The Mathematics of Psychological Warfare
The propaganda, marketing, and “public relations” technology of Edward Bernays is to PsyWar like a Vietnam-era helicopter is to a swarm of armed attack drones
Similar in overall purpose but completely different in terms of technical capabilities, sophistication, and countermeasure requirements.
The former was based on psychological insights of Bernays’ double uncle Sigmund Freud as well as Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter, Walter Lippmann (Le Bon having influenced the modern insights of Mattias Desmet).
Modern PsyWar is a product of the confluence of the internet age, social media, artificial intelligence, big data, and a desire of NATO and opponents to wage more effective Fifth Generation Warfare (5GW) on both foreign state-affiliated and non-state organizations.
Of course, as part of a broad US/NATO “whole of government” response to the Covid “pandemic” (which looks in retrospect like a cover up), PsyWar/Fifth Generation Warfare methods developed for offshore military combat were deployed on civilian populations by their governments.
For reference purposes, the “politically acceptable” term for PsyWar currently favored by the US Military-Industrial community is “Military Information Support Operations” or MISO.
Good to know. They do love their acronyms!
Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity
The concept of “Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity” was initially explored in a paper published in February 2014, and was based on research funded by the Air Force Research Laboratory and conducted by Warren Dixon, a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering and director of the University of Florida’s Nonlinear Controls and Robotics research group.
This research focuses on how social interactions influence thoughts, opinions, and actions within a group of individuals, which includes both influential social leaders and followers.
Each person in the network maintains a social state, which could be an emotional state or an opinion, and followers update their states based on the states of their local neighbors.
Social leaders, on the other hand, maintain a constant desired state.
To investigate and implement this mathematical approach, social interactions are modeled as a directed graph where each directed edge represents an influence from one person to another.
The social response of individuals in the network is modeled using fractional-order dynamics, which depend on influences from local neighbors and past experiences. This approach is motivated by the non-local property of fractional-order systems.
Örjan Bodin, María Mancilla García, and Garry Robins – “Reconciling Conflict and Cooperation in Environmental Governance: A Social Network Perspective“
Network characteristics. Panel a represents a centralized network, panel b represents a network that is denser (and less centralized) than a, and panel c represents a network that is fragmented into two isolated subgroups. The building block in panel d captures network closure, i.e., when two actors, tied to a common third actor, tend to also form a direct tie between them. Panel e represents two actors with different attributes (e.g., organizational affiliation, beliefs, gender, education) who tend to form ties (this is referred to as heterophily). Panel f consists of two types of ties: friendship (solid line) and dislike (dashed line). In this case, two actors being friends both dislike a common third (or, similarly, two actors that dislike a common third tend to be friends).
A decentralized influence method is developed to maintain existing social influence between individuals without isolating peers in the group and to influence the social group to a common desired state, within a convex hull spanned by social leaders.
The Mittag-Leffler stability methods are used to prove the asymptotic stability of the networked fractional-order system.
Way back in 2014, this research demonstrated that the mathematical principles used to control groups of autonomous robots (including drones) can be applied to social networks to control human behavior.
If properly calibrated, the mathematical models can then be used to sway the opinion of social networks toward a desired set of behaviors.
In the present, this is an example of the type of systems analysis and mathematical modeling that is now being deployed in most larger social media environments.
As a social media consumer and user, you are quite literally being managed and manipulated using the same methods that are used for controlling networks of drones.
My personal experience with this technical space goes back to the early years of the 20xx”teens”, beginning about 2012, lasting until about 2016. I have previously discussed (in this Substack and in our book “PsyWar: Enforcing the New World Order” that back in the day, I supported a client called “Behavior Matrix”.
I signed an NDA with that firm at that time, which at least partially constrains that I only discuss non-confidential information. The firm had a significant “classified” intelligence-related aspect to their activities, and I had DoD-issued “Secret” clearance at the time, so I do need to respect certain boundaries.
Behavior Matrix has since been sold off and absorbed into other corporations, presumably ones involved in the “intelligence” sector and in the “social media” sector.
So yes, Virginia, my background and experience relating to PsyWar and Fifth Generation Warfare goes back for over a decade, although at the time I did not think of things in those terms.
In Conclusion
You are being monitored, and your communication, thoughts, emotions and interpersonal relationships are being archived, categorized, and actively manipulated on a minute-by-minute basis using mathematical algorithms and artificial intelligence.
Any time you enter into any digital communication space (including both verbal and text messaging), you are entering into a communications and propaganda battleground.
A battleground in which what you infer as “truth” is highly manipulated and distorted to influence your thoughts, beliefs and emotions for a wide variety of purposes – including commercial (sales and marketing as well as selling products of the “press”), political and sociological.
I often refer to this as a “surrealist” Dali-esque information landscape.
If you don’t already realize it, let me be clear. You ARE the product being created using this technology.
Advanced mathematic algorithms, computer science, and social science (particularly psychology), commercial and government public policy interests have merged to power a set of tools that are designed for psychological manipulation and control.
These are being deployed on a daily basis by governments against their own citizens and by corporations to influence consumer behaviors and purchasing decisions.
Of course this also involves “Big Pharma”, the “Healthcare Industry” and the “Food Industry”.
Build it and they will come. Don’t be naive. What else would you expect?
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Header image: American Pychological Association
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