the supernatural made him useful to the agency. The CIA had become fascinated by the possibilities of hypnosis, ESP, telepathy, and other parapsychological phenomena. Mulholland became their internal reality check. By 1955, Mulholland was traveling around the country to meet and assess psychic test subjects engaged in an early version of “remote viewing,” a man who claimed that a copper-lined Faraday cage gave him enormous psychic abilities, and other X-Files-inflected occurrences.

In 1956, the CIA gave Mulholland another task: investigating UFOs.

UFOs had taken to the skies. And the CIA knew all about them. Because the CIA created them.

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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.

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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.

Society of the Psyop, Part 1: UFOs and the Future of Media Part 2 is linked at his article.


Part 3: Society of the Psyop, Part 3: Cognition and Chaos (Don't skip this part and then try to imagine what they may have today!)


Extra: One of the best video presentations about state secrecy from 2014.
Speaker: Trevor Paglen - Seeing The Secret State: Six Landscapes




Vid Summary:
The 30th Chaos Communication Congress (30C3) is an annual four-day conference on technology, society and utopia.

Although people around the world are becoming increasingly aware of the United States' global geography of surveillance, covert action, and other secret programs, much of this landscape is invisible in our everyday lives.

The drone war, for example, seems to happen "somewhere else" while surveillance programs take place among the (largely) invisible infrastructures and digital protocols of the internet and other communications networks. Moreover, the state agencies responsible for secret programs strive to make them as invisible as possible.

In this talk, artist Trevor Paglen discusses his work attempting to "see" the various aspects of the secret state. In examples ranging from tracking spy satellites to foraging through the bureaucratic refuse of CIA front companies, Paglen will discuss methods used to identify and exploit structural contradictions in classified programs which render them visible, and comment on the aesthetics and politics of attempting to "see" secrecy.


Excerpt from Harper's magazine...

Disclosure
by Hari Kunzru

On the day before Grusch testified, I was in Berlin, sitting on a stage in an art gallery. Hanging over my head was a confusing and weirdly compelling mirrored sculpture. As the crowd filed in, it was hard to concentrate, because I was aware of my own reflection, shattered and refracted above me. Titled PALLADIUM Variation #5, the sculpture was created by the artist Trevor Paglen, whose work is based on meticulous and conceptually sophisticated research into the contours of the secret state.

Paglen had asked me to come and talk about disinformation, secrecy, belief, and the UFO revival. With us was Mark Pilkington, a writer and publisher who lives somewhere near a stone circle in the west of England with a shed full of analog synthesizers and shelves of books on what is usually called “the Unexplained.” Pilkington knows, I think it’s fair to say, a suspicious amount of practical information about how crop circles are made, which means that he may (or may not) be responsible for blowing thousands of Nineties British raver minds. He is also one of the most judicious and perceptive UFO researchers in the world and the author of Mirage Men, which makes the case that military counterintelligence officials have manipulated the UFO community, stoking paranoia as a way to obfuscate their aerospace research.

Pilkington and Paglen have both interviewed the same former special agent for the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations at Kirtland Air Force Base, in Albuquerque. As the agent introduces himself in a film Paglen exhibited alongside PALLADIUM, his face fills the screen. “My name is Richard Doty,” he says, with just the hint of a smile. “And my favorite color is gray.”

Doty is an extraordinarily slippery character. He claims to have conducted “deception operations” as part of a local counterintelligence operation to protect the base. His job was to get in with the UFO research community and play both sides, telling some people that their information was fake, while hinting to others that they were on the right track.

Disclosure