The title of this post prompted me to write this - it's a theory I've had for some time, but haven't written about it since the days of Voat.
Let me start with a basic example to set the ground work:
- you're in vacation in Italy, from NYC
- an Italian man sees you have an NYC belt buckle and decides to mess with you
- knowing NYC people flip each other off, he flips you off, just to get you to flip home off back
- you respond by flipping him off
The Italian man has remote controlled you, by exploiting some basic knowledge about you.
Taking it to the Next Level
Secondly, let me use a more complex example to lay the framework for understanding this risk:
You receive the following email:
Hey <name>, you don't know me, but I got your email from <somebody you knew when you worked at <prior job>. I'm writing this to let you know that <your wife's name> has been cheating on you. A friend of mine recognized her during a gang bang and told me... [continues, goes into more detail, knows about a private tattoo on her body and even mentions some kinky things she's into, etc.] (things gleaned from audio spying via your mobile phone, social media, etc.)
If you're married, then even reading this hypothetical email probably triggered some parasympathetic reactions in your body; imagine how you'd feel, if you received a message like this...
The aforementioned example is extraordinarily simplistic, compared to what I'll get into, because A) the secret details are actually pretty basic, B) the result is most likely not deadly, and C) ... the really important bit ...
C) ... the M.O. of such an attack works from a basic premise, namely that the victim will likely react emotionally to the purported news that his wife is cheating on him in a really nasty way. But, people get over such things, dump their wife, talk through it and realize it was an elaborate scam, esp when they hear on the news that others have received such messages, etc.
Where Things Get Truly Scary
I posit that there exists sequences of words and social cues, for each person, which will cause that person to take each specific action within their capability, including committing violence and/or suicide.
Think of the secrets that make up your ego, the littlest things that you feel, have shame about, your nervous ticks, things you're afraid of, things you regret deeply, people you miss, moments in your life that you hate, your secret mortal enemies, envies you hold, etc., down to the deepest and most intricate detail.
Imagine something, with hyper intelligence, using that kind of knowledge, gleaned via what would essentially amount to a tempest attack on the human mind (e.g., sending minute signal modulations from your phone's antenna to a super computer with all fMRI and other telemetry data in existence) that, combined with the full corpus of available digital data available about you, to construct a sequence of words and social cues, whether all at once, or over a long period of time, through conversation. Now, imagine that happening to everyone in the US, all at once.
I believe this kind of attack will happen, at some point, and it'll likely work from the inside out, first using secret information to drive couples apart, and then to drive society into a state of unthinkable chaos.
We need to learn that nothing we see is necessarily true.
a) everything implies perceivable inspiration; "nothing" represents suggested information...ones consent to the latter tempts one to ignore the former.
b) wanting (true) vs not wanting (false) suggested information, tempts one to ignore the need to adapt to perceivable inspiration (moving differences). In short...both true (want) and false (not want) tempt one to ignore change (need). Want tempts one to hold onto; need demands one to adapt to change.
Example: suggested "Cola tastes better than Fanta" tempts one into a conflict of reason (true vs false, want vs not want; agreement vs disagreement; belief vs disbelief etc.), while also tempting one to ignore perceivable need...thirst. One needs to adapt to thirst, no matter what one drinks, no matter how it tastes and no matter who is suggesting one to drink.
c) everything (perceivable) represents need; nothing (suggested) represents want in ignorance of need...oneself represents the free will of choice within a balance (need/want) based system, while choosing want over need tempts one into imbalance (want vs not want).
"not" want represents the foundation for suggested "nothing".
Sleight of hand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQnaRtNMGMI
Interesting theory, and there is definitely some merit to this.
I imagine that there are many people who this would work on. But the best protection from it is actually to practice virtue: those who do not hide their sins or indulge their vices in secret have far less buttons to push this way.
A good dose of cynical skepticism is also a rather impenetrable defense as well. I swear those of my sub-generation (who are the blurred line between Gen X and Millenial who grew up in the earliest days of the consumer internet) are most immune to this and other online scams. When your formative experience with the internet was that it was a wild and anonymous tool but that you NEVER give real personal information and NEVER give full trust to ANYTHING online, then you have a sort of firewall against these schemes.
What I DO see as a potential method of attack that would be far more effective than the extent you say would be for these technologies and data to be used to do things such as break interpersonal relationships by seeding doubts and mistrust... even things as simple as manipulating suggested search results to make it appear a husband or wife was searching porn or hookup apps would be achievable with only cursory data and the ability to manipulate their browser remotely.
It is also already used to manipulate online social groups into echo chambers. Reddit, 4chan, maybe even here already do this with the most pernicious methods being making hidden "shards" (discreet individual virtual servers that separate access to the site) where certain people never see other people's interactions based on whatever tags are assigned to the given user. Threads and homepage results are created procedurally by sampling the entire site and curating which parts of the total data is delivered to any user experience. On 4chan this is often done by generating threads that will continue to be updated until the user makes a comment, at which point it is "killed" (action Al posts are not delivered to that user's shard, or that thread only existed in that shard and was generated to terminate upon interaction.)
These type of subtle (and easily executed) manipulations are designed to break social cohesion and information exchange as well as to psychologically manipulate the user to fell isolated or even to provoke suspic of "reality" (since the users of social media are conditioned to correlate online interactions with IRL interactions as both being equally real despite the obvious fallacy of this). To the conditioned user, if online "reality" seems controlled and fake then they extend that perspective to actual reality and think it is fake also.
I see the results of this often on these places in the utter decline of intelligent discourse in these communities (including this one) and it's replacement with amateur, naive, and absurd ignorance. **A perfect evidence of this is how this community almost ubiquitously uses the word "research" to signify "I googled this thing and read the top results and some other people's opinions about it on forums or YouTube and never consulted a single document or source that exists outside of the controlled and manipulated internet."
Interesting, I didn't realize that kind of thing happened over at 4Chan.
BTW, pertaining the "research", I agree, that is a very strange phenomenon, even most of the popular YouTube personalities, in the prepper and/or conspiracy genre, talk about having done research, and I imagine their version of research is exactly the same.
On the contrary... I do think that "research" can be achieved via a set of reasoning skills, rather than a specific set of activities and/or inputs. For example, a priori research might mean simply taking whatever corroborating information you can glean from various sources (all of whom may be simply regurgitating secondhand a posteriori information from the same source), and coming to novel conclusions based on logic. Because each of the sources will have a different understanding of the source information, developed in the abstractions they've built up over the years, in their reticular activating system (the map is not the territory), your own logic system might be able to the still a more correct truth than what can be gleaned from the original source.
An example of this can be described with regards to the Kyle Rittenhouse self-defense shooting:
Original Research (A Posteriori)
If you had access to every camera angle at the highest resolution available from the original sources, and you were being objective about what you saw, and you had decent spatial reasoning capabilities, as well as a pretty good understanding of the relevant self-defense legislation and case law, you would probably come to the conclusion that Kyle Rittenhouse acted in self-defense, as commonly defined by courts in the US. This would be an example of actual, original research.
Brainwashing
If, instead, you watched YouTube commentators analyze and comment on the shooting, and you came to your conclusion based on those commentators and the selected clips they played, you would likely determine whether or not Kyle acted in self-defense based on your bias. For example, if you watched The Young Turks, you would likely come away thinking Kyle Rittenhouse was guilty, while, if you watched donut operator, you would likely come away thinking Kyle Rittenhouse was not guilty. This would be an example of basically not doing any actual research or thinking.
Secondary Research (A Priori)
The third scenario, which I'm proposing adds value, involves a bit of both of the above, the former (watching original footage) for the purposes of being able to fact check statements and ideas, and the latter for the purpose of introducing yourself to ideas you wouldn't have, otherwise, come to know (relevant case law, things you may not know about, such as "stand your ground", etc.). Obviously, if you're not very diligent about your understanding of the original footage and/or the analyses that you watch, then, at best, your interpretation is subject to the same shortcomings that you would expect in a "byzantine generals problem" scenario. But if this is what you do, you quote research" by consuming information in thinking critically about the source and the arguments, I think that may well provide just as much, or more, value when compared to only original research.
One might be tempted to leave that a posteriori information (e.g., viewing the original video) is also necessary for this mode of research, but the court system proves that second hand accounts can be just as valuable. Secondarily, once you've established a source that you can trust, or in which you distrust, some trusted information can be gleaned purely from secondhand accounts. For example, if CNN says something is definitively true and seems to be pressing the point and trying to convince the viewer, one can be assured that the inverse of this information is likely true, or at the very least, the information is suspect. Simply using that reasoning, while watching CNN, can, in fact, introduce new, a priori information to your mind.
I agree fully with you. For years my practice of reading news has been to check several sources from every bias group and kind of assume an overall average is the closest to the truth. I.e read the reporting for the same event at NPR, MSNBC, VOX, FOX, WSJ, THE FEDERALIST and so on. If you balance out the bias you at least come close to reality for most normal things.
Psychological warfare. Yes, it's done in subtle ways. Information from you is gathered in small, incremental, benign ways. It is important to post and express disinformation about yourself and those around you so nobody or entity can produce a desired result. I will even visit web sites and articles that I have no interest in to skew results. I don't even read the articles, just slowly scroll through them as I'm eating or doing laundry. I even place my phone next to a radio playing music when my wife and I have a conversation we don't want to reveal. Be careful, this has been going on for some time. It's not really about my generation (I'm a boomer), it's about my grandkids. I've taught them the technique as well. It takes effort and conscious thought at first, but becomes habit over time.
Example, I'm a construction manager and I listen to classical music around people. One day my general manager drove up to my car when I drove down the street from the job site and I had Megadeath or Slayer full blast with my eyes closed getting my head cleared. He laughed and said there's no way he would have thought I listened and liked that music. Best of luck everyone
I like it (re: radio, fake article scrolling) - reminds me of the noise technique used in A Scanner Darkly (the masks).
I had a friend that was in the CIA and he taught me many years ago that intelligence is gathered in very small incremental steps. Questions are placed in context with a conversation where only the answer to that one question was desired. A skilled interviewer can segway a conversation where they want it to go, and sometimes the interviewed will offer additional information. Practice with a Briggs/Myers and build profiles on a few people. You'd be surprised at how valuable that information is
It could probably use modulated frequencies of light on your monitor and sound to hack your mind as well. I've see seen studies where they can cause specific reactions in people with such techniques. An AI would probably be far more sophisticated.
Hey look… a real person who isn’t from a shill farm posted something.
And it’s actually pretty interesting.
But I think the kind of chaos your imagining could probably be brought on in a much simpler way. Through Tik tok and other idiotic social media trends.
I could see things getting pushed to a destructive point where the youth just become unhinged and start vandalizing things for internet points.
Just imagine if the next Tik tok trend was pushed by China and involved 3D printing to derail trains or something crazy like that.
Yeah I could see a combination of what you're describing and also I could see those same social media avenues being used for a bit of a fusion between what I'm describing and what you're describing (like near-mind-control level signaling over relatively open social media channels, based on psychographic analysis, convincing people to do that kind of chaos).
It’s a scary thing to think about.
At this point I feel like the social media landscape is really psychologically abusive.
Absolutely. I think the best defense is to stay away from all of it. I work in the tech industry and I've managed to avoid using and/or supporting most of the things that I am vehemently opposed to. Everybody in this industry thinks they need to be into everything, in order to stay relevant, but they don't realize that, in their vain attempts to stay relevant, they are slowly rendering themselves obsolete.
Why is your wife from a gangbang?
a) your suggestion (a basic example) towards consent by others (to set the groundwork) instigates the consensual sequence of suggested cues which allows you to direct their reactions.
Their consent represents their faith; belief; agreement; trust etc. in your suggested cues, and they will continue to follow your lead until you choose to break the sequence.
b) one represents the seed (growth) within the ground (loss) aka the ingredient (living) within base (process of dying) aka that (life) which exists in-between start (inception) and finish (death) aka RE (response to) SET (being set by).
Sleight of hand: "we didn't start the fire, it was always burning...we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it"
c) suggestion represents ingredient within perceivable base aka reaction within enacting.
a) REMO'TE, adjective [Latin remotus, removeo; re and moveo, to move.] aka RE (response to) MOVE (being moved by) aka living responding to being moved by the process of dying.
b) REMOTE (free will of choice) within CONTROL (balance) of CHANNEL (a passage; a place of passing or flowing)...aka form within the momentum of flow.
The few invert this by suggesting remotes for control to switch channels if one consents to their tell-a-vision.
c) if knowledge represents perceivable, then suggestion represents the exploit to tempt one to ignore perceivable (reality) for suggested (fiction).
d) suggested information represents the temptation to gain access to ones consent, which when given, allows others to utilize the suggested to direct ones consenting reactions.
a) taking it (life) towards (from inception towards death) implies life losing resistance, which allows others to exploit life's lack of resistance.
b) now (living) next (process of dying).
c) choice can only exist within balance aka the momentum of motion aka the level within the natural order...living implies leveling (balancing by choice) or being leveled (back to base).
One (partial) within oneness (whole)...if all represents ONE in energy, then that's "the first; the last; eternity..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe_0zKVVGQw for "there can be only one", hence "all for one and one for all"...
SEC'OND, adjective [Latin secundus; sequor, to follow; to seek.]...why do you want to follow when you need to resist being moved? Why do you seek within suggested when everything (perceivable) is offered to everyone (perceiving) at every moment (um)?
Suggested information you consent to hold onto mentally, while physically perpetuating it by suggesting others "your" information. Meanwhile in reality...one represents form (life) within flow (inception towards death) aka temporary information within ongoing inspiration, hence tempted to want to hold onto, while ignoring the need to let go.
...then you consented to be bound by contract to another, while being licensed by a third party. Meanwhile in reality...intercourse is required for offspring...the child doesn't spring off to be bound, but to be set free (will of choice), hence springing out of internal course...
a) receive aka RE (respond to) CAPIO (to take)...can one take perceivable (thirst) or is one tempted to take suggested (drinks)? What if one perceives Inspiration before one can consent to receive suggested information?
b) feelings aka emotions (to move from) tempt one to ignore being (life) moved by (inception towards death), hence in need to resist.
c) IM'AGE, noun [Latin imago.] - "a representation of", hence IMAGINE (reaction to representation of) -ATION (enacting origin). One needs to discern the origin (whole) by reacting to the representations (partials) thereof, which implies ones self discernment about being partial (perceiving) within whole (perceivable).
One cannot grow self discernment by consenting; agreeing; believing; having faith in; trusting etc. the suggested information by others.
a) what if the perceivable natural order represents simplicity, while each extraordinarily suggestion tempts one to dump complexity upon simplicity?
b) if nature offers everything (perceivable) to everyone (perceiving), then what does EXTRA (beyond; excess) imply? Could it be ones ignorance of need (perceivable) for want (suggested), hence always being tempted to want more?
c) what if you can only suggest what "is"; because you willingly ignore that everything perceivable "was" available for you to shape your suggestions about it?
a) does a base conceal (secret) or reveal ingredients? Why is it called CONCEAL (to withhold from sight) MENT (mind/memory)? What within everything perceivable is withheld from ones perceiving mind/memory?
b) DETAIL, verb - "to relate, report or narrate in particulars"...what if the whole (process of dying) narrates itself in particulars (living)? Why are you looking for particular details instead of adapting as the particular to the whole narration?
Cause implies enacting, effect implies reacting...hence having free will of choice to react while being enacted upon.
Getting implies coming out of; scare aka terror aka fear implies towards outcome, hence others tempting one to fear suggested outcomes, while ignoring to resist perceivable origin.
What if your hold represents the greed that tempts the envy within others?
a) if knowledge represents perceivable inspiration; then intelligence (Latin intelligo; to understand) represents ones consent to stand under suggested information.
b) HYPER (over, denotes excess, or something over or beyond)...there's the aforementioned "extra" again, hence want (extra) tempting to want more (hyper)...
Perceivable inspiration represents all (whole) communicating itself to each one (partials)...suggested information can only ever attempt to mimic this, but it can only reach the ones who consent to let it in (knock, knock...it's Dracula...may I come in for a drink?)
Consider what your consent to a suggested point does to your point of view (perceiving partial within perceivable whole)? Does your "cone of vision" represent a pyramid, hence the all (perceivable) seeing I (perceiving), unless "capped off" by your consent to suggested points of view?
The few suggest one to want order out of chaos, which represents the inversion of being temporary chaos (life) within the ongoing natural order (inception towards death)....order represents the flow of inspiration coming in; chaos represents suggested information within those who willingly ignore perceivable order.
tl; dr...suggested words represent the interruption (disarray) of perceivable sound (sequence) and others shape ongoing symmetry into temporary symbols (letters), which they bind by your consent into words to mimic sequence (language)...spell-craft.