How Psyops ACTUALLY Work | Richard Hames meets Trevor Paglen

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When you're in school for doing this kind of psyops
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where most people wash out, and most people wash out
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like not because they can't do enough push ups or
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whatever it is, but most people wash out because you
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kind of have to be a sociopath to be able
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to do this work right. You have to be able
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to essentially lie and deceive people in ways that are
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you know, far beyond you know, the little kind of
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white lies that you know all of us engage in.
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I am subjects to media manipulation campaigns all the time,
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not because I'm someone special, but because I live in
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the same media environment that you do, and therefore you
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are also probably subject to these same manipulation techniques. That's
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what advertising is, it's what it's called campaigning is, and
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it's certainly what a lot of social media is. But
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there's now a new class of technologies that goes a
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step further and moves from just predicting what kinds of
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videos you will find funny or persuasive or just rage
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baiting enough to share into predicting directly the brain states
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that will result if you are shown a particular video
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or text or image. This technology has been around for
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a long time. It relies on fMRI scanning, which is
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a really standard technique, but in the last month there
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has been a big improvement in our ability to predict
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what exactly the brain will do and shown a given image.
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This doesn't mean that we have the mind reading stage technology. Yes,
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this machine still requires your active participation. It's a verity
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obvious when it's happening. You get put in a big
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machine to make the predictions anywhere half decent. But the
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fact there is this tendency towards systems that are more
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and more capable of predicting you, of controlling you, and
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of manipulating you without you even realizing it is of
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course deeply concerning, and it's a power that certainly shouldn't
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be in the hands of the people it's currently in,
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and ideally shouldn't really be in the hands of anyone
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at all. So where did this all come from? You
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probably have heard of the program mk Ultra. It was
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a secret program run by the CIA to test the
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limits of human manipulation. But there is so much more
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to the story of how we ended up in our
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manipulative media environment. Sycophantic chatbots, psyops, blatant media, lies, disinformation, campaigns,
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deep vakes, conspiracy theories that take people to the edge
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of madness, conspiracy theories that turn out to be true,
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the practice of flooding the zone with shit. As Trump
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Lieutenant Steve Bannon wants to put it, we are in
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a deep crisis when it comes to ascertaining what it
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is that is true and what it is that is false.
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That's why we have to do our own research. So
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who do you talk to when your thoughts are spiraling
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like these are? Trevor Paglin. Tripaglin is one of the
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most important artists in the world right now, but also
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one of the most generative thinkers on the questions of
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media manipulation the history of those technologies. And he's also
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a really lovely guy who is definitely not stilping anyone,
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and one of the few people in the world who
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will indulge my longstanding and extremely embarrassing interest in UFOs.
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This is one of those conversations that goes all over
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the map, from our conversations with Alfred McCoy about the
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history of the Cold War subter huge right through to
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Quinslabodi and Ben Tarnov's theories about where the Elon Musk
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Empire might be heading next particularly Cyborg Musk. Hope you
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enjoyed watching it as much as I enjoyed making it. Triipaglin,
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Welcome to your own research.
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Thank you so much for having me. I'm really thrilled
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to be here with you.
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We spoke about three years ago, and we spoke about
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your work documenting CIA black sites. We spoke about aliens, UFOs,
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the UFO phenomena. But one thing we didn't speak about,
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and one thing I didn't ask you because it would
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be insane, more insane than UFOs, more insane than neworks
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of black sites, is whether or not you think a
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substantial portion of global power is wielded by elite billionaire
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pedophiles with plausible connections to is rarely intelligence. I didn't
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ask you that be it's obviously insane. It is now
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twenty twenty six, right, it is not twenty twenty three anymore.
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Those wonderful halcyon days when everything was clear, whenever I
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understood everything that's going on. Right, we are now through
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the looking glass. Do you think to some extent that
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conspiracy theory has been validated as a methodology for understanding
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the world.
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That's a really good question. To a certain extent, yes,
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And what I I used to live down the street
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from a guy who is a very famous CIA officer,
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the guy who the movie Siriana was based on. And
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I was in graduate school at the time, and we
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would have lunch from time to time. We were friends,
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and it was just really interesting to talk to him
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because you know, he would look at like the work
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I was doing, you know, in social science, and say like,
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you know, you're analyzing this and your theories of value
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and you know, structural forms of power, and he's like,
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that's all there. But there is something to be said
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for knowing that the nephew of this Saudi prince who's
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the head of this part of the defense department is
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gay and nobody knows it. And he's like, that has
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enormous geopolitical consequences that you cannot understand through a kind
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of structural lens. So that's a long way of saying, yes,
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there is something to that in the sense that there
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are actors, and those actors have idiosyncrasies, and those idiosyncrasies
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can have huge, you know, snowball effects.
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I feel like we're in a kind of epistemic crisis
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in any way and what I mean by that after the
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kind of the epscene revelations, because it seems like things
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that were supposed to be fully discredited have been, you know,
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to some extent, proven to be to be to be accurate,
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although of course it's very possible to say that the
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hit rate of conspiracy theories not very high, right, Like
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you know, there are loads of conspiracy theories, only a
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few handful of them have been proven to be to
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be correct. But I do feel like we're almost in
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a kind of what you might think of in the
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thinking about the history of science, almost like a post
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paradigmatic stage in the history of sociology, where structural accounts
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in a very sophisticated Marxian kind of language, or the
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kind of general apparatus of critical intellectualism right that you
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and I perhaps wish to participate in, seems to have
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broken down in the way which it explains the world. Right,
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And so we're in this world in which things like
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conspiracy theory, but also, as your book documents, techniques such
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as magic or remote viewing, or like the outreaches of neuroscience,
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or the whole kind of complicated web of things that
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we perhaps dismiss right, seem to have an effect in
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the world, seem to be able to explain parts of
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the world that we don't in our rational way don't
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think they should be explained. And so that's where I
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want to take this conversation into that morass of sort
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of open, open ended questions, and I want to start
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right with tribe v two. This is a new model.
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It's a machine learning model that's come out. It's by
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Meta Can you just tell us what does it do?
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So tribe v two is a much more advanced version
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of models that people have been making in neuroscience labs
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for the last few years. And what people in computational
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neuroscience have been doing is essentially putting people in fMRI machines,
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exposing them to a lot of different sorts of stimulus
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that can be text or images or what have you,
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and then recording the neurological reactions people have to that
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stimulus and making models that will predict how your brain
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will respond to different kinds of things. So TRYB two
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is basically Facebook's take on that. Obviously, they have a
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lot more money than a random department at UC Berkeley
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or Cornell, and so they've come up with this pretty
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robust model called TRIBB two.
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So it can take an image or a text, a sound,
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and it can predict the brain states that corresponds to
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that in right.
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That's exactly what it does.
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Yeah, does it work? Go around? Can you say I
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want to make this brainstate, make me an image that
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can do that.
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That's one of the projects we're working on in my
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studio right now. That's a little bit more complicated, but yes,
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there's some work. There was a group at MIT that
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did something like this for language. There was a guy
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named Puyabashevon who was also at MIT as a postdoc
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working under Jim DeCarlo, and they were using pretty crude
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gans to generate stimulus that would maximally activate and simultaneously
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suppress different neurons in the visual cortex of monkeys. So
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people are trying to do this stuff for sure, and
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we're well on our way. Now, how different is that
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from TikTok making a video that is pretty irresistible to
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you based on behavioral data. There's a lot of similarities there.
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But what what technologies like try B two and other
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models that people are building are doing is making models
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based on neurological data rather than behavioral data, so essentially
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getting closer to you know, how your brain actually works.
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So in sense, there's a kind of a the image
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layer right where you are using an image to manipulate
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the brain. Yes, increasingly looks like actually kind of extraneous
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to the or like it's a it's media kind of
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communication medium rather than from from one brain state to
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another brain state, or from a from a target brain
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state to making that brain state real. It's increasingly kind
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of you know, not necessary in the middle.
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Yeah, exactly, you're you're you you, if you're if you're
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the TikTok algorithm. You're trying to collect certain similar kinds
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of data, but you're using behavioral data as a proxy.
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So you're looking at, you know, where somebody's mouth is clicking,
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you know, how long they're dwelling on a particular image
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or not, and you're you're trying to infer essentially neurological
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data from that. What models like the tribe model are
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doing is getting you know, cutting out that behavior and
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middleman and essentially trying to speak directly to the brain.
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I want to I want to add a little caveat
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here to our tour, our audience right, which is to
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say that there is a kind of a paraloid version
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of this, which is to say that brain imaging and
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brain prediction and mind reading and so on are entirely
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possible right now, as far as I understand, that's not
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the case yet, it's right. The kind of the f
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R MRI scan where you you take the sort of
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the gist of what someone is thinking EA is a
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only a gist and be requires that subject to be
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trained in some particular way. You're checking your head, you're suggesting, actually,
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that's not the case.
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That's changing really quickly. I've been working on this for
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a couple of years, and one of the motifs in
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those conversations is what some neuroscientists call the helmet, and
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the helmets is sort of like a stand in image
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for the idea that you know, in ten years when
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you go to work, do you put a helmet on
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and you use that to directly talk to your computer?
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Is that essentially like reading your brain and you're using
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it as an interface about you know, as of a
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year ago, nobody really thought the helmet was going to work,
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because you obviously you have a skull and any kind
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of wearable device is going to use a pretty coarse
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sensor like EEG, that's not very good at getting data out.
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That tune has changed among a lot of these labs
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and a lot of the people that study this, and
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what's changed. What's changed is the advent of LMS. Now,
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how does that figure into this, Well, let's assume you
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put on a helmet and it it has a pretty
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bad sensor on it, but you're reading neurological states and
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you pick out the words you know, quick fox og.
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You can use an LM to infer that the pattern
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there is the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,
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and you kind of can synthesize the data in between
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those course data points and you're going to be right
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pretty often. So that's why there's a lot more concerned
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about this essentially mind reading stuff now than there was
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even a year ago, which is terrifying.
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Right, you were saying your studio is working on it.
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What do you I mean maybe you can't tell us,
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but like, what do you mean by your studios working
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on it? For the alredience is say a sort of technologist,
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you're analysist?
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What is that?
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What do you what do you do?
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We're trying to take things like tribe v too and
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hook them up to image generators without having language as
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an intermediary state. In other words, can we have direct
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relationships between images and neurological responses and use that as
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a medium. I mean, I want to use it to
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make artworks. But it's tricky because the way that the
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foundation models are built is that images and language are
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paired throughout the model, and so if you want to
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generate an image, you have to go through a linguistic
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representation of that image, which creates a lot. I mean,
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it's very compressed in terms of what that does to
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the data that you're working with. So ideally, what you
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want to do is have like neurological data here, you know,
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you know, collections of activated neurons and images here, and
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have those two things be able to talk to each
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other directly. Right now, you have to go through language
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as an intermediary So you would have to say, here's
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a brain state that represents the word cow. Then you
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go through cow, and then here's the image of the cow. Right,
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I want to just get rid of that language later.
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I'm perhaps not a I am a humanist to some extent,
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and I feel a great deal of discomfort on the
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idea that instead of interacting with what I think of
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is me right, which is this forward facing kind of
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experiential environment in which I have access to the tools
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of language, I can reason them out the world. People
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can tell me things and I can think about them
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and so on. What you're describing is a system that
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is able to more than subliminally, but like directly interface
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with the kinds of brain states that I think of
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as sort of secondary to my language use. Like my
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experience of the world is that I am thinking right,
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and then the brain states come later. I know that's
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not the case, but like that's my experience of the world,
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and I'm sure it's people watching this their experience of
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the world as well. That you are having some sort
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of rational engagement with the world, right, or you are
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feeling things and you're thinking them and then and that's
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sort of what is in control. But what you're proposing
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is a model of the brain in which the thinking
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or the reasoning, on top of the the language use
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is actually in some ways a secondary, even parasitic, or
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extraneous dimension of what it means to be a brain.
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And that that brain can be spoken to more or
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less directly without going through the linguistic thing that we
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think of as constitutive of ourselves. Is that right?
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Yeah, so there's a lot there. So both of these
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things are right. I mean, so, first of all, I
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don't think that most people who study this believe in
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this Cartesian model of the brain anymore. I think most
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people understand perceptions to be so entangled with external stimuli
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that you can't meaningfully separate the two when you're talking
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about this rational part of your brain. You know, the
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capacity to reason that certainly exists, but that's only one
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thing that your brain can do. You know, a huge
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amount of what your brain does is cognis processed things
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pre cognitively right, And you only your brain will only
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kick up information to the conscious or reasonable part of
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your brain when it thinks that there's something there that
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you need to pay attention to, and your brain throws
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out the vast majority of stimulus that it brings in.
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And there's a lot of techniques that are designed to
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speak to those subconscious parts of your brain and to
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do things with them. So the most obvious one would
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be something like stage magic, where the theory of stage
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magic is if I know how your perceptual apparatus works,
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and I know what the blind spots in that are,
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I can design gestures that you're our conscious brain is
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going to throw away, and I can use those gestures
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as a means to deliver a payload that when I
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show you the payload, you're going to have a supernatural experience. Right,
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You're going to because your brain has thrown away the
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data that would have explained what happened there. There's other
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forms like this. Hypnosis is another medium that where the
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theory of hypnosis is that I can put you in
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a kind of meditative state, and when you're in that state,
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I can speak more directly to your subconscious and I
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can do things like therapeutic work, you know, help you
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quit smoking by essentially rewiring the neurological connections that you
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associate with smoking. Or I can do things like if
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I'm a stage hypnotist, like make you clock like a
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chicken or immerse yourself in about of ice without feeling cold.
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So there's a lot of different techniques of different forms
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of media for lack of a better word, that are
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designed to speak to these lower parts of your brain.
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And this is a point that you make in the
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book how To So I'm going to give the book
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out so that you people can see. I've only got
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a preprint. This is this is a completely true story
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I put this. I went to Madrid the other day
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to give a talk and the I've got stopped at
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the airport and the only thing that they wanted to talk.
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They take out of my bag and look at was
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this book, like the the the the airport scanning machine
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simply picked up how To See like a machine Tripaglin.
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This is a suspicious book needs to be scanned. They
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took it out and they were like, what's this And
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I was like, it's a book.
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That's pretty weird.
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Something in this in in the verse? Who does something
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to the book. I'm pretty sure that there's mysterious, mysterious
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media in here. It's confounding airport centers all in the world.
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Point is to say in the book, this is the
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point that you make where not just that there are
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media out there, but that the degree to which these
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kinds of media, these kind of neural media, are these
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kind of things that are able to interface seemingly directly
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with our subconscious perceptions of the world or are pre linguistic,
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or are pre cognitive perceptions of the world. Those media
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don't just they're not just media on their own, but
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in some ways they make us into a kind of
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media that is also itself capable of being programmed, manipulated, reorganized,
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and so on. That's a transformation of what it means
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to be a human.
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Yeah, one hundred percent percent. You know, you're you know,
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if you think about when you prompt an LM to
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make an image for you, you know, things in the world
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prompt you to images or make texts all the time.
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Tell what what do you mean by that?
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Like like like hypnosis is an example of that, Right,
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I'm essentially prompting you. I'm prompting your brain to go
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into a different state and to rewire itself. Stage magic
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another example of that. There's there's tons of examples of this,
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you know, going back to the nineteen fifties, there's a
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guy named Vance Packard who wrote a book called The
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Hidden Persuaders, and it was looking at early forms of
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market research and was doing things like, let's I'm going
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to give you the same laundry detergent, and I'm going
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to put one packet of it in a yellow box,
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one in a blue box, and one in a yellow
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and blue box, and you're going to perceive that detergent
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doing different things based on the color of the packaging essentially.
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So there's a pretty long history of trying to do
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this stuff in different forms of media that are you know,
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predatory on that you know, for lack of a better world.
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That's the sort of advertising side. We've talked a little
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bit about the kind of the subterfuge side, of conspiratorial side.
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We'll come back to conspiracy a bit later, because I
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think it's a it's a it is like a fascinating
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kind of realm of thought, and it's important to be
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able to get a handle on it. I think you are,
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if anyone I know, you are the person to get
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a handle on our epistomic chaos. I don't know how
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you feel about that designation. Maybe that's what That's what
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I spend much of my time trying to then parse.
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So that's the there's the advertising side. There's the there's
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the history of magic and of persuadability. There's the history
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of hypnosis and various therapeutic techniques, including other kinds of therapy,
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reflective therapy, Carl Rogers's idea, and they all seem to
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be coming together to create this new soup of media
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that we live in, including the media that we are
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becoming as well, right, so, the media of generity, they
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are the media of advertising campaigns that do very sort
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of strange things to us, the media of military styops,
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the media of disinformation of it all, these all these
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different kinds of media seem to have this kind of
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long trail or long history, and I want to take
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us through that history now, or rather I want you
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to take us through that history now, because it's always
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the book is about how.
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Far back do you want to go? And we've got
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to go to the Old Testament if you want.
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Let's well to tell tell us why we'd go to
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the Old Testament. What does that mean? What's that?
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Well?
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You can images? Yeah, exactly, Yeah. You know, people like
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it's the Second Commandment says you know, everybody thinks that
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it says, you know, you'll you won't have idolatrous images
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or graven images. But if you read the text, it
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actually is a blanket prohibition on the creation of images,
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you know, period right, says you know, no graven images
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nor any depiction of anything that's in the heavens above,
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or in the seas below, or anything on the earth.
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Have you. Uh, And it's an interesting story there. I mean,
404
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one of the stories that I tell is funny about
405
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that second commandment is that God issues that commandment. It's
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a bigger than the murder right higher up on the
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list number two. Right after you know, you'll have no
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gods before me. And then right after issuing that, God
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tells the Israelites to make an image. And you know,
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it's a make a sculpture that's like this many cubits
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tall and this many cubits. Why there's cherubim on the top.
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It's the ark of the Covenant, right, and so what
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is the Ark of the Covenant? Well, the Ark of
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the Covenant starts doing stuff. So the Israelites start hauling
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it around and it, you know, parts the River Jordan,
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it topples the walls of Jericho. It's essentially this supernatural meme.
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And the Israelites start treating the arc as if it
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were a weapon that they can control. And they are
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in a war with the Philistines and they're losing, and
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they're trying to figure out what to do, and they
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decide to bring the arc to the battlefield. There's going
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to be a battle this place called Aphek in ten
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fifty BCE something like that, and the Israelites imagine that
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they're going to be invincible if they have the art.
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The Philistines have heard about the arc, they're pretty scared
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of it, but nonetheless they charge the Israelites with you know,
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chariots and iron weapons. At this battle, Israelites they raise
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the arc. They assume like a wall of fire is
429
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going to come out or something that's will defeat the Philistines.
430
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The opposite happens. The Philistines overrun them, kill thirty thousand
431
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of them, and steal the arc. And I think about
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this as a very relevant allegory for the kind of
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image world that we live in now, and as an
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allegory for thinking about the power of images and their limitations.
435
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And so we have this kind of prehistory of essentially
436
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magic and memes and whatever you want to call it,
437
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and we have a thread that goes from there right
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to the present. We can skip over, you know, a
439
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lot of stuff in the meantime, but I thought it
440
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might be good to just ground this in a very
441
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old story.
442
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You know, what's the what's the what's the analogy between
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the arc of the convent or the COVID that that
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story and the present. Maybe I didn't not.
445
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A sound, Oh, I mean I think of it as
446
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very similar to believing that the prompting of images is
447
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the same thing as the prompting of reality. And I
448
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think that this is a big feature of you know,
449
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at least how the United States is working these days, right,
450
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particularly when we look at something like the Trump administration
451
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that is, on one hand prompting images of you know,
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Trump Superman or Jesus or what have you, and at
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the same time removing sensors from the oceans, so we
454
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don't we literally just do not have data about climate change,
455
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with the idea being that if we don't have data
456
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about it, then it just goes away. So you know.
457
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In other words, like the Arc seems like a story
458
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to me about the possibilities and dangers of confusing images
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with reality.
460
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There also another dimension there, which is the illusion of
461
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invincibility and what the illusion of vincibility allows you to do. Right,
462
00:27:34.240 --> 00:27:40.319
very clearly, Iran is winning the Iran War, the current
463
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the current pause, and not even in the kind of
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the slow drawn out way that the Vietnamese, for example,
465
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won the Vietnam War, right, which took a long time,
466
00:27:48.799 --> 00:27:51.440
and Thos propaganda about and he was very confusing, and
467
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the American city winning all the major battles, and there
468
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was kind of like a story people could tell even
469
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though they actually they lost, right there was there seemed
470
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to be kind of winning constantly in the brand watches
471
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straight up like they are just losing. And in that sense,
472
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there is a like that is the that is the
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undermining of the image of empire exactly, the image of
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of of the the the the the illusion of power
475
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that precedes and indeeds replaces eventually the actuality of power.
476
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Yeah, those are the chariots, right, you know. Having said that, like,
477
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the prompting of reality through images does do a lot
478
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of stuff, right. It does change people's minds, it does
479
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sculpt reality to a certain extense. It does mobilize armies,
480
00:28:36.680 --> 00:28:42.079
it does, you know, create beliefs, what have you. So
481
00:28:42.079 --> 00:28:46.920
we should we shouldn't, we shouldn't we shouldn't downplay the
482
00:28:47.559 --> 00:28:48.359
role of that either.
483
00:28:49.359 --> 00:28:50.839
This is what I wanted to get into with that
484
00:28:51.079 --> 00:28:57.400
conspiracy theory question at the beginning, which is like that. Yes,
485
00:28:57.559 --> 00:29:00.519
you can think that the task of the sellectual, the
486
00:29:00.519 --> 00:29:03.160
task of the critic, the task of the politically activated
487
00:29:03.200 --> 00:29:07.640
person is to do what in some ways the liberal
488
00:29:07.640 --> 00:29:11.799
pundit right. Ezra Kleine most clearly among them, he sees
489
00:29:11.839 --> 00:29:17.359
his task as separating disinformation from reality from truth right.
490
00:29:17.599 --> 00:29:21.240
And in some ways the task of the critical intellectual,
491
00:29:21.279 --> 00:29:23.440
or the kind of the intellectual from the left, has
492
00:29:23.480 --> 00:29:27.319
often been to say, no, actually, that the constitution of
493
00:29:27.960 --> 00:29:30.480
reality in a set of facts is not enough. You
494
00:29:30.559 --> 00:29:32.799
have to find that deeper structure. You have to find
495
00:29:32.839 --> 00:29:38.240
that kind of determining thing that tells you that, Okay,
496
00:29:38.240 --> 00:29:40.119
maybe you've got to the point of the story where
497
00:29:40.160 --> 00:29:42.079
it seems like you've got a kind of network of power,
498
00:29:42.240 --> 00:29:46.440
or you've got the nephew of some Sali prints right,
499
00:29:46.480 --> 00:29:49.119
who is gay, right in your example, You've got that,
500
00:29:49.319 --> 00:29:51.799
but that doesn't tell you how power operates. You have
501
00:29:51.839 --> 00:29:54.119
to go deeper than that. You have to find the
502
00:29:54.160 --> 00:29:57.640
structural conditions you have to find and it's only when
503
00:29:57.680 --> 00:30:01.079
you've gone past the place where will seems to be
504
00:30:01.119 --> 00:30:03.440
the determining elements of the world and into the place
505
00:30:03.480 --> 00:30:08.079
where structure tells will what to do. That you've reached
506
00:30:08.359 --> 00:30:12.759
truth or reality, and that seems to me fundamentally has
507
00:30:13.279 --> 00:30:16.599
broken down. Yeah, both the little gasciting stuff and the
508
00:30:16.640 --> 00:30:17.680
critically touch or stuff.
509
00:30:18.680 --> 00:30:24.000
Yeah. So this is at the core of one of
510
00:30:24.039 --> 00:30:27.200
the shifts that I'm feeling anyway, is that you know,
511
00:30:27.240 --> 00:30:30.440
we had a go to structure in the past, which
512
00:30:30.559 --> 00:30:33.079
was capitalism, right. I mean so like when you look
513
00:30:33.119 --> 00:30:36.079
at the you know, much of the history of people
514
00:30:36.119 --> 00:30:40.440
writing about images from a critical perspective are in this
515
00:30:40.519 --> 00:30:44.599
Marxian tradition where you're essentially doing ideology critique and kind
516
00:30:44.640 --> 00:30:48.799
of showing how the images that we see tell stories
517
00:30:48.839 --> 00:30:54.799
that naturalize you know, capitalist power relations. Right, that's ninety
518
00:30:54.839 --> 00:30:59.559
eight percent of what you know, any Marxist cultural critic
519
00:30:59.599 --> 00:31:03.880
has been doing up through people like Baudriard, who I
520
00:31:03.920 --> 00:31:07.559
recently reread. As I was trying to I just thought, oh,
521
00:31:07.799 --> 00:31:11.640
everything feels like a simulation. Let's go read, and I
522
00:31:11.680 --> 00:31:15.119
was like, this is a terrible book. This is still
523
00:31:15.759 --> 00:31:18.359
it's still assuming this kind of like essentially a kind
524
00:31:18.400 --> 00:31:22.440
of based superstructure model in the in the Marxian language,
525
00:31:22.680 --> 00:31:26.079
and that that doesn't feel right to me. That it
526
00:31:26.079 --> 00:31:29.880
feels to me like we're living in a different era
527
00:31:29.920 --> 00:31:32.039
and out now. I'm not saying that we're like in
528
00:31:32.079 --> 00:31:35.480
a post capitalist moment. I'm not saying that exploitation isn't real.
529
00:31:35.519 --> 00:31:38.119
I'm not saying that like let's throw away the whole
530
00:31:38.200 --> 00:31:41.920
Marxian analysis. But there does seem to me something more
531
00:31:42.799 --> 00:31:48.279
supernatural slash neurological going on now that is different than
532
00:31:48.559 --> 00:31:51.960
the you know Roland part critiquing you know, advertisements.
533
00:31:53.279 --> 00:31:56.079
Do not let me forget to come back to that
534
00:31:56.400 --> 00:31:59.680
supernatural slash neurological binary, because I think a lot of
535
00:31:59.680 --> 00:32:02.079
people's there could not be two things further apart than
536
00:32:02.440 --> 00:32:07.160
like claims out the supernatural and claims about neuroscience a
537
00:32:07.240 --> 00:32:10.400
clearer like a more confusing mobi a strip of things
538
00:32:10.400 --> 00:32:14.880
between them, I guess. So there's this critic that we
539
00:32:14.960 --> 00:32:20.880
had on Navarr fm rip which called certain Danish Marxist
540
00:32:21.200 --> 00:32:24.759
and he writes about what he calls mute compulsion, and
541
00:32:24.759 --> 00:32:26.240
I think it's great, Bok people shoul go and read that.
542
00:32:26.319 --> 00:32:30.640
It's really exciting theory of the world. And his idea
543
00:32:30.640 --> 00:32:33.720
is basically that in the critique capitalism, you have this
544
00:32:33.799 --> 00:32:36.839
sort of ideology aspect, you have this kind of direct
545
00:32:36.920 --> 00:32:39.880
violence aspect, but you also have this third thing, which
546
00:32:39.920 --> 00:32:43.720
is compulsion. And he says that instead of looking at
547
00:32:43.920 --> 00:32:46.160
the ways in which people believe the wrong thing right,
548
00:32:46.200 --> 00:32:48.359
which is what ideology critique can be sort of boiled
549
00:32:48.400 --> 00:32:51.119
down to in a very very simplistic way, or in
550
00:32:51.240 --> 00:32:54.440
the ways in which direct physical violence is meet it out,
551
00:32:54.680 --> 00:32:57.960
we should look at the ways in which capitalism constructs
552
00:32:58.119 --> 00:33:01.799
environments in which people cannot do anything but act in
553
00:33:01.839 --> 00:33:02.759
the ways that they act.
554
00:33:03.079 --> 00:33:03.200
Right.
555
00:33:03.279 --> 00:33:04.839
There is a kind of a field of the world
556
00:33:05.160 --> 00:33:08.279
that compels us in certain ways. And it really strikes
557
00:33:08.279 --> 00:33:10.720
me that what you're doing in the world of images
558
00:33:10.960 --> 00:33:13.920
is trying to move in some ways from an ideology
559
00:33:13.920 --> 00:33:17.599
critique to a compulsion critique, where it is about the
560
00:33:17.599 --> 00:33:20.680
way in which the environment of images, advertising images, but
561
00:33:20.720 --> 00:33:23.000
also like communipulative images in all different other kinds of
562
00:33:23.000 --> 00:33:26.519
ways determine what you do in a way that goes
563
00:33:26.559 --> 00:33:29.440
beneath ideology or but behind the back of ideology, behind
564
00:33:29.440 --> 00:33:31.759
the back of our brains, behind the back of language
565
00:33:31.839 --> 00:33:32.599
into our brains.
566
00:33:32.680 --> 00:33:35.359
Yeah. Yeah, so maybe that maybe.
567
00:33:35.119 --> 00:33:38.359
That's an extension of Marxism rather than a repudiation.
568
00:33:39.000 --> 00:33:41.519
Yeah, exactly, you know, so, I think that's that's a
569
00:33:42.839 --> 00:33:44.839
very much maps onto how I'm thinking, you know how
570
00:33:45.200 --> 00:33:48.079
you know, you can think about actions and like capitalism
571
00:33:48.319 --> 00:33:54.839
making a range of actions possible and prescribed, and making
572
00:33:54.920 --> 00:33:58.400
other kinds of things that you can do impossible and
573
00:33:58.440 --> 00:34:01.559
you're certainly not prescribed. We can extend that to the
574
00:34:01.599 --> 00:34:07.440
worlds of perceptions and the relationship between perception, cognition, action,
575
00:34:08.000 --> 00:34:13.039
what have you. And I think there's something there. I mean, like,
576
00:34:14.400 --> 00:34:19.719
if you use a kind of ideological critique framework, you
577
00:34:19.760 --> 00:34:23.159
cannot explain why you're looking at a twenty second video
578
00:34:23.239 --> 00:34:26.599
on TikTok of somebody eating spaghetti. You can't do it.
579
00:34:26.760 --> 00:34:28.320
There's something else going on there.
580
00:34:28.519 --> 00:34:32.440
Yeah, okay, well, genuine question. Genuine question. Now what do
581
00:34:32.519 --> 00:34:36.599
you get on your what's your discover page on Instagram?
582
00:34:36.639 --> 00:34:36.840
Oh?
583
00:34:36.960 --> 00:34:38.960
Just all kind of crap, I mean, like for it,
584
00:34:38.960 --> 00:34:42.519
it changes. I mean it's really weird. I mean I've
585
00:34:43.079 --> 00:34:45.719
once I figured out the extent that it was prompting me.
586
00:34:45.840 --> 00:34:48.599
I sort of trying to game it by you know,
587
00:34:48.679 --> 00:34:50.440
almost like in Dune, you know, when you have to
588
00:34:50.480 --> 00:34:53.159
walk in these weird steps to like prevent the worm
589
00:34:53.280 --> 00:34:56.719
from like getting the pat I see. I feel like
590
00:34:56.760 --> 00:34:58.280
I'm like that with a lot of my feeds.
591
00:34:58.320 --> 00:35:03.559
Now, yeah, you're you think it is an advertarial media,
592
00:35:03.599 --> 00:35:06.440
but it doesn't realize that you are adversarial media for
593
00:35:06.639 --> 00:35:08.719
Instagram or for TikTok or whatever it is. I don't
594
00:35:08.719 --> 00:35:10.360
know who's going to win that arms race. I'm not sure.
595
00:35:10.360 --> 00:35:11.239
I hope, I hope it's you.
596
00:35:11.280 --> 00:35:14.440
I hope it's you. You have no chance. You can
597
00:35:14.519 --> 00:35:17.800
just try to walk in staggered patterns across the desert
598
00:35:17.840 --> 00:35:18.800
for short amounts of time.
599
00:35:19.719 --> 00:35:23.400
There's there's because there is this technique called pattern of
600
00:35:23.440 --> 00:35:25.719
life analysis, right, which is part of the kind of
601
00:35:25.719 --> 00:35:28.840
the intelligence playbook, where you take a very large man
602
00:35:28.840 --> 00:35:31.800
information about someone's life and you construct a pattern and
603
00:35:31.840 --> 00:35:34.480
then you can try and decide or try and imagine
604
00:35:34.480 --> 00:35:37.559
certain that you know certain things about that person. Very
605
00:35:37.559 --> 00:35:40.960
famously used in the drone war in Afghanistan and Pakistan
606
00:35:41.119 --> 00:35:44.880
under the Barron administration. It's a way of saying, Okay, well,
607
00:35:44.880 --> 00:35:47.519
that person hangs out with those two people, and those
608
00:35:47.559 --> 00:35:49.840
two people we think are probably in sort of terrorist
609
00:35:49.840 --> 00:35:52.159
network or they have friends who are in a terrorist network,
610
00:35:52.320 --> 00:35:54.800
and therefore we can kill them with in pumty. Right.
611
00:35:54.840 --> 00:35:57.679
So it's a technique of murder, yeah, or it's a
612
00:35:57.679 --> 00:35:59.000
prelude to murder.
613
00:35:59.280 --> 00:36:02.880
In that that's the signature strike paradigm. And when I
614
00:36:02.880 --> 00:36:04.519
when I heard about that, I thought I meant the
615
00:36:04.519 --> 00:36:07.400
president had to write their signature to like authorize somebody
616
00:36:07.440 --> 00:36:09.880
to be killed. But no, it's just a metadata signature
617
00:36:10.000 --> 00:36:12.480
like elects you to be assassinated.
618
00:36:12.639 --> 00:36:15.960
As in, so metadata here just means that you know,
619
00:36:16.480 --> 00:36:19.480
not the content of the message between me and my friends,
620
00:36:19.480 --> 00:36:21.280
but the fact there was a message at all, Just
621
00:36:21.320 --> 00:36:26.440
like that kind of level of that. Yeah, And so
622
00:36:26.599 --> 00:36:28.199
this is why I'm bringing this up in this instance
623
00:36:28.320 --> 00:36:32.559
to think about how you could become adversarial to Instagram
624
00:36:32.639 --> 00:36:35.039
or to TikTok, because there is a thing called and
625
00:36:35.079 --> 00:36:38.480
people could see on the screen here two very similar pictures,
626
00:36:39.519 --> 00:36:43.039
almost identical pictures if you're a human. There's a thing
627
00:36:43.079 --> 00:36:46.880
called the one pixel attack where you take a picture
628
00:36:46.880 --> 00:36:51.320
of a horse, which the machine learning thing system that
629
00:36:51.360 --> 00:36:53.519
you're using is capable of saying that's a horse for
630
00:36:53.519 --> 00:36:56.880
one hundred percent certainty, and then you change exactly one
631
00:36:56.880 --> 00:37:01.360
pixel in it, and the entire system breaks and it
632
00:37:01.400 --> 00:37:04.280
doesn't know what that is anymore. Inactly in this case,
633
00:37:04.320 --> 00:37:06.840
it thinks that it's an automobile, but it says that
634
00:37:06.920 --> 00:37:09.960
with less than half percent accuracy, so it really really
635
00:37:09.960 --> 00:37:13.880
really doesn't know. One question I've been having for a
636
00:37:13.960 --> 00:37:16.920
very long time since I've thought about one pixel attacks
637
00:37:17.239 --> 00:37:20.800
and about pattern of life analysis. Is it possible to
638
00:37:20.960 --> 00:37:24.360
do a kind of injection attack? Right or sorry? Is
639
00:37:24.360 --> 00:37:27.159
it possible to do a kind of one pixel attack
640
00:37:27.599 --> 00:37:30.880
on your own life such that you become invisible to
641
00:37:31.320 --> 00:37:33.320
the system that is trying to predict you? Like, is
642
00:37:33.360 --> 00:37:36.039
there a video on instagram that I could watch that
643
00:37:36.079 --> 00:37:42.400
would completely break Instagram's sense of who I am?
644
00:37:42.679 --> 00:37:45.320
I don't know enough about how that algorithm works, but
645
00:37:46.280 --> 00:37:49.679
my guess is no, because like that is like a
646
00:37:49.760 --> 00:37:52.800
huge amount of data aggregated from many, many different sources
647
00:37:52.800 --> 00:37:55.280
and put together. And I'm not sure that there's one
648
00:37:55.639 --> 00:37:59.239
poison pill that you could do. You know, there are
649
00:38:00.440 --> 00:38:03.679
theoretical attacks that people have tried to think about visa
650
00:38:03.760 --> 00:38:07.079
v l lms where forget that there was one I
651
00:38:07.119 --> 00:38:10.599
think it was called night shade attacks, where the idea
652
00:38:10.719 --> 00:38:14.199
was that you would like poison different data sets, right,
653
00:38:14.280 --> 00:38:17.039
and then see how that that poisoning would play out
654
00:38:17.199 --> 00:38:21.559
over the entire system. I don't I my intuition is
655
00:38:21.559 --> 00:38:23.159
that No, you're not going to be able to do
656
00:38:23.199 --> 00:38:28.239
that for the Instagram feed. But related to this one
657
00:38:28.280 --> 00:38:32.559
pixel attack on pattern of life, you're talking about adversarial
658
00:38:32.599 --> 00:38:35.760
images in a digital context and in a you know,
659
00:38:35.840 --> 00:38:40.519
computer vision context. There was a weird paper that some
660
00:38:40.719 --> 00:38:43.360
people from Google were involved with, and I think it
661
00:38:43.400 --> 00:38:45.960
came out about two or three years ago, where they
662
00:38:45.960 --> 00:38:52.239
were looking at whether these kinds of adversarial images worked
663
00:38:52.280 --> 00:38:56.159
on humans, you know, using like literally the same techniques
664
00:38:56.159 --> 00:38:58.960
that you'd use to spoof a classifier. And what they
665
00:38:59.119 --> 00:39:02.280
found was that it is pretty negligible, but it worked.
666
00:39:02.320 --> 00:39:04.400
Like in other words, you could get like one one
667
00:39:04.440 --> 00:39:08.920
and a half percent you know, success rate in generating
668
00:39:08.960 --> 00:39:13.159
those images for humans. And you know, when you step back,
669
00:39:13.199 --> 00:39:15.360
you're like, Okay, well that's not that big a deal.
670
00:39:15.760 --> 00:39:18.360
But on the other hand, you know, at the scale
671
00:39:18.360 --> 00:39:20.800
of the Internet, like one percent of people is like
672
00:39:20.960 --> 00:39:23.559
a lot of people. I mean, elections in the US
673
00:39:23.639 --> 00:39:26.360
are won by less than one percent of the vote vote.
674
00:39:26.400 --> 00:39:31.000
You know, so there is there again. Here we are
675
00:39:31.360 --> 00:39:37.280
again in this you know, supernatural slash neurological space where
676
00:39:37.559 --> 00:39:43.360
we're talking about media and techniques that are designed to
677
00:39:43.400 --> 00:39:46.639
influence these parts of your perceptual and cognitive stack that
678
00:39:46.679 --> 00:39:48.119
you don't have a lot of control over.
679
00:39:51.480 --> 00:39:54.840
Let's do the history right, So like this is where
680
00:39:54.880 --> 00:39:56.639
this is the kind of the super' at this is
681
00:39:56.679 --> 00:39:58.760
the experience I think people have lots of the day
682
00:39:58.800 --> 00:40:02.159
that experience themselves is being prompted in some ways by
683
00:40:02.719 --> 00:40:05.519
their feeds, being prompted by various kinds of things around
684
00:40:05.519 --> 00:40:08.119
them in a way I think feels quite invasive. We
685
00:40:08.199 --> 00:40:09.559
will come onto the kind of the future of this
686
00:40:09.599 --> 00:40:11.440
a bit later, but for now, I want to take
687
00:40:11.480 --> 00:40:13.360
us all the way back, not all the way back.
688
00:40:13.800 --> 00:40:22.320
We are not going back to the Old Testament merely. Yeah, yeah, fifties. Yeah,
689
00:40:23.960 --> 00:40:26.960
with a collection of are things that get discovered after
690
00:40:27.000 --> 00:40:30.199
the Second World War. And this this connects very deeply
691
00:40:30.239 --> 00:40:33.000
to the episode that we did with Alfre McCoy right
692
00:40:33.039 --> 00:40:37.360
on the Cold War, because the initially spark for the
693
00:40:37.400 --> 00:40:40.519
famous program people that probably have heard of called mk
694
00:40:40.719 --> 00:40:48.440
Ultra is the Korean War. Various American soldiers are cadapt
695
00:40:48.519 --> 00:40:49.079
Is that the right word.
696
00:40:49.079 --> 00:40:51.920
No, they're captured in the capture their prisoners of war.
697
00:40:52.400 --> 00:40:55.599
Yeah, the prisoners of war. And then they are shown
698
00:40:55.679 --> 00:41:00.000
on TV to be reading out or to saying things
699
00:41:00.159 --> 00:41:02.840
about like the US committing war crimes, to be that
700
00:41:02.920 --> 00:41:06.360
kind of thing. The only explanation that is feasible for
701
00:41:06.440 --> 00:41:09.199
the CIA at that time is they've been brainwashed. So
702
00:41:10.159 --> 00:41:13.519
they then start to try and reverse engineer the process
703
00:41:13.519 --> 00:41:15.599
of brainwashing. They think these people might have gone through.
704
00:41:16.119 --> 00:41:17.639
What did they discover, what did they try?
705
00:41:19.719 --> 00:41:23.679
Yeah, so mk ulture was a response to these prisoner
706
00:41:23.880 --> 00:41:27.480
of war videos. They were trying to figure out whether
707
00:41:27.960 --> 00:41:30.960
the North Koreans and Chinese had figured out some way
708
00:41:31.039 --> 00:41:34.719
to essentially hijack the mind of these soldiers. So they
709
00:41:34.719 --> 00:41:38.119
were trying to reverse engineer this, and they tried lots
710
00:41:38.159 --> 00:41:40.960
and lots of different things. So they were doing a
711
00:41:41.000 --> 00:41:45.519
lot of experiments with things like LSD hallucinogenic drugs. They
712
00:41:45.599 --> 00:41:52.360
were doing things like you and Cameron at McGill was
713
00:41:52.440 --> 00:41:55.119
trying to do something called psychic driving, where they would
714
00:41:55.199 --> 00:42:01.480
like put you basically an isolation chamber and read you
715
00:42:02.000 --> 00:42:04.320
a text for two weeks that would say something like
716
00:42:04.519 --> 00:42:08.920
your mother hates you, what have you. They were doing
717
00:42:08.960 --> 00:42:14.159
things like experimenting with direct electric stimulation for the brain,
718
00:42:15.559 --> 00:42:18.880
basically anything that they could think of. This was a massive,
719
00:42:18.920 --> 00:42:22.199
massive program that involved as far as I can tell,
720
00:42:22.840 --> 00:42:27.199
almost everybody involved in psychology and early forms of like
721
00:42:27.320 --> 00:42:30.519
neuroscience at that time was kind of on the payroll here.
722
00:42:31.039 --> 00:42:33.280
But they had weird things that they were doing as well.
723
00:42:33.320 --> 00:42:39.000
They were looking into paranormal phenomena, things like telekinesis ESP.
724
00:42:40.199 --> 00:42:42.800
One of the first people that they hired, and who's
725
00:42:42.840 --> 00:42:45.039
on your board. Here's a guy named John mul Holland
726
00:42:45.519 --> 00:42:49.119
who was a stage magician who did a couple things
727
00:42:49.119 --> 00:42:55.320
for CIA. He was trying to adopt techniques from stage
728
00:42:55.400 --> 00:42:59.519
magic to be used in covert operations, and the other
729
00:42:59.559 --> 00:43:05.840
thing he was doing was investigating supernatural phenomena for CIA.
730
00:43:06.159 --> 00:43:10.719
He's trying to assess the validity of different spirit mediums.
731
00:43:11.119 --> 00:43:14.639
He was trying to assess the validity of things like
732
00:43:14.800 --> 00:43:23.440
UFO sightings. And so the point here is that they
733
00:43:23.519 --> 00:43:26.360
were kind of throwing everything they could think of at
734
00:43:26.360 --> 00:43:31.360
the wall and see what sticks.
735
00:43:29.880 --> 00:43:32.719
And what stuck, like what actually came out of this concretely?
736
00:43:32.760 --> 00:43:34.960
I mean, I know that we don't know fully because
737
00:43:35.800 --> 00:43:39.239
this guy, Richard M. Bissell Jor ordered it to be
738
00:43:39.280 --> 00:43:42.639
destroyed in ninety seventy three, But that's a good twenty
739
00:43:42.719 --> 00:43:46.159
years later. So what actually stuck. What came out of
740
00:43:46.159 --> 00:43:48.480
this that was proved to work. I mean LSD works,
741
00:43:48.519 --> 00:43:51.039
I know from personal experience. What does it work to do?
742
00:43:51.800 --> 00:43:55.079
Yeah? Well, I mean that's a really good point. Nobody
743
00:43:55.159 --> 00:44:00.840
knows exactly what the kind of successes of this project
744
00:44:00.880 --> 00:44:06.440
were because Richard Bissel had all the documentation from MKLTRU
745
00:44:06.800 --> 00:44:09.440
burnt in the early nineteen seventies, and a lot of
746
00:44:09.440 --> 00:44:12.199
the key players and it also burnt their own archives.
747
00:44:13.039 --> 00:44:17.239
So what we have left is records from that program
748
00:44:17.320 --> 00:44:19.519
that we're in a different place that were more associated
749
00:44:19.559 --> 00:44:22.400
with accounting and things like that. So that's our really
750
00:44:22.440 --> 00:44:26.960
our glimpse into it. We do know that a lot
751
00:44:27.000 --> 00:44:31.760
of the experiments done as part of MK Ultra made
752
00:44:31.840 --> 00:44:37.000
their way into interrogation manuals, right, So there was a
753
00:44:37.039 --> 00:44:41.639
famous manual, and this is very much Alphad McCoy territory.
754
00:44:41.679 --> 00:44:44.239
There was a it was called the Kubarc Manual I think,
755
00:44:45.199 --> 00:44:47.320
came out at that time, and that became a kind
756
00:44:47.320 --> 00:44:52.119
of blueprint that gets carried forward into things like you know,
757
00:44:52.199 --> 00:44:54.679
we were seeing at some of the Black Site prisons
758
00:44:54.719 --> 00:44:56.719
during the War on Terror, some of the things going
759
00:44:56.760 --> 00:45:00.360
on at Abu Grab, those kind of things of this
760
00:45:01.199 --> 00:45:06.920
history of interrogation. We have another history that comes out
761
00:45:06.920 --> 00:45:14.519
of mk Ultra which involves the kind of CIA continued
762
00:45:14.719 --> 00:45:21.599
exploration of the supernatural. So, for example, the guy who's
763
00:45:21.920 --> 00:45:24.760
the head of mk Ultra was a guy named Sydney Gottlieb,
764
00:45:25.039 --> 00:45:29.000
and Gottlieb the mk L just winds down for the
765
00:45:29.000 --> 00:45:31.639
most part in the nineteen sixties or migrates to a
766
00:45:31.679 --> 00:45:35.840
few other programs. One of those programs that gets spun
767
00:45:36.000 --> 00:45:39.719
up was the Remote Viewing program so like trying to
768
00:45:39.760 --> 00:45:42.440
teach people how to be psychic spies, and that goes
769
00:45:42.480 --> 00:45:48.800
from the early seventies through the nineteen nineties. So you just,
770
00:45:48.920 --> 00:45:52.039
you know, you have these histories of you know, essentially
771
00:45:52.079 --> 00:45:56.719
out there experiments that that continue beyond the beyond mk
772
00:45:56.920 --> 00:45:59.920
Ultra as well as you know a lot of interrogation
773
00:46:00.039 --> 00:46:05.320
and stuff, sigh up stuff. Probably a lot of disinformation
774
00:46:05.400 --> 00:46:08.519
techniques also probably come out of mk ULTRU.
775
00:46:08.920 --> 00:46:12.679
This Valentine's Day, the thing that my girlfriend did to
776
00:46:12.719 --> 00:46:14.920
me as a kind of like a romantic treat was
777
00:46:15.000 --> 00:46:18.960
we did the remote viewing techniques from the other room
778
00:46:19.000 --> 00:46:22.039
in our house. So like what else is in the bedroom?
779
00:46:22.039 --> 00:46:23.840
One of us is in the kitchen, and like there's
780
00:46:23.840 --> 00:46:25.639
a there's a there's an image, right, and like you
781
00:46:25.719 --> 00:46:27.159
have to kind of sit and meditate and see if
782
00:46:27.159 --> 00:46:28.760
you can you can do the kind of thing. We
783
00:46:28.760 --> 00:46:31.320
didn't get very good at it. Well, the results the
784
00:46:31.400 --> 00:46:35.679
results are not totally negligible, right, the results of the
785
00:46:35.679 --> 00:46:39.280
program are actually not nothing. And you'd think that nothing.
786
00:46:39.960 --> 00:46:42.000
You'd think that, how do you account for that? Like,
787
00:46:42.039 --> 00:46:43.920
how do you account for that? Because you are a
788
00:46:44.000 --> 00:46:48.000
rational person, you are not given to the supernatural? You
789
00:46:48.039 --> 00:46:50.039
are I mean, is it just that there was lots
790
00:46:50.079 --> 00:46:52.840
of prediction and when they're trying to do these remote
791
00:46:52.880 --> 00:46:55.079
viewing tasks where they're trying to look at something that
792
00:46:55.159 --> 00:46:58.559
is thousands of miles away, do they just like make
793
00:46:58.599 --> 00:47:00.599
a lot of guesses and sometimes they were right? Or
794
00:47:00.719 --> 00:47:03.679
is there something more to this that they passed secret information?
795
00:47:03.719 --> 00:47:06.000
Were they being prompted into other live in a way?
796
00:47:06.360 --> 00:47:07.280
How do you account for that?
797
00:47:09.920 --> 00:47:12.639
So I'm very deep in this rabbit hole now. I've
798
00:47:12.679 --> 00:47:15.599
been going through a lot of archives of the Remote
799
00:47:15.639 --> 00:47:18.599
Viewing program and have recovered a lot of weird stuff
800
00:47:18.639 --> 00:47:22.599
that I don't think people really know about. But and
801
00:47:22.639 --> 00:47:25.199
you know, I'm actually working on a whole body of
802
00:47:25.320 --> 00:47:28.320
artworks and an exhibition that's kind of inspired by a
803
00:47:28.360 --> 00:47:32.679
lot of this stuff. How do we account for what
804
00:47:32.719 --> 00:47:39.519
was going on there? These successes are tricky to evaluate.
805
00:47:39.599 --> 00:47:42.000
I mean, it seems like what they arrived at was
806
00:47:42.039 --> 00:47:46.800
that there's something here, but it is not predictable nor
807
00:47:46.960 --> 00:47:52.239
reliable enough to be used in a military context, right,
808
00:47:53.039 --> 00:47:59.599
And it's really hard to know how much of this
809
00:47:59.880 --> 00:48:06.400
is kind of creating impressions that then fit stories about
810
00:48:06.400 --> 00:48:15.599
the world after the fact. You don't you don't know
811
00:48:15.679 --> 00:48:19.599
how much of it is essentially chaos magic versus you know,
812
00:48:19.639 --> 00:48:21.880
something more rational. And what I mean by chaos magic
813
00:48:22.360 --> 00:48:27.400
is generating patterns that you see in other places. Right,
814
00:48:27.920 --> 00:48:30.719
I can generate a pattern of words, you're going to
815
00:48:30.840 --> 00:48:33.719
perceive that in some kind of your your mind is
816
00:48:33.760 --> 00:48:35.400
going to fill in the blanks of those patterns of
817
00:48:35.440 --> 00:48:39.480
words to derive an intelligible story from it. You think
818
00:48:39.480 --> 00:48:42.679
about like those refrigerator magnets. You have all these different words,
819
00:48:42.920 --> 00:48:44.880
you put a bunch of them together and your refrigerator.
820
00:48:44.920 --> 00:48:47.800
Your mind synthesizes a poem out of that that that
821
00:48:47.880 --> 00:48:53.079
seems to make sense. So something similar is probably definitely
822
00:48:53.119 --> 00:48:57.000
going on with remote viewing. Whereas like you're prompting me
823
00:48:57.119 --> 00:48:59.760
to see something. I'm giving you a string of words.
824
00:49:00.239 --> 00:49:04.719
You're then looking for a relationship between those words and
825
00:49:04.800 --> 00:49:07.760
the quote unquote target, and you will find that because
826
00:49:07.960 --> 00:49:11.639
humans are very very good at pattern matching. Right, even
827
00:49:11.679 --> 00:49:17.159
when there's no pattern, there is something supernatural going on there.
828
00:49:18.280 --> 00:49:21.639
I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I'm honestly
829
00:49:21.760 --> 00:49:25.599
agnostic about that. If there is something supernatural going on,
830
00:49:26.320 --> 00:49:34.440
it is not sufficiently predictable to be used operationally. I
831
00:49:34.440 --> 00:49:35.960
mean that part of it seems pretty clear.
832
00:49:37.880 --> 00:49:41.519
You mentioned eli other pretty much all the psychologists of
833
00:49:41.639 --> 00:49:44.159
the era sort of seemingly involved in this, not of
834
00:49:44.239 --> 00:49:46.840
course all of them, but like many, many of them
835
00:49:47.199 --> 00:49:49.320
on the board of got Donald's head, who is responsible
836
00:49:49.400 --> 00:49:55.079
for the foundational claim in neuroscience, which is about called
837
00:49:55.119 --> 00:49:59.199
heavy and learning neurons that fire together while together. My
838
00:49:59.280 --> 00:50:01.920
understanding of this is that like the electricity comes down
839
00:50:01.920 --> 00:50:06.199
in your own and that attracts insulation methylation to attacked
840
00:50:06.239 --> 00:50:10.079
around the around the neurone, which means that it's more insulated,
841
00:50:10.199 --> 00:50:12.239
which means that the next time around it it works better.
842
00:50:14.000 --> 00:50:18.679
Of course, there is another tradition of psychology, or an
843
00:50:18.679 --> 00:50:25.159
alstration of psychiatry or psychoanalysis in fact, which is Freudian psychoanalytists.
844
00:50:25.239 --> 00:50:29.960
And the image there in freud of how the mind
845
00:50:30.000 --> 00:50:32.320
works is that this experience that you and I are
846
00:50:32.320 --> 00:50:34.599
having right is actually just sort of the top of
847
00:50:34.599 --> 00:50:37.199
the iceberg, and beneath that there is a whole roiling
848
00:50:37.280 --> 00:50:38.239
mass of.
849
00:50:39.920 --> 00:50:40.400
Hands for.
850
00:50:42.400 --> 00:50:45.880
Power and immediate gratification from the id and then the
851
00:50:46.280 --> 00:50:50.400
super ego as the sort of regulatory ideal. What is
852
00:50:50.480 --> 00:50:53.400
the what is the image of the person that we
853
00:50:53.480 --> 00:50:57.840
get when we look at these experiments in the mk
854
00:50:58.000 --> 00:51:02.000
ultra sort of zone that we are thinking about the
855
00:51:02.000 --> 00:51:06.519
person as an almost like quasi supernatural antenna able to
856
00:51:06.559 --> 00:51:08.480
pick up radio signals and so on. Ea is it
857
00:51:08.519 --> 00:51:10.840
that be thinking about them as a fully rational person?
858
00:51:11.280 --> 00:51:13.599
And what is that you know, what is the image
859
00:51:13.599 --> 00:51:16.000
of the person that that comes out of this, this
860
00:51:16.000 --> 00:51:17.079
this set of experiments What you.
861
00:51:17.079 --> 00:51:20.639
Said, yeah, I mean like when you look at sciops literature,
862
00:51:20.920 --> 00:51:25.480
MK ultra literature, a lot of advertising literature, it is
863
00:51:26.679 --> 00:51:30.239
you do not arrive at the kind of bourgeois you know,
864
00:51:30.320 --> 00:51:33.760
free thinking subjects. You know, what you arrive at is
865
00:51:34.639 --> 00:51:43.159
a kind of theories of subjectivity where mostly what your
866
00:51:43.199 --> 00:51:51.920
subjectivity is our accumulated experiences, you know, like just neurological wiring,
867
00:51:52.519 --> 00:51:54.480
a lot of things that you have very very little
868
00:51:54.480 --> 00:51:58.199
control over. You do have a rational layer on top
869
00:51:58.280 --> 00:52:03.960
of that, but that layer can often and somewhat easily
870
00:52:04.039 --> 00:52:11.559
be overridden when you by knowing what psychological techniques will
871
00:52:11.559 --> 00:52:15.280
override that. This is like why rage bait works online.
872
00:52:15.400 --> 00:52:17.440
You know, this is I mean, that's that's kind of
873
00:52:17.440 --> 00:52:19.440
the proof of this, right. You just look at like
874
00:52:19.519 --> 00:52:24.360
online discourse and it is so captured by basically lizard
875
00:52:24.400 --> 00:52:25.280
brain dynamics.
876
00:52:25.320 --> 00:52:28.559
You know, I don't find myself captured by it, Like
877
00:52:28.599 --> 00:52:28.840
I don't.
878
00:52:28.840 --> 00:52:31.920
I don't know. Yeah, I don't either, But that's because
879
00:52:31.960 --> 00:52:33.840
I don't look at it and I don't engage with it.
880
00:52:33.880 --> 00:52:35.800
But I suspect the more you engage with it, and
881
00:52:35.840 --> 00:52:40.760
the more that you become involved in those incentive systems,
882
00:52:41.159 --> 00:52:44.039
the more that you would you know, if I if
883
00:52:44.079 --> 00:52:48.280
you you know, realize that by like you know, ship posting,
884
00:52:48.280 --> 00:52:50.239
you get a bunch of followers, you get to you
885
00:52:50.320 --> 00:52:52.840
get a reward based on that, you're kind of stepping
886
00:52:52.960 --> 00:53:01.159
into this uh dopaminogenic economy that is very similar to addiction,
887
00:53:01.480 --> 00:53:02.760
you know, among people who study it.
888
00:53:03.960 --> 00:53:06.400
My news resolution for the last two years has been
889
00:53:06.440 --> 00:53:12.360
to use social media more. How the stock, how the stuck, Like,
890
00:53:12.440 --> 00:53:14.039
I will look at Twitter.
891
00:53:15.280 --> 00:53:18.480
Yeah, no, I mean there's yeah. You know, some people
892
00:53:18.480 --> 00:53:21.280
are more susceptible to gambling addiction. Some people are more
893
00:53:21.320 --> 00:53:25.840
susceptible to nicotine nicotine addiction. We all have different makeups.
894
00:53:25.840 --> 00:53:28.440
There, let's talk about what you would what do you Bledsoe?
895
00:53:29.199 --> 00:53:32.239
Yeah, So Woody Bledsoe is a real interesting guy. He
896
00:53:32.880 --> 00:53:38.599
was did a PhD at Berkeley, worked at Sandia Labs
897
00:53:38.639 --> 00:53:41.599
weirdly at Kurland Air Force Base for a while in
898
00:53:41.760 --> 00:53:47.039
this this would have been in early nineteen fifties. Then
899
00:53:47.199 --> 00:53:52.000
he goes back to what is now Silicon Valley and
900
00:53:52.039 --> 00:53:55.800
he sets up an outfit called Panoramic Research. So they're
901
00:53:55.840 --> 00:53:59.280
doing experimental research projects. Their main client is the CIA,
902
00:53:59.800 --> 00:54:05.639
and the two big projects they do is they basically
903
00:54:05.639 --> 00:54:09.400
try to invent face recognition for CIA. So CIA wants
904
00:54:09.400 --> 00:54:12.440
a way to look at photographs and then use a
905
00:54:12.440 --> 00:54:15.719
computer to identify the people in the photographs, and so Bledsoe,
906
00:54:16.000 --> 00:54:20.880
you know, attempts to do that. That was not an
907
00:54:20.960 --> 00:54:24.280
mk Ultra project. That was just a generic CIA project.
908
00:54:24.719 --> 00:54:27.800
And then he does have one of these MK ultra projects,
909
00:54:28.039 --> 00:54:32.239
something called Subproject ninety four. Again, this is one of
910
00:54:32.239 --> 00:54:34.280
the projects we don't know a whole lot about, but
911
00:54:34.360 --> 00:54:42.280
we do know that it was trying to control animals
912
00:54:42.480 --> 00:54:45.159
essentially via a remote control. So what do we think
913
00:54:45.199 --> 00:54:50.840
he was doing was putting electrodes in the brains of dogs, burrows,
914
00:54:52.039 --> 00:54:55.000
you know, different kind of creatures, and then essentially try
915
00:54:55.000 --> 00:54:59.400
to control their movements remotely. So it was a secret
916
00:54:59.519 --> 00:55:04.239
version of work, very similar to what Jose Delgado was
917
00:55:04.239 --> 00:55:07.639
doing at Yale, and Delgata was doing famous public experiments
918
00:55:07.639 --> 00:55:10.039
where he'd put electrodes in the brains of a bull
919
00:55:10.320 --> 00:55:11.880
and then have the bull charge them, and then he'd
920
00:55:11.880 --> 00:55:13.920
press a button and that the bull would kind of
921
00:55:14.079 --> 00:55:18.719
veer out of the way. We know that something went
922
00:55:18.880 --> 00:55:24.639
terribly wrong with this Bledsoe project. In the mid nineteen sixties,
923
00:55:25.239 --> 00:55:29.320
the CIA comptroller said that the project had gone quote
924
00:55:29.400 --> 00:55:33.559
unquote off the rails and they defunded it, and Bledsoe
925
00:55:33.599 --> 00:55:36.800
then closed up Panoramic Research and went into academia. He
926
00:55:36.920 --> 00:55:40.000
was a professor at UT Austin for a long time
927
00:55:40.039 --> 00:55:45.039
after that. So what happened we don't really know. But yeah,
928
00:55:45.039 --> 00:55:48.360
this is like a sixty four to sixty five on this, which.
929
00:55:48.199 --> 00:55:50.920
Is a long time before the CIA like kind of
930
00:55:50.960 --> 00:55:53.280
clears up its act with the Church Committee, right, that's
931
00:55:53.599 --> 00:55:54.639
which is seventy three.
932
00:55:54.679 --> 00:55:56.360
I want to say, yeah, this is this is the
933
00:55:56.480 --> 00:56:00.800
age when you know everything everybody's going crazy that you know,
934
00:56:00.840 --> 00:56:03.360
also academia had not cleaned up its act either. There's
935
00:56:03.400 --> 00:56:08.360
not really human subject protocols, a lot of wildly unethical
936
00:56:08.400 --> 00:56:10.320
experimentation going on at that time.
937
00:56:12.639 --> 00:56:14.800
Why didn't they carry on with it? Because it does
938
00:56:14.840 --> 00:56:17.039
see maybe they did, we don't know about it, right,
939
00:56:17.320 --> 00:56:18.480
or is it is that the conclusion that we have
940
00:56:18.519 --> 00:56:18.840
to come to.
941
00:56:20.599 --> 00:56:25.760
I don't know. I think they did carry on with this.
942
00:56:25.800 --> 00:56:29.519
I think there was another lab uh in Baltimore, I
943
00:56:29.559 --> 00:56:31.679
think at Johns Hopkins that was working on this stuff
944
00:56:31.719 --> 00:56:37.119
as well. On one hand, we can say that they
945
00:56:37.199 --> 00:56:41.280
didn't carry on with it. On the other hand, you
946
00:56:41.320 --> 00:56:46.079
know what is neuralink. It's basically that you know, so
947
00:56:47.360 --> 00:56:50.519
this this this stuff definitely persists to the present, or
948
00:56:50.559 --> 00:56:52.360
at least this lineage did not die.
949
00:56:54.119 --> 00:56:55.920
Let's go through the rest the lineage because this other
950
00:56:56.000 --> 00:56:57.440
kind of like I mean, I do want to come
951
00:56:57.480 --> 00:57:00.679
to the neural link stuff. Eventually we have an here
952
00:57:00.920 --> 00:57:02.519
this is this is one of those episodes that really
953
00:57:02.559 --> 00:57:06.920
kind of sprawls across the whole We do we do,
954
00:57:07.000 --> 00:57:08.760
we do have some sort of neuralink things down here.
955
00:57:09.280 --> 00:57:12.000
Quinslabodium and Ben tanof who we intue a while back,
956
00:57:12.199 --> 00:57:15.239
have this idea of the Musk's cyborg turn Elon musk
957
00:57:15.320 --> 00:57:19.760
cybog turn, and the idea there is that instead of
958
00:57:20.119 --> 00:57:22.760
basically what we're talking about now, which is this process
959
00:57:22.800 --> 00:57:27.000
whereby the rational structure of humans is replaced with the
960
00:57:27.039 --> 00:57:29.880
free flow of memes right among the and this is
961
00:57:30.239 --> 00:57:32.280
very very cringe and Elon Musku's hands where he talks
962
00:57:32.280 --> 00:57:35.679
about who controls the memes controls the world. But there
963
00:57:35.719 --> 00:57:37.760
is something to the kind of the way in which
964
00:57:37.760 --> 00:57:39.559
people become things to be prompted, or the way in
965
00:57:39.559 --> 00:57:44.159
which we reduce other humans to mirre sort of like Ais, right,
966
00:57:44.199 --> 00:57:47.199
people become more like Ais than Ais become more like people,
967
00:57:47.320 --> 00:57:48.599
you know, in sense like there is a kind of
968
00:57:48.599 --> 00:57:51.480
a collapsing of the human into the technological.
969
00:57:53.119 --> 00:57:55.639
And I think humorally into the image, right, I mean,
970
00:57:55.679 --> 00:58:00.639
these are the technological image.
971
00:58:00.039 --> 00:58:02.559
But there does need to be like the images are
972
00:58:02.599 --> 00:58:05.519
sort of a My understanding where we were going earlier.
973
00:58:05.679 --> 00:58:08.079
Maybe I'm wrong, you can correct me. My understanding was
974
00:58:08.079 --> 00:58:11.800
that the image as a thing you can actually see
975
00:58:12.480 --> 00:58:16.639
right was taken to be more or less supplemental to
976
00:58:16.960 --> 00:58:22.239
a sort of deep process of of of processing and
977
00:58:23.760 --> 00:58:29.800
subconscious awareness, both in people and in for example, the
978
00:58:29.840 --> 00:58:33.559
CCTV camera that does that thing where it like draws
979
00:58:33.599 --> 00:58:35.639
a square around a thing he thinks is a person,
980
00:58:35.960 --> 00:58:37.679
or draws a square around my face, which you can
981
00:58:37.719 --> 00:58:39.800
see on your screen right now, Jonah, thank you for
982
00:58:39.800 --> 00:58:42.079
putting that on right, Like this is the thing that
983
00:58:42.360 --> 00:58:46.840
there is a you know that My understanding was the
984
00:58:46.840 --> 00:58:49.280
images had become a kind of supplemental layer that actually
985
00:58:49.320 --> 00:58:51.559
was unnecessary to the operation of power. But maybe that's
986
00:58:51.599 --> 00:58:52.400
not where you were going.
987
00:58:53.320 --> 00:58:57.000
No, I think there that is true. And also I'm
988
00:58:57.000 --> 00:59:00.519
not saying to get rid of representation entirely, Like I'm
989
00:59:00.559 --> 00:59:03.800
just saying that representations can be a part of that
990
00:59:03.920 --> 00:59:07.039
cognitive circuit, right in other words, like when you see
991
00:59:07.039 --> 00:59:10.800
the Trump meme of him making himself Jesus, like you
992
00:59:10.960 --> 00:59:15.400
understand the rhetoric of the image, like the representational content
993
00:59:15.400 --> 00:59:18.239
of the image, but it's also doing affective work. Right.
994
00:59:18.320 --> 00:59:22.039
It's also doing it's it's inducing a response in you, right,
995
00:59:22.360 --> 00:59:27.119
and it is also kind of it's altering reality in
996
00:59:27.159 --> 00:59:29.400
the sense that it is like altering the range of
997
00:59:29.440 --> 00:59:31.280
like what is thinkable and what is seeable?
998
00:59:31.559 --> 00:59:35.199
Right to think about what is the range of what
999
00:59:35.239 --> 00:59:37.079
is thinkable and what is seeable? I want to come
1000
00:59:37.079 --> 00:59:39.559
on to maybe the kind of the most like for
1001
00:59:39.679 --> 00:59:44.480
me exciting sort of a story in your book, but
1002
00:59:44.599 --> 00:59:46.800
also the exactly the same thing we talked about last time.
1003
00:59:46.880 --> 00:59:48.039
So you know, we're going to go with a small
1004
00:59:48.119 --> 00:59:50.239
territory here, but there is there is actually so much more.
1005
00:59:53.199 --> 00:59:59.800
Richard Doty is a was an Air Force officer of
1006
00:59:59.880 --> 01:00:02.239
a of the what is it, Special investigations, special agent
1007
01:00:02.639 --> 01:00:05.880
and he you met him, You've met him many times,
1008
01:00:05.920 --> 01:00:09.320
You've made a film with him. When Alph McCoy, who
1009
01:00:09.519 --> 01:00:13.639
as I mentioned, had on before, when he met Roger Trinkier,
1010
01:00:14.039 --> 01:00:18.280
who is this French canrosurgency officer, he described Roger Trinkier,
1011
01:00:18.320 --> 01:00:22.199
who is the very imposing man, as extending his his
1012
01:00:22.280 --> 01:00:25.400
pre number of power over him. That's how from McCoy
1013
01:00:25.400 --> 01:00:28.119
described him. And that makes a lot of sense because
1014
01:00:28.199 --> 01:00:30.440
Roger Trinkier, as you can see dressed in his army
1015
01:00:30.480 --> 01:00:34.679
fatigues here right, like is a serious military operator, a
1016
01:00:34.800 --> 01:00:38.719
very scary man. Yeah, what was it like perhaps in comparison,
1017
01:00:38.840 --> 01:00:40.519
so we can think about the different forms of power
1018
01:00:40.599 --> 01:00:46.400
involved him to meet SIOP Agent Extraordinary Richard Dotin.
1019
01:00:48.039 --> 01:00:52.760
So I was I wanted to do the film with
1020
01:00:52.960 --> 01:00:57.559
Dodie because I thought of him as like really an
1021
01:00:57.639 --> 01:01:00.800
allegory for media in the age of AI. Right, He's
1022
01:01:00.920 --> 01:01:09.280
essentially somebody who will tell very outlandish stories that will
1023
01:01:10.400 --> 01:01:13.239
often turn out to be true at key places, and
1024
01:01:13.280 --> 01:01:17.599
those stories are mixed with a lot of fantastical details
1025
01:01:17.639 --> 01:01:20.880
that are difficult to believe, and he is trained to
1026
01:01:21.159 --> 01:01:26.599
essentially manipulate your perception. Now I know that, you know,
1027
01:01:26.719 --> 01:01:31.280
several of the people that he ran sye ups against
1028
01:01:31.320 --> 01:01:36.039
essentially went insane. And so I was very afraid to
1029
01:01:36.079 --> 01:01:38.559
meet him, not because I thought that, you know, he
1030
01:01:38.719 --> 01:01:40.360
was there was going to be any kind of violence
1031
01:01:40.440 --> 01:01:42.599
or something like that, but in my mind he was
1032
01:01:42.639 --> 01:01:46.440
almost this like love Craftian figure where you know, you're
1033
01:01:47.199 --> 01:01:51.639
you struggle to maintain your sense of sanity when you, you know,
1034
01:01:51.920 --> 01:01:57.480
interact with somebody like that. He's very unassuming, he's very warm,
1035
01:01:57.559 --> 01:02:03.360
he's a very friendly guy, got along great, and but
1036
01:02:03.440 --> 01:02:10.400
when you're talking to him, you do feel you're grounding
1037
01:02:10.440 --> 01:02:16.880
in reality slipping away. And that's because he's trained to
1038
01:02:17.960 --> 01:02:21.440
tell stories that are designed to do that right, and
1039
01:02:21.519 --> 01:02:23.800
there's a craft to it, and he knows that craft,
1040
01:02:23.920 --> 01:02:26.719
and he'll explain to you exactly what the craft is
1041
01:02:27.440 --> 01:02:32.079
and then he'll do it on you and it still works, right.
1042
01:02:32.199 --> 01:02:35.199
So it's again one of these things that still works
1043
01:02:35.280 --> 01:02:40.920
even when you know what the trick is, right. So, yeah,
1044
01:02:40.920 --> 01:02:44.480
so I was I was pretty you know, nervous about
1045
01:02:44.800 --> 01:02:49.480
meeting him, and you know, it's it's it's it's tricky.
1046
01:02:50.480 --> 01:02:55.079
He talked a lot about when you're in school for
1047
01:02:55.239 --> 01:02:57.800
doing this kind of syops work, and he talks about
1048
01:02:58.119 --> 01:03:01.960
the fact that most people want out and most people
1049
01:03:02.159 --> 01:03:04.480
wash out, like not because they can't do enough push
1050
01:03:04.559 --> 01:03:06.960
ups or whatever it is, but most people wash out
1051
01:03:07.079 --> 01:03:10.280
because you kind of have to be a sociopath to
1052
01:03:10.320 --> 01:03:13.320
be able to do this work right. You have to
1053
01:03:13.360 --> 01:03:19.760
be able to essentially lie and deceive people in ways
1054
01:03:20.360 --> 01:03:24.840
that are you know, far beyond you know, the little
1055
01:03:24.960 --> 01:03:27.360
kind of white lies that you know all of us
1056
01:03:27.400 --> 01:03:32.320
engage in, but don't we don't generally if you're not
1057
01:03:32.360 --> 01:03:36.280
a crazy person, don't rise to the level of the
1058
01:03:36.320 --> 01:03:38.559
types of disceptions you are expected to do when you're
1059
01:03:38.599 --> 01:03:39.159
in that field.
1060
01:03:40.719 --> 01:03:43.199
What are the principles of stile? So if he's learned
1061
01:03:43.199 --> 01:03:47.079
the trade craft, like, what all the things that guide that?
1062
01:03:47.840 --> 01:03:51.280
Yeah, so there's all these you know, psychological factors that
1063
01:03:51.280 --> 01:03:53.960
that that go into it. The main one that he
1064
01:03:54.119 --> 01:03:59.840
talks about is the what he calls like the Magruder principle,
1065
01:04:00.480 --> 01:04:03.559
which is named after confederateve general and basically the principle
1066
01:04:03.639 --> 01:04:08.639
says that what you want to do is figure out
1067
01:04:08.639 --> 01:04:11.480
what somebody's pre existing beliefs are, and then you want
1068
01:04:11.519 --> 01:04:14.599
to amplify those. And so you start with what somebody
1069
01:04:14.639 --> 01:04:17.679
believes already, you push it further and further and further,
1070
01:04:17.960 --> 01:04:20.639
and you push it into a place, push it into
1071
01:04:20.639 --> 01:04:22.800
whatever place that you want it to go in. But
1072
01:04:22.880 --> 01:04:27.280
you have to. It's much easier to encourage somebody to
1073
01:04:27.360 --> 01:04:29.440
go down a path that they're already on than it
1074
01:04:29.519 --> 01:04:33.480
is to go onto a different path. The importance of
1075
01:04:33.519 --> 01:04:35.679
feedback is another one that I think is really interesting.
1076
01:04:35.719 --> 01:04:38.719
It's almost kind of cybernetic idea that you need to
1077
01:04:38.760 --> 01:04:43.079
be monitoring the effects of what you're doing on the
1078
01:04:43.119 --> 01:04:48.000
person and be continually refining them and customizing them to
1079
01:04:48.159 --> 01:04:50.960
that person. And to me that was just really interesting
1080
01:04:51.000 --> 01:04:53.760
because like that's literally what you know the algorithm is.
1081
01:04:54.119 --> 01:04:57.360
And you can think about the algorithm as you know,
1082
01:04:57.840 --> 01:05:00.679
using this particular syop technique for example, I mean you
1083
01:05:00.719 --> 01:05:03.679
can also think about it as using the Magruder's principle,
1084
01:05:03.719 --> 01:05:05.960
you know, bringing you further down a rabbit, or that
1085
01:05:06.000 --> 01:05:07.199
you're already primed to go down.
1086
01:05:08.000 --> 01:05:10.280
Can we talk about exactly what he does to Paul benefits?
1087
01:05:10.360 --> 01:05:11.039
Is that possible?
1088
01:05:11.119 --> 01:05:12.280
So what is it?
1089
01:05:12.599 --> 01:05:15.639
So Paul nav is a already as far as I
1090
01:05:15.719 --> 01:05:21.679
understand it, using this magruder technique, an amateur investigator. And
1091
01:05:21.760 --> 01:05:24.159
we should probably say that Richard Doughty is stationed at
1092
01:05:24.239 --> 01:05:28.400
Kirkland Air Force Base, which in New Mexico and is
1093
01:05:28.719 --> 01:05:32.440
the site where people think a lot of very advanced
1094
01:05:32.760 --> 01:05:38.320
Air force material is tread trained, tested planes, drones, you
1095
01:05:38.360 --> 01:05:40.679
know who knows you name it, it's probably in that
1096
01:05:40.760 --> 01:05:43.840
kind of area. And so his job at this Air
1097
01:05:43.880 --> 01:05:45.519
Force bace is to keep all of this a secret,
1098
01:05:46.199 --> 01:05:48.760
not by bringing people from seeing it, but in some
1099
01:05:48.800 --> 01:05:52.320
ways by causing them to see something else or really
1100
01:05:52.360 --> 01:05:53.760
maybe what they want to see that it is more
1101
01:05:53.760 --> 01:05:57.440
exciting than the truth, or depending on how much you
1102
01:05:57.760 --> 01:06:00.559
believe the sieup is real, right, like making people believe
1103
01:06:00.599 --> 01:06:02.840
mundane things when actually something very exciting thing that's happening,
1104
01:06:03.039 --> 01:06:05.320
you know, that's the real question. So what does he
1105
01:06:05.360 --> 01:06:06.199
do to pull benefits?
1106
01:06:06.280 --> 01:06:10.880
Particularly, So Paul Benowitz was a military contractor that worked
1107
01:06:10.880 --> 01:06:13.639
at Curland Air Force Base and his house was on
1108
01:06:13.719 --> 01:06:15.760
the fence line. And so when we talk about what
1109
01:06:15.840 --> 01:06:18.480
Curland Air Force Base is, it's not just a collection
1110
01:06:18.519 --> 01:06:21.000
of buildings, it's like a huge, huge swass of desert.
1111
01:06:21.400 --> 01:06:24.639
They're doing aerospace testing in there, they're doing electronic warfare
1112
01:06:25.239 --> 01:06:29.000
NSA's there. There's a bunch of nuclear stuff there. And
1113
01:06:29.440 --> 01:06:32.519
this is you know, late seventies, this is the height
1114
01:06:32.679 --> 01:06:37.079
of you know, research on electronic warfare, early stealth airplanes,
1115
01:06:37.119 --> 01:06:39.679
et cetera. So Benowitz is living on the fence line
1116
01:06:39.719 --> 01:06:44.239
and he starts seeing weird things flying around above the
1117
01:06:44.599 --> 01:06:48.519
above the desert, you know, in the restricted area, and
1118
01:06:48.599 --> 01:06:51.280
he starts setting up cameras, and he starts setting up
1119
01:06:51.400 --> 01:06:55.400
radio receivers. So he's starting to collect electronic transmissions from
1120
01:06:55.400 --> 01:07:00.280
the area as well, and he comes to believe at
1121
01:07:00.320 --> 01:07:06.559
what he's seeing are UFOs harassing the military. And so
1122
01:07:06.719 --> 01:07:11.599
he's got all this documentation and because he works at
1123
01:07:11.599 --> 01:07:13.880
the base, he's going to report it, say like, hey,
1124
01:07:14.199 --> 01:07:15.880
just so you know, I've been collecting this stuff. So
1125
01:07:15.920 --> 01:07:18.800
he goes to the base and Rick Dodie is the
1126
01:07:18.840 --> 01:07:24.039
guy who's waiting for him. Now, in all likelihood, Benowitz
1127
01:07:24.239 --> 01:07:30.039
had discovered some artifacts related to some top secret NSA
1128
01:07:30.159 --> 01:07:33.000
program or some kind of electronic warfor A program, and
1129
01:07:33.039 --> 01:07:37.239
Dote's job was to protect that. Benowitz did have a
1130
01:07:37.400 --> 01:07:43.400
pre existing interest in UFOs, I think pretty casually, but Dodie,
1131
01:07:44.440 --> 01:07:47.440
but yeah, Benowitz interpreted what he saw as UFOs, and
1132
01:07:47.440 --> 01:07:50.199
so what Dode's approach was to use this magruder principle
1133
01:07:50.239 --> 01:07:55.280
and says like, yes, in fact, you are seeing UFOs
1134
01:07:55.920 --> 01:07:58.679
and they are a problem, and I'm going to help
1135
01:07:58.719 --> 01:08:01.920
you to discover the truth about them. So keep doing
1136
01:08:01.960 --> 01:08:08.239
what you're doing. And Dody then starts amplifying that belief,
1137
01:08:08.239 --> 01:08:12.119
and he starts doing it by really crazy means, like
1138
01:08:12.280 --> 01:08:15.480
going so far as like installing speakers and Benowitz's house
1139
01:08:15.559 --> 01:08:19.159
that would like speak to him in alien languages. They
1140
01:08:20.079 --> 01:08:23.319
he kind of creates a Potempkin alien base on the
1141
01:08:23.359 --> 01:08:26.960
top of a mountain where he knows Benowitz will fly
1142
01:08:27.039 --> 01:08:29.760
by in his private plane and sort of like notice
1143
01:08:29.800 --> 01:08:31.800
this construction there, and Dody says, oh, well, it's this
1144
01:08:31.880 --> 01:08:36.640
alien base. In one of the weirder stories Dodie has,
1145
01:08:38.359 --> 01:08:42.199
he arranges for a computer to be delivered to Benowitz
1146
01:08:42.239 --> 01:08:46.800
and the computer will ostensibly decode the radio signals that
1147
01:08:47.279 --> 01:08:50.960
Benowitz is collecting. And what it will do is in
1148
01:08:51.079 --> 01:08:54.720
take the radio signals in, and then it will output
1149
01:08:55.039 --> 01:08:59.000
texts that are quote unquote the decoded signals, and all
1150
01:08:59.039 --> 01:09:03.439
of the text appear to be deliberations among you know,
1151
01:09:03.680 --> 01:09:07.960
alien forces that are invading the US. They're really weird.
1152
01:09:08.279 --> 01:09:10.640
There's like thousands of pages of this like gibberish that
1153
01:09:10.720 --> 01:09:14.800
sounds like, you know, we are crash saucers, we hate you,
1154
01:09:15.000 --> 01:09:19.800
We're gonna invade whatever it is, right, So Dody really
1155
01:09:19.840 --> 01:09:22.880
just spins up this whole world for Benowitz, and Benwitz
1156
01:09:23.199 --> 01:09:26.880
eventually has a mental breakdown. He barricades himself inside of
1157
01:09:26.920 --> 01:09:32.800
his house with sandbags and he's institutionalized. Dody does other
1158
01:09:32.880 --> 01:09:37.039
things like and it's not clear like what Dodey made
1159
01:09:37.119 --> 01:09:40.359
versus what he just distributed. But he starts to you know,
1160
01:09:40.640 --> 01:09:47.840
showing select journal journalists as well as Benowitz, these fake
1161
01:09:48.079 --> 01:09:53.000
top secret documents that describe, you know, fifty years of
1162
01:09:53.039 --> 01:09:58.520
collaboration between the US government and you know, alien invaders.
1163
01:09:58.960 --> 01:10:01.479
These would sort of evolve into the famous like MJ
1164
01:10:01.760 --> 01:10:06.439
twelve papers. The documents also I think talk about how
1165
01:10:06.640 --> 01:10:11.840
Jesus was an alien you know hybrid, So these really
1166
01:10:11.880 --> 01:10:16.560
weird stories. One of the people that he passes this
1167
01:10:16.600 --> 01:10:18.439
stuff onto is this woman that you have on the
1168
01:10:18.520 --> 01:10:24.039
chart here as well, Linda Moulton Howe, and she kind
1169
01:10:24.039 --> 01:10:27.039
of takes the bait and has been running with it
1170
01:10:27.119 --> 01:10:30.520
ever since, so to this day. She's talking about how,
1171
01:10:30.840 --> 01:10:35.640
you know, there's races of reptilian aliens that are collaborating
1172
01:10:35.680 --> 01:10:39.199
with the US government and some kind of giant conspiracy theory.
1173
01:10:40.279 --> 01:10:42.800
And the other person on your chart here is a
1174
01:10:42.800 --> 01:10:48.359
guy named William Moore, and he is a UFO researcher
1175
01:10:49.000 --> 01:10:55.439
that Dodie recruited to help disseminate these this kind of
1176
01:10:55.439 --> 01:10:59.720
disinformation within the within the UFO community, and he's working
1177
01:10:59.800 --> 01:11:02.840
very closely with Bill Moore. So there's a there's a
1178
01:11:02.840 --> 01:11:08.760
web of people here, and there's a web of insanity,
1179
01:11:09.079 --> 01:11:11.720
honestly that that is a result of all of this,
1180
01:11:12.640 --> 01:11:15.560
you know, a lot of this. This particular si op
1181
01:11:15.600 --> 01:11:20.520
then also makes its way into popular culture, evolves into
1182
01:11:20.960 --> 01:11:23.680
something called the Dark Side hypothesis, which I think was
1183
01:11:23.720 --> 01:11:29.079
first articulated by a named John Lear and also becomes
1184
01:11:29.079 --> 01:11:32.000
the plot of the television show The X Files. Right,
1185
01:11:32.319 --> 01:11:34.640
people in the UFO community are talking about these documents.
1186
01:11:34.920 --> 01:11:38.079
Then Chris Carter goes to a UFO convention, here's this story,
1187
01:11:38.319 --> 01:11:43.399
and it becomes like the plot of the television show. So,
1188
01:11:43.680 --> 01:11:47.720
you know, these things leak out and go much further
1189
01:11:47.760 --> 01:11:49.239
than they were ever intended to go.
1190
01:11:50.520 --> 01:11:53.159
The thing with Bill Moore was that he was offered
1191
01:11:53.199 --> 01:11:58.600
by Doughty proof of aliens right if he disinformed his
1192
01:11:58.680 --> 01:12:01.760
other person exactly presumably like one one would ask, well,
1193
01:12:03.279 --> 01:12:06.039
are you just not going to be disinforming me? Like,
1194
01:12:06.079 --> 01:12:08.319
you know, why why would I participate in a stile
1195
01:12:08.359 --> 01:12:10.199
up when I know that someone else will? You might
1196
01:12:10.279 --> 01:12:12.439
well as well be sipping me as well. It's a
1197
01:12:12.520 --> 01:12:14.359
it's a it's a strange.
1198
01:12:15.920 --> 01:12:18.359
Wheels with wheels in this world, Well, there are wheels
1199
01:12:18.359 --> 01:12:19.039
within wheels.
1200
01:12:18.800 --> 01:12:21.680
But like you know, is is there another wheel? Like
1201
01:12:21.840 --> 01:12:24.039
is Richard Doughty himself the subject of a sip like
1202
01:12:24.079 --> 01:12:26.439
does he really do this? Do you like?
1203
01:12:26.720 --> 01:12:30.319
What's how Well, when you talk to him, he said
1204
01:12:30.359 --> 01:12:32.680
that he was just falling orders. That was all, you know,
1205
01:12:33.079 --> 01:12:35.560
stuff that was coming down from Washington. Now I don't
1206
01:12:36.199 --> 01:12:41.079
totally believe that, but that's that's his story. But I
1207
01:12:41.119 --> 01:12:43.520
think he changes that story also in different contexts.
1208
01:12:44.600 --> 01:12:46.880
Yes, I imagine, So I imagine he tells people that he
1209
01:12:46.960 --> 01:12:49.279
changed the story as well. It tells him that he's
1210
01:12:49.319 --> 01:12:51.119
he tells him that he's changing the story for a
1211
01:12:51.119 --> 01:12:53.239
certain effect, and then the effect still works even though
1212
01:12:53.239 --> 01:12:56.399
you understand that you're doing. There's a whole bunch of
1213
01:12:56.479 --> 01:12:58.880
kind of like interesting aspects of the UFO phenomena that
1214
01:12:58.880 --> 01:13:01.359
I think are already thing. You make this brilliant point
1215
01:13:01.359 --> 01:13:03.359
I have to say, which is that in the age
1216
01:13:03.359 --> 01:13:06.880
of AI, every image is a UFO image. Which is
1217
01:13:06.920 --> 01:13:09.199
that like the UFO image is this I'm going to
1218
01:13:09.279 --> 01:13:11.159
butcher what you wrote in the book, but like is
1219
01:13:11.199 --> 01:13:13.640
a kind of a thing that we is really a
1220
01:13:13.640 --> 01:13:17.039
photograph about photography because it is it is placed on
1221
01:13:17.079 --> 01:13:20.399
the threshold of believability all the time, and something about
1222
01:13:20.399 --> 01:13:24.359
the condition of AI means that every image will eventually
1223
01:13:24.399 --> 01:13:27.319
be on this kind of threshold of indiscernibility if we're
1224
01:13:27.359 --> 01:13:32.680
not even there already, Yeah there is, Yeah.
1225
01:13:31.600 --> 01:13:33.920
No, I'm you know, I think I think we are.
1226
01:13:34.119 --> 01:13:36.680
I mean when I wrote the book mostly you know,
1227
01:13:36.760 --> 01:13:40.159
in the early part of last year, and I could
1228
01:13:40.159 --> 01:13:45.720
see coming that there would be a moment where the
1229
01:13:45.760 --> 01:13:51.359
relationship between images and reality would be upended, right. And
1230
01:13:51.520 --> 01:13:55.199
I noticed, like, right the day after the US started
1231
01:13:55.199 --> 01:13:57.840
bombing Iran, I had a moment where I was looking
1232
01:13:57.880 --> 01:14:01.279
online trying to figure out what actually is going on here,
1233
01:14:01.680 --> 01:14:05.920
and I realized that my mind had flipped and instead
1234
01:14:05.920 --> 01:14:09.079
of like looking for the kind of pieces of crap
1235
01:14:09.119 --> 01:14:11.640
and throwing it out, I was like looking for things
1236
01:14:11.680 --> 01:14:14.600
that I thought were reliable and trying to bring them in.
1237
01:14:15.159 --> 01:14:18.039
And I was like, whoa, Okay, that happened like that,
1238
01:14:18.039 --> 01:14:21.039
That's that's a moment to notice, to pay attention to,
1239
01:14:21.600 --> 01:14:27.880
you know, where you're the default reading of media changes.
1240
01:14:29.279 --> 01:14:31.840
Because of that default reading changing, there is a sense
1241
01:14:31.880 --> 01:14:34.439
that we are now in an arms race, right, that
1242
01:14:34.479 --> 01:14:36.520
it's kind of slipping away from us, in which the
1243
01:14:36.560 --> 01:14:39.720
tools that we used to create media and the tools
1244
01:14:39.760 --> 01:14:41.800
that we use to detect whether or not media is
1245
01:14:41.840 --> 01:14:48.920
fake on arms, racing themselves into currently you know no
1246
01:14:49.119 --> 01:14:53.000
exactly like yeahsense, so are kind of like, you know,
1247
01:14:53.039 --> 01:14:55.000
a world in which like it's impossible to work out
1248
01:14:55.039 --> 01:14:57.600
whether or not things are are true or false. And
1249
01:14:57.640 --> 01:15:00.000
this feels like what it might have felt like from
1250
01:15:00.079 --> 01:15:02.840
the inside of being pulled out betefits, right, this is
1251
01:15:03.279 --> 01:15:05.199
what in my fact, even though there are certain things
1252
01:15:05.199 --> 01:15:08.439
that you're absolutely certain of, Yeah, even when you try
1253
01:15:08.439 --> 01:15:10.600
and explain to other people, they just feel like they.
1254
01:15:10.520 --> 01:15:15.199
Dissolve exactly exactly. And this is so crazy, and this
1255
01:15:15.239 --> 01:15:17.960
is happening in so many domains. It's not just in
1256
01:15:18.000 --> 01:15:20.880
the domain of like, oh, is this actually an image
1257
01:15:20.920 --> 01:15:23.000
of something that happened in the world, you know, this
1258
01:15:23.039 --> 01:15:24.960
is in the domain of writing, like is this a
1259
01:15:25.000 --> 01:15:28.319
text that was actually authored by a person? There is
1260
01:15:28.399 --> 01:15:31.079
this It kind of pisses me off, where like you're
1261
01:15:31.079 --> 01:15:35.600
seeing AI cannibalizing image culture and also written culture. There's
1262
01:15:35.640 --> 01:15:38.119
all these things you can't write now anymore because it's
1263
01:15:38.119 --> 01:15:41.960
AI coded. You can't use the word genuinely anymore, you
1264
01:15:42.039 --> 01:15:47.359
can't use m dashes anymore. There's almost like you're struggling
1265
01:15:47.439 --> 01:15:52.039
to write because you're realizing that also in the style
1266
01:15:52.079 --> 01:15:53.800
that you write, and you're also trying to do a
1267
01:15:53.840 --> 01:15:57.159
proof of work that you're a human. Right, This is
1268
01:15:57.159 --> 01:15:58.800
a very strange situation to be in.
1269
01:16:00.079 --> 01:16:02.199
Yes, proof of proof of brain or something, proof of
1270
01:16:02.720 --> 01:16:05.279
proof of proof of like flesh, you know, like some
1271
01:16:05.359 --> 01:16:07.399
sort of way which I'm trying to establish other people. No,
1272
01:16:07.479 --> 01:16:09.079
I'm a real person. I'm not like a kind of
1273
01:16:09.359 --> 01:16:10.000
a simulation.
1274
01:16:10.520 --> 01:16:13.439
Yeah. I think we'll have some really weird forms of
1275
01:16:13.479 --> 01:16:15.479
slang that will that will come out of that, in
1276
01:16:15.560 --> 01:16:17.680
really weird forms of writing. I was. I was. I've
1277
01:16:17.720 --> 01:16:19.640
even noticed that, like in my own writing, like have
1278
01:16:19.720 --> 01:16:24.079
been much more swashbuckling in the style that I write
1279
01:16:24.079 --> 01:16:27.119
with because I just know that that like a I
1280
01:16:27.119 --> 01:16:28.359
would not do that, you know.
1281
01:16:29.399 --> 01:16:32.479
Right, Okay, so you you you you become less disciplined,
1282
01:16:32.640 --> 01:16:34.399
right because they because there was a certain kind of
1283
01:16:34.439 --> 01:16:38.600
like constrainedness to to the quality of AI pros. That's
1284
01:16:38.640 --> 01:16:41.560
very interesting. I think there is something, I mean, maybe
1285
01:16:41.600 --> 01:16:44.600
an overused reference. There is something I feel like we
1286
01:16:44.640 --> 01:16:48.239
are heading towards and almost like Adam Curtis' view of
1287
01:16:48.880 --> 01:16:54.079
Vladislav Cirkov and the world. So Ladislav Cirklev, we're deputy
1288
01:16:54.079 --> 01:16:57.359
of our Prime Minister of Russia. It is alleged, right
1289
01:16:57.479 --> 01:17:01.880
that circle of ran in the twenty two thousands, I think,
1290
01:17:03.000 --> 01:17:05.199
and maybe in the nineties as well, a collection of
1291
01:17:05.199 --> 01:17:10.079
campaigns to essentially destroy the political culture of Russia, not
1292
01:17:10.479 --> 01:17:14.439
by putting everyone under the thumb of the secret police
1293
01:17:14.920 --> 01:17:17.279
or you know, beating them up if they came and
1294
01:17:17.319 --> 01:17:21.560
did protests, but through amplifying almost everything. So I think
1295
01:17:21.760 --> 01:17:26.199
how it went is that he would essentially pay groups
1296
01:17:26.560 --> 01:17:29.520
from all of the political spectrum, so groups on the
1297
01:17:29.520 --> 01:17:32.119
far left, groups of the far right, groups of the
1298
01:17:32.479 --> 01:17:35.680
on parts of the political spectrum that only Russia has,
1299
01:17:35.720 --> 01:17:38.359
like the Liberal Democratic Party, which you should look up
1300
01:17:38.760 --> 01:17:43.239
nasbol National Bolshevism, not liberal, not democratic, scarcely a party.
1301
01:17:43.640 --> 01:17:46.279
But you know, he would pay the people to do
1302
01:17:46.359 --> 01:17:49.119
political activities and then he let it be known that
1303
01:17:49.399 --> 01:17:52.600
is what he was doing, right, and therefore their credibility collapses.
1304
01:17:52.960 --> 01:17:55.439
And I think this and what this leads to his
1305
01:17:55.600 --> 01:17:59.039
mass resignation, a mass belief that the public sphere cannot
1306
01:17:59.079 --> 01:18:01.279
be trusted, that it is not clear how to act
1307
01:18:01.279 --> 01:18:03.760
in that world. And I really feel like that's where
1308
01:18:03.760 --> 01:18:07.159
we're heading to with the kind of the slop nonsense
1309
01:18:07.239 --> 01:18:11.479
world that we that we experience now too depressing or
1310
01:18:11.520 --> 01:18:14.000
is it? Or I mean, I mean you have thoughts
1311
01:18:14.000 --> 01:18:15.720
about images, You have thought about what to do in
1312
01:18:15.720 --> 01:18:18.359
this kind of environment. Where do we grasp for agency
1313
01:18:18.479 --> 01:18:20.039
in that that terrifying slot point?
1314
01:18:20.079 --> 01:18:22.920
No, I think that's that's completely right. Is and like
1315
01:18:23.359 --> 01:18:26.000
this is another technique that's in the psyops literature, is
1316
01:18:26.000 --> 01:18:30.279
like you're destabilizing truth is an end in and of itself, right,
1317
01:18:30.279 --> 01:18:33.279
because the idea is like once, if you can completely
1318
01:18:33.279 --> 01:18:37.680
destabilize the idea of a shared reality or a particular reality,
1319
01:18:37.960 --> 01:18:41.239
you can fill that in with with whatever you want,
1320
01:18:41.600 --> 01:18:45.079
mostly through coercion, right, or mostly with some kind of fascism, right.
1321
01:18:46.359 --> 01:18:49.760
And so like Sirkov is certainly, you know, a very
1322
01:18:49.880 --> 01:18:55.960
much a Dodeye type figure who's trying to do to
1323
01:18:56.039 --> 01:18:58.439
do at scale, you know, the kinds of techniques that
1324
01:18:58.439 --> 01:19:01.399
Dodie was doing, you know, in a much more limited capacity,
1325
01:19:01.960 --> 01:19:07.600
and using those as a way to essentially create the
1326
01:19:07.600 --> 01:19:11.319
groundwork for you know, the fascist politics.
1327
01:19:12.800 --> 01:19:14.720
The other example, of course, we could reach for here
1328
01:19:14.720 --> 01:19:17.800
in terms of a kind of mass loss of contact
1329
01:19:17.800 --> 01:19:20.159
with the reality, which I think has become completely pervasive
1330
01:19:20.239 --> 01:19:21.880
in the last few years, right, which is one of
1331
01:19:21.920 --> 01:19:23.640
the reasons I mean, I just to break the Fourth
1332
01:19:23.640 --> 01:19:25.680
War here for a second. Like, one of the reasons
1333
01:19:25.680 --> 01:19:29.800
why we are doing this, right, despite being this kind
1334
01:19:29.840 --> 01:19:32.600
of the giant attempt to mapple the whole world, right,
1335
01:19:32.920 --> 01:19:36.439
is because despite being an impress regulated news organization, despite
1336
01:19:36.439 --> 01:19:37.920
being that, we are doing the kind of thing that
1337
01:19:38.000 --> 01:19:40.199
looks insane, because this is the kind of thing that
1338
01:19:40.239 --> 01:19:43.000
actually makes people engage with the world, right, they are
1339
01:19:43.880 --> 01:19:48.000
this conspiracy theory is a technology of bringing people into
1340
01:19:48.039 --> 01:19:49.800
the world. And if you can blake people believe in
1341
01:19:49.840 --> 01:19:52.960
conspiracy theories, you can move them from being on that
1342
01:19:53.079 --> 01:19:56.840
kind of conspiratorial, anti authoritarian dimension that someone like Alex
1343
01:19:56.920 --> 01:20:01.079
Jones was in the early two thousands too, becoming essentially
1344
01:20:01.079 --> 01:20:04.520
a full authoritarian, like because you can attach them to
1345
01:20:04.640 --> 01:20:06.680
your project and if you can make it seem like
1346
01:20:06.680 --> 01:20:09.560
the state project in this case, trump Ism is the
1347
01:20:09.600 --> 01:20:13.760
project of making uncovering the conspiracy in the form of Qanoon,
1348
01:20:14.720 --> 01:20:19.159
then you can make people who anti authoritarians into authoritarians
1349
01:20:19.359 --> 01:20:22.560
by like evacuating the space of reason that is that
1350
01:20:22.640 --> 01:20:25.000
is kind of terrifying exactly in process.
1351
01:20:24.800 --> 01:20:28.239
Exactly yeah, So that's like the bigger stakes that we're
1352
01:20:28.279 --> 01:20:30.840
talking about when we're talking about this new world of
1353
01:20:30.880 --> 01:20:34.199
images and activations and what have you. Is I think
1354
01:20:34.439 --> 01:20:37.800
where we're going with this is ultimately, if we like
1355
01:20:37.920 --> 01:20:42.840
the idea of democracy, and if liberal democracy is premised
1356
01:20:43.439 --> 01:20:50.039
on a form of empiricism that is being undermined through
1357
01:20:50.159 --> 01:20:54.600
new forms of media and technology, then what do we
1358
01:20:54.720 --> 01:20:57.880
imagine democracy can be.
1359
01:21:00.880 --> 01:21:04.319
Let's think about that more than the kind of well,
1360
01:21:06.920 --> 01:21:08.319
I mean, I don't have an answer to it, but
1361
01:21:08.359 --> 01:21:10.680
I feel like that's like the question, like the you
1362
01:21:10.720 --> 01:21:13.960
know that a lot of these conversations are are trying
1363
01:21:13.960 --> 01:21:15.960
to we're trying to develop a vocabulary to.
1364
01:21:15.960 --> 01:21:20.159
Have a version of an informed version of that conversation,
1365
01:21:20.279 --> 01:21:22.479
and we don't even really have that vocabulary yet. And
1366
01:21:22.560 --> 01:21:25.760
I think that's what you're trying to do with this project.
1367
01:21:25.800 --> 01:21:28.600
That's certainly what I'm trying to do, and I think
1368
01:21:28.640 --> 01:21:30.560
actually we've made a lot of progress with that over
1369
01:21:30.560 --> 01:21:33.960
the last couple of years. It feels very bewildering at
1370
01:21:33.960 --> 01:21:37.399
the moment, but at least I think we can have
1371
01:21:37.520 --> 01:21:41.000
much more nuanced conversations now than we were able to
1372
01:21:41.159 --> 01:21:42.039
even two years ago.
1373
01:21:43.479 --> 01:21:46.720
I feel like there was a after the Freudian trauma,
1374
01:21:47.319 --> 01:21:50.520
which is a name for the moment in history where
1375
01:21:50.880 --> 01:21:54.880
Freud comes along and says, the bourgeois subject is not
1376
01:21:54.920 --> 01:21:57.720
the master of their own house. Right, the thing we
1377
01:21:57.720 --> 01:21:59.680
think of as the person is not in charge of
1378
01:22:00.319 --> 01:22:02.079
the mind, not in charge of about their personhood.
1379
01:22:02.279 --> 01:22:02.399
Right.
1380
01:22:02.439 --> 01:22:04.560
There is something beneath that. That's why I think it
1381
01:22:04.600 --> 01:22:08.039
was the poorly in Trauer. Now, that was the opening
1382
01:22:08.119 --> 01:22:13.439
up for an enormous amount of artistic and social experimentation
1383
01:22:13.800 --> 01:22:16.199
and certainly a whole collection of new therapies and so on.
1384
01:22:17.159 --> 01:22:19.960
Do you feel like the kind of new the new
1385
01:22:20.159 --> 01:22:24.199
neural era of media in which we are circumventing images
1386
01:22:24.359 --> 01:22:26.439
and going straight to the brain, in which things like
1387
01:22:26.520 --> 01:22:29.880
Tribe v two, in which there are brain imaging system software,
1388
01:22:30.079 --> 01:22:32.800
in which there is ai generated slot that is activating
1389
01:22:32.840 --> 01:22:35.159
you in certain ways. Do you think there will be
1390
01:22:35.439 --> 01:22:40.399
a collection of artistic, therapeutic, social, intellectual projects that can
1391
01:22:40.399 --> 01:22:43.560
come out of that or are we simply sinking into
1392
01:22:43.560 --> 01:22:48.000
some sort of like precognitive pre reflective Mayer? Surely there
1393
01:22:48.039 --> 01:22:48.640
must be something.
1394
01:22:49.239 --> 01:22:53.239
Yeah, So I think there's a People have different opinions
1395
01:22:53.279 --> 01:22:56.640
about this, and you know, there's several different paths you
1396
01:22:56.720 --> 01:23:02.319
can go down. I think the most reasonable one is
1397
01:23:02.800 --> 01:23:06.079
to put a lot of this stuff into a public
1398
01:23:06.159 --> 01:23:09.439
health context, right, and so to kind of stop thinking
1399
01:23:09.520 --> 01:23:13.159
about media in relation to like very American ideas like
1400
01:23:13.279 --> 01:23:15.359
free speech or what have you. Like I'm not saying
1401
01:23:15.439 --> 01:23:18.439
like like, I'm not disparaging the idea of free speech,
1402
01:23:18.800 --> 01:23:21.359
but I'm just talking about we can have a more
1403
01:23:21.560 --> 01:23:26.159
nuanced understanding of what that means versus what you know,
1404
01:23:26.840 --> 01:23:33.800
essentially making addictive drugs in the form of media is right.
1405
01:23:34.720 --> 01:23:36.640
So I think that's one kind of framework. I think
1406
01:23:36.680 --> 01:23:41.199
another framework is this is going to sound very old fashioned,
1407
01:23:41.279 --> 01:23:45.439
but I think it's really important, is to revisit the
1408
01:23:45.600 --> 01:23:53.159
idea of kind of comprehensive online privacy regulation. So much
1409
01:23:53.760 --> 01:23:59.199
of whether it's generative AI, whether it's the algorithm, what
1410
01:23:59.399 --> 01:24:02.359
have you, much of this is downstream of the fact
1411
01:24:02.399 --> 01:24:10.239
that we don't have serious guardrails governing data collection, right.
1412
01:24:10.800 --> 01:24:13.479
So I think that's another really big one here.
1413
01:24:14.760 --> 01:24:16.319
I totally agree with that. I think I would say
1414
01:24:16.319 --> 01:24:19.359
the one thing about that is that that right to privacy,
1415
01:24:20.560 --> 01:24:22.920
which is foundational to liberal societies and I think it's
1416
01:24:22.960 --> 01:24:26.840
incredibly important, is also in some ways the rights to
1417
01:24:26.920 --> 01:24:29.920
make conspiracies right. The rights to privacy is also the
1418
01:24:30.000 --> 01:24:31.279
right to conspire.
1419
01:24:33.159 --> 01:24:33.479
Totally.
1420
01:24:34.800 --> 01:24:38.479
The fact, the fact that you know, a small, tiny
1421
01:24:38.520 --> 01:24:42.039
group of elite people can organize themselves in a certain
1422
01:24:42.079 --> 01:24:45.359
ways to manipulate the public sphere is because they have
1423
01:24:45.439 --> 01:24:47.520
a right to privacy. That is a and there is
1424
01:24:47.600 --> 01:24:51.039
that there is that profound contradictional tension inside that right
1425
01:24:51.119 --> 01:24:53.479
to privacy that I think needs to be further explored.
1426
01:24:53.880 --> 01:24:56.840
And I think that the thing that people misread about
1427
01:24:56.880 --> 01:24:59.039
the right to privacy is they think it's about you,
1428
01:24:59.319 --> 01:25:02.000
and they think it's a individualistic thing, where that's not
1429
01:25:02.119 --> 01:25:04.560
what it is. It's a public resource, it's a public
1430
01:25:04.680 --> 01:25:07.800
good right, it's it's a it's a it's a collective
1431
01:25:07.880 --> 01:25:10.039
resource rather than an individual one.
1432
01:25:12.159 --> 01:25:16.640
Although one that perhaps is unevenly distributed. And but that
1433
01:25:16.760 --> 01:25:20.439
maybe that's the best the case for everything. Yeah, try pacton.
1434
01:25:20.520 --> 01:25:21.560
Thank you for doing your research.
1435
01:25:22.520 --> 01:25:24.439
Thank you so much for having me. It's been wonderful
1436
01:25:24.479 --> 01:25:25.159
talking to you today.
1437
01:25:27.279 --> 01:25:34.319
M m hm hm
1438
01:25:38.279 --> 01:25:38.319
H