Plenty of bad news, but the good news is that an increasing number of people see through the bullshit. Once they have, they don’t go back to believing it. The alternative media can take some credit for that. From Josh Stylman at brownstone.org:
Having explored the physical and psychological mechanisms of control in a previous article, and their deployment through cultural engineering in yet another article, we now turn to their ultimate evolution: the automation of consciousness control through digital systems.
In my research on the tech-industrial complex, I’ve documented how today’s digital giants weren’t simply co-opted by power structures—many were potentially designed from their inception as tools for mass surveillance and social control. From Google’s origins in a DARPA-funded CIA project to Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos’ familial ties to ARPA, these weren’t just successful startups that later aligned with government interests
What Tavistock discovered through years of careful study—emotional resonance trumps facts, peer influence outweighs authority, and indirect manipulation succeeds where direct propaganda fails—now forms the foundational logic of social media algorithms. Facebook’s emotion manipulation study and Netflix’s A/B testing of thumbnails (explored in detail later) exemplify the digital automation of these century-old insights, as AI systems perform billions of real-time experiments, continuously refining the art of influence at an unprecedented scale.
Just as Laurel Cc served as a physical space for steering culture, today’s digital platforms function as virtual laboratories for consciousness control—reaching further and operating with far greater precision. Social media platforms have scaled these principles through ‘influencer’ amplification and engagement metrics. The discovery that indirect influence outperforms direct propaganda now shapes how platforms subtly adjust content visibility. What once required years of meticulous psychological study can now be tested and optimized in real-time, with algorithms leveraging billions of interactions to perfect their methods of influence.
Nudging from Tech Bros in the digital collective?
Shove it commie rat POS vermin.
Never used any Techno Triumphalist horseshit never will.
Fam tries to shame me for never having a cellphone, I fart loudly in their general direction.
Breaking from ZZ Top:
Jesus Just Left Chicago (from Tres Hombres)