(2024-09-09) Paglen Society Of The Psyop Part1: UFOs And The Future Of Media

Trevor Paglen: Society of the Psyop, Part 1: UFOs and the Future of Media. Generative AI, Adtech, recommendation engines, 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 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?

If the postwar media landscape was characterized by spectacle, and the late twentieth and early twenty-first century by an age of surveillance, then we are entering a new phase. One marked by affective computing, machine learning–enabled optimization, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology.

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.

Richard Doty

Doty conducted elaborate psyop programs for the US Air Force in the 1970s and ’80s. One of his targets, a defense contractor, was so consumed by paranoia after being subjected to Doty’s craft that he was committed to a mental institution

My intuition was that Doty’s career as a cultural producer could shed some light on what media might be like in an age of recommendation algorithms

For the next two days, Doty explained the finer points of military interrogations and influence operations, the theory and practice of psyops, and how he’d created and used folklore about UFOs to develop counterespionage missions designed to protect classified Air Force assets.

I first met Richard Doty in 2022

When Doty arrived in 1979, Kirtland was synonymous with top-secret military technology experiments

Doty’s job was to keep all of this secret.

In the late 1970s, a military contractor named Paul Bennewitz, who lived on Kirtland’s northern border, started seeing and photographing unusual lights and movements over the restricted range adjacent to his house. He came to the conclusion that they must be UFOs

Evidently, it wasn’t an alien invasion that Bennewitz had discovered, but a top-secret NSA program. The case landed on Rick Doty’s desk.

he staged an elaborate deception and cover-up operation to encourage Bennewitz’s imagination

In the summer of 1980, Doty made a pitch to this source, named William Moore, who was the coauthor (with Charles Berlitz) of the 1980 book The Roswell Incident. Doty’s proposal was this: Doty would provide Moore with incontrovertible proof of extraterrestrial contact in exchange for Moore’s help in conducting AFOSI investigations and reporting on the activities of amateur UFO groups. The deal was irresistible, and Moore cooperated.

Doty began using Moore as a proxy. Doty gave Moore doctored top-secret documents to pass along to Bennewitz

the documents implied that Bennewitz’s discoveries were relevant to an above-top-secret program called “Aquarius,” administered by a shadowy group called “MJ Twelve.”

The operation against Bennewitz snowballed

Bennewitz to receive a computer he could use to decipher the “alien” signals. The doctored computer spat out long streams of quasi-nonsensical text as if it were a chatbot in a trance or fugue state:
WE CANNOT TELL MILITARY OF THE US MAKING HUMANOIDS REASON FOR HATE IS YOU ARE GOOD—WE TRUST YOU TAKE VAST PORTION UNIVERSE (markov chain)

the operation against Bennewitz became more elaborate. Knowing that Bennewitz was an avid amateur pilot and that he suspected the existence of a top-secret alien captive near the town of Dulce, New Mexico, AFOSI installed surplus military equipment on the top of Archuleta Mesa so that Bennewitz would see it on one of his flyovers

Doty began a second operation. Linda Moulton Howe was an award-winning television journalist who’d recently completed A Strange Harvest, a documentary on the “cattle mutilation” phenomena. In the wake of that success, Howe received a contract from HBO to make a second documentary on the topic of UFOs.

offered her access to an Air Force colonel who had allegedly handled one of the surviving aliens from the Roswell crash. Howe was thrilled. Weeks passed. Then months. No footage arrived, no interviews materialized. HBO killed the project. Howe’s documentary on the UFO phenomenon was not going to happen.

The 1988 edition of the US Army Field Manual outlines ten principles of military deception.

It turns out that US military and intelligence agencies have a long history of using UFOs as a psychological instrument, having discovered their hyper-mimetic qualities in the 1950s. Decades before Doty’s variations on the theme, UFOs were a well-known self-replicating cultural trope capable of infecting individual and cultural consciousness and spreading like a virus.

The discovery of the UFO hyper-meme took place in the 1950s, against the backdrop of a massive effort by US military and intelligence agencies to develop ways to manipulate people’s minds.

The outcome was a path to insanity. Paul Bennewitz became ever more paranoid about alien surveillance, accusing his wife of being controlled by aliens and eventually barricading himself in his house. In August 1988 he would be hospitalized for a mental breakdown

The next summer, William Moore publicly confessed to participating in a disinformation campaign against Bennewitz and colluding with the US government to betray the UFO community. He faded into obscurity soon after.

For her part, Linda Moulton Howe doubled down on her project to seek “the truth” about extraterrestrials. To this day, she claims that there are 168 advanced civilizations in the Milky Way, that multiple species of extraterrestrials inhabit earth and can manipulate time

And why use UFOs? There are no good answers to most of these questions, but we have a better answer for why UFOs became Doty’s primary mimetic device.

At this point, we might ask a simple question: Why? Was the top-secret NSA program at Kirtland so sensitive as to warrant the incredible resources spent

Both the field manual and Doty himself agree that the most important of these principles is “Magruder’s Principle—The Exploitation of Perceptions.” Named after the Confederate general John B. Magruder, it holds that "it is generally easier to induce the deception target to maintain a pre-existing belief than to deceive the deception target for the purpose of changing that belief"... not making him less certain of the truth, but more certain of a particular falsehood.

Society of the Psyop, Part 2: AI, Mind Control, and Magic - Journal #148

Brain Warfare

It was the spring of 1953, and a lot of things were on the newly appointed CIA director Allen Dulles’s mind. The plan to implement Operation Ajax, a coup to overthrow the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, was in full swing and was only a few months away from implementation. A second plan, to overthrow the government of Guatemala, was under active development for the following year. But on April 10, something else was on the director’s mind: “brain warfare.”

psychological warfare

Dulles was giving a speech to a group of Princeton alumni in Hot Springs, Virginia that day. Standing before the crowd, Dulles described a psychological warfare program he believed to be taking place in Korea, China, and behind the Iron Curtain.

A new form of media had appeared in American public life. In the midst of the Korean War, captured American prisoners made films confessing to the surreptitious use of biological and chemical weapons against Korean civilians.

By the end of the war, more than half of all American POWs had signed statements denouncing the war and calling on the US to end the conflict.

Influenced by the work of Edward Hunter, an anti-communist journalist and CIA operative who popularized the term “brainwashing” in his sensational 1951 book Brain-washing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Men’s Minds, the government concluded that the Koreans (with Chinese backing) must be “brainwashing” their American captives.

If a “brainwashing” capability did exist, as the CIA believed, then there was a “brain warfare” gap. The Americans had no mind-control program. Three days after his speech in Hot Springs, Dulles authorized its creation.

Spearheaded by CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb, MKULTRA was a wide-ranging effort consisting of at least 149 subprojects investigating how the agency could use the human mind as a strategic and tactical arena of covert action, intelligence collection, and warfare.

They conducted cruel experiments on unwitting students, soldiers, prisoners, drug users, sex workers, and the mentally ill.3

We have only scant documentation of MKULTRA’s scale and scope. On January 30, 1973, as journalists and congressional overseers started to learn about the program, CIA director Richard Bissel dispatched Sidney Gottlieb to the agency’s records center in Warrenton, Virginia to destroy all documentation of the mind-control experiments.

What we know about the various MKULTRA subprojects comes from a cache of nearly twenty thousand documents, located during the 1977 Church Committee investigation, that survived Gottlieb’s purge because they’d been stored at a different location.

Could the mind be programmed, erased, and reprogrammed like a computer or played like the “disc put on its spindle by an outside genius,” as Dulles imagined?

The answer would turn out to be “yes.”

Facial Recognition and Remote Control Animals

Woody Bledsoe was an early trailblazer in artificial intelligence, specializing in devising algorithms to conduct pattern matching, a crucial predecessor to modern machine learning.

set up a research lab on the peninsula south of San Francisco in what would become modern Silicon Valley. He called the group Panoramic Research.

In 1963, the CIA—using the cutout company “King-Hurley Research Group”—contracted Bledsoe to develop a system that would use computers to identify people by looking at pictures of their faces.

Bledsoe found inspiration in the work of Alphonse Bertillon, one of the founders of biometrics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He began photographing his associates and analyzing their faces, assigning key points to various facial features (center of pupils, the inside corners of the eyes, the outside corners of the eyes, etc.), and measuring the distances between them.

Bledsoe’s idea was to use a computer to analyze photos of people, calibrate the result against the standard head, look for a pattern corresponding to an image in the database, and identify a specific person’s face. Today Bledsoe is known as the grandfather of facial recognition.4

It wasn’t Bledsoe’s first CIA contract. In May 1959, he had received MKULTRA funding to carry out something called Subproject 94, which involved “investigations on the remote directional control of activities of selected species of animals including mammals and feathered vertebrates

the work of a Spanish neuroscientist named Jose Delgado, whose lab at Yale University had shown the feasibility of controlling animals through an electronic brain implant (a “stimoceiver”) activated by remote control. In the 1950s and ’60s, Delgado’s experiments on animals and humans proved that a brain-computer interface could indeed be used to influence a subject’s motor control, movements, and even emotions

The individual is defenseless against direct manipulation of the brain because he is deprived of his most intimate mechanisms of biological reactivity. In experiments, electrical stimulation of appropriate intensity always prevailed over free will.

Subproject 94 began in the summer of 1959 with experiments on rats and burros.

Bledsoe to extended his experiments to dogs. In 1961, the agency reported that “performance is satisfactory”

Bledsoe was set to begin studying the effects of his methods on human beings.

But in 1962, something happened. The agency shut it all down.

We don’t know whether Bledsoe’s remote-control mind experiments were ever tested on humans. The CIA burned their MKULTRA records in 1973. Bledsoe burned much of his own archives in the 1990s after being diagnosed with ALS and realizing that he would soon die.

With Subproject 94, he’d contributed to the development of a form of media that eschews images, representation, narrative, or abstraction and instead finds its purchase through the direct insertion of instructions into a living brain, using direct neurological stimulation to elicit a desired emotion, behavior, or perception.

Computers “seeing” humans. Computers “controlling” humans. Operational media gone wild.

ELIZA

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Robert M. Fano, a protégé of Claude Shannon, founded and led the Project on Mathematics and Computation (Project MAC)

one of Project MAC’s many endeavors involved inventing a system that allowed multiple researchers to network their computers together and share resources on a central mainframe

...chatbot named ELIZA....written by Joseph Weizenbaum, who would become one of history’s most influential critics of artificial intelligence, ELIZA took the form of a digital therapist working in the style of Carl Rogers. Rogers’s method emphasized “reflective listening,” a form of active listening involving the therapist reflecting back the patient’s statements.

Joseph Weizenbaum described his early work with computers, only somewhat ironically, as that of a “confidence man.”

He titled a paper describing the game “How to Make a Computer Appear Intelligent.” The idea, he explained, “was to create the powerful illusion that the computer was intelligent,” even as he described exactly how the program worked

An apocryphal story holds that Weizenbaum’s secretary spent hours “talking” to the chatbot and even asked Weizenbaum to “leave the room so that [she] and ELIZA could have a real conversation.

The AI researcher was taken aback by the success of his conjuring: “I had not realized,” Weizenbaum would write, “that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people

Weizenbaum decided to dispel the illusion he’d created. He would do this by publishing ELIZA’s source code. If he explained exactly how the trick worked, he surmised, he could dispel the “delusional thinking” the program prompted

He was horrified to learn that some users continued to believe that ELIZA was sentient, even after he revealed exactly how the magic trick worked. He was similarly horrified to learn that a colleague, Keneth Colby, who wrote an analogous program called DOCTOR sought to commercialize it as an ersatz therapist for mental health patients. Weizenbaum believed this to be highly unethical.

the computer must have intended to communicate those meanings. Thus, the computer was “intelligent.”

secondary magic trick. Because the user could derive meaning from the statements ELIZA made, the user would preconsciously attribute intentions to the program making the words

language doesn’t require a speaker or writer’s intention to “work.”

Weizenbaum demonstrated something about the relationship between language, meaning, perception, and consciousness.

Illusions or supernatural-seeming phenomena, whether chatbots, Ouija boards, or bananas, are prompts for the imagination.

The prompt works by creating subtle cognitive contradictions.

You must either “choose” to believe that something supernatural is truly happening, or you must find a way to rationalize or explain away a supernatural cause.

We therefore find ourselves on fertile ground for the “Magruder's Principle,” as we saw in Part 1, where a skilled practitioner doesn’t waste effort trying to change an existing belief, but rather scans for opportunities to amplify one that’s already present.

Weizenbaum did not work for the CIA and was not intentionally engaged in work on psyops, but the type of conjuring he’d performed, and the subtle dynamics between perception and reality that he’d demonstrated, were of great interest to the agency.

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

In practice, the craft of magick suggests that by altering our perceptions, we can effectively alter reality itself

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.

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...

In stage magic, supernatural-seeming feats are all “false.”

In contrast, theories of “magick” are not so confident about distinctions between true and false or illusion and reality. There is a much bolder claim: perception and reality cannot be disentangled, and so they actually are, for practical purposes, one and the same.

In theoretical literature on magic, there are numerous schools of thought about what magic “is,” and each understands the gap between perception and reality in different ways. For our purposes, we will make a vastly oversimplified distinction between “stage magic” and “magick.”

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

For Mulholland, magic had little to do with the supernatural. He was highly skeptical of claims about the paranormal.

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

In 1952, he wrote an article for Popular Mechanics debunking the UFO phenomenon.

In early 1953, Mulholland disappeared from public life....the magician had accepted a position in the CIA’s newly formed MKULTRA program

The art of magic involves, in part, mimicking patterns that produce those “throwaway” observations or perceptual blind spots, and using them as a wrapper for an unexpected payload—a rabbit coming out of a hat, for instance. When the payload is revealed, it appears to have a supernatural origin because our minds have preconsciously “thrown away” the wrapper that contained it.

magic is the art of the cognitive injection attack, or mind hacking.

manual entitled “The Art of Deception,” instructing CIA field officers on using the fundamentals of magic to conduct more effective covert operations. Mulholland’s manual, eventually published in 2009 as The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception,

Magick

Bledsoe, Weizenbaum, and Mulholland were developing and refining an odd assortment of media, united by their ability to bypass reason and the sensible, to speak directly to the mind’s nether regions, and to elicit precognitive responses. Media designed to fly below the radar of rationality to shape perceptions, beliefs, and consciousness in ways that dissolve boundaries between perception and reality, the material and the immaterial, and the natural and the supernatural.

Tricks are meant to deceive and distort, to be sure, but they can have no bearing on reality itself, whose metaphysical foundations remained immune from such illusionistic knob-twisting.
But what if they were wrong?

What if they believed they were practicing stage magic, but were in fact playing with something far more occult? What if they were inadvertently playing with magick?

*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.*

Society of the Psyop, Part 3: Cognition and Chaos - Journal #149

October 1962, Havana Bay, Cuba

Global thermonuclear war was imminent. Soviet nuclear missile installations in Cuba were powered up and online.

In Washington, President John F. Kennedy ordered the Strategic Air Command (SAC) set to DEFCON 2, one step from nuclear war

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.

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.

The “ghost planes” (as the CIA called them) conjured by the Palladium system emerged from an insight into the changing nature of warfare.

The operational theater had transformed into a blend of the electronic, cognitive, and material.

military engineers realized that control over the electromagnetic spectrum was as crucial to war-fighting as traditional aims such as capturing territory

Whoever could most effectively control the electromagnetic spectrum would have an advantage. Winston Churchill dubbed this contest “The Battle of the Beams.”

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

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

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.

May 1, 1960, when U-2 pilot Gary Powers was brought down over Sverdlovsk,

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,

From the outset, OXCART was designed to be as invisible as possible to electronic sensors

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.

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.

Palladium was a precursor to what is now called “Cognitive Warfare,”

We Are Media

Every sensor system “sees” the world differently.

In a very basic sense, our eyes are like cameras

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

morphed into a different paradigm: computers and networks could be used to take advantage of the cognitive quirks of human perception.

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.

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.

Once, we looked to military technology for glimpses of the future.

Nowadays we find much of this technology in our personal electronic devices.

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.

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.

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.

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.