If It Walks Like a Duck: Is The AI Mania a Psych-Ops? By Charles Hugh Smith

AI in 2025 feels like the Internet in 1999. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

Let’s summarize our thought experiment: the AI Mania scores 100% on all eight metrics of a Psych-Ops.

Before you scream, “Oh no, not again–could somebody please take off his tin-foil hat?”, hear me out. Let’s do a thought experiment exploring this question: Is The AI Mania a Psych-Ops?

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck, and there is a strong case to be made that AI is walking and quacking like an immensely clever Psych-Ops. (Hey, maybe AI designed its own Psych-Ops…)

Let’s start with a basic definition of Psych-Ops:

Psychological operations (PSYOPs or Psych-Ops) aim to achieve narrative dominance by molding perceptions and attitudes via multi-channel information and persuasive messaging. PSYOPs seeks to achieve control through non-violent means by influencing the minds of the target audiences.

Discussing Psych-Ops publicly is tricky, as the algos are quick to send you to Digital Siberia without recourse to protect the public. Been there, done that, so let’s stick to examples that won’t get me sent (again) to Digital Siberia.

Though the gummit is often fingered as the source of Psych-Ops, the most successful campaigns are public-private partnerships. Others are mostly private-sector efforts. For example, the masking of the takeover of the American economy by monopolies and cartels can be understood as a private-sector Psych-Ops aided by politicians, the agencies under their authority and the courts.

COINTELPRO is an infamous example of a domestic Psych-Ops:

COINTELPRO, the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program from 1956 to 1971, aimed to disrupt and discredit various political organizations perceived as subversive within the United States. These tactics included surveillance, infiltration, and the dissemination of false information to create divisions within groups targeted by COINTELPRO.

Psych-Ops aimed at the general public often focus on generating support for a war of choice or support of economic policies that benefit the few at the expense of the many.

Examples include the Spanish-American War, the Vietnam War, the Desert Wars and the bailout of the players who triggered the Global Financial Meltdown in 2008-09. (“We had to bail out the Too-Big-To-Fail Bad Guys because if we didn’t, they were gonna shut down the ATMs.”)

It’s, well, interesting, that the whole AI mania is constantly couched as an “AI war with China we can’t afford to lose,” as if we’ll all be living in cardboard boxes beneath the freeway underpass if we don’t “win this war,” with AI Supremacy defined as whatever AI a merchant in Timbuktu or the jungles of Laos will use a few years hence.

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